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Stephen A. Smith Gives Up Radio Show

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Ex-Columnist Says ESPN Wanted Him on TV More

Stephen A. Smith, the former Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist who is now an NBA analyst and commentator for ESPN, is giving up the radio show he began three years ago on ESPN’s radio network, he told listeners to his show on Friday.

 

 

“ESPN wanted me to concentrate on television and I agreed,” Smith told Journal-isms. “I’m a bit tired. It’s a two-hour radio show. It was physically taxing. I don’t think a lot of people realize that about radio.”

Smith’s New York-based show aired from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. In September, the last hour began airing nationally. Its final broadcast “for right now” will be Thursday, he said.

“You used to see me on TV” frequently, Smith said. “Now you might see me on Friday night or occasionally on ‘SportsCenter.’ Now you’re going to see me a lot more.” Smith said he had to be in New York or at ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Conn., to do the radio show, which limited his mobility.

“I don’t like to talk about people that I can’t talk to, he said. “I want to be where I can see you. I don’t want to be on the sidelines pontificating.”

ESPN announced in September that Smith’s radio show was going national, a month after the Inquirer stripped him of his column and reassigned him to the reporters ranks, an assignment he never accepted. He also hired a high-powered attorney, Florida trial lawyer Willie E. Gary.

In January, the Inquirer fired Smith for job abandonment, and he shot back at the newspaper, saying through Gary, “What they have done to me is malicious, intentional and vindictive.”

Smith told Journal-isms that without the radio show, he will have more time to write for ESPN: The Magazine and espn.com, although no arrangements with those units have been worked out.

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Media Join in Martin Luther King Commemoration

News outlets joined in the national commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination Friday with special packages, on-location reporting from Memphis, assessments of how far the nation has come and tie-ins to present-day conditions.

The Rockford (Ill.) Register-Star, for example, ran as its main headline, “Fear’s Legacy,” topping a picture of presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama shaking hands in a crowd as Secret Service agents looked on. “Barack Obama may represent the embodiment of Martin Luther King’s dream,” the front-page tease began. “But on the 40th anniversary of the day King was killed, the enthusiasm many have for Obama’s historic run for president is tempered by a worry that he will face the same fate as the slain civil rights leader.”

More common were local tie-ins: residents who knew King or could recall where they were when they heard the news; remembrances of the riots that broke out in urban neighborhoods across the country in reaction to his assassination. Others focused on Sen. Robert F. Kennedy‘s breaking the news to a crowd in Indianapolis, just months before he would be killed himself.

Some papers ran an Associated Press story, “The Question Begs: What If He Had Lived?” on their front pages. But others, such as the New York Times and USA Today, confined front-page King coverage to references to stories inside the paper.

 

 

On television, news that former president Bill Clinton and his wife, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, had released their tax returns trumped the King activities on ABC’s “World News.”

The “CBS Evening News” discussed a CBS News/New York Times poll that showed that “eight years ago, 31 percent of blacks viewed race relations as good; now it’s 42 percent. Among whites, it’s about the same it was eight years ago, with 57 percent describing race relations as good,” anchor Katie Couric told viewers.

Correspondent Dean Reynolds said, “While 59 percent of blacks feel Obama’s campaign has brought the races together, only 26 percent of whites do. And almost as many whites believe his campaign has pushed the races apart.”

“NBC Nightly News” stuck with its plans to broadcast from the site of the Lorraine Motel, where King was killed, and it led with King activities. Anchor Brian Williams told viewers, “Please come here if you haven’t seen this already.” At what is now the National Civil Rights Museum, Williams interviewed presidential candidates Clinton and Republican John McCain, who were in Memphis for the ceremonies, and Democrat Obama, who was in Fort Wayne, Ind., by satellite.

The Arizona senator repeated his regret that he had voted against the federal King holiday but said he had later voted for the state observance; Clinton said King, as a “category breaker,” helped her as “a white woman,” and Obama said of King, “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him.”

Like some others, Obama tied King’s message of racial equality with that of economic justice, noting the day’s other big news, a Labor Department report that employers had slashed 80,000 jobs in March, the most in five years, and that the national unemployment rate had climbed to 5.1 percent.

The Institute for Policy Studies released a report that said, “The home ownership rate for African-Americans is 47 percent compared to 75 percent for Anglos. There remains a dramatic divide in median household wealth, with whites averaging $118,300 and blacks averaging $11,800. If we continue to close the gap at the same rate since 1983, when government agencies began to track net worth by race, it will take 600 years to attain black-white equality.”

In a front-page assessment in the Washington Post, “The Other Side of the Mountaintop: Scholars Assess Nation’s Progress — And an Icon’s Rougher Edges — Four Decades After Assassination,” Kevin Merida wrote of King, “His life, like those of other historical figures — Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt — has been simplified, scholars say, his anger blurred, his militancy rarely discussed, his disappointments and harsh critiques of government’s failures glossed over.”

On the op-ed page, E.J. Dionne saw a different significance in King’s assassination: “American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has still not recovered. On April 4, 1968, a relatively brief but extraordinary moment of progressive reform ended, and a long period of conservative ascendancy began,” Dionne wrote. The shots that felled King “signaled the collapse of liberal hopes in a smoky haze of self-doubt and despair.”

Some tried to tie the assassination to calls for a national conversation about race, which Clinton told NBC’s Williams should also include gender and religion.

Public television’s “This Is America” with Dennis Wholey, for example, taped a two-part conversation on “Race in America” with Roger Wilkins, history professor at George Mason University; Deborah Simmons, editorial page editor of the Washington Times; Jabari Asim, editor of the NAACP magazine the Crisis; Michelle Bernard, president and CEO of the Independent Women’s Forum; the Rev. Dr. Morris L. Shearin Sr., pastor of Israel Baptist Church in Washington; and Fath Davis Ruffins, curator of African American history and culture in the Division of Home and Community Life at the Smithsonian Institution. The show has started to air in some markets.

CNN led off its four-month “Black in America” series Thursday with “Eyewitness to Murder — The King Assassination.”

It received mixed reviews. In Variety, Brian Lowry said, “a fair assessment of ‘Black in America’ will have to wait, but in terms of first impressions, ‘Eyewitness to Murder’ represents a missed opportunity. The only thing it proves conclusively, in fact, is that when it comes to TV news, ‘ambitious’ and ‘smart’ don’t always go hand in hand.”

But David Hinckley wrote in the New York Daily News, ” After we see some of those FBI files, the notion the government would order a domestic assassination shifts from ‘unthinkable’ to ‘let’s consider the possibility.'”

 

Life magazine — a coffee-table staple during the King years — made a reappearance for the commemoration — in soft-cover “book” form. “Scheduled to be published on April 4, LIFE: REMEMBERING MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR: 40 YEARS LATER (Time Inc. Home Entertainment/ $11.99) tells the epic story of the King years through many of the most important and revelatory photographs of the era,” an announcement said. It includes the work of activist and photojournalist Bob Adelman, who traveled with King.

“The book takes us back to a time when leaders and organizers of the movement depended on photos — not TV cameras — to help tell the story of events and conditions that were occurring in the South.”

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Black-Radio Execs Say Advertisers’ Bias Will Remain

The Federal Communications Commission voted last month to ban a practice used by some advertisers to avoid radio stations that program to people of color. But the attempt to eliminate “no-urban” or “no-Spanish” dictates — is unlikely to be successful, according to some of Radio Ink magazine’s “Most Influential African Americans in Radio.”

“I applaud the FCC for their efforts. We are moving in the right direction, but I wonder how they will enforce the rule,” said Deon Levingston, vice president and general manager at WBLS/WLIB in New York, one of 35 who made it to the magazine’s 10th annual list, published in the March 24 issue.

“Earlier this month, we had a major restaurant group place a buy in New York City, but they didn’t buy a black or Hispanic station. The market is over 40 percent ethnic, and four of the top five stations in the market in their target demo are ethnic.

“According to the company, blacks and Hispanics don’t live in the areas where their stores are located. A couple of simple zip code runs showed all their stores are in areas at least 35 percent to over 50 percent ethnic.

“But according to the company, blacks don’t shop in their stores. We called every store in the market and talked to the store managers, who said at least 20 to 40 percent of their customer base is black. We gave all this information to the CMO of the company,” referring to the chief marketing officer. “He informed us that no ethnic station is in the top 10 of incomes $75,000 and above, and that is why none were purchased. Did I mention that the average item in the store cost less than three dollars? I’m sure every person on this list can tell a similar story. No one calls them no-urban dictates anymore — they just keep changing the criteria to justify their buy.”

The magazine’s Top 10 African American broadcasters are, in order, Alfred Liggins III, CEO and president of Radio One; Catherine Hughes, founder/chair of Radio One; Pierre “Pepe” Sutton, chairman/CEO of ICBC Broadcast Holdings; Sydney L. Small, chairman/CEO, Access I Communications; Ronald Davenport Sr., chairman, Sheridan Broadcasting; Skip Finley, vice chairman, ICBC Broadcast Holdings; Charles Warfield, president/COO, ICBC Broadcast Holdings; Barry Mayo, president/radio division, Radio One; Tom Joyner, host, “The Tom Joyner Morning Show,” chairman/founder, REACH Media Inc., and Michael L. Carter, chairman/CEO, Carter Broadcast Group.
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Story on Growing Pundit Diversity Challenged

A New York Times story on Wednesday about a growing diversity among television’s political pundits has ignited a small debate.

The progressive media watch group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting wrote, “the new media diversity is, well, a lot like the old media: It leans to the right, politically speaking. If you consider diversity only a matter of the race or sex of the commentator, then this lineup looks pretty diverse. If you factor in the ideas they share when they’re on TV — at least as important a measure — it becomes a lot less so.”

Media critic Eric Deggans wrote on his St. Petersburg Times blog, “Unfortunately, I think it also brushed aside the reason why these outlets have developed such a diverse palette of experts: their field of anchors is amazingly devoid of that same diversity.

“Indeed, as cable TV begins to more closely resemble talk radio as the voice of the Angry White Male, you have a list of TV news shows which closely resembles the talk radio universe — mostly middle-aged white guys with a few women sprinkled in.”

Lee told Journal-isms, “There are a million ways to parse diversity and so there will be a million ways to look at what some see as progress and what some see as business as usual.”

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Poll Says Americans Ready for a Black President

“In a survey conducted by CNN, Essence magazine and Opinion Research Corp., an overwhelming majority of those interviewed say the nation is ready for a black president,” Mark Silva wrote on the Chicago Tribune’s political blog, “The Swamp.” “More say so on the question of a black president than on the question of a woman as president — lending some support to what retired Sen. George McGovern, an erstwhile candidate for president and current supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton, has said about this year’s race.

“The ranks of Americans saying the nation is ready for a black president also have grown since similar surveys were conducted in late 2006 — suggesting, perhaps, that many also have grown more comfortable with the personage filling the role of the candidate who could become the first African-American presidential candidate of a major party: Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.”

“Feminist Gloria Steinem must be screaming, ‘See, I told you so!’ Roland S. Martin wrote in his syndicated column. “But there are some other realities that we must confront before we accept the notion that gender is a greater barrier than race. . . .”

[In another development, the New York Times reported on Saturday that a story about a health-care nightmare that Clinton has been telling on the campaign trail is not true. “Over the last five weeks, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has featured in her campaign stump speeches the story of a health care horror: an uninsured pregnant woman who lost her baby and died herself after being denied care by an Ohio hospital because she could not come up with a $100 fee,” the story by Deborah Sontag said.

[“The woman, Trina Bachtel, did die last August, two weeks after her baby boy was stillborn at O’Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens, Ohio. But hospital administrators said Friday that Ms. Bachtel was under the care of an obstetrics practice affiliated with the hospital, that she was never refused treatment and that she was, in fact, insured.

[“A Clinton spokesman, Mo Elleithee, said candidates would frequently retell stories relayed to them, vetting them when possible. ‘In this case, we did try but were not able to fully vet it,’ Mr. Elleithee said.”] [Added April 5]

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Trinity Church Getting Fed Up With News Media

“Sen. Barack Obama’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ, is fed up and not going to take it anymore,” Frank James reported Friday on the Chicago Tribune’s political blog, the Swamp. “‘It’ would be the media intrusions that have come with the controversy over the by-now infamous comments of its retired senior pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

 

“The church’s new lead pastor, Otis Moss III, held a press conference yesterday to make two points. He called for a national conversation about race. And he wanted to read the riot act to some reporters who have gone overboard in the opinion of church members and others, in their pursuit of interviews with Trinity members.

“The call for a racial dialogue gave the press conference a more elevated gloss than if it had been merely held for the purpose of telling reporters to cease and desist from bothering church members.

“But one got the sense from watching the press conference that the main purpose was to tell the media to back off. . . .

“According to Moss, journalists have tried to conduct interviews during church services. They have accosted members as they’ve headed into the church.

“Some journalists have even actually gone as far as calling church members whose names they found on the sick and shut-in list that appeared in the church bulletin, a list which included the names of people dying in hospices.”

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer complained Friday that after Obama’s March 18 speech on race and Wright, the “invitation to move on, as it were, has been widely accepted. After the speech it became an article of faith that even referring to Wright’s comments was somehow illegitimate, the new ‘Swift-boating.'”

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Short Takes

 

 

Lisa Ling

 
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