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Web Accelerates News from Detroit

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Indictment of Mayor an Instant Media Sensation

“If there has ever been a bigger local story than the criminal charges filed against Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, I sure haven’t seen it in my 40 years in the news business,” Mike Wendland wrote on the Web site of the Detroit Free Press on Monday. “But because of technology, the felony perjury and obstruction of justice charges against the mayor . . . have set a new benchmark for the use of the Internet as a news distribution channel.

“Thanks to the Internet,” the announcement of charges against the mayor and his former chief of staff, Christine Beatty, “was distributed far wider and faster than any news story we’ve ever seen hereabouts.

 

 

“All three Detroit network TV stations, the major news radio stations and both daily newspapers streamed live the news conference of Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy this morning.

“Naturally, all the local over-the-air stations broadcast it live as well. The story went far beyond local news. Cut-ins soon came from cable TV network news programs.

“The Drudge Report made it the lead story before the news conference was even over. Its headline screamed ‘Detroit Mayor Charged in Sex Affair.’ Later it amended that to ‘Democrat Rising Star hit with 12 counts.. Detroit Mayor learns his fate…Obstruction, Misconduct, Perjury…..”

“By noon, an hour after the charges were announced, Google News listed 386 fresh Internet stories on the charges. By 1 pm, the Internet story count was 585.

“For the most part, all the technology worked as close to flawless as such things can be, though traffic congestion as thousands clicked on the streaming links simultaneously resulted in occasional stutters or brief pauses.

“And then the blogosphere kicked in.”

Kilpatrick and Beatty surrendered to Wayne County, Mich., authorities Monday afternoon after Worthy charged them with perjury, obstruction, conspiracy and misconduct. Kilpatrick said he expects “full and complete vindication,” as the Free Press reported.

Web sites of Detroit media outlets featured dozens of stories and videos. “MAYOR, BEATTY BOOKING PHOTOS,” proclaimed WXYZ-TV.

“There is a saying in the city that goes something like this: Detroit politics is always a floor show with never a cover charge,” Charlie LeDuff, a former New York Times reporter now at the Detroit News, wrote in advance of the indictments.

“Worthy’s investigation began after the Free Press uncovered text messages that showed a romantic relationship between Kilpatrick and Beatty — a relationship both had denied under oath during the police whistle-blower lawsuit last summer. The pair also gave misleading testimony about the firing of [Deputy Police Chief Gary] Brown, the messages show,” as the Free Press said.

“Although Kilpatrick apologized for his conduct in a televised appearance with his wife, Carlita, in late January, he has blamed the media for his troubles and rejected calls from the City Council, Attorney General Mike Cox and city union locals to resign. . . . He accused the Free Press of illegally obtaining the text messages – which the newspaper denies – and accusing the media of conducting a public lynching. He said the text messages and the settlement agreement that concealed them should never have been made public.”

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Year-Old Letter From Rev. Wright Takes On New Life

The controversy over remarks by Sen. Barack Obama‘s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has given new life to a year-old open letter that Wright wrote to Jodi Kantor of the New York Times.

The March 11, 2007, letter is being e-mailed with a vengeance as if it were written yesterday. “I think he put the wrong year though on accident,” one e-mailer mistakenly said in forwarding the message. It was even posted last week in a blog on Obama’s Web site.

“Jodi, out of two hours of conversation I spent approximately five to seven minutes on Barack’s taking advice from one of his trusted campaign people and deeming it unwise to make me the media spotlight on the day of his announcing his candidacy for the Presidency and what do you print? You and your editor proceeded to present to the general public a snippet, a printed ‘sound byte’ and a titillating and tantalizing article about his disinviting me to the Invocation on the day of his announcing his candidacy,” Wright wrote.

“I have never been exposed to that kind of duplicitous behavior before, and I want to write you publicly to let you know that I do not approve of it and will not be party to any further smearing of the name, the reputation, the integrity or the character of perhaps this nation’s first (and maybe even only) honest candidate offering himself for public service as the person to occupy the Oval Office.”

Kantor said Tuesday she could not comment without permission from her editors, and Wright is reported to be out of the country.

Wright was likely referring to a March 5, 2007, story reporting that Obama had disinvited Wright from giving the invocation at Obama’s Feb. 10, 2007, announcement of his candidacy.

Somewhat prophetically, Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton is quoted as saying, “Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church, but because of the type of attention it was receiving on blogs and conservative talk shows, he decided to avoid having statements and beliefs being used out of context and forcing the entire church to defend itself.”

Although the letter criticizes Kantor for using only a “sound byte” of their conversation, Kantor also wrote a lengthy piece on April 30, “A Candidate, His Minister and the Search for Faith,” that explored the Obama-Wright relationship more extensively.

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Public Editors Fault Papers on Wright Coverage

“The Post — and some others in the news media — came late to reporting on the controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. , Barack Obama’s former Chicago pastor. The story, long there for the picking, touched raw nerves — racial, political and religious — among readers,” Ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote Sunday in the Washington Post.

“The New York Times and the Associated Press had detailed accounts of the relationship between Obama and Wright about a year ago; Religion News Service wrote about it in a 2005 story. (The Post subscribes to RNS, and I used to supervise it.) But before March 15, Wright had been in only one substantive Post story — a Feb. 28 piece about Obama trying to reassure Jewish leaders about his support for Israel. Wright has been a strong supporter of the Palestinians. A Chicago Tribune story about the church’s theology appeared in The Post on Jan. 28, 2007, but only in an early Sunday street-sales edition.”

Howell was but one ombudsman to address coverage of Wright over the weekend.

In the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer, Public Editor Ted Vaden said, “I think The N&O did miss the boat in not picking up on the Jeremiah Wright controversy sooner. After all, that’s what propelled Obama to pause his campaign to make that major address on race — which some consider to be historic. Underplaying the controversy fed those ‘agenda’ theories out there.”

In the Kansas City Star, Readers’ Representative Derek Donovan wrote, “I believe that readers could perceive bias against Obama if journalists investigated his church’s teachings and not the other candidates’, as if Trinity United’s mission alone is worthy of scrutiny because some find its pastor extreme.”

Ted Diadiun, reader representative for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, answered readers who often challenge coverage by writing, “If that story had been about . . . you would have . . .”

“In the wake of the news created by the incendiary sermons of Barack Obama’s longtime pastor and mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, it came as no surprise when critics were ready with their interpretations of how The Plain Dealer would have handled the story if Obama had been white, or a Republican,” Diadiun said.

“But life is too complex for such reasoning. The components never line up that tidily. Every story comes with its own characters, with its own set of circumstances, and means something different from every other story — no matter how similar they might seem.

“Changing one major fact about Obama changes everything else. He is NOT a Republican and he is NOT white, and trying to arbitrarily reverse a person’s race or personal values without adjusting everything on the other side of the equation will give you a faulty result. Ask any mathematician.”

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Buchanan Asks Why Blacks Are Not More Grateful

Some conservative white columnists have started in earnest the racial dialogue urged by Sen. Barack Obama.

 

 

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright “ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American,” thundered Pat Buchanan Friday in his syndicated column.

“No people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream,” Buchanan wrote in a column called, “A Brief for Whitey.”

“Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants.

“We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

Similarly, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer pronounced Obama’s Philadelphia speech “A Brilliant Fraud.”

Black columnists Monroe Anderson, Deborah Mathis and Colbert I. King responded with outrage or astonishment at Buchanan’s column.

On the San Francisco Chronicle Web site, Interactive Editor Andrew S. Ross observed, “Gone mostly unremarked about Obama’s former pastor and his seemingly anti-patriotic remarks is the fact that he served in the military, in both the Marines and the Navy.

“Not all who have jumped on the Wright affair can claim the same service to his or her country, of course. One thinks, for example, of William Kristol, who referred in a recent New York Times column to “Wright’s thoroughgoing and conspiracy-heavy anti-Americanism.” No trace of patriotic military service in Kristol’s CV, although he is often in favor of the use of U.S. military power abroad.”

Some black columnists found Wright wanting. In the New Republic magazine, researcher-reporter-researcher Dayo Olopade wrote that he had visited Wright’s church two months ago.

“It isn’t just that Wright is self-centered, although that seems to be the case; it is also that his worldview doesn’t recognize firm boundaries between religion and politics, or really between religion and anything,” Olopade wrote.

In Newsday, columnist Les Payne said, “Barack Obama’s decision to run — and the campaign results to date — utterly refute his pastor’s musings.” Payne noted that in a 2006 Howard University speech, Wright stated that “no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body.” Payne said, “The current U.S. secretary of State puts the lie to that projection as flatly as Obama’s strong standing does to the one about a black candidate’s chances.”

“But if we learned anything from the Clinton White House, other than that Bill was unfaithful to Hillary,” Payne continued, “it was that white America was not ready for a frank discussion of race.”

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4,000 U.S. Dead in Iraq, but Do Media Still Care?

“Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers and the Internet,” Richard Pérez-Peña wrote Monday in the New York Times.

“The fact that the economy and the election are now of major interest to the public is part of the reason for the war being put on the back burner.

“Media attention on Iraq began to wane after the first months of fighting, but as recently as the middle of last year, it was still the most-covered topic. Since then, Iraq coverage by major American news sources has plummeted, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

“The drop in coverage parallels — and may be explained by — a decline in public interest.”

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Series on Health Inequality Issues Starts Thursday

“With the issue of health care at or at least near the top of the agenda for an overwhelming majority of Americans today, I would like to urge you to watch Unnatural Causes: Is inequality making us sick?” Dwight Lewis declared in his Nashville Tennessean column.

“The documentary deals with such an important topic, and it will surely have you, too, asking such questions as, ‘Why are so many people (in America) suffering from chronic health illness in the first place?’

Former U.S. surgeon general Dr. David Satcher and his colleagues calculated that in 2002, 83,570 African Americans died who would not have died if black-white differences in health did not exist, a rate of 229 “excess deaths” per day.

“We produced UNNATURAL CAUSES to draw attention to the root causes of health and illness and to help reframe the debate about health in America. Economic and racial inequality are not abstract concepts but hospitalize and kill even more people than cigarettes,” series creator Larry Adelman says on the film’s Web site. “The wages and benefits we’re paid, the neighborhoods we live in, the schools we attend, our access to resources and even our tax policies are health issues every bit as critical as diet, smoking and exercise.”

The series, produced by California Newsreel and presented on PBS by the National Minority Consortia of public television, airs nationally over four consecutive Thursdays on PBS beginning Thursday at 10 p.m. Local dates and times may vary. Co-sponsors included the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

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CNN Announces “Black in America” Series

“Forty years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., CNN will launch a sweeping on-air and digital initiative, ‘CNN Presents: Black in America,'” the network announced on Monday.

“Breaking new ground in revealing the current state of Black America, this landmark programming features six hours of documentaries, a weekly series of reports that will air on CNN/U.S. and CNN International and appear as part of a multimedia online effort. The programming, which airs over four months in 2008, focuses on fresh analysis from new voices about the real lives behind the stereotypes, statistics and identity politics that frequently frame the national dialogue about Black America.

“Reported by anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien, ‘Black in America’ begins with the two-hour premiere of ‘Eyewitness to Murder: The King Assassination,’ a first-person account of what happened on April 4, 1968.”

‘Black in America’ continues in July with two additional two-hour documentaries that will air on CNN/U.S. and CNN International: ‘Black in America: The Black Man,’ Wednesday, July 23, 9 p.m. (two hours) and ‘Black in America: The Black Woman & Family,’ Thursday, July 24, 9 p.m. (two hours).

“As part of the ‘Black in America’ series, weekly special reports will air between April and June that investigate topics including parenthood and marital rates among black adults, high rates of HIV/AIDS among African Americans, achievement gaps in education, careers, and even disparities in life expectancy rates between African Americans and the general population. These reports will debut after the world premiere of ‘Eyewitness to Murder: The King Assassination.'”

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Short Takes

 

 

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Feedback: Put Heads Together for Howard U. Paper

I was dismayed to read in your column about the financial struggles of Howard University’s student newspaper, which caused the premature announcement of it shutting down.

In this day and time, I can’t believe that a solid case for financial rescue hasn’t been planned or at least discussed. Black newspapers across the country are struggling and experienced black reporters and editors are being let go weekly. Howard should always exist as the shining example of excellence for our people. All of this should give us pause to examine the probability that without help, the newspaper could go under.

We’re not talking about just a commercial venture, but one with the legacy of a slavery-to-freedom timeline that reflects the current African American students, academic environment and global community.

I encourage Yanick Rice Lamb, the faculty adviser, and editor Drew Costley to take a good look around campus, snake out a few academic experts in the financial realm, and put together a realistic three-year operational budget to submit for a loan that will carry the publication through this rough period. You have options perhaps that have not been considered. This might be a perfect consult for Earl Graves. It wouldn’t hurt to ask.

What about the Board of Trustees reviewing such a plan? Isn’t this important enough for their involvement?

The one thing that needs to happen is a “realistic slap in the face” among those who would be slow to agree that there is a serious need for this publication to survive. Howard University isn’t like most institutions.

Make this newspaper what it should be: another voice among few that can offer the black perspective, perhaps, on a global level.

Tom M. Jones
Class of ’70
An Original Pioneer of WHUR-FM
Raleigh, N.C.
March 22, 2008

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