Racist Code Words or Truth Telling?

Artie Williams, Photographer, Dies on Scuba Trip

Artie Williams III, a photographer at KABC-TV in Los Angeles, died Saturday after having what was described as a "medical emergency" while scuba diving at Catalina Island off the Southern California Coast. He would have been 60 years old on Sunday and was to commemorate 30 years at the station on Tuesday, authorities and friends said.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said in its report, "two scuba divers surfaced on the Isthmus Reef, a dive site located on the north side of Catalina Island. While swimming on the surface back to their commercial dive boat, one of the divers became unresponsive. The unresponsive diver was a male adult, approximately 60 years old. Nearby boaters assisted the dive partner by pulling the unresponsive diver into their boat. They attempted to administer life-saving measures."

The department withheld the name of the male diving partner. The Los Angeles County coroner's office said it had not determined a cause of death.

"Williams was a beloved colleague and respected competitor," the Black Journalists Association of Southern California said in a statement. "He also mentored countless aspiring broadcasters during his 30-plus year career at KABC. Artie, as he was widely known, quietly gave back to the community in a host of ways including his recent presentation to teen scholars at LA's Urban Media Foundation."

The Greater Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists echoed those sentiments in a separate statement.

"I first met Artie Williams in Baltimore," Williams' friend Ron Olsen wrote Sunday in a blog post. "It was in late 1979. I had just gone to work for WMAR-TV. So had Artie. He got started by attending an art school. From there, he transitioned into photography and tv news. He had come in from Richmond at about the same time I came in from Pittsburgh. The World Series was on. The Orioles were up against the Pirates. For the next three years, we worked together, partied together and became friends. I helped Artie study for his first black belt in Karate while on our way to assignments. He eventually became an instructor, but I never once saw him raise a hand against another human being in anger. I did though, see him stop a fight.

"We were on our way to an assignment when Artie spotted two kids fighting in an alley. It was a big kid on top of a little kid. Artie pulled into the Alley, drove up to the fight, rolled down the window and said, 'Hey! If you want to fight somebody, how about fighting me?' The big kid looked up at Artie, got off the little kid, and the fight ended.

"Later, Artie moved west for a job shooting video for KABC-TV. A few months later, I followed in his footsteps, taking a reporting job at the same station. Others moved west as well. Michael Jones and Rawn Hairston. All four of us left WMAR for KABC. A producer, Bob Compton, left WMAR and came to Los Angeles to work for KNBC. It led to jokes about the 'Baltimore Mafia.' "

Jeff Dooley, president of the National Association of Black Scuba Divers, of which Williams was a member, said by telephone that they had previously dived together in Catalina and that Williams had been a diver for "more than 10 or 15 years."

A poster identifying himself as Williams' nephew, Tyvelle Williams, of Richmond, Va., wrote under Olsen's essay, ". . . He definitely died doing what he loved."

• Pablo Pereira, KTTV Los Angeles: Local TV News Photographer Dies While Diving Off Catalina Island

Richard Masato Aoki was one of the Bay Area’s most prominent radical activists of the 1960s. (Video)

Black Panther Trainer Was Undercover FBI Informer

"The man who gave the Black Panther Party some of its first firearms and weapons training — which preceded fatal shootouts with Oakland police in the turbulent 1960s — was an undercover FBI informer, according to a former bureau agent and an FBI report," Seth Rosenfeld reported Monday for the Berkeley, Calif.-based Center for Investigative Reporting.

"One of the Bay Area's most prominent radical activists of the era, Richard Masato Aoki was known as a fierce militant who touted his street-fighting abilities. He was a member of several radical groups before joining and arming the Panthers, whose members received international notoriety for brandishing weapons during patrols of the Oakland police and a protest at the state Legislature.

"Aoki went on to work for 25 years as a teacher, counselor and administrator at the Peralta Community College District, and after his suicide in 2009, he was revered as a fearless radical.

". . . Aoki's work for the FBI, which has never been reported, was uncovered and verified during research for the book, 'Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power.' The book, based on research spanning three decades, will be published tomorrow by Farrar, Straus and Giroux."

Rosenfeld is a former investigative reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle who has won the George Polk Award and other journalism honors.

In "Stripping Down," Zakaria Resigns as Yale Trustee

"The plagiarism scandal connected to a nationally known journalist has hit home," Ann DeMatteo reported Monday for the New Haven (Conn.) Register.

"Fareed Zakaria, an editor-at-large at Time magazine and CNN host, on Monday resigned from the Yale Corporation," where Zakaria, a Yale graduate, was a university trustee. "In a letter to Yale President Richard C. Levin, Zakaria said he needed to shed some responsibilities and focus more 'on the core of my work.' "

Zakaria signaled he would be cutting back in an interview published Monday in the New York Times.

". . . Not that long ago, getting a column in Time would have been the pinnacle of a journalist's career," the Times' Christine Haughney wrote Sunday. "But expectations and opportunities have grown in the last few years. Many writers now market themselves as separate brands, and their journalism works largely as a promotion for more lucrative endeavors like writing books and public speaking."

Zakaria was suspended from Time and CNN last week after bloggers discovered that his column of Aug. 20 for Time magazine had passages lifted almost entirely from an article in the New Yorker by historian Jill Lepore. He was reinstated in less than a week after Time and CNN found the plagiarism to be an isolated incident.

"The problem, as Mr. Zakaria discovered, is that stain from any scandal can spread across platforms, threatening the image he had carefully built," Haughney continued.

". . . In an interview on Friday in his CNN office, Mr. Zakaria again apologized for what he had called 'a terrible mistake.'

" 'This week has been very important because it has made me realize what is at the core of what I want to do,' Mr. Zakaria said. He said he wanted to 'help people to think about this fast-moving world and do this through my work on TV and writing.'

"He added: 'Other things will have to go away. There's got to be some stripping down.'

"Even a stripped-down schedule for Mr. Zakaria seems ambitious. Mr. Zakaria said he works on his column ideas each weekend, reports them on Monday, writes on Tuesday and Wednesday and films his Sunday television program on Thursday.

"Then there are the three books he wrote and one book he edited, the speeches, the Twitter postings, all while trying to spend mornings with his family . . . "

• Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, salon.com: America's worst historians: Fareed Zakaria's plagiarism scandal shows the danger of journalists trying to write history
  
  
• David Carr, New York Times: Journalists Dancing on the Edge of Truth
  
  
• Mathew Ingram, gigaom.com: Plagiarism, defamation and the power of hyperlinks
  
  
• Scott Leadingham, Poynter Institute: Why journalism should rehabilitate, not excommunicate, fabulists and plagiarists
  
  
• Tunku Varadarajan, Newsweek:  Schadenfareed

Duluth News Director Moving, Claims Native Ancestry

Jason Vincent, the news director for KQDS-TV in Duluth, Minn., who resigned after writing on Facebook, "Add drunk, homeless, Native American man to the list of animals that have wandered into my yard," is moving to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to become a morning anchor, Robin Washington reported Sunday in the Duluth News Tribune.

". . . Many assumed he'd been fired or resigned under pressure," Washington wrote.

"Not true, Vincent said Friday, and again in a News Tribune interview yesterday.

"I'm moving to (Cedar Rapids) Iowa, KGAN-TV. I'll be a morning anchor down there," he said, explaining he had been looking for a new job for several months and the offer came coincidentally.

Vincent and Washington were among those on a WGZS-FM radio broadcast Friday, ". . . much of it to explain to anyone unaware that it's insulting to call any group of people 'animals' and particularly to perpetuate the stereotype of 'drunken Indians.'

". . . Vincent used the airtime to answer another question: Is he really Native?

" 'It’s on my dad's side,' he said. 'My grandfather's grandfather came from a tribe in southern Minnesota' — later identifying it as Mdewakanton Sioux, though he's not enrolled and hasn't lived the experience.

"He may join another Native group, however. While condemning his comment, members of the Native American Journalists Association have invited him to join. Vincent said he is considering it and only just now has become aware of the organization, which advocates for the hiring of Native journalists and sensitivity in covering Native communities."

• "Moving Beyond Racism" WGZS-FM special

Can't Reboot J-Schools Without Diversity

"Rebooting journalism schools" has been a hot topic this spring and summer, culminating at the recent convention of the American Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in Chicago," Geneva Overholser, director of the School of Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, wrote Saturday for the Online Journalism Review.

". . . It's about the PUBLIC. This is after all the POINT of journalism. These are the people for whom it all exists. Remembering this can help us focus on the most critical questions: How do we work most effectively with the folks who are now creating the journalism with us? How do we best engage citizens? At the heart of this debate, we must place their needs and wants — indeed, the ways in which they are actively reinventing journalism even as we discourse about it. The current discussion seems to harbor the notion that the debate is primarily between the academy and the 'industry' — an idea that is sorely out of date.

". . . Diversity! My final point brings us back to the beginning. This is about the public. And the entire public is not old, white and male (I can say that, since I'm two of those). We can't serve, be partners with, or even begin to understand a diverse population — if we're not one. And we mostly are not. A remarkable number of discussions on the future of journalism — the FUTURE of journalism — are conducted by groups that look like the Kiwanis club of Peoria in 1950. This won't do. When we hire and put into place people who look like the future and are excited about its promise — that is when rebooting ceases to be a conversation and becomes reality. The biggest change we need in journalism schools is an ever-changing cast of characters."

Marker Honors "Fighting" Editor in Richmond, Va.

"John Mitchell Jr. was nationally known as the 'fighting editor' for his brave, heroic stands for freedom against Confederate-minded policies that stripped Black people of their human rights during the post-Reconstruction era," Joey Matthews wrote for the Richmond (Va.) Free Press.

"Now, a step has been taken to officially recognize his greatness in Richmond, the former Capital of the Confederacy that fought the Union to preserve slavery. Richmond-area residents and visitors to Downtown can view a prominently displayed state historical highway marker that recognizes, among other achievements, his courageous battles against lynching, his triumph against segregated streetcars in Richmond, his election to City Council and his economic justice accomplishments."

". . . The marker stems from efforts of Raymond H. Boone, editor/publisher of the Richmond Free Press, which underwrote the production and erection of the marker."

"Henry" Cardenas, Miami Photographer, Dies at 71

"Enrique 'Henry' Cardenas spent 28 years behind a camera for WSVN-7 — and most of his spare time feeding stray cats," Elinor J. Brecher wrote Monday for the Miami Herald.

"He carted around huge bags of cat food in 'Unit 22' — his station-issued, white Ford Crown Victoria — and colleagues knew that between assignments, they could find him doling out kibble to feral felines at Pelican Harbor Park, close to WSVN studios on the 79th Street Causeway.

"Cardenas, a Cuban exile, mentored a generation of young colleagues, many of whom posted poignant remembrances on his Facebook page after Cardenas died Tuesday at 71, at his home in North Miami Beach.

". . . Cardenas made sure that 'young reporters knew to enjoy life. Cuban coffee was a mandatory stop during any assignment, even breaking news,' " Brian Andrews, a former WSVN reporter, said.

"Cardenas died at his North Miami Beach home of respiratory failure following years of bad health that decimated his once robust frame.

"A former smoker, he contracted jaw cancer about 10 years ago. Doctors replaced part of his jaw with a metal plate, which led to complications like trouble swallowing and pneumonia, said close friend and neighbor Evelyn Garrison.

" 'Even when he was so sick that he lost the ability to talk, he gave 100 percent,' added Kirk Wade, WSVN’s chief photographer. 'He'd come to work and stand out in the heat.' "