MediaWatch: July 1990
Table of Contents:
Revolving Door: South African Sun Rise
South African Sun Rise. After three years of obstinacy, the South African government has finally granted a visa to Jerelyn Eddings, enabling her to become Johannesburg Bureau Chief for the Baltimore Sun. In 1978 the American Political Science Association selected Eddings, then an United Press International reporter, to be one of eight congressional fellows allowed to work in the office of their choice. Eddings selected two Democratic Senators: Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and Paul Simon of Illinois. Eddings returned to UPI in 1979 as a congressional reporter, jumping to the Baltimore Sun in 1982 where she wrote editorials until this June.
Barry Brigade. Trying to put the best spin on daily revelations during D.C. Mayor Marion Barry's cocaine and perjury trial is Lurma Rackley, his Press Secretary since late last year. Rackley spent the 1970s working for The Washington Star, where she rose to metro editor by the time she left in 1979. She's not the first reporter to toil for the liberal Democrat. Rackley replaced John White, who joined Barry from the Philadelphia Daily News in 1987. Kwame Holman, Assistant Press Secretary in 1979 and Press Secretary to Barry in 1980, signed on with the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour as a Denver-based correspondent in 1983, moving to his current Washington position in 1987.
Mouthing & Molding Mandela. The Mandela National Welcome Committee hired Christine Dolan, Cable News Network Political Director for four years before a salary dispute prompted her 1988 resignation, to serve as Press Secretary. She coordinated press relations during the African National Congress Deputy President's late June and early July tour of U.S. cities....The same committee has chosen Globalvision, co-founded by former ABC News 20/20 producer Danny Schecter, to create the official Mandela tour documentary, The Boston Globe reported. Globalvision produces South Africa Now, seen weekly on many PBS stations. Schecter has served as Executive Producer since leaving ABC in 1989 and Carolyn Craven, a National Public Radio White House reporter in the early 1980s, is anchor. The show is funded by the Africa Fund, established by a leading lobbying group for U.S. corporate divestment, the American Committee on Africa.
Summer Reading. Three reporters who once held political positions are out with books. Steven Emerson has co-authored The Fall of Pan Am Flight 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation. Emerson was an aide to the late Senator Frank Church and an investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the late 1970s. Last month he joined CNN's special assignment unit as a contributing correspondent....Judith Miller, Deputy Media Editor for The New York Times "Business Day" section and formerly Deputy News Editor in Washington, has written One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust. Miller began her career as Washington correspondent for the Progressive...Michael Barone, Vice President until 1981 of Peter Hart Research Associates, a Democratic polling firm, and now a Senior Writer for U.S. News & World Report, recently completed Our Country, The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan.
