Latinos Feeling “Under Siege”

Geraldo, Others Urge Journalists to Fight Back

First came celebrity journalist Geraldo Rivera of Fox News, taking the stage at an awards banquet for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists to decry a CNN program. He said it used images of immigrants to accompany a story about an increase in violent urban crime. “There is no such link!” Rivera exclaimed.

“We are Terri Schiavo. We are gay marriage. We are the wedge issue for this election,” Rivera warned his mostly Latino audience. In this campaign season, some “will do whatever they can to gain political advantage on the backs of people who look like us. Crunch time is coming. . . . Have the courage to stand up,” he said.

It was similar to a message Rivera gave the same gathering two years ago, when he announced from the stage that he was donating $80,000 to NAHJ and $20,000 to Unity: Journalists of Color, the largest gift to NAHJ by an individual, then-president Veronica Villafañe said at the time.

“Bust them on their hypocrisy,” Rivera said then, speaking of those in newsrooms who deride illegal immigrants. “In vast sections of the country, there would not be a lawn mowed or a dish washed but for illegal immigrants.”

Since 2005, immigration has become even more of an issue, reflected in the awards presented on Thursday night at the Capital Hilton in Washington. And it has affected Latino journalists both personally and professionally.

“Every day we’re asking questions about whose Constitution is it?” Dianne Solis of the Dallas Morning News, the Frank Del Olmo Print Journalist of the Year, told the group. And does it apply to immigrants in the country illegally?

“We are the only ones who have a voice for the immigrants, illegal or not,” Rebecca Aguilar, reporter for KDFW-TV in Dallas, the association’s Broadcast Journalist of the Year, declared.

The awards come after a year of immigration marches around the country, and the heightened visibility of the issue moved many not only to report on immigration-related topics but, on Thursday night, to declare their own illegal immigrant roots or those of their parents.

“Story after story has shown that immigrants have a lower crime rate,” the master of ceremonies, anchor Antonio Mora of WBBM-TV in Chicago, said from the stage after Rivera’s speech. “And as an immigrant myself, my blood boils” when hearing the opposite.

Mora, 49, is a native of Havana.

CNN’s illegal-immigration crusader Lou Dobbs was a frequent target, and on behalf of Latino CNN employees, CNN alumnus Renay San Miguel, who is now in public relations, said there were journalists who were trying to set the record straight during the rest of the CNN schedule “and we need to continue to give them our support.”

The award winners told of how their parents worked the sugar beet fields or had only a fourth-grade education but learned English by reading the newspaper. If they spoke Spanish to the crowd, the words came in accents from El Salvador, Mexico, the Dominican Republic or Spain.

It was not just the immigration issue that contributed to the feeling of being, as Solis said, “under siege.”

The winner of the Emerging Journalist of the Year award, Maria Burns Ortiz, “wrote daily English- and Spanish-language columns with the intention of appealing to an underserved Hispanic audience” when she worked at the Fort Wayne (Ind.) News-Sentinel, according to the program. “The Spanish pieces generated a storm of controversy, but she showed strength beyond her years and didn’t back down.”

“Long before I even thought about sports I was a Latina,” Ortiz told the audience of about 260. “I thought, ‘you do have a voice and you do have to take a stand.'” The Spanish-language versions stayed. She is now a college soccer columnist for ESPN.com.

Gloria Campos Brown, news anchor at WFAA-TV in Dallas and honorary gala chair, said that at her station, the highest-ranking Hispanic, Executive Producer Sarah Garza, just left to become assistant news director at rival KTVT-TV. “Will she be replaced” by a Latino? “I seriously doubt it,” she said.

“Gloria is the only Latina anchor in our town,” Aguilar said.

The Leadership Award went to Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a former journalist who now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. Since 1999, she has led the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project there, and she helped lead the fight to force producer Ken Burns to include Latinos in last month’s public television documentary miniseries on World War II, “The War.”

What the Burns fight showed, she said, “is that we still haven’t been accepted as Americans. It’s like we’re at a wedding and have to explain why we’re there.”

“It seems like we’ve gone backwards,” into defensive mode, added Janet Murguia, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza, a onetime broadcast journalism major and the presenter of the Leadership Award to Rivas-Rodriguez.

“Now, more than ever, the story of the Latino contributions must be told.”

That’s some of what the award-winners, both Latino and not, said they were doing.

Gary Coronado, photographer at the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post, won the Photojournalist of the Year award “for his vivid images of Central Americans, who risk life and limb to enter the United States as they jump, and in some cases, cling on to trains heading north,” NAHJ said. His Post colleague Christine Evans tied in the feature category for the series “Train Jumping, a Desperate Journey.”

Patricia Nazario of Southern California Public Radio won for radio reporting for “Immigration Backlash,” about immigration feelings among African Americans, a topic the organization said had rarely been explored.

Pablo Gato of Telemundo “presented a powerful series of reports on the U.S. military’s contingency plans to invade Mexico. The ‘green plan’ had been developed by the former War Department back in the late 1920’s and was still in effect post World War II. . . . He brought this incredible story to life by explaining over 70 years worth of declassified information, providing analysis/perspective and ultimately showing its relevancy to modern day US-Mexican relations,” NAHJ said.

Carmen Escobosa of Punto Fronterizo, San Diego and Baja California won the award for Latin American reporting for a half-hour show that “gives a sobering, yet educational look at the impact that AIDS is having on border towns where drugs and sex on the Mexican side” draw tourists and increase the risk of spreading the disease, NAHJ said.

A Dallas Morning News series about Yolanda Méndez Torres, a 19-year-old Mexican who suffered sexual abuse on both sides of the border, won in both the print and online categories.

“These were stories I had never heard about before,” Mora told Journal-isms.

“Look at the work in Spanish-language media and say, ‘why am I not reading this in English?'” Rafael Olmeda of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and the NAHJ president, told the group.

With tickets at $150 for members and $250 for nonmembers, Iván Román, the association’s executive director, said the event grossed $125,000.

List of winners

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Birmingham News Leaders, SCLC Meet Over Cartoon

“The editor and publisher of The Birmingham News met with leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference today to discuss concerns the group had with the newspaper’s coverage,” the Alabama newspaper said on its Web site on Friday.

The meeting occurred after Charles Steele, national president and CEO of the SCLC, and other SCLC officials “held a news conference on the paper’s steps earlier in the day protesting an editorial cartoon by Scott Stantis that was a commentary on the use of race in the campaigns for mayor,” Hannah Wolfson reported.

“In the version of the cartoon published Tuesday, Langford and Mayor Bernard Kincaid pat candidate Patrick Cooper on the back while pasting two labels on his back, ‘white’ and ‘Republican.’ Another version that appeared online for a time Sunday had the label ‘honky’ on Cooper’s back.

“Birmingham News editors said that cartoon did not appear in the newspaper and was accidentally posted on the Web site. It was removed the same day, and The News printed an explanation in Thursday’s editions.”

• ABC affiliate’s news story

Thomas “Kind of Shut Down” to “Hard Questions”

While others have criticized Steve Kroft’s “60 Minutes” interview with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as too soft, “Kroft defended the half-hour look at the

Supreme Court justice and his autobiography, saying his questions were probing enough that at one point Thomas’s wife, Virginia, told producers she wanted the interview stopped,” Howard Kurtz wrote Friday on the Washington Post Web site.

“‘It wasn’t like we didn’t ask hard questions, challenge him on some of this stuff,’ the CBS newsman said. ‘We made the decision we were not going to re-argue the facts of the Anita Hill case because it happened 16 years ago and because he was not responsive on it. . . . He didn’t want to reopen the whole thing. . . . He kind of shut down.'”

Meanwhile the Post covered Thomas’ book party Wednesday night at the Capitol Hill home of Thomas friend Armstrong Williams, the conservative commentator and entrepreneur.

“Out of the corner of his eye, Thomas recognized sports commentator Stephen A. Smith, who hosted ESPN’s now-defunct ‘Quite Frankly,'” Linton Weeks wrote.

“Thomas began quizzing him.

“‘Who was the Black Jesus?’ Thomas asked.

“Before Smith could answer, Thomas said, ‘Earl Monroe.’

“After Thomas grilled Smith on more old-school trivia, Smith finally said, ‘You’re trying to show me that you know more about sports than I do.’

“Thomas launched into an impassioned speech decrying Bob Hayes’s absence from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. ‘That is one of the great injustices!’ Thomas said. ‘And that is frankly speaking.'”

Meanwhile, National Public Radio announces that Angela Wright, the former EEOC employee and one of the women who, along with Anita Hill, accused Thomas of harassment, talks on Tuesday with Michel Martin, host of “Tell Me More.” At the time of the Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991, Wright was assistant metro editor of the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer.

• Jabari Asim, Washington Post: Let Me Be the Judge: A Supreme Court justice recounts a difficult ascent
• Carleton Bryant, Washington Times: Be positive, Thomas urges
• Merlene Davis, Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader: A justice for all? Not Thomas
• Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times: Black women aren’t traitors for speaking up
• David Person, Huntsville (Ala.) Times: A revised view of Justice Thomas

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Daughter Thankful Gates Revealed Dad’s Secret

In the New Yorker magazine in 1996, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates exposed New York Times book reviewer Anatole Broyard, who died in 1990, as a black man who had passed for white.

“Broyard, a New York Times reviewer for 19 years, died in 1990, but Gates talked of another kind of ‘passing,'” as Margo Hammond recalled for the St. Petersburg Times. “In 1920 in New Orleans Broyard was born into a black family, but when his light-skinned parents moved to Brooklyn and began passing for white to obtain work, a common practice during those racist, segregated times, their son went a step further: He left his black roots behind entirely. Eventually, he married a blond, Nordic woman and had two children, a blond, green-eyed son named Todd and a dark, curly-haired daughter named Bliss, whom he raised in the nearly all-white town of Greenwich, Conn. When he died, on his death certificate, under the heading of race, was the word white.”

Now Bliss Broyard has written her own memoir, “One Drop,” and she was asked on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” what effect the Gates article had on her and her family.

“Well, at first I was really upset about it, as he knows,” Broyard said. “I think I really had this idea that because I didn’t have control of this information as a child, I wanted to take control over it by being the one who outed my father. Now I’m really grateful that I didn’t have to take on that responsibility. I think that, again, I had this idea that I could, you know, write a 1,000-word essay or I somehow could come up with a statement that would encapsulate the struggle that he had over his racial identity and explain it, and I think — it was very hard for me to do that. So I think that Gates kind of forced me to — gave me something to respond to and got the information out there. I mean, I had always like told friends ever since I’d known, but the act of kind of a public outing, I think, required, you know, a sort of drama that I’m glad I didn’t end up getting engaged in.”

Broyard, a writer, was asked how she thinks of herself racially. “Well, it sort of depends on the circumstance,” she said. “Usually for a form, I would say black, white, check all that apply, which we are now able to do since 2000. So in my case it would be black, white and Native American. In conversation, I used to really struggle over how to answer the question because I felt that if I said biracial or black/white that there might be some expectation that I would seem more black in some way. I felt, in the beginning, that there was some kind of right answer out there. That I could put the circumstances of my life — you know, raised as a WASP for 23 years, learned this information at 24, met this many family members and knew this much about history and come up with a succinct answer of my own identity, and it’s a lot more complicated.

“You know, there isn’t one right answer. So I think I’m sort of more interested in — I think that now that I’ve learned a lot about my history and I met my family, I feel more comfortable with who I am and less concerned about how I represent myself. But the short answer would be, I say, `I have mixed race ancestry.'”

Separately, three black women journalists or former journalists of varying skin tones have collaborated with fiction writer Tracy Price-Thompson to produce “Other People’s Skin: Four Novellas,” a new book that helps “to acknowledge, examine, and heal the skin/hair ‘thang’ between black women and to promote a sense of self-love and cultural pride in people of the African Diaspora,” according to the publicity material. The three women are writer TaRessa Stovall, now at the Montclair (N.J.) Times; Desiree Cooper, Detroit Free Press columnist; and Elizabeth Atkins, a novelist and former Detroit television and newspaper journalist.