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Media Were Indispensable in Arbery Case

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Determined Reporter, Talk Show Host Played Roles

From Nov. 24:

Reporting Helps Free Long-Held Innocent Man:
Kansas City Star Undertook Its Own Investigation
‘Groveton Four’ Exonerated in 1949 Case
Grady’s Name to Remain on UGA J-School
Billingsley Honor Is a First for Black Cartoonists

Short Takes: Kevin Lightfoot; Facebook and race; “food apartheid”; Columbia Journalism School; Scott M. Mills; Canadian pipeline arrests; Univision’s “Despierta America”; Fernando González; “Black and Missing”; Vincent Chin; “The Press in Prison”; journalist killed in suicide bombing; Native perspective on Thanksgiving.

Homepage photo: Celebrating the verdict in the murder of Armaud Arbery (Credit: ABC News)

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Ali Velshi said “Amen” to the #SupportLocalJournalism slogan repeated by the Brunswick News, “The world needs trustworthy reporting. But good journalism isn`t free.” (video)

Determined Reporter, Talk Show Host Played Roles

Were it not for a dogged newspaper reporter in coastal Brunswick, Ga., and a talk radio broadcaster in the same town, it is unlikely that justice would ever have been meted out in the murder of Armaud Arbery.

“In the small coastal Georgia town of Brunswick, rumors swirled about a Black man who was shot while being pursued by two armed White men in a pickup truck, but no one was charged and the case received little attention nationally,” Meryl Kornfield wrote Wednesday in The Washington Post, recounting the Feb. 23, 2020, shooting.

“It wasn’t until May 5, when a local radio station uploaded graphic footage of the deadly chase, that widespread outrage ensued. Two days later — 74 days after Arbery was killed while on a jog — arrests were made.

“The convictions of Travis McMichael, 35, his father, Greg McMichael, 65, and their neighbor William ‘Roddie’ Bryan, 52, on Wednesday raised recollections of the beginning of the case when police let the men walk free and two prosecutors did not press charges. Yet, after just two days of deliberations, the jury found the three men guilty of murder and other charges for the pursuit and fatal shooting of Arbery.”

Ali Velshi, substituting for Rachel Maddow on her MSNBC show Wednesday, told viewers, “Over the past few years journalists have increasingly been forced to question official police accounts. In June of 2020, three months after Breonna Taylor was killed, police in Louisville, Kentucky, released a nearly blank report omitting that she was shot eight times by police.

“The month before, when George Floyd was killed, Minneapolis police failed to initially report that Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes. And when Ahmaud Arbery was killed near Brunswick, Georgia, last year, seasoned local journalist Larry Hobbs (pictured) of the Brunswick News knew that he needed to push for information because the police weren’t sharing enough.

“So instead of relying on official statements, Hobbs filed a public records request. As Hobbs told this show today, the less answers you give us, the more questions we ask. Accordingly, he started to ask police, quote, why a young man was shot dead in the middle of a sleepy neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon? Why an unarmed burglary suspect is shot dead in the middle of a public street and not, say, inside a burgled home?

“Also, was there a conflict of interest since one of the suspects previously worked for the district attorney?

“Well, his curiosity paid off. The public record request that Hobbs filed allowed him to obtain a police report containing the first preliminary answers as to how and why Arbery was killed. He published his findings on April 2nd, 2020. It was the first time America and perhaps Arbery`s family got a better picture of what happened.”

Hobbs, a crime reporter, continued to follow the story. A month after his initial report came another break.

As Bert Roughton Jr. and Brad Schrade would write May 17, 2020, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “On May 4, more than two months after the shooting, attorney Alan Tucker took a thumb drive containing a video clip to a Brunswick radio station. It showed the shooting in graphic detail.

“ ‘It almost steals your soul to watch that video,’ morning show host Scott Ryfun (pictured) said.”

In addition to his hosting job at WGIG in Brunswick, Ryfun is vice president of programming at iHeart Brunswick, which has five stations in the market.

“I consulted two members of the Black community before I released the video, both of whom are very politically astute and one of whom is a community leader,” Ryfun messaged Journal-isms on Friday. “The leader has always asked that I not share his identity. . . .”

The AJC continued, “ ‘Do I put that out?’ Ryfun asked himself.

“Ryfun, who is white, and the civic leader, who is black, watched the tape together, mostly in silence.” They compared the tape to a letter from George Barnhill, the district attorney in neighboring Ware County, which was providing backup in the case, saying he found no cause for arrest.

“ ‘That’s not what I saw,’ the civic leader said.

“Arbery was black. The McMichaels are white.

“Ryfun posted the video on May 5. The station removed it within two hours, deeming it too graphic. But that was enough time to change everything.”

Tucker told Sarah Mervosh of The New York Times last year “that the video had come from the cellphone of a man who had filmed the episode and that he later gave the footage to the radio station. Mr. Tucker’s role was confirmed by Scott Ryfun, who oversees the station’s programming.

“Asked why he had leaked the video, Mr. Tucker said he had wanted to dispel rumors that he said had fueled tension in the community. “It wasn’t two men with a Confederate flag in the back of a truck going down the road and shooting a jogger in the back,” Mr. Tucker said.

“It got the truth out there as to what you could see,” he added. “My purpose was not to exonerate them or convict them.”

Bryan recorded the video; he gave it to the police before he also gave it to Tucker, the Times said. “Yet it was arguably the outrage which came in the wake of the video that led higher authorities to finally act after the original officials on the case were scolded for not doing enough,” Aaron Keller wrote May 9, 2020, for Law & Crime.

Bryan was found guilty of felony murder, as were his co-defendants, the McMichaels.

In an understatement, NYU Law Prof. Stephen Gillers told Law & Crime, “It was certainly not in the McMichaels’ interest” to have a lawyer with whom the eventual defendants consulted “disclose the video to a news outlet.”

As for Hobbs, he wrote on Facebook on Wednesday, “On so many occasions, this strange and exotic and beautiful place called the South that I love so much has come up wanting in times of reckoning. (This certainly holds true for a certain Southern demographic, of which I am a member.) Today, Nov. 24, 2021, in a town called Brunswick on the Georgia Coast, was not such an occasion. I do not usually post newspaper stories from my day job here, but I am making an exception. Tomorrow, I think I will go fishing. Peace, y’all. ✌?✌”

Ryfun messaged Friday, “It’s been bizarre to see all of this unfold on a national level simply because I clicked ‘upload.’ My worry initially was that it could do more harm than good, because I knew people would be angry when they saw it, and I wasn’t sure if the power structure in this town would relent to allowing a proper examination of this tragedy.

“Ultimately they had no choice. I didn’t sleep or eat much the first two days, but when the state issued arrest warrants that Thursday, I knew the right thing had been done and I believed it would result in justice.”

Reporting Helps Free Long-Held Innocent Man

Nov. 24, 2021

Kansas City Star Undertook Its Own Investigation
‘Groveton Four’ Exonerated in 1949 Case
Grady’s Name to Remain on UGA J-School
Billingsley Honor Is a First for Black Cartoonists

Short Takes: Kevin Lightfoot; Facebook and race; “food apartheid”; Columbia Journalism School; Scott M. Mills; Canadian pipeline arrests; Univision’s “Despierta America”; Fernando González; “Black and Missing”; Vincent Chin; “The Press in Prison”; journalist killed in suicide bombing; Native perspective on Thanksgiving.

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After 43 years, Kevin Strickland left prison Tuesday after judge vacated his conviction in a 1978 triple murder. Strickland, who said he was in disbelief, was freed from prison after the seventh-longest wrongful imprisonment confirmed in U.S. history. (Credit: Tammy Lijungblad/Kansas City Star)

Nov. 26 update: Nearly $1.2 million raised from donors around the world to aid Kevin Strickland (Kansas City Star)

Kansas City Star Undertook Its Own Investigation

“A Kansas City man who was jailed for more than 40 years for three murders was released from prison Tuesday after a judge ruled that he was wrongfully convicted in 1979,” Heather Hollingsworth and Margaret Stafford reported for the Associated Press. A major share of the credit goes to reporting by the Kansas City Star.

It was the seventh-longest wrongful imprisonment confirmed in U.S. history, according to the Star.

“Kevin Strickland, 62, has always maintained that he was home watching television and had nothing to do with the killings, which happened when he was 18 years old,” the AP reporters wrote. “He learned of the decision when the news scrolled across the television screen as he was watching a soap opera. He said inmates began screaming.

“ ‘I’m not necessarily angry. It’s a lot. I think I’ve created emotions that you all don’t know about just yet,’ he told reporters as he left the Western Missouri Correctional Center in Cameron [Mo.]. ‘Joy, sorrow, fear. I am trying to figure out how to put them together.’ “

Strickland had maintained his innocence from the beginning. The case against him “was ‘thin from its inception’ and relied almost entirely on the testimony of a traumatized woman who was shot during the murders, prosecutors now say,” Luke Nozicka (pictured) and Matti Gellman reported for the Star. But that was not enough to free Strickland.

As the Star’s Nozicka, Robert A. Cronkleton and Tammy Ljungblad reported Tuesday, “Strickland’s innocence was the focus of a September 2020 investigation by The Star, which interviewed more than 20 people, including two men who admitted guilt and swore Strickland was not with them and two other accomplices during the killings. The Star also reported that the lone eyewitness to the murders, whose testimony was paramount in the case against Strickland, told relatives she wanted to recant her identification of him and believed she helped send the wrong teenager to prison.

“Jackson County prosecutors began reviewing Strickland’s conviction in November 2020 after speaking with his lawyers and reviewing The Star’s investigation.”

In May, Jackson County, Mo., Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker’s office “announced that Strickland is ‘factually innocent’ in the April 25, 1978, triple murder at 6934 S. Benton Avenue in Kansas City and should be freed immediately. . . .”

Jackson County’s prosecutors determined that Kevin Strickland, who’s spent 40+ years in prison for a 1978 triple murder, is innocent. The Midwest Innocence Project filed a petition to overturn the conviction. (Credit: Jill Toyoshiba/Kansas City Star)

There is more to editorialize about.

“Asked what he thought about the criminal justice system, Strickland said it ‘needs to be torn down and redone. ‘It don’t work,’ he said. ‘I mean, it work here in the long run, but it took 43 years to get here.’ ”

Moreover, Strickland “will not receive any compensation from the state for his more than 42 years behind bars,” Nozicka and Katie Moore reported.

“That’s because Missouri’s compensation law only allows for payments to prisoners who prove their innocence through a specific DNA testing statute. That was not the case for Strickland, or most exonerees across America. Unlike guilty prisoners, a parole officer will not help Strickland find counseling, housing or work. And unlike exonerees in some other states, he will not be eligible through a compensation package for social services, such as participating in the state’s healthcare program.” 

“If you want to pitch in to help Strickland begin building back his life, the Midwest Innocence Project coordinated a GoFundMe fundraiser where you can donate. So far, people have donated more than $70,000, which comes to about $1,666 for each year he was wrongfully incarcerated,” wrote the Star’s Nozicka and Allison Dikanovic.

The Star followed its reporting with editorials.

‘”Gov. Mike Parson not pardoning Kevin Strickland shames MO,” read one headline from July 3, adding, “No pardon for Kevin Strickland, whose continued incarceration is a national shame.”

A Sept. 22 headline asked, “Are Missouri politics keeping an innocent man in prison?”

Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s No. 1 personality, held up copies of the Star’s stories on its investigation on her show Tuesday night. “The Midwest Innocence Project, the Kansas City Star and, remarkably, the local prosecutor’s office finally got him free today“ (video), she said.

Online, Maddow was joined in her kudos to the Star by Tony Messenger, Pulitzer Prize winning Metro columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and former editorial page editor there. Messenger tweeted his congratulations.

There is more to editorialize about.

“Asked what he thought about the criminal justice system, Strickland said it ‘needs to be torn down and redone.’“It don’t work,” he said. “I mean, it work here in the long run, but it took 43 years to get here,” the Star reported.

Moreover, Strickland “will not receive any compensation from the state for his more than 42 years behind bars. That’s because Missouri’s compensation law only allows for payments to prisoners who prove their innocence through a specific DNA testing statute. That was not the case for Strickland, or most exonerees across America, Nozicka and Katie Moore reported.

“Unlike guilty prisoners, a parole officer will not help Strickland find counseling, housing or work. And unlike exonerees in some other states, he will not be eligible through a compensation package for social services, such as participating in the state’s healthcare program.

“If you want to pitch in to help Strickland begin building back his life, the Midwest Innocence Project coordinated a GoFundMe fundraiser where you can donate. So far, people have donated more than $70,000, which comes to about $1,666 for each year he was wrongfully incarcerated,” wrote the Star’s Nozicka and Allison Dikanovic.

The Star editorialized Wednesday, “Kevin Strickland gets a measure of justice, but Missouri needs to write him a check”

From left: Jailer Reuben Hatcher, Walter Irvin, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd and Lake County, Fla., Sheriff Willis McCall. (Courtesy of Gary Corsair via Orlando Sentinel)

‘Groveton Four’ Exonerated in 1949 Case

“Four Black men wrongly charged with raping a white woman more than 70 years ago in Florida were exonerated on Monday, bringing an end to a saga that has shadowed their families for decades,” Amanda Holpuch reported Monday for The New York Times. The four had been pardoned in 2019.

“The accused — Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd and Ernest Thomas, known as the Groveland Four — died before Florida officials re-examined the case, which a prosecutor said lacked due process and would not be tried today.

“It all began on July 16, 1949, when a 17-year-old white woman and her estranged husband told the police that after their car broke down in Lake County, Fla., the four men had stopped to provide help, then took the woman from the car and raped her.

“The accusation left a trail of destruction. Mr. Thomas was killed by a mob after fleeing Lake County. Mr. Irvin and Mr. Shepherd, both of whom were World War II veterans, were shot by Willis McCall, the Lake County Sheriff, while they were being taken to a pretrial hearing before their cases were retried in 1951. The sheriff claimed that the men, who were in handcuffs, had tried to escape. . . .”

In 2019, the Orlando Sentinel posted an apology for its complicity.

“We’re sorry for the Orlando Sentinel’s role in this injustice. We’re sorry that the newspaper at the time did between little and nothing to seek the truth. We’re sorry that our coverage of the event and its aftermath lent credibility to the cover-up and the official, racist narrative.

“We’re sorry that reporters and editors failed in our duty to readers, to the community and to the Groveland Four and their families. . . .”

Widespread interest in the Groveland Four was renewed in 2012 by Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America.”

The Editorial Board of Georgia State University’s The Signal published this photo illustration with a 2019 editorial urging that a statue of Henry W. Grady come down.

Grady’s Name to Remain on UGA J-School

The Georgia Board of Regents decided Monday it would not move forward with an advisory group’s recommendations to rename more than six dozen buildings and colleges on public university campuses statewide, including the journalism school at the University of Georgia, named for Henry W. Grady.

Grady, editor of The Atlanta Constitution after the Civil War, has been described as a cheerleader for the reconstruction of Atlanta and the “New South.” “Critics, though, say some of his speeches and writings supported white supremacy,” Eric Stirgus wrote Monday for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“The board’s decision was criticized by several people who pressed in recent months for the changes, saying many buildings are named after slave owners and segregationists. One group that wanted the name of Henry W. Grady removed from the University of Georgia’s journalism and mass communications school, called the decision ‘not surprising.’

“ ‘It demonstrates to us the board’s support of racism and the upholding of white supremacy,’ the group, #RenameGrady, said in a statement. ‘This failure signals a willful ignorance of the history of people of color and a disregard for the physical, emotional, and mental well-being of (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) students who have to walk the halls of these institutions every day.’ . . .”

Last year, two alumnae circulated a petition to rename the school after Charlayne Hunter-Gault (scroll down). “We “demand that you take the necessary steps to rid the journalism & mass communication college of its association with this racist, white supremacist, and we strongly recommend that you consider renaming the college after one of its most storied graduates — award-winning journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who courageously integrated this University in 1961, ” they wrote. The petition gathered more than 9,100 signatures.

Billingsley Honor Is a First for Black Cartoonists

“Ray Billingsley (pictured) didn’t much like his second-floor Harlem home on Bradhurst Avenue back then,” Michael Cavna reported Monday for The Washington Post. “It was affordable — this being the mid-’80s — but he felt isolated, and he knew crime was a threat: ‘One evening while in bed with the window open, I actually heard three guys planning on burglarizing my apartment.’

“Yet this setting was also where, later that night after going to bed, Billingsley drew inspiration. He awoke with a creative burst. ‘I had a vision of these two kids. I sketched them down in the dark and went back to sleep. That morning, I found the first images of Curtis and Barry.’ . . .”

Cavna also wrote, “In October 1988, King Features launched Billingsley’s comic strip ‘Curtis,’ centering on the 11-year-old title character and brother Barry, and featuring a predominantly Black cast, which was rare in syndicated comics of the era. The family strip soon proved popular with millions of readers; today, ‘Curtis’ has about 220 print clients and 300 digital clients, according to King.

“Thirty-three years later, Billingsley smiles into his computer’s camera as he records an acceptance speech (video) from his Stamford, Conn., home. ‘I never thought I’d see this day,’ he says last month, pausing as he feels the moment. He recalls later by phone: ‘I was on the verge of tears.’

“Billingsley has just won the Reuben Award for outstanding cartoonist of the year. It is the 75th year of the National Cartoonists Society’s peer-voted prize — whose legendary recipients include Charles Schulz, Matt Groening, Rube Goldberg and Roz Chast — but 2021 marks the first time that it has been won by a Black creator, according to comics historians. ‘This has been a huge step for me, as well as a [huge] step for the NCS,’ Billingsley says into the camera, adding: ‘This has been a very long journey, and I have literally lived my life on a deadline.’

“Billingsley, 64, has spent more than a half-century at the drawing board, having turned professional at age 12. He grew up devouring all types of humor and became very aware of such pioneering mid-century Black cartoonists as Morrie Turner (creator of ‘Wee Pals’), Ted Shearer (‘Quincy’) and Brumsic Brandon Jr. (‘Luther’).

“ ‘It’s been Ray — alone — who has bridged the gap between the first Black nationally syndicated newspaper cartoonists in the [mainstream] White press in the ’60s and ’70s to the current lot,’ says cartoonist Barbara Brandon-Croft (‘Where I’m Coming From’), daughter of Brandon Jr. and the first African American woman to be nationally syndicated to mainstream newspapers. Such strips as ‘JumpStart,’ ‘Mama’s Boyz’ and ‘The Boondocks’ followed Billingsley’s syndication debut. . . .”

Short Takes

Jamie Edwards tends an urban garden that was a vacant lot in North St. Louis. Edwards said she’s had to overcome escalating costs and accidental demolitions as she tries to feed the community. (Credit: Wiley Price/St. Louis American)
Various ingredients foraged from prairie land around Coteau des Prairies Lodge near Havana, N.D., in 2016.(Credit: Dan Koeck—The New York Times/Redux)
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