One of Its Highest-Ranking Journalists of Color Exits
One of Its Highest-Ranking Journalists of Color Exits
Victor Vaughan, who as national photo editor of the Associated Press was one of the highest ranking journalists of color at the world’s largest news cooperative, was laid off Monday, sources at the AP told Journal-isms.
Paul D. Colford, director of media relations for the AP, said Tuesday he would not discuss or confirm any layoffs. However, he noted that Tom Curley, the president and CEO, told employees last year that AP planned to reduce the size of its global payroll by 10 percent in 2009.
“We remain committed to our goal,” Colford said. A hiring freeze took place before the Curley announcement and upwards of 100 staffers left this year under a voluntary buyout program.
Vaughan, a former board member of the National Association of Black Journalists and of the Associated Press Photo Managers, once also headed NABJ’s Visual Task Force. His appointment by the AP was announced in February 2007, when the news cooperative said he would lead the AP’s 200 photo staff around the United States. He had been assistant managing editor for presentation at the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson.
“I am delighted to welcome Victor into this new role. He has the focus, the talent and the desire to take on this crucial job in the AP’s photo department,” Santiago Lyon, director of photography, said in making the 2007 announcement. “He will bring energy, vision and imagination to his new challenge of overseeing AP’s extensive photo operations in the U.S.”
On Tuesday, Lyon referred questions about Vaughan to the corporate communications department.
Before joining the Tuscon newspaper, Vaughan worked for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., from 2000 to 2002 as a night photo editor and team leader.
He had been laid off earlier from the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., but he told Journal-isms later that “I did not wallow in the past or things [over] which I had no control, I reveled [in] the possibilities for a brighter future.
“It really tested my faith but through perseverance, patience and support I was able to rebound.”
He did not respond to requests for comment.
Separately, Regina Burns is leaving the AP’s Dallas bureau on Dec. 2 “to return to her roots as a Web Content Editor/TV Producer,” Jeff Kummer, Texas News Editor-Dallas wrote to staffers on Monday.
Burns told Journal-isms she was not laid off. She joined the AP in October 2006 in Jackson, Miss., as broadcast editor. “She produced with AP photographer Alex Brandon several slideshows documenting Hurricane Katrina’s devastation on the Gulf Coast. Their work was included in the AP entry that took First Place in the 2008 EPpy awards for enterprise.
“Regina transferred to the Dallas bureau in June 2008 as Overnight Editor and later served as Night Editor and Night Breaking News Staffer,” Kummer’s note said.
- Associated Press: AP Covers Its Own Layoffs: 38 Jobs Gone (So Far) [Nov. 18]
- Gawker: The AP Layoff List
Race, Speech Issues Follow Obama to China
Nov. 16, 2009
CNN Reporter Detained Two Hours Over T-Shirt
Natives Undeterred by Decision on “Redskins”
Ifill: Message on Fox Was for Mainstream Media
Unity Chides Rights Groups on “Net Neutrality”
Web Outfit Funded to Cover Health, Race Issues
Black Anchor Fired Over “N” Word Loses Lawsuit
Is “Precious” an Eye-Opener or Trashy “Gangster-Lit?”
Comcast-NBC Merger Not Expected to Affect TV One
CNN Reporter Detained Two Hours Over T-Shirt
President Obama was expected to address such topics as security, environment, the economy and U.S.-Asia relations as he stopped in China on his nine-day tour of Asian countries, but the topics of race and free expression were not far from many journalists’ minds.
“When the two ‘most powerful people in the world’ sit down in Beijing Sunday they will not likely elaborate on the coincidence that neither of the leaders of the two reigning economic superpowers on earth is a white male,” veteran journalist Les Payne wrote Saturday on his blog.
“Obama will register another historic moment in China, one likely to slip past the near-sighted media.”
In the Washington Post, Keith B. Richburg wrote from Shanghai on Saturday, “As the country gets ready to welcome the first African American U.S. president, whose first official visit here starts Sunday, the Chinese are confronting their attitudes toward race, including some deeply held prejudices about black people. Many appeared stunned that Americans had elected a black man, and President Obama’s visit has underscored Chinese ambivalence about the growing numbers of blacks living here.”
Richburg told of 20-year-old Lou Jing, whose father is a black American and who prompted a furor in late August when she beat out thousands of other young women on “Go! Oriental Angel,” a televised talent show. Angry Internet posters called her a “black chimpanzee” and worse. One called for all blacks in China to be deported.
Jesse Washington, the national race relations reporter for the Associated Press, took a different tack, writing that Chinese-Americans “embody the challenges facing the giants of East and West.
“They have as many different feelings about their ancestral home ‚Äî hope, indifference, pride, pain ‚Äî as there are characters in the Chinese language. Yet many share a conviction that is both logical and personal: The destinies of China and America are inseparable.”
On National Public Radio’s “Tell Me More,” NPR’s Anthony Kuhn and Public Radio International’s Phillip Martin discussed the plight of ethnic minorities in the region.
Press freedom groups had their own concerns. Reporters Without Borders prepared “Ten questions for Barack Obama to put to Hu Jintao,” the Chinese president.
“Why are the websites of the US companies Twitter and Facebook blocked by the Chinese authorities?” the list began.
“Is he going to pardon the hundreds of imprisoned journalists, intellectuals and bloggers, including Liu Xiaobo, Hu Jia, Shi Tao and Qi Chonghuai, who did nothing but express their opinions peacefully?
“Why are foreign journalists, including American journalists, unable to visit Tibet without a permit?”
On a CNN blog, reporter Emily Chang wrote Monday about searching Beijing for a banned T-shirt showing Obama wearing a Red Army uniform. On the front it says “Serve the People” in Chinese. On the back, “Oba-Mao” in English.
“Two security guards happened to pass by at the moment I announced to the camera: ‘This is the T-shirt everybody is talking about.’ And that was it. They scrambled towards us and tried to pry the shirt out of my hands. I didn’t give in.
“There was a bit of yelling and quite a scuffle. My producer Jo Kent emphatically stated our case. Photographer Miguel Castro kept his cool. By this point, we had everything on tape.
“We ended up being detained for two hours in the cold, maze of a market.”
Obama took questions Monday from government-selected students at a town hall-style meeting in Shanghai. He called himself “a big supporter of non-censorship.” “But the Beijing government, apparently, is not, and most Chinese never got to hear or read what Obama said,” the Washington Post’s Richburg reported on Monday.
“His talk to the students was never mentioned on China’s main official 7 p.m. news broadcast. The session was broadcast live only on a single small Shanghai television station ‚Äî and that station’s Web site switched to a children’s program instead of live-streaming the president’s event. And most news Web sites deleted stories about Obama taking a question on Internet freedom.”
As for commonality among the nonwhite Chinese and the nonwhite Obama, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman tried Thursday to explain why Obama should not meet with the exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, Barbara Demick reported for the Los Angeles Times.
“‘China abolished the feudal serf system [in Tibet] just as President Lincoln freed the black slaves. So we hope President Obama, more than any other foreign state leader, can have a better understanding of China’s position,’ Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters.”
By all accounts, the analogy fell flat.
[On Tuesday, “In closed-door sessions, Mr. Obama pressed the Chinese president on a range of human-rights issues, from the treatment of ethnic minorities to the ‘firewall’ that restricts Chinese access to the Internet,” Jonathan Weisman and Ian Johnson reported for the Wall Street Journal, quoting Jeffrey Bader, the National Security Council’s senior director of East Asian policy. Bader boasted that he had never heard such blunt talk in his decades of diplomatic work in the region, the story said.]
- Phillip Martin, “Color Initiative,” Public Radio International’s “The World”: China, Globalization and Race (audio)
- Reporters Without Borders: Were Tibetan writers’ long jail sentences a pre-emptive response to Obama’s comments?
Natives Undeterred by Decision on “Redskins”
“A nearly two-decade legal challenge by Native American activists to the nickname of the Washington Redskins came to a close Monday when the Supreme Court declined to review the group’s last loss in federal courts,” Robert Barnes wrote for the Washington Post.
However, Suzan Shown Harjo, an activist in the Native American Journalists Association and other Native groups, said the fight will be taken up by younger people.
“The justices declined without comment to reconsider a lower court’s ruling that the activists waited too long to bring their assertion that the nickname is so racially offensive that it does not deserve trademark protection,” Barnes’ story continued.
“A new group of challengers has filed the same trademark cancellation suit in hopes that their slightly different circumstances can avoid the procedural bar that halted this case.”
The Native American Journalists Association was one of several Native groups joining in a friend of the court brief calling on the Supreme Court to review a case contending that the name of the NFL’s Washington Redskins is so odious that it should be denied its trademark.
“From 1992 to 1999, the experts at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office examined this case and dismissed laches as a defense because there is an overriding public policy issue involved,” Harjo explained to Journal-isms Monday.
“That issue, put simply is whether or not a trademark license giving the exclusive privilege of making money off a racist name should be granted by the federal government.
“After a seven-year trial, three trademark judges ruled unanimously on the Native American side in a 145-page decision, canceling the federal trademarks for the team‚Äôs name ‘on the grounds that the subject marks may disparage Native Americans and may bring them into contempt or disrepute.’
“We defended the trademark judges’ decision to the Supreme Court, as lower court judges allowed Pro Football to escape through the loophole of laches, meaning as they defined it that we waited too long after reaching our 18th birthdays to bring the lawsuit. In 2006, an identical case to ours, Blackhorse et al v. Pro Football, Inc., was filed before the PTO by young Native Americans, who filed their lawsuit when they were between the ages of 18 and 24.
“Now that our case is over, the Blackhorse case begins. The name remains disparaging and continues to hold us up to contempt and disrepute. No one can deny that it is racist on its face. It should be an embarrassment to all that this dreadful name is touted in the Nation’s capitol area. That it is not an embarrassment to all shows us how much ground we have yet to gain in the maturation of society.”
Gwen Ifill at the Miami Book Fair: “They were trying to shame us.” (video)
Ifill: Message on Fox Was for Mainstream Media
PBS correspondent Gwen Ifill said Saturday that the White House assault on Fox News could actually have been directed not at Fox, but at the rest of the mainstream media.
“My theory, this is based on just watching the way language is used in these kinds of debates,” Ifill said at the C-Span televised Miami Book Fair, “is that . . . the White House wasn’t really attacking Fox News, they were attacking us, who serve as an echo for the kinds of stories that they might do.
“For instance, someone asked me earlier today, ‘Don’t you think ACORN is a big deal?'” referring to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, an advocate for low-income and minority residents that was caught in scandal.
“And I said, bigger that what? Bigger than Afghanistan? Bigger than, I don’t know, health-care reform? Sure, it was a story, but was it that big a story? It becomes that big a story when we, mainstream media, [become] the megaphone for what is in the end, cable news, which not that many people watch.
“We spend a lot of time writing about it and echoing what they do, for better and worse. so I think that’s really what that shot across the bow was about. They were trying to shame us into not writing or not paying attention. Now, that said, I don’t necessarily buy into the idea of any government telling us what news should be, or who should be asking the questions or how, so I’m not really enamored with that.”
Ifill is managing editor of “Washington Week,” a senior correspondent on “The News Hour With Jim Lehrer,” and author of “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.”
Outgoing White House communications director Anita Dunn told Eamon Javers of Politico on Friday that the White House criticism has been effective in preventing other networks from picking up stories broken by Fox.
“It did help people get a sense of perspective again,” Dunn said. “People took a step back and said, ‘Hmm, am I really wanting to go chase those stories?’”
Unity Chides Rights Groups on “Net Neutrality”
Unity: Journalists of Color is chiding activist groups of color who have urged the Federal Communications Commission to slow down in its efforts to require “network neutrality,” a term Unity defines as “preventing service providers from blocking or discriminating against content online.”
“Now is not the time to stop this fight” for network neutrality,” Unity leaders said in a letter to the groups. “Without Net Neutrality, we run the risk of large phone and cable companies giving preferential treatment, better access and higher speeds to whoever can pay them the most. This would obliterate the Internet‚Äôs current level playing field and erect additional barriers preventing journalists of color from providing our community with the news and information they need to participate in a democratic society.”
On Oct. 29, a coalition ranging from the League of United Latin American Citizens to the Black College Communication Association, the Asian American Justice Center and the 100 Black Men of America urged [PDF] the FCC to include in its net neutrality rulemaking “the framework and a request for comment that would produce a careful and empirical analysis of the impact that these regulations would have on people with disabilities, low-income, minority, multilingual, elderly and young Americans.”
The coalition said, “The Commission needs to ensure that net neutrality would not delay bridging the digital divide by altering consumer prices and discouraging broadband adoption and deployment.”
The presidents of Unity and of the national associations of black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American journalists argued against delay.
“Now is not the time to stop this fight and we must be on the right side of history on this. . . . It is precisely now, as the government is shaping media policy and creating a broadband plan, that we put into place regulations to ensure openness, fairness and a level playing field,” said their letter.
Web Outfit Funded to Cover Health, Race Issues
The St. Louis Beacon, an online news operation that has paid special attention to health and race, has received a $100,000 grant from the Missouri Foundation for Health. A full-time staff reporter, Bob Joiner, a former editorial writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has won a $7,000 grant from the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.
The Hunt grant was awarded for reporting about health issues in the St. Louis region that disproportionately affect minorities — specifically infant mortality, sexually transmitted diseases, obesity-related illnesses and lead poisoning, the Beacon said. The Missouri Foundation for Health grant funds a dedicated health reporter, news technology and research support.
Last month, a five-part series on the history of health care in America was published in the Beacon, then printed in full over five days in the Columbia (Mo.) Tribune.
“Reporting enhanced by both grants will fit in perfectly with the Beacon’s ‘Race, Frankly,’ project ‚Äî a year long series of events, in-depth reporting and video pieces in partnership with the Missouri History Museum and KETC/Channel 9,” an announcement said. “The project is presented on the Beacon site and in conjunction with the museum’s exhibit, ‘Race: Are We So Different?’ which opens in January.”
Black Anchor Fired Over “N” Word Loses Lawsuit
A veteran African American television anchor who has worked in Los Angeles, Denver, Dallas, Kansas City and Charlotte, N.C., has lost a challenge to his firing from his latest job in Huntsville, Ala., where it was alleged he called an African American producer the “N”-word.
Madison County, Ala., Circuit Judge James Smith Friday ruled against Michael Scott, who charged WAAY-TV, the ABC affiliate owned by Calkins Media, with breach of contract. Scott was WAAY’s evening anchor and managing news editor.
Neither Scott nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment Monday, but the NewsBlues subscription-only Web site reported that Scott sent an e-mail Friday to “family and friends” that said, “I am very disappointed….but at least it’s over. Got to focus on the future right now.”
The Web site said Scott had sought the remaining two years of his $120,000 per-year contract.
David Person, then an editorial writer and columnist with the Huntsville Times, interviewed Scott shortly after the May 2008 incident. “The truth, Scott said, is that he never called Prewitt that name,” referring to the producer, Jabaree Prewitt. “He said he called him a ‘Negro’ while trying to quell what he described as a profanity-laced tirade by Prewitt,” Person wrote.
“‘Specifically, Scott said that his response to the tirade was ‘Negro, please.’
“‘Prewitt was offended by the word ‘Negro,’ according to Scott. Still angry, Prewitt stormed out off the news set where the exchange took place.
“Puzzled, Scott said he turned to co-anchor Karen Adams and said: ‘Does he think that I called him a nigger?’ “
Is “Precious” an Eye-Opener or Trashy “Gangster-Lit?”
The new film “Precious” is gathering more than its share of praise, coming in at No. 4 at the box office after 10 days of limited release, having been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine and already talked about for Academy Awards. But Juan Williams, commentator for Fox News and National Public Radio, sees the film as an exemplar of trashy “gangster-lit.”
“The movie gives prominence to the subculture of gangster-lit novels, bringing them into the mainstream,” Williams wrote for the Wall Street Journal. “Not only the best but the worst that can be said about these books is they are an authentic literary product of 21st-century black America. They are poorly written, poorly edited and celebrate the worst of black life.
“Much as rap music ‚Äî also fascinated with predatory sex, anger and violence ‚Äî has displaced jazz or soul singers on the black music charts, gangster lit now overshadows the common late 20th-century theme of black middle-class striving,” Williams wrote.
Others have praised the movie as bringing to the fore a segment of society previously invisible to many, in much the same way “The Color Purple” is said to have spotlighted abuse against women.
African American film critic Esther Iverem, was critical of the film for a different reason: Its creator, Lee Daniels, “returns to the formula that won him acclaim and won Halle Berry an Oscar for her role in ‘Monster’s Ball’ ‚Äî poor Black women are pathetic, sick and incapable of caring for themselves or their children,” she wrote.
Iverem summarizes the plot this way: “Precious, raped by her father, has borne two children that are also her siblings. She is illiterate. Her mother, played by comedian Mo‚ÄôNique, also abuses Precious sexually, physically and through an unhealthy relationship to food that has made Precious morbidly obese. But compared to the book, there is more emphasis on abuse heaped on Precious by her mother than by men, including her father.”
- Stanley Crouch, New York Daily News: ‘Precious’ humanity avoids minstrelsy and heals us all
- Bonnie Davis, thegrio.com: Does ‘Precious’ movie stereotype big black women?
- Deborah Douglas, theRoot.com: The Truth About Incest
- G. Melesaine, New America Media: Precious’ is About Women I Know
- Courtland Milloy, Washington Post: A film as lost as the girl it glorifies [Nov. 18]
- Dr. Janet Taylor, essence.com: ‘Precious’ Raises Issues of Sexual Abuse
- Alicia Villarosa, theRoot.com: ‘Precious’ and the Pushback
- Jack White, theRoot.com: How ‘Precious’ Is Like Palin’s ‘Going Rogue’
- Jeff Winbush, theDailyVoice.com: Armond White Abuses “Precious”
Comcast-NBC Merger Not Expected to Affect TV One
The sale of NBC Universal to Comcast might make the cable carrier one of the world’s largest owners of programming, but it will not affect TV One, the cable network targeting African American adults in which Comcast is major investor, according to TV One CEO Johnathan Rodgers.
“It’s a great move for Comcast but we don’t expect it to have any material impact on TV One, which is a separate company whose managing partner is Radio One,” Rodgers told Journal-isms. “Over the last six years, Comcast has been a wonderful strategic partner and we expect that relationship to continue to prosper into the foreseeable future.”
“Thrusting Comcast into the upper echelons of the entertainment firmament would cast the Philadelphia-based cable operator beyond its traditional role of distributing programs made by others, a lucrative business but one that appears to have peaked, Meg James wrote Monday in the Los Angeles Times. “Comcast would become one of the world’s largest owners of programming, from blockbusters such as ‘The Bourne Identity’ franchise to prime-time hits such as ‘The Office.’
“At the same time it would not only assure Comcast a powerful voice in determining how and when consumers watch movies and TV shows, but also provide a hedge against one of its fastest-rising costs: the content that flows through those “pipes.”
“Holding up the deal, at least for now, is a decision by French telecommunications firm Vivendi on whether to sell its 20% stake in NBC Universal to General Electric Co., which already owns 80% of NBC Universal. Comcast will not move forward with the deal until Vivendi agrees to exit, according to people familiar with the negotiations who asked not to be identified because the talks were confidential.”
The advocacy group Free Press is assembling organizations to oppose the merger.
“This train wreck of a deal will hurt all over,” its executive director, Josh Silver, wrote on the Huffington Post. “It will mean increased costs for cable television service; currently free online NBC content locked behind a pay wall; less opportunity for the distribution of independent media; even fewer choices and less programming diversity. On average, nearly one quarter of all channels offered to cable subscribers will be owned by the bloated Comcast.”
Short Takes
- Window Media, the nation‚Äôs largest gay and lesbian newspaper publisher, shuttered the Southern Voice and a handful of other gay publications nationwide over the weekend, the newspaper’s editor, Laura Douglas Brown, confirmed to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday. But Erik Wemple, editor of the Washington City Paper, wrote later Monday, “Tomorrow morning, the staff of the defunct Washington Blade will meet to launch a new publication that does pretty much what the Blade has done/did since 1969 ‚Äî cover gay Washington. It just won’t be called the Blade anymore.”
- “Secrets of the Dead: Mumbai Massacre,” a PBS film about the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, India, on Nov. 26, 2008, that left more than a hundred dead in just an hour, airs on TV for the first time on Nov. 25. WNET-TV, in partnership with the New York chapter of the South Asian Journalists Association, is holding a special press screening and panel discussion on Tuesday, Nov. 17, from 6 to 8:30 p.m., at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Reply to Jitin Hingorani at 212-560-6609 or HingoraniJ (at) wnet.org.
“Let’s get this out of the way. I’m not on death row. Stop with the e-mails, the dirty looks and the questions. I’m not Moises Sandoval Mendoza. I’m a different Moises Mendoza ‚Äî a law-abiding one. Yes, we’re both 25 and we even (sort-of) look the same. But I promise you, I’m Moises David Mendoza, so leave me alone,” Mendoza, Houston Chronicle reporter, wrote in his paper on Sunday. “In the world of the Internet it’s getting tougher for me to escape Moises Sandoval Mendoza’s shadow.” - “The Newseum is collecting artifacts for a special exhibit on Hurricane Katrina slated for 2010, the five-year anniversary of the devastating storm that ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi,” Joe Strupp reported for Editor & Publisher. “Susan Bennett, Newseum vice president for exhibits and programs, said the effort is in a ‘fact-finding stage at the moment. We have been talking to the people in New Orleans and down in Biloxi [Miss],’ she said of the Times-Picayune and the Sun Herald, which shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 2005 hurricane.”
- If it’s true that one should avoid foods advertised on television (when does one ever see fresh fruits and vegetables?), then Black Entertainment Television inadvertently helped make the case Sunday night. First its news special on obesity in the black community, “Heart of the City: Dying to Eat in Jackson,” demonstrated how poor diet choices contribute to the problem. Then, as the show headed toward a conclusion, Popeye’s surfaced, oblivious to the message. A commercial featured an attractive woman pushing Louisiana-styled fried chicken. BET.com has made the special available online.
- “Nine years later, I want to use this space once again to warn some of you not to be like me when it comes to getting medical screenings, and in this particular case, screenings for cancer,” columnist Dwight Lewis wrote Sunday in the Nashville Tennessean. “‘I tried to get you to come in to get your colon examined when you turned 50,’ said Dr. Jeffrey Eskind, a gastroenterologist who practices at Nashville’s Saint Thomas Hospital. ‘You almost waited too late, and if you had waited just a little while longer, you would have been dead meat.'”
- They rolled out a strawberry-chocolate cake for Roland Martin Sunday on TV One’s “Washington Watch With Roland Martin.” Asked on air what he wanted for his 41st birthday, Martin said, “I got a lot of stuff already, and so my favorite charity is the National Association of Black Journalists . . . I‚Äôm on the board there, and so . . . if folks on NewsOne, TVOneOnline.com, if they want to do it, I say support our Black journalist organization. We‚Äôre trying to train the next generation of Black journalists. So, they should go to TVOneOnline.com, go NewsOne.com, or NABJ.org, or even my personal site, RolandSMartin.com. We‚Äôll have the link [and] . . . they can actually give to NABJ, because we need the next generation of Robert Traynhams, Smokey Fontaines and Roland Martins,” referring to other participants on the show.
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