Journalists reacted with cautious approval Friday to an announcement by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that he was revising Justice Department procedures that enraged reporters this year as the department pursued leak investigations.
"I'm cautiously optimistic," said Hugo Balta, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the only leader of a journalist-of-color organization to agree to meet with Holder as the attorney general sought feedback from the Fourth Estate before revising the guidelines.
"I'm happy to see that a lot of what it speaks to is not criminalizing journalists for doing their jobs. What we need to wait and see is how it will be enforced."
Balta, his executive director, Anna Lopez Buck, and Walt Swanston, interim executive director of Unity: Journalists for Diversity, attended a June 3 meeting with Holder. Other journalist of color groups declined, citing the stated off-the-record ground rules. Those rules were lifted once the meeting began.
"In a six-page report, Mr. Holder outlined changes to the Justice Department's investigative guidelines that would prevent the Federal Bureau of Investigation from portraying a reporter as a co-conspirator in a criminal leak as a way to get around a legal bar on secret search warrants for reporting materials," Charlie Savage reported for the New York Times.
"The revisions would also make it harder — though not impossible — for prosecutors to obtain a journalist's calling records from telephone companies without giving news organizations advance notice. Notifying news organizations in advance would give them a chance to contest the request in court."
Savage continued, "Investigators' targeting of the communications records of Associated Press and Fox News reporters in separate leak investigations came to light in May, setting off a furor, both among journalists and in Congress, about the administration's increasingly aggressive record on leak investigations."
Two months ago, President Obama "gave Mr. Holder a July 12 deadline to review the rules and make recommendations. Mr. Holder held a series of meetings with newsroom leaders and lawyers for media companies, along with lawmakers and First Amendment scholars, in May and June, and briefed Mr. Obama about the changes at the White House on Friday morning.
"Several of them directly addressed controversies from the earlier disclosures. For example, a 2010 affidavit that came to light in May sought a warrant for e-mails from the Google account of James Rosen of Fox News in which he corresponded with a State Department analyst who was suspected of leaking classified information. . . ."
Michael Clemente, Fox News' executive vice president of news, said in a statement, "The guidelines appear to be welcome steps. That said, the Attorney General, Justice Department officials and the FBI should also take full responsibility for the illegal actions taken against Fox News and James Rosen," Fox News reported. No journalist was prosecuted, however.
The Associated Press said it was "gratified that the Department of Justice took our concerns seriously. The description of the new guidelines released today indicates they will result in meaningful, additional protection for journalists. We'll obviously be reviewing them more closely when the actual language of the guidelines is released, but we are heartened by this step."
Journalists, media organizations and others expressed alarm when the AP disclosed on May 13 that the Justice Department had seized records for 20 separate phone lines, all assigned to AP and its journalists, over a two-month period as part of a leak investigation.
"Investigators did not notify the AP to request the phone records before obtaining them, a break with protocol in dealings between the government and the press," Michael Calderone and Ryan J. Reilly noted for the Huffington Post. Gary Pruitt, chief executive of the AP, called the sweeping seizure 'unconstitutional.'
"Under the new policy, news organizations will be given advance notice when investigators seek access to news-gathering materials, except in situations where the attorney general determines that 'for compelling reasons, advance notice and negotiations would pose a clear and substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation, risk grave harm to national security, or present an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm.'
"That determination will be made after consulting members of a newly created News Media Review Committee, which will include senior DOJ officials who are not directly involved in the investigations and who have relevant expertise and experience in media matters."
Balta said that he suggested at the June 3 meeting that any Justice Department materials provided the news media be available in Spanish for Spanish-language media.
Moreover, the NAHJ president invited Holder to NAHJ's summer convention. That will be part of the annual Excellence in Journalism Conference Aug. 24-26 in Anaheim, Calif., which is staged with the Radio Television Digital News Association and the Society of Professional Journalists.
Asked about those two requests, a Justice Department spokeswoman told Journal-isms by email Friday, "We are considering President Balta's recommendations regarding Spanish-language materials and look forward to working with NAHJ in the future."
Balta, speaking by telephone from Miami, where NAHJ is conducting a regional conference with SPJ South Florida chapters this weekend, said the invitation for Holder to address the convention remains open.
Noted Thinkers Write About Race in Newspaper Series
The first story in the 11-part series is by Douglas A. Blackmon, who won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for his book, "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II," later a PBS documentary. It begins:
"On July 31, 1903, a letter addressed to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House. It had been mailed from the town of Bainbridge, Georgia, the prosperous seat of a cotton county perched on the Florida state line.
"The sender was a barely literate African-American woman named Carrie Kinsey. With little punctuation and few capital letters, she penned the bare facts of the abduction of her 14-year-old brother, James Robinson, who a year earlier had been sold into involuntary servitude.
"Kinsey had already asked for help from the powerful White people in her world. She knew where her brother had been taken — a vast plantation not far away called Kinderlou. There, hundreds of Black men and boys were held in chains and forced to labor in the fields or in one of several factories owned by the McRee family, one of the wealthiest and most powerful in Georgia. No White official in this corner of the state would take an interest in the abduction and enslavement of a Black teenager.
"Confronted with a world of indifferent White people, Mrs. Kinsey did the only remaining thing she could think of. Newspapers across the country had recently reported on a speech by Roosevelt promising a 'square deal' for Black Americans. Mrs. Kinsey decided that her only remaining hope was to beg the president of the United States to help her brother.
" 'Mr. Prassident,' she wrote. 'They wont let me have him…. He hase not don nothing for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help.' . . . "
Starting Friday, and for 10 consecutive Fridays afterward, newspapers that signed up were to receive free of charge articles examining the nation's progress on race in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The pieces have such titles as "Emmett and Trayvon" by sociologist Elijah Anderson; "Deconstruction Reconstruction" by Nicholas Lemann, the New Yorker writer who just stepped down as dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; "Lincoln Died for Our Sins," by Jelani Cobb, author, historian and director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut; and "A Second Emancipation" by Taylor Branch, the Martin Luther King Jr. biographer, and Haley Sweetland Edwards, an editor of the Washington Monthly.
Blackmon continued with his story. "Considered more than a century later, her letter courses with desperation and submerged outrage. Yet when received at the White House, it was slipped into a small rectangular folder and forwarded to the Department of Justice. There, it was tagged with a reference number, 12007, and filed away. Teddy Roosevelt never saw it. No action was taken. Her words lie still at the National Archives just outside Washington, D.C.
"As dumbfounding as the story told by the Carrie Kinsey letter is, far more remarkable is what surrounds that letter at the National Archives. In the same box that holds her grief-stricken missive are at least half a dozen other pieces of correspondence recounting other stories of kidnapping, perversion of the courts, or human trafficking — as horrifying as, or worse than, Carrie Kinsey's tale. . . ."
Meanwhile, NPR on Friday announced an addition to the commemorations of the March on Washington. For its first public event at its new Washington headquarters, the network is hosting a free evening screening July 19 of the documentary "The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords," followed by a panel discussion and Q-and-A session with Terence Samuel, national political editor at the Washington Post; Julian Bond, politician, professor and writer; and Laura Murphy, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union. Those interested may register for tickets at http://events.npr.org/npr/Home.
Station Airs Mock Asian Names of Pilots in Crash
"Words cannot adequately express the outrage we, at the Asian American Journalists Association, feel over KTVU’s on-air blunder that made a mockery of the Asiana Airline tragedy and offended so many loyal viewers of the San Francisco Bay Area station," Bobby Caina Calvan wrote Friday for AAJA.
"During KTVU’s noon newscast, the anchor said the station had learned the names of the four pilots in the cockpit of the ill-fated flight, which crashed in San Francisco on July 6 and killed three passengers," Calvan, AAJA MediaWatch chair, and Paul Cheung, national AAJA president, wrote.
"Unfortunately those names were not only wrong, but grossly offensive. We won’t repeat the names, which caricatured Asian names.
"The station apologized later in the same newscast. Still, we fail to understand how a television news station with such a vaunted reputation could have fallen victim to such juvenile antics. . . . "
Other websites were not shy about listing the false names. "Yeah — we didn't think 'Sum Ting Wong,' 'Wi Tu Lo,' 'Ho Lee Fuk' and 'Bang Ding Ow' were real names either," Gabe Meline wrote for Bohemian.com.
The station said on its website "Prior to air, the names were confirmed by an NTSB official in the agency's Washington, D.C. office. Despite that confirmation, KTVU realized the names that aired were not accurate and issued an apology later in the newscast.
AAJA said, "Earlier in the afternoon, the NTSB said it had no role in confirming the names. But when pressed by KTVU and others, the agency looked deeper into the matter. By evening, the NTSB issued an apology.
" 'A summer intern acted outside the scope of his authority when he erroneously confirmed the names of the flight crew on the aircraft,' the agency said in a statement.
"Appropriate actions will be taken to ensure that such a serious error is not repeated."
The correct names of the pilots in the cockpit are Lee Gang-guk and Lee Jeong-min.
YouTube: KTVU Flight 214 Fail (Original)
MSNBC Briefly Shows Trayvon Martin's Dead Body
"For a fleeting moment Thursday night, MSNBC aired what analysts covering George Zimmerman's second-degree murder trial have called the most graphic evidence in the case — a photo of Trayvon Martin's dead body lying in the grass," Harold Maass wrote Friday for theweek.com. "This was not the image published by the Huffington Post and other news outlets showing the 17-year-old's corpse covered by a yellow blanket. This image, captured before police covered him up, shows Martin in full — his face, his eyes and mouth open, his arms at his side.
"In the courtroom, prosecutors used the photo to illustrate their closing argument. Martin, they said, was just an unarmed kid returning from a convenience store with Skittles and a drink, and he would be alive today if Zimmerman, a white, Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer, hadn't stalked him because he was black. 'His body speaks to you even in death,' the prosecution told the jury. (Zimmerman maintains that Martin was the aggressor, and that he shot the boy in self-defense.)
"Some readers and viewers saw things differently. One commenter at Balloon Juice, for example, called the airing of the image 'wrong and disgusting,' and said MSNBC should apologize, even though it only aired the photo briefly in a live feed before quickly panning away.
"Was it wrong to show the victim's corpse in such a high-profile, racially charged case? . . ."
Wayne Bennett, the Field Negro: New theories from the right about a trial going on down in Florida.
Jenée Desmond-Harris, the Root: Zimmerman Trial: Race Verdict Already In
Jenée Desmond-Harris, the Root: Poll: Gawker Wrong to Show Trayvon's Body?
Earl Ofari Hutchinson, syndicated: Federal Prosecution of Zimmerman Compelling, But Unlikely
Kevin Powell, Vibe: George Zimmerman Trial Is Exposing America's Ugly Truths
"Rebeldes," Latino Rebels: The "White Hispanic" Label: Yes, People, Racism Is a Latino Thing, Too (March 29, 2012)
Noah Rothman, Mediaite: Predictions Of Riots If Zimmerman Acquitted Display Appalling Lack Of Faith In Black Community
Adam Weinstein, Gawker: This, Courtesy of MSNBC, Is Trayvon Martin's Dead Body. Get Angry.
Erik Wemple, Washington Post: Geraldo: Jurors would have 'shot and killed Trayvon Martin a lot sooner than George Zimmerman did'
Erik Wemple, Washington Post: George Zimmerman trial 'riot' fears: A rundown of coverage
Alex Weprin, TVNewser: Zimmerman Trial Stirs More Pundit Pontification About CNN
Deanese Williams-Harris, Chicago Tribune: Social media 'blackout' as jury gets Trayvon Martin case
Juan Williams, Fox News: 'Crackers,' a 'teenage mammy' — the sorry truth about race and Zimmerman trial
Two Egyptian Journalists Killed Covering Protests
"In the past two weeks, two Egyptian journalists were killed while covering protests and clashes between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and opposition activists, Hiba Zayadin reported Wednesday for IFEX, a Toronto-based global network "defending freedom and expression."
"On 29 June, Salah al-Din Hassan, a 37-year-old reporter with independent news website Shaab Masr, was killed while covering a demonstration against President Mohammed Morsi in the city of Port Said.
"Ahmed Assem El-Senousy, 26, journalist and photographer for the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice newspaper, was shot by a sniper while covering the events of 8 July when Egyptian soldiers opened fire on Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators, killing more than 50. El-Senousy captured his own death on camera as he filmed the incident.
"Prior to these deaths, only four journalists had been killed in Egypt since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
"The country has been steadily falling deeper into a state of chaos since the days leading up to 30 June, which marked one year of President Morsi's rule. . . ."
Adel Iskandar, Committee to Protect Journalists: Amid upheaval, Egypt's media blunders
ABC Spotlights Group Seeking Missing Women of Color
"Long after the search for those three missing women from Cleveland grew cold, Derrica Wilson and her sister-in-law Natalie Wilson of Washington, D.C., were still leading a search for Gina DeJesus on the internet," Steve Osunsami reported Thursday on ABC-TV's "World News with Diane Sawyer."
"They shared her photos and worked the phones for clues up until the very day Ms. DeJesus came home alive. It was May 6, 2013, after a decade in captivity.
"There’s a reason they focused on DeJesus — because she is Hispanic.
"They believe it’s their 'assignment from God' to help African-American, Latino and low-income families find missing loved ones who they believe authorities and the media have forgotten. . . ."
"The Power of Southern Blacks Has Been Dissipated"
"To understand the depth of the damage that the Supreme Court's June 25 decision, Shelby County v. Holder, has inflicted on the voting rights of African-Americans, you have to measure it against the backdrop of the takeover of state legislatures, primarily in the South, by the Republican Party," Thomas B. Edsall wrote Wednesday for the New York Times.
"Since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the number of blacks elected to Southern state legislatures has grown from fewer than five to 313, all but a handful as Democrats. While blacks rose in the once dominant Democratic Party, Southern whites defected. Now, in the former Confederacy, Republicans have gained control of all 11 state legislatures.
"Despite their growing numbers, the power of Southern blacks has been dissipated. African-American Democratic officials — according to data compiled from academic research and the Web sites of state legislatures — have been relegated to minority party status. Equally important, an estimated 86 African-Americans who spent years accumulating seniority have lost their chairmanships of state legislative committees to white Republicans. . . ."
Mark C. Alexander, the Record, Bergen County, N.J.: Voting rights: Our democracy will suffer (June 30)
Alberto Gonzales, Fox News Latino: Voting Rights For All Americans
Nikole Hannah-Jones, ProPublica: America's Long Civil Rights March, Complete With Stops and Starts
Tom Joyner, blackamericaweb.com: Don't Fall For the 'Banana in the Tailpipe' (June 30)
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun Magazine: Why the Supreme Court Said "No to Blacks, Yes to Gays" (June 27)
Roland S. Martin, Creators Syndicate: Don't Just Get Mad Over Voting Rights Act; Get Even (June 28)
Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune: GOP turns against its own history (July 3)
Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald: Voting rights ruling a dagger in heart of civil rights movement (July 2)
Mark Trahant, indianz.com: Supreme Court sends message on voting rights (July 1)
Layhmond Robinson Jr., Pioneer Black Journalist, Dies at 88
"Layhmond Robinson Jr., one of the first black reporters at The New York Times, who later became a local television news correspondent, died on June 29 in Queens," Daniel E. Slotnik reported Thursday for the Times. "He was 88.
"The cause was complications of pneumonia, his daughter Deborah Robinson said.
"Mr. Robinson became a reporter for The Times in 1950, when black faces in the newsroom were rare. He covered crime in Brooklyn, then the New York State Legislature and the contentious 1961 mayoral race between Robert F. Wagner Jr. and then state attorney general, Louis K. Lefkowitz. In 1964, he became the first black president of the Legislative Correspondents Association, a group of reporters covering New York State government.
"Mr. Robinson helped to inspire the next generation of black journalists. . . ."
Winning Photographer Sees Spirit Shining Through Decay
"After more than 40 years telling stories, Camilo José Vergara has reached the ranks of Joan Didion and Tony Kushner by receiving the 2012 National Humanities Medal this week from the President; he tells his stories through photos, instead of words. He is also the first photographer to ever receive this honor," Kristina Puga reported Thursday for NBCLatino.
" 'Camilo José Vergara, for his stark visual representation of American cities,' was how the thought-provoking photographer was acknowledged for his award at the White House. 'By capturing images of urban settings over time, his sequences reflect the vibrant culture of our changing communities and document the enduring spirit that shines through decay.'
"The 2002 MacArthur fellow, whose books include, 'American Ruins' and 'How the Other Half Worships,' likes to photograph American cities, photographing the same buildings and neighborhoods from the exact spot, over many years, to capture changes over time.
" 'For more than four decades, I have devoted myself to photographing and systematically documenting the poorest and most segregated communities in urban America,' Vergara says in an essay for LightBox. 'My focus is on established East Coast cities such as New York, Newark and Camden; rust belt cities of the Midwest like Detroit and Chicago; and such West Coast cities as Los Angeles and Richmond, California. . . . "
Vergara was born in Chile and is based in New York.
Nearly four times as many young murder victims in the United States were killed by firearms than by other methods such as stabbing, strangling or poisoning in the past 30 years, according to a study Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Yasmeen Abutaleb reported for Reuters. "The study found that males, people aged 20-24 and black people are murdered at higher rates than the overall average. . . ."
Mary Alice Jervay Thatch, editor and publisher of the Wilmington (N.C.) Journal, was elected publisher of the year by the National Newspaper Publishers Association, George E. Curry reported Wednesday for NNPA. The honor was awarded in large part because of the successful campaign Thatch led to free the Wilmington Ten, civil rights activists who were falsely convicted and imprisoned 40 years ago.
Carole Simpson, who retired from ABC News in 2006 to become leader-in-residence at Emerson College's School of Communications in Boston, will be awarded the 2013 Col. Barney Oldfield Distinguished Service Award, the Radio Television Digital News Foundation announced Wednesday. The award honors someone who, through his or her own efforts, has contributed to the growth and success of RTDNF. Simpson, a former member of the RTDNF Board of Trustees, "established the Carole Simpson Scholarship to encourage and help minority students overcome hurdles along their career path. Carole Simpson Scholarship winners are working as reporters, producers and anchors in television and radio stations across the country," the group said.
CNN was the big winner at the 19th annual Vision Awards of the National Association for Multi-Ethnicities in Communications on Thursday, R. Thomas Umstead reported for Multichannel News, winning four awards. Harpo Studio won in the "news/informational" category for "Oprah's Master Class."
Yoruba Richen's "The New Black," which chronicles the division in Maryland's black community leading up to the state's 2012 ballot initiative granting same-sex marriage rights, won the audience award for best feature at American Film Institute's annual documentary festival, conducted at Washington area theaters, Andrew Lapin reported for Current.org. The producers received partial funding from the Independent Television Service and the National Black Programming Consortium. The film is to air on PBS' "Independent Lens" in February 2014.
"In the first six months of 2013, white men dominated the guest lists on the broadcast network Sunday shows and CNN's State of the Union," Rob Savillo reported Wednesday for Media Matters for America. "MSNBC was the only network achieving notable diversity in its guests, particularly on Melissa Harris-Perry's show. . . . "
Compared with the ratings four years ago, journalists have dropped the most in public esteem among occupations surveyed, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life, the center said Thursday. "The share of the public saying that journalists contribute a lot to society is down 10 percentage points, from 38% in 2009 to 28% in 2013. The drop is particularly pronounced among women (down 17 points). About as many U.S. adults now say journalists contribute 'not very much' or 'nothing at all' to society (27%) as say they contribute a lot (28%). . . . "
Columnist Suzette Martinez Standring of Milton, Mass., won first prize in the category "Online, Blog, and Multimedia Column — under 100,000 monthly unique visitors" in the annual column writing competition of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Standring writes "Spiritual Café", a spirituality column and blog that appears in the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., and is nationally syndicated. The late movie critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times won first place in the "Online, Blog, and Multimedia Column — over 100,000 monthly unique visitors" category.
In San Francisco, "KQED has named well-known Bay Area television reporter Thuy Vu to replace the retired Belva Davis as host of a revamped Friday evening news program, known for years, but no more, as 'This Week in Northern California,' " David Wiegand reported Thursday for the San Francisco Chronicle. Vu was most recently co-host of KPIX's "Eye on the Bay." The program’s new name will be "KQED Newsroom."
Evrod Cassimy, who once released his own CD single and was advertised as "TV News' FIRST R&B recording artist," is joining Detroit's newly named morning newscast, "Local 4 News Today," beginning Aug. 12. WDIV-TV announced Thursday. "Cassimy will co-anchor 4:30 a.m. – 7 a.m. weekdays alongside current anchor Rhonda Walker." Cassimy is morning anchor and reporter for KCNC-TV in Denver.
In Trinidad and Tobago, "Turmoil in the Guardian newsroom which began on Monday solidified yesterday when three senior members quit," Ria Taitt reported Wednesday for the Trinidad Express. Dr. Sheila Rampersad, Guardian public affairs editor, and Anika Gumbs-Sandiford and Denyse Renne, two key investigative reporters, resigned "following what has been described by Rampersad as the virtual sidelining of its editor-in-chief, Judy Raymond. Speaking with the Express, Rampersad said the three left because there had been an accumulation of external pressure on the editorial processes and the editorial product in the newsroom. . . ."
"Many international correspondents in China believe reporting conditions have worsened over the past year, according to a new survey by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China that also finds the Chinese government has 'increasingly resorted to threats and intimidation against foreign media,' " Bob Dietz wrote Thursday for the Committee to Protect Journalists. He added, "The full report [PDF] is worth reading. It's not pretty."
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Journal-isms is published on the site of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education (mije.org). Reprinted on The Root by permission.