Fresh Details in 8,000-Word New York Magazine Piece
Jake Tapper’s New CNN Show Dragging in Ratings
Dominican Says Daily Caller Paid to Set Up Menendez
Digital Reporter Corey Dade Leaves NPR After 2½ Years
200 at L.A. “Summit” on Asian American Stereotypes
Criticism of Pre-Iraq War Coverage Called Too Simplistic
Whites More Likely Victims of Suicides; Blacks of Homicides
Anthony Lewis Explained Threat to Journalism, Civil Rights
Short Takes
Fresh Details in 8,000-Word New York Magazine Piece
The repercussions of the dumping of Ann Curry as a co-host of NBC’s “Today” show haven’t stopped. Monday’s media columns were filled with reports from a nearly 8,000-word article by Joe Hagan in New York magazine with fresh reporting on the saga.
Here’s how Jack Mirkinson summarized it for Huffington Post:
“That has proven exceedingly hard to do, as report after report trains its focus squarely on Lauer and the show’s disastrous ouster of Ann Curry last June. In just the past few weeks, Lauer himself spoke to media reporter Howard Kurtz about Curry, saying the show handled her departure badly and that he had pleaded with the network to give her more time. Then there was the front page New York Times report which portrayed Lauer as increasingly unpopular with viewers and the subject of hushed whispers all around NBC News.
“On Sunday night, New York magazine threw its hat into the ring, with a nearly 8,000-word article by Joe Hagan that will not make for happy reading at 30 Rock.
“Hagan dives deeply into the frostiness between Curry and Lauer, whose personalities appear to have been a complete mismatch. Lauer, he writes, ‘openly complained’ about Curry and ‘simply didn’t like her.’ “
[Referring to co-anchor Meredith Vieira and former co-anchor Katie Couric, Hagan writes, “Off air, Curry and Lauer had no relationship and barely spoke. When she started, Curry had asked Lauer out for lunch to get advice, but Lauer seemed to drag his feet scheduling it and Curry felt he didn’t offer much. With Couric and Vieira, Lauer could be an easygoing straight man; with Curry, who threw off his rhythm and also threatened his dominance of the hard-news stories, he could often look sour.”]
Hagan’s “account of the behind-the-scenes negotiations to oust Curry also places Lauer at the center, by noting that it came just as he was about to sign a new contract with NBC, rather than bolt for ABC and Katie Couric — something he has openly admitted to have thought about:
“At the moment when he had maximum leverage with NBC, Lauer, as the multimillion-dollar megastar, could easily have saved her — but he didn’t. To the contrary, in signing a new contract to remain at the show for at least two more years, he tacitly ratified the plan to remove her.
“Curry’s despair was plain for all to see when she bid farewell to the show. Her on-air tears, and especially her pained refusal to let Lauer hug her, immortalized her public image as the wronged victim. Hagan writes that, off air, she was just as distraught, crying all the way to the airport as soon as the show ended. Astonishingly, he adds, NBC continued to play hardball with her, even refusing to let her tweet a message of support for the ailing Robin Roberts for fear she was trying to undermine ‘Today.’ . . . “
However, the New York piece said, Curry left with a deal that gave her $12 million and her own production unit at NBC.
- Eric Deggans, Poynter Institute: ‘Today Show’ narrative grows more complicated with New York Magazine piece
- Alex Weprin, TVNewser: How Matt Lauer Almost Joined ABC News: NY Mag Story Hits NBC News ‘Like a Ton of Bricks’
Jake Tapper’s New CNN Show Dragging in Ratings
“Four days into its run during the 4 p.m. hour, the show fronted by network newcomer Jake Tapper continues to come up shy of its time-slot predecessor, Wolf Blitzer‘s The Situation Room,” Michael O’Connell reported Friday for the Hollywood Reporter.
“Thursday’s outing of The Lead With Jake Tapper, which featured an interview with Jimmy Kimmel about NBC’s Jay Leno dilemma, brought in just 326,000 viewers. It marked the lowest viewership since the premiere, with the series now averaging 42 percent fewer viewers than the same four days last week. . . . “
A week ago, CNN President Jeff Zucker excitedly proclaimed Tapper, lured away from ABC, as “the face of the new CNN, ” Along with other recent hires, that declaration led some to question why the “face” of CNN and other networks invariably was white.
- Tatiana Brown blog: Mainstream Media Phases Out Prominent African-Americans
- Rebecca Dana, New Republic: Slyer Than Fox: The wild inside story of how MSNBC became the voice of the left
- Laura Washington, Chicago Sun-Times: Roland Martin isn’t leaving CNN quietly
Dominican Says Daily Caller Paid to Set Up Menendez
“A top Dominican law enforcement official said Friday that a local lawyer has reported being paid by someone claiming to work for the conservative Web site the Daily Caller to find prostitutes who would lie and say they had sex for money with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.),” Carol D. Leonnig and Luz Lazo reported Friday for the Washington Post.
“The lawyer told Dominican investigators that a foreign man, who identified himself as ‘Carlos,’ had offered him $5,000 to find and pay women in the Caribbean nation willing to make the claims about Menendez, according to Jose Antonio Polanco, district attorney for the La Romana region, where the investigation is being conducted.
“The Daily Caller issued a statement Friday saying that the information allegedly provided by the Dominican lawyer, Melanio Figueroa, was false.
“The videotaped claims of two women, made with their faces obscured, were posted in the fall on the Daily Caller. The site reported that ‘the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000-acre resort in the Dominican Republic. . . . They claimed Menendez agreed to pay them $500 for sex acts, but in the end they each received only $100.’ . . . “
Digital Reporter Corey Dade Leaves NPR After 2½ Years
Corey Dade, hired at NPR in 2010 as a Washington-based national correspondent amid concern about the paucity of on-air African American men at the network — still a problem — left NPR on Friday, he told Journal-isms.
“I’m leaving because I want to expand my work across platforms, take on a greater role as a news analyst and write a book,” Dade told Journal-isms by email. “My two and a half years at NPR were incredibly rewarding, so much so that I’m excited to continue collaborating with my friends there.”
Dade, who is also a board member of the National Association of Black Journalists, was a national correspondent for NPR Digital News. On March 12, NPR aired “The Revolution of Reverend Al Sharpton,” an 11-minute story that resulted from a day Dade spent in New York with the activist and MSNBC host.
Dade joined NPR from the Wall Street Journal, where he was based in the Atlanta bureau for nearly five years, covering southern politics and economics. He has also worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Boston Globe, Detroit Free Press and Miami Herald.
200 at L.A. “Summit” on Asian American Stereotypes
“More than 200 participants gathered in Little Tokyo on Saturday to talk — and tweet — candidly about persistent negative images damaging to their ethnic group, especially when it comes to family, education, politics and news coverage,” Anh Do reported Saturday for the Los Angeles Times.
“Participants converged on Little Tokyo for ‘Beyond the Bad and the Ugly,’ the first ever summit on Asian American stereotypes. Some sported buttons with labels touting them as thugs, geeks, players and FOBs, or ‘fresh off the boat.’ “
The event was organized by Jeff Yang, co-author of “Shattered, the Asian American Comics Anthology” and a cultural columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He said in the story that the “event really is the culmination of a dream, seeing people not only talking about these issues — but doing something about it. The point is to empower everyone, telling them, ‘Change is happening, and it’s happening inside — with us.’ “
- Conference Twitter feed
- Leo Duran, Southern California Public Radio: Tackling Asian stereotypes in film and TV
Criticism of Pre-Iraq War Coverage Called Too Simplistic
“For much of the past decade, the American news media has chastised itself for how badly it performed in the months leading up to the war in Iraq,” Paul Farhi wrote Sunday in the Washington Post. “The 10th anniversary of the conflict, in particular, offered article after article this past week condemning the media’s ‘failure’ to challenge the Bush administration’s rationale for the war, plus plenty of mea culpas by journalists.
“There’s no doubt that many news organizations, including this one, missed important stories, underplayed others that were skeptical of the administration’s case and acted too deferentially to those in power. A few instances — such as the New York Times’ September 2002 report hyping Iraq’s aluminum tubes as evidence of a reconstituted nuclear program — have become infamous. The Times and The Washington Post have publicly examined and admitted their shortcomings.
“But ‘failure’ grossly oversimplifies what the media did and didn’t do before the war, and it ignores important reasons the reporting turned out the way it did. As new threats loom, from Iran to North Korea, better understanding these circumstances can help us assess what happened and whether we’re better positioned today.
“Thousands of news stories and columns published before the war described and debated the administration’s plans and statements, and not all of them were supportive. Reporters at The Post, the Times, Knight Ridder, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek periodically produced stories that challenged the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq.
“Some of these stories — too many — were not given prominence and, in the case of newspapers, didn’t make the front page. But it wasn’t impossible for skeptics of the war to connect the dots. . . .”
- Moni Basu, David S. Holloway and Brandon Ancil, CNN Digital: Iraq’s Baby Noor: An Unfinished Miracle
- Michael Calderone, Huffington Post: Washington Post Defends Not Running Article On Iraq Media Failure
- Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting: Iraq War, Ten Years Later
- Rick Horowitz, Huffington Post: Horrors in the Rear-View Mirror: Ten Years of Iraq (video)
- Dahr Jamail with Amy Goodman, “Democracy, Now!” Pacifica Radio: Ten Years Later, U.S. Has Left Iraq with Mass Displacement & Epidemic of Birth Defects, Cancers
- Eugene Kane, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Let’s not revise Iraq war history
- Mary Sanchez, Kansas City Star: Soldier critical of Iraq war, ready to die
- Vincent Stehle, Chronicle of Philanthropy: How a Misguided War Led to a Powerful Nonprofit Partnership
- Alex Weprin, TVNewser: Anchors Reflect On 10 Years Of War In Iraq
Short Takes
- People of color in the nation’s largest environmental organizations say “the level of diversity, both in leadership and staff, of groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Sierra Club and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is more like that of the Republican Party they so often criticize for its positions on the environment than that of the multiethnic Democratic Party they have thrown their support behind,” Darryl Fears reported Sunday for the Washington Post.
- A Detroit program is nurturing the potential journalism pipeline early, Detroit’s WDIV-TV reported last week. The United Way gives 300 parents the book “Time for Bed” and a magnetic picture frame if they commit to reading to their new baby for 15 minutes each day. The project was launched in the fall with the help of a $27 million donation from the GM Foundation.
- “ColorOfChange.org and its members are urging FOX, and corporate advertisers of the television show ‘COPS,’ to make the 25th season of show its last in primetime,” the online advocacy group said Thursday. “Since its debut in 1989, FOX, ‘COPS’ producers, and corporate advertisers have built a profit model around distorted and dehumanizing portrayals of black Americans and the criminal justice system. . . .”
- Time magazine Monday issued its third annual list of “Best Twitter Feeds,” featuring Twitter users who “stand out for their humor, knowledge and personality.” Few, if any, journalists of color are listed. Is it lack of humor, knowledge or personality?
- Jethro Nededog is starting at TheWrap April 1 as senior TV writer, Richard Horgan reported Thursday for FishbowlLA. Nededog is longtime friend of Joseph Kapsch, incoming deputy managing editor, and has been a colleague at Zap2it, the Hollywood Reporter and Celebuzz, where Nededog is currently.
- Frederick Melo of the Pioneer Press in St. Paul, Minn., wrote a front-page story Monday about Jasmine Tierra, a 2010 graduate of the city’s Arlington High School. Tierra has just released an album, her first, on the Internet. It is “a soulful pop compilation of 14 original songs — all written by Tierra — and sung largely in Hmong, an Asian language she learned from her friends” at the high school. The school “was 57 percent Asian when she was a senior in 2009-2010, its last year in operation. About a third of the students were African-American, like her. . . .”
- “The office of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas denied 18 Palestinian journalists access to cover U.S. President Barack Obama’s official visit to Ramallah on Thursday for ‘security reasons’, according to local sources,” Naomi Hunt reported Sunday for the International Press Institute. “Those banned for ‘security reasons’ included journalists who work for pro-Hamas media, but also journalists working for media close to the Palestinian Authority who have made critical remarks about the government in their reports or on social media. . . .”
- Is Pope Francis, a native Spanish speaker born and raised in the South American nation of Argentina but whose parents were born in Italy, Latino? Jesse Washington, race relations reporter for the Associated Press, explores the question and writes that for millions, “If you are born in Latin America, and share its language, history and culture, they say, you are Latino — period. They point to the fact that Pope Francis loves tango, drinks the traditional South American beverage mate and follows the San Lorenzo de Almagro futbol team. . . .”
- “Change is the latest news to come out of Cuba, though for Afro-Cubans like myself, this is more dream than reality,” Roberto Zurbano wrote in the New York Times Sunday Review. “Over the last decade, scores of ridiculous prohibitions for Cubans living on the island have been eliminated, among them sleeping at a hotel, buying a cellphone, selling a house or car and traveling abroad. These gestures have been celebrated as signs of openness and reform, though they are really nothing more than efforts to make life more normal. And the reality is that in Cuba, your experience of these changes depends on your skin color. . . .”
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