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It's difficult sometimes to explain why I care so much about diversity in media.

Sure, as a black man working in various outlets, I benefit from people caring about this stuff. My most effective writing comes from experiences which are uniquely mine; when the world cares about that perspective more, I benefit personally, no doubt.

But, as I stood before a room in the Poynter Institute packed with area journalists, announcing the winners of the Tampa Bay Association of Black Journalists' Griot Drum Awards -- I serve as association president and coordinator of the awards banquet -- I felt like we had accomplished something special.

Already, we'd given out $2,500 to black kids from Tampa headed to college to study journalism. We'd marveled at kids from St. Petersburg's Soulful Arts Dance Academy, who were learning breathtaking skills in the heart of one of the city's most challenged neighborhoods. And we had a bona-fide network TV talent, the Early Show's Rene Syler, on hand to give encouragement.

I was reminded in a flash of an old advertisement for an insurance company,. which showed a black child with a towel pinned on his back looking into a mirror and picturing a super hero who was white. If we can make modern media as diverse as it should be, when that kid looks in the mirror and pictures himself at his best, I'm hoping he won't have any trouble thinking of a black man gazing back at him.

Anyway, here's a list of the folks who won our contest last night:

Television
Spot News
•    “Martin Luther King Jr. Parade” by Matt McGlashen,
WFTS- ABC Action News 28

Non-Deadline Reporting
•    “Lottery Secret” by Jackie Callaway & John Fulton,
WFTS-ABC Action News 28

Investigative/Series
•    “Small Town Justice” by Doug Smith, Lisa Blegen &
Craig Davisson, WTVT-Fox 13

Community/Public Affairs
•    “Righting Wrongs” by Anne-Marie Fagler & Kathy
Fountain, WTVT-Fox 13

Print (100,000 or more)
Deadline/Spot News Reporting
•    “A Sound of Their Own” by Nicole Johnson, St.
Petersburg Times

Features
•    “The Invisible Men” by Ron Matus, St. Petersburg
Times

Community/Public Affairs
•    “Facing Racism” by Cloe Cabrera, Tampa Tribune

Sports Feature
•    “In 76th Season, Another Barrier Broken,” by Dave
Scheiber, St. Petersburg Times

Print (below 100,000)
Deadline/Spot News Reporting
•    “Migrant Workers Face Hurricane” by Laura Figueroa,
Bradenton Herald

Investigative Reporting
•    “Exposing Pollution, Coverup in Tallevast” by Donna
Wright, Bradenton Herald

Features
•    “Women of the Fields” by Ricahrd Dymond & Laura
Figueroa, Bradenton Herald

Community/Public Affairs
•    “Roots Run Deep” by Donna Wright, Bradenton Herald

Commentary
•    “Tallevast: Exposing the Coverup” by David Klement,
Bradenton Herald

Radio
Spot News reporting
•    “From F to A: Day One” by Bobbie O’Brien, WUSF-87.5
News

Feature Reporting
•    “Looking for Angola” by Bobbie O’Brien, WUSF-87.5
News

Documentary/News Series
•    “The Hat That Started A Riot” by Alan Lipke,
Listening Between The Lines, Inc.

Investigative Reporting
•    “Handcuffs& Schools” by Bobbie O’Brien, WUSF-87.5
News

Public Affairs
•    “Handcuffs & Schools” by Bobbie O’Brien, WUSF-87.5
News

Photo/Graphics
Features
•    “Calculated Move” by Carrie Pratt, St. Petersburg
Times

Sports Feature
•    “Crash Landing” by Carrie Pratt, St. Petersburg
Times

Photo Essay
•    “A New Beginning” by Fred Bellet, Tampa Tribune

Gerald Levert Tribute

His death at age 40 didn't get a lot of ink last week. But the passing of R&B singer Gerald Levert touched me -- he was about my age and had his greatest success when I was trying to be a pro musician as well -- and was captured amazingly well in this column by Leonard Pitts Jr.

"BY LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@MiamiHerald.com
One day, maybe 20 years ago, I ran into Eddie Levert. Eddie, a charter member of the legendary O'Jays, is one of the greats, a singer of thunderous power. Back then, his son Gerald was just starting out as a professional singer but already, people were remarking how much he sounded like his father.

''You better look out,'' I told Ed. ``He's gaining on you.''

''Aw, don't tell that boy that,'' growled Eddie. ``It'll go to his head.''

For all his feigned indignation, he couldn't hide his pride. You saw it in him whenever they performed together, the son mimicking dance steps he grew up watching from backstage, or egging the father on with vocal dives and climbs and barrel rolls straight from the old man's own playbook.

So my first thought was of Eddie last week when the news came that Gerald had died of an apparent heart attack at the absurd age of 40. I can't imagine what it must be like to bury your son. Frankly, I don't want to know.

www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/16033050.htm

Reminds me why I always loved Levert and Pitts.

More Deggans Punditry Than U Can Stand

I'm scheduled to appear on CNN's Reliable Sources program at 10 a.m. Sunday to discuss the O.J. Simpson media frenzy and Dan Rather. And my new buddy Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers' Association has asked me to be a judge in his online debate over whether MSNBC's Keith Olbermann degrades the journalism standards of NBC News by his opinionated stands (he maintains the critical, conservative-friendly Olbermann Watch web site). Check out the judges' responses here.

This is the day media decided to explode locally and nationally, what with Clear Channel's decision to sell off 448 radio stations, the Tampa Tribune admitting its star Al-Arian reporter has left the story after starting a romantic relationship with the one of the prosecutor, news I reported yesterday of WFLA-Ch. 8 being criticized for airing a video press release as news and the arrival in St. Petersburg tonight of Early Show co-anchor Rene Syler, in town to speak at the annual awards ceremony convened by the Tampa Bay Association of Black Journalists, which I lead.

I don't have much time today, but I wanted to write about another media story exploding today: Fox's decision to present an interview with O.J. Simpson to coincide with his upcoming book If I Did It.

I wish there was a way to write about this without adding to the media buzz already surrounding this awful mess. We all know the dynamic: media and TV critics write columns condemning the show, anchors on the cable newschannels convene talk segments with experts condemning the program (I'll be doing one, CNN's Reliable Sources, at 10:30 a.m. Sunday) and then a huge audience turns up to watch the train wreck commence.

It's an orgy of synergy. O.J.'s book is published by ReganBooks and his so-called interview (conducted by his publisher, Judith Regan) airs over two nights on the Fox network. Guess what company owns both entities? Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (the show is kicking up such a stench that even Bill O'Reilly tried to distance himself from it last night, claiming "Fox Broadcasting has nothing to do with the Fox News Channel." Well, except for the fact that the same guy signs everybody's checks.

I know my little blog is less than a drop in the big media bucket on this issue. But I want to make a plea here, for my own sanity as a media commentator, to any household whose viewing habits are monitored by the ratings company Nielsen Media Research.

PLEASE DO NOT WATCH THIS SHOW.

Doesn't matter if you or I stay away from it, if our viewing habits aren't tabulated by the folks who count ratings. This is the first time I've ever written such a recommendation, because it feels a little like cooking the books -- changing the viewership sample to affect the popularity of a show.

But if this television train wreck actually draws ratings, it will only encourage the networks to do more. If you thought Dateline's To Catch a Predator series was skeevy, imagine what sorts of freakizoids the networks will stick in front of a camera if their O.J. project breaks the ratings bank?

So, Nielsen families, our viewing fate is in your hands. I've met enough of you to know that most of you take your responsiblities very seriously. Do us a favor, and give Fox a reason to never try anything this sordid again.

The Center for Media and Democracy Tuesday released an update to its April report Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed, in which it claimed to document loads of instances in which local TV stations used footage from Video News Releases without properly disclosing their sources.

VNRs are essentially video press releases prepared by companies, trade associations and even politicians. The original goal was to provide TV journalists with some information and footage to entice them into working up a story on whatever issue product or person they hoped to publicize. But, as local TV stations expand their newscast hours and shrink staffing to maximize profits, more companies have used VNRs wtihout editing them or researching them -- passing along the claims and information provided by publicists without verifying the information independently.

The CMD claims to have documented 46 stations in 22 states airing such material in their newscasts. This time, they found a Tampa station -- WFLA-Ch. 8 -- which incorporated a short snippet of VNR footage and script without citing the source of its material.

But TV industry folks say the CMD exaggerates its claims, comparing use of the VNR material to newspapers using press release copy verbatim in brief columns such as event listings (which is still a no-no at most big papers).

Since I'm pulling together a column on this, I'll keep my deeper thoughts to myself. But I encourage you to check out the WFLA clip for yourself and decide: journalistic sin or harmless shortcut?

Rule No. 2: Don't Put Fight Club Footage on MySpace

A friend emailed a stunning bit of footage originally featured on some people's MySpace pages. It's video of two small boys, probably age 10 or younger, fighting in a yard while adults stand over them, encouraging them to mix it up. The labelling indicated it may have been filmed in St. Petersburg.

As the kids tumble over each other punching, shoving and kicking, the adults form a ragged semicircle shouting awful encouragement. All the people involved are black, and the shouts of "rush that nigga" or "don't let that nigga steal on you (punch you)" made my heart hurt.

Of course, some idiot filmed it and put it on MySpace.

WTSP-Ch. 10 did a story on the footage which said Florida authorities are investigating. But I don't think we'll ever know what might possess someone to inflict something that damaging on young children.

Marie Claire Really Tries to Make News

ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas did do an interview with Marie Claire about breastfeeding. What she didn't do, was pose for a photo while doing it.

That didn't stop the magazine from using the wonders of Photoshop to create an image showing a smiling Vargas with a baby at her breast.

Vargas has issued a mealymouthed objection: "While Elizabeth Vargas was happy to discuss issues of balancing work and motherhood and is quite proud to breastfeed her newborn son, she was disappointed that Marie Claire chose to Photoshop her head onto a fake image,” an ABC spokesperson said in a written statement.

I, however, would have said something like "I'm incredibly pissed that a magazine which purports to practice something resembling journalism would gin up a fake photo of me using someone who is not my baby showing me doing something I would never inflict on a worldwide audience."

But maybe that's just me.

Could this guy be the new Regis Philbin?

ABC finally released an early video of William Shatner's latest attempt at reinvention -- this time as a black-clad game show host in a hastily-developed quiz program called Show Me the Money (sneak preview at 9:30 tonight).

As you might expect, it's a clone of the modern game show form pioneered first by ABC and most recently by NBC in hits such as Deal or No Deal and 1 vs 100. The flashing, glitzy light show and postmodern set motif comes courtesy of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire; the sexy models helping show off the money at stake, the overcaffinated contestants and the goofy host with a tangled pop culture history -- that's all Deal-inspired upgrades.

So as I watch Shatner waddle across a set that looks like it was cribbed from one of his earlier Star Trek films, I found myself thinking: I liked it better when he wasn't in on the joke.

I'm not sure when it happened. When he told a group of Trekkers to get a life in a Saturday Night Live skit; when his Priceline.com commercials took off; when every Trek castmember except the guy who played Yeoman Johnson wrote tell-all memoirs commemorating what an egotistical jackass he could be.

But at some point, Shatner realized there was a fortune in lampooning his own image as a self-important actor, even when he clearly wasn't past the behavior he was ridiculing. (To see when he took himself much more seriously -- to hilarious result -- watch this)

In Show Me the Money, contestants are presented with three potential questions keyed around a particular word or phrase. Contestants can pass on the first two questions but must eventually answer the last one. Before each question, the contestant chooses a model who opens a scroll revealing the dollar amount at stake. And, oh yeah, one of them has a "killer card" which can stop play immediately.

Yeah, it has the virtue of being both a baldfaced Deal ripoff and a pointlessly   complicated game. Add in the fact that Shatner apparently can't be bothered to explain the rules up front -- at least, in the early version I have -- so he is constantly coaching the contestant through the process of picking models, choosing questions, delivering answers and sweating out the outcome. At least the dollar amounts -- which range from $20,000 to $250,000 in the episode I watched -- make the pressure intense from the start.

Shatner plays the action like Denny Crane on the Game Show Network, dancing around the set with a detached air that seems as if he's not quite sure whether he should act ironically superior or totally invested.

Up against The Unit and Law & Order, he may not have much time to decide.

Rather Redux

Here's some stuff leftover from my story today about Dan Rather. I'll admit, I have buddies here in the building who are tired of stories about the deconstruction of the network TV anchor. But Rather's fall is something else -- the story of the perpetual outsider finally shown the door.

I read a portion of a book on TV anchors where Rather was dubbed Mr. Outside, a perfect example of his quandary in the TV news industry. Never as   accepted as Tom Brokaw, Peter Jenings or his predecessor Walter Cronkite, Rather was perpetualy reaching for the bass ring in his work -- as if total acceptance by the news industry was just one scoop away. Now, he's searching for that scoop on HDNet, of all places.

On the Memogate mess that cost him his job:

"“I learned a lot. That’s getting to be a long time ago. I don’t think much about it anymore. I don’t run across regular people who think much about it anymore. It was what it was and it is what it is. There are lot of aspects to the way it worked out. Including the fact that the story was and is true. It didn’t have to have the memos to prove it. However, we left ourselves vulnerable on the memos themselves, because those who didn’t want the story to get out, looked for where we were vulnerable. We’d left ourselves vulnerable on the memos. The commission – the independent commission that cbs put into being to look into all this. Their conclusions were number one: that no political bias was the motivation for doing the sotry. Number two: that what mistakes I made were primarily post the broadcast, the way we defended the broadcast. the commission said if we had handled the blowback better they neverwould have been put into being. Number three:  given unlimited tome and monmetary resources, they did not conclude that the memos were other than they’ve purported to be.  A lot of that got lost in the coverage of the blowback of it."

On why he insisted on traveling to the big stories instead of sitting in a studio and reading news like Cronkite:

"How can you, over the long pull – consistently stay in a windowless room on the west side of Manhattan, how can you stay there, never go anywhere, never walk the ground, particularly on the tough stories, and have the audience believe you know what you’re talking about. I want to say this gently and respectfully but also directly. Anhoring a network newscast – if you aren’t careful, it is such an ego-centric existence. You’re constantly breathing NASA grade rocket fuel for the ego. You can believe your own bullshit. That can be injurious to your own personal health and career.”

On how to judge whether Katie Couric is a success: "When the new anchor and the new CBS News has to come on the air handling a 9/11 or a tsunami – where they have to stay on for hours on end – sometimes for days on end – without a script. That will be a decisive time. Then we’ll be able to draw a breath and say, OK we have an idea of what the new direction is.”

Alan Weisman, who said he avoided writing about Rather's "extracurricular activities" to keep his unauthorized biography Lone Star from turning into a Kitty Kelley-style gossip repository, noted this about the anchor.

"The problem with dan was that he never thought just being himself was good enough – so he kept creating these personas. I think that stems from his youth – he wanted to be a marine and couldn’t pass the physical. He was always told he went to this little college nobody heard of, and you’ll never make it. Once he did, he still felt the insecurity."

Battle of the Media Bands Saturday

If you have time Saturday, check out this charity event i'm involved with, where bands covened among employees of ABC Action News, Tampa Bay's 10, the St. Petersburg Times and Clear Channel Radio perform hourlong sets of music for the title of Tampa Bay's Best Media Band.

For those who have wondered what Brendan McLaughlin might look like playing lead guitar or how I navigate singing Public Enemy and Peter Gabriel in the same set -- come out to Jackson's Bistro at 8 p.m. Saturday to find out first hand. Proceeds from $5 cover go to a scholarship fund maintained by the Bay Area Media Network, a local chapter of American Women in Radio and Television.
 

It's the only move the TV networks have left in a fall season where, once again, the most anticipated new shows have tanked and the stuff no one could see coming -- Jericho and Criminal Minds, anyone? -- has won big.

New shows. Lots of them.

Think about it. Rerunning popular stuff doesn't work -- you can only plug holes so often with various iterations of CSI and Law & Order -- and the only thing audiences hate more than endless reruns is the network's other substitution for a quickling tanking new show: newsmagazines.

But, at a time when broadcasters are going through new shows like used Kleenex, they gotta put something up to replace the Smiths and Kidnappeds of the world. Hence, the flood of new shows coming your way this month.