Study Documents Whiteness of Talk Shows
“Only 8 percent of the guests on the major Sunday morning talk shows over the past 18 months were African Americans, with three people accounting for the majority of those appearances, according to a new study by the National Urban League,” as Darryl Fears wrote Sunday [July 31] in the Washington Post.
“Black guests — newsmakers, the journalists who questioned them and experts who offered commentary — appeared 176 times out of more than 2,100 opportunities, according to the study, which is scheduled for release today. But 122 of those appearances were made by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state Colin L. Powell and Juan Williams, a journalist and regular panel member on ‘Fox News Sunday.’
“‘There’s very clearly a division, an exclusion,’ said Stephanie J. Jones, executive director of the Urban League Institute, who initiated the study, ‘Sunday Morning Apartheid: a Diversity Study of the Sunday Morning Talk Shows.’
“‘I watch these shows regularly,’ she said. ‘I just started to notice after a while, week after week after week, that there were no African Americans on them. I saw people talking about issues, even though they didn’t have a particular expertise.’
“The study analyzed NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ ABC’s ‘This Week,’ CBS’s ‘Face the Nation,’ Fox television’s ‘Fox News Sunday’ and CNN’s ‘Late Edition.’ It found that more than 60 percent of the programs that aired during the 18-month period had no black guests. ‘Meet the Press,’ the talk show with the largest number of viewers, had no black guests on 86 percent of its broadcasts, the study said.
“Network officials said they rely on guests who are newsmakers, most of whom are white men in the top echelons of government,” Fears’ story continued.
“Williams, a senior correspondent for National Public Radio and an analyst for Fox News Sunday, is the only African American who appears regularly on a Sunday morning talk show. ‘I don’t go anywhere in the country without people saying, “Thank God you’re there,”‘ he said.”
“‘They say they watch for that reason.’
“. . . The Urban League study did not include appearances by members of other minority groups, but Lisa Navarette of the National Council of La Raza, agreed that lack of diversity on the shows is a problem. “. . . ‘I’ve seen many discussions of the Latino vote and immigration done with people who are not terribly knowledgeable about the people or the subject.'”
The lack of journalists of color on the Sunday talk shows has long been a sore point with many of those journalists. Coincidentally, yesterday’s “Meet the Press” panel on NBC featured Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, who is African American, in its roundtable.
“His booking was not [in] response to the report,” NBC spokeswoman Barbara Levin told Journal-isms via e-mail. “We booked Mr. Robinson on Wednesday and didn’t hear about the study until Thursday from the Wash Post reporter.
“Mr. Robinson is a regular member of our roundtable panel and has appeared several times in the past. He will continue to appear as a regular panelist in the future.”
[Added Aug. 6: Robinson told Journal-isms he had appeared on the show three times.]
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Journalists Weigh Reverberations of Teele Suicide
“Thousands of mourners poured into a modest funeral home in Liberty City on Sunday to pay their final respects to Arthur E. Teele Jr., a man considered both the pride and the heartbreak of Miami’s black community,” Monica Hatcher reported in the Miami Herald today.
“Outside, some blamed the media for Teele’s suicide.
“One group passed out handbills that urged a boycott of The Herald and Miami New Times, an alternative weekly that published detailed reports of Teele’s alleged illicit dealings and affairs on the day he died.”
“Some of Teele’s supporters blamed the Herald’s coverage of Teele’s legal troubles for his death,” Mc Nelly Torres reported today in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “Hours after Teele’s death, the Herald fired columnist Jim DeFede for secretly taping a phone conversation with him. The secret taping was a possible violation of state law and the newspaper’s ethical standards.
“But others pointed to the alternative weekly Miami New Times, which hours before Teele’s death published a lurid account of his troubles, including allegations of sexual misconduct and corruption. Many in the black community said media coverage pushed Teele over the edge.” Teele shot himself Thursday in the lobby of the Herald building.
Meanwhile, journalists continued to debate the media’s culpability in the tragedy. The number of journalists’ signatures on an online petition urging DeFede’s reinstatement passed 400.
Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. quoted Francisco Alvarado, who wrote the New Times piece as saying, ”It’s just a surreal coincidence that he did this on the day my article came out. I really feel bad; I would never want anyone to harm themselves over something I wrote, but at the end of the day, I was just doing my job.” In Editor & Publisher, Alvarado said, “I don’t feel like the story played a role. I don’t know if he even read the story.”
In a Sunday column, Herald editor Tom Fiedler explained his decision to fire DeFede by saying, ” the people with whom we deal cannot think that they can trust us some of the time, even most of the time. They have to know that they can trust us all the time, in every encounter.
“When we tell them a conversation is off the record, it will remain so. And when we don’t tell them that their words are being recorded, they can know that they aren’t.
“It’s all about trust.”
But Manning Pynn, public editor at the Orlando Sentinel, disagreed, writing, “When someone speaks with a reporter, there is no secret about what is going on. The journalist is gathering information and recording — in one form or another — what is said. The objective, for both parties, should be accuracy.
“Even when someone wants to say something off the record, reporters often continue recording what is said — either by writing it down or taping it. ‘Off the record’ means that the information is not to be published, not that it can’t be recorded.”
- Robert Bianco, USA Today: Newspaper criticized for firing columnist
- Carl Hiassen, Miami Herald: Mixed record of good and bad for Teele
- Michael Mayo, South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Finding the right balance while striking a chord
- Ana Menendez, Miami Herald: Teele didn’t create persona all by himself
- Rem Rieder, American Journalism Review: A Punishment Too Harsh?
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Bombings Put Racial Profiling Back in Debate
The recent terrorist bombings in London have put racial profiling back on the table for discussion on talk shows and on editorial pages.
When the “Fox News Sunday” discussion came to New York’s new random searches of subway passengers, for example, Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said he approved of police ‘profiling’ those they search. “You’re not serious if you don’t do some kind of profiling,” he said. “I mean, to randomly search one of five passengers and not to select by age, by gender, by appearance in all kinds of ways, is . . .”
Regular panelist Juan Williams took a different view, saying, “I think we all know about racial profiling in the United States, that it injures trust and credibility in our law enforcement. And we don’t want to injure trust and credibility with regard to going after terrorists. I think we, as an American people, want to stay together, including people who are Muslims, in taking on this fight.
“This is something that — you know, you stop and you have to think for a second, who’s responsible for bombing the Oklahoma City building, federal building? It’s Timothy McVeigh. It’s a white male. Eric Rudolph was responsible for the bombing in Atlanta.”
Kristol replied: “What if, in Oklahoma City, Timothy McVeigh had had associates who were on the loose, and we knew, obviously, that they were white Aryan racist types, I would have no problem with the Oklahoma City police and police in neighboring jurisdictions profiling whites and ignoring African Americans and ignoring Hispanics. That’s who you’re looking for.”
- Amanda Cassandra, New York Amsterdam News: Public safety vs. civil rights in subway searches
- Robert L. Jamieson Jr., Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Justice lost and found in Ressam terror case
- Colbert I. King, Washington Post: You Can’t Fight Terrorism With Racism
- Letters, New York Times: What Does a Terrorist Look Like?
- Les Payne, Newsday: License to kill not a good terror defense
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“Representation” of Muslim Concerns Urged
“There is some inner voice nagging at me, reminding me that when I speak with peaceful Muslims from America, Australia, England, Pakistan and Scotland, I become aware of their reality, which conflicts on some very deep levels with my own,” Sabaa Saleem, an editor on the Washington Post’s foreign news desk, wrote Sunday in an essay headlined, “Being Muslim in a Mad, Sad World.”
“With fresh eyes, I begin to see their point of view. And I realize that their voices have been adopted and warped by Islamic radicals.
“I feel that the concerns of moderate Muslims are legitimate when I read this: According to two British organizations, at least 25,000 Iraqi civilians have died so far in the war, more than one-third of them killed by U.S. troops and their allies and more than 1,000 of them children. Killed in a war that the Muslims I have spoken with found difficult to justify.
“And when I read this: Nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in July 1995, and callously tossed into mass graves in the surrounding area. They were murdered with U.N. troops standing by, unable to act. . . .
“The Muslims I have spoken with, and many others I know, have stressed that these events contribute to their formulation of history, their sense of what is right with this world, and of what is horribly wrong. It is these incidents, however, that are taken up by extremists and used to justify acts of violence that, by their very nature, are unjustifiable. And thus, the worldview and anxieties of mainstream Muslims are painted with the black brush of extremism.
“As a Pakistani relative in Australia said, mainstream Muslims ‘do not support bloodshed. What they do support is a representation of their concerns.’
“But representation is often difficult to find, he said, expressing what is becoming a familiar sense of frustration.”
- “Progressive Islam in America” (“Speaking of Faith,” American Public Media)
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Black Journalists Reflect on NABJ’s 30th Year
As members of the National Association of Black Journalists prepare to gather in Atlanta this week to celebrate the group’s 30th anniversary, Michael H. Cottman of BlackAmericaWeb.com asked some veteran black journalists for their assessment of how much progress has been made.
“We’ve moved in, but we haven’t moved up,” said Bryan Monroe, the organization’s vice president for print.
“I think people make ‘diversity’ harder than it needs to be. Just do it,” said Yanick Rice Lamb, a journalism professor at Howard University and a former editor at BET Weekend magazine and the New York Times. “There have been so many revolutionary changes in the industry that it’s hard to believe that it takes so long to achieve parity.”
“We have tweaked and analyzed data for years, but the message has always been the same: Too little reward for too much aggravation,”said Jackie Jones, a longtime member of NABJ and journalism professor at Penn State University.
“Richard Prince, a seasoned journalist who writes a media diversity column, ‘Journal-isms,’ for the Maynard Institute, said black journalists ‘have come a long way in the news business,’ but acknowledged that ‘many of us are misdirected.’
“‘Many of us don’t know what the “black” in “black journalist” is supposed to be about or — worse — don’t care,’ Prince told BlackAmericaWeb.com. ‘Some of us think we got in these positions all through our own effort, and don’t think much about relating to the community, young black journalists or even to fellow black journalists. Many have fallen victim to careerism.'”
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Stephen A. Smith’s New ESPN Show Debuts Today
Stephen A. Smith debuts tonight as the star of a nightly one-hour talk show on ESPN2, “Quite Frankly,” a development that in the last week earned him coverage in the New York Times, his own Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune and Sports Illustrated.
“Perhaps the most riveting part of almost any studio session with Mr. Smith is watching him not speak. He clearly suffers from the pain of anticipation,” Richard Sandomir wrote Sunday in the New York Times.
“From his earliest days on ESPN, Smith was the voice who demanded an audience, the guy who made you hit the ‘replay’ button on your TiVo,” Teddy Greenstein wrote Friday in the Chicago Tribune. “Smith said he wants his show to be ‘a cross between Bill O’Reilly, Oprah and Larry King.'”
“Will you keep doing your newspaper column, and radio, and TV? Seems like it,” Don Steinberg asked Sunday in the Inquirer.
“Smith had no problem crossing the street every afternoon to do television after his radio show, he said, and the money wasn’t bad either. (Sports Illustrated says he’s making about $800,000 a year combined, and privately he says that’s not too far off.)”
When ESPN signed Smith, wrote Karl Taro Greenfeld in Sports Illustrated, it got “an African-American who is not afraid to be, as his fellow Philadelphian Schooly D might say, ‘black enough for ya.’ . . . Yet ask most sports fans or scroll through the sports blogosphere, and one take recurs regularly when it comes to Stephen A. or, as he has been dubbed, Screaming A. Smith or Stephen Anal Smith or Stephen X: He is the most despised sports personality on the air today.”
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Golfer Charges Defamation by Mike Freeman
Professional golfer John Daly has filed a lawsuit against the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, claiming he was defamed by a column that appeared in March,” Matt Galnor reported Saturday in that paper.
“The column, written by Mike Freeman during The Players Championship, discusses Daly’s past in a piece about fans continuing to root for Daly and Jacksonville native David Duval. Daly is suing over statements that he’s ‘accused of smacking women around’ and that he has ‘Thug Life qualifications’ and ‘a rap sheet that would make R. Jay Soward look like a Backstreet Boy.’
“Soward is a former first-round pick of the Jacksonville Jaguars who was suspended for repeated violations of the National Football League’s substance abuse policy.
“‘It’s regrettable that Mr. Daly has taken this step,’ Times-Union editor Patrick Yack said Friday. ‘Mike Freeman is a fine journalist. We stand by his work and his column. The matter is now before the court.'”
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Magazine Plug Nets Bachelor Reporter 30+ E-Mails
New York Daily News reporter Warren Woodberry says he’s received about three dozen e-mails from women around the country since he made the “eligible bachelors” list in the August issue of Marie Claire magazine.
And he arranged to meet one last weekend at the Harlem Book Fair, an author with whom he shared some of his wildlife and nature photographs.
“This is the first time I’ve ever had anything like this — online dating,” Woodberry, 32, said. His coworkers find the attention amusing, though it was one of his colleagues who asked him to send his information to the magazine, Woodberry said.
The women who made contact come from “all walks of life, women of various races . . . not anything too forward; no one has propositioned me,” Woodberry said. Things got a little complicated when an ex-girlfriend reappeared shortly after he began receiving the messages. But the ex said she had no objection to him continuing to meet those who were e-mailing.
Woodberry, a general assignment reporter at the News, covers Queens, N.Y., particularly the LaGuardia and Kennedy airports. Before he arrived at the paper 5 1/2 years ago, he was at Connecticut’s Hartford Courant and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He said he plans to be at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Atlanta this week.
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Short Takes
- “BET News programming has gone on temporary hiatus effective today,” the network announced. “BET Nightly News” staffers will go in varying directions, with some, such as anchor Jacquie Reid, remaining, some going elsewhere within the parent Viacom Corp., and some leaving, spokesman Michael Lewellen told Journal-isms. News programming is to return in October. ?During this brief hiatus, BET will maintain an active, functioning news operation to stay abreast of breaking news, and are planning some news-oriented specials in the interim,? CEO Debra Lee said in a statement. The network plans news briefs throughout the day, news specials and “television-to-Internet convergence.”
- “Local news operations at television-stations WXLV and WUPN will end on Aug. 10. In all, 22 employees at the sister stations – including lead anchorman Frank Fraboni and news director Pam Cook – will lose their jobs,” Tim Clodfelter reported Friday in North Carolina’s Winston-Salem Journal. Among those at the stations are reporter-producer Adrianne Flores, and reporter Denise Jackson.
- Joe Vasquez, reporter at KPIX-TV in the San Francisco Bay area, has been given the additional duties of weekend anchor for the Saturday morning news show. His co-anchor is Lisa Chan, who had been a free-lance reporter, a station spokeswoman said. Vasquez was formerly in Philadelphia.
- An editorial in the New York Times today, “Debunking the Concept of ‘Race,'” discusses the revelations that can come from genetic screening tests. Referring to an experience at Penn State, the editorial reported that, “One ‘white’ student learned that 14 percent of his DNA came from Africa – and 6 percent from East Asia. The student told The Daily Collegian, the student newspaper, earlier this year: ‘When I got my results I was like, there’s no way they were mine. I thought it was just an example of what the test was supposed to look like. Then I was like, Oh my God, that’s me.'” The goal of the testing is to make students less prejudiced and more open to a deeper discussion of humanity, the editorial said.
- The Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y., was among the papers cited by the Gannett Co. for public-service coverage, “For a campaign by the newspaper’s editorial board to clean up the violence, drug references and mistreatment of women in ‘gangsta’ rap music. A reader ‘rap’ session and a series of editorials, guest columns and Web-extra content engaged community debate on the issue. The newspaper published coupons that were filled out by more than 2,000 readers and sent to recording-industry leaders.”
- Chicago Tribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice added her voice today to the few African Americans commenting in mainstream newspapers on the movie “Hustle & Flow.” “A pimp as a hero? Rap music as his white horse out of hell? I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t also have to ride the backs of the women,” she wrote.
- Columnist David Person of the Huntsville Times in Alabama paid tribute Friday to his friend Tony Jordan, news director of WEUP AM/FM radio in Huntsville, who died July 22 of pneumonia at age 37. “Tony reveled in raising hell, as much for the attention it brought him as for the causes he believed in. And he loved to be pinning some power-broker or wannabe power-broker to the wall while doing it,” Person wrote.
- International PEN is condemning the July 27 death in Sierra Leone of “For Di People” newspaper editor Harry Yansaneh, who died of kidney problems apparently caused by an assault he suffered on May 10, according to the International Freedom of Expression Exchange Clearing House in Toronto. In a letter that Yansaneh sent to the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists, he explicitly accused a member of Parliament of ordering the attack.
- “What’s An Indian Woman To Do?” a one-woman play written and directed by Mark Anthony Rolo, former executive director of the Native American Journalists Association, is coming to the Minnesota Fringe Festival, Art Coulson, editorial page editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, wrote Sunday. “The central question of the play and the poem is ‘What’s an Indian woman to do when white girls act more Indian than the Indian women do?'”
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