August 11, 2007

Ex-Anchor Has Messages for White Males, Owners

Bernard Shaw, the veteran journalist who retired as CNN anchor in 2000, struck out at unnamed media owners who are "sabotaging the public good" with their "profit fixations," and, as he accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award Saturday night from the National Association of Black Journalists, warned white males that they ignore diversity at their peril.

Nyema Vernon Bernard Shaw said he was speaking in the tradition of Frederick Douglass.

"Journalists, hear me tonight," Shaw told an awards banquet audience at the NABJ convention in Bally's hotel in Las Vegas. "There are some owners in the business — bosses, parent companies — whose profit fixation and staffing directives and decisions sabotage the public good they profess to serve.

"They are turning the people's right to know into the people's fight to know," he said.

"Beyond this ballroom tonight, white males, wake up," Shaw continued. "Globally, you are an island speck in an ocean of color.

"The reins of power will weaken and so will your grip — if you do not faithfully support our nation's greatest strength, diversity.

"To you, caught in the middle, stay vigilant. You must stay strong."

Shaw emphasized the word "globally" in discussing his remarks afterward with Journal-isms, saying he was aiming at a worldwide audience. "What matters is that my words give hope" to people of various ethnic groups, he said. Shaw would not name the white males or the companies he was talking about. "People in the media know who they are," he said. "All you have to do is look at the numbers. They know who they are and we know who they are."

Shaw, 67, also said, "I was speaking for the historical record. I expect my words to resonate long after I'm dead." He said a speech accepting the NABJ's Lifetime Achievement Award deserved carefully chosen words. "That was in the tradition of Frederick Douglass," the first well-known black journalist, he said. "I was seeking to inspire, to inform and to light a fire under some asses."

Also honored during the program was Steve Capus, president of NBC News, who had said on Friday of ousted radio host Don Imus, "I'm not going to bring him back to MSNBC."

Capus received the Ida B. Wells Award, presented by NABJ and the National Conference of Editorial Writers, in part for his actions during the Imus affair in April, when the radio host described the Rutgers women's basketball team in racist and sexist terms. Capus ended MSNBC's simulcasting of the Imus show from CBS-owned WFAN radio in New York. CBS pulled the plug on Imus the next day.

"Whether he deserves another shot on somebody else's airwaves, someone else will decide," Capus said. "I'm not going to bring him back to MSNBC." He was responding to a question about a comment by "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert that he would return to Imus' show should it be reinstated.

The NBC News executive, who was also praised for appointing two African American vice presidents, Mark Whitaker and Lyn Pitts, said he was proud of the diversity-friendly culture at NBC. He noted on Saturday night that the GE African American Forum, part of the NBC Universal operation, had raised $100,000 for the NABJ scholarship fund, and that his network's commitment shows in its coverage.

Anchor Lester Holt is in Africa, looking at Zimbabwe border clashes and doing stories on South Africa and global warming, and Capus said reporter Ann Curry had made seven trips to Sudan in connection with the Darfur genocide crisis.

Shaw's honor was just one for CNN at the convention. The network also received the association's Best Practices award. In accepting that citation on Thursday, Johnita Due, who chairs CNN's Diversity Council, said Jim Walton, CNN Worldwide president, had become such a diversity advocate he had been referred to as "the first black CNN president."

As evidence of CNN's commitment, she pointed to CNN's coverage of the "Jena Six" case in Louisiana, where six young black men were charged with attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit attempted second-degree murder after a white student was beaten and knocked unconscious at school; and the Aug. 2 slaying of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey. The coverage was enhanced by a black presence at the network, she said.

"We will not become complacent," said Due.

In declaring Black Entertainment Television the winner of the organization's Thumbs Down award, Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times, who chairs the NABJ's Media Monitoring Committee, Thursday cited not only BET's dearth of regular public affairs programming and its failure to broadcast live the funeral of Coretta Scott King.

He said the "College Hill" reality series distorted life at historically black colleges and that "Hot Ghetto Mess," retitled "We Got to Do Better," was an example of "the problematic images that BET continues to present."

"NABJ objects to the channel's perpetuation of harmful Black stereotypes due to the airing [of] hip-hop videos that often have misogynistic, materialistic and violent themes," the organization said in its convention booklet.

Despite that, BET News walked away with two of NABJ's "Salute to Excellence" awards, one for a segment on methamphetamine on the discontinued Sunday morning show "The Chop Up"; the other for a look at the Louisiana and Mississippi region in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The Saturday night program also saw Dean Baquet, who returned to the New York Times in March as Washington bureau chief after battling over financial cutbacks with the Tribune Co. as editor of the Los Angeles Times, accept an award as Journalist of the Year.

"If I could make one request," Baquet said, "let's stop gazing at our own navels" and focus on why we became journalists. Rather than spend all of our time focusing on our own problems, Baquet said, we should remember that we have to cover two wars, economic upheaval, political turmoil in our cities, and a presidential election unlike any we've seen in a generation.

• Michel Martin, "Tell Me More," National Public Radio: Wisdom Watch: Bernard Shaw
  
  
• Juan Williams, "Morning Edition," National Public Radio: 'BET' Gets Thumbs Down Award From Journalists
  
  

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2 Somalis Assassinated as NABJ Honors Their Union

While the leader of the National Union of Somali Journalists was in Las Vegas Saturday being honored by the National Association of Black Journalists, two of his constituents were assassinated.

One was Ali Iman Sharmarke, owner of the HornAfrik Media Company, who was killed after his vehicle hit a roadside bomb that was remotely detonated. The other, Mahad Ahmed Elmi, the director of Capital Voice, Horn Afrik's second FM station, was shot dead by two men armed with pistols, according to the Shabelle news service in Somalia.

"HornAfrik's broadcasts have criticized both the government and the Islamic militants who have been trying to topple the administration through a bloody insurgency," Mohamed Olad Hassan reported for the Associated Press.

"There was no immediate indication of who had killed the men. Deputy police commissioner Abdullahi Hassan Barise said the men were targeted because of their jobs at the independent radio station."

Omar Faruk Osman, secretary general of the journalists union, told Journal-isms he had spoken to one of the victims just 20 minutes before he was killed.

Osman came to the convention to accept the Percy Qoboza Foreign Journalist Award on behalf of the union.

"Freedom of the press is an uncommon liberty in Somalia, a country ravaged by internal warfare and repressive regional authorities seeking to gain control of the region's territories," the NABJ's convention booklet said. "The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) has earned a reputation for exposing press freedom infringements, campaigning against repression of journalism and pushing for the release of detained journalists while advocating for journalists' rights."

John Yearwood, the NABJ treasurer and world editor of the Miami Herald, who hosted Osman at the convention, said he would urge NABJ to observe a moment of silence at its gospel brunch on Sunday.

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Broadcaster Ciara Elected to Lead NABJ

August 10, 2007

Aaron Morrison/NABJConvention.org Barbara Ciara listed her priorities as hiring, retention and professional development. Her overriding vision is for "training for the new technology."

Norfolk, Va., Anchor Wins Over Cheryl Smith, 310-278

Barbara Ciara, managing editor and anchor at WTKR-TV in Norfolk, Va. and vice president/broadcast of the National Association of Black Journalists, was elected president of the association on Friday, defeating black press advocate Cheryl Smith, 310-278.

Ciara, who has worked as an investigative reporter, photographer, producer and assignment editor in a career of more than 25 years, said her top priorities would be hiring, retention and professional development.

It was the third run at the job for Smith, executive editor of the Dallas Weekly and a former NABJ board member. The race provided a clear contrast in styles between Ciara, the television anchor and member of the current board, and Smith, who touted her grass-roots ties and said she had been described as "the Harriet Tubman of NABJ," the nation's largest organization of journalists of color.

In other contested races:

• Ernie Suggs, the incumbent vice president/print and a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, defeated New York-based Meta J. Mereday, a former associate member of the board and senior editor of Equal Business Publications, 414 to 165, to win reelection.
  
  
• Kathy Times, investigative reporter at WVTM-TV, Birmingham, Ala., won over Shannon Powell, reporter/anchor at WAVY-TV in Portsmouth, Va., 419 to 142, for vice president/broadcast.
  
  
• For secretary, Deirdre Childress, weekend editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, defeated Russell LaCour, copy editor/paginator at the Tulsa (Okla.) World and a regional representative on the board, 333 to 236.
  
  
• For parliamentarian, Tonju Francois, editorial producer at CNN en Español in North Miami, Fla., beat Victor Vaughan, national photo editor at the Associated Press in New York and a regional representative on the board, 306 to 246.
  
  
• Christopher Nelson, a communications major at Loyola College of Maryland in Baltimore, defeated Charles Taplin, a communication major at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., to become student representative on the board, 69 to 47.
  
  

Gregory Lee Jr., senior assistant sports editor at the Boston Globe, a former board secretary and chair of the NABJ Sports Task Force, ran unopposed for treasurer.

Some 32 percent of the organization's 1,798 full-time members voted, and 9 percent of the 1,213 eligible students cast ballots, according to the elections committee. The election saw the organization's most extensive use of the Internet, allowing members to vote online until 5 p.m. Pacific time on Friday.

After the results were announced at the end of a banquet at the association's convention, which continues at Bally's hotel in Las Vegas, Ciara hugged Smith, who was seated on the dais, and told members that toward the end of the campaign, the two women made a pledge "to work together to make a better NABJ," regardless of who won. "We were both ladies during the process, we didn't have to get witchy, and now we'll be like sisters," Ciara said.

As vice president/broadcast, Ciara often took the lead in formulating the organization's position on broadcast matters.

In 2006, when a survey from the Radio-Television News Directors Association showed that an increase in minority journalists in TV newsrooms came almost entirely from an increase in Hispanics and Asian Americans, she said in an NABJ statement, "The question is, what will the radio and broadcast industries do with these numbers. I hope this survey is not an indication that the broadcast industry is just trading one race off for another instead of making a true effort to really diversify our nation's newsrooms."

During the campaign, Ciara said she had improved ties with the Meredith Corp., the company that in 2005 fired the head of its broadcast operation, Kevin O'Brien, for remarks criticizing African Americans. At the time, Ciara called O'Brien the true definition of "a power bigot."

After Ciara worked with Paul Karpowicz, who succeeded O'Brien as president of Meredith's Broadcast Group, more than 100 student NABJ members applied for a Meredith program in which students spend a week working in the newsroom of KPHO-TV in Phoenix, she said. The students spend time with reporters, producers, editors, videographers and instructors from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Ciara also said at a candidates forum in Washington that "the stats went up, up, up" on black professionals employed at Meredith.

Asked then for her overriding vision for the organization, she answered, "For me, it's training for the new technology."

Ciara will preside over an organization that moved from a deficit of $468,249 last year to a projected surplus this year of $100,215, outgoing president Bryan Monroe and Treasurer John Yearwood said earlier Friday at a business meeting.

Monroe said membership, which had declined, had rebounded to more than 3,714, and that attendance at the convention exceeded 3,000.

Among those inducted into the NABJ Hall of Fame Friday night was John L. Dotson Jr., a board member of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and former publisher of the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, who in 1974 ran the Michele Clark Program at Columbia University, a precursor to the Maynard Institute.

There, one of his students was Chauncey Bailey, the editor of the Oakland Post who was slain on Aug. 2. "Chauncey was always feisty, looking to challenge whatever he was exposed to. Now he's dead, evidently for getting too close looking into gang violence in California. I hope there will be others to take up this mantle," Dotson said. He said he hoped "NABJ will find a way to honor him."

Dodson also offered this advice: "Don't let the same thing happen to news on the Web that happened to newspapers. There is still time to get on that elevator going up. Do what you can do to get on that elevator."

Others inducted into the NABJ Hall of Fame were Xerona Clayton, an Atlanta broadcaster who is founder, president and CEO of the Trumpet Awards Foundation Inc.; Mervin Aubespin, the first African American news illustrator at the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, its first black reporter and a former NABJ president who was described as mentor to thousands; and Jim Vance, longtime anchor at WRC-TV in Washington.

• Renita Burns, NABJ Convention Online: Ciara Elected President
  
  

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Richard Prince's Journal-isms originates from Washington and is published Monday, Wednesday and Friday. (Full disclosure: Richard Prince works part-time at the Washington Post and is editor of the Black College Wire.) It began in print before most of knew what the Internet was, and it would like to be referred to as a "column." For newcomers: The words in blue (on most computers) are links leading to more information. The Web site BugMeNot.com provides passwords and user names to some registration-only news sites.

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