School Shooting Moves Ethics Questions Up Front
Smiley Sends Mo’Kelly Cease-and-Desist Letter
In ’80s, Obama Says, He’d Be Called Moderate Republican
Given African Past, Rice Was “Absolutely” Right to Withdraw
2nd Fired Shreveport Reporter “Just Trying to “Lie Low”
China Daily Establishes African Edition
Chicago Magazine Publishes Mug Shots of Those Arrested
Right-to-Work Laws Originated With Segregationists
Short Takes
School Shooting Moves Ethics Questions Up Front
“‘There’s a lot of trying to shield the children from the eyes of the media,’ ABC News reported in the aftermath of the horrific Sandy Hook school shooting, describing the scene,” Joanne Ostrow reported Friday for the Denver Post.
“There was a lot of shoving of microphones in the faces of the children, too.
“Shielding and shoving, the media plays its part in what has now become a too-well-rehearsed ritual.
“Television did its usual best and worst Friday morning to relay information of the latest national horror. For hours, a confusing array of raw information, much of it unconfirmed, was pushed through social media and TV outlets. More questions than answers kept the spectacle a blur. Were there multiple shooters? How many fatalities? How many of them children? Did the killer or killers have a connection to the school?
“On CNN, Soledad O’Brien said, ‘we want to remind viewers this is raw reporting from various networks, we cannot independently confirm.’
“In special reports pre-empting regular programming, news anchors used the media’s familiar backhanded trick of lamenting media intrusiveness while furthering media intrusiveness in the pursuit of information.
“Beyond the sickening events, beyond the much needed discussion of gun control, the Connecticut tragedy moved questions of journalistic ethics to the fore.
“Questions like: Does it serve any journalistic purpose to put children on live television in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting? Is it ethically [permissible] to put shocked parents on live TV, to give the nation a taste of the horror? . . . “
- James Fallows, the Atlantic: American Exceptionalism: The Shootings Will Go On
- Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic: The Case for More Guns (And More Gun Control)
- Scott Hensley, NPR: How To Talk To Your Kids About The Conn. Shootings
- Blair Hickman, Suevon Lee and Cora Currier, ProPublica: The Best Reporting on Guns in America
- Ezra Klein, Washington Post: Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States
- Roland S. Martin, Creators Syndicate: Now Is the Time to Talk Guns, Mental Illness
- Jack Mirkinson, Huffington Post: Connecticut Shooting Media Coverage Follows Tragically Familiar Script
- Askia Muhammad, Washington Informer: President Obama’s Legacy: On Top of His Game?
- Darryl E. Owens, Orlando Sentinel: Teen’s death over loud music one more reason to change gun laws (Dec. 7)
- Pew Research Center for the People & the Press: As Fiscal Cliff Nears, Democrats Have Public Opinion on Their Side
- Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald: Gun control? Maybe these kids are onto something (Dec. 4)
- Jeff Winbush blog: A Real American Horror Story
Smiley Sends Mo’Kelly Cease-and-Desist Letter
“A clash between two outspoken media personalities has heated up to the point where the lawyer for public TV showman and ‘poverty tourist’ Tavis Smiley sent radio commentator and blogger Mo’Kelly a ‘cease and desist’ letter demanding that he stop talking and writing bad about him!,” Betty Pleasant reported Wednesday for the Wave newspapers in Los Angeles.
“Mo’Kelly — whose complete name is Morris W. O’Kelly — has been critical of Smiley’s and Cornel West’s ongoing national anti-poverty campaign.
“Mo’Kelly, a 43-year-old graduate of Georgetown University who grew up in South Los Angeles, has used his KTLK-AM 1150 radio show, ‘Mo’Kelly in the Morning,’ to comment and opine about the social and political activities of just about every Black person in the local and national news, including Smiley and West. And he has blogged his opinions about everything, including the pair’s motives, on his Mo’Kelly Report column which appears on various websites.
“Most recently, Mo’Kelly received a press release from the Smiley Group Inc. advising him and the rest of the local media which received the release, that Smiley and West have scheduled yet another ‘poverty tour,’ from Jan. 18, to Jan. 25, but this time they are calling it the ‘Poverty Manifesto Lecture Series.’ The purpose of this series, which is slated to occur on college campuses, is to press President Obama into convening a ‘White House conference on the eradication of poverty in America.’
“After receiving this press release, Mo’Kelly invited Smiley to his Nov. 16 ‘Mo’Kelly in the Morning’ radio show to discuss it. Smiley came and Mo’Kelly tore him up. . . .”
Mo’Kelly worked as a producer on Smiley’s TV show from 2005 to 2010. Browning & Browning law offices, representing Smiley, sent Mo’Kelly a letter “advising him, in effect, to shut up talking, blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, or using ‘other similar Internet platforms’ about Smiley because he signed a confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement with Smiley when he left his employ on Nov. 14, 2010, and if he did not stop, all manner of bad legal things will happen to him,” Pleasant wrote.
In ’80s, Obama Says, He’d Be Called Moderate Republican
Tavis Smiley‘s radio partner Cornel West, the Princeton University professor, made headlines last month when he called President Obama a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface.”
On Thursday, the president agreed with the first part of that phrase. In an interview with Alina Mayo Azze of Univision’s Noticias Univision 23, Obama said, “. . . The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican. I mean, what I believe in is a tax system that is fair.”
Azze asked Obama, ” . . . why reach out to the local media. I’m from a local TV station in Miami, why reach out to us?”
Obama answered, “One thing that I found is so important during the course of the campaign is that the conversation here in Washington isn’t the same as the conversation out in the country. The people are worried about paying their bills, about paying their mortgage, about the quality of their schools, about getting their kids to college, big potholes in roads, flooding, making sure that we have safe streets. And so when I — whenever I talk to local stations where what I find is the ability to reach more Americans, and in resolving issues like the fiscal cliff here, it’s so important that members of Congress hear from people back home.
“So I’m hoping that if one thing comes out of this — this interview, I’m hoping that people will watch me and say, ‘You know what? I want to reach out to my member of Congress and say, “Compromise. Let’s go ahead and get this thing solved. Let’s think about the country first and not politics first.” ‘ “
- Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune: Who’s afraid of the fiscal cliff?
- Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald: Good pol should never say never (Dec. 9)
- Eugene Robinson, Washington Post: Ready to jump from the ‘fiscal cliff’
- Tonyaa Weathersbee, Black America Web: The Obama Attacks Continue
Given African Past, Rice Was “Absolutely” Right to Withdraw
On Dec. 3, Howard W. French, New York Times bureau chief for West and central Africa in the 1990s and author of “A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa,” wrote about Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations widely viewed as President Obama’s choice as the next secretary of sate.
“. . . In any discussion of Susan Rice’s career, there is no escaping Africa,” French, who now teaches at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, wrote in the Atlantic. “It is the place where she cut her teeth and built her essential record as a diplomat and national security official. Although there has been nary a hint of this in the fuss about Benghazi, I would go further still and say that one would be hard pressed to find anyone in American government who has played a larger and more sustained role in shaping Washington’s diplomacy toward that continent over the last two decades.
“If Rice survives the current controversy over Libya and is nominated to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, understanding the details of her past work in Africa, and drawing her out about Washington’s approach toward the continent in the future, should be a matter of serious national concern.’
“Right now, Africa is changing with extraordinary speed and in surprising ways, but American policy there remains stale and stuck in the past: unambitious, underinvested and conceptually outdated.”
Does that mean that Rice’s announcement Thursday to withdraw her name from consideration for secretary of state was a good thing?
“Absolutely,” French told Journal-isms by email. “Her legacy in Africa has been a very negative one.”
- Anson Asaka, Jack & Jill Politics: Why Didn’t Obama Stand By Susan Rice?
- Dylan Byers, Politico: Fox News slams Andrea Mitchell
- Bonnie Newman Davis, the Grio: Susan Rice’s withdrawal reminds us of Guinier, Elders and more
- Keli Goff, the Root: Susan Rice: This Decade’s Lani Guinier
- Janaye Ingram, Loop21: Susan Rice and How Washington Works
- Melody Johnson, Media Matters for America: Fox Uses Falsehood-Based Poll Questions To Back Up Its Phony Benghazi Scandal
- J. Christian Watts, Jack & Jill Politics: A Hell of a Day
2nd Fired Shreveport Reporter “Just Trying to “Lie Low”
A second reporter at KTAS-TV in Shreveport, La., was fired for defending himself online, but unlike meteorologist Rhonda Lee, who has been the center of a media whirlwind this week, Chris Redford would rather not talk about it.
“I’m really just trying to lie low and keep things private right now,”
However, Lylah M. Alphonse, senior editor of Yahoo! Shine, reported Friday, “one source with ties to the station tells Yahoo! Shine that Redford was fired without warning for responding to a personal attack on his own Facebook page.
” ‘He is an openly homosexual man that denounced gay slurs left on same KTBS site,’ the source, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, wrote in an email to Yahoo! Shine. ‘The only difference is he did not write on the KTBS Facebook page, he responded on his own PERSONAL FB page and was given NO prior warning.’
“Redford, whose twin brother is a New York City police officer, was defending a straight coworker who was being harassed online, the source wrote. KTBS station manager George Sirven told Yahoo! Shine in an email that he had no comment.
“In November, Shreveport, Louisiana police arrested a local man accused of stalking Redford. ‘KTBS gave emotional and financial support to white females that faced problems with stalking, but directed Chris Redford to ignore the public humiliation this man put him through,’ the source told Yahoo! Shine.”
Asked about an earlier report that he was dismissed “for using Facebook to respond to a reported gay stalker,” Redford messaged Journal-isms, “I did not ‘respond to a gay stalker.’ That’s all I’ve got.”
Meanwhile, Jennifer Vanasco, writing Friday in Columbia Journalism Review, wrote that Lee should not have been fired.
“. . . News organizations are not ordinary businesses. They have a duty to the public to inform and educate. What Rhonda Lee did in responding to those Facebook posts was correct misinformation on a Web page administered by the station as well as educate viewers about African American culture. Lee was using social media as a journalist; she did exactly what she should have,” Vanasco wrote.
“But she shouldn’t have needed to do anything, because the station should have responded first, either by taking the comments down (most organizations have a policy of deleting racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise inappropriate comments) or by replying in a way that supported its African American staff members and viewers.”
China Daily Establishes African Edition
“China Daily, China’s biggest English-language newspaper, has launched an African edition — the latest of several Chinese media initiatives in Africa,” the BBC reported last week.
“The state-run weekly, which also comes in digital form, aims to explain ‘the relationship between China and the African continent,’ its editor says.
“China’s CCTV and Xinhua news agency already have operations in the region.
” . . . ‘The relationship between China and the African continent is one of the most significant relationships in the world today,’ said the paper’s publisher and editor-in-chief, Zhu Ling.
“. . . China has also implemented other innovative media projects, like giant news screens in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, and thousands of scholarships for African journalists, reports BBC Africa analyst Mary Harper.”
Last month, the Associated Press reported that the U.S. military’s Africa command had established two newswebsites in Africa, as part of a propaganda effort aimed at countering extremists in two of Africa’s most dangerous regions — Somalia and the Maghreb. The sites’ American origins are not immediately evident to viewers.
Short Takes
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To look through the latest newsletter of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University is to see a faculty and staff that seems to lack people of color. “We have had many among the fellows” in the past, though there is “no one on the staff at this time,” Alex S. Jones, the former New York Times reporter who is director of the center, told Journal-isms by telephone on Friday. Jones said there are only four fellows and noted that the center does not have quotas. Turnover among the staff is slow. Still, he said the organization is “mindful of gender and race” and that “you can expect to find people of color when we can and to make the diversity broadly defined. If you will look over our history, you will see that we have had people of color represented and we will again.” - “NBC News correspondent Mara Schiavocampo has been named the anchor of the early-morning NBC program ‘Early Today,’ which airs at 4 AM ET and MSNBC’s early news show ‘First Look,’ which airs at 5 AM ET,” Alex Weprin reported Friday for TVNewser. “She will continue in her role as a correspondent, contributing to all of the NBC News platforms and programs.”
- “Blacks are barely represented on the air and in management at Twin Cities television and radio stations,” Charles Hallman reported Wednesday for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. “The MSR recently examined four local station websites — WCCO (Channel 4), KSTP (Channel 5), KMSP (Channel 9), and KARE (Channel 11) and found: WCCO: one Black female anchor, one Black anchor/reporter, one Black reporter. KSTP: No Blacks. KMSP: One Black reporter. KARE: No Blacks.”
- “If a notable woman dies and a major national newspaper doesn’t report it, did it actually happen?” Dana Liebelson asked Wednesday in Mother Jones. “Big papers’ lists of significant deaths in 2012 overwhelmingly feature men. The Washington Post put 18 women and 48 men on its list. On the other side of the country, the Los Angeles Times listed 36 women and 114 men. And lest you think this is some kind of freak 2012 phenomenon, the New York Times has consistently listed many more men than women over the last five years.”
- “D’Jango Unchained: The TV One Special,” a one-hour “profound and revealing look at the making of Quentin Tarantino’s blockbuster film D’Jango Unchained ” airs Saturday at 7 p.m. ET and Sunday at 2 p.m. ET, TV One announced. Cathy Hughes, founder and chairperson of the network, asks filmmaker Quentin Tarantino about why he wrote and directed this controversial and never before told story about one of the most shameful and difficult times in American history.” The movie features Jamie Foxx as a slave who kills white men to free his wife from the clutches of a sadistic plantation owner. [Video]
- Philadelphia Daily News columnist Jenice Armstrong Friday announced the 10 winners of the paper’s third annual, Oprah-style My Favorite Things holiday-gift giveaway. “Thank you to everyone who nominated deserving neighbors, friends and co-workers. We had a couple of hundred entries, and narrowing the list down to just 10 names was a challenge,” she wrote.
- T.J. Holmes left CNN, where he was a weekend anchor, for BET, which developed a late-night daily show for him that has since been scaled back to once a week. “Don’t Sleep” was designed in the spirit of Comedy Central’s “the Daily Show.” Now the Daily News in New York, citing “industry sources,” reports that Jeff Zucker, CNN’s new chief, “is looking to liven up the ailing channel’s late-night slate with a news-driven satire program, like ‘The Daily Show’ . . . ”
- In Charlotte, N.C., “Radio personality Ramona Holloway has been named the new co-host of ‘Charlotte Today,’ the lifestyle and entertainment show that airs on WCNC-TV,” April Bethea reported Thursday for the Charlotte Observer.
- “Mexico’s regional newspapers are publishing more stories about murders linked to the drug trade, but they remain reluctant to write what they know about the organizations responsible for the killings,” Stephen Engelberg reported Thursday for ProPublica. “A new study by our colleagues at Fundación MEPI, an investigative journalism center in Mexico City, reviewed daily coverage in 14 of 31 Mexican states. It found a significant increase in the number of stories on organized crime groups. But the study says that only two newspapers, El Norte in Monterrey and El Informador in Guadalajara ‘provided context to the violence, identified the victims and did follow-ups. . . . ‘ ”
- “An Equality Matters analysis found that cable news networks’ coverage of the reemergence of Uganda’s proposed ‘Kill the Gays’ bill — legislation which would make homosexuality punishable by death — has been scant over the past several weeks and paled in comparison to their coverage of the Korean pop song ‘Gangnam Style,’” according to EqualityMatters.org, “a new media and communications initiative in support of gay equality.”
- “Reporters Without Borders is saddened to learn that the journalist Al-Hosseiny Abu Deif died yesterday in central Cairo’s El Qasr Al Aini Hospital of the serious head injury he received while covering clashes outside the presidential palace in Cairo in the early hours of 6 December,” the press freedom group reported on Thursday. “Hospitalized in a critical condition after a rubber bullet was fired at his head at close range, Deif never recovered consciousness.”
- “. . . HuffPost Media Group is partnering with Japan’s Asahi Shimbun Company to make the Japanese-language version of the HuffPost happen. As for when the site will launch, well, that’s still being worked out. However, HuffPost officials are still excited about it,” Chris O’Shea reported Thursday for FishbowlNY.
