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Some Explore Race as Campaign Factor

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Barack Obama campaigned Saturday in Bloomington, Ind. (credit: barackobama.com)


N.Y. Times Finds Issue “Timely and Important”


After exit polls from Tuesday’s Pennsylvania Democratic primary showed 16 percent of white voters called race a factor in their decision— one benefiting Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. — more news organizations decided to tackle the issue of racism as an element in the campaign.


Most notable was the New York Times, which led Thursday’s newspaper with “For Obama, a Struggle to Win Over Key Blocs,” by Adam Nagourney, a cautiously worded story that asked, “Is the Democratic Party hesitating about race as it moves to the brink of nominating an African-American to be president?”


“The story arose from our analysis of the exit poll results in Pennsylvania, which made clear once again the stark demographic divide between Clinton and Obama supporters, with race among the starkest divisions,” Richard Stevenson, the Times’ political editor, told Journal-isms, referring to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.


“Given the ways in which race and related issues like values and elitism are suffusing the campaign, we felt the time was right to step back and look at the topic in a broad, analytical and unflinching way.” He said the story was awarded the lead position because “the judgment of the editors who make that decision was that it was a smart look at a timely and important subject.”


The Nagourney story said, “For Mr. Obama, race presents two potential problems: Voters opposing him simply because he is black, and Democrats who will not support him because they do not think a black man can win a general election.


“. . . ‘Race is intertwined with a broader notion that he is not one of us,’ said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, which did an extensive examination of voter attitudes, particularly among Democrats who have an unfavorable view of Mr. Obama. ‘They react negatively to people who are seen as different.'”


Not all observations were as nuanced. In the Times of London, in a column that also ran in Australia, Anatole Kaletsky wrote flatly, “America may not yet be ready to elect a black President.”


On Wednesday’s “All Things Considered” on National Public Radio, co-host Melissa Block raised the exit poll finding with Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., an undecided superdelegate.


“Well, of course it troubles me,” Miller said. “That makes me wonder if we’ve made as much progress as I’ve hoped that we have made. But that does also bring back the question about electability. If what we’re saying with electability either directly or indirectly is that Senator Obama cannot win because he is African American, I can’t explain that to the African Americans who live in my district and I can’t explain that to myself as a reason not to support him.”


Syndicated columnist Robert Novak noted Thursday that, “In 1982, exit polls showed Los Angeles’ black mayor, Tom Bradley, ahead for California governor, but he actually lost to Republican George Deukmejian. Pollster John Zogby — saying what practicing Democrats would not — told me, ‘I think voters face-to-face are not willing to say they would oppose an African-American candidate.’


“If there is a Bradley Effect in 2008, Zogby sees peril ahead for Obama in blue states,” Novak wrote.








 

 

As the Times noted, “A poll of Democratic voters conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the television networks and The Associated Press found that Mrs. Clinton drew 63 percent of the white vote while Mr. Obama drew 90 percent of the black vote, mirroring a pattern in many other states. More strikingly, the poll found that 18 percent of Democrats said that race mattered to them in this contest — and just 63 percent of those voters said they would support Mr. Obama in a general election.”


Gary Langer, ABC’s director of polling, compared racial and gender considerations on his blog.


“One reason the effect of race does bear watching — beyond the results themselves — is that they’re not replicated in similar measures of the impact of the candidates’ sex. Clinton has done better overall with women who say the sex of the candidates is important in their vote — 26 points better in Pennsylvania, about the average in all primaries to date. (Men who call the candidates’ sex important also have been more apt to support Clinton, by 9 points.)


“But here’s the crucial difference: whether Pennsylvania voters said sex was important or not important in their vote did not materially affect their preference in a Clinton-McCain matchup,” referring to the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.


“That makes race, and its impact on an Obama-McCain contest, look like a different kettle of fish.”


In fact, when the National Journal’s Linda Douglass asked Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, about race, he said, “I mean the vast, vast majority of voters who would not vote for Barack Obama in November based on race are probably firmly in John McCain’s camp already.”


Some news organizations queried the voters themselves, or their surrogates.


NPR’s new “The Bryant Park Project” asked more broadly, “have white men become the soccer moms of 2008?” and invited David Paul Kuhn, senior political reporter for politico.com and author of the book, “The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma,” to answer.


“In some sense because we have an African American who could be president and because we have a woman who could be president, it’s almost culturally freed up the media, the punditocracy to talk about white guys, because, hey, they’re not totally ruling in our two-party system,” Kuhn said.


He also volunteered, “There’s still racism, there’s still this sort of different cultural sensitivities, you know, you name it. But really, white guys are told that anything that happens to them is really not only fair, but in fact, their fault.'”


From Scranton, Pa., Kevin Merida and Jose Antonio Vargas wrote Monday in the Washington Post, “Obama’s campaign opened a downtown office here on March 15, just in time for the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. It was not a glorious day for Team Obama. Some of the green signs the campaign had trucked in by the thousands were burned during the parade, and campaign volunteers — white volunteers — were greeted with racial slurs. More episodes would follow, according to staffers and campaign surrogates.


“Lackawanna County Commissioners Mike Washo and Corey O’Brien, who represent the Scranton area, received hate mail after they endorsed Obama. But it only made them more resolute, they said. ‘It was a very jarring response from a select group of people,’ said O’Brien. ‘Some of the ugliest parts of our society shined at those moments.’ But he added: ‘Things are certainly moving in the right direction. Running out of time here, but moving in the right direction.'”


The Philadelphia newspapers went to suburban voters.


Daniel Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer began his Thursday column about Montgomery County, Pa., where Clinton won, with a quote from Shelley Goodman, a 53-year-old psychologist who was walking her coonhound, Blue. “Goodman has adopted or fostered a household of mixed-race children, and so she is speaking from a giant heart,” Rubin said.


“I voted for Hillary. I don’t think this country is ready for a black president,” she said.


“A vote for Obama, Goodman concluded, was a vote for someone who could not win in November. ‘People want to vote for a winner,'” Rubin wrote.


Also in the Inquirer, Tom Fitzgerald and Tom Infield quoted Jack Treadway, a political scientist at Kutztown University who closely follows state politics. “We don’t want to call voters racists,” he said, “but the reality is that it did break down on racial lines. . . . You’re going into areas [in the suburbs] that are more affluent and have better educations — he should have done better there.”


Yet Montgomery County Democratic chairman Marcel Groen had a simpler explanation, they wrote: An Obama strategy that called for spending more time in areas of the state where he was known less.


“Either the candidate, her husband, former President Bill Clinton, or their daughter, Chelsea — was in the county an average of three times a week. Obama and his wife, Michelle, made two or three appearances during the entire six-week campaign, he said.”


Dave Davies said much the same in his story in the Philadelphia Daily News, “Did Obama blow the election by blowing off Philly?”


In his Friday column in the Washington Post, “Pennsylvania Fault Lines,” E.J. Dionne Jr. added religion to his analysis of the white vote, observing that “Older white Catholics were decidedly more resistant to Obama than other older whites.” But this month, he said, the Obama campaign “announced the formation of a Catholic ‘advisory council’ whose ranks include Sharon Daly, a former top official at Catholic Charities USA, and Mary Jo Bane, who served in the Department of Health and Human Services in Bill Clinton’s administration.


“There is only so much Obama can do to deal with outright racial prejudice. But in grappling with his difficulties among Catholic voters, Obama may find a way to ease the burdens of race,” Dionne concluded.



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Wright Says Critics “Know Nothing About the Church”


In a rare interview airing Friday night, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. “told journalist Bill Moyers that media organizations circulating controversial sound bites of his sermons on the Internet wanted to paint him as ‘un-American’ or ‘some sort of fanatic’ to bring down Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama,” Manya A. Brachear reported Friday in the Chicago Tribune.


“‘I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ,’ Wright said in the first interview he has granted since comments critical of U.S. policies surfaced on television and the Internet,” she wrote.


“And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint? That’s what they wanted to communicate. They know nothing about the church. They know nothing about our prison ministry. They know nothing about our food share ministry. They know nothing about our senior citizens home. They know nothing about all we try to do as a church and have tried to do . . . not only in terms of the preached message on a Sunday morning but in terms of the lived-out ministry throughout the week.”


“The blowing up of sermons preached 15, seven, six years ago and now becoming a media event, not the full sermon, but the snippets from the sermon . . . having made me the target of hatred, yes, that is something very new,’ Wright told ‘Bill Moyers’ Journal,’ ” Rachel Zoll reported for the Associated Press.


The Tribune’s Brachear analyzed Wright’s sermons in March, and wrote then, “Thirty-second snippets of 30-minute sermons led pundits to question how Obama could remain a member of Wright’s flock. Examining the full content of Wright’s sermons and delivery style yields a far more complex message, though it’s one that some will still find objectionable.”


Moyers’ interview of Wright, which in large part discussed Wright’s concept of “liberation theology,” or theology from the viewpoint of the oppressed, aired as the North Carolina Republican Party scheduled an ad featuring Wright in an effort to target two statewide Democratic candidates who support Obama. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has asked the party not to run the ad, but the state party has refused. WSOC-TV in Charlotte and WRAL-TV in Raleigh have decided not to air it, according to David Ingram, writing in the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, with reporting from the Raleigh News & Observer.


“I think it’s offensive, and I’m not real comfortable with the implications around race,” said Joe Pomilla, general manager for WSOC-TV in Charlotte, in the story.


Meanwhile, elements of the blogosphere were still buzzing over an in-your-face defense of Wright by a white Chicago priest, the Rev. Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina’s church, on Fox’s “The Bill O’Reilly Show.”


Pfleger, a friend of Wright, told an O’Reilly producer, “Jeremiah Wright loves America. He’s a Marine. So you know — first of all, was Bill O’Reilly a Marine? Let’s be real honest. He served this country. He loves this country. He’s not bigoted. He’s not anti-American. He’s not hateful. Jeremiah Wright is one of the most loving, loyal people I know. He’s a true patriot, because he loves the country enough to criticize it and challenge it,” O’Reilly reported April 3 on his blog.


In the Moyers interview, Wright recalled attending President Lyndon B. Johnson while a cardiopulmonary technician in the Navy. Moyers was Johnson’s press secretary, and the interviewer showed a picture with himself standing behind Wright during the operation. Wright’s references to the news media were usually to “the corporate media.”


On Sunday, Wright plans to deliver a sermon at a Dallas church and later speak to the Detroit branch of the NAACP. He speaks Monday at the National Press Club in Washington as part of a divinity conference of black church leaders.


The cleric’s renewed public profile “risks giving Obama’s critics more fodder, as if they don’t have enough already,” Lynn Sweet wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times.



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Why Are Candidates More Diverse Than Press Corps?


James Poniewozik writes in the May 5 issue of Time magazine what many journalists of color have been saying about the disconnect between the faces of the Democratic candidates and those of the press corps covering them.


“Is it the year 2060 in America, or 1960? Jon Stewart at the Oscars and voters in the street have noted there’s something sci-fi about an election in which two leading candidates are a woman and a black man. ‘By the time this came,’ a Pennsylvanian told the New York Times Magazine, regarding Barack Obama’s run, ‘I thought I’d be flying around in a spaceship or driving in some kind of Jetsons vehicle.’


“If one side of the debate stage is ‘Star Trek,’ however, the question-asking side looks like ‘Dragnet.’ In the Democratic debates, [Barack] Obama and Hillary Clinton have taken questions from Charles Gibson, Brian Williams, Tim Russert, Wolf Blitzer— white guy, white guy, white guy, white guy.


“. . . It should be embarrassing that presidential politics — which gave us all those dead white guys in your wallet — is moving forward as TV news is moving back. Our leaders are more diverse than our anchors.


“The dissonance between the candidates’ podium and the anchor desks has prompted some change. Like a company scouring the staff for a black employee to attend a meeting with a minority client, cable news—where all but a handful of prime-time hosts and anchors are white men—has loaded up on female and minority pundits and analysts instead.


“There are journalistic reasons to make this call . . . Race and gender are real campaign issues—and white men have every right to cover them —but the networks have been practically handicapped by their makeup. If they were not largely fronted by white men, they would have been less vulnerable to the uncomfortable images of the media’s boys ganging up on Hillary in the earlier debates or of largely white TV personalities piling on Obama about Jeremiah Wright in the much trashed ABC debate and before. Finally, there are solid business reasons. If TV news has any hope of finding another generation of viewers, hiring staff who reflect younger viewers’ reality is relevant.”



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Columnist Says Sean Bell Verdict Pressures Obama


Detectives were found not guilty Friday on all felony and misdemeanor charges in the November 2006 death of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 police bullets outside a club in Queens, as the New York Times reported, and one columnist-blogger sees repercussions for Barack Obama.


“His candidacy already mired in the racial machinations of his opponents, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Obama will find himself having to maneuver between the need to speak out on the most egregious, high-profile example of institutional racism and police brutality since the Rodney King beating and the need to deflect Clinton and McCain’s racialized attacks aimed at fomenting white fear of blacks and other non-whites,” wrote Robert Lovato on his blog Of América on the Huffington Post.


On the New York Daily News Web site, columnist Juan Gonzalez called the verdict predictable:


“Anyone who spent time in the Sean Bell trial knows the prosecutors only going through the motions. The absymal New York Knicks had a better game plan this season, and far more desire, than the prosecutors of Detectives Michael Oliver, Gescard Isnora and Marc Cooper.


“You couldn’t help feeling they mailed it in, and Supreme Court Judge Arthur Cooperman only stamped it.”



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Chicago Paper Crusades to Reverse Murder Rate


“Today we reversed almost every word on our front page, including our very name, and it was not some awful mistake,” the Chicago Sun-Times told readers on Tuesday.


“We are trying to say to our fellow Chicagoans, in the most attention-grabbing manner we can, that turning our back on the violence killing our young people will not make it disappear.


“Seven more people were shot dead last weekend. Twenty-nine more were shot but survived. Winter is over, the spring kill is here, and summer is coming. Still more blood will stain our sidewalks and streets, our porches and playgrounds.


“In the coming weeks, the Chicago Sun-Times will take those words to heart — “One murder is one too many” — and lead our city in what we hope will be a smart and honest conversation about what to do to quell the violence. Our reporters and columnists will investigate what we believe to be the roots of the problem — gangs and guns, to be sure, but also the social forces that turn our young people to gangs and guns — and we will ask you to offer your own best ideas,” it continued.


The newspaper said it borrowed the idea of reversing the type from El Tiempo, a newspaper in Colombia. El Tiempo ran its reversed front page on the day of public protests against FARC, a guerrilla organization considered a terrorist group.


“That front page inspired tens of thousands of Colombians to march in the streets.


“Our front page today, we hope, will inspire you to work to end the killing of our children.”


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Pentagon Overrules Family on Coverage of Burial


“Lt. Col. Billy Hall, one of the most senior officers to be killed in the Iraq war, was laid to rest yesterday at Arlington National Cemetery. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Pentagon doesn’t want you to know that,” Dana Milbank wrote Thursday in the Washington Post.








 


 


 


“The family of 38-year-old Hall, who leaves behind two young daughters and two stepsons, gave their permission for the media to cover his Arlington burial — a decision many grieving families make so that the nation will learn about their loved ones’ sacrifice. But the military had other ideas, and they arranged the Marine’s burial yesterday so that no sound, and few images, would make it into the public domain.


“That’s a shame, because Hall’s story is a moving reminder that the war in Iraq, forgotten by much of the nation, remains real and present for some. Among those unlikely to forget the war: 6-year-old Gladys and 3-year-old Tatianna. The rest of the nation, if it remembers Hall at all, will remember him as the 4,011th American service member to die in Iraq, give or take, and the 419th to be buried at Arlington. Gladys and Tatianna will remember him as Dad.


“The two girls were there in Section 60 yesterday beside grave 8,672 — or at least it appeared that they were from a distance. Journalists were held 50 yards from the service, separated from the mourning party by six or seven rows of graves, and staring into the sun and penned in by a yellow rope. Photographers and reporters pleaded with Arlington officials.”



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Feedback: FIU J-Program Can’t Be Allowed to Die


I was distressed to read recently that the journalism school at Florida International University in Miami is faced with budget cuts so severe that it may be dismantled. The cuts are required because the state of Florida is undergoing a drop in sales tax collections, a vital source of revenue.


I was chairman of the journalism and broadcasting department for that school from 1999 to 2003 and was on the faculty as editor-in-residence for four years before that. During that time, six FIU alums (one still a senior at the time) shared a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news; a sixth won his second Pulitzer and another won her second. In all, eight FIU grads can claim Pulitzer status. All were Hispanics. And that part is important. FIU graduates as many — some would count more — Hispanic journalists each year than any other university. There are more than 2,000 students studying journalism, broadcasting, advertising and public relations at FIU —and 80 percent of them are minorities, the overwhelming percentage of them Miami-born students of Cuban descent, but a fair number of them are Haitian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Nicaraguan and the like.


From FIU, they land jobs across the United States, and a healthy percentage return to their home countries in Central and South America and practice journalism there.


FIU was the first university in this country to start a master’s degree in journalism taught entirely in Spanish. The university’s journalism professors regularly are on weekend flights to Mexico to teach graduate classes to mid-career journalists there. The same can be said of FIU’s public relations and advertising programs, each of which has a heavy Hispanic component.


In an era where universities are making excuses as to why they cannot hire minority faculty, FIU’s faculty is incredibly diverse — and bilingual.


If FIU allows its journalism program to fade away, it could have a major impact on the diversity of journalists in this country. (Nearly all of the Hispanic graduates are bilingual and they are an integral part of the growth in Spanish-language media in this country.) It will also have a terrible effect on press freedoms in Latin America, where faculty from FIU’s International Media Center have been training journalists for 20 years in how to form coalitions and stand up for a free press.


You can find out more about the program by pointing your Internet browser to: http://jmc.fiu.edu/


Mike McQueen
Chief of Bureau
The Associated Press
Louisiana/Mississippi
April 25, 2008


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Feedback: Luther Jackson Kept Me in Journalism


I am deeply saddened to hear about Professor [Luther] Jackson’s death. The man literally pulled me through Columbia as my project adviser. I am as indebted to him as anyone for keeping me in the field of journalism.


Doug Lyons
Class of ’74
Senior Editorial Writer
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
April 25, 2008


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Feedback: Don’t Condemn Obama to the Backyard


While I have no discernible argument with the first part of Zedrick Barber’s comments (April 23 column) on whether the so-called Tavis Smiley vs. Barack Obama dispute is similar to W.E.B. DuBois vs. Booker T. Washington, I do take exception to his last paragraph: “By distancing himself from meetings, events and commitments of the black community, Obama is simply ‘not talking that black stuff.’ Tavis seems to think that he should, and to get our vote I agree with Tavis. . . .”


This goes back to the debate as to whether Sen. Obama is running for president of the United States, or Black president. Seems logical to me and several million people that he is running for the former. This cry for more Obama in the ‘hood is like a 2-year old screaming every time momma leaves her sight. Come on, before you size him up on the short stick, take a look at where he’s been, who he’s been talking to, what he’s saying and what it’s going to take to “represent a nation of people,” many of whom will not vote for him because he’s Black. Yet he has galvanized a mixed-blood collective of people chanting for CHANGE. Read/research his background before condemning him to the “Tavis Smiley Backyard.”


Incidentally, I was a big fan of Smiley’s before his gaffe of demanding Obama appear at a Smiley-sponsored function. That was an unfortunate mistake that even his fellow media colleagues have tagged as a possible error in judgment. It’s a shame that it cost him supporters, but Smiley’s got options. I’m glad to see him exercise those by moving forward.


Tom Jones
Beckwith Bay Marketing
Raleigh, N.C.

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