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Journal-isms Oct. 28

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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."

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."

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.

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