State of the Media

Texas is no different from any place in America. It has always had communities that are underserved or ignored by larger local and regional media. And it has always had news outlets attempting to fill the gap—from The Texas Observer to the defunct Dallas Express, from The Forward Times in Houston to alternative weeklies across the state.

One of the mainstays of this gap-filling mission has been KKDA-AM in Dallas, which has served black listeners a combination of news, views and cultural touchstones hard to find anywhere else in North Texas. For decades, the station has been a listening post, sounding board and rallying force for black Dallas. It has given a voice to political figures, activists and artists marginalized or stereotyped by the mainstream media. Fans try to figure out how to pull down the signal in Waco, Tyler and other towns.

Recently, almost the entire on-air team at the station was laid off by Service Broadcasting Corporation, its owner, and replaced by less-expensive, automated programming. R.L. Griffin, Bobby Patterson and Ernie Johnson are among the exuberant, irrepressible, longtime personalities who have been abruptly silenced. They served Dallas for years with a mixture of music, humor, history and news (and their emphasis was often on local music; the three men are among the finest blues/soul artists in Texas).

Their departure points to a mad jumble of things, including modern fiscal realities and how history is fading very, very fast. The layoffs not only remove a ton of institutional memory from the airwaves, more important, they erode the community-based media born of necessity during segregation.

Hearing Griffin (also known as “The Right Reverend of The Blues”) and the others over the years was like picking up signals from a parallel reality, one that was seldom referenced in news venues other than KKDA. It’s impossible to overestimate KKDA’s role in what some industry insiders still call “urban radio” and in the racial history of North Texas. Here’s just one example:

In 1991 the station aired the funeral service for NAACP leader Hudson Washington Griffin Sr., the mightily influential unofficial mayor of South Dallas. Until his death, Griffin (no relation to R.L.) had spent 40 years at his tiny tailor shop, just a short stroll from the site of the sprawling Confederate Cemetery. He would sit by the front window, hemming pants and dispensing advice on voting and housing rights to residents who remembered how the city’s white power structure once wielded the poll tax as a bludgeon to suppress black voter turnout.

Richard Nixon and Bill Clements reached out to him, trying to figure out how to tap the black vote. KKDA was the only Texas media outlet truly cognizant of the revered man’s place in history, and the station selected to broadcast Griffin’s services at New Friendship Baptist Church.

The station once boldly gave voice to controversial County Commissioner John Wiley Price (his show was called “Talk Back: Liberation Radio”) and City Councilman Al Lipscomb. Like them or not, both men made national news for good and bad reasons, and both brought to the airwaves discussions that were not being held anywhere else in Texas. KKDA once had seemingly unbridled scope and ambition. Roland Martin, now on CNN, once served as KKDA’s news director.

When Price, Lipscomb and Linwood “Cuzzin’ Linnie” Henderson, another North Texas media legend, left the air in the ’90s, they were replaced by Patterson and the other folks who have now been let go. For now, KKDA morning talk show stalwart Willis Johnson remains in place.

For years the station has promoted itself as KKDA/Soul 73 and built its legacy on its interaction with the community. It hired Patterson and the others because they have loyal followings in Dallas. Now, a big chunk of the station’s righteous soul has been silenced.

For the last few months, the Houston Chronicle has transfixed the city with an internal fandango that seems like a mashup of La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini’s nod to journalism, and Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West’s brilliant take on the Fourth Estate.

A Chronicle reporter was covering Houston high society until the feisty Houston Press revealed that she had been working as a stripper. High-profile feminist attorney Gloria Allred recently joined the fray, representing the reporter, who was apparently fired by the newspaper for not indicating her other work on her employment application.

At the center of this story is a sticky ethical conundrum that keeps labor lawyers gainfully employed: Do the past—and extracurricular—activities of journalists have anything to do with their “day gigs” as news providers?

For a decade, the Houston Chronicle has been looking for an heir to the legendary Maxine Mesinger—easily the most famous chronicler of high-and-mighty society in Texas. For almost 40 years, Mesinger subtly mocked and unabashedly celebrated Houston’s power circles. The columnist’s self-referential catchphrase was “She Snoops To Conquer.”

When she died in 2001, some feared a desperate Chronicle would eventually import fizzy tabloid gossip gatherer Lloyd Grove, who honed his craft at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times and The Dallas Morning News. Others wanted Douglas Britt, the Chronicle’s respected art critic and part-time society writer, to do a full-blown, post-modern column about the guarded Houston elite.

But last year, Britt left the paper and then blogged that he had once been a male escort. He still writes at Reliable Narratives, as “an artist, critic and gay sex worker—an escort and occasional adult-video performer—I’m the visual arts editor of Arts + Culture Houston magazine and the former art writer and society reporter for the Houston Chronicle.”

Following Britt, Sarah Tressler, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Houston, was entrusted with doing some of the Chronicle’s coverage of society functions. In March, the Houston Press reported that Tressler was the anonymous author of the “Diary of An Angry Stripper” blog and had worked as an exotic dancer. A week later, she was fired from the biggest newspaper in Texas.

New York magazine, Radar, The Huffington Post, The New York Daily News and The Los Angeles Times picked up the story. Tressler hired attorney Allred, who said:

“Most exotic dancers are female, so to terminate an employee because that employee had previously been an exotic dancer would have an inverse impact on women, since it’s a female-dominated occupation. Terminations like this would also discourage women from trying to improve their lives.”

Tressler has filed a gender discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In her one-page document, she says she was canned “because my prior activity as an adult dancer was not disclosed when I applied for the job [at the Chronicle]. I believe that the stated reason for my termination was pretextual in that I answered the questions that were put to me truthfully in connection with my application for employment. The true reason for my termination was discrimination on account of my gender.” She maintained she was an independent contractor, an entrepreneur.

The newspaper has refused media inquiries about Tressler. A brisk, dutiful May 11 story about her complaint read, “The Chronicle declined to comment.”

That article also noted that Tressler was very pleased to be working with Allred– who is well known for tightening the screws on everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Tiger Woods to disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner.

“Couldn’t ask for anyone better by my side… So grateful,” Tressler tweeted on May 10.

Clearly, journalism still doesn’t pay much. (Britt has astutely blogged about this subject.) There is little job security. Today, editors everywhere are telling reporters to be fiercely entrepreneurial at work; build “brands” through Facebook and Twitter; develop high profile, public platforms; seize any multimedia opportunity and, well, do several jobs at once.

In the end, an inherent hypocrisy creeps in: The very institutions pushing for all those aggressive, new ways to monetize the news sure as hell don’t want their journalists to be too entrepreneurial in their private lives.

Other than coverage of Mexico, there is almost no original international reporting by the Texas media anymore, leaving Texans increasingly in the dark as we experience the ripple effects of events abroad.

The Texas Observer’s courageous Melissa del Bosque routinely travels across the Rio Grande to cover Mexican issues. The Houston Chronicle’s Dudley Althaus has been a rock-steady, fearless reporter living in Mexico for over two decades. Alfredo Corchado of The Dallas Morning News has been on the front lines from the newspaper’s bureau in Mexico City. Almost any other international reporting for a state audience by Texas publications is now practically non-existent. Almost every media outlet in Texas has slashed its foreign news budget—as have most national news organizations—in response to economic pressures.

A count by American Journalism Review last year found only 230 foreign correspondents employed by U.S. newspapers, down from 307 in 2003, when the last AJR survey was conducted. (The AJR study showed only Althaus and Corchado working abroad for Texas publications).

Texas does have a precious few magazine correspondents who sometimes roam abroad, including The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright (based in Austin, and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11) and Forbes’ Christopher Helman (based in Houston, who occasionally covers the energy industry’s power plays in Saudi Arabia and Qatar). Arguably Texas’ most well-traveled international reporter is National Public Radio’s John Burnett. He routinely jets to cover natural disasters in Haiti or Japan for the national radio audience.

The sad fact is that the dearth of foot soldiers covering international news on behalf of Texas media outlets has often allowed xenophobes to go unchallenged. Billionaire T. Boone Pickens loves summoning the foreign bogeyman as he touts natural gas as a “patriotic” alternative to imported oil. The search for alternative energy sources is one issue, but employing jingoistic tones is another. And the media in Texas still too often stumble on their idolatry of the state’s citizen kings—especially the international oilmen—and don’t drill down on how these powerful business leaders may be swaying U.S. foreign policies for their own corporate benefit.

With Texas’ ascension to certified Super State status and the deep inroads made here by foreign corporations such as British Petroleum, there are clear reasons for Texas media outlets to cover more foreign news. Never mind that Houston and Dallas are filling with immigrants from every corner of the globe.

Beginning in the 1980s, there was an incredible surge in ambitious foreign coverage led by Texas reporters: The Dallas Morning News won Pulitzers for its photojournalism about Romanian orphans and the war in Iraq. It won an international reporting award for a powerful investigative series into global violence against women. The best foreign correspondent in the history of Texas newspapers, Ed Timms, covered the hottest spots: Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, the Palestinian territories, Angola, the Balkans, Haiti and Zaire.

For a while, the Morning News seemed almost hellbent on proving its international mettle. The paper opened bureaus in Berlin and Toronto and many other major international cities and several correspondents (including me) were dispatched to cover strife in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, East Germany, the Soviet Union and the Philippines. The Houston Chronicle and Fort Worth Star-Telegram also had coverage from abroad, some leading to Pulitzers and other major prizes.

The Dallas paper even set up a Havana bureau in 2000. At the time, that bureau seemed to be some sort of symbolic last stand for Texas-tied international reporting. The bureau closed in 2004, and with it rang a death knell for foreign news’ heyday in Texas.

For now, there isn’t much to be done about it—other than tune into NPR and read The New York Times and The Economist, or search your other favorite online sources. And hope some reporter out there has seen the ties that bind this country called Texas to events around the world.

Either that, or you can read some more numbingly simplistic, subservient coverage of Texans who embrace natural gas as a surefire way to give the middle finger to all those wicked foreigners— from Venezuela to the Middle East.

For the next several months, plenty of eyes will turn to Texas for insider intelligence. The emails of Austin-based firm Stratfor, a private global security analysis company, have been hacked and given to WikiLeaks.

In late February, WikiLeaks started publishing more than five million emails from the company; the process could go on for months, maybe years. WikiLeaks has partnered with 26 media outlets around the world, including Rolling Stone, to analyze and provide news coverage about the material. None of the outlets are in Texas.

Initial findings from the correspondence underscore the sadly redundant and deliberate ways that Big Government and Big Business work together. There is a mash-up of surveillance details about political campaigns and activist organizations. There are insights into how Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are linked to the Obama administration, and hints about how the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Marines fit into the mix.

Beyond the evidence of government-and-business collusion, the emails contain disturbing suggestions about the relationship between reporters and the elusive world of “intelligence gathering,” in which reporters can grow far too close to the people they cover, influencing what they report and how they report it. It’s an old problem, one that scorched former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, whose exclusives about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were later proved wrong.

Stratfor has posted a note on its website that should resonate with anyone who questions how journalism is practiced:

“Stratfor has worked to build good sources in many countries around the world, as any publisher of geopolitical analysis would do. … We have developed these relationships with individuals and partnerships with local media in a straightforward manner, and we are committed to meeting the highest standards of professional and ethical conduct.”

Alternately, here’s what WikiLeaks had to say about how reporters from Argentina to Azerbaijan delivered information to Stratfor’s offices in downtown Austin:

“Stratfor did secret deals with dozens of media organisations and journalists—from Reuters to the Kiev Post … While it is acceptable for journalists to swap information or be paid by other media organisations, because Stratfor is a private intelligence organisation that services governments and private clients these relationships are corrupt or corrupting.”

The reaction in the U.S. media says volumes. The Nation and Rolling Stone are predictably not lingering over how the emails were lifted from Stratfor. Rather they are fixated on what the emails contain. The New York Times, on the other hand, has noticeably shied away from the content of the emails, instead concentrating on criminal allegations and the role the FBI has played in investigating “data stolen from Stratfor.” Good luck finding any drilled-down work in the Texas media about the information contained in the emails, or the extent to which it was gathered from working journalists here and abroad.

That lack of coverage doesn’t just indicate a lack of curiosity, but an ongoing culture in Texas media circles: Intelligence organizations, spin doctors and think tanks have long relied on sympathetic state journalists. Some young Austin journalists go to work as “open source intelligence monitors” for Stratfor. Some do research for Public Strategies (run in part by Mark McKinnon, who years ago was the crusading editor of The Daily Texan, the University of Texas at Austin student newspaper, before he single-handedly invented George W. Bush’s media campaigns). Some journalists even move on from years at the liberal news weekly The Austin Chronicle to become affiliated with conservative policy shops like The Manhattan Institute.

Such “exchange” of information may also be less deliberate than the deals suggested in the Stratfor/WikiLeaks revelations. It could take other forms, maybe some social lubrication at The Austin Club, The Petroleum Club, The Houston Club.

One thing is sure: More emails are coming this year. And the more the story is ignored in the Texas media, the more it says about the Texas media.

I recently exchanged emails with a reader about whether one has to have some sort of socio-cultural DNA to actually get this place—to really decipher Texas. Do you have to be from here to understand here, and to do the public-service journalism that is the connective tissue between justice and truth?

An easy answer is embodied in the extraordinary legacy of the late Barbara Karkabi, one of the finest journalists in the state—ever. To me and countless other journalists, she was proof that if you carry enough love and understanding into the contract you broker with the people you interview, then you can produce civic-minded journalism that matters.

Karkabi was raised in New York City and began her journalism career in war-torn Beirut before becoming a stalwart of the news scene in Houston. She passed away recently at the age of 65 after a long battle with cancer. She leaves behind a devoted husband (Mike Snyder, another bastion of Houston journalism) and daughter. She also leaves behind a body of work that shows boundless empathy and compassion—and how we are all far more alike than different.

Barbara rolled up her sleeves each day for almost 30 years to work for the often derided mainstream media, and courageously wrote about subjects that made the editors of the Houston Chronicle uncomfortable. When I worked with her in the early 1980s, the Houston Endowment ran the paper like the Great Eye of Sauron, staring down and sometimes condemning coverage of what Barbara knew had to be addressed: women’s rights, poverty, and the mistreatment and neglect of ethnic populations, immigrants and refugees.

She fought the good fight and stood her ground with humor, grace, and generosity. And she introduced Houstonians to people, to worlds, that were often hidden in plain sight.

She wrote about a hunger strike by Baylor College of Medicine student Ahilan Sivaganesan. The doctor-in-training was fasting to draw attention to the ethnic conflict engulfing the Tamil people of Sri Lanka. Barbara hooked Houston into a global humanitarian concern and let readers know about that young man’s human rights group, People for Equality and Relief in Lanka.

She told the story of another Houstonian, Anjum Bilgrami, who honored the Muslim month of Muharram by visiting his mosque to pray for healing—especially amid the ceaseless strife in Gaza.

And in what is now an oft-told tale in Houston media circles, Barbara once wrote about cost-effective medications that could save countless people from river blindness, a parasitic disease associated with poor and developing nations. Upon reading her story, Houston philanthropist John Moores gave $25 million to fund an initiative by a University of Houston professor to get the medicine to the people who needed it most. That is the very definition of cause-and-effect journalism.

She helped found the Association for Women Journalists in Houston. She was long admired by Houston feminists for her work on the board of the Friends of Women’s Studies, affiliated with the University of Houston’s women’s studies program.

The New York Times’ Samuel G. Freedman talks about great journalism existing on a temporal axis and an eternal axis. Good stories and good journalists are of the moment, but they also open a window on timeless values. Barbara did that, by design, and by dint of her smarts. It was her spiritual gift to her readers. She covered a seemingly hard, divisive Houston and found its multi-hued soul.

Her brilliant colleague at the Chronicle—her friend Claudia Feldman—has called Barbara “humble.” That is so perfect. Barbara treated people in the newsroom and in interview settings with care, dignity and life-affirming humor. She was self-effacing. She listened to people; she listened to the heartbeat of her city.

In the end, she was a writer who showed so many “ordinary people” in her adopted state to be truly extraordinary. Her work, day in and day out, proved that no matter where we are from, we ultimately have more in common than we know. She was an example for journalists in a melting-pot country called Texas.