N.Y. Post Fires Black Reporter

Blair Sued Cops After Stop-and-Frisk Incident

“The New York Post has canned a black reporter who is suing the NYPD for civil rights violations stemming from an incident in which he was stopped, frisked and arrested,” Bill Hutchinson reported Monday in the New York Daily News.

Leonardo Blair

“Leonardo Blair, 28, a freelance crime reporter since May 2007, was let go just days after he slammed the NYPD in a federal suit filed on his behalf by the New York Civil Liberties Union.

“Blair’s suit came on the same day the Post defended the Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy in an editorial.” The juxtaposition, picked up in other media, no doubt embarrassed the Post.

“He blindsided the New York Post,” Post spokesman Howard Rubenstein told Journal-isms, by not telling the paper he planned the suit. As a freelancer covering the police department, filing suit placed him in a conflict of interest, Rubenstein said.

The Civil Liberties Union planned to meet on the development Monday, a spokeswoman told Journal-isms. “This is all very new to us as well,” Jennifer Carnig said. “We’re very saddened by this.”

New York Post reporters are not represented by a union, according to the Newspaper Guild of New York. Owner Rupert Murdoch replaced striking Guild members after he purchased the newspaper in 1993. It is unclear whether a free-lancer would be entitled to union protection.

The Daily News reported that Blair refused to comment when reached Sunday night.

When the Jamaican-born reporter filed suit May 7, the Civil Liberties Union said:

“In 2007, the NYPD stopped about 469,000 New Yorkers — almost 1,300 people every day. Eighty-eight percent were completely innocent. Though they make up only a quarter of the City’s population, more than half of those stopped were black. Another 30 percent were Latino. Though whites make up more than 35 percent of New York City’s population, they were only 11 percent of those stopped. In 2006 and 2007, blacks and Latinos were the target of about 90 percent of the nearly one million stop-and-frisk encounters.”

Blair wrote an account of his stop by police for the Post in December. He also told his story in a YouTube video and on National Public Radio’s “Tell Me More.”

FEEDBACK: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.

Howard French Leaving N.Y. Times for Columbia U.

Howard W. French, Shanghai bureau chief for the New York Times, is taking a buyout and joining the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism after 22 years at the newspaper, French told Journal-isms.

“I’ll continue to write for the paper under contract. I’ve also got two active book projects in the works, one of them involving fiction, the other photography,” French, 49, said.

Howard W. French

French has also been Tokyo bureau chief, West Africa bureau chief, Caribbean correspondent and metro reporter. Before joining the Times, he was a conference translator in Abijan, Ivory Coast, and was an assistant professor of English at the University of Ivory Coast. He also was a stringer for the Washington Post from West Africa.

After his Africa tour, French wrote “A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa,” and told Journal-isms, “African Americans in general should pay far greater attention to Africa. The fact that we don’t, I believe, is one of the most damaging legacies of our common experience of slavery. Nearly every other immigrant group in the United States maintains more substantive ties with its country or region of origin than we do. Africa suffers terribly for the lack of constituency it might enjoy, and black Americans, I would argue, suffer for reasons of culture and identity.”

LynNell Hancock, interim vice dean at the Columbia journalism school, said French would teach international reporting in the fall and a seminar to be determined in the spring.

Times Executive Editor Bill Keller announced in February that the newspaper would eliminate about 100 newsroom jobs this year, and said buyouts would be part of the process. Longtime Times journalists Sheila Rule, senior editor, and Stephen C. Miller, assistant to the technology editor, confirmed in April they were taking the buyout offer.

FEEDBACK: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.

Arana, Jenkins Taking Buyout at Washington Post

Marie Arana, editor of the Washington Post’s Book World section, and Keith W. Jenkins, multimedia director, are the latest Washington Post newsroom employees of color to confirm they are taking the company’s buyout offer. Reporter Sylvia Moreno said she signed up for the offer, but “I’m still thinking about it.”

Marie Arana

Arena told Journal-isms via e-mail, “The Post has asked me to accept a contract to write for them after I leave my position on Dec. 31, which I will do. I’ll be looking for a fellowship position (or some such like) at a university and writing a book about Simon Bolivar,” hero of the South American fight for independence from Spain. “My second novel (4th book) comes out in January. I’ll be writing, rather than editing, in the future.”

Arana came to the Book World section in 1992 from Simon & Schuster, where she was vice-president and senior editor in the general book division for four years. She has served on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and created and led programs on Latin American literature for the Kennedy Center, the Organization of American States, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Library of Congress and the writers group PEN. A native of Peru, her new novel, “a love story across race, class and generations,” will be called “Lima Nights.”

Keith Jenkins

Jenkins said he had not settled on his next move. “There are several options out there and I hope to have a decision in a few weeks. My hope is to take a little time off and then to get even more connected with web journalism and remain in the D.C. area.”

Jenkins was promoted to multimedia director only in November, “responsible for developing a newsroom wide plan to coordinate multimedia (photography, graphics, video and audio) assignments, production and presentation in conjunction with the multimedia department” at the Post Web site, an announcement said at the time. “This will include a step-by-step process for creating multimedia, on a daily basis, in The Washington Post newsroom.”

He was picture editor of the newspaper for two years, after serving for six years as photography editor for the Post’s Sunday Magazine.

Other newsroom employees of color who have confirmed they are taking the buyout are Deborah Heard, assistant managing editor for Style; Don Podesta, assistant managing editor for copy desks; Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb, obituaries editor; Athelia Knight, director of the Young Journalists Development Program; Lynne Duke, assignment editor in the Style section; Karl Evanzz, researcher; Vanessa Barnes Hillian, deputy picture editor; Mae H. Israel, editor of the weekly section for Montgomery County, Md.; Jana Long, director, news technology services; Carol D. Porter-Esmailpour, page designer for the Real Estate section; and D.C. reporter Yolanda Woodlee.

More than 100 newsroom employees are taking a buyout offer, and had to sign up by May 15. To be eligible, the employee must turn 50 within calendar 2008 and have at least five years’ experience, also by the end of calendar 2008. Some 235 people, both those in the Newspaper Guild and in management, were eligible, according to Peter Perl, assistant managing editor for training and development.

• Richard Perez-Pena, New York Times: Another Beltway Institution Seeks New Leader
• Joe Strupp, Editor & Publisher: Ben Bradlee: ‘Post’ Buyouts, Change in Editor ‘Not Distressing’
• Erik Wemple, Washington City Paper: Woodward’s Buyout Package: $20K or $360K?

FEEDBACK: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.

Clinton: “Probably Right” — Comment Was Dumb

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., was “probably right” to say her statement that she appeals to “white . . . hard-working” voters was “the dumbest thing you could have said.”

Clinton told USA Today on May 7, a day after the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” As evidence, the story said, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” Clinton said.

The statement was initially downplayed by the mainstream media, but bloggers, columnists, cartoonists and the Sunday talk shows seized on Clinton’s linkage of “hard-working Americans” with “white Americans” and the seeming bid to be the “white candidate.” Even “Saturday Night Live” parodied it.

Blitzer asked on his “Late Edition” on Sunday, “as someone who has championed civil rights all of these years, and you see all these stories coming up, and he’s getting 90 percent of the African American vote, you’re doing well with these white working class voters, as you did in West Virginia, for example, Pennsylvania, in Ohio, how does that make you feel when you see this issue all of a sudden explode out there?

Clinton replied, “Well, I obviously regret people exploding an issue like that, because I think it’s not only unfounded, but, you know, it’s offensive.

“I think people vote for me because they think I’d be the better president. I think people vote for him because they think he’d be the better president.”

Meanwhile, at least two African American columnists complained about the lack of nuance in the media when discussing black voters.

“I grew up working class, with bona fides bred in a Baltimore row house and a father who worked two and three jobs. He even had one of those work shirts with his names embroidered on the pocket,” Mary C. Curtis wrote Saturday in the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer.

“But somehow, between then and now, ‘working class’ morphed into shorthand for ethnic whites.

“Apparently, you can’t be black and blue— collar.

“Catholic — I’m that, too.

“But when they talk about Catholic voters, they never mean me.

“White folks get to be everything — farmers, housewives and philatelists. Minorities are one-size-fits-all.”

In the Chicago Tribune, Dawn Turner Trice asked on May 12, “What exactly is the ‘black vote’? Do we really know anymore? In the media, black voters are the most non-distinct, non-descript of all the voting blocs. The black vote is the least dissected, the least analyzed, the least colorful.”

The same might be said of the “women’s vote.”

Jodi Kantor wrote Monday in the New York Times, “Mr. Obama, who sought to minimize the role of race in his candidacy, led something of a national dialogue about it, but Mrs. Clinton, who made womanhood an explicit part of her run, seemed unwilling or unable to talk candidly about gender.

“Mrs. Clinton, for example, declined a New York Times request earlier this year for an interview about the gender dynamics of the race; an aide said the topic would be impossible for her to address in a frank way.”

• Monroe Anderson, ebonyjet.com: Swiftboating the Presidency
• Playthell Benjamin: TheBlackWorldToday.com: Idiot in Chief
• Meghan Daum, Los Angeles Times: The white vs. off-white election
• George Diaz, Orlando Sentinel: Musicians Rock On — Voters Tune Out
• Todd Gitlin, Columbia Journalism Review: Russert Watch: In which Tim stays on the surface about “appeasement”
• Bob Herbert, New York Times: Hard Roads Ahead
• Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe: The Republican strategy backfires
• Allen Johnson, Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record: If Hillary had packed it in, so would most, if not all, of the county’s bonds
• Stanley Kurtz, Weekly Standard: Jeremiah Wright’s ‘Trumpet’
• Dwight Lewis, Nashville Tennessean: Tuesday contests may tell the tale
• Douglas C. Lyons, South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Obama needs help from five Florida politicians to win over the state
• Roland S. Martin, Creators Syndicate: Make Wearing a Flag Pin the 28th Amendment to the Constitution
• Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher: Noonan and Parker Question Obama’s “Full-blooded” Americanism
• Ruben Navarrette, San Diego Union-Tribune: Looking at the Obama generation
• Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune: Will Obama claim a cultural war victory?
• Les Payne, Newsday: And the rightful winner is…
• Les Payne, Newsday: Obama, don’t let Hillary drive
• Eugene Robinson, Washington Post: The GOP’s Ideas Deficit
• Bob Ray Sanders, Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram: ‘Where have you been for 20 years?’
• Danny Shea, Huffington Post: ABC Bumps Clinton For Edwards And Obama
• Deron Synder, Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press: America ignores half of Obama’s lineage and race
• Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Shabby tactic of race baiting shows its age
• Kenneth P. Vogel, Politico.com: Hillary turns fire on media

FEEDBACK: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.

Nieman Program Sees Increase in Applicants of Color

The Nieman fellowship class for 2009, announced on Friday, came from an applicant pool that was larger than last year’s and had a greater number of journalists of color, according to curator Robert H. Giles.

The 2009 U.S. Nieman applicant pool was up 32 over 2008 — 119 for the class of 2009 vs. 87 for the class of 2008, Giles told Journal-isms on Monday.

“Our improved application numbers among journalists of color (32 up from 15 a year ago) is a direct result, I believe, of our recruitment efforts led by Callie Crossley, our program manager, and Cecilia Alvear,” a former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and a Nieman Foundation advisory board member, he said.

The Nieman program, established in 1938, is the oldest and most prestigious of the journalism fellowships designed to provide a subsidized, mid-career break. Those selected come to Harvard for a year of study, seminars and special events. There are 13 U.S. fellows, plus a Global Health Fellow who is selected from a different applicant pool.

Giles provided these racial and ethnic figures, with last year’s numbers in parenthesis.

White — 87 (72) applied; 7 (10) selected

African American — 11 (6) applied; 2 (3) selected

Asian — 9 (4) applied; 1 (1) selected

Hispanic — 7 (3) applied; 1 (0) selected

Arab American — 2 (2) applied; 2 (0) selected

Native American — 3 (0) applied; 0 (0) selected

The John S. Knight journalism fellowship program at Stanford University experienced a sharp drop-off in U.S. applicants from daily newspapers, according to director James R. Bettinger, although the Knight-Wallace program at the University of Michigan reported about the same number of applicants as last year.

FEEDBACK: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.

“Unprecedented Openness” on China Disaster

Journalists have covered the Chinese earthquake disaster “with unprecedented openness and intensity, broadcasting nearly nonstop live television footage, quickly updating death tolls on the Internet and printing bold newspaper editorials calling for building industry and other reforms,” Maureen Fan wrote Sunday in the Washington Post.

In the New York Times, Howard W. French told this anecdote: “Two and a half hours after a huge earthquake struck Sichuan Province on Monday, an order went out from the powerful Central Propaganda Department to newspapers throughout China. ‘No media is allowed to send reporters to the disaster zone,’ it read, according to Chinese journalists who are familiar with it.

“When the order arrived, many reporters were already waiting at a Shanghai airport for a flight to Sichuan’s provincial capital, Chengdu. A few were immediately recalled by their editors, but two reporters from the Shanghai newspaper The Oriental Morning Post, Yu Song and Wang Juliang, boarded a plane anyway. Soon, they were reporting from the heart of the disaster zone.

“Their article filled an entire page of the next day’s Post, one of the first unofficial accounts of the tragedy by Chinese journalists. It included a graphic description of the scene and pictures of a mourning mother, a rescued child and corpses wrapped in white bunting. The paper further risked offending censors by printing an all-black front page that day, stressing the scale of the catastrophe.

“. . . By Wednesday, so many reporters had ignored the government’s instructions that the Propaganda Department rescinded its original order, replacing it with another, more realistic one, reflecting its temporary loss of control. ‘Reporters going to the disaster zone must move about with rescue teams,’ it said, giving tacit, retroactive approval to freer coverage.”

FEEDBACK: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.

Short Takes

• Philadelphia’s police commissioner said Monday that four officers will be fired and four others disciplined for their roles in the beatings of three shooting suspects, an encounter that was captured May 5 by a WTXF-TV news helicopter on videotape and drew widespread outrage, Maryclaire Dale reported for the Associated Press. “Another eight officers who had physical contact with the suspects will undergo additional training on the department’s policies concerning the use of force, Commissioner Charles Ramsey said.”
• Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, 24, an Afghan journalism student sentenced to death for insulting Islam, denied the charges before an appeals court Sunday, saying he confessed to questioning the religion’s treatment of women only because he was tortured, Alisa Tang and Rahim Faiez reported for the Associated Press. “It was the first time the public and the media heard full details from the closed-door trial, which highlights the influence of conservative religious attitudes in post-Taliban Afghanistan’s still-nascent justice system.”
• If he had his preference on what to call foreign nationals in the United States without immigration papers, “I’d loosen the style manual to allow ‘undocumented’ and ‘unauthorized,'” Ted Vaden, public editor at the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer wrote on Sunday “‘Illegal’ may be used to describe how people got here — ‘immigrants who are in the country illegally’ — but not to describe the people themselves — ‘illegal immigrants.’ And rule out ‘aliens,’ legally correct though it may be. Ditto for ‘illegals.’ I don’t like adjectives as nouns, especially as a label for people who violated the law to improve their families’ lives.”
• “Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation’s U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950,” Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang reported for the Associated Press. “The mass executions — intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners — were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century.”
•  

Sean Fennessey and Celia Smith

• Sean Fennessey has been promoted to music editor and Celia Smith returns to Vibe Media Group as market editor, Vibe announced on Monday. Fennessey is to conceptualize, assign and edit music features for Vibe magazine, including its cover story. Smith will be responsible for conceiving, coordinating and executing the front-of-book fashion section of the magazine. She is a former fashion and beauty assistant at Vibe Vixen.
• “Ben Jealous is young, smart and committed. While he was not my first choice for the job, I’m hoping that he proves me wrong,” George E. Curry wrote in his column on Monday, speaking of the man chosen Friday to lead the NAACP. Jealous is former managing editor of the Jackson (Miss.) Advocate, and onetime executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, representing black-community newspaper publishers.
• “The English-language offshoot of Al Jazeera, the Arabic television news network, is pushing for a ‘breakthrough’ that would make the channel available to American TV viewers and help it move beyond a turbulent start-up phase, according to its new managing director, Tony Burman,” Eric Pfanner wrote Monday in the New York Times.
• “Concerned that singer R. Kelly won’t get a fair trial, a judge Friday denied a media request to get access to sealed documents in the case,” Stefano Esposito and Kim Janssen wrote Friday in the Chicago Sun-Times. “The Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press and Chicago Public Radio teamed up to ask for access to records of closed-door hearings in the case, arguing that the public has a constitutional right to observe the process. Kelly, 41, is charged with videotaping himself having sex with a girl as young as 13. He has pleaded not guilty.”
• Hearst Magazines’ Marie Claire magazine has finally made it official: It’s snagged Project Runway judge Nina Garcia as fashion director of the magazine,” Lucia Moses wrote on Thursday for Mediaweek. “Garcia will jump from Hachette Filipacchi Media’s Elle, where she had the same title.”
• The Saturday marriage of Theola Labbé of the Washington Post and Brian DeBose of the Washington Times was recorded in the New York Times on Sunday in a story that noted that DeBose, formerly a national political correspondent, is now an editorial writer.
• Longtime Los Angeles reporter Mandalit Del Barco was promoted to correspondent at National Public Radio, in recognition of “a distinguished body of work that merits a promotion,” NPR spokeswoman Andi Sporkin explained on Monday.

FEEDBACK: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.

Feedback: New York Post Made Two Mistakes

What is truly sad about this Leonardo Blair incident is that the NY Post has made two mistakes: 1) defending something that is still very much a subjective action by NYPD and 2) firing Mr. Blair for not only reporting the incident but then filing a civil suit. It seems that the Post would rather hide behind the blue shield than protect the rights and liberties of its employees, who are living in the United States.

For any employer to fire an employee because he or she has decided to protect his or her own personal interests is very unpatriotic and should be unconstitutional. Mr. Blair needs to amend his lawsuit and not only sue the NYPD for the unlawful stop but also his former employer for discrimination. The Post retaliated against Mr. Blair simply because he decided to do something about his personal situation. It is not his fault that the editors decided to back the police and not their own employee.

Gregory Moore
Managing Editor, San Antonio Informer
and syndicated columnist
May 19, 2008

FEEDBACK: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.

Feedback: New York Post Had No Choice

On Leonardo Blair:

Sorry, seems to me that the Post had to fire this guy — how could he objectively report on crime when he’s involved in a lawsuit?

Dionne Walker
The Associated Press
Richmond, Va.
May 19, 2008

FEEDBACK: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.

Feedback: Why Not Give Blair Another Beat?

It would have presented a conflict for Leonardo Blair to continue to cover the police while he’s suing the police. Still, it’s unfortunate that in the heat of the moment, Blair got fired. After all, it wasn’t his fault that he apparently got profiled by the NYPD.

Further, by not notifying his editors of the incident, Blair acted properly. He stayed on the right side of the personal/professional wall, and thus kept the newspaper from being put in a position where its news judgment could appear compromised. The fact that the incident cut against the Post’s editorial views is irrelevant; had the arrest corroborated the newspaper’s views, observers might have suspected that the Post was exploiting the incident for its own purposes. Thanks to Blair, the Post is able to defend itself by pointing out that it had no notice of the incident.

Perhaps, after reflecting on the matter, the Post should rehire Blair and assign him to another beat. After all, a reporter talented enough to work for the Post can adapt quickly to cover any subject. This incident isn’t worth the loss of a talented young journalist, especially one with the integrity to question official misconduct.

David Honig
Executive Director
Minority Media and Telecommunications Council
Washington
May 20, 2008

FEEDBACK: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.

Feedback: I’m Rooting for Blair on Two Fronts

I agree that Leonardo Blair has suffered two injustices: one at the hands of the NYPD, and another at the hands of the Post. The irony of the clash of constitutional issues here is astounding.

I would also advocate that instead of firing Mr. Blair, the Post could have reassigned him to another beat to address the apparent conflict of interest. By releasing him, the Post does open itself up to legal action. The Post also sends the wrong signal to the rest of the industry by in essence labeling Mr. Blair as damaged goods so early in his career.

The Post in fact has damaged its own credibility with its knee-jerk reaction to its public “embarrassment.”

It missed a golden opportunity to be a champion of civil liberties. It decided to back an oppressive and discriminatory practice instead of supporting someone who is dedicated to upholding the First Amendment and by extension the Bill of Rights, as well as the Constitution.

I’m rooting for Mr. Blair to score a double victory against the NYPD and the Post. I applaud him for standing up for his rights and will support him if he plans subsequent action against the Post.

Johnson Young Lancaster
Journalist
St. Louis
May 20, 2008