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Black Press Hears of Jailed Youth, Voter Suppression, Obama

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Black Press Hears of Jailed Youth, Voter Suppression, Obama

Reporter Who “Caught the Bug” Late Wins Investigative Award

African American-Oriented Websites Show Gains

“Council on Aggregation” to Be Diverse After All

White House Defends Request to Imprison Yemeni Reporter

Short Takes

Video explains Children’s Defense Fund’s Freedom Schools. CDF founder Marian Wright Edelman told black publishers they should sound an alarm about functional illiteracy. (Video)

Black Press Hears of Jailed Youth, Voter Suppression, Obama

Functional illiteracy among black children, the high rate of their number born to single-parent families, an unacceptable black youth unemployment rate and the plight of young African Americans in prisons have created “one of the worst crises since slavery,” Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, told the annual Black Press Week meeting of black newspaper publishers on Thursday.

“The whole point of slavery was to keep us illiterate,” Edelman said, urging the black press to sound an alarm. “If you can’t read or compete in this global economy, you are sentenced to death,” she said. Edelman received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Newspaper Publishers Association, sponsor of Black Press Week.

President Obama, who greeted the publishers at the White House, and Ben Jealous, the NAACP president who received the group’s community service award, also has messages for the publishers.

“Our goal is to get to 250,000 young people that are going to have opportunities, internships, apprenticeships, you name it. And I think we’re already at 180,000, so we’re making progress,” Obama said, outlining his accomplishments in office. “This is going to be an example of the kind of thing that all of you can be helpful with. Because one of the things I’ve realized after three years in this office is, if we wait for Congress to do everything, a lot of stuff won’t get done.”

Jealous had returned from Geneva, Switzerland, where NAACP leaders pressed a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council for help battling what the organization views as forces attempting to push back voting rights, as Melanie Eversley reported for USA Today.

The real purpose of voter ID laws is the same as it was when the formerly incarcerated were banned from voting, Jealous said.

Jealous quoted a delegate to a 1906 convention in Virginia that extended a ban on formerly incarcerated people from voting, a ban he said is still in the state constitution. “The darkey will be eliminated as a factor in the state’s politics within five years,” the delegate said. He said the NAACP was urging the Justice Department to restore restoration voting rights of ex-cons.

Edelman said she had just visited the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi, which she described as “the largest prison for black youth in the country.”

“Most of them are there for possession of pot,” Edelman said. The prison is operated by GEO Group, Inc., the nation’s second largest private prison corporation, and is the subject of a federal class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center for which a proposed settlement was reached two weeks ago. As of last week, there were 958 inmates up to age 22 at the facility. Eighteen of the inmates were 18 or younger, Jerry Mitchell reported for the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss.

“The complaint describes rampant contraband brought in by guards, sex between female guards and male inmates, inadequate medical care, prisoners held inhumanely in isolation, guards brutalizing inmates and inmate-on-inmate violence that was so brutal it led to brain damage,” John Burnett reported for NPR last year.

“Go into those prisons,” Edelman told the 125 Black Press Week attendees, who met at a Capitol Hill hotel. “Many of them never get visitors.”

There was more. Black churches need to “open the doors and compete with the drug dealers.” Eighty percent of black children cannot read or compete at grade level in the fourth, eighth or 12th grade, Edelman said.

Edelman also promoted the “Freedom Schools” program of the Children’s Defense Fund, saying “we can’t wait for the public schools to do their jobs.”

The CDF Freedom Schools program “provides summer and after-school enrichment through a model curriculum that supports children and families around five essential components: high quality academic enrichment; parent and family involvement; social action and civic engagement; intergenerational servant leadership development; and nutrition, health and mental health,” according to the organization.

Separately, Danny Bakewell Sr. of Bakewell Media and the Los Angeles Sentinel, past chairman of NNPA, said Comcast had penalized black newspapers by not advertising sufficiently because NNPA would not back Comcast’s takeover of NBCUniversal last year, which required government approval.

“We would not sign on with them until they made a series of commitments to the black press,” Bakewell told Journal-isms. “They put $7 million into a proposal for minorities. We were asking for $10 million for the black press alone,” Bakewell said.

Neal Scarbrough, a spokesman for Comcast, told Journal-isms Friday he would have no comment.

At a luncheon Thursday at the National Press Club, National Urban League President Marc Morial said he subscribed to 20 black newspapers and said he would add any paper that gave him a business card that day, according to journalist George Curry, who moderated a roundtable. “He had a lot of publishers lining up.”

Obama’s welcome to the publishers was a reminder of his appearance as a candidate at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Las Vegas in 2007. Cheryl Smith, editor of the Dallas Weekly, asked why Obama had reached out to the black press, with whom he had held a conference call early in the year, and whether he would continue to reach out if elected.

Naming three Chicago black newspapers — the Defender, the Crusader and the Citizen — Obama said that when he served in the Illinois legislature, those papers would cover issues he was working on that the mainstream press would not.

“My attitude is that if you were covering me when nobody wanted to cover me, then they should cover me when everybody wants to cover me. That attitude will continue when I’m in the White House,” the candidate said.

On Thursday, Obama praised those papers, saying, “. . . one of the things that I always love about African American publications is that it’s not just gloom and doom. Part of what you guys do is you lift up that kid whose overcome barriers and is now succeeding, or that family that has pulled together and helped to strengthen a community, or that church that is the bedrock of a neighborhood. Those stories of success and hope, that’s what sustains us, that’s what has driven us, that’s what has given people a sense that no matter how tough things get sometimes, there’s always a better day ahead. And you’re part of telling that story. So I very much appreciate you.”

Reporter Who “Caught the Bug” Late Wins Investigative Award

“Reporter Corey G. Johnson was given a simple assignment soon after becoming one of the first reporters to arrive at our offices in Berkeley in August 2009 ,” the Center for Investigative Reporting’s California Watch said on Friday. “We asked him to write about seismic safety at schools  — pegged to an upcoming quake anniversary. New to California, Johnson saw what scores of reporters had overlooked for decades.

“With his colleagues at California Watch, he went on to detail a staggering regulatory failure. We found that thousands of school buildings were being occupied even though they did not meet seismic safety requirements. Reporter Erica Perez and Johnson found that bad inspectors missed major defects or falsified reports — while being rewarded with more work. And the state made it practically impossible for schools to get much-needed seismic repair money.”

California Watch won Scripps Howard’s Roy W. Howard Award for Public Service for a 19-month series, “On Shaky Ground,” detailing a breakdown in the way the state protects children and teachers from the threat of a major earthquake.

The honor is also a testament to a now-defunct program of the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. It trained non-traditional students to work at their local daily newspaper. Most students were making a career transition into journalism.

“For a young reporter to receive this honor is testament to the Freedom Forum’s vision that potential reporters of color were in every locale, that they were educable, and that one day soon they will make hiring editors look very smart,” Dwight F. Cunningham, a program administrator who worked with Johnson at the institute, told Journal-isms.

Johnson, 37, left Florida A&M University in 1997, not earning the three more credits he needed to graduate until 2003. A psychology major, Johnson said he did not discover his passion for news until after he graduated. “If three guys were arguing in the barbershop, I’d be the one to pull out the article,” he said. He said of his passion, “I didn’t really know it was called journalism.”

Back in his hometown of Atlanta, Johnson became curious about the role of local police in the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., called David J. Garrow, a King biographer who was teaching at Emery University, and conducted impressive research. Garrow contacted the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where Johnson met editors who put him in touch with Investigative Reporters and Editors, which was meeting in Atlanta that year. “I caught the bug,” Johnson said. However, he had no clips.

Still, the AJC connection led to a job at another Cox newspaper, the Greenville (N.C.) Daily Reflector, and a recommendation that Johnson enroll in the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute. Johnson was scraping for cash, living with his parents and helping to support a three-year old son. Yet he was pursuing investigative work. He spent two years at the Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer. When one of his IRE mentors, James Grimaldi, took a job at California Watch and urged him to apply, Johnson did.

When you win an award such as Scripps Howard’s, you “look back at all the things that have happened where somebody helped you along the way,” Johnson told Journal-isms. “Or when you fail, and you were at that crossroads and you didn’t get a break.

He got the breaks, he said. If he hadn’t, “I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you or anybody else.”

African American-Oriented Websites Show Gains

December figures that showed newsier African American websites overtaking those offering gossip and celebrity news were no fluke: The pattern held during February, according to the comScore Inc. research company. Most sites showed gains.

The top-ranked African American-oriented website was that of BET Networks, with 2,919,000 unique visitors, down from 3,649,000 in December; followed by HuffPost BlackVoices, with 2,761,000, up from 2,604,000 in December; MediaTakeOut.com, 2,595,000, up from 2,502,000 in December; theGrio.com, 2,067,000, up from 1,603,000; Bossip.com, 1,700,000, up from 1,433,000; theRoot.com, 1,459,000, up from 1,408,000; Essence.com, 1,372,000, up from 988,000 ; NewsOne, 1,175,000,up from 604,000; MadamNoire.com, 1,151,000, down from 1,383,000; HelloBeautiful.com, 1,034,000, up from 625,000.

Also, EURWeb.com, 846,000,up from 352,000; YBF.com, 824,000; BlackPlanet.com, 699,000, up from 480,000; BlackAmericaWeb.com, 467,000, up from 399,000; ConcreteLoop.com, 293,000, down from 314,000; and ebony.com, 55,000, up from 41,000.

“Council on Aggregation” to Be Diverse After All

Simon Dumenco, a columnist for Advertising Age, has “decided to pull out the big guns: He has formed a committee aiming to establish standards for aggregation” on the Web, David Carr wrote Monday in the New York Times. “Buckle up, here comes the Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation. . . . An august list of names has signed on to the effort. . . .”

None of the names listed in Carr’s column was a person of color, however, and Dumenco hadn’t responded to an email inquiry by the time an item about the development appeared in this space on Wednesday.

However, Dumenco replied on Thursday.

“The reason why you haven’t seen a complete list of members of the council is because there isn’t one yet,” he wrote. “What’s been lost in the coverage so far is that this is a group that is ‘forming’ — not ‘formed.’

“So while David Carr of The New York Times chose to highlight the participation of a few specific media properties –– I’m guessing just because name-checking the likes of The Atlantic and Esquire suggests old-school mainstream media support for this project — unfortunately that gave the impression that this group is dominated by white males. In fact, there are probably more women then men who have said yes so far, and right from the start I’ve been reaching out to people of color, including Sheryl Huggins Salomon, managing editor of The Root (who I’m happy to say said yes), and [name deleted] (who I haven’t heard back from yet . . . ) . . . (Another example on the diversity front: Aaron Hicklin, editor-in-chief of Out magazine, has also agreed to participate.)”

White House Defends Request to Imprison Yemeni Reporter

“White House officials Friday defended President Obama’s request that the government of Yemen keep a local journalist behind bars for alleged terrorist ties,” Jake Tapper reported Friday for ABC News.

“Abd al-Ilah Haydar Al-Sha’i had investigated a series of airstrikes in December 2009 against what Yemeni officials described as an Al Qaeda training camp in al Majala, finding what he assessed to be remnants of U.S. ordnance — Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs — and reporting that among the victims of the strikes were 21 children and 14 women. The journalist also interviewed terrorist cleric Anwar Awlaki, an American citizen who was in September 2011 killed by a U.S. Predator drone. His December 2009 interview with Awlaki for Al Jazeera publicly established the cleric’s praise of the Fort Hood shooter, Major Nidal Hasan.

“In January 2011, Al-Sha’i was convicted in a Yemeni court of terrorism-related charges and sentenced to five years in prison — but he was reportedly in line to receive a pardon. In February 2011, however, President Obama spoke on the phone with then-Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and, according to a White House read-out of the call, ‘expressed concern over the release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai, who had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP,’ al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

“On Thursday, ABC News asked White House press secretary Jay Carney about al-Sha’i, a Yemeni journalist whose case was recently covered by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation. Carney said he didn’t have any information, but would get back to ABC News, a White House official did today.

“In a statement to ABC News, National Security Staff spokesman Tommy Vietor said that ‘President Obama expressed concern last February about Sha’i’s possible early release from prison on the basis of his involvement with AQAP — a group that had twice launched attacks on the United States. The President’s comments had absolutely nothing to do with Sha’i’s reporting or his criticism of the United States or Yemen. A Yemeni court, not a U.S. court, convicted Sha’i. We refer you to the Yemeni government for details on Sha’i’s arrest, conviction, and the status of his detention.”

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