Journal-isms Oct. 28

Robert Gibbs, Fox News VP Meet at White House

"That’s all I can confirm – a meeting took place and it was private. Anything else you’re reading is pure speculation," Irena Briganti, spokeswoman for Fox News, told Journal-isms on Wednesday.

She was referring to a reported meeting between Michael Clemente, Fox News Channel senior vice president, and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs in Gibbs’ office at the White House. Clemente then met with the FNC D.C. bureau, according to Steve Krakauer, writing¬†for the Web site mediaite. Some Web sites speculated they had reached a "truce." On Politico, Mike Allen reported, "A Fox source said that the marching orders are to ‘continue doing what we’re doing – reporting the news, asking tough questions and providing analysis/opinion on shows like O’Reilly, Beck and Hannity.”

The meeting came after a war of words between the White House and Fox News that escalated this month when White House communications director Anita Dunn said of Fox News in the New York Times, "We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent." She added on CNN, ""Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party."

For its part, Fox News relished the attention and the chance to ratchet up its own rhetoric. On "Fox News Sunday," host Chris Wallace declared the show would discuss "what’s being called the new White House enemies list."

Kenneth T. Walsh wrote earlier Wednesday for U.S. News & World Report, "White House strategists say they have no second thoughts about taking on Fox News in the biggest media feud of President Obama’s administration. A senior Obama adviser says that, even though the West Wing has been roundly criticized by both adversaries and some allies for blasting Fox as an arm of the Republican Party and not a real news organization, administration insiders are pleased with how things stand.

"The fuss has energized core Democrats who have wanted Obama and his advisers to get tough with Fox and other critics of the administration, the adviser says. And it has made the point that Fox is an outlier in the journalistic community, a notion that many liberals embrace."

• Kevin Allocca, MediaBistro:¬†White House Refutes Claims It Tried to Block Fox from Feinberg Interview
• Matea Gold, Los Angeles Times: Fox News relishes Obama administration scorn
  
• Michael Massing, Columbia Journalism Review:¬†Howard Kurtz, Missing in Action
  
• Jon Meacham, Newsweek: The Great American Ideological Crackup
• Tony Romm, the Hill:¬†Jarrett charges Fox is biased, backs off on mention of MSNBC
  
• Jim Rutenberg, New York Times:¬†Behind the War Between White House and Fox
  
• Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times:¬†Obama’s misguided Fox hunt

Obamas "Revised Some of the Standards" of Pols’ Marriages

"The centrality of the Obama marriage to the president‚Äôs political brand opens a new chapter in the debate that has run through, even helped define, their union," the New York Times’ Jodi Kantor wrote¬†Monday in a "preview" of a Sunday’s New York Times Magazine piece. "Since he first began running for office in 1995, Barack and Michelle Obama have never really stopped struggling over how to combine politics and marriage: how to navigate the long absences, lack of privacy, ossified gender roles and generally stultifying rules that result when public opinion comes to bear on private relationships.

"Along the way, they revised some of the standards for how a politician and spouse are supposed to behave. They have spoken more frankly about marriage than most intact couples, especially those running for office, usually do. (‘The bumps happen to everybody all the time, and they are continuous,’ the first lady told me in a let‚Äôs-get-real voice, discussing the lowest point in her marriage.)

"Candidates’ wives are supposed to sit cheerfully through their husbands’ appearances. But after helping run her husband’s first State Senate campaign in 1996, Michelle Obama largely withdrew from politics for years, fully re-engaging only for the presidential campaign. As a result, she has probably logged fewer total sitting-through-my-husband’s-speech hours than most of her recent predecessors. Even the go-for-broke quality of the president’s rise can be read, in some small part, as an attempt to vault over the forces that fray political marriages. People who face too many demands — two careers, two children — often scale back somehow. The Obamas scaled up."

Meanwhile, Samantha Critchell of the Associated Press reports that Michelle Obama "is fashion’s star, but that’s not why she’s one of Glamour’s December cover models.

"Mrs. Obama’s work in mentoring earned her the spot, which will be rotated with four other covers. She’ll receive a special recognition in the annual Women of the Year issue that goes on newsstands Nov. 10.

". . . The outfit was from her own closet, and no designer will be credited in the magazine."

• Charles M. Blow, New York Times: The Magic of Michelle
• Tony Burroughs, CNN.com: Commentary: Tracing Michelle Obama’s roots — and yours
  
• Stanley Crouch, New York Daily News: DNA’s our hottest melting pot: Michelle Obama’s racial heritage is mixed, just like that of millions

Upon being freed from death row in 1999, Anthony Porter lifts Northwestern Professor David Protess in an embrace as then-students Shawn Armbrust (back turned), Syandene Rhodes-Pitts and Tom McCann watch. (Credit: Medill Innocence Project)

News Outlets Back J-Students in Dispute With Prosecutors

"The major voices and organizations in the industry need to speak out, write briefs and raise holy hell about this witch hunt by Cook County prosecutors," Tim McGuire, the former editor of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis who now teaches at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, writes¬†on a university blog.

McGuire is writing of efforts by prosecutors in Cook County, Ill., who are targeting journalism students at Northwestern University who say they have uncovered new evidence that proves the innocence of Anthony McKinney, who has spent 31 years in prison for the slaying of a security guard in 1978, as Jeff Long reported in the Chicago Tribune last week.

According¬†to the students’ professor, David Protess, "In the past week, more than a score of news organizations covered the battle over the state’s subpoena, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, ABC News, Time magazine and USA Today. Editorials supporting the Project were published in the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, the Washington Examiner, Salon.com, Mother Jones magazine, the Boulder Daily Camera, Dissenting Justice, Reason magazine, Outside the Beltway, The Business Insider and The Daily Texan. At this writing, prosecutors’ sole editorial support has come from the right-wing National Review."

McGuire wrote that more voices are needed. "Every advocate for good journalism needs to see this case really matters. Each university clinic program in America from Cronkite News Service, to Cronkite’s four day-a-week Newswatch to the Innocence Project to scores of others need the protection from harassment that is afforded journalists," he said.

"Their great work IS journalism, no argument needed. The bullies who want to hamstring great student journalism need to be stopped. God bless John Lavine, the Medill Dean, for standing strong against the misguided prosecutors, but Lavine and the Medill Innocence Project need editorial support and the voices of the big journalism guns to close down this brazen attempt at usurping a free press."

The students who performed the investigation are part of a nine-member class in investigative journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, Protess explained.

They are a self-selected group that includes an African American woman from Chicago’s South Side and three Latinos, he said. As journalists, they cannot advocate, but Protess turns over their findings to the Medill Innocence Project, which does so, he said.

Of the 11 people who have been freed as a result of their work, seven were African American. "It’s who gets railroaded by our justice system," Protess said. "It has to do with race and social class."

"The Cook County state’s attorney subpoenaed the students’ grades, notes and recordings of witness interviews, the class syllabus and even e-mails they sent to each other and to professor David Protess," Long reported in the Tribune.

"Northwestern has turned over documents related to on-the-record interviews with witnesses that students conducted, as well as copies of audio and videotapes, Protess said.

"But the school is fighting the effort to get grades and grading criteria, evaluations of student performance, expenses incurred during the inquiry, the syllabus, e-mails, unpublished student memos, and interviews not conducted on the record, or where witnesses weren’t willing to be recorded."

2 Stations That Opposed Honduras Coup Return to the Air

In Honduras, "Radio Globo and Canal 36 television, two stations that have been the main media opponents of the 28 June coup d‚Äô?©tat, were allowed to resume broadcasting on 19 October, three and a half weeks after the de facto government used a decree suspending civil liberties to close them down and confiscate their equipment," Reporters Without Borders reported¬†last week.

"Sources at Radio Globo, which had managed to keep operating as a clandestine web radio, nonetheless said the station has had to censor itself since it resumed broadcasting. At the same time, Radio Cadena Voces (RCV), a station owned by a coup supporter, has dropped three programmes hosted by women’s groups that allowed government opponents to speak on the air.

‚Äú’Neither the official lifting of the 28 September state of siege nor the resumption of broadcasting by Radio Globo and Canal 36 means that the rule of law has been restored in Honduras,’ Reporters Without Borders said.

Afghanistan Coverage "Simplistic" Over the Years

"For almost 30 years — ever since we got a close-in view of it — American press coverage of Afghanistan has been simplistic, misleading, unexamining, accepting and echoing government propaganda, and just plain wrong. There have been exceptions…but not many," the husband-and-wife team of Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould wrote Tuesday for Nieman Watchdog.

They are identified as the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981.

"Our personal experience with the media was an excellent example of how the Afghanistan story was framed to encourage war and to downplay peaceful settlement. Like the cold war itself, it is a framework that still haunts Afghanistan. Perhaps it has now come to haunt the United States even more," they wrote.

• Roland S. Martin, Creators Syndicate:¬†Mr. President, Ignore Cheney on Afghanistan
  
• Ruben Navarrette Jr., San Diego Union-Tribune:¬†Make Afghan footprint bigger
  
• Rose Russell, Toledo Blade: Get Cheney a positive job

Short Takes

• After suffering a stroke at her home on Friday, having no movement on the right side of her body and being unable to speak, Barbara Johnson "was a veritable chatterbox tonight! Okay, so I exaggerate a bit. I’ve earned it," Roy S. Johnson, her sports journalist husband, wrote¬† Tuesday on the CaringBridge site devoted to his wife. Barbara Johnson is a corporate headhunter who was a producer throughout the 1990s at WABC-TV and from 2002 to 2004, news director at WNBC-TV, both in New York. "do you remember two days ago when I wrote that the doctor said she’d have to learn t speak all over again. Well, I guess you can put B in the AP class! Oh, at did I tell you she walked, too?"
• Jehmu Greene, who led Rock the Vote, the largest youth voter registration group, has been named president of the Women’s Media Center, a leading media advocacy and training organization, the center announced on Wednesday. The group was founded in 2005 by Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Robin Morgan, and Helen Zia, who has been active in the Asian American Journalists Association, is board chair.
• "Earlier this year when the New York Post launched its vicious attack on Congressman Charles Rangel, the Amsterdam News sensed there was more to it than just a random investigation by the Post," Herb Boyd wrote¬†in the New York Amsterdam News. "That some organization and/or individuals were fueling and possibly funding the nefarious pursuit was recently confirmed. Parts of a May 18 letter from the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) discloses its intentions to ‘finish off’ Rangel."
• "Published figures from national research sources found that GM spent only $29.9 million on advertising in Black-oriented media in 2008. That represents a meager 2.4 percent of the $1.17 billion of all of GM’s advertising expenditures. Market experts are baffled," Hazel Trice Edney wrote for the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Danny Bakewell, NNPA chairman, said he will lead the federation "in a direct confrontation with the automotive industry," Edney wrote. Armando Ojeda, director of supplier diversity development for Ford, one of the companies mentioned, "said industry trends may be leaning away from newspapers and more toward the Internet."
• "ESPN broadcaster Bob Griese has been suspended one week for a remark he made about NASCAR driver Juan Pablo Montoya," ESPN reported on Monday. "During ESPN’s broadcast of the Minnesota-Ohio State game Saturday, a graphic was shown listing the top five drivers in NASCAR’s points race. Fellow analyst Chris Spielman asked where was Montoya, who is Colombian. Griese replied he was ‘out having a taco.’"
• Pamela Glason Thornton, who spent more than 20 years writing and editing for black-themed publications in central Ohio, died Saturday. She was 45 and had been battling lupus, an inflammatory immune-system disease, for the past few years, said Donna Mattison, her sister-in-law, Jeb Phillips reported¬†Wednesday in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. "Thornton was a writer, city editor and religion editor with the Post, where her husband of 15 years, Ray Thornton, is the operations manager. She previously had worked at Purpose magazine and American Diversity Magazine , and she had served as the secretary for the Columbus Association of Black Journalists."
• "Jayson Blair, who was at the center of a major journalism scandal as a New York Times reporter in 2003, will be the featured speaker at Washington and Lee University‚Äôs 48th Journalism Ethics Institute on Friday, Nov. 6. The title of Blair‚Äôs talk is ‚ÄúLessons Learned,‚Äù the Rockbridge Weekly in Rockbridge County, Va., reported http://www.rockbridgeweekly.com/staff2.php ‚Äú’Inviting Jayson Blair to keynote this institute was definitely a departure for us,’ said Edward Wasserman, the Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics at W&L."
• Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh "sounded off Friday on a supposed report that Time magazine reporter Joe Klein had unearthed" President Obama’s "college thesis, titled ‘Aristocracy Reborn,’ in which he sounded off on the nation’s Founding Fathers and the Constitution and the distribution of wealth," Michael Saul reported¬† Sunday in the New York Daily News. "The only problem ‚Äî the report was pure fiction. The original post with the fabricated details about Obama’s college thesis was written as a satire on a humor blog."
• Tai Takahashi is becoming news director of WAND-TV, an NBC affiliate in Decatur, Ill., TV Spy’s Shop Talk reported on Wednesday. Takahashi was fired as news director at WTVQ in Lexington, Ky., when the station changed owners in 2008, the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader reported at the time. He was one of only a handful of television news directors of Asian American descent, the Asian American Journalists Association said when Takahashi was named¬†to the Lexington job in 2004.
• The new Mexican Chamber of Deputies has not renewed the mandate of a special congressional committee on violence against the press appointed in 2006, the Reporters Committee on Freedom of the Press said¬†"We call on the Congress to show its full commitment to a free press by granting federal authorities jurisdiction over crimes against freedom of expression, a reform still pending in the legislature.‚Äù
• In the Caribbean country of Grenada, "The Grenada Today weekly is apparently about to disappear as a result of a drawn-out libel suit by one of Grenada‚Äôs former prime ministers, Keith Mitchell. High court judge Claire Henry ordered its liquidation this week after the owners failed to reach an agreement with Mitchell over payment of an exorbitant damages award," Reporters Without Borders said on Wednesday.