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Journalisms Fri Feb 1

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CNN Denies Exec Called Morning Viewers “Too Ethnic

A CNN spokeswoman denied Friday that VP Bart Feder has complained that the viewership of the “Early Start” and “Starting Point” morning programs was ‘too ethnic,’ based on the high concentration of minority viewers.

“The quotes attributed to Bart Feder in the FishbowlDC’s blog are false,” Christal Jones said in an email. She did not respond when asked what Feder actually said.

In discussing the future of CNN correspondent and anchor Soledad O’Brien, Betsy Rothstein wrote Wednesday in FishbowlDC, “”. . . Many staffers were stunned when Feder constantly complained that the viewership of ‘Early Start’ and ‘Starting Point’ was ‘too ethnic,’ based on the high concentration of minority viewers. This common complaint worked itself up through the company, to CNN’s Diversity Committee, and to other staffers, who were mortified that a CNN executive was squabbling over attracting minority viewers.”

Rothstein updated with this note: “UPDATE: To clarify, Feder’s issue with “Starting Point” was that the audience was too small and happened to be predominately comprised of minorities. A source close to the show insists that the ethnicity of the audience was never the issue, it was the size. Feder in no way meant to imply that the audience was too ethnic.”

 

Ed Koch Was Lightning Rod for 2 Black Journalists

Edward I. Koch, the feisty New York mayor who died Friday at age 88, was a lightning rod for at least two New York black journalists during his three terms at Gracie Mansion: the late Wilbert Tatum, editor and publisher of the weekly Amsterdam News, and Les Payne, columnist for Newsday.

Reporting Tatum’s death in 2009, Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins wrote in the Village Voice, “In the 1980s, he memorably pounded away at former Mayor Ed Koch in a weekly column that ran on the paper’s front page for more than two years. Week after week, it carried the same headline: ‘Koch Must Resign.’ Years later, he urged Rudy Giuliani to do the same.”

Payne emailed Journal-isms, “. . . as a weekly columnist, I carried on a long-running shootout with Koch WHILE HE WAS MAYOR THOSE 12 YEARS, WITH THE REST OF THE CITY MEDIA, SAVE THE VILLAGE VOICE, KISSING HIZZONER’S BIGOTED ASS.

“Several times, on official New York Mayor stationery, Koch wrote and asked Newsday to fire me, and once the Editor came very, very close, the closest I’d come to getting fired at the paper.

“Also, for what it’s worth, he included me and my attacks on him in several of his jive books.

“Beyond catering to his people, Koch, unlike even Geo. Wallace, went out of his way to offend black New Yorkers, far beyond any requirement of ‘taking care of your own.’ Wallace, at least had the cover, and thus the excuse of doing the bidding of his constituent white-racist voting majority. . . .”

Koch was aware of the antipathy toward him on racial grounds in some circles. Responding to a critical review by scholar Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the New York Review of Books, Koch wrote, “. . . no racial disturbances or violence have marred my terms. They did mar the terms of my three ‘fair-minded’ predecessors.

“Nor could one expect Dr. Schlesinger to regard as significant the fact that in the 1981 general election I received 60% of the black vote, 70% of the Hispanic vote and carried every Assembly District in the City of New York.”

Paul Schwartzman explained in the Washington Post: Koch’s mayoralty “. . .  was defined by several racially charged crimes, including one in 1984 in which Bernhard Goetz, a white man who became known in the headlines as the ‘Subway Vigilante,’ shot four black men he believed were about to mug him aboard a subway train. Five years later, five black and Hispanic teenagers were accused of raping and beating a woman jogging in Central Park, an attack that Mr. Koch branded at the time as ‘the crime of the century.’

“The convictions of the men were later overturned, a saga that became the subject of a recent Ken Burns documentary, ‘Central Park Five.’

“Four months after the jogger case dominated the headlines, Yusef Hawkins, a 16-year-old African American, was shot to death after he and three friends were attacked in the white neighborhood of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. Hawkins’ death prompted the activist Al Sharpton to lead protest marches through the neighborhood, at which white onlookers mocked the marchers by holding up watermelons.”

On Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now!” co-host Juan Gonzalez, who is also a columnist at the Daily News, cited Koch’s “very hostile relationship with African American and Latino community,” but said Koch had “launched a huge low-income housing program” and concluded, “people who look back now at his period of time will say, ‘Well, Mayor, you did pretty well,’ for a figure who was so long on the political scene.”

Tribune Syndicate Backs Away from Column on Vietnamese

Tribune Media Services retreated Friday from an opinion column by former New York Times reporter Joel Brinkley that alleged that Vietnamese people eat birds, squirrels, rats and dogs. The piece, which drew outrage from some readers, “did not meet our journalistic standards,” the news service said in an editor’s note.

“TMS has a rigorous editing process for its content, and in the case of Brinkley’s column that moved Jan. 29, all the required steps did not occur . We regret that this happened, and we will be vigilant in ensuring that our editing process works in the future.”

Brinkley, who won a Pulitzer prize in 1980 for his reporting from Cambodia, began his column, “You don’t have to spend much time in Vietnam before you notice something unusual. You hear no birds singing, see no squirrels scrambling up trees or rats scurrying among the garbage. No dogs out for a walk.

“In fact, you see almost no wild or domesticated animals at all. Where’d they all go? You might be surprised to know: Most have been eaten.”

The Vietnamese publication Thanh Nien reported Friday, “‘Vietnam isn’t the monster portrayed in the article,’ Jake Brunner, program coordinator for Vietnam with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, told Vietweek.

“Brinkley’s attention-grabbing opener was a misrepresentation of reality, other conservationists say.

” . . . The journalism professor, however, could see no merit in all the criticism he has faced. He dismissed it as ‘borne of hysteria.”

“’I stand by my reporting,’ he told Vietweek. ‘I’ve spent a great deal of time in the region,’ he said.”

 

John-Hall, Philly Columnist Six Years, Takes Buyout

Annette John-Hall, Philadelphia Inquirer metro columnist since 2007, wrote a farewell column to readers Friday after taking a buyout.

” . . . I’m guessing that fully a third of my commentaries focused on the city’s homicides — and the young African American men who were the victims as well as the perpetrators,” she wrote. “In November 2007, with a homicide rate at 336 and counting, I wept while writing a column about my love for black men:

” ‘I am a black woman who was raised by a black man, married a black man, and gave birth to a black son. Which is why it breaks my heart to even think this, let alone write it: I’m starting to profile black men.’

“That admission generated hundreds of e-mails and phone calls, and landed me on a couple of national news programs. I made sure to note that my fear of black men wasn’t so much of them as for them. . . .”

John-Hall told Journal-isms she did not know what she would do next. “I’m open to anything — communications, writing a book, teaching, doing another form of journalism, even going back to school,” she said by email. “The nice thing about taking a buyout is that it gives you a little bit of a cushion to decompress, focus and decide.”

The number of African American newspaper columnists is shrinking as newspapers continue to downsize. An astonishing 10 African American metro or op-ed columnists stopped writing their columns in 2011, and most were not replaced by another journalist of color. In 2012, Eugene Kane of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel left the paper but continued to write a Sunday column.

Maybe AP Could Use a “Rooney Rule” for Itself

Barry Wilner of the Associated Press wrote this on Friday: “Three black former NFL head coaches say the league needs to rethink its Rooney Rule for promoting minority hiring after 15 top vacancies – eight head coaching jobs and seven general manager positions – were all filled by white candidates since the regular season ended a month ago.”

Straightforward enough, but it doesn’t capture the irony, according to a Journal-isms correspondent. Wilner writes for the Associated Press, where, according to sports journalists, only three full-time African American sports reporters or editors work among a number estimated at 90 to 100 worldwide.

The three are Oscar Dixon, Atlanta-based South regional sports editor; reporter Fred Goodall in Tampa and reporter Gary Graves in Louisville, Ky.

In 2011, reporting that the percentage of sports editors at websites and newspapers who were women or people of color fell 2.3 percentage points — from 11.7 percent in 2008 to 9.42 percent in 2010 — Richard Lapchick, the report’s primary author, called for a news media version of the “Rooney Rule.“

The recommendation apparently received no traction. AP spokeswoman Erin Madigan White did not respond to emailed requests for comment on Friday.

 

Journalists Help Hmong Weather Minnesota Storms

“Fingertips blackened by frostbite. Cars buried in snow up to their windows. Tornadoes swirling at a frenzied 120 miles per hour. Temperatures rising to 100-plus degrees,” Gail Rosenblum wrote Thursday for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis.

“A multimedia presentation Tuesday offered the cold, hard fact that Minnesota has some of the world’s greatest weather extremes. And it was potentially lifesaving news to those in attendance, who sat in rapt attention.

“KSTP news anchor Joy Lim Nakrin and KSTP meteorologist Jonathan Yuhas delivered the afternoon presentation to about 40 members of the Hmong community at the Lao Family Community Center in St. Paul. Many are new arrivals understandably ill-prepared for our capricious climate.

“With the assistance of a Hmong interpreter, Yuhas used slides and video footage to explain windchill and the heat index, how to be safe in a tornado and why it’s really dumb to drive a car over a freshly frozen lake or river.

“The outreach is largely the vision of Nakrin, newly named vice president of the Asian American Journalists Association-Minnesota. Nakrin, whose mother is Chinese, is sensitive to potential cultural and language barriers.

” ‘Coming from an immigrant family myself, I’m always heartbroken to hear how the challenges of finding one’s way in a new country can be harmful or potentially deadly.’ . . . “

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