Articles Feature

D.C. Anchor Bruce Johnson Dies at 71

by richard02890

Retired Newsman Had Begun Book Tour

Support Journal-isms

Retired Newsman Had Begun Book Tour

Bruce Johnson, a recently retired longtime news anchor in the nation’s capital who was on a book tour promoting a just-published memoir, died Sunday, his wife, Lori Smith-Johnson, disclosed on Facebook Sunday night. He was 71.

Johnson’s station, WUSA-TV, said he died in Delaware and that the cause was heart failure. It called him “legendary” and said “he was honored with nearly every journalism award of distinction.”

Johnson suffered a heart attack in 1992 while covering a street story and in 2009 wrote a book, “Heart to Heart: 12 People Discover Better Lives after Their Heart Attacks,” featuring the recovery and comeback stories of heart attack survivors.

Then, in April 2018, Johnson announced he was battling cancer, but told viewers four months later that he had beaten it. “Lymphoma Update. I’m now cancer free! The PET scan came back negative. I can’t thank each of you enough for the prayers, love and support. To all the other cancer survivors who reached out, You Rock! Count me in!” he wrote on social media.

Friends and colleagues who learned of his passing Sunday praised Johnson as a down-to-earth journalist with the community’ best interests foremost.

Al Jazeera journalist Jeff Ballou, who in 2017 became president of the National Press Club, wrote on Facebook, “We discussed surviving life as African-American male journalists in a town that can easily consume and destroy you. I am glad that I was able to thank him for his long time support of me and so many colleagues across the years.”

Theola DuBose, a former Washington Post reporter who went on to become director of communications at the D.C. Public Charter School Board, wrote, “When I answered my phone I heard that unmistakable gravelly and peppy alto voice say: ‘Hey Theola, I need a good news story about a school. Find me one to visit.’

“That was Bruce, always using his media spotlight to shine on something positive. He highlighted a new charter school that focused on children with special needs.”

Johnson also gained the confidence of the late D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, and spoke at Barry’s 2014 funeral (video).

Barry wrote in his memoir, “Ironically, CBS-WUSA-Channel 9 news anchorman Bruce Johnson told me years later that a lot of the media professionals were going through the same issues that I was going through with drinks, drugs, alcohol and women.

” ‘He said, ‘Shit, Marion, we had our own struggles and addictions to deal with. That’s what made your case so strong and hypocritical for a lot of us.’ . . . “

Accepting congratulations on the success of his book, Johnson messaged this columnist last month, “The response has been awesome. Hoping to contribute to . . . much needed conversations that you helped start a long time ago.”

Johnson retired from WUSA-TV in 2020 after serving 44 years as an anchor and reporter. He was scheduled to discuss his new memoir Wednesday at an event co-sponsored by the Washington Association of Black Journalists. “One of the District’s most trusted, honored and recognized journalists, Johnson’s assignments for WUSA9 took him worldwide. But Johnson’s most inspiring story is in his book, ‘Surviving Deep Waters: A Legendary Reporter’s Story of Overcoming Poverty, Race, Violence, and His Mother’s Deepest Secret’,” the association said in a promotional announcement.

Lorenzo Hall wrote for WUSA in February, ” ‘I didn’t want to write just a journalism book, ok?’ Johnson explained. ‘I wanted to write a story about a kid who grows up poor, to a poor mother, who was raised by a grandmother. They lived in an alley. They were evicted so many times, they stopped packing and unpacking.’

“The book, he says, is about life lessons; like what he learned growing up poor and fatherless in Kentucky.

” ‘You can get away from the projects, the poverty and the violence, the blatant segregation, racism and all that other stuff,’ Johnson said. ‘But you never get away clean. You bring some of that with you.’

Lori Smith-Johnson’s Facebook notice.

Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy, who was to appear with Johnson Wednesday at D.C.’s Martin Luther King Jr. library, spoke for many Sunday night when he told Journal-isms, “I’m just shocked.”

Milloy wrote about the memoir in March. “During his 45 years at Channel 9 in D.C., Bruce Johnson became one of the most respected and highest-paid TV news reporters in the country. By the time he retired in 2020, he’d won 22 Emmys, among other honors, and even had his likeness included on the mural outside Ben’s Chili Bowl. . . .”

“It’s a richly detailed, often humorous life’s journey. But it is his account of the decisions he made to stay in TV news that I found especially timely,” Milloy wrote.

Example: “Johnson recalled the time another news director snapped at him: ‘Bruce, why don’t you speak English?’ During his brief time at the seminary, Johnson had studied Latin and Greek. He had worked hard on pronouncing words correctly, no longer calling his hometown ‘Lou-uh-vull,’ much to the chagrin of his childhood buddies who’d never left the place.

“Now his news director was cracking on his English?

“ ‘It sounded like a racial slur,’ Johnson wrote. ‘He’s coming at me and he’s angry. I had instinctively leaped to my feet, fists clenched. I was furious. Didn’t he know I was raised in the projects? I was about to get myself fired.’

“Johnson wrote that he heard his mother’s voice saying to him: ‘Don’t move. Uncurl your fists, but don’t sit back down because it will look like you’re backing down.’ The peace between Johnson and the director was brokered during a meeting with the general manager. After the meeting, Johnson shook the news director’s hand. . . .”

Milloy also quoted this passage from Johnson’s book: “The gains made in the last year and certainly from the civil rights movements of the late 1960s and 70s cannot be taken for granted. Despite my success … I feel that if our progress isn’t guarded and recalibrated, history could repeat itself.”

Africans Fleeing Ukraine Held for Weeks

March 30, 2022


In U.S., Debate Continues on Coverage Priorities

Seattle Times Revisits WWII Internment Coverage
In Poll, Most Back Smith Over Rock on ‘The Slap,’ but now Academy says Smith broke its rules, faces consequences
Anti-Lynching Law Took 124 Years

Homepage photo: Hiding in a home in Irpin, Ukraine. (Credit: Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)

Support Journal-isms

Ukraine residents of African origin who have crossed the border to escape the war have been placed in closed facilities, with some having been there for a number of weeks, the Independent reported. (Credit: Bel Trew/The Independent)

In U.S., Debate Continues on Coverage Priorities

“Non-white students who have fled Ukraine have been detained by [European Union] border authorities in what has been condemned as ‘clearly discriminatory’ and ‘not acceptable‘,” May Bulman and Nadine White reported for Britain’s The Independent.

“An investigation by The Independent, in partnership with Lighthouse Reports and other media partners, reveals that Ukraine residents of African origin who have crossed the border to escape the war have been placed in closed facilities, with some having been there for weeks.

“At least four students who have fled Vladimir Putin’s invasion are being held in a long-term holding facility Lesznowola, a village 40km from the Polish capital Warsaw, with little means of communication with the outside world and no legal advice.

“One of the students said they were stopped by officials as they crossed the border and were given ‘no choice’ but to sign a document they did not understand before they were then taken to the camp. They do not know how long they will be held there.

“A Nigerian man currently detained said he was ‘scared’ about what will happen to him after being held in the facility for more than three weeks. . . .”

“Latino USA” photographed asylum seekers “walking together as a ‘caravan’ being temporarily detained from entering a highway in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, by Mexican law enforcement officials. The group had been on the road for nearly two weeks after leaving Tapachula in the southern state of Chiapas in late October 2021. “Latino USA’s” “Maria Hinojosa said Wednesday that the United States treated them differently from Ukrainians because “white supremacy in the context of refugees and desperate people” was at work. (Credit: Yurema Perez-Hinojosa/Latino USA)

The March 24 report by the Independent and its media partners is part of a continuing racial narrative that questions the completeness of the reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the context in which it is taking place. The invasion is having ripple effects around the globe, affecting food prices in North Africa and the Middle East, the price of a college education for students in India and politics in Latin America.

News editors determine which angles to pursue and where to deploy resources. Much depends on media accessibility to the location in question, but that is not the only factor.

Brazilian journalist Yan Boechat, who was in Ukraine, told Gabriel Bonis of LatAm Journalism Review that Ukraine receives more international prominence because it takes place in Europe and it affects European civilians. “I was in the Ethiopian war, where a lot of people died, but nobody wanted to know about that conflict,” he said.

Here in the United States, veteran journalist Maria Hinojosa, who traveled with Haitian refugees seeking asylum as they made their way through Latin America, only to be detained for months by the United States, contrasted their experience with the open-arms U.S. welcome for Ukrainian refugees. She was joined Wednesday on “Democracy Now!” by Guerline Jozef, an advocate for Haitian refugees. “We are ready and willing to welcome immigrants as long as they are not Black and brown,” Jozef said.

Hinojosa also criticized media demonization of caravans joined by those seeking safety in the United States. “It is a caravan of love, of solidarity,” she said. “The caravan is the only place you feel safe.”

Jon Allsop wrote March 15 in Columbia Journalism Review, “The biases that are often present in Western coverage of war and the biases that are making the coverage of this war different both ultimately reflect ingrained assumptions about global power dynamics that are not only morally indefensible, but factually untenable. . . .”

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, a former foreign editor at the newspaper, wrote March 14, “I have to wonder whether something more than technology is involved in the way this war, as opposed to other wars, is being presented. The unmistakable subtext of the coverage is: These are people just like us, and we could be at risk like them. . . . Whether intentionally or subconsciously, news organizations make this war more vivid and more tragic by focusing so tightly on victims and refugees. We get to see them as individuals, not as an undifferentiated mass. . . .”

Marcus Yam, right, of the Los Angeles Times, named “Photojournalist of the Year – Large Market” by the National Press Photographers Association, wrote, “On Day 7 of the Russian invasion, while I was reporting in a Kyiv subway station, 9-year-old Uliana tapped me on my arm. She gifted me a heart-shaped item she’d embroidered while sheltering underground with her family during air raids.” The Times published a collection of Yam’s photos from Ukraine. (Credit: Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)

Tony Norman, a columnist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, wrote March 22 under the headline, “Barbarians inside and outside the gates of Ukraine; President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy hasn’t spoken out against bigotry experienced by Black Ukrainians and African students in his country.” Journalists Robinson and Norman are Black.

Karolina Ashion, a Black Ukrainian television presenter and producer, shared last summer “what she describes as the most painful moment of her career: when her former boss — then the director of Ukraine’s 1+1 media conglomerate and current Minister of Culture Alexander Tkachenko — allegedly told her that her appearance on a popular morning show would hurt the network’s ratings,” as the Daily Beast reported.

And yet, Black people who are in Ukraine, including the few Black journalists, are as fervent as anyone in urging support for the country in its time of peril.

American freelancer Terrell Jermaine Starr tweeted March 20, “@MalcolmNance and I understand the violence [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wages against Ukraine better than most westerners because, as Black people, we get oppression. Leading up to the invasion, he described Ukrainians in very racist ways. Listen to our interview on
@gaslitnation for our analysis.”

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon. a University of Pennsylvania history expert who is Black, has been helping a group of stranded international students in Sumy, Ukraine, near the Russian border, which has been heavily bombarded since the invasion started.

She told Jenice Armstrong of the Philadelphia Inquirer, “If Ukraine falls to Russia, what do you think will happen to these Black and brown people? They are going to be killed. They are visible minorities. I’m in contact with a couple of students from Sumy State University … [They] were trying to leave [and] got shot at. They sent me pictures of bullet holes in their luggage. So, this is very real. If Russia is widely killing Slavic-looking Ukrainian citizens, what do you think they will do to very visible minorities?”

Still, some, while sharing condemnation for the invasion, also embrace “what about — ” theories that the United States shares the blame, even though others counter some of their arguments.

One contention is that the United States and NATO pushed Russia to its position by its eastward expansion closer to Russia’s borders. But Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian who spoke on “Democracy Now!, responded March 1, “when we speak of NATO enlargement, I mean, that’s a bit of a misnomer. NATO was not there to enlarge. There wasn’t much willingness on the part of Western Europe or the U.S. to enlarge. It was the East Europeans themselves who pushed the process forward.”

Another barb is that the NATO expansion was a provocation comparable to the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, when the Soviet Union installed missiles 90 miles from the United States.

“Ukraine posed no threat to Russia, much less an imminent threat. There are no NATO nukes in Ukraine aimed at Moscow, so the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962, is a weak parallel,” Tom Piatak, contributing editor to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, wrote Tuesday.

On March 4, Nigeria evacuated 804 of its citizens fleeing Ukraine. President Muhammadu Buhari said about 4,000 Nigerians were in the country, mostly students. One said, “When I was leaving for the border, I was in the cold and had to walk for six hours straight to get to the gate, and on getting to the gate they were allowing only Ukrainians to pass and I had to leave and get a bus to another border point. This took another 24 hours to get to but this time around I was in a bus.” Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka was among 165 Nobel laureates condemning the invasion (Credit: This Day, Nigeria).

A third assertion is that the United States is doing in Yemen what the Russians are in Ukraine, but the media are playing insufficient attention. Shireen Al-Adeimi, an assistant professor of education at Michigan State University who has worked for years to raise awareness on Yemen and human rights, told Janine Jackson of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, “the fact of the matter is that the US is really a party to the war [in Yemen], and they don’t want to end this war because they are a party to the war. They’re engaged in hostilities. And yet they’ve enjoyed this PR campaign, essentially, of it being called ‘the Saudi-led coalition’ and not ‘the US-led war in Yemen.’ ”

The Yemen crisis is indeed devastating, and few would argue that it is receiving the coverage it merits. The United Nations has described Yemen as the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe.

More than a dozen U.N. agencies and international aid groups said this month that 161,000 people in Yemen are likely to experience famine over the second half of 2022 — a fivefold increase from the current figure.

Moreover, the crisis is likely to deteriorate because of the war in Ukraine. Yemen depends almost entirely on food imports, with 30 percent of its wheat imports coming from Ukraine, the U.N. agencies said, according to the Associated Press.

Critics such as The Intercept have run headlines such as “AS U.S. FOCUSES ON UKRAINE, YEMEN STARVES,” portraying the Ukraine and Yemen crises as equivalent, though the Ukraine situation involves a nuclear power and has global consequences.

” That’s a big worry,” Allsop conceded in Columbia Journalism Review. “But it doesn’t explain why coverage focused on Ukrainian suffering — which has been rightly prominent, and often excellent — has dwarfed the attention the media collectively pays to human suffering in other warzones. As Moky Makura of Africa No Filter, a group that works to dispel stereotypes about the continent, wrote for CNN recently, ‘The ‘unthinkable things’ that happen in places like Africa are typically reported in terms of issues, numbers and trends — rather than the people, the emotions and the lives destroyed. . . .”

“In the broadest sense, mainstream Western media has been pretty united in denouncing Russia’s invasion — a far cry, it would seem, from the bellicose punditry and credulous reporting that legitimized the US invasion of Iraq, for example. But old modes of war coverage can manifest in subtler ways, too. . . .”

James Jeffrey added last week in the Progressive, “Recognizing such double standards in the media — whether steeped in implicit or subconscious racism or not — is crucial if we are to better nourish our empathy and abilities to parse the war in Ukraine and in conflicts occurring elsewhere.”

Viewing through today’s eyes, the editors wrote, “We would not make this photo the lead image of the day. It is not related to the biggest news headline. It was 3 months old at the time of publication and it didn’t need to be on Page One; its accompanying story is far inside the paper. Instead, we would move up the story about Bainbridge Island residents being forced to leave their homes, and use two or three photos from Bainbridge, the ferry and the train as residents were being taken away.” The offensive slur for Japanese Americans was redacted.

Seattle Times Revisits WWII Internment Coverage

Eighty years after Japanese-Americans were rounded up and placed in internment camps, the Seattle Times apologized for its “harmful coverage” and, Executive Editor Michele Matassa Flores wrote, “for the pain we caused in the past that still reverberates today.”

As columnist Naomi Ishisaka recalled in a separate piece, “Starting with 227 residents of Bainbridge Island on March 30, 1942, women, men and children were forced to leave their jobs, schools, homes and the lives they knew for an uncertain future. By the end, 120,000 Japanese Americans — two-thirds of them U.S. citizens — would be incarcerated in desolate camps in remote regions primarily in the Western interior during World War II.”

Flores (pictured) wrote Sunday after a “team from our newsroom pored over the March 30, 1942, edition of The Seattle Daily Times (as we were called then), critiquing A1 (the front page) through a present-day lens of accuracy and fairness. The group included writers, editors, artists, designers, photographers, videographers, a news researcher and a digital producer.

“They examined pages from that critical time and consulted experts from Densho, a Japanese American history group. They also researched the work of other nearby publications and interviewed our contrite publisher, Frank Blethen, whose ancestors owned the paper then (and back to the late 1800s).

“Among other things, the team found a slur for Japanese and Japanese American people used time and again, in huge headline type, at the top of front pages and throughout the newspaper. They read reports on the arrests of ‘dangerous’ Japanese Americans, which ran with no evidence of the supposed threat. And they saw how our newspaper parroted government euphemisms like ‘humane’ and ‘efficient’ to describe the treatment of people who were ripped from their lives, homes and families. . . .”

The re-examination team was led by Crystal Paul (pictured), a Black journalist and interim features editor. The paper published copies of front pages with the offensive term for Japanese Americans redacted, though those interested could click again to see the unedited version.

“Paul, who joined the Times in 2018, began advocating within the newsroom for this type of accountability project soon after she arrived. The reason: She was disturbed by mistakes we’d made — in both the distant and the recent past — and the resulting mistrust she encountered when reporting for us among communities of color,” Flores wrote.

Paul “recalls prospective sources side-eyeing her and she felt shame and anger as she learned of our missteps — some recent. Things like detailing the irrelevant criminal record of a shooting victim. Or repeating police accounts that obscure the truth to shift blame. Or swooping into certain neighborhoods to cover crimes or other bad news, while neglecting to write about the achievements and resilience of those areas the rest of the time.”

Graphics Editor Emily Eng (pictured), who is Asian American, “along with artist Jennifer Luxton and other staff members, landed on the idea of annotating the historical pages. The concept, Eng said, was to bring readers along on our thought process as we reflected and learned from past mistakes,” Flores explained.

Flores added, “Our team is considering future installments for this project, which we have named A1 Revisited. Sadly, it won’t be hard to find other periods of coverage that cry out for examination. And not all of those will be in the distant past. We hope you, our readers, will help by pointing to past transgressions and — as always — by holding us accountable for the work we publish now.”

Pollsters asked, “Last night, there was an incident at the Academy Awards show you may have heard about. The host, comedian Chris Rock, made a comment about Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair loss, joking that she should be cast in a movie as G.I Jane,” the survey told participants. “In response, her husband, actor Will Smith, stormed on the stage and slapped Rock across the face. Who do you think was more in the wrong?”

In Poll, Most Back Smith Over Rock on ‘The Slap’

Despite a seemingly overwhelming consensus among opinion writers to the contrary, “A poll conducted by Blue Rose Research, a well-known Democratic pollster, found that a higher percentage of Americans ultimately see Chris Rock in the wrong after Will Smith slapped him in the face,” Leia Idliby reported Tuesday for the New York Post.

White, Black, Hispanic and Native Americans surveyed faulted Rock, while Asian Americans were split evenly down the middle.

Women blamed Rock while 52.4 percent of men surveyed viewed Smith, who later accepted the award as “Best Actor,” in the wrong.

Smith apologized after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced it would start a formal review around the Oscar night incident.

“I was out of line and I was wrong,” Smith said in the statement. “I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be.”

“The survey was conducted on Monday, the day after the much talked about Oscar ceremony, asking 2162 online respondents who they viewed as ‘more in the wrong’ during the Smith-Rock controversy,” Idiliby reported.

Meanwhile, Taryn Ryder reported for Yahoo Wednesday evening that “Will Smith may face ‘suspension’ or ‘expulsion’ from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for slapping Chris Rock during Sunday’s Oscars. The Board of Governors of the body that oversees the Oscars held an emergency meeting to discuss repercussions for the King Richard star, who just won his first golden statue. According to a new statement on Wednesday, the Academy asked Smith to leave the ceremony but he ‘refused.’ The organization admitted they botched the handling of the incident. . . .”

Jack Coyle wrote for the Associated Press, “A representative for the academy declined to give specifics on how it tried to removed Smith. After Smith struck Rock in response to a joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, several stars including Denzel Washington, Bradley Cooper and Tyler Perry spoke with the 53-year-old Smith. . .

“ ‘Mr. Smith’s actions at the 94th Oscars were a deeply shocking, traumatic event to witness in-person and on television,’ the academy said. ‘Mr. Rock, we apologize to you for what you experienced on our stage and thank you for your resilience in that moment. We also apologize to our nominees, guests and viewers for what transpired during what should have been a celebratory event.’ . . .”

Anti-Lynching Law Took 124 Years

“Finally, 124 years after my great-grandmother Ida B. Wells first talked to President McKinley in 1898 about enacting this legislation, it happened yesterday, Michelle Duster, descendant of the crusading anti-lynching journalist, messaged.

“I come in around minute 23.”

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were also present for President Biden’s signing of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. It “finally designates lynching as a federal hate crime in America,” said Joyce Beatty, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. “Despite more than 200 attempts to make lynching a federal crime over the past 120 years, it has never before been done. That ends today.”

Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., said, “Lynching is a longstanding and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy. “Perpetrators of lynching got away with murder time and time again — in most cases, they were never even brought to trial.”

 ‘ Support Journal-isms

 

To subscribe at no cost, please send an email to journal-isms+subscribe@groups.io and say who you are.

Facebook users: “Like” “Richard Prince’s Journal-isms” on Facebook.

Follow Richard Prince on Twitter @princeeditor

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

About Richard Prince

View previous columns (after Feb. 13, 2016).

View previous columns (before Feb. 13, 2016)

Related posts

N.Y. Times Exit Worries Black Journalists

richard

Opioid Mixture Killed Anchor Roy Hobbs

richard

How Journalists Can Be Successful Authors

richard

Leave a Comment

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.