Connecting - Nov. 20, 2023

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Connecting

Nov. 20, 2023

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Photographer Evgeniy Maloletka points at the smoke rising after an airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. Still from FRONTLINE PBS and AP’s feature film “20 Days in Mariupol.”

Colleagues,

Good Monday morning on this Nov. 20, 2023,

Check your television listings and set your DVR for Tuesday night, when Frontline PBS and The Associated Press will present the U.S. broadcast premiere of 20 Days in Mariupol: a visceral, first-person account of the war in Ukraine, told through the perspective of Ukrainian filmmaker and AP video journalist Mstyslav Chernov.

Chernov and his colleagues, photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and field producer Vasilisa Stepanenko, were the last international reporters who remained in Mariupol as Russian troops attacked the city. Together, the 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists documented what would become some of the most defining images of the war: dying children, mass graves, the bombing of a maternity hospital, and more.

The 94-minute film has been met with critical acclaim and an audience award at the Sundance Film Festival. Click on this AP story on here’s how to watch. Check your local listings for the airing time in your neck of the woods.

TERRY TAYLOR TRIBUTES: Linda Deutsch - Congratulations on your powerful presentation of tributes to Terry Taylor. Although I met Terry only briefly during a visit to 50 Rock, I felt like I knew her after reading all the tributes you posted. It occurred to me that if there was no “Connecting,” there would be no outlet for this amazing outpouring of memories, praise and love for a woman whose AP legacy will now be known for generations to come. RIP TRT. You changed a piece of the news world. Long may “Connecting” live.

This is Thanksgiving week – and in that spirit, how about sharing your thoughts on what you are thankful for in journalism. Look forward to your responses.

Here’s to a great week ahead – be safe, stay healthy, live each day to your fullest.

Paul

Remembering Rosalynn Carter

Frank Aukofer - During the Carter administration, reporters and their spouses were routinely invited to special parties for the press at the White House, usually one in the summer and the other near the Christmas holidays. As one-half of The Milwaukee Journal’s Washington bureau, I often was invited.

I danced with Rosalyn at one of the Christmas parties and she was a genuine, sweet charmer. I was so impressed that, when President Carter came out as well and started dancing with some of the lady journalists, I suggested to my wife, Sharlene, that she should make a bit of family history and dance with the president. I said I’d even tap him on the shoulder so she could cut in.

Her reply was classic.

“If you tap him on the shoulder,” she said, “you’re dancing with him."

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Peggy Walsh - Although it's been decades, I remember fondly the time I spent with Rosalynn Carter at the beginning of my AP career.

From the campaign with the Peanut Brigade to Plains to interviewing her and her mother when Miss Allie was part of the first Friendship Force exchange of regular citizens of two countries. I covered the trip to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne England.

Miss Allie had worked at the Plains Post Office and the First Lady asked if I could make sure she got to see a proper British one.

She changed the role of first lady in both Georgia and the United States with her strength, intelligence, determination and grace.

Jimmy Carter, her husband of 77 years, said it best:

"Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished. She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”

More of your memories of Terry Taylor

Jim Litke - As almost everyone noted, Terry had a gift for getting into people’s ears and staying there. In my case, it was hardly a figure of speech.

I sat elbow-to-elbow with her for almost three decades at events in places I’d only dreamed about, or be awakened at some ungodly hour by calls from halfway around the world noting a dropped word in the seventh paragraph, followed by a cheerful, “Thanks, bye!” Click. And when I got a fact wrong – good thing I wasn’t a neurosurgeon – she might ghost me for days. I only knew one other person that committed to anything and she birthed me. I owe Terry way, way more than most.

Not surprising, she fell in like family the first time she came to Chicago and every time after. She knew my wife and boys well and watched them grow up. At the APSE convention here in 2000, she squired my parents around after dinner like they were Katharine and Donald Graham. It might have been the first time my father realized I worked for the AP -- "a big-shot news organization," he told everyone after that -- and not the (long-defunct) A&P grocery chain.

We shared a hundred meals and at least that many conversations in press rooms and boarding lounges, occasionally surrounded by IOC swells and often before staff gatherings big and small, where some in the audience struggled to square the image of the 5-foot-tall, fashionably dressed woman standing in front of them with stories they’d heard about someone resembling “Red Sonja.”

Terry had brains and style and yet somehow was one of the most selfless people I knew. She had a deep, abiding faith I admired, yet one she rarely spoke about and was, in her own way, as private as anyone I’ve ever met.

Like everyone who ever worked with Terry, I can’t help wondering what she’d like about this and wouldn’t, what she’d change and wouldn’t and, as your line in yesterday’s Connecting intro reminded -- “cob stevens, enough already, trt” -- how long she’d put up with this much fussing over her in the first place. Yet she deserved every word and a million or so more.

Donations to the AP

Denis Gray - May I second Paul Herrington's comment on donations to the AP. Even before I retired, the AP began to dramatically increase the number of senior executives while decreasing the number of news gatherers (at least in bureaus in Asia). Now, we hear from Connecting on a rather regular basis that yet another vice president, director, etc. has been added to the staff. As has been often said, "Generals don't win wars. The foot soldiers do."

Charissa Thompson and made-up quotes

Bruce Lowitt - Charissa Thompson's acknowledgement that she made up quotes when a coach wasn't available during halftime of NFL games is a dagger into the heart of journalism. The most important thing reporters have is integrity. Without it, there is nothing and the public, which more and more these days tends to view journalism with skepticism, has the right to not believe what any of us reports when one of us admits to committing a sin of that magnitude.

That said, permit me to suggest that, for the most part, the most pointless and useless 15-30 seconds of any televised NFL game is the halftime "interview" of a coach as he walks off or back onto the field. Quotes like "We have to run the ball better" add nothing to the game or the viewers' knowledge. Even if it's a question of a player's injury, the coach most often will give a "we'll have to see" response. The sideline reporter giving updates on a player who has entered the blue medical tent or reporting on what was heard in a heated conversation between players or a player and coach is worthwhile. But the "what do you have to do" halftime question is a joke.

More on phone booths and covering news

Frank Aukofer - As a rookie reporter on The Milwaukee Journal in the early 1960s, a great piece of advice came from a veteran rewrite man, Rod Van Every, who went on to become the city editor. He took me under his wing when I was filling in on the building beats, phoning information for stories to him and others on the rewrite desk. One of the things he advised stuck with me: always carry a pencil and dimes in your pocket.

I didn’t quite understand until, quite a few months later, there was a five-alarm fire in below-zero weather not far from The Journal’s headquarters, when the water from the fire hoses froze almost as soon as it came out of the nozzle. I got the assignment and, because I already was at work, I was properly dressed. I went to the scene, not far away, and knew what to do—interview the highest-ranking fire fighter. But I had to get the information and call it in.

The pencil was a godsend because my ballpoint pen froze. And I found a telephone booth (anybody remember those?), where the dimes dropped in like they were greased. I got the page one bylined story in our afternoon paper. And, of course, Rod wrote it.

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Terry Ganey - Connecting's recent run of accounts related to the use of pay telephones and news collection prompted me to check with Dale Singer, a former colleague at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to make sure the story that follows would clear censorship, pass muster and otherwise not offend anyone. Given the green light by Mr. Singer, I bring you the tale of the famous fone foot race that occurred in what was then the federal courts building in St. Louis, Missouri on the afternoon of Dec. 12, 1972.

In those days, Singer and I worked for competing wire services. He was with United Press International, and I was working for the Associated Press. On that particular day, we were both stationed in a courtroom awaiting a jury's verdict in the case of Martin J. McNally, a man accused of hijacking a passenger plane in St. Louis, demanding $500,000 in ransom and then parachuting out of the plane with the money near Peru, Indiana.

After less than an hour's deliberation, the jury found McNally guilty of two counts of air piracy. The delivery of the verdict was like a shot from a starter's pistol. Singer and I sprinted out the courtroom's door. After all, there was only one pay telephone on that floor of the federal courthouse.

Singer had no way of knowing it, but he was at a severe disadvantage. How could he know that the man he was competing with had once set the 440-yard record (52.8 seconds) at Assumption High School in East St. Louis? He could not know he was paired with a former member of a mile relay team that had placed second in the 5th Battalion's Field Day during U.S. Army Basic Training at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

Yes, I won the race to the pay telephone and filed the jury's decision with the AP's St. Louis office. But the fone foot race story does not end there. My "urgent" had to be sent from St. Louis to the AP Bureau in Kansas City before being retransmitted on the news broadcast wires throughout Missouri. At the time Singer made his phone call, UPI was in the middle of a split. His St. Louis office had immediate access to the UPI wire. His story was timed off before mine.

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Carl P. Leubsdorf - At the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, one of the problems reporters had to overcome was a strike by the local telephone company that prevented the installation of the extra phones that were usual for such an event. As a result, we were confined to using what was already in place, and there were very few of those.

As a young AP reporter, I found myself on an upper floor of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, covering the Rules Committee which was the center of some of the most bitter fights at that convention, stemming from the abuses in the nominating process that were to force substantial reforms the next year. I noticed there were only two pay phones, and I realized I could be in trouble if I was unable to get to one when something happened. No cell phones in those days, of course. And it was the first year I was deemed able to cover the conventions.

So I resorted to a trick shown to me several years earlier by Austin Scott, then with the AP and later with The Washington Post. If you unscrewed the mouthpiece of a phone and turned over the diaphragm that was sitting there, it made the phone inoperative. So I doctored one of the two pay phones -- until I needed it. If anyone else tried to use it, it wouldn’t work. If I went in and undid the damage, VOILA -- it worked.

Among those unable to get the balky phone to work was Illinois Gov. Sam Shapiro, the committee chairman. He seemed quite frustrated.. In mid-evening, there were some developments which I dutifully phoned in. The next time I checked with the desk, the editor on duty said he had fielded a call from The New York Times, noting that its reporter, the late and highly esteemed Warren Weaver Jr., had not matched what AP had. "Maybe he's having trouble finding a phone," I helpfully told my editor, not letting on why that might have been.

Small trick. Big competitive advantage. Whatever it takes.

Sadly spotted in the background

Scott Charton - What struck me about this photo in Friday’s Connecting showing an AP senior producer covering the Israel-Hamas war in southern Israel, close to the Gaza Strip, Nov. 1? There appears to be scaled-down purple childrens'-sized chairs in background, or is that just perspective playing visual tricks? It just reminded me of kids in war zones, heartbreaking.

Up Close & Personal: Texas Rangers World Series trophy!

AP retiree Diana Heidgerd (right) and friend Susan Palmarozzi Haley clasped hands behind the Texas Rangers World Series championship trophy.

Diana Heidgerd - It’s really something to behold as fans still celebrate the Texas Rangers recently winning their first World Series.

I couldn’t make the parade but had the chance to celebrate, up close, on Saturday when the championship trophy was on display at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas.

My friend, former Texas radio/TV journalist Susan Palmarozzi Haley, emailed me last week to say that the Bush center would be allowing timed entry to the public on Saturday to see the World Series trophy.

Perfect timing! My new Texas Rangers championship T-shirt arrived in the mail on Friday.

On Saturday, I joined Susan to wait our turn to get close to the trophy, which was displayed on a table with room for fans to crowd around one group at a time. Susan and I clasped hands, behind the trophy, as one of the Bush center staffers used my cellphone to snap some shots.

I’m guessing a lot of those Texas fans will be sharing holiday photos featuring them (in their favorite Rangers garb) while proudly standing next to that amazing World Series trophy.

Me too.

BEST OF THE WEEK — FIRST WINNER

Data-driven reporting highlights outsized presence and influence of fossil fuels industry at climate negotiations

Several members of the Climate team were struck by the large size and flashiness of stands dedicated to oil and gas at last year’s COP27. Others have taken note, too, but the AP team wanted to get beyond the anecdotes to truly measure the presence and influence of fossil fuel industries.

Climate data journalist Mary Katherine Wildeman developed a methodology to cross reference, identify and categorize more than 24,000 participants at last year’s summit. Then, Climate reporter Seth Borenstein, Climate news editor Dana Beltaji and others on the Climate team worked to identify and verify people connected to fossil fuels.

The conclusions were striking: Nearly 400 people from fossil fuels industries attended the summit that focuses on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Combined into a single group, it represented the third-largest delegation at COP27.

AP’s Climate team also found that many participated in ways that arguably were not transparent. For example, Switzerland-based energy trade Mercuria Energy sent a delegation as members for the Brazilian government, the International Chamber of Commerce and a nonprofit.

Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.

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When it comes to Israel-Hamas war videos, don’t always trust what you see (CU Boulder Today)

By Lisa Marshall

Flip through TikTok, Instagram or X (formerly Twitter) each day, and a barrage of grainy, chaotic videos paints a complicated picture of the Israel-Hamas war.

In one, a soldier is thrown to the ground during a fiery bomb blast, the victim of “the destruction of an Israeli tank in the attack of Hamas,” the caption proclaims. Another, titled “Israel attempting to create fake footage of deaths,” shows a boy lying in a pool of blood as a director shouts instructions and a videographer films. In a third, U.S. marines are shown exiting an airplane, purportedly arriving in Israel to join a ground war.

The problem: None of these clips, already viewed by millions of people around the world, represent this conflict. The first is from a video game. The second is a behind-the-scenes shot from a short film production, and the third is video captured as marines arrived in Romania for a celebration in April.

“Unfortunately, truth can be the first casualty of war,” said Sandra Ristovska, a professor of media studies in the College of Media, Communication and Information who studies the use of images and video in times of war and conflict.

Read more here. Shared by Paul Albright.

Today in History - Nov. 20, 2023

Today is Monday, Nov. 20, the 324th day of 2023. There are 41 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On Nov. 20, 1947, Britain’s future queen, Princess Elizabeth, married Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey.

On this date:

In 1789, New Jersey became the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights.

In 1945, 22 former Nazi officials went on trial before an international war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany. (Almost a year later, the International Military Tribune sentenced 12 of the defendants to death; seven received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life; three were acquitted.)

In 1952, President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower announced his selection of John Foster Dulles to be his secretary of state.

In 1967, the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Clock at the Commerce Department ticked past 200 million.

In 1969, the Nixon administration announced a halt to residential use of the pesticide DDT as part of a total phaseout.

In 1985, the first version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, Windows 1.0, was officially released.

In 1992, fire seriously damaged Windsor Castle, the favorite weekend home of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.

In 1998, forty-six states embraced a $206 billion settlement with cigarette makers over health costs for treating sick smokers.

In 2000, lawyers for Al Gore and George W. Bush battled before the Florida Supreme Court over whether the presidential election recount should be allowed to continue.

In 2003, Michael Jackson was booked on suspicion of child molestation in Santa Barbara, California. (Jackson was later acquitted at trial.) Record producer Phil Spector was charged with murder in the shooting death of an actor, Lana Clarkson, at his home in Alhambra, California. (Spector’s first trial ended with a hung jury in 2007; he was convicted of second-degree murder in 2009.)

In 2012, former boxing champion Hector “Macho” Camacho was shot while sitting in a car in his hometown of Bayamon, Puerto Rico. (Camacho died four days later after doctors removed him from life support.)

In 2015, Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, was released from prison after 30 years behind bars for spying for Israel.

In 2017, CBS News suspended Charlie Rose, and PBS stopped distribution of his nightly interview show, after a Washington Post report carried accusations of sexual misconduct from eight women.

In 2018, President Donald Trump declared that he would not further punish Saudi Arabia for the murder of U.S.-based columnist Jamal Khashoggi (jah-MAHL’ khahr-SHOHK’-jee), dismissing reports from U.S. intelligence agencies that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman must have at least known about the plot to kill the writer.

In 2022, a 22-year-old gunman opened fire at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, killing at least five people and leaving 18 injured before he was subdued by patrons.

Today’s Birthdays: Actor Estelle Parsons is 96. Comedian Dick Smothers is 85. President Joe Biden is 81. Singer Norman Greenbaum is 81. Actor Veronica Hamel is 80. Broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff is 77. Singer Joe Walsh is 76. Actor Richard Masur is 75. Opera singer Barbara Hendricks is 75. Former national security adviser John Bolton is 75. Actor Bo Derek is 67. Former NFL player Mark Gastineau is 67. Reggae musician Jimmy Brown (UB40) is 66. Actor Sean Young is 64. Pianist Jim Brickman is 62. Actor Ming-Na is 60. Actor Ned Vaughn is 59. Rapper Mike D (The Beastie Boys) is 58. Rapper Sen Dog (Cypress Hill) is 58. Actor Callie Thorne is 54. Actor Sabrina Lloyd is 53. Actor Joel McHale is 52. Actor Marisa Ryan is 49. Country singer Dierks (duhkrs) Bentley is 48. Actor Joshua Gomez is 48. Actor Laura Harris is 47. Olympic gold medal gymnast Dominique Dawes is 47. Country singer Josh Turner is 46. Actor Nadine Velazquez (veh-LAHZ’-kehz) is 45. Actor Jacob Pitts is 44. Actor Andrea Riseborough is 42. Actor Jeremy Jordan is 39. Actor Dan Byrd is 38. Actor Ashley Fink is 37. Rock musician Jared Followill (Kings of Leon) is 37. Actor Jaina Lee Ortiz is 37. Actor Cody Linley is 34. Pop musician Michael Clifford (5 Seconds to Summer) is 28.

Got a story or photos to share?

Connecting is a daily newsletter published Monday through Friday that reaches more than 1,800 retired and former Associated Press employees, present-day employees, and news industry and journalism school colleagues. It began in 2013. Past issues can be found by clicking Connecting Archive in the masthead. Its author, Paul Stevens, retired from the AP in 2009 after a 36-year career as a newsman in Albany and St. Louis, correspondent in Wichita, chief of bureau in Albuquerque, Indianapolis and Kansas City, and Central Region vice president based in Kansas City.

Got a story to share? A favorite memory of your AP days? Don't keep them to yourself. Share with your colleagues by sending to Ye Olde Connecting Editor. And don't forget to include photos!

Here are some suggestions:

- Connecting "selfies" - a word and photo self-profile of you and your career, and what you are doing today. Both for new members and those who have been with us a while.

- Second chapters - You finished a great career. Now tell us about your second (and third and fourth?) chapters of life.

- Spousal support - How your spouse helped in supporting your work during your AP career.

- My most unusual story - tell us about an unusual, off the wall story that you covered.

- "A silly mistake that you make"- a chance to 'fess up with a memorable mistake in your journalistic career.

- Multigenerational AP families - profiles of families whose service spanned two or more generations.

- Volunteering - benefit your colleagues by sharing volunteer stories - with ideas on such work they can do themselves.

- First job - How did you get your first job in journalism?

- Most unusual place a story assignment took you.

Paul Stevens

Editor, Connecting newsletter

[email protected]