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Rittenhouse Warms Up to Tucker Carlson

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Lawyer, Overruled, Says He Ousted Fox Crew
Malcolm X Expert: What Took D.A. So Long?
‘1619 Project’ Debuts in Book Form
. . . The 19th Launches Fellowship for HBCU Grads
Watch the Terms You Use for Native Americans
AP Finds U.S. Prison System to Be ‘Hotbed of Abuse’
. . . Racist Florida Guards Go Unpunished

Screws Would Turn to Force Diversity Disclosures
Facebook Pledges Action on Black, Latino Issues
Gala Honors Press-Freedom Heroes
About Brazil’s Press: ‘No Idea How White It Was’
Ethiopia Warns Western News Organizations

Short Takes: Build Back Better and local journalism; Raju Narisetti; Lester Sloan; Natalie Morales; Jared Servantez; Journal-isms assistant editor position; U.S. media coverage of Palestine; repression of Palestinian journalists; Eritrea; Nigeria.

Homepage photo: Demonstrators and media assembled outside the Kenosha County Courthouse after the verdict was read in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. (Credit: WITI-TV, Milwaukee)

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Justin Blake, uncle of Jacob Blake, the man who was partially paralyzed in the police shooting that ignited the protests in Kenosha, Wis., explains his disappointment to crowds at the Kenosha courthouse. (Credit: WTMJ-TV Milwaukee)

Lawyer, Overruled, Says He Ousted Fox Crew

Right-wing media are embracing Kyle Rittenhouse, found not guilty of all charges Friday in the shooting deaths of two men and the wounding of a third. Meanwhile, the 18-year-old’s lawyer disclosed that members of a film crew working for Fox News host Tucker Carlson embedded themselves with the Rittenhouse defense team despite the lawyer’s opposition.

“Tucker Carlson revealed on Friday night that his Originals series on Fox Nation would premiere a documentary about Kyle Rittenhouse, who was found not guilty on all counts earlier in the day,” Michael Luciano reported Friday for Mediaite. In addition, Carlson will interview Rittenhouse Monday night on Fox News” (photo below).

Rittenhouse was accused of killing two white men and wounding another during a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wis., in August 2020. He said he was acting in self-defense.

Rittenhouse attorney Mark Richards was interviewed by Chris Cuomo on CNN hours after the acquittals, Luciano reported.

“ ‘ Please don’t take this question the wrong way and let me know if you’re taking it the wrong way,’ said Cuomo. ‘Word [is] that you guys had a film crew embedded with you from Fox News from Tucker Carlson.’

“ ‘I hadn’t,’ said Richards.

“ ‘I want to know why that decision was made,’ said the CNN host.

“ ‘I did not approve of that,’ replied Richards. ‘I threw them out of the room several times. They were — and I’m not suggesting that Fox or some other network — I don’t think a film crew is appropriate for something like this. But the people who were raising the money to pay for the experts and to pay for the attorneys were trying to raise money. And that was part of it. So, I think – I don’t want to say an evil, but a definite distraction was part of it. And I didn’t approve of it, but I’m not always the boss. . . . ‘

“CUOMO: Were you worried that your client was becoming an agent of animus? I mean, Fox News is one thing. I used to work there. Tucker Carlson is a different animal. You know what he means in the political dialogue. Were you worried that Rittenhouse was going to become a stooge of that fringe of our political spectrum?

“RICHARDS: I had a talk with Kyle. All I can say is what I say. And Kyle’s going to have some hard choices in his life about the direction he goes and what he stands for. Those will have to be made by Kyle eventually.”

Asked who made the calls about who would receive access to the process, Richards replied, “Kyle’s family and his adviser.”

Separately, Kenosha County Circuit Court Judge Bruce Schroeder said reporters who wanted to communicate with jurors will have to go through him.

“Schroeder said a number of outlets wanted to talk to jurors and that he would allow them to make presentations in writing,” John Eggerton reported for nexttv.com. “It was entirely up to jurors whether they wanted to contact those outlets, he said, but ‘they are not to contact you.’

“He said jurors who are contacted and did not want to talk should say they are not interested in discussing the case, adding: ‘If anyone persists in doing so, report that to us and it will be addressed, I assure you.’ ”

Demonstrators in Oakland, Calif., raise their fists Friday during a protest against the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse and his role in the deadly Kenosha shooting. (Credit: Stephen Lam /San Francisco Chronicle)

Assessing the verdict, journalists of color cited the fabric of white supremacy in the criminal justice system and in the nation; others spoke of the nature of Wisconsin laws or a biased judge.

“To be a white person who stands up for African-American lives is to place yourself in opposition to the great body of whiteness and privilege by which this country is driven,” wrote Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.

Jonathan Capehart gave a nuanced response Friday on the “PBS NewsHour.”

“I’m not surprised by the verdict, because of the instructions from the judge, because of Wisconsin law, and the law as it pertains to self-defense,” Capehart said.

“I read parts of the statute, and I’m looking at it. And I’m thinking, if I were on that jury, and this was the evidence that was presented to me, and I take my role as a juror seriously, what else am I left to do?

“But that’s not an indictment of the jury. That’s an indictment of the law. That is an indictment of — I think of society, in that you can . . . take the video and a different narrative shows up. But that then requires you to live in a silo, and not take into account, why on earth was he there in the first place?

“And he shouldn’t have been there. And so while, sure, great, on the law, he should have been released, but that’s not how people live. People don’t live in silos. And that’s why I think people are sort of outraged by this verdict.”

Panelists on PBS’ “Washington Week” discuss the exonerations in the assassination of Malcolm X.

Malcolm X Expert: What Took D.A. So Long?

A 2020 Netflix documentary series, “Who Killed Malcolm X?” and efforts by the Innocence Project prompted Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. to review the convictions of Khalil Islam and Muhammad A. Aziz, who last week were exonerated in the crime, their convictions tossed out.

But at the time, experts on the assassination scoffed at the notion that the Netflix series had produced any new evidence, and many had identified the actual killers, something the Vance probe did not do.

Journalist and author Peter Goldman (pictured) was one such expert. He met Malcolm in 1962 when Goldman worked for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and was later national affairs writer for Newsweek, and was dogged in his determination to find out who killed Malcolm.

Journal-isms asked Goldman his reaction to last week’s developments. He asked what took the D.A. so long and said he had been rebuffed when he had outlined his findings to that office in the late 1970s .

Goldman replied:

“My opinion of the Netflix series hasn’t changed, but if its shallow mediocrity was enough to get the New York district attorney’s office to review and undo this historic wrong, we owe it our thanks.

“My own reaction was, what took so long? The evidence that two of the three accused assassins were innocent has been accessible for years. I laid out much of it in the second edition of my book, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, and expanded on it in a third edition, with the aid of the brilliant black historian Paul Lee. I pressed the case in articles in Newsweek and The New York Times. I appeared on several major TV shows and series and consulted on others. My message was constant: two of the three convicted men, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, were innocent beyond a reasonable doubt.

“I outlined my findings to the New York DA’s office.

“A mid-level staff member returned the last of my several calls.

” ‘Our office considers this case closed,’ she said.

“In the third edition, published eight years ago, I laid out my final judgment and the supporting evidence Paul Lee had provided me: the murder of Malcolm X was ordered by Elijah Muhammad and carried out by six-member ‘special squad’ from the Newark and Paterson, N.J., mosques of the Nation of Islam. One of the convicted men, Mujahid Halim, was in fact a member of that squad; we have his word in a sworn affidavit and in several interviews with me that his two co-defendants, Aziz and Islam, were innocent.

“Each of the three men — two innocent, one guilty and repentant — spent twenty-plus years in prison. Islam did not live to see his exoneration. Aziz stood alone when the judge undid his conviction. His feelings, as he told me that evening, were mixed. He was obviously pleased by the verdict, but underlying his smiles were a residual bitterness at what his conviction had cost him and his family. He’d lost his marriage, his connections, the prime-time of his life.

“We’d become friends during his prison years, when we were newly middle-aged. When we bro-hugged the last time on the night of his exoneration, we were two old men. My life had been fulfilling. His had been all but ruined by a misdirected rush to injustice.”

‘1619 Project’ Debuts in Book Form

“The 1619 Project” arrived in book form this week, with its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times Magazine, on a promotional tour and appearing in one-third of the covers of the new issue of Essence magazine. Hannah-Jones, Simone Biles and Lizzo split the press run of the November/December edition.

“The project, which started with a collection of essays in the New York Times two years ago, recontextualizes American history by shifting our attention from 1776 to 1619 when the first enslaved Africans were brought to these shores“ (scroll down), Ron Charles writes for the Washington Post Book Club newsletter.

“From its start, ‘The 1619 Project’ has inspired impassioned responses. Some praised it as a long overdue dismantling of American mythology. Others condemned it as an ideological disparagement of the United States. President Trump created ‘The 1776 Commission’ to produce a counterpoint vision of America’s past that was appropriately red, white and blue but especially white.

“Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) suspended his faith in local government to introduce a bill that would limit federal funds to any school that dared teach the 1619 Project.

“This week’s book version of ‘The 1619 Project’ includes expanded versions of those initial NYT essays, along with additional essays and related short stories by Jesmyn Ward, ZZ Packer, Yaa Gyasi and others; and dozens of poems by Claudia Rankine, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rita Dove and more.”

Hannah-Jones told LZ Granderson of the Los Angeles Times, “Who would think that a single work of journalism would become a Republican talking point, would be in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, would be named in legislation across the country? All of that has been very weird. But of course — and I think a lot of things led to the moment that we’re in — 1619 certainly played a role.”

In July 2020, Oprah Winfrey, Lionsgate and The New York Times announced a wide-ranging partnership to develop “The 1619 Project” into an expansive portfolio of feature films, television series and other content for a global audience.

​. . . The 19th Launches Fellowship for HBCU Grads

The 19th, the online magazine that launched in 2020 “committed to rewriting our national narrative: to expanding whose voices are reflected in American media and who gets to tell those stories,” Friday announced “a groundbreaking fellowship program for graduates of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

“The Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Fellowship Program — named for the ‘mother of African American journalism‘ (pictured), funded with a $3.8 million gift from Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden, and developed in partnership with Nikole Hannah-Jones, Howard University’s Knight Chair in Race and Journalism — will provide recent graduates and mid-career alums of Historically Black Colleges and Universities with full-year, salaried and benefit-laden fellowships in the areas of reporting, editing, audience engagement or newsroom technology,” Emily Ramshaw and Amanda Zamora wrote.

 Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is the first Native American cabinet secretary in United States history. (Credit: InStyle)

Watch the Terms You Use for Native Americans

“Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland today formally established a process to review and replace derogatory names of the nation’s geographic features,” the Interior Department announced Friday. “She also declared ‘squaw’ to be a derogatory term and ordered the Board on Geographic Names – the federal body tasked with naming geographic places – to implement procedures to remove the term from federal usage.

” ‘Racist terms have no place in our vernacular or on our federal lands. Our nation’s lands and waters should be places to celebrate the outdoors and our shared cultural heritage – not to perpetuate the legacies of oppression,’ said Secretary Haaland. ‘Today’s actions will accelerate an important process to reconcile derogatory place names and mark a significant step in honoring the ancestors who have stewarded our lands since time immemorial.’ ”

The release also said, “Derogatory names have previously been identified by the Secretary of the Interior or the Board on Geographic Names and have been comprehensively replaced. In 1962, Secretary Stewart Udall identified the N-word as derogatory, and directed that the BGN develop a policy to eliminate its use. In 1974, the Board on Geographic Names identified a pejorative term for ‘Japanese’ as derogatory and eliminated its use.

“Several states have passed legislation prohibiting the use of the word ‘squaw’ in place names, including Montana, Oregon, Maine, and Minnesota. . . .”

The Associated Press Stylebook declared in 2019, “Avoid words such as wampum, warpath, powwow, teepee, brave, squaw, etc., which can be disparaging and offensive.”

Veteran Native journalist Tim Giago once wrote, “If you think Indian women do not object to the word squaw walk up to an Indian woman sometime and say ‘hello, squaw’ and see if you don’t get your face slapped.”

 


A July Associated Press investigation found that “An unknown number of klansmen were working inside the Florida Department of Corrections, with significant power over inmates, Black and white.” (Credit: WCJB-TV)

AP Finds U.S. Prison System to Be ‘Hotbed of Abuse’

“More than 100 federal prison workers have been arrested, convicted or sentenced for crimes since the start of 2019, including a warden indicted for sexual abuse, an associate warden charged with murder, guards taking cash to smuggle drugs and weapons, and supervisors stealing property such as tires and tractors,” Michael Balsamo and Michael R. Sisak reported Nov. 14 for the Associated Press.

“An Associated Press investigation has found that the federal Bureau of Prisons, with an annual budget of nearly $8 billion, is a hotbed of abuse, graft and corruption, and has turned a blind eye to employees accused of misconduct. In some cases, the agency has failed to suspend officers who themselves had been arrested for crimes. . . .”

. . . Racist Florida Guards Go Unpunished

. . . Separately, the AP’s Jason Dearen reported Friday that “Some Florida prison guards openly tout associations with white supremacist groups to intimidate inmates and Black colleagues, a persistent practice that often goes unpunished, according to allegations in public documents and interviews with a dozen inmates and current and former employees in the nation’s third-largest prison system.

“Corrections officials regularly receive reports about guards’ membership in the Ku Klux Klan and criminal gangs, according to former prison inspectors, and current and former officers. . . .

“The people AP talked to, who live and work inside Florida’s prison system, describe it as chronically understaffed and nearly out of control. In 2017, three current and former Florida guards who were Ku Klux Klan members were convicted after the FBI caught them planning a Black former inmate’s murder. . . .”

 


Tennessean columnist LeBron Hill interviews Kia Jarmon, agency director for the Nashville-based MEPR Agency, for an episode of the Black Tennessee Voices conversations on the Voices group’s Facebook page on March 23.

Screws Would Turn to Force Diversity Disclosures

“The News Leaders Association wants to hold newsrooms accountable for improving diversity among their staff,“
Shawna Chen and Russell Contreras reported Nov. 13 for Axios. “The board is discussing partnering with foundations and awards organizations to require participation in its survey when applying for journalism prizes.

“If newsrooms aren’t willing to even assess the problem, the industry will never be able to address issues of equity, said Dallas Morning News executive editor Katrice Hardy (pictured), who chairs the News Leaders Association’s diversity committee. ‘We need more to recognize that it’s not optional.’ “

Meanwhile, in London, top editors concluded that ensuring more diversity among journalists and interviewees is necessary for newsrooms’ survival, Rachel Savage reported Thursday for Reuters.

“The business case for diversity is clear, whether in building credibility by representing society or finding stories that interest and engage readers, panelists told the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s annual Trust Conference.

” ‘ From a financial standpoint, there are so many different advertisers who want to reach different segments of our population,’ said Danielle Belton, who in April became editor in chief of U.S. online news company HuffPost.

” ‘If we’re not making the effort to actually reach those individuals, we’re basically just saying we don’t want them.’ “

Back in the United States, Alisa Cromer reported for Editor & Publisher Friday on a new initiative at The Tennessean in Nashville.

“Engaging the community and curating voices is part of the newspaper’s new approach to building relationships with Black audiences. In 2020, [columnist LeBron] Hill (pictured) was tapped to head the initiative, which now includes a vodcast, a curated monthly email newsletter, a page of Black writers in the Sunday Insights print section, and Hill’s column on Black issues.

“While still on the first leg of a marathon, the initiative has attracted Black audiences to The Tennessean, often for the first time. Less than a year old, the newsletter has a 40% open rate, with a clickthrough rate of 8%.

“ ‘Tennessee is a predominantly conservative area,’ Hill said. ‘For a long time, there were issues that have not been spoken about, but these are issues that people want to talk about.’ . . .”

Facebook Pledges Action on Black, Latino Issues

“The parent company of Facebook and Instagram is looking into whether its platforms treat users differently based on race, after years of criticism particularly from Black users and its own employees about racial bias,” Shannon Bond reported Thursday for NPR.

” ‘There are a lot of members of systemically and historically marginalized communities who feel that their experience on our platforms is different,’ said Roy Austin Jr., vice president of civil rights at Meta, formerly known as Facebook.

“That includes Black users who say their posts about racism have been taken down for violating the company’s hate speech rules. Facebook also apologized in September after a flaw in its artificial intelligence software led to a video of Black men being labeled as ‘primates.’

“Meta is starting by tracking the race of its platforms’ users, which Austin described as ‘a huge step to moving from the anecdotal to the data driven.’ He said the work would allow the company to understand how people’s experiences on Facebook may differ by race, a first step toward addressing any problems. . . .”

Meanwhile, Brian Contreras and Maloy Moore wrote Nov. 16 for the Los Angeles Times about efforts by Latino activists and public officials to stem “the spread of viral misinformation among Latino and Spanish-speaking Facebook users.”

They wrote that a report on the company’s 2020 expenses indicated that after English, the second-highest number of hours spent on work related to measuring and labeling hate speech went toward Spanish-language content.

“But to those seeking to better protect Latinos from targeted disinformation, Facebook’s assertions of sufficient resources — and the concerns voiced by its own employees — raise the question of why it isn’t doing better.” (Photo: Wall graffiti at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.)

Awards Gala Honors Press-Freedom Heroes

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) paid tribute to brave journalists from Guatemala, Mozambique, and Myanmar by presenting them with CPJ’s 2021 International Press Freedom Awards (IPFA) in New York, the press freedom group said Thursday.

“CPJ also honored Hong Kong media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai with its 2021 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award.”

“The quote that stuck with me most was from Matías Guente, executive editor of Canal de Moçambique and CanalMoz,” CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote Thursday in his “Reliable Sources” newsletter. “His newsroom was gutted by an arson attack in August 2020. He was also pursued by local officials, harassed, and intimidated in recent years. ‘They can burn the newsrooms down,’ he said, ‘but they can’t burn thoughts down. The threat of fire only increases what these arsonists fear most, the critical spirit.’

“Via ABC’s recap of the event: ‘CPJ also presented media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai with its Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award — an award reserved for an individual who has shown extraordinary and sustained achievement in the cause of press freedom.’ Lai, the Apple Daily newspaper owner and pro-democracy media mogul, has been behind bars for nearly a year. CPJ reiterated on Thursday that Lai should be released immediately and that all the charges against him should be dropped…”

Journalist Amanda Bennett, a former director of Voice of America, interviewed Lai’s son, Sebastien Lai, who shared the story of his father’s courage in the face of crackdowns from Chinese authorities. (Video)

About Brazil’s Press: ‘No Idea How White It Was’

“For the first time, a quantitative study measured the prevalence of white and Black professionals in newsrooms in Brazil and the result reveals the breadth of inequality between journalists,” Júlio Lubianco wrote Friday for LatAm Journalism Review.

“The Racial Profile of the Brazilian Press shows that 77.6 percent of Brazilian journalists are white, while 20.1 percent are Black. The composition of the population shows that Black people make up 56.1 percent of the 209 million Brazilians, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE, for its acronym in Portuguese).

“ ‘We always knew it was a white press, but we had no idea how white it was. Realizing that the Black population [in journalism] is less than a third of what it represents in the Brazilian general population is shocking. Because there really is no diversity in the newsrooms,” journalist Eduardo Ribeiro, director of Jornalistas & Cia. and Portal dos Jornalistas, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). . . .”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated his government’s call for an unconditional ceasefire Wednesday as a conflict between the Ethiopian government and Tigrayan-led forces raged on. (Credit: Global News/YouTube)

Ethiopia Warns Western News Organizations

​The Ethiopian Media Authority issued warning letters to the Associated Press, CNN, the BBC and Reuters Friday “for [the] manufacturing and disseminating of false news and news analyses” as the country grapples not only with a civil war, but what some are calling the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Amnesty International warned Nov. 5 that “Ethiopia is teetering on the brink of a human rights and humanitarian catastrophe.”

Amnesty noted “an alarming rise in social media posts advocating ethnic violence, and government officials have implored civilians to take up arms against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), which have recently joined forces against the central government.”

The government accused the four international news organizations of favoring the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

The media authority wrote, “media outlets were reporting that the government is using famine and rape as a weapon of war in the Tigray region; producing defamatory reports on the country’s leading institutions and generating news seeking to discredit the country’s leader in the international arena and put the country under intense diplomatic pressure.”

In addition, the “Authority stated in the letters that in issuing licenses for journalistic operations, [it] expects reports not to endanger Ethiopia’s national interest, territorial integrity, or the peaceful coexistence of the people of Ethiopia.”

The Ethiopian crisis is also affecting American politics. Some “Ethiopian Americans in Virginia heeded calls to cast a vote for the GOP at the polls earlier this month amid a coordinated effort to express disapproval with how President Biden has handled growing conflict in the East African nation,” Teo Armus reported Nov. 14 for The Washington Post.

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Richard Prince’s Journal-isms originates from Washington. It began in print before most of us knew what the internet was, and it would like to be referred to as a “column.” Any views expressed in the column are those of the person or organization quoted and not those of any other entity. Send tips, comments and concerns to Richard Prince at journal-isms+owner@groups.io

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