Posted January 13, 2003

Fired L.A. Weatherman Was Abusive, Magazine Says

Popular Los Angeles weatherman Christopher Nance was fired shortly before the new year after developing "a reputation for profane and menacing off-air behavior, marked by sexual innuendo and violent outbursts," reports Los Angeles magazine.

KNBC President and General Manager Paula Madison fired the station's only African American weekday anchor over what Nance claimed in the Los Angeles Times were unfounded allegations of sexual harassment involving an intern.

In 1990, the Los Angeles City Council declared June 16 Christopher Nance Day, in honor of his community service to young people. Nance's "Let's Talk Weather" school program has been presented to more than 500,000 students, according to his bio.

But in a cover story, Los Angeles magazine writes of Nance:

"In an incident now legendary at the station, he once called a technical director a 'cunt' in front of the morning crew, reducing her to tears. He had the same effect on a well-known anchor, telling her 'fuck you' as she sat at the news desk. On yet another occasion, he shouted down the station's vice president – also female – vowing to 'shove my foot so far up your ass you're going to taste shoe polish.' The most frightening allegation involves a woman who became romantically involved with Nance near the beginning of his NBC4 tenure, sometimes meeting him at the station for their trysts. She later accused Nance of attacking her, first with punches and kicks, then by squeezing his hands around her neck. By portraying the woman as a deranged fan, Nance not only avoided charges but won a temporary restraining order against her. At the time she was so humiliated that she let the matter drop. But today, 12 years later, she tells the same story. 'Christopher Nance tried to kill me,' she says.

Comcast, Radio One Plan to Compete With BET

Comcast, the nation's biggest pay-television provider, and Radio One, a midsize radio broadcasting company, have agreed to create a new television network aimed at middle-age blacks, the Washington Post and New York Times report.

Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp. and Radio One Inc. of Lanham, Md., which owns 65 urban music stations, are to officially announce their plans today for a 24-hour news and entertainment network targeting African American adults, the Post said in a front-page story.

The Times said it appeared likely that Comcast would offer the new network only in markets with a significant proportion of black customers, that no other cable or satellite providers had yet agreed to distribute the new network, and that Comcast appeared to be looking for outside investors in the new network.

However, the Post quoted Alfred C. Liggins III, chief executive of Radio One and the founder's son, saying he has been planning for four years to expand into television, but had been unable to find a partner until he worked out the deal with Comcast and that other investors haven't been announced because final deals with them have not yet been made.

BET President and Chief Operating Officer Debra L. Lee issued this statement today:

"The idea of launching another cable channel option targeting African Americans -- or somehow competing with BET, for that matter -- is not new. One such venture recently shut down its operation, while another is still trying to survive. BET recognized more than 22 years ago the importance of the African-American audience, and has been very successful at delivering the kind of music, entertainment, news, sports, documentaries, cinema and specials that African Americans want to see. And we continue to evolve our lineup to build on our current ratings success, and to further expand our distribution, which is currently at an all-time high of 75 million homes."

Gov. Credits Journalists in Commuting Death Sentences

When outgoing Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted 167 condemned inmates' sentences Saturday, clearing the state's death row in a historic move, he gave credit to the reporting of journalists and journalism students.

From Ryan's statement:

"I never intended to be an activist on this issue. I watched in surprise as freed death row inmate Anthony Porter was released from jail. A free man, he ran into the arms of Northwestern University Professor Dave Protess, who poured his heart and soul into proving Porter's innocence with his journalism students.

"He was 48 hours away from being wheeled into the execution chamber where the state would kill him.

"It would all be so antiseptic and most of us would not have even paused, except that Anthony Porter was innocent of the double murder for which he had been condemned to die.

"After Mr. Porter's case there was the report by Chicago Tribune reporters Steve Mills and Ken Armstrong documenting the systemic failures of our capital punishment system. Half of the nearly 300 capital cases in Illinois had been reversed for a new trial or resentencing."

Mills' and Armstrong's five-part series, "The failure of the death penalty in Illinois," ran in November 1999.

Protess, four of his students, and longtime investigative reporter Rob Warden, now executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, worked to free four young suburban African American men convicted in the 1978 slayings of Lawrence Lionberg and Carol Schmal.

Their story is told in a 1998 book, "A Promise of Justice"

"The book chronicles efforts to get the Ford Heights Four--Dennis Williams, Verneal Jimerson, Kenny Adams and Willie Rainge--out of prison, and Williams and Jimerson off death row. It took 14 years of work by Protess, a professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and Warden, a political consultant and longtime investigative reporter, as well as the defendants, four of Protess' students, assorted lawyers, judges, investigators and other journalists to get the job done," according to the Tribune.

Northwestern's Center for Wrongful Convictions has put the book online.

Talk Shows Go Easy on Frist Endorsement of Pickering

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, supporting, among other things, President Bush's renomination of U.S. District Court judge Charles Pickering of Mississippi, whom Democrats rejected last year when they controlled the Senate.

In a "talking point" that went unchallenged, Frist repeated that the American Bar Association called Pickering "well-qualified" for his nomination to a federal appeals court.

But when that claim was made Friday on National Public Radio's "The Tavis Smiley Show," Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights replied that the "reference to the American Bar Association's evaluation of Judge Pickering came in before it was known that he had hundreds of unpublished opinions that they had never had a chance to review."

On "Fox News Sunday," meanwhile, commentator Juan Williams said to general agreement that African Americans in Mississippi supported Pickering, and that it was the national civil rights leadership that opposed him.

However, at a Jan. 8 news conference, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said: "When Judge Pickering's name first came before the Judiciary Committee for this elevation, for a lifetime appointment to the second-highest court in the land, 38 black Mississippi state legislators wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee speaking out against him. Every state branch and chapter of the NAACP, 140 of them in Mississippi, opposed his nomination, and it also opposed his nomination to the district court. Congressman Bennie Thompson, the only African-American congressman from Mississippi, said that Judge Pickering was not sensitive enough to minority concerns."

NAHJ President to Testify on Media Ownership

Juan Gonzalez, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, is scheduled to testify Thursday on proposed changes in media ownership rules at a forum at Columbia University Law School, according to NAHJ.

"This forum gives an opportunity to those who will be directly affected to voice their thoughts and opinions regarding these proposed changes," said June Besek of Columbia Law School's Kernochan Center. "We have invited a wide range of panelists from studio heads to independent producers, from politicians to the public in addition to the FCC Commissioners who will ultimately make the decisions."

As reported Jan. 3, NAHJ filed a list of questions with the FCC as it sought public comment, saying, "Latinos and people of color have historically been marginalized by the news media. Many Hispanic journalists are concerned this trend will worsen with further consolidation."

Time Series on Native Casinos Called Rehash, Distortion

Reporter Jodi Rave, who covers Native news for 21 states, criticizes a two-part Time magazine series on Indian casinos as "mostly rehashed information, much of it already told by tribes themselves."

Rave, based at the Lincoln Journal Star in Nebraska and a regional reporter for Lee Enterprises, comments on a Time series that ran Dec. 16 and Dec. 23 under the headlines, "Dirty Dealing: Indian Casinos are making millions for their investors and providing little to the poor." and "Indian Casinos: Wheel of Misfortune."

The pieces "read more like editorials, a throwback to the magazine's early days as an opinion journal," Rave writes for the News Watch Project. "The stories highlight extreme gambling examples. This flawed framework doesn't accurately reflect the tremendous impact casino profits have had on tribes not located near metro market areas -- such as those in Montana, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Idaho, Nebraska and South Dakota. So far, the magazine has devoted only a four-paragraph story to positive gains from gambling."

Hispanic or Latino? Still Under Debate

For the 2000 census, federal officials changed the ethnic category so respondents could choose Hispanic or Latino, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Prior to that, Hispanic was the only choice.

"But that hasn't squashed the debate over which label is better ,the story said. Last year, Atlanta Latinos weighed in on the issue in articles and an online poll.

"The results: Of the 344 respondents, 46 percent, or 157 people, preferred being called Latino; 35 percent, or 120 people, liked the word Hispanic. The remaining 19 percent chose the "other" category, a likely reflection of their identifying more with their countries, such as Dominicans."

The story, from the paper's Gwinnett bureau, quotes a National Association of Hispanic Journalists history of both terms.

Washington Post's "Relentless" Colbert King Praised

In a column called "Riding With the King: The Best Washington Post Columnist You've Never Heard Of," Slate magazine editor at large Jack Shafer praises the Post's Saturday op-ed columnist Colbert I. King, who is also the paper's deputy editorial page editor, "not because he's the most artful writer in the business or even the brainiest, but because he possesses the most relentless voice I've encountered in a daily newspaper since alcohol dimmed Mike Royko's and death extinguished it."

"He's a winning example of what editors (and writers) could do with the op-ed form if they drew on their passion now and again. King takes names. He names names. And he calls people names," Shafer says.

22% of Americans Get News from Talk Jocks

One in five Americans considers listening to Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly or other talk radio shows as getting his or her daily dose of news, according to a recent Gallup Poll, the Los Angeles Times reports.

"The growing trend of news in this country is interpretation ahead of the facts, of talk rather than information," said Amy Mitchell, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington, D.C.-based organization dedicated to raising the standards of American journalism.

"There's certainly nothing wrong with listening to Rush Limbaugh for what Rush Limbaugh provides," Mitchell told the newspaper, but "Limbaugh isn't concerned about an objective portrayal of the facts, and he admits that."

She said the danger lies in listeners "taking it as the facts without deciding for themselves. It's not producing an informed democracy."

Nat Hentoff to Require J-Students to Read McGowan Book

Nat Hentoff, once known as a liberal, a jazz critic and a free-speech advocate, announces in Editor & Publisher magazine that "when I start teaching at New York University's Graduate School of Journalism in the fall, one book that will be mandatory reading" will be William McGowan's "Coloring the News: How the Quest for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism." The book was slated to receive the National Association of Black Journalists' Thumbs Down award for its distortions, half-truths and spin, shortcomings also pointed out by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Elsewhere on the Maynard site, Kara Briggs, former president of the Native American Journalists Association, describes how McGowan's book takes her comments out of context.

So why would Hentoff use such a book to teach journalists? Hentoff approvingly quotes the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, who says, "to the extent that there has been a bias in the establishment media, it has been less a liberal tilt than a preference for the values of the educated professional class -- which, surprise, surprise, is roughly the class position of most journalists." Too bad for the profession that this was the only book Hentoff could find to make that point.

Send tips and comments to Richard Prince rprince@maynardije.org.

View previous columns