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Is Kavanaugh Battle Really About Privilege?

richard

Updated Sept. 29

Question Has Implications for News Coverage

Cosby Sentencing ‘Shook Me’ as a Black Journalist

Balta Leaves ESPN-Disney for Media Diversity Work

N.Y. Times to Begin Yearlong Fellowship Program

Poll Finds Nonwhites Not as Harsh on Media

Was GOP’s Black-Media Man, Now He’s a Democrat

Librarians, Translators Aid Mexican Journalist

CNN Having Hard Time Keeping Trump Defenders

Short Takes

Support Journal-isms

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

Question Has Implications for News Coverage

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, whose nomination now moves to the Senate floor, shocked many who watched his aggressive performance at his confirmation hearing Thursday, with some calling his lashing out at opponents over the top.

On MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” analyst Lisa Green called it the reaction of “a man who saw the ground shift from under him.”

Kavanaugh’s pushback at members of the Senate Judiciary Committee was unprecedented. He turned the hearing’s focus from Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that Kavanaugh had assaulted her as a teenager to his partisan accusation that the committee’s Democrats conspired to exact retribution for President Trump’s election and to take “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.”

The appeals court judge’s ire was really about something else, MSNBC contributor Sam Seder explained after Green’s comment: privilege, and the potential loss of it. It was not just a political issue, but a cultural one, Seder said. “Loss of privilege is a form of aggrievement for a large part of the population,” he said.

Seder put his finger on something that should give journalists pause as we frame coverage of this Supreme Court battle. And it hits uncomfortably close to home for the news business. As some women of color have noted, the #MeToo movement and the quest for newsroom diversity are linked.

It was a point made last January at “The Power Shift Summit,” which took place at the Newseum in Washington. Most of the 125 attendees were white women who discussed a range of issues associated with harassment, but the women of color among them kept returning to race as part of the core issue: a power imbalance that handicaps both women and people of color.

“It’s not just an issue of sexual harassment,” Sarah Glover, president of the National Association of Black Journalists and one of the facilitators, told the group.

“It’s really about power and power situations and newsroom environment and work environment, and power often leads to issues of discrimination at large, and so I think it’s very important that we look at this not just as a straight, white female issue,” said Glover, who was circling part of the room with a microphone, taking comments from the attendees.

“This is an issue that’s impacting LGBT communities, black communities, black, brown, Asian, and so we want to make sure that when we talk about a power shift that women of color and women beyond straight, white women are at the table.”

In fact, according to Farai Chideya, a journalist and educator who is now a program officer at the Ford Foundation, even some white men don’t fit the model of those entitled to assert supremacy. “In the intersectionality of race, class and gender, the more things that remove you from heteronormative, white male power, the less likely you are to be able to speak and to be heard,” Chideya said from the audience.

Christine Blasey Ford

On Thursday, America: Jesuit Review, a weekly magazine published by Jesuits, revoked its endorsement of Kavanaugh, writing that “this nomination battle is no longer purely about predicting the likely outcome of Judge Kavanaugh’s vote on the court.

“It now involves the symbolic meaning of his nomination and confirmation in the #MeToo era. The hearings and the committee’s deliberations are now also a bellwether of the way the country treats women when their reports of harassment, assault and abuse threaten to derail the careers of powerful men. . . .”

It’s not that the cultural significance of the Kavanaugh battle is not part of the coverage; it’s a matter of degree.

Some, such as the Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe, who went to the Landon School, a boys’ elite prep school “down the road and not all that different from” Georgetown Prep, have called out the presumption of male entitlement in which they were raised — “the culture of casual misogyny and heavy drinking that existed in the 1980s.”

Doreen St. Felix wrote Thursday in the New Yorker, “More than presenting a convincing rebuttal to Ford’s extremely credible account, Kavanaugh — and [Sen. Orrin] Hatch, and Lindsey Graham — seemed to be exterminating, live, for an American audience, the faint notion that a massively successful white man could have his birthright questioned or his character held to the most basic type of scrutiny. . . . Republican senators apologized to the judge, incessantly, for what he had suffered. There was talk of his reputation being torpedoed and his life being destroyed. This is the nature of the conspiracy against white male power — the forces threatening it will always somehow be thwarted at the last minute. . . .”

Michael D’Antonio, author of “Mortal Sins, Sex Crimes and the Era of Catholic Scandal,” also touched on power and entitlement. He wrote Monday in the Boston Globe, “A man groomed to hold black-robe power wants more of it from an institution that supposedly serves a greater good. GOP senators are trying to give it to him while appearing to act justly. The parallels to the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, including the arrival of a second accuser, abound.. . . ”

The Globe’s Joan Vennochi added Thursday, “Brett Kavanaugh was as mad as a privileged white man can be at the prospect of losing a coveted seat on the US Supreme Court to a girl who wasn’t part of his Georgetown Prep social circle back in their high school days. How dare someone like that mess up the careful career plan he built upon fealty to Republican smear tactics?”

Vennochi’s Globe colleague Renée Graham saw the old ways changing, however slowly. She wrote Tuesday, “Kavanaugh may still be confirmed, so that he can violate women’s rights under the shield of justice. Yet nothing can still a movement already forcing a glacial but steady shift from a dangerous ‘boys will be boys’ mind-set to one where ‘boys’ will be held accountable — even those who grow up to be Supreme Court nominees. . . .”

These are commentators however, not news executives.

In July, the Rev. Jesse Jackson reiterated for attendees of the National Association of Black Journalists an admonition he made to the group back in 1984, that black journalists must seek “appraisal power.”

The American Society of News Editors is emphasizing training for newsroom leadership in its diversity efforts.

After the 2016 presidential election, some journalists of color challenged the notion that Trump’s victory was largely the result of economic anxiety in the heartland.

Now John Sides of George Washington University, Michael Tesler of the University of California at Irvine and Lynn Vavreck of the University of California at Los Angeles have a new book, “Identity Crisis.” “They have plumbed and analyzed a wealth of polling and voting data, examined surveys of attitudes taken long before, during and after the 2016 campaign,” Dan Balz wrote for the Washington Post. “Their conclusion is straightforward. Issues of identity — race, religion, gender and ethnicity — and not economics were the driving forces that determined how people voted, particularly white voters. . . .”

In other words, loss of privilege.

Which editors shaping the news report will give that issue the centrality it deserves?

Bill Cosby is escorted by police in handcuffs as he exits the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in Norristown, Pa., on Tuesday. (Credit: Jose F. Moreno/Philadelphia Inquirer)

Cosby Sentencing ‘Shook Me’ as a Black Journalist

“The sight of Bill Cosby being led away in handcuffs following his sentencing for sexual assault on Tuesday shook me to the core,” Greg Braxton wrote for the Los Angeles Times. “For a few moments I stopped breathing. Although this ending to the long and sad legal saga was inevitable, it was still overwhelming to actually see it play out on national television.

“Please don’t get me wrong. This emotional response is not in any way dismissive of the horrific acts that Cosby is convicted of, or the pain and anguish his numerous victims have suffered for decades. That he has still not uttered one word of apology nor expressed any kind of remorse makes his crimes even more monstrous.

Greg Braxton

“The initial gut reaction is more about reconciling the fall from grace of a once-universally beloved entertainer now labeled as a ‘sexually violent predator’ with my personal recollections of covering and bonding with one of the most beloved pop cultural figures of my generation — a towering figure of black culture who was a success at everything he did.”

“For me as a black journalist, Bill Cosby transcended his status as a top entertainer. He was an African American legend whom I had worshiped since childhood, a larger-than-life figure whom I got to know on a first-name basis and who became one of the touchstones of my career. . . .”

Braxton also wrote, “That’s not to say it was always easy. Interviewing Cosby could at times be a challenge because he would not speak in sound bites. Tangents would go on for several minutes, and I had to learn to be patient if I wanted my questions answered. . . .

“There were also those occasions when I was truly puzzled by Cosby. He could be a great talk show guest, and his upbeat personality and charisma was at the center of his triumphs as a star, pitchman and host of the retooled game show ‘You Bet Your Life’ in the early ’90s. But he could also display a darker edge. . . .”

However, Michael Calderone wrote Wednesday for Politico, “Some prominent journalists have expressed regrets for not adequately following up for years on the accusations against Cosby, which now come from more than 60 women.

“In Nov. 2014, New York Times media columnist David Carr wrote on Cosby’s ‘media enablers,’ including himself, and Ta-Nehisi Coates reflected on his failure to address the allegations in a 2008 Atlantic feature on Cosby.

” ‘I don’t have many writing regrets,’ Coates wrote. ‘But this is one of them. I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough. I take it as a personal admonition to always go there, to never flinch, to never look away.’ . . .”

Balta Leaves ESPN-Disney for Media Diversity Work

Hugo Balta, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, has left ESPN, his employer for the last seven years, he announced this week.

Hugo Balta

“Balta joined ESPN in 2011 as a coordinating producer for ‘SportsCenter’ and was named Senior Director of Multicultural Content for ESPN’s Digital & Print Media team two years later,” Veronica Villafañe reported Thursday for her Media Moves column.

“In 2016, he moved to a new role at the sports cable network that focused on diversity and inclusion as Senior Director of Hispanic Initiatives at ESPN Deportes.

“I’m taking advantage of an opportunity to take all I’ve learned in the past several years in order to focus on projects where I can integrate journalism, diversity and inclusion and a focus on best serving the U.S. Hispanic audience,” Balta tells Media Moves.

“ ‘I will be working with NJ Spotlight, CALmatters, Identidad Latina and other print/digital media in expanding their reach of Hispanics/Latinos by developing strategies for improving storytelling in English and Spanish in local and national coverage.’ ”

Balta messaged Journal-isms Friday, “The work I will be doing is consistent with the responsibilities I had during my 7 years with ESPN and the Disney ABC Television Group, including overseeing news coverage. That work is consistent with my eligibility as a regular member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) and as such fulfills the requirements to serve as a member of the national board.”

Balta announced earlier this month he had become on-camera talent coach for the NWT Group. “The work for NWT helps me fund the not-for-profit I started in 2016 to raise funds for scholarships to Latino journalism students,” Balta said then.

N.Y. Times to Begin Yearlong Fellowship Program

The New York Times is replacing its newsroom summer internship program with a yearlong fellowship aimed at recent graduates of college and graduate school, the Times announced on Friday.

“We hope that this new immersive program will benefit not only the participants and The Times, but other newsrooms. We expect most of our fellows will graduate to positions at other publications,” the announcement said.

“We plan to open an application window later this fall, with our first class of fellows starting in summer 2019. We will post the application link soon on our Careers page.”  The newspaper said it would determine the size of the first class at a later date.

While the Times is discontinuing its two-year David Carr Fellowship, launched in 2015, it said the Summer Journalism Institute will remain. The institute is for “students (or December or May graduates) who are members of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists or the National Association of Black Journalists or students (or December or May graduates) at a historically black college or university.”

Among the “frequently asked questions” [PDF] the Times posted was “How does this relate to diversity initiatives at The Times?”

It answered, “Building a diverse and inclusive workplace is essential to our mission. It enriches our report, because journalists with diverse backgrounds reflect the society we cover. As noted in our diversity report, many of the numbers are moving in the right direction — though not far enough or fast enough. However, there is evidence that our efforts are paying off. Companywide, 61 percent of our new hires in 2017 were women, and 39 percent were people of color.”

Poll Finds Nonwhites Not as Harsh on Media

Despite longstanding complaints about the news media, the Pew Research Center found that nonwhites are more favorably disposed than whites when pollsters questioned U.S. adults about the media’s watchdog role.

A greater percentage of nonwhite adults than white adults ranked the media more highly on these criteria:

The figures are at odds with other studies of people of color and the news media. In February, for instance, a study of Twitter users sponsored by the Knight Foundation reported that “when media outlets do try to cover minority groups, they actually drive up disdain on the platform. Not only is hate-tweeting articles a real thing, it may be the dominant mode for how minorities talk about media coverage about their communities, as Cliff Kuang reported then for fastcodesign.com.

Overall, Jeffrey Gottfried, Galen Stocking and Elizabeth Grieco of Pew reported Tuesday, “After a year of continued tension between President Donald Trump and the news media, the partisan divides in attitudes toward the news media that widened in the wake of the 2016 presidential election remain stark, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of survey data of 5,035 U.S. adults collected between Feb. 22 and March 4, 2018. . . .

” A vast majority of Democrats (82%) say in the survey conducted earlier this year that they support the news media’s watchdog role, believing that news media criticism keeps political leaders from doing things that shouldn’t be done. On the other hand, the majority of Republicans (58%) think news media criticism gets in the way of political leaders doing their job. . . .”

Telly Lovelace protests to the Journal-isms Roundtable, discussing the upcoming midterm elections on Tuesday, that he’s no longer the person to ask about the Republican Party. “I changed my party registration to Democrat,” he said. (Credit: George Dalton Tolbert IV)

Was GOP’s Black-Media Man, Now He’s a Democrat

As national director of African American Initiatives and Media for the Republican National Committee, Telly Lovelace was the go-to guy for journalists seeking information about African Americans and the Republican Party.

But now Donald Trump is president, and Lovelace is no longer a Republican.

“Just last spring, I changed my party registration to Democrat,” Lovelace told the Journal-isms Roundtable in Washington on Tuesday.

“I used to see Ron Dellums on the elevator” at the Capitol, Lovelace said of the activist Bay Area congressman who died at 82 on July 30. Dellums and other House Democrats “knew I was a Republican and they would always tell me, ‘Telly, you’re always welcome to come home.’

“This spring, I finally came home. I did it out of frustration with what’s going on with the Republican Party. . . . but also, I wanted to vote in the Maryland Democratic primary. I wanted to have a say in that. There’s not much action in the Republican side, outside of Larry Hogan there,” speaking of the incumbent governor running against Ben Jealous, the Democrat who would become the state’s first African American governor.

“I think he will be re-elected,” Lovelace said of Hogan. “The numbers are showing that, but I voted for Ben Jealous in the primary.” Lovelace also said, “at the end of the day, the Republican Party became the party of Trump. I personally saw that, witnessed that, being at the Republican National Committee in the latest stages of the primary going into the general election, that the Republican Party, the RNC, the entire apparatus, structure was becoming Trump, and day to day, that’s who we are, so. . . .”

The Republican National Committee did not respond to a question about whether the African American liaison position was filled. Former RNC Chairman Reince Priebus appointed Lovelace to the job on April 1, 2016.

“Trump received 8 percent of the black vote in the 2016 general election, and many black Republicans were on record saying they would not support him,” Vanessa Williams wrote June 15 in the Washington Post. With Omarosa Manigault’s departure,” Williams added, “Ben Carson, the retired pediatric neurosurgeon who also ran for president in the last election, is the lone high-profile African American in the administration. He is the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. . . .”

Lovelace is now a principal at Lovelace Capitol Strategies, describing himself as a public relations/strategic communications/government affairs professional.

Librarians, Translators Aid Mexican Journalist

“Journalists were scandalized when the Trump administration jailed an award-winning Mexican journalist in Texas and sought to extradite him to the homeland he fled after death threats,” David Beard reported Wednesday for the Poynter Institute.

Emilio Gutiérrez Soto (Credit: Julian Aguilar/Texas Tribune)

“In July, Emilio Gutiérrez Soto seemed to have had a happy ending. He was freed from an El Paso detention facility after his case was championed by the National Press Club, and he moved north to attend a prestigious mid-career journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan.

“But a hearing remains in October before [an] immigration judge in Texas, who has doubted Gutiérrez Soto’s work or his reason to fear persecution if deported. Judge Robert Hough, disregarding investigations into the Mexican army’s role in threatening Gutiérrez Soto’s life after his reporting of soldiers’ theft from migrants, asked for proof — clips — that he had actually been a journalist.

“To that end, librarians and translators have worked to unearth three decades of his journalism from local outlets in Mexico’s northern Chihuahua state.

“Molly Molloy, a research librarian at New Mexico State, searched through an online database to recover 144 of his bylined stories. And this weekend, more than 60 Spanish-language translators have signed up for a ‘translate-a-thon’ that seeks to compile an English-language portfolio of Gutiérrez Soto’s work for the court.

“Is there a sense of urgency? ‘Absolutely,’ said Julie Evershed, director of the University of Michigan’s Language Resource Center and organizer of the weekend effort in Ann Arbor. She has had 150 translators of all languages volunteer. . . .”

CNN Having Hard Time Keeping Trump Defenders

“CNN’s shows regularly feature people who like to defend the administration of President Donald Trump. Keeping their seats filled is becoming a tougher task,” Brian Steinberg reported Monday for Variety.

“Jason Miller had become a steady presence on CNN, appearing on programs like ‘Erin Burnett OutFront’ to defend White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, among other Trump officials. But Miller, a former Trump campaign aide, left his role as a CNN political analyst this weekend after allegations about his off-camera behavior surfaced, in the process becoming the latest pro-Trumper to exit the network after gaining national recognition for his appearances.

“He joins a growing parade of Trump defenders who have found it difficult to stay on CNN. The AT&T-owned cable-news network in August suspended Paris Dennard, a strong defender of Trump decisions, after The Washington Post reported Dennard had been fired from a job at Arizona State University for what the paper called ‘inappropriate incidents’ involving two women there.

“Ed Martin, a former Missouri Republican Party chairman who also hosts a radio show, offered outspoken pro-Trump commentary on CNN for several months before parting ways after describing some African-American members of a CNN panel in which he was included as ‘black racists.’ And of course, CNN cut ties with one of its most polarizing and well-known Trump backers, Jeffrey Lord, after he used the phrase ‘Sieg heil!’ on Twitter. . . .”

Short Takes

Members of the Washington Post Metro Seven reunite at the New York home of Clifford and Adele Alexander on Saturday. The Metro Seven were black Washington Post reporters who filed a complaint against the newspaper with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1972. Cliff Alexander was the group’s lawyer. From left: Richard Prince, Ron Taylor, Ivan C. Brandon, Clifford J. Alexander, Leon Dash and Bobbi Bowman. Penny Mickelbury was unable to be present; Michael B. Hodge died last year. < http://bit.ly/2w7ZE3n > Story on the Metro Seven < http://bit.ly/2vODU8z > (Credit: Adele Alexander)
Frances Robles

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