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Ferguson Prompts More Hatin’ on the Media

richard

Returning Monday, Dec. 1

Prosecutor, Protesters Single Out Cable News, Social Media

TV Critics Home in on Don Lemon Gaffes

News Organizations Launch FergusonNext.com

Irrelevant Story on Boy, 12, Fatally Shot by Police?

Free After 40 Years Thanks to Cleveland Reporter’s Digging

Cosby Biographer Mark Whitaker Apologizes for Omissions

89% of Latino Voters Support Obama’s Immigration Move

Sierra Leone Citizen Journalists Share Ebola Stories

Cronkite School Plans Degrees in Sports Journalism

Short Takes

Prosecutor, Protesters Single Out Cable News, Social Media

From stone-throwers literally and figuratively to public officials and anguished citizens, the crisis in Ferguson, Mo., this week brought out the media haters.

“The President, in a speech addressing the grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown, said that there would be some ‘negative reaction’ to the decision, which would make for ‘good TV,’ ” Broadcasting & Cable reported Tuesday.

“Last night in Ferguson, one protestor interrupted CNN’s live coverage to shout ‘Fuck CNN!‘ Well, this time, a whole group of New York protestors chanted it for several seconds on CNN,” Josh Feldman reported Tuesday for Mediaite.

“The site of Michael Brown’s killing has become particularly dangerous for media members in the last 24 hours,” Jessica Lussenhop reported Tuesday for Riverfront Times in St. Louis. “A crew of four freelance journalists was robbed at gunpoint this evening around 8 p.m. as they tried to film a segment at the Canfield Drive memorial. . . .”

At Northwestern University, For Members Only, the black student alliance,  held the university’s largest meeting on the Ferguson issue but told the North by Northwestern student newspaper, “unless you are willing to let us see the full text and quotes of the article before it goes to print, you will not be permitted to enter, record, or report on this event . . . .Our community is in a fragile state, and this time is too important to have it tainted by poor reporting afterwards.” The newspaper declined to agree to those terms.

And in a much-anticipated news conference announcing that there would be no indictment against Wilson in the Aug. 9 killing of Brown, “St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch appeared to be auditioning for the job of the Erik Wemple Blog,” Wemple wrote in his Washington Post media blog.

” ‘The most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the 24-hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite for something, for anything to talk about, following closely behind with the nonstop rumors on social media,’ said McCulloch. . . .”

What’s going on?

On Facebook, Durrie Bouscaren, a reporter for St. Louis Public Radio, offered one explanation.

“I’m a local reporter here in STL — we first started seeing certain stations kicked out of protests back in September,” Bouscaren wrote.

“I’ve heard of isolated events where journos were hit or had cameras and phones stolen. (Major props to Sara [Sidner of CNN] for continuing her broadcast). But I’ve also seen protesters protect or stick up for reporters being harassed.

“I think some of the anger stems from the community feeling incredibly violated by a mass influx of media in a relatively small town — residents have told me they feel it contributes to the more violent nights. Others say they agreed to do an interview and were then misquoted to a national audience.

“If anyone is in Ferguson right now, the only thing I ask — is remember that people live here. For many, Michael Brown was a neighbor and a friend. The past few months have been traumatic for the entire community; residents, businesses, police and protesters. Your work is important and is a public service. But no private citizen owes you an interview, or a photograph.”

As for complaints from public officials such as McCulloch, many commentators see hypocrisy. After all, as the month began, the Rev. Al Sharpton and others were annoyed by leaks from McCulloch’s office. “Sharpton charged that leaks to the media about the events that unfolded on Canfield Drive the afternoon Brown was killed have ‘tainted’ the process while ‘defaming and desecrating Michael Brown,’ ” Steve Giegerich wrote then for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

“Sharpton said the leaks of internal investigation reports and the autopsy on Brown’s body were designed to ‘make the victim look like a thug (instead) of an unarmed young man who was shot and killed. . . .’ “

Writing Tuesday for Time, James Poniewozik suggested, “I suspect part of what’s behind the frustration of people like McCulloch is that social media makes everyone a critic. Thousands and thousands of people are watching over your shoulder to see if you slip up, checking what you missed, judging whether you were thorough enough, questioning your agenda. Good. Having everyone watch you do your job, or not do it, may be a pain, it may be stressful, but in an imperfect justice system, it’s not exactly a bad thing. . . .”

David Folkenflik, media reporter for NPR, spent more than five minutes on the subject Tuesday on NPR’s “On Point.”

“I don’t think he was entirely fair (audio),” Folkenflik said of McCulloch. “I think if you look back to the protests in August, which were not anything like as violent as what we have seen in the last 24 hours in Ferguson, that the national media’s presence helped.

“To be honest, the treatment of the national media and of reporters on the ground there in Ferguson by the local law enforcement community gave real vibrance and life to the assertions by black residents of Ferguson that they had been sort of consistently run roughshod over and manhandled by law officials there, and the fact that local police were essentially stiff-arming time and again, often for no reason, reporters on the scene in Ferguson meant that it was impossible to ignore the claim of locals.

“I’m not saying their complaints shouldn’t have been taken seriously anyway, but it was an interesting way in which they were a surrogate. . . . “

But Folkenflik also saw the cable news networks taking sides, failing to look at the big picture and, in the case of Fox News Channel, which scored the night’s highest ratings among the news networks, mischaracterizing what took place.

“You certainly saw these moments when people who were taking sides,” Folkenflik continued. “I was talking with my colleague Eric Deggans, the TV critic for NPR, earlier this morning, and he and I were talking, and it seemed at times as though Van Jones, a former community activist and briefly an Obama administration official turned CNN pundit, a guy who knows a lot about street protest, he was saying, ‘look, the people who were bad actors in the crowd [was] very low’ . . .

“Chris Cuomo, you know, someone who almost takes a prosecutorial tone in reporting about crime and public unrest, although a colleague of Van Jones, he was put in almost a ‘Crossfire,’ oppositional-like position to what Van Jones was saying, and saying that no, the percentage of those who wanted to do damage, and to act out, was almost far greater.

“And you know, I don’t think that’s actually serving a purpose. I don’t think the day of the announcement of an important decision not to indict someone in a closely watched case with a question of law enforcement, a question of safety of law enforcement officers, a question of racial relations and a host of other issues — you know, that’s the moment to get into a ‘Crossfire’-like atmosphere.

“Similarly, MSNBC was very much on the side of those who were protesting and objecting, and you saw over on Fox News the emphasis was almost exclusively on the idea that the protesters were acting illegitimately and out of turn, and you know, this is almost like different voices in a Greek chorus, and if you look at almost any one of them, you’re seeing, you’re hearing a voice in that chorus, but you’re not seeing a bigger picture.

“You know, 24-hour news is this constant lens, and it doesn’t allow for deep breaths and taking pauses, but they could have easily retreated to [a] studio and talked about these things and unpacked them and figured out where they needed to go, rather than just having — oftentimes reporters vamp as uncertain things happen behind them.

“I must say that Jake Tapper on CNN stood out by virtue of calmly and soberly interviewing the protesters about what they were experiencing. Chris Cuomo repeatedly kept saying to people who were chanting or shouting or trying to interject, he said ‘let us continue our coverage here,’ but it meant that he was never actively talking to anybody involved on any side about what was happening as things were breaking out around him.

Folkenflik continued, ” . . I was very struck by, for example, last night on Fox. There was a very large Chyron at the base of the screen, as I believe Shep Smith, one of their news anchors, but also as Sean Hannity, obviously one of their top opinion hosts, and it said — I want to get the phrasing exactly right, but it said something along the lines of ‘Violence in Multiple American Cities,’ or something like that, and it wasn’t clear to me that there was violence in multiple American cities. . . . There was a genuine public safety element to those concerns, and yet there was also, in some ways almost a gleeful and provocative element to it as well, where if you harp on that, and . . . I’m not saying it’s inciting violence [but] they’re almost saying there’s a desire for there to likely to be some backlash against the protesters . . . “

All of this points to the need for better news consumers, Jihii Jolly wrote Tuesday for Columbia Journalism Review. Jolly tied McCulloch’s criticisms to the need for news literacy and to the News Literacy Project.

“Rather than avoiding the untethered bits of information we find on social media, we need more of it, and also better skills to process and contextualize it all,” Jolly wrote.

” ‘The Ferguson story underscores why it is vital for the public to have the tools to discern what information is reliable in the midst of such fast-breaking and highly charged news events,’ NLP founder and president Alan Miller said after reviewing the McCulloch statement, ‘and why people need to look for a variety of credible sources and follow a story over time as verified facts emerge.’ “

TV Critics Home in on Don Lemon Gaffes

“The streets of Ferguson were calm Tuesday morning, aside from another round of angry verbal sparring between CNN’s Don Lemon and his favorite on-air punching bag, Van Jones,” Peter Holley reported Tuesday for the Washington Post.

” ‘In my estimation there’s been too much political correctness, trying to appease protesters,’ a suddenly impassioned Lemon borderline shrieked before adding, ‘there was nothing peaceful about last night.’

“This incident was the latest in a distinct pattern. Less than a week ago Lemon asked a woman who alleged that Bill Cosby raped her why she didn’t halt the encounter by using her teeth as, you know, ‘a weapon.’

” ‘I believe every journalist should be able to ask questions even if those questions are uncomfortable,’ Lemon said in his own defense the next day.

“A few weeks earlier, he ruffled a few more feathers by defending controversial comments made by Charles Barkley and, a few weeks before that, he could be found on air comparing hitting a child to hitting a dog.

“It remains unclear which came first — Don Lemon inserting his agitating personal opinion into his coverage or his bosses rewarding him with more air time for doing just that. Either way, the combination has been a volatile one. In a matter of months the one-time golden boy with the charming smile has gone from a talking head to a head that seems incapable of not talking when other people are trying to answer his questions. Not since gaffe-laden Rick Sanchez has a CNN anchor courted this much controversy. . . .”

Don Kaplan of the Daily News in New York, the Post’s Erik Wemple and the TMZ website made similar observations.

News Organizations Launch FergusonNext.com

“A collection of news organizations have teamed up to launch FergusonNext.com, a site dedicated to finding justice in the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting/Darren Wilson ruling,” Chris O’Shea reported Wednesday for FishbowlNY.

“Collaborators on FergusonNext include The Guardian US, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ebony, Colorlines, The St. Louis American and The St. Louis Riverfront Times.

“FergusonNext allows readers to submit a solution to the issues at hand. Users on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr can contribute using the hashtag #FergusonNext. The site also has links to the various news organizations’ Ferguson-related opinion content and a link to donate to the Brown Sibling Memorial Fund.”

Irrelevant Story on Boy, 12, Fatally Shot by Police?

“Last weekend, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by a Cleveland police officer responding to a 911 call,” Nick Wing reported Wednesday for the Huffington Post.

“The caller was concerned about the young black boy who appeared to be handling a gun at a park. The firearm, it turned out, was only an Airsoft pellet gun — and although the orange plastic ring indicating it wasn’t an actual weapon had been removed, the caller did say the gun was ‘probably fake.’ But that detail was apparently not relayed to responding officers, who shot Tamir twice in the torso just seconds after they arrived at the scene. Tamir died later at a hospital.

“On Tuesday, police officials announced that they planned to release video of the incident. The next day, Tamir’s family and members of the community, still reeling from the boy’s death as well as the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, awoke to this headline from the Northeast Ohio Media Group instead:

“Tamir Rice’s father has history of domestic violence”

Seemingly in reaction to social media criticism that the father’s past was irrelevant to the shooting death of the 12-year-old by police, the Northeast Ohio Media Group story explained, “People from across the region have been asking whether Rice grew up around violence. The Northeast Ohio Media Group investigated the backgrounds of the parents and found the mother and father both have violent pasts. . .”

Free After 40 Years Thanks to Cleveland Reporter’s Digging

“This morning, Ricky Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman walked out of jail, free men for the first time in nearly 40 years,” Vince Grzegorek reported Friday for the Scene in Cleveland.

“The two had been convicted of a 1975 murder on Cleveland’s near east side, along with Wiley’s brother Ronnie Bridgeman (who was released on parole in 2003), based on the testimony of a 13-year-old witness. Ricky Jackson had been pinned as the trigger man.

“A 2011 Scene investigation into the case, which found the child’s account was a lie told as a result of police coercion and threats, also pointed out numerous other holes in the state’s evidence. The story led the Ohio Innocence project to take up the case. . . .”

Kyle Swenson, who wrote the 2011 Cleveland Scene story and now works at the Broward-Palm Beach New Times, told Journal-isms Wednesday by email:

“This was an incredible experience the whole way through. I first started working on this story in 2010 when I was contacted by Ronnie Bridgeman, one of the three men convicted in 1975. He had paroled out in 2003 and was living a good life under another name. Still, he maintained that they had all been wrongly convicted, and he was looking for someone to tell their story. Later, he’d tell me he’d contacted tons of journalists. No one paid much attention to him.

“Journalists — me included — are getting hit up all the time by people claiming [their] innocence, didn’t do it, were framed, etc. Obviously, if you start digging, most of these claims are bogus or at least so suspect they’re hard to turn the situation into a compelling story. I can’t say for sure why I agreed to hear Ronnie out. I think it was because he had an extremely detailed grasp on the situation. He didn’t set off my BS detector. Also, I was only 25, so honestly I think I wasn’t as jaded as a newsperson.

“When we met for the first time, he brought along about 1,000 pages of trial transcript. It became pretty clear this was going to involve a lot of leg work — I had to find old trial transcripts, spend hours photocopying them, then hours reading through. It was also extremely difficult to track down folks from the old neighborhood. That’s where Ronnie came in: he’d kept track of a lot of folks, and he was a big part [of] helping me find people. Overall, this took about six or seven months of legwork. I remember my editor kept asking if it was ready, and I’d have to stall him by taking a week or so to write another story so I could keep plugging away on this one.

“After time — after reading the trial transcripts and spending a lot of time with Ronnie — I was convinced these guys were innocent. I knew it was worth the long hours. But as a journalist, you can only take the story so far. Once it came out, nothing happened for a few years until the Innocence Project picked up the baton and ran it to the finish line. I like to think Ronnie and I got this process moving, and Brian [Howe, staff attorney with the Innocence Project] and the Innocence Project finished the job. And now we have this beautiful outcome.”

Asked whether race played a part in the case, Swenson said, “definitely . . . . In the 1970s, we’re talking about a predominantly white police force working in an African-American part of Cleveland’s east side. Not far from where this happened, there were large-scale race riots in the late 1960s — which I believe really set the tone for the relationship between people and police around the time the crime occurred.”

Cosby Biographer Mark Whitaker Apologizes for Omissions

“Bill Cosby’s biographer has apologized for leaving details about the comedian’s alleged sexual abuse out of his book Cosby: His Life and Times,” the WENN Newsdesk reported Tuesday for philly.com.

“Mark Whitaker took to Twitter.com on Monday and admitted he was ‘wrong’ for not including allegations about the comic. His apology comes hours after New York Times reporter David Carr criticized Whitaker for ignoring the allegations in his recent book, suggesting the biographer should have investigated fresh claims against his subject.

“Whitaker wrote, ‘David, you are right. I was wrong to not deal with the sexual assault charges against Cosby and pursue them more aggressively.’ He added he has been following ‘new developments’ and ‘will address them at the appropriate time.’

“He tweeted, ‘If true, the stories are shocking and horrible.’ . . .”

Whitaker’s “Cosby: His Life and Times” ranks 8,984 on the amazon.com best-seller list.

Published in September, “It started out quite strong, it was on the best-seller list, and then it kind of fell off a little bit but was still doing okay,” Whitaker told the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove for a Nov. 20 article. “It’s fallen off a little bit more since then. That’s what happens with books these days.”

Sierra Leone Citizen Journalists Share Ebola Stories

“The Ebola crisis has been a difficult story for mainstream media to report on as it’s often difficult to access areas that are most affected by the epidemic. In Sierra Leone citizen reporters have been sharing updates on the crisis with main stream media — the Guardian, BBC World Service and Channel 4 News,” Caroline Bannock reported Tuesday for the Guardian in Britain.

“In 2012 the citizen journalism training organisation, OnOurRadar ran a training programme in Sierra Leone and it’s these citizen reporters who have been sharing news about how Ebola has affected their communities all around Sierra Leone — from cities and mining towns to remote villages. Their reports were submitted using basic mobile phone technology, that’s available to them, sharing information via recorded telephone interviews, WhatsApp audio and photo functions, and SMS.

“We wanted to find out more about the citizen reporters who have been sharing their reports from Sierra Leone. Here are some of their stories. . . .”

Cronkite School Plans Degrees in Sports Journalism

“The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University will offer two new degrees in the fast-growing field of sports journalism beginning in fall 2015,” the school announced on Tuesday.

“The Arizona Board of Regents last week approved new bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sports journalism. The proposal for the degrees is now pending final approval from the University Senate, with action expected on Dec. 1.

“Student interest in sports media and sports journalism is tremendous and growing,” Cronkite School Dean Christopher Callahan said. “Our new degree program will make Cronkite the first major journalism school in the country to offer bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sports journalism.’ . . .”

Short Takes

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