Can one journalist make a difference?

Bill Minor's legacy

Can one journalist make a difference?

A documentary makes the case for one reporter, whose work from Mississippi may have proven more influential than any other during the height of the civil rights movement. And much of that work carried no byline.

“Bill Minor took risks to tell the story of what was happening in Mississippi,’’ Myrlie Evers, wife of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, says in the documentary. “But he also did something else. He gave us hope for a brighter future.”

Former New York Times journalist Claude Sitton called Minor a “first warning system” during the civil rights era, and Dr. Robert Smith, a veteran civil rights activist, said “the black community essentially had no access to the major press except through Bill.”

The 56-minute documentary is entitled “Eyes on Mississippi,” the name of the weekly column Minor wrote. Minor, a lifelong Catholic, World War II vet and son of a Louisiana linotype operator, began reporting from Mississippi for the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1947, later also working as an un-bylined “stringer” for the Times and Newsweek. He never left Mississippi, and kept writing his column nearly until his death in March 2017.

Director Ellen Ann Fentress, who had 40 hours of footage with Minor, shows the stories that tore at him — the circus-like atmosphere at the electrocution of a black man in Laurel, Mississippi; the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till; the riots and U.S. military intervention in the state to enroll a black student at the University of Mississippi; the swift police arrest of nine black college students for the “crime” of asking to borrow a book from the white public library in Jackson.

Also: The assassination of the NAACP’s Evers, a regular source, in the driveway of his Jackson home in June 1963. Also: The slaying of three civil rights workers in eastern Mississippi and the trial for those killings.

Minor covered that trial, in which a Mississippi court, for the first time, convicted white men for the killing of a black man, James Chaney. In fact, the judge asked Minor right before the trial if he knew any of the jurors, and the next day appointed Minor’s acquaintance as jury foreman. That move, Minor learned later, played a big role in the convictions.

“It’s hard to imagine today what a reign of terror existed in this state,” Minor says in one interview. It was a long effort to tell the truth that many local outlets, including the Jackson newspapers, had hidden about federal civil rights changes. “It makes you feel like you were put here for a reason,” Minor tells Fentress.

Former Gov. William Winter tells Fentress that Minor was about the only Mississippi journalist who was preparing state residents for the future, telling them they could not put their heads in the sand and imagine that Brown vs. Board of Education or the Voting Rights Act hadn’t occurred. Minor, who saw himself as a champion of the ordinary person, endured the ire of segregationists for decades afterward, as well as threats and a Klansman’s brick through his office window.

He could have worked anywhere, but Minor chose to stay in Mississippi, saying once, "I wanted to see how the story ended." So does Fentress, a native of Greenwood, Mississippi, who worked for Minor at the start of her journalistic career and now is the Times stringer in the state.

Did Minor make a difference? The New York Times called him the “conscience of Mississippi” in its obituary. Sitton said “no Southern newspaperman has done more for civil rights and civil liberties.” Fentress called Minor “the most essential reporter the nation has never heard of.”

That may be true, at least until the release of a broadcast version of her documentary later this year. Can’t wait to see it? Contact Fentress, who has has been showing an early version of the documentary to universities and other venues.

IRE Awards showcase accountability reporting

An award favorite and an international independent investigative unit took the two top prizes from the Investigative Reporters & Editors on Monday.

The New York Times reporting on Harvey Weinstein and sexual harassment on factory floors helped forge the #MeToo movement, and its work won both an IRE public service award and a prize for top print/online entry among big outlets. The package also had won an American Society of Newspaper Editors award last week.

Judges gave a public service and video/broadcast award to Bellingcat for “Killing Pavel,” a 49-minute documentary that uncovered new details in the 2016 car-bomb slaying of Ukrainian journalist Pavel Sheremet. Of the project, judges wrote: “Nothing could be more in the spirit of the IRE.”

CCTV footage of the two people believed to have planted the car-bomb. (Screengrab)

Among other winners:

·        "From Russia With Blood," by BuzzFeed News: Even before the nerve-gas poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter last month in Great Britain, there were a series of suspicious “suicides” in Britain and Washington that involved two Russian turncoats and three English citizens. The outlet’s investigation prompted authorities to reopen an inquiry and look more closely at Moscow’s role in the deaths.

·        "Deadly Decisions," Malheur Enterprise: This Oregon weekly newspaper fought a state agency that wanted to block documents in the killing of two people by a longtime ward of the state. It launched a GoFundMe drive to raise money for a lawyer to defend the journalist from a state lawsuit. The governor stepped in to support the paper and public records. “This work,” the judges wrote, “is proof that you don’t need a large staff and deep resources to move the needle on open records.”

·        "They Got Hurt at Work, Then They Got Deported," NPR and ProPublica: They were legally entitled to workers' compensation benefits, but insurance companies and Florida employers targeted these injured workers for denial of benefits and even deportation.

·        "The Pope's Long Con," The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting: State Rep. Danny Ray Johnson, a pastor who referred to himself as the pope of his flock, had a secret history: fraud and self-enrichment, including perjury and an insurance scam, and the sexual assault of a 17-year-old girl. Within hours, lawmakers called for Johnson’s resignation. Tragically, Johnson took his life days later.

Here is the full list of winners, including the Seattle Times, The Lens in New Orleans, WSMV-Nashville, WVUE-New Orleans, the San Francisco Chronicle and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The awards come two weeks before journalism’s most established awards, the Pulitzer Prizes, out April 16.

Why cricketers cheat (and you might too) Michael Sanders, Robbie Tilleard, Juliane Weise and Jamie Pickering With offices in Sydney and London, and a good mix of Australian and English employees in each, we’ve been following the Australian ball tampering scandal with interest and sympathy (full disclosure: some of us find it easier to summon sympathy than others). As the fallout engulfs the most successful team in the history of the world’s second most popular sport, people are asking questions. How did this happen? What happens next? And, in the United States, what exactly is cricket?   A lot of people cheat, a little bit Behavioural science has a lot to say about why people lie and cheat. Dan Ariely, author of The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, tries to understand what exactly goes on when we fail to accurately follow our moral compass or, in this case, try to illegally sandpaper a cricket ball in front of a global television audience. In one lab experiment, Mazar, Amir and Ariely gave participants five minutes to complete as many maths problems as they could, getting paid 50c for each correct answer. When people were asked to recycle their score sheet and self-report their scores – giving them the opportunity to cheat – they mysteriously got a lot better at maths compared to those with no opportunity to lie. Ariely also shows that there aren’t just a few people who massively increase their number of correct problems. Instead, a lot of people cheat only a little bit, increasing their score by just a few points. In another lab experiment, Gino, Ayal and Ariely find cheating is influenced by groupthink. We are more likely to cheat if we see others in our group (or cricket team) doing so, but less likely if we see other groups cheating (South Africa may be safe from scandal for now). Ariely calls our invisible cap on cheating the personal fudge factor: a mechanism through which we can allow ourselves access to the benefits that come from cheating, without significantly altering our idealised impression of our honest selves. In Smith, Warner, and Bancroft’s case, the scrutiny of their actions is not by an academic in a lab but in front of the world’s media. This makes it easy for us to impose a harsh judgment. However, reflection on our own lives might also reveal a number of, albeit more private, instances of straying from the truth.   Still, cheating can be reduced Cheating is no small matter – once trust is damaged, it’s difficult to get back, and there is always a risk that a few particularly bad apples spoil the bunch. What can we do? First, one solution might be to introduce honesty declarations at the start of games – much in the way that witnesses in court have to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Research by Lisa Shu, a professor at London Business School, and co-authors finds that getting people to sign a declaration before they had the chance to cheat makes them more likely to tell the truth than if they made a similar declaration at the end. Second, the same tools that are used to encourage other behaviours, like voting, could be used to discourage cheating. Christopher Bryan, at the University of Chicago, gave people the chance to cheat and get paid more for a task than they deserved. He found that when people were asked ‘please don’t be a cheater,’ they were significantly less likely to cheat than when they were asked ‘please don’t cheat.’ By making cheating a threat to identity, he made it hard to do. Finally, sunlight, as Louis Brandeis said, remains the best disinfectant. Perhaps cricketers, like bankers, need greater scrutiny of their on-field discussions. A cricketer may be less likely to sledge a member of his opposing team or, perhaps, cheat, if they knew the chat was recorded and available for review and release by the governing body. The risk of compromising a public identity of honesty and integrity would increase – likely to a level to prevent misbehaviour. And what about for us backyard cricketers and enthusiasts? In the end, as in so many aspects of life, we need to rely on most people not cheating – at least in a major way – to reinforce the social norm of fair play. Oh, and for our perplexed American readers, it’s like baseball, only entertaining. Gill Callister: leading the way to better school outcomes. "Sometimes there is this magical thinking that by applying for the principal’s job and then getting it, you’ll somehow be able to do that job well just by dint of being in it." (Centre for Public Impact) Tax Review Committee Hansard Galley Proof 28 March 2018 AD