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Journal-isms July 20

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Sonia Sotomayor, all smiles, arrives July 15 for Day 3 of her confirmation hearings. (Credit: talkradionews)

Sotomayor Hearings Viewed as They Began:  Differently

The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on Tuesday on President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, and if the last week of hearings is any indication, the preponderance of media commentary will discuss how "civil" and unremarkable the confirmation process was. There will be no Latino journalists among the commentators.

Yet there will be some of all races who will have seen in the experience something completely different:

A public assertion of white male privilege and Sotomayor’s effort to succeed despite it.

"As political theater, the Sonia Sotomayor hearings tanked faster than the 2008 Fred Thompson presidential campaign," Frank Rich wrote¬†Sunday in the New York Times. "Yet the Sotomayor show was still rich in historical significance. Someday we may regard it as we do those final, frozen tableaus of Pompeii. It offered a vivid snapshot of what Washington looked like when clueless ancien-r?©gime conservatives were feebly clinging to their last levers of power, blissfully oblivious to the new America that was crashing down on their heads and reducing their antics to a sideshow as ridiculous as it was obsolescent."

Rich wasn’t the only one who got it. The previous Tuesday, his op-ed colleague Maureen Dowd, in a piece headlined, "White Man’s Last Stand,"¬† was on to the game. "The judge’s full retreat from the notion that a different life experience is valuable was more than necessary and somewhat disappointing. But, as any clever job applicant knows, you must obscure as well as reveal, so she sidestepped the dreaded empathy questions – even though that’s why the president wants her," she wrote.

Jill Abramson, now a managing editor of the New York Times, covered the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991, when she worked for the Wall Street Journal. In a cover piece¬†for the Times’ "Week in Review" section, she compared the treatment accorded Anita Hill, who accused Thomas of sexual harassment, and other women nominees to the court, with that given Sotomayor, who would be the court’s first Hispanic justice and its third woman.

"History is being made," Abramson wrote. "Though Republicans pushed her into disowning her ‘wise Latina’ remarks, the full texts of those speeches reveal an interesting generational shift between Judge Sotomayor and the women who preceded her, Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg were among a tiny minority of women in their law school classes, and both faced barriers as they broke into the legal profession. (Justice O’Connor was offered secretarial jobs after graduating third in her Stanford Law class in 1952.)." Sotomayor fared better, "but success came at a price."

Their views were miles away from the worldview expressed on the Sunday talk shows. "The Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings were relatively calm, even civil," John King remarked on CNN’s "State of the Union," seemingly oblivious to the undercurrents.

In the Washington Post, media writer Howard Kurtz said on Monday, "Sotomayor’s rise from a Bronx public housing project was a stirring story at first, but that narrative quickly ran its course. The ‘wise Latina’ remark had its YouTube moment. With no new revelations to stoke public interest." He called the hearings mundane,

"Mundane" was the last word Sophia Nelson, in an essay on theRoot.com, seemed to be thinking.

"I am not easily angered," she wrote. "But as I watched the second day of confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor, I grew closer and closer to the stereotype. Angry-black-woman syndrome – hard to get along with, excitable, overly aggressive, difficult, a bully and a badgerer – began to set in."

Added Jill Nelson on niaonline: "I felt disgust and anger listening to questions concerning Sotomayor’s judicial temperament, disposition, and the unrelenting question of whether she could, as a Latino woman from a working class background, be impartial. Sorry, dudes, but the days when you could convince anyone that being white, male, straight and rich was the baseline for being fair and impartial are over."

Henry Louis Gates Arrested After Report of Break-In

"Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation’s pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling," Tracy Jan reported Monday for the Boston Globe.

"Police arrived at Gates’s Ware Street home near Harvard Square at 12:44 p.m. to question him. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, had trouble unlocking his door after it became jammed.

"He was booked for disorderly conduct after ‘exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,’ according to a police report. Gates accused the investigating officer of being a racist and told him he had ‘no idea who he was messing with,’ the report said.

"Gates told the officer that he was being targeted because ‘I’m a black man in America.’"

In addition to his Harvard duties, Gates is editor in chief of theRoot.com, and is a an occasional journalist, frequent essayist, and now television documentary producer, exploring such topics as Abraham Lincoln and the searches among African Americans for their geneology.

The arrest recalls studies that show that African Americans are overrepresented in stories about crime, sports and entertainment and underrepresented in news about business, politics and stories about everyday life. However, at 58, Gates is too old to fit the profile of a break-in suspect.

A statement from Gates’ lawyer, Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, posted Monday night on theRoot.com, said Gates "was headed from Logan airport to his home [in] Cambridge after spending a week in China , where he was filming his new PBS documentary entitled ‘Faces of America’. Professor Gates was driven to his home by a driver for a local car company.

"Professor Gates attempted to enter his front door, but the door was damaged. Professor Gates then entered his rear door with his key, turned off his alarm, and again attempted to open the front door. With the help of his driver they were able to force the front door open, and then the driver carried Professor Gates’s luggage into his home."

"Professor Gates immediately called the Harvard Real Estate office to report the damage to his door and requested that it be repaired immediately. As he was talking to the Harvard Real Estate office on his portable phone in his house, he observed a uniformed officer on his front porch. When Professor Gates opened the door, the officer immediately asked him to step outside."

"Professor Gates remained inside his home and asked the officer why he was there. The officer indicated that he was responding to a 911 call about a breaking and entering in progress at this address."

Boston’s Bay State Banner to Accept Loan from City

"The Bay State Banner, Boston’s only black-owned newspaper, plans to accept a $200,000 loan from the city to stay afloat, despite criticism that the money could compromise its impartiality during an election year," Megan Woolhouse reported for the Boston Globe on Saturday.

"Publisher Mel Miller said yesterday that he never met with Mayor Thomas M. Menino to arrange the bailout loan, but when he learned of the offer, decided ‘only a fool wouldn‚Äôt take it.‚Äô

‚Äú’Let the Banner fail and deprive the community?‚Äô Miller, 75, asked yesterday. ‘That‚Äôs just foolish, and I‚Äôm not going to do that.‚Äô"

The tabloid Boston Herald editorialized against the move on Saturday.

"Will the mayor be there with his checkbook when any other news outlet in this city runs into difficulty? Every other minority-owned business?" it asked.

"Of course not. But as he bids for an historic fifth term it can’t hurt Menino to have a paper that reaches deep into the city’s minority neighborhoods — one that has ripped him, at times mercilessly — owe him a favor.

"If the Banner can live with this arrangement, well, that makes it one of the few news outlets that could. But if the market didn’t support it — a fact common to struggling news outlets all over the United States — why should the government?"

Cronkite Fought for International Press Freedom

"Walter Cronkite had such a profound impact in so many ways that one might overlook an important part of his legacy — his long efforts on behalf of international press freedom and his advocacy on behalf of local journalists around the world," Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, wrote Friday, the day the venerated CBS anchorman died at 92.

"Cronkite was a vital participant in the launch of the Committee to Protect Journalists 28 years ago and, though his title here may have been honorary co-chairman, he was an active force throughout the years."

As one example, Simon cited the organization’s attempt to visit apartheid South Africa in 1983, "to persuade South African officials to ease the country’s practice of imprisoning journalists and taking other highly repressive steps such as ‘banning’ them from public life.

"It was a letter from Cronkite to the South African Embassy that secured visas for our delegation. . . . A government official who was so powerful in South Africa that he proudly took credit for approving journalist detentions was in awe of Walter Cronkite."

Harry Porterfield, 81, Let Go From Chicago’s WLS-TV

"Anchor and reporter Harry Porterfield, a celebrated Chicago TV fixture for 45 years, the last 24 at WLS-Ch. 7, is leaving the ABC owned-and-operated station at the end of this month, the latest casualty of the revenue crunch that’s squeezing the media business," Phil Rosenthal reported¬†Friday in the Chicago Tribune.

"Porterfield, 81, most recently has been working four-day weeks and filing his human-interest "Someone You Should Know" reports twice weekly in addition to hosting occasional ‘People, Places & Things You Should Know’ specials.

"’Harry has been a legend and a pioneer in Chicago broadcasting,’ Emily Barr, Channel 7’s president and general manager, said in an interview. ‘These are very difficult times and every decision we make is a challenge and, frankly, anguished. I adore Harry. He’s a treasure. … But because of the economy, we have to be looking at everything. In the last few months, we have looked at other situations and other contracts. Some get renewed. Some don’t.’"

Porterfield was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Black Journalists last year at its Chicago convention.

From NAHJ Convention to a Coup in Honduras

"Parachuting into a foreign crisis can be journalistically treacherous, not least because, out of ignorance, you may get the story wrong. The Herald’s Frances Robles, a foreign correspondent with experience in the region, faced a particularly daunting situation as she landed two weeks ago in Honduras, faced with two men claiming to be president and an unusual coup," Edward Schumacher-Matos, ombudsman at the Miami Herald, wrote on Sunday.

Robles told Journal-isms she was at the airport, having just left the National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she was program chair, when she got a message on her BlackBerry from World Editor John Yearwood, immediate past treasurer of the National Association of Black Journalists. There had been a coup in Honduras and she needed to get there, he said. It was June 28.

"Robles published separate, exclusive interviews with the military chief, an army attorney and the deputy attorney general that best clarified the army role and captured the curious nature of the ‘coup,’" Schumacher-Matos wrote.

Robles, who covers Latin America and has since left Honduras, said that one thing that was unusual about the Honduras situation was that reporters could not rely on local media, since it was all on the side of the coup leaders.

Reporters Without Borders last week "condemned targeted censorship by the de facto Honduras government against Venezuelan public television channels Venezolana de Televisi??n (VTV) and Telesur, which had 11 journalists detained then forced to leave the country, on 13 July.

"“The detention and departure of these journalists is yet another step in the selective news blackout that has been imposed since the military coup,” the worldwide press freedom organisation said."

Schumacher-Matos wrote that overall, he saw from the Herald "errors common to foreign coverage from Central America. . . . what was missing from someone on The Herald’s team was a genuine legal analysis sifting through the claims" about the legitimacy of the coup, "and taking the Honduran constitution seriously.

"If the coverage did better than most in reporting the military’s involvement, it began last week to drift into stereotypical territory about class divisions and poverty in Central America."

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