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Speech Isn’t Quieting Wright Issue

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Journalists Seek to Put Sound Bites in Context

Three days after Sen. Barack Obama‘s widely praised speech calling for an elevated racial dialogue, pundits, bloggers and those with access to YouTube were pulling the discussion back to the comments of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

Two black journalists pointed to more complete videos of Wright’s sermons to demonstrate that the mainstream media and the blogosphere had taken what were viewed as incendiary comments out of context. Others continued to point to statements made by a supporter of Republican Sen. John McCain to contend that a double standard was at work.

The New York Times was among the news organizations that ran a photo of Wright at the White House in 1998 with President Bill Clinton.

In another development, Obama gave critics further ammunition by saying in a Philadelphia radio interview that his grandmother was a “typical white person” in her fears about black men on the street that she does not know. Conservative pundits took this as more evidence that Obama was throwing his grandmother “under the bus.”

Meanwhile, CBS News reported Friday that Obama has received largely positive reviews from voters, according to a CBS News poll.

“But the percentage of voters who think Obama would unite the country as president has dropped since late February.

“Sixty-nine percent of voters who have heard or read about Obama’s speech say he did a good job addressing the issue of race relations, and 63 percent of voters following the events say they agree with Obama’s views on race relations. Seventy-one percent say he did a good job explaining his relationship with Wright,” CBS reported. The poll was conducted on Thursday night.

Brian Stelter, who writes the “TV Decoder” column for the New York Times, reported that Obama’s Philadelphia speech drew high ratings. “On a typical weekday morning, about two million Americans are watching the three cable news channels. This Tuesday, when Barack Obama delivered a speech about race, more than four million viewers tuned in. Fox News Channel drew more than two million viewers in the hour, CNN attracted almost 1.3 million, and MSNBC delivered close to one million,” he wrote Thursday.

Medialifemagazine added, “Tuesday night’s episode of ABC’s ‘Nightline,’ which featured an exclusive interview with the Illinois senator, averaged a 4.0 overnight metered market rating, placing it ahead of both NBC’s ‘Tonight Show with Jay Leno‘ (3.9) and CBS’s ‘The Late Show with David Letterman‘ (2.5), a rarity. That’s an 18 percent increase in ‘Nightline’s’ average household rating over the past four weeks.”

Late Friday, at least two black journalists, Eric Deggans, media critic at the St. Petersburg Times, and Roland S. Martin of CNN and Essence.com, posted longer video clips of Wright’s sermons that put some of the controversial soundbites in context.

“A look at these clips, which present much larger excerpts of Wright’s speeches, shows that his seemingly damning statements came during passionate speeches about America’s history of racial oppression and America’s history of killing innocents while exacting military revenge against enemies,” Deggans wrote on his blog.

 

 

“One of Rev. Wright’s most controversial comments — the statements about ‘chickens coming home to roost’ after 9/11 — was his quote of a white ambassador speaking on Fox News Channel. Why didn’t the TV news reporters tell us this?”

On Essence.com, Martin echoed Deggans: “Note that the ‘chickens coming home to roost’ comment was attributed not to Wright but former Ambassador to the Iraq, Edward Peck,” he said.

The online Huffington Post on Wednesday quoted former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee defending Wright, and included a video. “As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say ‘That’s a terrible statement!’ ” said Huckabee, whose base as a Republican presidential candidate was evangelical Christians, “I grew up in a very segregated South.

“And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie, you have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant, you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus.

“‘And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment, and you have to just say, “I probably would, too.”‘ ” Huckabee appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

In this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “controversial televangelist Rev. John Hagee declares, “It’s true that [John] McCain’s campaign sought my endorsement.” But Hagee, interviewed by Deborah Solomon, declares, “My statements regarding the Catholic Church have been grossly mischaracterized. I never called the Catholic Church ‘the anti-Christ’ or a ‘false cult system.’ I was referring to those Christians who ignore the Gospels.”

“Hagee has called the Catholic Church the ‘Great Whore,'” Cenk Uygur contended Wednesday on the Huffington Post. “He has said that the Anti-Christ will rise out of the European Union (of course, the Anti-Christ will also be Jewish). He has said all Muslims are trained to kill and will be part of the devil’s army when Armageddon comes (which he hopes is soon). John McCain continues to say he is proud of Reverend Hagee’s endorsement.”

Right-wing talker Sean Hannity was also a subject for videographers. On Wednesday, Hannity “was confronted about his own past association with white supremacist Hal Turner,” read a post on the NewsHounds Web site. “First Hannity denied knowing Turner, then he said he had long ago banned Turner from his show. While it’s probably true that Hannity banned Turner, what Hannity didn’t mention is that before Turner got banned, he was regularly welcomed on Hannity’s show, even after saying on the air that if it weren’t for the graciousness of white people, ‘black people would still be swinging on trees in Africa.’ Updated with video.”

Many whites — particularly conservatives — professed to be put off by the passage in Obama’s Tuesday’s speech in which he mentioned that his grandmother “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and . . . on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Liberal Susan Estrich, campaign manager for 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, wrote, “Being afraid of black men is, unfortunately, rational even if it is also racist, in the sense that it involves judging people negatively for no reason other than the color of their skin.”

Obama’s comment to the radio host afterward gave his critics more to work with.

The Illinois senator was “off message in a way that only endless hours of campaigning can do to any man’s discipline,” Mark Silva wrote on the Chicago Tribune blog “The Swamp.”

“The three words linger on the short loop that is cable television news and reverberate on the Internet like some bad political equivalent of the film, Groundhog Day: ‘Typical white person.’ And, suddenly, the candidate who delivered in the heart of the City of Brotherly Love what widely has been called the most powerful speech about racial harmony since the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the issue is lambasted online as racist. The truth is, virtually every white person and every black person knows precisely what Obama meant. After generations of racial segregation either de jure (Southern) or de facto (Northern), the inbred, impulsive reactions of people who either mistrust, fear or resent members of another race are no secret in America. Even those of the youngest generation, in whom Obama sees hope for progress, can probably recall a parent or grandparent who has given voice to precisely what Obama meant: ‘Typical.'”

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NBC News Meets With 5 Leaders of Black Churches

Days before the Rev. Jeremiah Wright became a household name, five prominent African American pastors convened in New York for a “Day of Dialogue” with NBC News President Steve Capus, Brian Williams, “NBC Nightly News” anchor and managing editor, and other NBC News executives and producers to draw the network’s attention to key issues affecting the black community, according to a news release issued a few days afterward.

 

 

 

“Bishops Charles Blake, Sedgwick Daniels and T.D. Jakes, along with pastors A.R. Bernard and John Borders III, provided an enlightening look at the church’s role in addressing the problems faced by African Americans nationwide,” a March 12 release said of the meeting, which took place on March 8.

“This session was the first time that NBC News has brought together such a distinguished group of pastors representing the African American community of faith,” Capus said in the statement.

“As the epicenter of many inner cities, the church has the responsibility to go into the communities and show our brothers and sisters how to survive and thrive,” said Jakes, senior pastor of the Potter’s House of Dallas. “We need to find a way to work with the media in a concerted effort to increase awareness of the resources offered by Black churches to communities all over the country.”

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Michigan, Florida Papers Wrestle With Primary Mess

Along with the courts, state legislatures and party officials, editorial boards in Michigan and Florida have been grappling with how to resolve an impasse over seating delegates from the two states at the Democratic National Convention. Proposals to hold do-over primaries in the two states, which moved up their contests in violation of party rules, apparently collapsed this week.

“On Monday, Florida’s party said it was acceding to input from its members and dropping plans to stage a vote-by-mail primary that would have been open to 4.2 million registered Democrats,” as June Kronholz reported Friday in the Wall Street Journal. “The next day, Michigan Democrats said they had failed to agree to legislation that would have allowed for a state-run, privately financed primary.”

“Democrats gave up too quickly on a mail-in revote for Florida’s presidential primary,” the Orlando Sentinel said editorially on Friday.

The Democratic National Committee stripped Florida of its delegates “because state legislators scheduled the primary for Jan. 29, a week earlier than party rules allowed, in a bid to gain relevance that the state hasn’t enjoyed in prior nominating contests,” the editorial noted.

“Those same party rules, however, would have allowed the DNC to strip just half the state’s delegates. That’s the more reasonable approach that the Republican National Committee took with Florida and Michigan, which held its primary three weeks early.”

The Sentinel suggested that a proposal from Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., “to seat all the state’s delegates, but give each just half a vote at the convention,” is “more practical than stripping the state of half its delegates now that the party has chosen all of them.

“If this concession isn’t enough to appease party bosses,” the editorial continued, “here’s an additional step that should: Strip Florida of its 26 super delegates — the party officeholders and officials who would not be committed to either candidate as a result of the Jan. 29 vote. That would punish party leaders who had some say in setting the primary date, not the ordinary voters who didn’t.”

On Wednesday, the St. Petersburg Times said, “the fairest approach would be for all sides to agree before the convention that Florida’s pledged delegates would be divided equally and the candidates could fight for the superdelegates.”

The Miami Herald wrote on March 13, “At this point, the most important thing is that Florida do nothing to compromise the votes of 1.7 million Democrats who dutifully cast their ballots on Jan. 29. Voters did so with full knowledge of the candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, even though the candidates generally honored their pledge to the DNC not to campaign in Florida.”

In Michigan, the Detroit News wrote on March 13, “The state party could . . . simply agree to split its delegates 50-50 during its county conventions on March 26, accept the reality that Michigan is not going to be a player in the campaign and blame the Democratic National Committee for treating it poorly. If Florida adopts a similar strategy, it would be a wash for Clinton and Obama.

“. . . It’s not the most savory solution. But it may be the one that’s most doable and causes the least amount of friction among Michigan Democrats.”

The Detroit Free Press said on March 7, “Either seat the Michigan delegates chosen during the Jan. 15 primary — most of which will go to Hillary Clinton, — or hold a new round of balloting at party expense.”

National party officials have said that diversity was a key factor in setting the primary calendar; that Nevada, which has a large rural population, and South Carolina, which has a large African American electorate, had been moved up to balance the contests in overwhelmingly white Iowa and New Hampshire. The importance of Nevada and South Carolina would be diminished if other states moved their contests up as well, they said.

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Ex-Broadcast Journalist’s View of Affirmative Action

 

“When Geraldine Ferraro declared that somehow Barack Obama was about to be anointed the nation’s first affirmative action president I cringed, then doubled over in the type of pain only a thirty year wasted life on the affirmative action forefront could produce,” former broadcast journalist Del Walters wrote Tuesday on ebonyjet.com.

“But where the Ferraros of the world get it wrong is that most of us who walked the integration gauntlet never heard the chorus. Instead we heard the word ‘nigger’ over and over again. Sometimes it was uttered behind our backs, often in front of our faces. Retaliation meant the door would be closed forever for those who chose to follow in our footsteps, ignoring it ate away at the very essence of our souls. At one point, in Washington, D.C. of all places, the news director closed the door looked me in the eye and declared he didn’t think I was black. He was white. I never will forget the anger that swelled up inside me. I wanted to hit him, to cry out in anger, but instead I said nothing. I had the next African American who would walk through those doors to protect. Looking back I wish I had decked him. He deserved it and so did I.

“. . . Over the last decade we have been asked to leave.

“A seat simply isn’t good enough if America is to once again move forward. Anyone in television long enough to matter knows this. It is not enough to wear the microphone. We must be the ones in the board rooms and control rooms. We must be the ones on the floor directing the questions to the various panelists and demanding answers. We should know this.

“The truth about affirmative action, or lack thereof sits before us each and every weekend as color television reverts back to black and white. Mostly white.”

Walters, 50, left WJLA-TV in Washington in 2003 after 18 years, then headed the investigative unit at WMAR-TV in Baltimore for 2½ years. He is now a documentary filmmaker and author of a new novel, “The Race.”

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Howard U. Paper Struggles With Financial Issues

Howard University’s student newspaper the Hilltop, which in 2005 became the nation’s first black daily college newspaper, is struggling with financial issues and alerted advertisers that it planned on March 14 to stop publication for the year.

However, editor Drew Costley told Journal-isms that the note was sent out “prematurely” by the business manager and that the newspaper plans to resume publication on Tuesday, after students return from spring break.

“There was transition in the business office and turnover that disrupted operations,” Yanick Rice Lamb, a faculty member who has advised the newspaper, told Journal-isms. “There were also production problems that contributed to missing deadlines,” she said.

The paper published an “open letter to the Howard community” on Jan. 28 in which Costley said:

“For the last three years, we’ve seen decreases in the amount of revenue generated by the publication but have managed to stay afloat due to shrewd budgeting and financial support from the Office of Student Affairs. While preparing for the spring semester, we discovered that the newspaper’s liabilities outweighed our expected revenue and collected revenue.”

Costley, who was returning from New Orleans Friday with 500 other Howard students and Lamb from a spring break trip to assist Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts, said the newspaper had a $48,000 bill from the Washington Times for printing expenses but had raised $20,000 of that amount. The university’s student affairs office kicked in $10,000 and the editorial staff had agreed to go without salaries for the time being.

“Leadership at the university is discussing the issue and trying to decide what is the next step,” university spokesman Ron Harris said.

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NAHJ Suspends Parity Project at San Jose Paper

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists is suspending its partnership with the San Jose Mercury News, which just underwent a round of buyouts and layoffs, in NAHJ’s Parity Project, NAHJ announced.

“More positive signs in the hiring and retention of journalists of color at the Mercury News that increase the diversity of its staffing and an improvement in its relationship with the local Latino community need to be undertaken,” NAHJ said in a statement dated March 13.

“When the Mercury News shows its commitment to newsroom staffing that reflects the diversity of its community and its active interaction with that community, NAHJ stands ready to resume our active partnership.”

The Mercury News, a former Knight Ridder paper, is now owned by MediaNews Group Inc., whose CEO is William Dean Singleton. It lost 10 newsroom employees of color in its most recent staff reductions two weeks ago.

The Parity Project involves NAHJ’s work with selected English-language news organizations that serve large Latino communities, but that do not have a representative percentage of Latino journalists in their newsrooms, according to a description on NAHJ’s Web site. Twenty-five companies are participating.

“Through the Parity Project, NAHJ helps these organizations to accomplish two main goals: 1) to find and hire more journalists who happen to be Latino for their newsroom job openings. And 2) establish even stronger ties than they might already have with Latino leaders and groups in their areas that can offer ongoing guidance when it comes to coverage of Hispanics.”

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Story Looks at Attitudes Toward Iraqi Skin Color

As the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq is commemorated, a public radio program looked at the role the Iraqis’ skin color plays in the minds of American soldiers; an anonymous CBS News journalist remains in captivity and Reuters has compiled a Web site that documents the five years of war.

The Reuters site includes “video footage, images, interviews with journalists who have covered the conflict, a visual timeline of the War, and more.”

Public Radio International’s “The World” ran “Coloring Iraqis,” on whether prejudice and skin-color stereotypes influence how American servicemen and women view Iraqis, on Friday. In the piece, executive produced by Phillip Martin, one speaker called U.S. actions “racial profiling of the most primal type,” because American soldiers often cannot tell which Iraqi is friend and which foe.

On his “TV Decoder” blog on the New York Times Web site, Brian Stelter wrote on Thursday, “Amid the coverage of the five-year anniversary coverage of the Iraq war, one story has gone largely overlooked: an anonymous CBS News journalist is still being held captive somewhere in the country.

“Two CBS News employees were kidnapped in Basra, Iraq on Feb. 11. At the time, Iraqi publications reported that the hostages were a British photographer and his Iraqi interpreter. While the interpreter was later freed, the journalist is still being held.

“In a brief statement on Feb. 12, CBS said efforts were underway to find the journalists and asked other news organizations not to speculate about their identities. The network has not spoken about the situation publicly for five weeks. Organizations often stay silent in public while they work in private to secure a hostage’s release. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists 51 reporters were kidnapped in Iraq between 2004 and 2007, including several producers and correspondents for international television networks and several employees of The New York Times.”

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Immigration—and Wording Issues—Won’t Disappear

 

 

Dianne Solis of the Dallas Morning News, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ “Print Journalist of the Year,” says the immigration story “will be with us for quite some time because of globalization and because of the nature of immigration itself — it’s very, very hard to stop.”

Solis is the Morning News’ lead immigration writer. In the March/April issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, she told assistant editor Clint Hendler, “One magnet is simply family reunification: the need, the want, to be with your family. And many, many people have their families now in the U.S. It’s a hot-button issue here right now, and that’s driving the need for more coverage. It’s a big story on our presidential beat, for example. It’s a big story in our criminal-justice coverage. It’s a big story in our education coverage.”

Hendler asked Solis whether there was a distinction between “illegal immigrant” and “undocumented immigrant.”

“We use them interchangeably, but we use ‘illegal immigrant’ more often,” she said. “But many advocates think there’s a distinction. Some believe that anybody who’s here without papers is illegal, and that we should say that. And others believe that that’s a very harsh term, that no human being is illegal, and if you have illegal immigrants you must also have, by logical extension, illegal employers.

“Others parse it more finely and say that there are many people who legally come to the United States on a visa and then overstay that visa; so since they did not come over illegally, it’s wrong to call them illegal immigrants. Then others will say, ‘Well, wait a minute, they’re out of legal status now, so they’re therefore illegal.’ It just goes on and on.

“On the term ‘undocumented,’ there are employment lawyers who will say, ‘Let’s get real, folks; everyone has documents, they’re just false documents. Or they’re just not their documents. And you know that’s the way it is in your workforce.'”

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Short Takes

 

 

 

 

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Feedback: What About Obama’s Handyman?

Julius Cooper, a black handyman, was hired in August 2004 by Barack and Michelle Obama to repair the back porch steps of their South Side Chicago home.

It is reported by an anonymous source that, at the time, Cooper was still angry over a $200 judgment against him in small claims court for inadequate work he had done for a white client.

Cooper is said to have muttered in Obama’s presence: “That’s the way the American justice system works. A black man don’t stand a chance.”

Obama, it is reported, said nothing but shook his head and went back in his house.

News organizations are investigating whether there are any videos, CDs, tape recordings or other eyewitness accounts of this incident that could shed light on Obama’s reaction, as an indication of his character, his views on race, his integrity and his fitness to hold the highest office in the land.

Cooper has refused numerous media requests for interviews, but reporters have conducted an intensive look into his background, searching public records and interviewing his relatives and friends to see if the handyman has a history of making controversial statements.

A cousin, Cephus Cooper, told Fox News: “Julius was always a troublemaker— like back in 1972, when he attacked a policeman’s club with his head during a routine traffic stop.”

Rita Mcball, a white elementary schoolteacher, recalled for the New York Times when she had Cooper in her second grade class. “I’m sure he had ADHD,” she said. “He sometimes wanted to go to the bathroom twice in one day. Back then, we called it being fidgety, but it certainly was a disruption for the class.”

Brian Sinclair, who operated a grocery store in Cooper’s West Side Chicago neighborhood, told CNBC: “I’m not surprised he’s in the news. He was always trying to stir up mischief, reading expiration dates on the meats and milk and stuff.”

Reaction to the story in a media sampling of voters is split. “Obama should have cut off relations with Cooper immediately and ordered him off the property,” said Mike Gallot, a metalworker in Xenia, Ohio. “He needs to denounce Cooper and his racist statements publicly.”

Donna Rankin, a white bank teller in Ames, Iowa, and an Obama supporter, defended the candidate but wonders now how he really feels about race. “I thought he was going to bring us all together. I know two black people I was ready to be friends with, but now that’s all up in the air,” she said. “His remaining silent and simply going back in his house in the face of such scurrilous remarks makes me stop and wonder.”

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is preparing a response. It is believed the candidate will make a major speech soon in which he will try to put the Cooper remark in context while disassociating himself.

A campaign insider says the speech will rely heavily on the social philosophy of King— Rodney King— asking: “Can’t we all just get along?”

Joseph N. Boyce
Indianapolis
March 18, 2008

Boyce is a former Time magazine bureau chief and Wall Street Journal senior editor who retired in 1998 after 32 years in the business.

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Feedback: News Reports Are Expensive Hearsay

The subject of race in America is the story of perpetrated, institutionalized bashing of the black man’s nature and his contributions to the world. Sen. Barack Obama’s words in Philadelphia put it all in perspective without sacrificing what’s important to him — his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who he sees as a mentor.

Obama stands tall next to pundits who claim to understand the racial issues in America but articulate them casually. After the repeated, televised video of his pastor’s speech, his relationship with Rev. Wright is still intact.

Despite the random massage media affords our aching, informationally overwhelmed minds, we must not allow media anchors and hosts to interpret the correctness of remarks as important as those that qualify a candidate for president of the United States. The mental calisthenics required to evaluate primary information are our responsibility. Even the best news reports, in my opinion, should be viewed only as expensive hearsay. I listened to Obama’s words and I am satisfied that his take on race in America is revolutionary because it is ethically uncompromising.

When I discovered my Choctaw ancestors, I discovered the price of compromise. Like all of the civilized tribes, my Choctaw ancestors in Livingston, Ala., dressed like the early white settlers, spoke English and educated their children in American schools and colleges. The result of relinquishing their Choctaw practices and values is that they were the first Native people to be placed on reservations. Obama is an astute observer. He has learned that before, during and after a trial by fire, when you package loyalties for sale, no matter the outcome of the “game,” you still lose.

I always thought America, as all entities, must end as it began. This means we would see America coming to its end with great strife; an Armageddon of sorts. I don’t know if I believe that anymore.

Obama is, unbelievably, changing my mind. Maybe, just maybe, an Obama, who does not allow window dressers to frame his expressions of loyalty and faith, will brave the coming storms of his detractors and teach us how to foreclose on a prophetic end. Maybe we will all take up the great cross of race and do something!

ZSun-nee Matema
Baltimore
March 20, 2008

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