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2 Reporters Detained, Released in Ferguson

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Washington Post’s Lowery Tweets He “Can’t Shake Anger”

AP Journalist Is First Reporter Killed in Israel-Gaza Conflict 

Key Figure in Story on Blacks and AIDS Changes Account 

Navarrette Blasts NAHJ Over Award to Fox News Latino 

Sports Reporter Nate Taylor Hired at SunSentinel 

Social Media Give More a Venue to Challenge Yellowface 

Back From Suspension, Le Batard Has a Sly Message

Short Takes

Washington Post’s Lowery Tweets He “Can’t Shake Anger”

“The Huffington Post’s Ryan J. Reilly and the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery were arrested Wednesday while covering the protests in Ferguson, Missouri surrounding the death of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown, who was shot by a police officer last week,” the Huffington Post reported Wednesday.

“The journalists were released unharmed, but their detentions 
highlighted the town’s ramped up police presence, which has left numerous residents 
injured by rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear gas during protests held every night after 
Brown’s death.

“SWAT officers roughed up the reporters inside a McDonald’s, where both journalists were working. Reilly snapped a photo, prompting cops to request his identification.

” ‘The officer in question, who I repeatedly later asked for his name, grabbed my things and shoved them into my bag,’ said Reilly, who appeared on MSNBC’s ‘All In with Chris Hayes‘ shortly after his release to recount the arrest. ‘He used his finger to put a pressure point on my neck.’

” ‘They essentially acted as a military force. It was incredible,’ Reilly said. ‘The worst part was he slammed my head against the glass purposefully on the way out of McDonald’s and then sarcastically apologized for it.’ . . .”

Lowery, meanwhile, tweeted these messages:

Talking Points Memo added, “The police actions were condemned by senior editors from both the Huffington Post and Washington Post.

” ‘We’re very glad that Ryan has been released and is doing well,’ Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for the Huffington Post, told TPM in an email. ‘But this is what happens when local police are allowed to become para-military units.’

” ‘That behavior was wholly unwarranted and an assault on the freedom of the press to cover the news,’ Marty Baron, executive editor at the Washington Post, told Post reporter Mark Berman.

Lowery wrote a first-person account of the experience for the Post.

AP Journalist Is First Reporter Killed in Israel-Gaza Conflict

“Simone Camilli, a video journalist with the Associated Press, died Wednesday in an explosion in the Gaza Strip,” Howard Koplowitz reported Wednesday for International Business Times. “The Italian, who worked for the wire service since 2005, is the first journalist to be killed since the conflict in Gaza between Hamas and Israel started more than a month ago.

“Camilli was one of five people killed in the explosion, which occurred while Gaza police engineers were trying to neutralize unexploded ordnance in Beit Lahiya, the AP reported. Also killed were Ali Shehda Abu Afash, who was working for the AP as a translator, and three Gaza policemen. Four others were seriously injured in the incident, including AP photographer Hatem Moussa, the wire service said.

“Since it erupted more than a month ago, the Gaza conflict has left more than 1,900 Palestinians and 67 Israelis dead.

“The death of the AP journalist came a day after New York Times journalist Alissa J. Rubin was injured when an Iraqi military helicopter trying to deliver aid to stranded Yazidis on Mount Sinjar, in Iraqi Kurdistan, crashed. The pilot of the helicopter was killed in the accident. . . .”

Meanwhile, the International Federation of Journalists said Tuesday it was “appealing to its affiliates across the world to contribute to a special solidarity appeal it has set up to provide financial aid to journalists in Gaza who are desperately in need of help.

“The IFJ says that the current limited cease-fire may have halted the loss of life, but many journalists and families are now homeless after their houses were razed to the ground or suffered extensive damages as to render them inhabitable. . . .”

Key Figure in Story on Blacks and AIDS Changes Account

A key figure in an ambitious Washington Post story about black gay men and HIV who caused the Post to remove a 2,000-word chunk of the story after he told the Post he had fabricated his account now says he was not fabricating after all.

Instead, Mickyel Bradford said, the reporter, Jeff Guo, misunderstood what he was saying. Bradford contended that he said he had fabricated only to help protect the reporter. He actually was describing the actions of several people, not just himself, he said. 

Bradford said in a note to Journal-isms, “I did not fabricate a story, I spoke with Jeff at length on several occasions and he appears to have misunderstood what I was telling him, all of which was true as I described it, but involved different people and wasn’t accurate the way Jeff described it in the article.

“At this point, I’m seeking to have my name removed from the correction because it casts me in a bad light and makes it sound like I lied to a reporter, rather than what actually happened, which is that the reporter did not correctly collect the information and wrote an inaccurate story as a result.”

The Post says Bradford’s latest story is hogwash.

Jim Tankersley, editor of Storyline, the new Post section that published the piece, said by email, “Mikyel Bradford has admitted to The Post, in writing, that several details of the courtship story he recounted to our reporter ‘were fabricated’. He confirmed that our reporter ‘was unaware of any of these fabrications.’ We also have recordings of the interviews in which Mr. Bradford describes those fabricated events. We stand by our editor’s note.”

As Erik Wemple explained in the Post on Aug. 5: “Bradford was one of the people upon whom ‘Storyline’ reporter Jeff Guo had relied to tell the human dimension of his story. The goal was to shed light on something of a conundrum: Why do gay black men have such high rates of HIV even though they practice safe sex? As the story notes of the preliminary results in an Atlanta study, ‘Among black gay men, 43 percent were HIV positive, compared to 13 percent of white gay men, even though the black gay men had fewer sex partners and less unprotected sex.’

“The sections of the piece that have been retracted and removed are well written and provide dimension to the story. If only they had held up, that is. . . .”

Bradford’s complete statement is in the “Comments” section.

Navarrette Blasts NAHJ Over Award to Fox News Latino

Ruben Navarrette Jr., the most widely syndicated Hispanic columnist in English-language media, takes another swipe at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in his latest column for the Washington Post Writers Group.

“The National Association of Hispanic Journalists is getting good at producing embarrassing headlines,” Navarrette wrote Tuesday.

“Last year, at the NAHJ’s conference in Anaheim, the organization’s leaders rolled over and allowed one of the panelists — John Perez, then the Democratic speaker of the California Assembly — to exclude Republican political consultant Hector Barajas. “Last week, as the NAHJ met in San Antonio, 84-year-old Charlie Ericksen, one of the group’s co-founders, kicked up some dust when he said it was ‘kind of a farce’ for the organization to honor Fox News with an NAHJ Media Award.

“The group seemed impressed by the fact that the conservative network launched FoxNewsLatino.com a few years ago. Still, it certainly didn’t hurt that Fox News Channel and Fox News Latino sponsored the conference. [Fox News and Fox News Latino were among several sponsors of the convention, whose chief sponsor was Toyota.] . . .”

Navarrette concluded, “Ericksen may be right about Fox after all. But he’s also right to use the word ‘farce’ to describe the process by which NAHJ hands out its awards. In fact, he should have gone further and applied that label to the entire organization.

“Because of its corporate subservience, knack for public relations and coziness with elected officials and the same media companies over which it is supposed to be a watchdog, the NAHJ has gone from a valued institution to a vaudeville act.”

Meanwhile, new NAHJ President Mekahlo Medina announced that the NAHJ board on Sunday had named Sid Garcia of KABC-TV in Los Angeles, longtime member of NAHJ and CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California, interim secretary. The board also chose Barbara Rodriguez of the Associated Press to be vice president, print. No one ran for the two positions in last week’s election. Both are to serve in their positions for one year and run for election in August 2015.

Sports Reporter Nate Taylor Hired at SunSentinel

Nate Taylor, who in 2012 replenished the vacant ranks of African American sports reporters at the New York Times when he joined the paper under a program that hires young reporters on a probationary basis, is leaving the paper for the South Florida SunSentinel, Gregory H. Lee Jr., SunSentinel executive sports editor, said Wednesday.

Taylor is to become the paper’s Florida Atlantic University athletics and recruiting reporter, Lee said.

Taylor’s departure leaves the Times again without black reporters or editors in its sports department, though William C. Rhoden remains a sports columnist. 

Taylor is a 2009 graduate of the Sports Journalism Institute, a nine-week training and internship program for college students interested in sports journalism careers, and has worked at the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.;  the Boston Globe; the Star Tribune in Minneapolis; and freelanced for the Kansas City Star.

Social Media Give More a Venue to Challenge Yellowface

“You might have heard a lot about ‘yellowface’ in recent months,” Sam Sanders reported Wednesday for NPR’s “Code Switch.”

“It’s the word widely used to refer to someone donning makeup or clothing to present the appearance of looking Asian. But why is it that we’re seeing the word — and the phenomenon it refers to — so much this year? Is it because it’s happening more, or are we just more aware?

“In the past month, Seattle’s Gilbert and Sullivan Society came under fire for its production of The Mikado. The operetta premiered in London in 1885 and was intended to be a satirical commentary of British society — except it was set in Japan. (The Mikado was banned in Japan in the opera’s early years.)

“Sharon Pian Chan, a columnist for The Seattle Times, penned an op-ed that sparked another wave of discussion:

” ‘The opera is a fossil from an era when America was as homogeneous as milk, planes did not depart daily for other continents and immigrants did not fuel the economy.’

“The Gilbert and Sullivan Society in Seattle wrote its own op-ed in the same paper. Mike Storie, the show’s producer, and Gene Ma, a board member of the group, wrote that ‘the ethnicity of the actor or the production is only an issue if one is looking for issues.’ 

“A few years ago, Rick Shiomi found a way to produce The Mikado in Minneapolis, Minn., with no yellowface. . . .”

Sanders quoted Chan, “If there were not an Asian-American columnist at the Seattle Times this year, no one would have written about it here.”

Sanders also wrote, “There are more Asian-Americans now than ever who are observing the culture and speaking about it. Social media, blogging and the like have given people the tools to discuss issues in ways that historically weren’t available. . . .”

A tag beneath the story added, “Come back Thursday as we chat more about this topic with three experts.”

Short Takes

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