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Thread 6656

Thread ID: 6656 | Posts: 8 | Started: 2003-05-14

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il ragno [OP]

2003-05-14 18:31 | User Profile

A guy named Seth wants you to understand that the Jayson Blair scandal really means there's not enough diversity in the media. Honest.

[url=http://www.msnbc.com/news/913147.asp?0cv=KB10&cp1=1]http://www.msnbc.com/news/913147.asp?0cv=KB10&cp1=1[/url]

[SIZE=3][font=Times]What’s Race Got to Do With It? [/font][/SIZE]SETH MNOOKIN *In the end, it was a system of favoritism at The New York Times that created Jayson Blair *

NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE

  May 13 —  Monday night on “Hardball,” Liz Swasey, a mouthpiece for the benignly named Media Research Center, a right-wing attack group, smeared Howell Raines’ and The New York Times’ commitment to diversity. Speaking of Raines, Swasey said that in the past, “he said that diversity was more important than journalism.”

PEOPLE SAY MANY INCENDIARY things on television, and a lot of those things are taken seriously. But Swasey was openly laughed at; I know, because I was one of the other guests. What Raines actually said, speaking at the 2001 convention of the National Association of Black Journalists about the paper’s commitment to hiring talented minorities, was “this campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.”

   Swasey seemed like a perfectly intelligent woman, so I suspect that **she was simply being intellectually dishonest, twisting reality to make her point (that’s what rabid ideologues tend to do**). In her view, the politically correct cabal running the media is sacrificing fairness and accuracy at the altar of affirmative action.

   I happen to think Swasey is dead wrong. Diversity is important, period; it’s more important for the country’s news organizations. **The media have a responsibility to reflect different viewpoints, to report on varied cultures, to shine light in places we might not tread ourselves**. I’m glad Raines, and the Times, at least pay lip service to the notion that diversity is a laudable and important goal.

   Or maybe I should say have paid lip service in the past. Since the Jayson Blair story broke, no one at the Times has stepped up to say the newspaper will continue its commitment to making the paper’s reporters and editors better reflect the world they write about. And it does need to be better reflected: outside of Gerald Boyd, the Times’ African-American managing editor, there are very few non-whites (or non-males, for that matter) in major newsroom positions. The national, foreign, sports, metro, and business editors are all white; so are the Times’s Magazine and Book Review editors. The paper’s Washington editor, the editor of the Sunday Week in Review section, and the editor of the Sunday Arts & Leisure section are all also white—though those three jobs, at least, are held by women.   
    **
   “I don’t think diversity had anything to do with why Jayson Blair was there for so long,” says Condace Pressley, the president of the National Association of Black Journalists. “I think bad management has everything to do with it.”** Pressley says she’s put in a call to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., because she wants to ask him to “reaffirm The New York Times Company’s commitment to diversity,” a reaffirmation Pressley says she “has not heard yet.”

   While Blair’s race undoubtedly was a factor in his initially coming to the paper, increasingly his personal relationships with top editors seem to have played more of a role in his sticking around. **Boyd, who newsroom sources describe as being personally friendly with Blair, said yesterday that he had “less contact” with Blair than he has with most reporters**. “In my role as a deputy managing editor or as a managing editor, I didn’t have direct dealings with Jayson, and to the degree I did on one or two occasions, it wasn’t unusual,” Boyd told NEWSWEEK.

    **Boyd said he wasn’t aware of the fact that Blair had nominated him for a NABJ “Journalist of the Year” award until after he had won, and that he had nothing to do with the fact that Blair wrote a warm biographical sketch of Boyd in the Times’ internal newsletter **when Boyd was named managing editor. Meanwhile, Tuesday’s Village Voice and Daily News both raised Blair’s personal contact with top newsroom managers. **A Daily News article detailed Blair’s romantic involvement with the daughter of one of Raines’s wife’s best friends**; a Daily News column by former Times staffer E.R. Shipp writes than “an old boys’ system got Jayson Blair to the highest ranks of The New York Times’ national reporting staff.”

   Inside the Times, the Blair incident is serving to unleash deep resentment about a star system in which Raines is seen as doling out plum assignments to buddies. Raines had scheduled sessions with reporters and editors over the next week or so aimed at airing those grievances and any other issues surrounding the Blair case. But internal dissent at the Times has reached such a fevered pitch that on Tuesday afternoon rumors swirled that top managers were in danger of losing their jobs. At 2:30 pm, Raines sent an e-mail to the entire newsroom staff, which read in part, ”[W]e need to have a meeting of our entire staff….With apologies for the lateness of the message, I am canceling the [smaller] meetings we had scheduled for this afternoon. Arthur, Gerald and I have decided to have a town hall meeting at a time and place to be announced as soon as a venue is secured.”

   There’s a lot to discuss. Preferential treatment is definitely at issue, but in the end it may be as much about the top editor’s desire to pick favorites—and will them to success—as it is about the Times (or any other newsroom’) **laudable drive toward diversity**.

   © 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

Texas Dissident

2003-05-14 18:40 | User Profile

Originally posted by il ragno@May 14 2003, 13:31 A guy named Seth wants you to understand that the Jayson Blair scandal really means there's not *enough diversity in the media. Honest.* **

Seth Mnookin ??

Didn't Shirley MacLaine channel that guy once?

<_<

Roy Batty

2003-05-14 21:15 | User Profile

What'd I tell ya' in the other thread? More diversity. Yes, white America must repent. I'm still awaiting the announcement of Blair's new TV show.

Whether it's government or the media, when a zhidraelite or one of their weapons of choice against whites (in this case, the smiling black face of Blair and his possessed keyboard) is caught with their shorts around their ankles, the answer is quick reprimands, token punishment, and then a new job. Equal to or BETTER than the job/position that gave them a chance to get in trouble in the first place. At some point, Blair will be lecturing Americans on how diversity must be increased, or more 'injustices' such as the ones he faced in his time of crises will occur.

Franco

2003-05-14 22:25 | User Profile

Hey -- Seth, Noah, Joshua, Moishe, Abraham -- what's in a name, huh?

Seth is just a name. Are you implying something here, folks? Are you suggesting that Seth has an ethnic agenda? [giggle, tee-hee] :D

amundsen

2003-05-14 23:19 | User Profile

Diversity is important, period; it’s more important for the country’s news organizations. The media have a responsibility to reflect different viewpoints, to report on varied cultures, to shine light in places we might not tread ourselves.

I agree. I think my local paper needs to again shine its light on the diversity of my community. If only they would reinstate their old policy of reporting the race of our local murderers and rapists. It is always good to keep up with the activities of our minority, actually given their birth rate soon to be here majority, community.

Recluse

2003-05-14 23:22 | User Profile

Originally posted by Franco@May 14 2003, 16:25 **Hey -- Seth, Noah, Joshua, Moishe, Abraham -- what's in a name, huh?

Seth is just a name. Are you implying something here, folks? Are you suggesting that Seth has an ethnic agenda? [giggle, tee-hee]  :D**

"Growing up in Newton, Mass., Newsweek reporter Seth Mnookin, 30, said he and his family "were High Holiday Jews." In the past five years, however, his parents have grown more observant; they attend Sabbath services weekly and are studying for their bar and bat mitzvahs." :naughty:

[url=http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.02.28/fast1.html]http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.02.28/fast1.html[/url]

Robbie

2003-05-15 03:13 | User Profile

Of course the newspapers need more "diversity". After all, it's the state religion.

Then again, even without all the "diversity", newspapers would still be the written mouthpieces for Marxism.

:y

Walter Yannis

2003-05-15 08:10 | User Profile

Originally posted by Texas Dissident@May 14 2003, 18:40 ** > Originally posted by il ragno@May 14 2003, 13:31 A guy named Seth wants you to understand that the Jayson Blair scandal really means there's not *enough diversity in the media. Honest.* **

Seth Mnookin ??

Didn't Shirley MacLaine channel that guy once?

<_< **

It sounds Armenian to me.

Mnookian is a common Armenian name.

Walter