A Note on News and Notes

    My Diplomatic Immunity  column on Blacks and Blackwater landed me a seat Monday on Bloggers Roundtable for News and Notes.
    I couldn’t believe how rusty I’d gotten.
    My first radio interview was in New York City, as a Newsweek intern, after I had the dubious honor of being one of the first journalists beaten by the Chicago Police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. I can’t count the number of radio interviews I’ve done since. Or television interviews. My first was on the Phil Donahue show in 1976, after I’d participated in a Chicago Tribune investigative series on automobile repair fraud.
    I became a regular on radio and television talk shows when I covered the Harold Washington campaign in the early 1980s and City Hall, once he became mayor. As Press Secretary to Mayor Eugene Sawyer, it was my job to speak to newspaper, radio and TV reporters daily. I even executive-produced and hosted my own public affairs television talk show, Common Ground, on WBBM-TV, a CBS owned-and-operated station, for eight years.
    All that to say, I am no stranger to broadcast media.
    But I've been laying low for the past five years so I've only been a radio guest five or six times during that stretch. On Monday’s NPR show, I was not all that quick or agile or authoritative in my answers to host Farai Chideya. I stuttered and sputtered while the other two guests for our segment, Kim Tempest Bradford, of the blog The Angry Black Woman and Anthony Bradley, creator of The Institute blog, were real pros as we talked about blacks in the military, about a white Homeland Security employee’s appearance in blackface at an office Halloween party, Oprah’s move into YouTube and the Jena 6 donations.
    I hadn't done a good job. I was depressed. But, I did what I did. Good thing for me, practice makes better, which is what I was the next day when I taped a segment on the 20th anniversary of the death of Mayor Washington for Eight Forty-Eight on Chicago’s Public Radio station, WBEZ-FM.
    The program won’t air until next Friday, November 23. But, what a difference a day made.