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AP Photog to Be Freed After 2 Years

by richard0619

U.S. Military Turned Bilal Hussein Over to Iraqis

“An Iraqi judicial committee has dismissed terrorism-related allegations against Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and ordered him freed after nearly two years in U.S. military custody,” the AP reported on Wednesday.

 

 

“The decision by a four-judge panel says Hussein’s case falls under a new amnesty law and orders Iraqi courts to ‘cease legal proceedings.’ The ruling says that Hussein should be ‘immediately’ released if no other charges are pending.

“The ruling is dated Monday but AP’s lawyers were not able to thoroughly review it until Wednesday.

“AP President Tom Curley is hailing the decision and demands that officials ‘finally do the right thing’ and free Hussein.”

Hussein is part of the AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2005 for coverage of the Iraq war.

The U.S. military arrested him in Ramadi, Iraq, on April 12, 2006, for alleged links to Iraqi insurgents, and referred his case to the Iraqi justice system for possible prosecution.

“Throughout his incarceration, he has maintained he is innocent and was only doing the work of a professional news photographer in a war zone,” Wednesday’s AP story said.

“The amnesty committee’s decision covers various allegations by the U.S. military against Hussein, including claims he was in possession of bomb-making material, conspired with insurgents to take photographs synchronized with an explosion and offered to secure a forged ID for a terrorist evading capture by the military.

“The committee may still be reviewing a separate allegation that Hussein had contacts with the kidnappers of an Italian citizen, Salvatore Santoro, whose body was photographed by Hussein in December 2004 with two masked insurgents standing over Santoro with guns.”

Several journalist groups have joined the AP in protest.

“That Bilal Hussein has been held for more than 19 months without charge and on the pretext of unsubstantiated, shifting allegations is deeply alarming,” Executive Director Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalists said in November. “While we welcome the military’s belated attempt to give him his day in court, we are equally alarmed that he continues to be denied due process and that his legal team has no idea what the evidence is against him so they can prepare a proper defense.”

“AP officials have been working for 19 months to get the U.S. military to either charge Hussein with a crime or let him go,” the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said then. “They have repeatedly criticized the government’s failure to provide Hussein with basic due process protections found in the American court system.”

A hearing finally took place on Dec. 9. The AP said then, “Bilal Hussein and his lawyers have finally had a chance to learn about the allegations that the U.S. military has withheld from them since they imprisoned Bilal 20 months ago. But, they were not given a copy of the materials that were presented today, and which they need to prepare a defense for Bilal.”

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McCain’s Narrative Incomplete on King Holiday

As they stood at the site of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 40 years ago, NBC’s Brian Williams said to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the presumptive Republican nominee for president, “Today, here, you apologized for once voting against the M.L.K. holiday.”

“Yes,” McCain said.

“What was your justification then and what changed your position?” Williams asked.

“Well, the justification was the expense and another federal holiday,” McCain replied. “It was not a good excuse. I later am proud to work very hard and been involved in the effort for the recognition of Dr. King by home state of Arizona, and I think I have a clear record since then. But it was wrong.”

McCain’s mea culpa earlier in the day had been greeted by shouts of, “we forgive you, we forgive you,” as the Baltimore Sun’s Jill Zuckman wrote on the Chicago Tribune’s blog “The Swamp.”

Soon enough, though, the Democratic National Committee found a news story from April 13, 1987, showing that McCain initially opposed the King holiday in Arizona, a fact that not all news accounts noted, and which was left out of McCain’s narrative.

Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now!” stated flatly, “In 1987, McCain publicly supported the governor of Arizona’s decision to repeal the state’s recognition of King.”

Was he for it or against it in his home state? Actually, both. And the facts led Jake Tapper of ABC News to conclude about McCain last week, “his views on race in the 1980s do not stand up to the sunlight of America a quarter-century later.”

Tapper’s conclusion dovetails with a story in the Politico newspaper and Web site on Tuesday about McCain’s relationship with blacks in Arizona.

“The widespread perception of activists in the state’s traditional civil rights organizations and the African-American press is that McCain has consistently treated them with indifference,” reported Jonathan Martin.

“As far as I’ve seen, he has no relationship with the African-American community in Arizona,” Cloves Campbell Jr., publisher of the Arizona Informant and a Democratic state representative from Phoenix, said in the story. “He’s never been to the paper,” said Campbell. “We’ve called to get interviews, but there has never been any response. I’ve never talked to him.”

Tapper explained in his ABC piece that as a young congressman, McCain voted against a federal King holiday in 1983, though most Republicans in the House voted for it.

“In Arizona, a bill to recognize a holiday honoring MLK failed in the legislature, so then-Gov. Bruce Babbitt, a Democrat, declared one through executive order,” he continued.

“In January 1987, the first act of Arizona’s new governor, Republican Evan Mecham, was to rescind the executive order by his predecessor to create an MLK holiday. Arizona’s stance became a national controversy.”

John Blanchard, writing in the Phoenix Gazette of April 13, 1987, reported this about a McCain appearance before more than 30 teenage Republicans:

“McCain said that he felt Mecham was correct in rescinding the holiday, but he felt the governor handled the situation poorly.

“‘If I were him,’ McCain said, ‘I would have stayed on the basis of legality rather than any personal opinions.'”

And while this part of the narrative was omitted, McCain spokesman Brian Rogers told Journal-isms, “He’s not being disingenuous in any way. He realizes he was on the wrong side of the issue.”

Also, as Tapper explained, eventually McCain changed his mind, “and in 1990, McCain successfully appealed to former President Ronald Reagan to support the holiday.” (By that time, Meacham was out of office. He was removed in 1988 on charges of corruption.)

As Friday is the 40th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson‘s signing of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, the Democratic National Committee notes that McCain also voted to uphold President George H.W. Bush’s veto of the 1990 Civil Rights Act.

“The veto override fell one vote short of the necessary 67 votes, and thus the legislation died — the first major civil rights bill to be defeated in the last quarter century. It would have expanded the reach of several discrimination laws that had been narrowed or overturned by the Supreme Court,” it said.

Rogers, McCain’s spokesman, said McCain voted for other civil rights bills, but this one “would have mandated quotas.”

News organizations looking at McCain’s civil rights efforts should note that the senator has supported efforts to create incentives for minority ownership of broadcast properties. In Arizona, the Politico story notes, McCain helped facilitate KMJK in Phoenix, the first black-owned radio station in the area, getting on the air in 1992.

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Clinton Generates Week’s Clearest Story Line

“Barack Obama attracted the most coverage of any presidential hopeful last week, and John McCain‘s biographical tour helped him climb back into the headlines. But it was Hillary Clinton who generated the clearest story line in the media last week in advance of the April 22 Pennsylvania primary,” Mark Jurkowitz wrote for the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

“The narrative was the debate over whether it might be time for Clinton to throw in the towel in the nomination fight. It was the single biggest campaign story line, accounting for 7% of all the campaign stories last week, and it was big enough that Clinton herself fought back by embracing one of Philly’s fictional favorites,” a reference to Rocky Balboa, the character played by Sylvester Stallone.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama wrote pieces about their spouses for Us Weekly, and Hillary Clinton was the subject of an interview in Vibe magazine.

“As a woman, does it pose a conflict for you — because it’s a conflict for me as an African-American woman — to know that one of your strongest supporters is Bob Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, which airs videos filled with negative images of women?” Vibe correspondent Joan Morgan asked the New York senator.

Clinton replied that she has been “an outspoken critic of the media,” counted the late C. DeLores Tucker, who crusaded against vulgar rap lyrics, as a friend, and concluded, “I’ve been real outspoken, and I’ve been criticized for taking on Hollywood and taking on this culture. And I intend to keep taking it on.”

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Obama’s New Pastor Urges Broadened Perspectives

The new pastor of Barack Obama’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago has sent out an op-ed piece in which he says of the uproar over the words of his predecessor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright: “I am convinced that much of the recent controversy stems from the deep racial and social divisions and misunderstanding of African-American [sacred] rhetoric.”

 

Otis Moss III

“African-American ministers are masters at hyperbole, metaphor and the use of sub-text to speak to a community familiar with their rhetorical vocabulary,” the Rev. Otis Moss III said in a column sent to the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the primary organization of black-community newspaper publishers, and first published in the Afro-American of Baltimore and Washington.

“African-American preaching uses what some call ‘the blue note’ to place before the people tragedy and sorrow during the preaching event. It should be noted that this ‘blue note’ is always paired with ‘good news;’ the sound of sorrow must be played before the chord of the Gospel can be introduced into the composition.

“. . . The critical issue we are being challenged to come to grips with in this moment is our ability as Americans to be bi-cultural. Are we willing to look through the lens of shrouded liberty lifted up by Dr. Wright? Or, will we choose to assume that our faith tradition, political perspective and cultural vantage point is the only perspective worth engaging?

“What an incredible gift to give to our children, if we choose to be bi-cultural Americans instead [of] ethno-centrist[s] locked in our own limited worldview of humanity. The pain of this ‘manufactured’ controversy is our democracy . . .birthing a new conversation into the civic arena on race or the grief of our democracy . . . crying because our cynicism aborted her child. When the history of this moment is written, I pray we will all be standing on the right side of history.”

 

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L.A. Times Metpro Program to Add 10 Recruits

The Metpro program, begun at the old Times Mirror Co. to improve diversity at its newspapers but sustaining cutbacks under the Tribune Co., which purchased Times Mirror in 2000, is expanding at the Los Angeles Times, Editor Russ Stanton told staff members on Monday.

“As you may know, Tribune decentralized the program over the last couple of years, leaving it up to individual newspapers to select and train their own Metpros. We were going to proceed this year with only two participants, but now we’ll be adding 10 more young recruits to our ranks, bringing this year’s total to 12,” he said in a memo.

“The Metpro candidates will train with us for six months and, if all goes well, they will then work their way through the newsroom as two-year temps. Those who successfully complete the program will become Times staffers. (In the past, most of those who successfully completed the training went to other Tribune papers.) I plan to bring another dozen recruits in next year and expand this program, which was one of the major recommendations of last year’s Reinvent report.”

The Reinvent report was the product of a committee studying how the Los Angeles newspaper should change to meet new realities. Among its recommendations was a proposal called “30 under 30” — hire 30 young journalists and prepare them for a multimedia world, Randy Hagihara, senior editor for recruitment, told Journal-isms.

Stanton’s memo continued, “This program is a great way to address two of our staff’s diversity shortcomings: age and ethnicity. And as you know, Metpro has produced an all-star team of Times staffers over the years, including foreign correspondents Henry Chu, Ching-Ching Ni, Hector Tobar, Assistant Metro Editor Carlos Lozano, Senior Copy Chief Henry Fuhrmann, Web Deputy Michelle Maltais and a host of others around the newsroom.”

Hagihara, who now has the Metpro portfolio, told Journal-isms, “Metpro was created 24 years ago to help us diversify our newsrooms. That goal hasn’t changed. I find it rather amazing during this age of cutbacks that not only does the program still exist, it’s even being expanded here at The Times.”

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Star-Telegram to Combine Its Spanish Papers

 

 

La Estrella, the free weekly paper first produced by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram 14 years ago, and one of the first Spanish-language products produced by a mainstream U.S. newspaper, will be merged with La Estrella En Casa, a free weekly publication launched last May that is delivered to about 100,000 households in Dallas-Fort Worth, the Star-Telegram announced on Monday.

“Star-Telegram Publisher Gary Wortel said Monday that the combined publication will have the local news content of La Estrella as well as the entertainment and cultural stories of La Estella En Casa,” a story by Robert Cox said on Tuesday.

“‘La Estrella En Casa is doing very well,’ Wortel said. ‘What we’re finding is the home-delivery product is what advertisers are looking for.’

“La Estrella started as a weekly insert in the Star-Telegram. It evolved into a twice weekly stand-alone publication and then expanded to five days a week, before returning to twice weekly and then once-a-week in the last year. It is distributed largely on newspaper racks.

“Some La Estrella staff members will be reassigned within the Star-Telegram, Wortel said.”

Charles Blow Back at N.Y. Times in Pioneering Job

 

Charles Blow left the New York Times, where he was deputy design director for news and its highest ranking journalist of color, for Washington-based National Geographic magazine in 2006. Last week, he returned to the Times in a newly created role on the op-ed page and Times Web site.

“He is returning to us as a columnist, but an entirely new kind of columnist — a visual columnist, if you will,” Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal said in a memo to the staff.

“Charles will do his own Op-Charts, lending his formidable skills and distinct style to that form of opinion journalism.

“And, equally exciting, he will create a new kind of journalistic space on our website. I’d call it a blog if I were given to using that word. Charles envisions a gathering place for visual journalists, especially those who use numbers and images and charts to express opinion. It will be just the kind of ‘you won’t find it anywhere else’ feature that ought to be on nytimes.com.”

Blow, 37, told Journal-isms on Wednesday that he was never able to relocate to Washington for the National Geographic job because he is a single father of three. For more than a year, he commuted four days a week from New York to Washington; for the last three months, the magazine let him work from home.

His new job is a “great opportunity to do something that’s a bit more on the edge, that’s taking note of a changing landscape in opinion journalism. Everybody realizes it’s a changing landscape” and recognizes “the growing visualization of society. It’s a first for newspaper journalism,” Blow said of the new gig.

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Judge Curbs Protests at Vietnamese-Language Paper

A judge in Orange County, Calif., on Tuesday “put restrictions on demonstrators who have protested outside a Vietnamese-language newspaper in Little Saigon daily since late January,” My-Thuan Tran reported Tuesday in the Los Angeles Times.

“The preliminary injunction restricts protesters from threatening newspaper employees, vandalizing newspaper property, trespassing and interfering with customers and employees.

“The demonstrators have argued that their protests are an act of free speech in opposition to Nguoi Viet Daily News’ decision to print a photo they said was sympathetic to communists.”

The situation at the newspaper prompted a diverse group of leading editors from ethnic news media to gather in Los Angeles on Monday “to share accounts of threats they had received from their own communities,” Kenneth Kim reported on Wednesday for New America Media.

“The roundtable discussion, ‘A Challenge for Ethnic Media: When Coverage Provokes Threats from Your Own Community,’ was co-hosted by New America Media, the California First Amendment Coalition, USC Annenberg’s Institute for Justice and Journalism, CSU Northridge’s Center for Ethnic and Alternative Media and other media advocacy groups.

“Journalists, editors and publishers of ethnic media told harrowing tales of having been boycotted, protested, sued, harassed, and physically threatened by members of their own communities who wanted to dictate what the ethnic news media could and couldn’t cover.”

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Denver Post Wins “Let’s Do It Better” Award

The Denver Post, led by reporter Mike Riley, is among the winners of the annual Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism honors presented at the Let’s Do It Better! Workshop on Journalism, Race and Ethnicity.

The newspaper “was named the 2008 Paul Tobenkin Award recipient for writing courageously about racial discrimination in ‘Lawless Lands,’ a series that investigates how a dysfunctional federal justice system allows serious American Indian reservation crimes to go unpunished.”

Arlene Morgan, associate dean and director of the workshop program, said seven people are to receive lifetime achievement awards: Mae Cheng, executive editor of AMNewYork, a former president of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) and a demographics reporter and editor at Newsday; Jeff Fager, executive producer, CBS “60 Minutes”; Sig Gissler, founding director of the workshop, Columbia professor of journalism and current administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes; Earl G. Graves Sr., founder of Black Enterprise magazine; Bob Herbert, columnist at the New York Times; Ray Suarez, senior correspondent for PBS’ “the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer“; and Walterene (Walt) Swanston, director of diversity management for National Public Radio.

Awards at the May 1-3 meeting will be conferred on additional print and broadcast journalists and for “best practices.”

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Nominate an Educator Who Has Helped J-Diversity

The National Conference of Editorial Writers annually grants a Barry Bingham Sr. Fellowship — actually an award— “in recognition of an educator’s outstanding efforts to encourage minority students in the field of journalism.” The educator should be at the college level.

Nominations, which are now being accepted for the 2008 award, should consist of a statement about why you believe your nominee is deserving.

The final selection will be made by the NCEW Foundation board and will be announced in time for the Sept. 17-20 NCEW convention in Little Rock, Ark., when the presentation will be made.

Since 2000, an honorarium of $1,000 has been awarded the recipient, to be used to “further work in progress or begin a new project.”

Past winners include James Hawkins of Florida A&M University (1990); Larry Kaggwa of Howard U. (1992); Ben Holman of the U. of Maryland (1996); Linda Jones, Roosevelt U., Chicago (1998); Ramon Chavez, U. of Colorado, Boulder (1999); Erna Smith of San Francisco State (2000); Joseph Selden of Penn State (2001); Cheryl Smith; Paul Quinn College (2002); Rose Richard, Marquette University (2003), Leara D. Rhodes of the University of Georgia (2004), Denny McAuliffe of the University of Montana (2005), Pearl Stewart of Black College Wire (2006) and Valerie White of Florida A&M University (2007).

Nominations may be e-mailed to Richard Prince, NCEW Diversity Committee chair, at this e-mail address. The deadline is May 15.

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Short Takes

 

 
  • “After two years of record-low ratings, both CBS News executives and people close to Katie Couric say that the “CBS Evening News” anchor is likely to leave the network well before her contract expires in 2011 — possibly soon after the presidential inauguration early next year,” Rebecca Dana is reporting in Thursday’s editions of the Wall Street Journal. “Ms. Couric isn’t even halfway through her five-year contract with CBS, which began in June 2006 and pays an annual salary of around $15 million.” Responding to the story, CBS insisted no such decision had been made, the Los Angeles Times reported.
  • “The Seattle Times Co., reeling from continued declines in advertising revenue, announced Monday it will slice its flagship newspaper’s staff by nearly 200 and make other cuts aimed at saving $15 million,” Eric Pryne reported in the Times on Tuesday. “Vice President Alayne Fardella said in an e-mail to employees that up to 45 circulation workers, 30 newsroom employees and 24 advertising staff could be laid off. The exact number will depend on how many employees choose to accept buyouts and leave voluntarily, she said.”
  • “The executive editor of the nation’s largest alternative newspaper company angered dozens of Arizona journalists Friday night when he used a racial slur during an awards speech,” Dennis Welch reported Tuesday for the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz. “Michael Lacey, co-owner of Village Voice Media, which publishes a chain of weekly newspapers across the United States including Phoenix New Times, used the slur while accepting an award from the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Lacey’s reference to an old friend of his, the late Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Tom Fitzpatrick, as ‘my (n-word),’ sparked immediate reaction from those who attended the event. The short, impromptu speech also included some vulgar phrases. Billye Paulson, a black journalist who works for the Tribune, called the speech ‘offensive’ and fired off an angry e-mail to Lacey demanding an apology.”
  • Cari Champion, a weekend Atlanta anchor who was fired in November after she was said to have uttered the word “m—–f—–” during her newscast, but was reinstated after contending her superiors misheard what she said, has left WGCL-TV for an on-air job in Los Angeles, her lawyer and a Meredith Corp. spokesman confirmed on Wednesday. She left “on her own accord,” spokesman Art Slusark said. Champion’s lawyer, Daniel Kobler, told Journal-isms, “if she hadn’t stood up for herself, she would have had the short end of the stick.”

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