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Making News With Rice, Clinton, Obama

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Critic Has Questions for Reporters on Bosnia Trip

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave Sen. Barack Obama perhaps some unexpected support in his call for a national conversation on race; Obama, making a string of television appearances, laid out conditions under which he might have dumped his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright; and a media critic questioned why two network news reporters who covered Hillary Clinton did not speak up to say that Clinton misspoke when she repeatedly said that she ran from sniper fire at an airport in Bosnia while first lady.

In a meeting with reporters and editors at the Washington Times, the Republican Rice mentioned Obama’s March 18 speech in Philadelphia on race, saying it was “important” that the Illinois Democrat “gave it for a whole host of reasons.”

“‘America doesn’t have an easy time dealing with race,’ Miss Rice said, adding that members of her family have ‘endured terrible humiliations,’ the Times reported in a story by Nicholas Kralev Friday that took up most of the top half of the front page. Rice is the highest ranking African American in the Bush administration.

“‘What I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and had faith in this country even when this country didn’t love and have faith in them — and that’s our legacy,’ she said.”

The story led with Rice’s oft-repeated description of the United States as having trouble dealing with race because of a national “birth defect” that denied blacks the opportunities given to whites at the country’s founding.

While the secretary did not mention conservative Republican commentator Pat Buchanan, her comments came a week after that onetime presidential candidate disparaged Obama’s call for racial dialogue, saying in his column, “White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to. . . . We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?” Buchanan followed up this week.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, on ABC-TV’s daytime talk show “The View,” Obama said he had talked to Wright after the airing of inflammatory snippets of Wright’s sermons sidetracked his campaign.

The candidate explained, “I think he’s saddened by what’s happened, and I told him I feel badly that he has been characterized just in this one way, and people haven’t seen this broader aspect of him.

“Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country — for all its flaws — then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable staying there at the church.”

In Obama’s March 18 speech, he said: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” as Ben Smith noted on thepolitico.com.

Obama taped his “View” conversation on Thursday, the same day he talked about the U.S. economy with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC and spoke with Charles Gibson on ABC’s “World News,” MediaBistro.com reported.

On his St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times blog, media critic Eric Deggans asked why CBS’s Sharyl Attkison and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who were with Clinton when she, as first lady, visited Bosnia in 1996, and “who have filed more than a few election stories this year,” have not “remembered the truth before now?

“As I’ve been watching coverage of Hillary Clinton’s attempt to explain why she characterized a visit to Bosnia years ago as much more dangerous than it actually was, I’ve been struck by network reporters’ attempts to insert themselves into the story,” Deggans wrote.

Both Attkison and Mitchell “have pointed out during their reports that they were actually with Clinton on that Bosnia trip and recalled no sniper fire, rushing crowds or exaggerated danger. Since headlines have been filled with the news, other journalists who took that trip 12 years ago — including former MTV News reporter Tabitha Soren — have weighed in.

“So why did it take comic Sinbad to blow the lid on the whole deal?”

Spokeswomen for NBC and CBS did not respond to a request from Journal-isms for comment.

For her part, Clinton has tried to counter the discovery of her misstatement by striking out at Obama.

“Mrs. Clinton’s campaign responded with an e-mail catalog of Mr. Obama’s ‘exaggerations and misstatements,'” as Patrick Healy reported Wednesday in the New York Times.

“The campaign cited his saying that he was a law professor —he was a senior lecturer — and that his parents fell in love because of the historic 1965 civil rights march in Selma, Ala., even though he was born in 1961. He later said he was referring broadly to the civil rights movement.”

Juan Williams, senior correspondent at National Public Radio and commentator at Fox News, was handed a rare rebuke from host Diane Rehm when he repeated those charges as fact Friday as a panelist reviewing the week on “the Diane Rehm Show,” which originates at Washington’s WAMU-FM and airs on National Public Radio.

Rehm read complaints from listeners about Williams’ statements. One told Rehm that Obama had never said his parents met at the Selma demonstration, but at events like it.

Rehm produced a news release from the University of Chicago Law School — which the school had posted on Thursday — saying that senior lecturers there are in fact considered professors. Williams, who had said Obama “may have been in the classroom” but was not a constitutional law professor, said the university was splitting hairs. Rehm concluded, “I think we ought to stop questioning whether he was a professor of constitutional law. That’s what I think,” and the discussion moved on.

[Williams repeated the allegations on Fox News’ “Fox News Sunday.”]

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Bob Johnson Tries to Pressure Pelosi on Delegates

 

 

The last time Robert L. Johnson was in the news as a Hillary Clinton supporter, he was apologizing to Sen. Barack Obama for calling attention to Obama’s admitted drug use as a teenager and for referring to Obama as Sidney Poitier in the 1967 film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

That was in January, and Clinton was forced to declare the comments by the founder of Black Entertainment Television “out of bounds.”

This week, Dan Balz and Perry Bacon reported Thursday in the Washington Post, Johnson helped organize a letter that “upbraided House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) . . . for suggesting that Democratic superdelegates should back the candidate with the most pledged delegates and urged her to respect the right of those delegates to back whomever they choose at the end of the primary season.” Obama is leading in pledged delegates.

“The letter made it clear that the fundraisers believe their voice should carry real weight with the speaker. Noting their past financial support, they wrote, ‘We . . . hope you will be responsive to some of your major enthusiastic supporters,’ they said.”

CNN reported that “Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly said late Wednesday the California Democrat stands by her argument that the party’s superdelegates would do damage if they go against the will of voters and hand the nomination to the candidate who finished second among those delegates awarded from the round of caucuses and primaries.”

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Time Sorry for Description of South Side Chicago

Time magazine apologized on Thursday for a Web site description of the South Side of Chicago as “a sprawl of cracked sidewalks and boarded buildings that inspires fear among the city’s middle classes, and even its wizened cabbies.”

“We will remove the original description in the story on TIME.com today and will replace it . . . We will also run language explaining the clarification at the bottom of the story . . . TIME regrets the original inaccurate description,” Ali Zelenko, vice president, communications at Time, told Journal-isms on Thursday.

The new language in “A Visit to Obama’s Chicago Church” says, “Many of Trinity’s members live on Chicago’s South Side, a vast swath of land that includes the city’s convention center, multi-million-dollar mansions, and boarded-up flop-houses. Among Trinity’s members are doctors, architects, prominent journalists, as well as teachers, firemen and garbage collectors. . . .”

The clarification reads:

“The original version of this story had a narrow and incomplete description of the South Side of Chicago that omitted mention of recent changes and developments in the area.”

Other media outlets writing about Trinity United Church of Christ and its neighborhood have also painted Chicago’s South Side with a broad brush. A March 7 story from the Associated Press used one word to describe the South Side, “decayed.”

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Budget Cuts Could Have Led to False L.A. Story

 

 

 

The ill-fated Los Angeles Times story that tied the 1994 wounding of rap icon Tupac Shakur to associates of another major rap figure, Sean “Puffy” Combs, “prompted threats of legal action from attorneys for Combs and a talent manager implicated in the piece,” Howard Kurtz reported Friday in the Washington Post.

The story “represents the biggest debacle at the Times since 1999, when the paper damaged its credibility by sharing profits with the Staples Center from a special magazine issue on the sports arena. It is also the most prominent blunder involving unverified documents since CBS News retracted its 2004 report about President Bush’s National Guard service,” Kurtz wrote.

“The Tupac piece was published a month after Russ Stanton took over as editor, in the wake of the parent Tribune Co. firing the paper’s top editor for the second time in 15 months during disputes about budget cuts. Bob Steele, a scholar at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said newsroom cutbacks may have had an impact, noting that the Times account said the story was read only” by Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin “and two copy editors.

“‘For a paper like the L.A. Times to blow it, on what appear to be fake documents, is a very grievous journalistic error,’ Steele said. He credited the paper with quickly making amends but said ‘that doesn’t erase the error.’

“Michael Parks, who was editor of the Times during the Staples controversy, said he always insisted that he and another top editor read all front-page stories in addition to the primary editor.

“‘In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job,’ Chuck Philips, the story’s Pulitzer Prize-winning author, said in a statement. ‘I’m sorry.’ . . . Duvoisin also took responsibility, saying: ‘We should not have let ourselves be fooled. . . .

“Stanton, who had been the paper’s innovation editor, declined interview requests for the second straight day.”

On Editor & Publisher’s Web site, Joe Strupp wrote that the episode “shows the new scrutiny that newspapers and other news outlets are facing when they post such documents online.”

Steele wrote on the Poynter site, much of the L.A. Times’ internal investigation “should focus on how the quality control process at the LA Times apparently fell far short,” and he contributed questions that investigators might ask.

On Slate.com, Jack Shafer offered “a few general suggestions for journalists, investors, scientists, juries, and other targets of how to avoid getting swindled by your sources.”

The story received 382 reader comments on the L.A. Times Web site from 2:03 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday to 4:28 p.m. on Friday.

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2 More Black Journalists Leave L.A. Times

 

 

Black journalists Mike Terry, longtime sportswriter, and Gregory W. Griggs, a reporter in the suburban Ventura County Bureau, left the Los Angeles Times on Friday after accepting buyouts. Their departures further diminish the diversity at the newspaper, which has now lost eight black journalists since June 1, 2007.

“I don’t have any immediate plans, but I’m not retiring,” Terry told Journal-isms.

His wife, Gayle Pollard-Terry, who left the paper last year, wrote this of her husband:

“Best known at the Times for his coverage of the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks and national college women’s basketball including the Final Four, Mike spent more than 13 years at the newspaper. While there, he also served as a Chairman of the National Association of Black Journalists Sports Task Force. He remains the cohost of NABJ’s Sam Lacy Awards, named in honor of the legendary African-American and Major League Baseball Hall of Fame sportswriter. The awards are presented annually at the convention to pioneering sports figures and journalists.

“He also won an Emmy. While co-hosting and reporting for the Los Angeles Times High School Sports Report, broadcast on Fox Sports, West, he was part of the team that won the 2005 Los Angeles Area Emmy for ‘Sports Series.’ Mike’s first love is Major League Baseball. He covered the California Angels (now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim) for close to a decade before joining the Times, and covered enough games while at the paper to earn a vote for the Hall of Fame. He is one of only a few African-American journalists who has that privilege.”

Griggs, whose colleagues were taking him out for a farewell lunch on Friday, did not respond to a request for comment. Times spokeswoman Nancy Sullivan said she was unable to say how many employees had taken the buyout.

A Feb. 29 Times story said, “Employees at The Times have until 3 p.m. Monday to respond to a voluntary buyout offer aimed at eliminating 100 to 150 jobs, 40 to 50 of them in the newsroom. If not enough people volunteer, layoffs will make up the balance.”

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Aldape Lands as Vice President of Scripps Co.

 

 

Javier J. Aldape, who edited three editions of the Tribune Co.’s Spanish-language Hoy newspapers and said this month he was leaving the company, has been named vice president of niche products for the newspaper division of the E. W. Scripps Co., Scripps announced on Thursday.

“Beginning April 14, Aldape, 36, will work with the company’s newspapers in 15 communities to identify market-specific or company-wide opportunities to create print or online specialty publications. His appointment aligns with the company’s strategy to increase the share of ad revenue that is derived from niche products,” the announcement said.

Aldape, a Texas native, was based at the Los Angeles Times. He came to Tribune Co. from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where he was a vice president and edited its Spanish-language newspaper La Estrella. He was also treasurer of Unity: Journalists of Color and active in the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

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More Weigh In on Vogue Cover With LeBron James

 

Several African American editors and critics polled by Women’s Wear Daily are critical of the Vogue magazine cover featuring the NBA’s LeBron James, the first black male ever to appear on the magazine’s cover. He is holding model Gisele Bündchen, who is white, by the waist.

“The image has been compared by some to King Kong sweeping away a helpless white damsel in distress and triggered debate on ‘The Today Show’ on Wednesday morning as to whether it is offensive,” Stephanie D. Smith of Women’s Wear Daily wrote on Thursday.

“It’s a reminder that as African-Americans, we have come very far to have an African-American male featured on the cover of Vogue, but we have very far to go to continue to educate people within our industry regarding the power of images and the potential impact they can have on their readers,” Men’s Fitness editor in chief Roy Johnson said in the piece.

“Emil Wilbekin, editor in chief of Giant, also said he felt the cover didn’t accurately reflect the athlete, describing him as ‘cool’ and ‘gentlemanly.’ Wilbekin just finished a yearlong consulting project with Microsoft as a reporter and blogger for James’ Web site, lebron.msn.com, and followed the player through the NBA finals, to China and various events such as his appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live.'”

On the e-mail list of the Sports Task Force of the National Association of Black Journalists, one writer noted similarities with Army recruitment posters from World War I said to be used as models for the “King Kong” movie poster; David Steele of the Baltimore Sun found other portraits by photographer Annie Leibovitz, who shot the James cover, in which black athletes were half-naked.

Vogue spokesman Patrick O’Connell told Journal-isms, “Because Vogue’s April Shape issue celebrates athleticism, for the cover and throughout the issue, we wanted to showcase the athletic ideal, not only in size and shape, but also in character. Vogue feels LeBron James and Gisele are perfect examples of these qualities. LeBron James appears on the cover and in the issue in the same powerful spirit he takes to his game. We are honored to have both LeBron and Gisele on the cover.”

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RiShawn Biddle Settles With Indianapolis Star

 

RiShawn Biddle, the Indianapolis Star editorial writer who was ousted in October after his blog item used the word “coon” to describe black officials, has reached a settlement with the newspaper.

“The company agreed to not contest RiShawn’s unemployment benefits from the state (which it could have done, as it previously claimed RiShawn had been fired for ‘just cause’), and agreed to turn over copies of his entire personnel file, which contain some positive information and evaluations and which will be useful to him as he seeks new employment,” Abe Aamidor, president of the Indianapolis Newspaper Guild, told Journal-isms on Thursday.

“In return, The Indianapolis Newspaper Guild has agreed to withdraw its demand for binding arbitration in the matter.

“RiShawn was apprised of this deal in a timely manner, weeks ago, and agreed to it in conversations with me.

“There was no ‘no disclosure’ clause in the agreement, or demand that RiShawn not sue at a later date.”

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Many Media Outlets Can’t Witness Zimbabwe Vote

Veteran journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault says she will be covering Saturday’s election in Zimbabwe. “It’s almost D-Day,” she wrote, “where 5.9 million registered voters will go to the polls and the D could stand either for Democracy or Disaster,” Hunter-Gault wrote on theRoot.com.

“Democracy would mean that for the first time in a long time — more than a decade — Zimbabwe would have an uncontested, free and fair election.

“Disaster would be a contested, unfair election that was not free. And that would undoubtedly mean that the 84-year-old Robert Gabriel Mugabe, who has ruled the country since independence in 1980, would be returned to power in a country that is now staring into the abyss, facing more than 100,000 percent inflation. There is no food on the shelves, or money to buy even if there were.”

Mugabe’s government has banned most media from covering the election and many are trying to cover it from Johannesburg, she wrote.

“I didn’t even apply since I work for an international news organization and most of those are on the country’s baaaad list (Al-Jazeera being one of the exceptions.) At the beginning the last election I went to cover in 2005, I was detained by Mugabe’s police until it was too late to report on any of the day’s activities.

“And so, we, the undesirables, cover the story from Johannesburg, where there often appear to be more Zimbabweans than back in their country.

“. . . On Thursday, the Johannesburg-based Foreign Correspondents’ Association issued a condemnation of the Mugabe government’s media accreditation, saying that in canvassing its 192 journalists from 122 world media organizations, the organization had concluded ‘that rare approvals were given according to race and nationality.'”

 

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French Media Debate Inclusion of Arab, African Youth

By Audrey Edwards
For Journal-isms

Just as the Kerner Commission report in 1968 following America’s urban riots led to a move for diversity in American media, French media, too, will have to be more racially inclusive if France’s recently exploding urban problems are to be solved.

This was the conclusion reached during a wide-ranging public conference held in Paris Wednesday that convened journalists and magazine editors, Internet providers and television owners, advertising executives and academics, as the French media community came together to assess its role in reaching France’s troubled African and Arab youth population.

The conference, “Médias & Nouvelles Générations Urbaines: Exclusion ou Intégration?” (“Media and the New Urban Generation: Excluded or Included?”), drew an audience of nearly 300 black and white French intellectuals, activists and college students to a French-American conference center near the Champs-Elysees for a half-day session of panel presentations.

Sponsored by the U.S Embassy in Paris, along with Trace TV, a French channel that does urban-oriented programming, and Club Averroes, a French-African social rights organization, the conference came on the heels of recent riots in the suburbs of Paris that exposed a dangerously neglected young underclass.

Largely West African black and North African Arab, and the offspring of French-speaking immigrants from the former French colonies, this second generation of urban youth, aged 15 to 34, was born in France, but has been mainly confined to ghettoized towns in the suburbs that surround Paris. They are disproportionately poor, jobless, poorly educated, often at odds with the police — and angry.

When riots exploded in a Paris suburb in the summer of 2005 after two youths were electrocuted in a power plant during a police chase, the country got a horrifying view of just how enraged this disenfranchised class had become. Rioting went on for three weeks, extending to 300 towns in the suburbs. It was the worst French civil disturbance in 40 years.

Then, last fall in the northern suburb of Villiers-le-Bel, two teenagers — one African, the other Arab — were riding together across an intersection on a motorbike when they were struck and killed by a police car coming in the other direction. Furious over what residents said was a police coverup, youths took to the streets, assaulting police and seriously injuring nearly 100 of them. Worse than the 2005 riots in its intensity, the uprising rocked French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his newly formed government.

It was against this back story that the U.S Embassy in Paris, along with Trace TV and Club Averroes, joined forces to sponsor the conference.

How can France’s new generation of disaffected urban youth be most effectively reached through the media? And what lessons can France learn from an American media that seem to be inclusive of its own urban population and also influenced by the hip-hop culture this population has come to represent?

France has not kept statistics by race, religion or ethnic group since World War II, when French Jews were singled out to be sent to concentration camps. “We are all just French,” became the politically correct sentiment after the war.

But if the French don’t have a head count on who their youth are by race and religion, they are starting to measure how this group uses media, which may be the key to advancing urban youth inclusion in France.

“This generation doesn’t depend on television for information anymore,” said conference panelist Alexandre Michelin, head of Microsoft in France. “There is new technology, especially the Internet.”

According to Philippe Tassi, deputy director of the French marketing firm Mediametre, 46 percent of black African French youth ages 13 to 34 are regular users of the Internet, as are 39 percent of Caribbean French and 46 percent of North African French in the same age group.

“The Internet is changing everything,” said panelist Jean-Louis Missika, vice president of Free, a French Internet provider. “People who used to be passive receivers of content are now producers of content.”

This is particularly true with the advent of blogging, noted Nordine Nabili, editor in chief of Bondy Blog, an online site used to teach youths in the suburb of Bondy to do blog writing. “We are teaching these youths to become journalists,” he said, and blogging might prove critical to politicizing French urban youth. “There are 50 million bloggers in America,” Nabili noted, “and 11 percent of them blog about politics. There are 9 million bloggers in France, but 37 percent of them blog about politics.”

People also want to see themselves reflected in media, a desire that French media have lagged behind America in addressing, said Claude Grunitzky, editor in chief of Trace magazine, a publication directed to French people of color.

 

 

France, for instance, had no nonwhite television newscaster until 2006 when station TF1, in response to the 2005 riots, hired Harry Roselmack, a 32-year-old Martiniquean, to anchor the evening news. Almost immediately, the station’s share of the market in that time slot rose to 44.8 percent.

France’s urban youth, like young people the world over, are particularly influenced by American hip-hop, several of the panelists noted. “Hip-hop in America now defines much of American culture,” said African American journalist Audrey Edwards, a contributing writer for Essence magazine.

Because revenues from hip-hop music generate so much wealth in the recording and fashion industries, Black American youth are an important market that the U.S. media cannot afford to ignore, Edwards said.

Though hip-hop is popular in France, its influence has not yet elevated French urban youth to influencers of media in French culture. Racism is still too prevalent, contended Thibaut de Longeville, a young Parisian hip-hop producer of Martinique heritage. Making an impassioned speech from the audience during the Q&A session, he said that while Michael Jackson’s 1983 “Thriller” album made Jackson a major star for Sony, French record companies “would rather spit on us” than do business with French urban youth.

If that is true, then France still has a way to go in addressing its urban youth problem.

Conference translation by Serge Noukoue.

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