Networks, Columnists, Pundits Are Critiqued
“It’s official: the networks no longer cover news, they slap it onto the bottom edge of their regular programming like Post-it notes,” Alessandra Stanley wrote Wednesday in the New York Times.
Discussing coverage of Tuesday’s four primaries — those in Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island — Stanley said, “There were crawls (‘Huckabee drops out’) and brief updates, but viewers who wanted to immerse themselves in the speculation and suspense — and Tuesday night was arguably a more critical and dramatic election than Super Tuesday — were relegated to cable news.
“. . . Not having a prime-time election report on ABC, CBS or NBC was a little like celebrating an anniversary at an all-you-can-eat buffet instead of a fancy French restaurant: nobody leaves hungry, but it would have been nice to mark the event with a decent wine and starched linen napkins.”
In the Cleveland Plain Dealer, television critic Mark Dawidziak wrote, “Looking at the exit poll breakdowns, veteran analyst Bob Schieffer told CBS anchor Katie Couric during the 6:30 p.m. newscast that it ‘was not good news for Barack Obama.’ It set the tone for the night’s coverage.”
There were the usual pundits, including some who had only recently suggested that Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., who won all but Vermont on Tuesday, should drop out. On CNN, “political analyst” Amy Holmes blithely said that if Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., won 51 percent of the vote in November, he would become president — ignoring the electoral college or the precedent of the 2000 election turmoil.
As on previous primary nights, it fell to numbers crunchers such as Chuck Todd, political director of NBC News, to put things into perspective.
On MSNBC’s “Hardball,” before the polls closed, Todd said of Clinton, “the problem she’s got is, as far as delegates are concerned, she can win a lot of these Latino districts all she wants; she’s only going to get 2-1 delegate splits, 3-2 delegate splits. . . . because a lot of Latinos didn’t turn out for Democrats in 2004, a lot of them voted for Bush, they weren’t Democratic-performing voters, and they didn’t get rewarded with voters.
“But who did? It was voters in the Dallas area. It was voters in the Houston area, and it was voters in the Austin area. These are the three areas that Obama has done very well in. He could — he could lose the popular vote, say, 52-48, win the caucuses 52-48, net more delegates out of Texas than she does.”
Sure enough, on Wednesday, Stephen Ohlemacher of the Associated Press reported, “Obama survived defeats in three primaries Tuesday with his lead in the delegate race essentially intact.
“Clinton netted only a 12-delegate pickup, despite winning primaries in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island, according to an analysis of returns by The Associated Press. There were still 12 more delegates to be awarded.”
On Tuesday, New America Media ran a piece that said of Clinton, “To understand the candidate’s continued popularity among Latinos in Texas, one need only read the Hispanic press, which has been following Clinton’s campaign closely.
“The 36-percent-Latino population of Texas brought the Hispanic vote into the spotlight before the state’s primary. Along with it came a story of tension between African Americans and Latinos,” Peter Micek wrote.
On Tuesday, a piece on the Nieman Watchdog site questioned the role of black columnists.
“If race is not an issue in this presidential contest (and I believe it is and will be), then how come virtually every mainstream black columnist has been effusively and unabashedly supporting Sen. Barack Obama, and highly critical of and even caustic towards Sen. Hillary Clinton?” asked Saul Friedman, a former White House correspondent for Newsday and Knight Ridder newspapers, in an article that received wider exposure on the Romenesko Web site.
Eugene Kane of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who was quoted by Friedman, told Journal-isms, “I was troubled by the way he suggested black columnists who wrote anything positive about Obama were essentially endorsing him for president.
“Other than editorial writers, I don’t see any black columnists endorsing any politician just because they write about their impressions.
“I also noted to Friedman that many black conservative columnists were probably not writing glowing things about Obama because of their politics. Same as white columnists.”
Chicago columnist Monroe Anderson replied on the Nieman site, “If Barack Obama were Jewish, would Jewish columnists be called into question for supporting one of their own? Ditto for a Polish candidate and Polish columnists. Or Mexican.”
DeWayne Wickham, a columnist for USA Today and Gannett News Service and like Kane and Anderson a member of the Trotter Group of African American columnists, told Journal-isms, “The very first column I wrote about Obama was hardly a mindless embrace of his campaign. See: “Obama needs to slow bandwagon.” And as you can see from this column, I have not been hostile to Hillary Clinton: “Clinton’s connection with blacks is a good starting point.” I also wrote a column that applauded Mike Huckabee for some of the positions he took during the GOP debate at Morgan State University.
“My point is this: I haven’t cast my lot with any of these folks, yet. But while I am not mentioned in Mr. Friedman’s article, I infer from what he said that he was painting with a very broad brush. This suggests to me that his view is as much the result of a racial myopia as what he thinks motivates black columnists in this matter.”
In its weekly analysis of news coverage, the Project for Excellence in Journalism said of Feb. 25-March 2:
“With no primary contests to consume press attention, Clinton’s charges of a pro-Obama tilt reverberated in the media echo chamber last week. Obama’s life and record came under a heightened degree of scrutiny, with everything from his legislative career to his ties to Louis Farrakhan to his African attire getting a public airing.
“Obama was the top campaign newsmaker and a significant or dominant factor in 69% of the stories from Feb. 25-March 2, a period between the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary and the March 4 tests in Texas and Ohio. That was the highest level of coverage for any candidate in 2008. And part of it was news outlets — from ‘Good Morning America’ to The New York Times — engaged in introspective inquiry aimed at answering this headline atop one Feb. 29 newspaper story: ‘Are the media giving Obama a free ride?’ “
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Dallas Staffers Could Vote in Caucuses After All
Staffers at the Dallas Morning News were told last week that they
couldn’t vote in Tuesday’s political party caucuses, because “The caucus just might be seen as a step into activism, and we don’t want to create false impressions that way,” according to a memo from Managing Editor George Rodrigue, leaked to the Romenesko Web site at the Poynter Institute and published elsewhere, including in this space.
But that was before one of the newsroom employees complained that such a policy would violate state law, Editor Bob Mong told Journal-isms on Wednesday.
As a result, another memo was issued that said, in essence, “anybody who wants to do it, go ahead,” Mong explained.
He said he did not know how many journalists actually attended the caucuses, which require a public declaration of support for a candidate.
Benjamin J. Armbruster, ThinkProgress.org: McCain Hosts His ‘Base’ For A BBQ: The ‘Maverick’ And The Press Are Back Together Again
Dallas Morning News: Winners and Losers (at end of article)
Eric Deggans blog, St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times: SNL or the Red Phone Ad: Which TV Display Turned the Tide for Hillary?
Will Evans and Peter Overby, Center for Investigative Reporting: The Money Behind the Anti-McCain Ad
Megan Garber, Columbia Journalism Review: Scenes from a Stall: For Clinton’s press corps, being kept in the loop meant being kept in the loo
Julianna Goldman, Bloomberg.com: Obama Delivers Tough-Love Message to Black Audiences
Kim McAvoy, tvnewsday.com: What If It’s President McCain in 2009?
Morton Mintz, Nieman Watchdog: Gore would have invaded Iraq, don’t you think? (on Ralph Nader)
Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times: Facts don’t back black, brown divide in Texas
Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times: Dallas caucus site overflowing with crowds
Phillip Morris, Cleveland Plain Dealer: One voter who is clearly decided
Ruben Navarrette, San Diego Union-Tribune: Being a part of two worlds
Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: So we’re all fools for Obama? Please
Leonard Pitts Jr. , Miami Herald: President Average Joe really not one of us
Gregory Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times: Rally ’round the flag, Dems
Ken Rodriguez, San Antonio Express-News: Texas Two-Step trips up voters who tried casting two ballots
Terence Samuel, theRoot.com: Groundhog Day for the Dems
Mark Q. Sawyer, theRoot.com: So You Wanna Fight Dirty?
Brian Stelter, New York Times: CNN’s Advantage in Español
Ronald Takaki, New America Media: Barack Obama: A New Voice for Asian Americans
Terry Trippany, Newsbusters.org: Politico Changes Headline After Protest From Obama Campaign
Jack White, theRoot.com: A Clay Moment
Dorreen Yellow Bird, Grand Forks (N.M.) Herald: Campaign calls up old stereotypes
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FCC Outlaws Bias Against “Urban” Broadcasters
Racial and ethnic minorities make up 34 percent of the U.S. population, yet they own only 7.7 percent of full-power radio stations and 3.15 percent of television stations, according to the media advocacy group Free Press.
Stations that program to people of color have found themselves the object of unwritten decisions by advertisers — called “no-urban” or “no-Spanish” dictates — to avoid them, the Federal Communications Commission has found.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court continues to limit the affirmative-action measures that can be used to redress these inequalities. And the FCC is the focus of a battle between citizens groups and Big Media over growing media consolidation, having just completed hearings around the country to glean public sentiment.
In the midst of these cross-currents, the FCC on Wednesday adopted 13 minority-ownership proposals and put another 12 proposals for public comment.
“One initiative deserves special mention: the FCC’s ban on broadcast advertising discrimination, which is the most significant new federal nondiscrimination mandate in any industry in over 30 years,” David Honig of the Minority Media Telecommunications Council said in a statement. “We expect the FCC to enthusiastically enforce this landmark provision, which should restore to minority broadcasters the $200 million or more they lose every year due to ‘no urban’ and ‘no Spanish’ dictates.”
The council added, “The FCC served the public interest by banning discrimination in broadcast advertising and transactions . . . heightening protections against ownership fraud, and authorizing several incentive programs to encourage the sale of stations to minorities.” The council itself had proposed many of the measures.
But not everyone on the five-member commission was as pleased.
“There was a real opportunity to do something meaningful today after years of neglect, and we blew it,” outspoken member Michael J. Copps, a Democrat, said.
His Democratic colleague Jonathan S. Adelstein contended it was possible to meet the Supreme Court’s strict guidelines for affirmative action and still help women and people of color become broadcast owners. Instead, the FCC adopted guidelines that determined who could be helped based on the revenue generated by the business.
“Based on the Commission’s own calculation, our definition will help .5 percent more minority stations than if we did nothing at all,” Adelstein said in a statement posted on the FCC Web site, as were those of his colleagues.
Said Copps, “We are told to be content with baby steps to help women and minorities — but the fine print shows that the real beneficiaries will be small businesses owned by white men. So even as it becomes abundantly clear that the real cause of the disenfranchisement of women and minorities is media consolidation, we give the green light to a new round of — yes, you guessed it — media consolidation.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., is making good on his threat to try overturning the FCC’s new media ownership rules, which allow local newspaper owners to buy TV stations in their towns, as Ira Teinowitz reported in TV Week. Dorgan’s resolution is co-sponsored by 13 senators, including Democrats Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Kerry, as well as Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.
Allowing local newspaper owners to buy local TV stations, Dorgan, Copps and others argue, will lead to even less diversity in media ownership.
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Pulitzer Winner Nazario Asks L.A. Times for Buyout
Sonia Nazario, who has won more than 60 awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, during her 15-year career at the Los Angeles Times, has applied for a buyout from the paper, Nazario confirmed on Wednesday.
The Times is seeking to eliminate 100 to 150 jobs, 40 to 50 of them in the newsroom.
Nazario won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for “Enrique’s Journey,” “her touching, exhaustively reported story of a Honduran boy’s perilous search for his mother who had migrated to the United States,” in the words of the Pulitzer board. She braved the 12,000 miles herself, and the stories eventually became a book that has been translated into six languages.
“I’ve been struggling over the last year between continuing here and going to write books full-time,” she told Journal-isms. “I just felt like I had to make a choice.”
With the buyout offer, she can pursue her books without having to juggle teaching and writing magazine pieces to support herself, she said. Her next project will be another nonfiction narrative, Nazario said, that grew out of her reporting.
Nazario, 47, came to the Times in 1993 from the Wall Street Journal. She first appeared in this column in 2002 as one of Hispanic Business Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Hispanics.
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Pop Critic Sanneh Leaves N.Y. Times for New Yorker
Kelefa Sanneh, “one of the most inventive, interesting, and brilliant pop music critics in the history of the form,” in the words of his editor at the New York Times, Sam Sifton, is leaving for the New Yorker magazine.
Sifton, the Times’ culture editor, wrote this memo to the staff on Friday:
“No use pretending it’s good news, ladies and gangsters: Kelefa Sanneh is leaving The Times. He’s heading back to 43rd Street, this time to write broadly about culture for The New Yorker. We’ll lose one of the most inventive, interesting, and brilliant pop music critics in the history of the form.
“‘I always considered him Music Critic 2.0,’ Jon Pareles said this afternoon. ‘He can even dance.’
“K came to The Times in late 2000, and has since contributed over 1,000 bylines to our pages. He’s written a lot about hip-hop, of course, and teen pop and jam bands and slow jams. He followed rap from cocaine to codeine and back. He’s been the paper’s best explainer of the kind of country music they actually play on country radio: real country music, that is, not the went-to-college roots version that shuns the Nashville limelight (though he’s good on that, too).
“He’s taken readers into the world of American heavy metal, European death metal, really freaky Norwegian Viking metal (sung in Icelandic, naturally, because of that language’s similarity to Old Norse). He did electronica. He got down with the emo kids in Nebraska and New Jersey and happily followed them up the charts.
“And of course he buried the rockists, back in 2004, in an Arts & Leisure essay that stood tall for the very kind of music appreciation he believed in then and believes in now, and which is a good model for anyone interested in pop.
“Let’s sample it:
“‘A rockist isn’t just someone who loves rock ‘n’ roll, who goes on and on about Bruce Springsteen, who champions ragged-voiced singer-songwriters no one has ever heard of. A rockist is someone who reduces rock ‘n’ roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon. Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.’
“We’ll miss that voice, and miss the jokes slipped into reviews like gems, and miss K’s sly, not-for-nothing critiques of the paper itself. ‘He’s one of a kind,’ Jon said today. It’s going to be less fun around this joint without him.
“As his last official act, he’ll review James Blunt at the Beacon Theater tonight. You’re damn right that’s payback.”
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Bill Clinton Admits Mistake on Crack Penalties
“It was an expression of regret that didn’t seem to register with the knot of journalists who came to cover the event — an apology that deserves more than fleeting attention,” DeWayne Wickham wrote Tuesday in his USA Today column.
In a keynote address last week at a University of Pennsylvania symposium commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report on the causes of racial disturbances in the 1960s, Bill Clinton did what many politicians find hard to do: admit he made a big mistake.
” ‘I regret more than I can say that we didn’t do more on it,’ he said about his administration’s failure to end the disparate sentencing for people convicted of crack and powder cocaine offenses. ‘I’m prepared to spend a significant portion of whatever life I’ve got left on the earth trying to fix this because I think it’s a cancer,’ the former president said of the devastating impact this sentencing imbalance has had on blacks.”
Gregory Kane, Baltimore Sun: 40 years later, still larger than life
Dwight Lewis, Nashville Tennessean: Optimism guarded, 40 years after riots
Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune: Election time reflection time
Les Payne, Newsday: America’s way of justice favors whites over blacks
Elmer Smith, Philadelphia Daily News: Kerner report saw racial divides, and they’re still there
Tonyaa Weathersbee, Florida Times-Union: Time to revive ‘black pride’ movement
Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com: Black Self-Sufficiency is a Fine, Worthwhile Goal — As Long as it Doesn’t Scare White People
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Television Reporter Targeted for Story on Sex Toys
In January, reporter Kandiss Crone of WLBT-TV in Jackson, Miss., participated in a “3 on Your Side” undercover investigation.
She walked into a store and said, “Hi, I’m going to a bachelorette party. I’m looking for a sex toy.”
“Adult Video and Books on McDowell Road in Jackson is apparently selling illegal sex toys again,” her report began.
“Section 97 of Mississippi State Law prohibits the sale of such 3-dimensional devices like the one we were sold,” she continued.
Crone’s stories earned her the scorn of Dan Savage, syndicated sex columnist in the alternative press, who urged readers to contact her.
“Lots of readers wrote to the Jackson, Mississippi, teeveenewz reporter about her idiotic, sex-phobic ‘sting’ of a sex-toy shop, and many were kind enough to CC me. A sampling of Savage Love readers’ letters to Crone can be found at www.thestranger.com/savage/crone. In other sex-toys news, last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled Texas’s ban on sex toys was unconstitutional. (Lawrence v. Texas just keeps on giving.) Mississippi is under the Fifth Circuit’s jurisdiction, so it seems that sex toys are now legal in Jackson, Mississippi. Someone alert Kandiss?”
Crone told Journal-isms she reported on the court decision and said she had received “quite a bit” of reaction, but could not quantify it. “People have a right to their opinion, and that’s all I have to say about that,” she said.
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Short Takes
Bob Moran, a sportswriter in Arizona for his entire professional career, died Tuesday at his home in Chandler, Ariz., Jeff Metcalfe reported Wednesday for the Arizona Republic. One of the first black sportswriters in the area, “Moran, 55, covered Arizona State athletics for the East Valley Tribune from 1987 until 2004, when he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He worked for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson from 1974, after graduating from Ohio University, until joining the Tribune. Moran moved to Phoenix in 1980 to cover a variety of sports for the Daily Star.”
“According to search committee sources, the finalists for NAACP president and CEO are: Benjamin Todd Jealous, 35, president of the Rosenberg Foundation; the Rev. Frederick D. Haynes III, 47, senior pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas; and Alvin Brown, 37, a former White House official now working on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign,” George E. Curry writes in his column for Thursday’s Philadelphia Inquirer. Jealous was once executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, an organization of the publishers of black newspapers.
Three Hampton University students have been chosen for the New York Times’ 18-member summer internship class, Times Senior Editor Sheila Rule told Journal-isms: Austin Bogues, the Washington bureau’s reporting intern; Angelica Rogers, a design intern who was previously a participant in the New York Times Student Journalism Institute in New Orleans, and Eba Hamid, a copy editing intern. “In any given summer, it hasn’t been all that uncommon to have two interns from the same school — for example, this year we’ll have two each from Syracuse, Columbia and Harvard — but I don’t recall ever having three from the same school,” Rule said.
“After more than seven years as a reporter-anchor at WDSU-Channel 6,
Helena Moreno is departing the station today, telling co-workers that she’s weighing a run for the U.S. Congress in Louisiana’s 2nd District, the seat currently held by William Jefferson,” Dave Walker wrote on Monday on the New Orleans Times-Picayune Web site.
“ESPN Films, a new initiative announced today by Keith Clinkscales, ESPN senior vice president, content development and enterprises, will present quality scripted and documentary film projects for television and theatrical release, including ’30/30,’ a celebration of the last three decades of sports timed with ESPN’s 30th anniversary in September 2009. The announcement also marks a new collaboration with The Walt Disney Studios on scripted sports films,” ESPN said on Monday.
A number of journalists were burned when Margaret Seltzer, author of “Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival,” written under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones, admitted the book was fabricated. Writer Rebecca Walker and Times book critic Michiko Kakutani were among those who praised the book, which described the childhood of a half-white, half-Native American woman raised by a black foster mother in South Central Los Angeles. Seltzer is actually white. “The very morning we planned to air the interview,” the New York Times “broke the story that it was a hoax — so we scrapped it until we could figure out what to do,” Michel Martin, host of National Public Radio’s “Tell Me More,” told Journal-isms. The interview is posted on the “Tell Me More” Web site.
In South Africa on Tuesday, “a cross-section of South African journalists attended a discussion on racism in the media, with black editors being accused of acting as white owners’ puppets and accusations that the media fails to reflect the reality of South Africa today,” Beauregard Tromp wrote on Wednesday for the Star newspaper. Much of the discussion centered around the relaunch of the Forum of Black Journalists, “and the incident where some white journalists decided to attend a private meeting, addressed by ANC president Jacob Zuma, open only to current and former black journalists.”
“South Africa’s 2010 soccer chief Irvin Khoza apologised unreservedly in a statement on Wednesday for using the word “k****r” towards a black journalist,” the South African Web site iol.co.za reported, referring to the racial slur “kaffir.”
New Zealand Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres “says ethnic minority groups continue to be under-represented in New Zealand journalism,” Radio New Zealand reported. “He says there are very few Asian, Maori and Pacific Island journalists operating in this country, despite the fact a significant part of the population is made up of those three races.”
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Feedback: Piece on Black Columnists Harks to 1950s
Saul Friedman’s half-baked monitoring of black columnists is as insidious as his conclusions are inaccurate. His Newsday column for seniors, called “Gray Matters,” is not half bad; he clearly should stick to his day job.
Friedman’s free-lance blogging — on the Nieman site no less — is woefully undernourished. It reminds us that this curmudgeon came of age as a newspaperman in Houston of the 1950s, when industry unanimity made no place for uppity opinion of the sort that so rankles Mr. Friedman.
Les Payne Columnist?Newsday?Long Island, N.Y.?March 6, 2008
