Maynard Institute archives

Victorious Zimmerman Team Blasts Media

by richard0452

“He Didn’t Know Why He Was Turned Into This Monster”

New Rules: No Criminalizing Journalists

Noted Thinkers Write About Race in Newspaper Series

Station Airs Mock Asian Names of Pilots in Crash

MSNBC Briefly Shows Trayvon Martin’s Dead Body

Two Egyptian Journalists Killed Covering Protests

ABC Spotlights Group Seeking Missing Women of Color

“The Power of Southern Blacks Has Been Dissipated”

Layhmond Robinson Jr., Pioneer Black Journalist, Dies at 88

Winning Photographer Sees Spirit Shining Through Decay

Short Takes

Sybrina Fulton, left, and Tracy Martin, center, parents of slain teen Trayvon Ma

“He Didn’t Know Why He Was Turned Into This Monster”

The lawyer for newly freed George Zimmerman said Saturday night that the news media painted his client as a monster and “took a story that was fed to you and you ran with it, and you ran right over him.”

For their part, commentators said Zimmerman’s acquittal in the slaying of unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was less a ratification of Zimmerman’s contention that he acted in self-defense and more the product of poor presentation by the prosecution.

“Zimmerman’s attorneys managed to cast reasonable doubt on the prosecution’s narrative that their client was the aggressor who followed Trayvon Martin and killed him with no justification,” USA Today’s editorial board said. “And the prosecution — which had the burden of proof — was unable to effectively refute Zimmerman’s story of self-defense. . . .”

The New York Post headlined its Sunday edition, “Uproar at ‘not guilty’ verdict in teen slay. TRAYVESTY.”

Nevertheless, lawyer Mark O’Mara and Zimmerman’s brother, Robert Zimmerman Jr., portrayed the news media as toadies to a narrative that portrayed the Martin case in racial terms, with Zimmerman as the aggressor.

“Two systems went against George Zimmerman that he can’t understand,” O’Mara said. “You guys, the media. He was like a patient in an operating table where mad scientists were committing experiment on him and he had no anesthesia. He didn’t know why he was turned into this monster. But quite honestly you guys had a lot to do with it, you just did, cause you took a story that was fed to you and you ran with it, and you ran right over him. And that was horrid to him.”Trayvon Martin. At first, the debate over media coverage of his killing was a

O’Mara did not mention that in late March, Robert Zimmerman Jr. repeatedly tweeted a photo comparison of Martin and De’Marquise Elkins, a 17-year-old who has been detained in the murder of a Georgia infant. Both pictures feature the young men flipping the middle finger at the camera, with the caption ‘A picture speaks a thousand words…Any questions?'” Both Elkins and Martin are black.

In an appearance on NPR on Sunday, Robert Zimmerman Jr. said the media’s sins included “painting George as a white man in order to get that traction.” George Zimmerman was initially identified as white, then as a “white Hispanic.”

In his Washington Post media blog, Erik Wemple pushed back. “Indeed the media committed atrocities in covering the encounter between Zimmerman and Martin,” Wemple wrote. “Most notably, NBC News mal-edited a police audiotape that portrayed Zimmerman as an out-and-out racial profiler.

“Yet to posit that the media and activists orchestrated a national issue gives too little credit to the nation. Simply put, people across the country were horrified that a 17-year-old kid walking through a neighborhood with candy and a soft drink could have ended up shot to death. They didn’t need the media to tell them to get out and demand Zimmerman’s arrest, or simply to express solidarity with the victim. . . .”

But in USA Today, media critic Rem Rieder agreed with O’Mara. The media “prefer straightforward narratives, with good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. Those tales are much easier for readers and viewers to relate to,” Rieder wrote.

Robert Zimmerman Jr. told NPR that the family “very cautiously” anticipated a not-guilty verdict and so he was not in the courtroom for the unanimous decision by the six-member jury. “So I had to leave Florida in order to be able to be here in New York City to address the media upon that verdict,” he said on “Weekend Edition Sunday.”

One of his first stops Saturday night was an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan. “Most of our family is just now getting to process the reality that we’re not on the other end of this mountain of misinformation that now the jury has spoken and that now we are exonerated as a family,” Zimmerman said. “But more importantly, George is exonerated as a defendant and we are going to process that.

“It takes time. We’ve been on the other end of this for better part of a year and a half now. It’s going to take some time to heal. . . .”

When Morgan asked Robert Zimmerman Jr. what he would do if the Martin and George Zimmerman roles were reversed, Robert Zimmerman asserted that the jury believed that Martin was the aggressor. “If Trayvon were my brother and he was legally armed and, you know, able to carry that firearm in a legal way, and my brother blindsided him by breaking his nose and pummeling his head into concrete and continuing to punch him, I would find and the jury has found that unfortunately he had the greater hand in his own demise, which was causing by his own hand his death. That’s unfortunate but that’s the reality,” he said.

What the jury actually believed might be difficult to discern. NBC News reported, “A court spokeswoman, Michelle Kennedy, said that the jurors had ‘no desire to speak to media,’ and she warned reporters that an order protecting their anonymity was still in effect.”

On MSNBC after the verdict, panelists discussed why they believed that race was in fact a large part of the story, despite the Zimmerman side’s denials. Melissa Harris-Perry was among those pointing to the case of Marissa Alexander, a black mother of three in Jacksonville, Fla., who fired a single bullet into her kitchen ceiling two years ago to warn her husband, Rico Gray, against continuing his physical attack on her.

As Harris-Perry said on a May 2012 program, “Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ castle-doctrine law somehow didn’t apply to her, despite the fact that her case appears to fit the statute to a T.

“She was convicted of three counts of aggravated assault in a matter of minutes — and today, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison, a sentence she will appeal.”

Harris-Perry and the Rev. Al Sharpton, host of MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation,” said an appropriate response for those aggrieved by the verdict was to challenge state laws. By “taking to the ballot box, taking to organized, reasonable, safe protest,” Harris-Perry said.

“We need to bring this to a national level,” Sharpton said. The federal government has always been a defense against unjust state laws, he said. “We are dealing with a larger issue, and that’s where this needs to go.” He and others urged that civil rights charges be taken to the Justice Department. On Sunday, the Justice Department said it had “an open investigation” into Martin’s death.

Part of the reason for disappointment in the verdict is that many saw the case in terms of larger issues, some commentators said. “Criminal trials are poor proxies for big issues,” such as racial profiling or gun control, Gene Demby of NPR’s Code Switch race relations project said on “Weekend Edition Sunday.”

Other commentators cited the racial factors at play.

Aura Bogado wrote for the Nation, “When Zimmerman was acquitted today, it wasn’t because he’s a so-called white Hispanic. He’s not. It’s because he abides by the logic of white supremacy, and was supported by a defense team — and a swath of society — that supports the lingering idea that some black men must occasionally be killed with impunity in order to keep society-at-large safe. . . . “

In the New Yorker, Jelani Cobb wrote, “During his post-verdict press conference, O’Mara said that, were his client black, he would never have been charged. At the defense’s table, and in the precincts far beyond it where donors have stepped forward to contribute funds to underwrite their efforts, there is a sense that Zimmerman was the victim.

“O’Mara’s statement echoed a criticism that began circulating long before Martin and Zimmerman encountered each other. Thousands of black boys die at the hands of other African Americans each year, but the black community, it holds, is concerned only when those deaths are caused by whites. It’s an appealing argument, and widespread, but it’s simplistic and obtuse.

“It’s a belief most easily held when you’ve not witnessed peace rallies and makeshift memorials, when you’ve turned a blind eye to grassroots organizations like the Interrupters in Chicago, who are working valiantly to stem the tide of violence in that city. It is the thinking of people who’ve never wondered why African Americans disproportionately support strict gun-control legislation. The added quotient of outrage in cases like this one stems not from the belief that a white murderer is somehow worse than a black one but from the knowledge that race determines whether fear, history, and public sentiment offer that killer a usable alibi. . . .”

Leonard Greene of the New York Post added, “This case became a racial incident the moment George Zimmerman left his car with his gun and stalked an unarmed black teenager.

“But it’s not that this kind of thing happens to blacks and people of color all the time that makes this about race.

“What makes this about race is that it never happens to anyone else. . . .”

The verdict seemed likely to dominate radio talk shows on Monday. In Chicago, WVON-AM announced it would “host a full day of coverage and analysis of the trial and ‘Not Guilty’ verdict of George Zimmerman,” starting at 6 a.m. Likewise, in Baltimore, “the Marc Steiner Show” on WEAA-FM said it would begain a two-hour special on the verdict at 9 a.m. 

New Rules: No Criminalizing Journalists

July 12, 2013

President Obama with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Holder presented

Optimism After Revised Guidelines From Justice Dept.

Journalists reacted with cautious approval Friday to an announcement by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that he was revising Justice Department procedures that enraged reporters this year as the department pursued leak investigations.

Hugo Balta“I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Hugo Balta, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the only leader of a journalist-of-color organization to agree to meet with Holder as the attorney general sought feedback from the Fourth Estate before revising the guidelines.

“I’m happy to see that a lot of what it speaks to is not criminalizing journalists for doing their jobs. What we need to wait and see is how it will be enforced.”

Balta, his executive director, Anna Lopez Buck, and Walt Swanston, interim executive director of Unity: Journalists for Diversity, attended a June 3 meeting with Holder. Other journalist of color groups declined, citing the stated off-the-record ground rules. Those rules were lifted once the meeting began.

“In a six-page report, Mr. Holder outlined changes to the Justice Department’s investigative guidelines that would prevent the Federal Bureau of Investigation from portraying a reporter as a co-conspirator in a criminal leak as a way to get around a legal bar on secret search warrants for reporting materials,” Charlie Savage reported for the New York Times.

“The revisions would also make it harder — though not impossible — for prosecutors to obtain a journalist’s calling records from telephone companies without giving news organizations advance notice. Notifying news organizations in advance would give them a chance to contest the request in court.”

Savage continued, “Investigators’ targeting of the communications records of Associated Press and Fox News reporters in separate leak investigations came to light in May, setting off a furor, both among journalists and in Congress, about the administration’s increasingly aggressive record on leak investigations.”

Two months ago, President Obama “gave Mr. Holder a July 12 deadline to review the rules and make recommendations. Mr. Holder held a series of meetings with newsroom leaders and lawyers for media companies, along with lawmakers and First Amendment scholars, in May and June, and briefed Mr. Obama about the changes at the White House on Friday morning.

“Several of them directly addressed controversies from the earlier disclosures. For example, a 2010 affidavit that came to light in May sought a warrant for e-mails from the Google account of James Rosen of Fox News in which he corresponded with a State Department analyst who was suspected of leaking classified information. . . .”

Michael Clemente, Fox News’ executive vice president of news, said in a statement, “The guidelines appear to be welcome steps. That said, the Attorney General, Justice Department officials and the FBI should also take full responsibility for the illegal actions taken against Fox News and James Rosen,” Fox News reported. No journalist was prosecuted, however.

The Associated Press said it was “gratified that the Department of Justice took our concerns seriously. The description of the new guidelines released today indicates they will result in meaningful, additional protection for journalists. We’ll obviously be reviewing them more closely when the actual language of the guidelines is released, but we are heartened by this step.”

Journalists, media organizations and others expressed alarm when the AP disclosed on May 13 that the Justice Department had seized records for 20 separate phone lines, all assigned to AP and its journalists, over a two-month period as part of a leak investigation.

“Investigators did not notify the AP to request the phone records before obtaining them, a break with protocol in dealings between the government and the press,” Michael Calderone and Ryan J. Reilly noted for the Huffington Post. Gary Pruitt, chief executive of the AP, called the sweeping seizure ‘unconstitutional.’

“Under the new policy, news organizations will be given advance notice when investigators seek access to news-gathering materials, except in situations where the attorney general determines that ‘for compelling reasons, advance notice and negotiations would pose a clear and substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation, risk grave harm to national security, or present an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm.’

“That determination will be made after consulting members of a newly created News Media Review Committee, which will include senior DOJ officials who are not directly involved in the investigations and who have relevant expertise and experience in media matters.”

Balta said that he suggested at the June 3 meeting that any Justice Department materials provided the news media be available in Spanish for Spanish-language media.

Moreover, the NAHJ president invited Holder to NAHJ’s summer convention. That will be part of the annual Excellence in Journalism Conference Aug. 24-26 in Anaheim, Calif., which is staged with the Radio Television Digital News Association and the Society of Professional Journalists.

Asked about those two requests, a Justice Department spokeswoman told Journal-isms by email Friday, “We are considering President Balta’s recommendations regarding Spanish-language materials and look forward to working with NAHJ in the future.”

Balta, speaking by telephone from Miami, where NAHJ is conducting a regional conference with SPJ South Florida chapters this weekend, said the invitation for Holder to address the convention remains open.

Having exhausted all other options, a desperate young woman named Carrie Kinsey

Noted Thinkers Write About Race in Newspaper Series

The first story in the 11-part series is by Douglas A. Blackmon, who won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for his book, “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” later a PBS documentary. It begins:

“On July 31, 1903, a letter addressed to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House. It had been mailed from the town of Bainbridge, Georgia, the prosperous seat of a cotton county perched on the Florida state line.

“The sender was a barely literate African-American woman named Carrie Kinsey. With little punctuation and few capital letters, she penned the bare facts of the abduction of her 14-year-old brother, James Robinson, who a year earlier had been sold into involuntary servitude.

“Kinsey had already asked for help from the powerful White people in her world. She knew where her brother had been taken — a vast plantation not far away called Kinderlou. There, hundreds of Black men and boys were held in chains and forced to labor in the fields or in one of several factories owned by the McRee family, one of the wealthiest and most powerful in Georgia. No White official in this corner of the state would take an interest in the abduction and enslavement of a Black teenager.

“Confronted with a world of indifferent White people, Mrs. Kinsey did the only remaining thing she could think of. Newspapers across the country had recently reported on a speech by Roosevelt promising a ‘square deal’ for Black Americans. Mrs. Kinsey decided that her only remaining hope was to beg the president of the United States to help her brother.

” ‘Mr. Prassident,’ she wrote. ‘They wont let me have him…. He hase not don nothing for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help.’ . . . “

Starting Friday, and for 10 consecutive Fridays afterward, newspapers that signed up were to receive free of charge articles examining the nation’s progress on race in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The pieces have such titles as “Emmett and Trayvon” by sociologist Elijah Anderson; “Deconstruction Reconstruction” by Nicholas Lemann, the New Yorker writer who just stepped down as dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; “Lincoln Died for Our Sins,” by Jelani Cobb, author, historian and director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut; and “A Second Emancipation” by Taylor Branch, the Martin Luther King Jr. biographer, and Haley Sweetland Edwards, an editor of the Washington Monthly.

Blackmon continued with his story. “Considered more than a century later, her letter courses with desperation and submerged outrage. Yet when received at the White House, it was slipped into a small rectangular folder and forwarded to the Department of Justice. There, it was tagged with a reference number, 12007, and filed away. Teddy Roosevelt never saw it. No action was taken. Her words lie still at the National Archives just outside Washington, D.C.

“As dumbfounding as the story told by the Carrie Kinsey letter is, far more remarkable is what surrounds that letter at the National Archives. In the same box that holds her grief-stricken missive are at least half a dozen other pieces of correspondence recounting other stories of kidnapping, perversion of the courts, or human trafficking — as horrifying as, or worse than, Carrie Kinsey’s tale. . . .”

Meanwhile, NPR on Friday announced an addition to the commemorations of the March on Washington. For its first public event at its new Washington headquarters, the network is hosting a free evening screening July 19 of the documentary “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords,” followed by a panel discussion and Q-and-A session with Terence Samuel, national political editor at the Washington Post; Julian Bond, politician, professor and writer; and Laura Murphy, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union. Those interested may register for tickets at http://events.npr.org/npr/Home.

KTVU in San Francisco confirmed the names with the National Transportation Safety Board. (video)

Station Airs Mock Asian Names of Pilots in Crash

“Words cannot adequately express the outrage we, at the Asian American Journalists Association, feel over KTVU’s on-air blunder that made a mockery of the Asiana Airline tragedy and offended so many loyal viewers of the San Francisco Bay Area station,” Bobby Caina Calvan wrote Friday for AAJA.

“During KTVU’s noon newscast, the anchor said the station had learned the names of the four pilots in the cockpit of the ill-fated flight, which crashed in San Francisco on July 6 and killed three passengers,” Calvan, AAJA MediaWatch chair, and Paul Cheung, national AAJA president, wrote.

“Unfortunately those names were not only wrong, but grossly offensive. We won’t repeat the names, which caricatured Asian names.

“The station apologized later in the same newscast. Still, we fail to understand how a television news station with such a vaunted reputation could have fallen victim to such juvenile antics. . . . “

Other websites were not shy about listing the false names. “Yeah — we didn’t think ‘Sum Ting Wong,’ ‘Wi Tu Lo,’ ‘Ho Lee Fuk’ and ‘Bang Ding Ow’ were real names either,” Gabe Meline wrote for Bohemian.com.

The station said on its website “Prior to air, the names were confirmed by an NTSB official in the agency’s Washington, D.C. office. Despite that confirmation, KTVU realized the names that aired were not accurate and issued an apology later in the newscast.

AAJA said, “Earlier in the afternoon, the NTSB said it had no role in confirming the names. But when pressed by KTVU and others, the agency looked deeper into the matter. By evening, the NTSB issued an apology.

” ‘A summer intern acted outside the scope of his authority when he erroneously confirmed the names of the flight crew on the aircraft,’ the agency said in a statement.

“Appropriate actions will be taken to ensure that such a serious error is not repeated.”

The correct names of the pilots in the cockpit are Lee Gang-guk and Lee Jeong-min.

MSNBC Briefly Shows Trayvon Martin’s Dead Body

“For a fleeting moment Thursday night, MSNBC aired what analysts covering George Zimmerman‘s second-degree murder trial have called the most graphic evidence in the case — a photo of Trayvon Martin‘s dead body lying in the grass,” Harold Maass wrote Friday for theweek.com. “This was not the image published by the Huffington Post and other news outlets showing the 17-year-old’s corpse covered by a yellow blanket. This image, captured before police covered him up, shows Martin in full — his face, his eyes and mouth open, his arms at his side.

“In the courtroom, prosecutors used the photo to illustrate their closing argument. Martin, they said, was just an unarmed kid returning from a convenience store with Skittles and a drink, and he would be alive today if Zimmerman, a white, Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer, hadn’t stalked him because he was black. ‘His body speaks to you even in death,’ the prosecution told the jury. (Zimmerman maintains that Martin was the aggressor, and that he shot the boy in self-defense.)

“Some readers and viewers saw things differently. One commenter at Balloon Juice, for example, called the airing of the image ‘wrong and disgusting,’ and said MSNBC should apologize, even though it only aired the photo briefly in a live feed before quickly panning away.

“Was it wrong to show the victim’s corpse in such a high-profile, racially charged case? . . .”

Two Egyptian Journalists Killed Covering Protests

“In the past two weeks, two Egyptian journalists were killed while covering protests and clashes between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and opposition activists, Hiba Zayadin reported Wednesday for IFEX, a Toronto-based global network “defending freedom and expression.”

“On 29 June, Salah al-Din Hassan, a 37-year-old reporter with independent news website Shaab Masr, was killed while covering a demonstration against President Mohammed Morsi in the city of Port Said.

“Ahmed Assem El-Senousy, 26, journalist and photographer for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice newspaper, was shot by a sniper while covering the events of 8 July when Egyptian soldiers opened fire on Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators, killing more than 50. El-Senousy captured his own death on camera as he filmed the incident.

“Prior to these deaths, only four journalists had been killed in Egypt since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

“The country has been steadily falling deeper into a state of chaos since the days leading up to 30 June, which marked one year of President Morsi’s rule. . . .”

Short Takes

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