:: Going From Jackson

No 'Unnamed Sources,' Ledger? You sure?

Cledger-Ledger honchos have been known to declare that the paper does not use "unnamed sources." We already know that's not true due to mucked-up stories like the one by Ledger Washington Bureau reporter Ana Radalat (OK, they called her that before the muck-up) where she wrote a story based on an MBN memo in 2003 "obtained from" Frank Melton, who was then an unnamed source. Ledger Metro editor Grace Simmons accepted the piece, despite the supposed policy against unnamed sources—and, alas, the memo turned out to be largely false, blah, blah.

Today the Ledger has a page one story about Judge Delaughter by reporter Jerry Mitchell that relies solely on an unnamed source that he doesn't bother to explain at all, even to say they're an unnamed source, which leads one to think that the Ledger thinks that not admitting to unnamed sources means they're not using them. Uh, no.

In essense, he starts the confusing story by telling us:

Authorities are investigating the finances of suspended Hinds County Circuit Judge Bobby DeLaughter, including his purchase of a Civil War-era house.

Note that he then does not tell us how he knows that information (like: "according to a source in the U.S. Attorney's office..." or "according to an internal investigative memo leaked to The Clarion-Ledger.") There is no explanation whatsoever, which is a common habit at the Ledger, and one we've seen Mitchell use a number of times in the DeLaughter saga alone. Is this to get around admitting to a naive public that the Ledger is, in fact, using "unnamed sources"? If not, it's just sloppy and should not get past an editor.

The truth, whether the Ledger wants to admit it or not, is that all investigative reporting needs unnamed sources -- to tell us stuff, to blow the whistle, to give us documents. Pretending that they don't use them is extremely disingenious, and an article written like this one just makes the reader wonder what the reporter is up to. In addition, very little else is said in the piece, other than previously published information on a house that DeLaughter bought.

The story seems like a hit job to me because, clearly, no one in the DeLaughter camp talked to Mitchell. Thus, how does he know that DeLaughter didn't, say, use the book advance from his book about the Beckwith case to buy the house? Or that his wife didn't come up with it in some way? This story clearly did not seem ready for primetime.

Speaking of the Beckwith case, why is Mitchell writing about the DeLaughter-Peters scandal? He was also in the film he refers to, which was loosely based on a case his work helped with—he clearly has a conflict of interest in covering DeLaughter and doesn't even reveal it.

We have noticed that readers are questioning Mitchell's coverage of late as well. Under this story, one reader has posted:

This is another patch-work story by I-no-longer-care-about-investigative-reporting Jerry Mitchell. The only thing new here is Delaughter's house payment. Which includes some yo-yo that reads the NY Times and believes "A balloon is very conservative.". Gee - what a nut. And the sad part is the CL thinks this quality (or lack of) reporting that belongs on the front page.

My Statement About Mike Lacey’s Use of Racial Slur

April 18, 2008—When I first heard that one of AAN’s highest ranking executives had used the n-word to jokingly refer to a deceased friend of his, I assumed his friend was black and was shocked. When I learned that the friend was white, I was just as appalled. The issue, to me, is not who he was talking about; it was about his use of the most notorious white supremacy label as a flippant term of endearment. Even more puzzling to me is why Mr. Lacey, or other white men, would even consider doing such a thing considering the baggage that word continues to carry for so many Americans, black and white.

Mr. Lacey has the right to choose his words, and they were clearly his own words—just as Don Imus chose his and Sen. Trent Lott from my state chose his to honor his good friend Strom Thurmond. But as someone who considers myself a civil libertarian, I always believe that the best response to offensive speech is more speech. Thus my remarks and personal observations today.

Regardless of Mr. Lacey’s intent, the most disturbing consideration to me is the message that one public episode, in a roomful of respected journalists including African Americans and their families, could send about our industry, especially if both journalists and readers do not intentionally use the incident as a tool for self-examination and to further racial dialogue on our staffs and in our communities.

Unfortunately, that one incident—which Mr. Lacey says he regrets and which his friends say does not accurately reflect his racial sensitivity—has the potential to say to both readers and potential alternative-news staffers (of color, and white) that this kind of casual use of the most hurtful language is acceptable at the nation’s alternative newspapers. It could compel some potential good hires of various races to turn away from our papers, or not to even consider us in the first place—simply because we do not show enough understanding of why the phrase was so wrong (as would have the use of “my ______; fill in with a gay, Jewish, Latino or Asian one-word perjorative). And it could cost us readers, especially new ones who aren’t as familiar with the alternative press and our mission and history.

As the diversity chair of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, I know well the determination of members of the alternative press to diversify our staffs and our coverage, as well as to move more people of color into management positions. Like other media, we do not have a perfect track record in this regard, but we are working hard and deliberately on making progress, and have for years before I took this position last year. For two years in a row, I have been invited to the Gatekeepers gathering at Columbia University, which is a diverse and straight-talking workshop for media “gatekeepers” from around the country led by experts like Keith Woods of the Poynter Institute. Last year, I gathered much information, not only on diverse hiring, but on how hiring and retention is interdependent with diversity content efforts (including images) throughout our newspapers in editorial and advertising, as well as on efforts to ensure that our newsroom cultures are open and sensitive to the concerns of diverse staffs. The diversity committee is also doing extensive demographic research on how our target audience is changing, and how younger attitudes from all races and ethnicities toward media are growing more expectant about diversity.

This summer at our national convention in Philadelphia, AAN has scheduled a business-editorial track presentation by Alden Loury, editor/publisher of the Chicago Reporter, to help us present up-to-date demographic/diversity information and advice to our member papers, which are hungry to address diversity challenges. We will continue that discussion on a new diversity blog and on a listserv that will be open to all AAN members.

We are also continuing our existing efforts at diversity training and hiring—which have focused on both our diversity grant program and the Academy for Alternative Journalism at Northwestern’s Medill Journalism School in Chicago every summer. Both of these programs are designed to deliberately reach out to journalists and interns of color in order to get them into the alternative media pipeline for hiring and advancement. And I would be remiss if I did not point out that Mr. Lacey and his company helped fund and launch those programs and have hired many AAJ grads over the years.

In many ways, that is a major reason that his comment in Phoenix was so disheartening to me personally and professionally. Such an insensitive use of such a painful, loaded word has the power to overshadow some of the diversity efforts that AAN in general, and Mr. Lacey and his papers in specific, have made over the years.

I am disappointed that this incident occurred and have high hopes that it will not damage the diversity efforts of any alternative newspaper. However, I urge AAN papers, and the media and public in general, to seize the moment to have more intimate and revealing conversations about race and the language of racial hatred so that good can come from this moment.

Donna Ladd
Editor, Jackson (Miss.) Free Press

Suggested links:

AAN Academy for Alternative Journalism

“Let’s Do It Better!" Workshop on Journalism, Race & Ethnicity

Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education

Poynter Online — Diversity

Village Voice Media Owner Offends with Racial Slur

OK, so this was not the best moment for the alternative-news industry. The owner of the alternative newspaper industry's most corporate chain, Mike Lacey, accepted an award from the Phoenix Society of Professional Journalists on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's death. At the podium, he referred to his deceased (white) friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tom Fitzpatrick, as "my n*gger." In the audience were black journalists, as well as an 82-year-old mother of a deceased black sports journalist there to accept a special award on his behalf.

This is what Gawker has to say about Lacey's oh-so-hip usage of a racial slur in such an offensive manner:

So how much contrition has Lacey shown for his remark—the classic fatal mistake of white men who mistakenly believe they're down enough to say whatever they want—delivered to an audience including grandmothers? He's sorry that his "comments about a dead colleague rankled listeners."

"My words, meant to honor a friend, were inappropriate," Lacey said. "All present have my sincere apology. It is regrettable that any phrase of mine offended those attending a First Amendment awards banquet."

He's sorry the sticks in the mud in the audience are oversensitive enough to get offended. They probably didn't realize he was down.

My feelings about this stunt are obvious to anyone who knows me. However, I do want to say this: Not only is this offensive to individual people of color (not to mention whites who take racial slurs seriously), it is not the right message for a leader of the alternative-newspaper industry to send. Nobody is questioning his First Amendment right to say something stupid and offensive; respondents are challenging Mr. Lacey and other white men who see nothing wrong with this to think again about their actions.

As the diversity chair of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, of which Village Voice papers are members, I know well that the alternative-newspaper industry, like much media throughout America, is working to increase our diversity, in content, staffing and attitudes to better reflect and serve our readership. Mike Lacey's comment certainly does not speak for other alt editors and publishers. I, for one, am appalled.

Hopefully, though, this episode can serve as a way to increase dialogue on race, racial healing and ongoing distrust and disparities in America. We can only hope and pray that it will.

Here's the video of Lacey's remarks, by the way.

Who's Got the Biggest Fallacy?

The MississippiforMcCain Web site is truly acting like a cyber-moron at the moment. We just turned up this general swipe at "another lefty"—who, it turns out, is a guy with radical, inconsistent (at best) views at best who wrote a letter to the Ledger the McCain crowd doesn't like. George Lambus wrote to the Ledger complaining that:

Carroll County in Mississippi has been from its inception a hotbed of Klan activity, now if Sen. John McCain's great-grandfather was once a sheriff there, what does that say? Apples don't fall far from the tree!

So, the McCainians apparently did a Google and found this letter from the same wacko in the JFP, in which he shocked our sensibilities with his lambasting of young, black males, even as he stated that he is himself black. This letter is one of the more notorious that we have ever received here, and even drew a response from our former assistant editor, Natalie Collier, who is black.

The fun part, though, is to watch the Mississippi McCain crowd try to use these whacked-out letters to paint the whole "lefty" crowd (presumably anyone not supporting their geezer).

Listen up, Mississippi Republicans: This kind of illogical, ignorant witchhunt for "lefties," coming from the party that perfected the southern race strategy in Mississippi, is why your party is in trouble with younger generations. This is not real; it is stupid, and it is reminiscent of the "communist" and "liberal" bashing of past years.

Try something new, please.

Need 'Famous' Jackson Pets

OK, what animals do y'all know of in the community that are "famous" in some way—meaning have to know people beyond their owners. Pets that live in businesses? Pets with lots of friends? You get my drift. Need fast!

The JFP Bloggers' Guide to Success in Life and Business

Thanks to a conversation that started about tipping over on under Kaze's column about race dialogue, I promised I would start a thread so that JFP readers could discuss tips about etiquette in life and and business (and continue the tip conversation if they want). So here is my thread, as promised. I'll start with a few random things I've learned from running my own business in Mississippi; feel free to add your own and discuss:

1. Don't ever call for directions right before you're supposed to be somewhere. In fact, never ask a busy person for directions and landmarks. Get the mailing address, print out a Google map, figure out where it is in advance, learn to read street numbers, and then get there without excuses about getting lost. If someone does that to me for a job interview, I automatically assume they can't think for themselves well.

2. Don't ask anyone else for a phone number you can look up for yourself. And don't rely on e-mail alone. The phone is still relevant.

3. Don't text-message when having a conversation with someone or while sitting in a meeting. It's rude, and they will notice.

4. Do learn to tip appropriately.

5. Remember that employers will always remember the last things you did when you left a job first. Never be an irresponsible short-timer. And never burn a bridge you don't have to: I've been fired by people who later became some of my biggest supporters. On the other hand, I've seen people "rape" the computers at jobs because they were shortsighted (and use that word to brag about it). Life is long, so don't mess up your chances with stupid stuff, and don't assume they will give you a reference based on your first month and not your last.

6. Never assume the bosses won't hear about you badmouthing them. They *always* do.

7. Work harder when your boss is out of town—if you want to be promoted later. It's not the time to goof off and miss work.

8. I've gone to job interviews and come face to face with people who waited on me in bars and restaurants. See tipping advice.

9. Give, give, give to those around you. My own students have become some of my best editors, and paid me good money to do stuff. You never know.

Why Women Back Obama

Especially younger ones. This is extremely well said, and captures something that resonates with me—I like the way he treats women. The Clintons seem to come from another generation, when men sh!t all over their families, and their wives blink lovingly back at them, no matter what. And, as the writer points out, Obama promises change on so many levels—from the personal to the most public. And that's what so much of the American public craves. Money quotes:

Perhaps what many women find attractive about Barack Obama is a freshness of interpersonal expression in the way he treats his wife and daughters.

Rather than some kind of disdain for the crow’s feet critics love to point out on Hillary, or school-girl attraction to Obama’s chiseled cheekbones, what is driving more and more women toward the male candidate is rooted in Obama’s promise for change – of the way politicians treat their wives, and the respect they show their children by not engaging in any “family business.”

The cynics (myself included) who have thought “He’s pretty, but can he lead?” should remember that “the issues” were not all that mattered to Americans 10 years ago, as even the biggest Clinton supporters were disheartened by his personal behavior. As much as we may want to “focus on the issues,” somehow the Clinton candidacy too often feels like a consolation prize for the years of hell Bill put the women in his life through.

Women who feel like they are selling out the sisterhood and setting gender relations back by voting for Obama should extend their peripheral vision to examine the personal gender relations of each of the candidates. They are far more indicative of what the future of America will be.

Obama Picks Up Two More Mississippi Delegates

Yesterday Secretary of State Delbert "Low to Moderate Turnout" Hosemann certified the results of the Mississippi Democratic Primary, giving him essentially two new delegates because he made it over the 62.5 percent margin that draws him yet another at-large delegate. According to DemocraticUnderground.com, Obama ended up with 62.512 percent of the vote (even with all those DeSoto County Republicans crossing over for Hillary Clinton). The final numbers were:

Obama - 265,502
Clinton - 159,221

That gives Obama a heads-up 62.512% victory, which WILL switch another state-wide at-large delegate to him (there are 4 statewide pledged PLEO's in Mississippi, so 62.5% is the tipping point for them to break 3-1 instead of 2-2).

Bill Clinton—Carville's Mafia Boss?

Does James Carville really think that people should make political decisions based on loyalty above all else? No matter what someone does? No matter who else comes along who is more impressive, and inspirational to a new generation of voters? Carville's "Judas" comment—and this column today in The Washington Post showing no remorse for it—shows how hopelessly out of touch both he and the Clintons are. You don't run a country, or elect a president, based on loyalty. That is patently absurd and and an insult to the American people. Good he's honest about what he's all about, though. This should cost the Clintons even more votes (and watch for the part where he makes it sound like Bill Clinton was the mafia boss who "made" him). This is gross:

Last Friday the New York Times asked me to comment on New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama for president. For 15 years, Richardson served with no small measure of distinction as the representative of New Mexico's 3rd Congressional District. But he gained national stature -- and his career took off -- when President Bill Clinton appointed him U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and later made him energy secretary.

So, when asked on Good Friday about Richardson's rejection of the Clintons, the metaphor was too good to pass by. I compared Richardson to Judas Iscariot. (And Matthew Dowd is right: Had it been the Fourth of July, I probably would have called him Benedict Arnold.) [...]

I believe that loyalty is a cardinal virtue. Nowhere in the world is loyalty so little revered and tittle-tattle so greatly venerated as in Washington. I was a little-known political consultant until Bill Clinton made me. When he came upon hard times, I felt it my duty -- whatever my personal misgivings -- to stick by him. At the very least, I would have stayed silent. And maybe that's my problem with what Bill Richardson did. Silence on his part would have spoken loudly enough.

Republicans Singing the Blues?

A New York Times Magazine piece chronicles the depression that is setting in for Republicans now that the strategies that gave them temporary power are starting to turn off new generations of voters:

After the 2004 elections, Karl Rove began to talk with growing conviction about a permanent majority for the Republican Party. That majority lasted two more years. It would have been difficult then to imagine a more stunning reversal. The Democrats now control both houses of Congress and suddenly enjoy an advantage in campaign funds that, given the G.O.P.’s intimacy with big business and the recent supremacy of Republican fund-raising, would have been unimaginable just three years ago. Cole maintains that the 2006 election was an event of equal scale and significance to the Republican victory in 1994 — “in many ways, it’s a flip.” Republican operatives now worry that the social conservatism that helped seal Rove’s majorities might create for them a deficit that lasts a generation, that the party’s position on social issues like gay marriage may permanently alienate younger, more moderate voters.[...]

The situation has provoked an uncommon modesty in the Republican establishment. “Most of us can’t wait to get to 2010,” Dan Mattoon, a lobbyist and former deputy chairman of the N.R.C.C. told me. John Ensign, Cole’s counterpart in the Senate, has made a point of acknowledging, publicly, that he doesn’t expect to win back seats this year. The Republican consultant Rich Bond told me, “Tom was dealt an almost unwinnable hand.” Yet Cole has been almost strangely sunny about his prospects. “This isn’t an ideologically conservative country, and maybe some of us overreached in thinking that it was, and have been corrected for that,” he told me in January. “But I believe that it is still a center-right country, and I think this election will show that.”

The article talks about a new "suburban populism" that is shifting old Reagan voters back to the Democratic column:

[M]any within the Democratic Party believe that the gains of the 2006 election weren’t merely the result of good strategy. They believe that the map was undergoing a fundamental shift. Perhaps the most-studied Democratic detailer of the map’s evolution is a consultant named Mark Gersh, whose analysis of the 2006 election results has become the Democratic Party’s official version. “Most people think of politics as changing from the grass roots up,” Gersh says. “It doesn’t. It changes from the top, from presidential races on down.”

For Gersh, the modern political map has sustained two basic changes in the past 30 years. The first, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 but only culminating with the 1994 election of Newt Gingrich’s insurgents, was the slow, top-down conversion of socially conservative blue-collar voters, in the South and elsewhere, from Democratic partisans to Republican ones. In 2006, Gersh saw the culmination of the second big shift. “The biggest thing that happened in 2006 was the final movement of upper-income, well-educated, largely suburban voters to the Democrats, which started in 1992,” he says. The largest concentrations of districts that flipped were in the suburbs and the Northeast. This, Gersh says, was the equal and opposite reaction to the earlier movement toward the Republicans and to some degree a product of the social conservatism demanded by the Republican majority. When I spoke to Emanuel earlier this month, he told me: “I believe there’s a suburban populism now. The Republican Party has abandoned any economic, cultural or social connection to those districts.” [...]

In their intimacy with the numbers, many Republican operatives now worry that crucial segments of the electorate are slipping away from them. Republicans had traditionally won the votes of independents; in 2006, they lost them by 18 percent. Hispanic voters, who gave the Democrats less than 60 percent of their votes in 2004, cast more than 70 percent of their votes for Democrats in 2006. Suburban voters, long a Republican constituency, favored Democrats in 2006 for the first time since 1992. And Democrats won their largest share of voters under 30 in the modern era, a number particularly troubling for some Republicans, since it seems to indicate the preferences of an entire generation.

“What is concerning is that we lost ground in every one of the highest-growth demographics,” said Mehlman, the former R.N.C. chairman and Bush political adviser, who is now a lawyer at the lobbying firm Akin Gump.

[Remember that Ken Mehlman was the RNC chairman who apologized to the NAACP for the GOP's use of the southern race strategy.]

For operatives like Cole, focused on expanding the party’s appeal, the conservative movement had become too demanding: its aggressive rhetoric on some social issues alienated young voters, its swagger on immigration hardened Hispanic voters against Republicans and its emphasis on tax cuts for the wealthy made it difficult for the party to appeal to populist voters. Buffeted by those movement passions, the great thing at the center of it all — the party — began to fray. “If there are Republicans out there who think that 2006 was a year that could be changed by a few votes in a few districts, they need to wake up,” Mehlman told me. “It was a rejection.” [...]

Part of the problem, for a Republican Party that wants to get back to basics, is that George Bush and Karl Rove’s party was not theirs alone but a pretty precise articulation of decades of post-’60s Republican strategy. “You go back to the Reagan years, and even before that, and we always had a three-legged stool: anti-Communism, anti-abortion and tax and spend,” Dan Mattoon, the Republican lobbyist and former deputy chairman of Cole’s committee, told me. “The first leg dropped off when the Berlin Wall fell, and after 9/11 we’ve tried to do the same thing with terrorism, but it’s not as strong. The second leg, tax and spend, was pretty strong until George Bush. Then we had just one leg of the stool, which was social issues, and I think that you look at the makeup of the younger generation and there’s more of a libertarian view on social issues.” Cole says that the party’s rhetoric on issues like gay marriage has cast Republicans as too reactionary for many suburban districts. “My problem on social issues is the tone — sometimes we have been too shrill, and that has alienated voters who might otherwise have joined us,” he told me. The challenge, then, is finding a new generation of candidates who aren’t. [...]

The Democratic Congressional committee’s eight-to-one fund-raising advantage over its Republican counterpart has been understood by Republican operatives in the stiff terms of a morality play. Though Republicans traditionally built their fund-raising on small donations from grass-roots conservatives, the party began to pay less attention to that group after 1994, when its position in the majority meant contributions from K Street, which came more easily and in larger chunks. After 2006, the party found that its financial support from both groups had eroded — the base because it was disappointed by a party that had ignored it, and the lobbyists because the Democrats were now in control of Congress. “Corporations and PACs go where the power is,” the Republican strategist Scott Reed told me. But mostly the party’s operatives blame themselves for not realizing this. (Republican operatives say that the Republican National Committee’s small-donor list, diligently tended to, is the reason it, alone among the party’s committees, has been able to outraise the Democrat’s national committee.) When I asked the House minority leader John Boehner how he assessed the committee’s fund-raising so far, he told me: “It stinks. No other way to put it.” [...]

In November, Cole asked the party’s leadership to give him a seat on the appropriations committee, making the case that he would be able to raise more money from corporations if he were in a position to reward them for their generosity. The Democrats published gleeful press releases (“Is Tom Cole carrying on the Abramoff-DeLay legacy?”) and Cole eventually withdrew his name from contention, with Boehner’s staff, in a final indignity, leaking early word of the departure to the media. Things got bleaker in January, when Cole’s staff discovered accounting irregularities so troubling that they turned their books over to the F.B.I. (In mid-March, the National Republican Congressional Committee announced that its former treasurer, Chris Ward, may have funneled several hundred thousand dollars into his personal and business accounts; the F.B.I. is investigating.) [...]