Articles Feature Archives

20% of Trump’s Base Disagrees With Lincoln Freeing Slaves

by richard01768
Photos on Donald Trump’s campaign website show African American supporters at the podium in Greenville, S.C., four days before last Saturday’s South Carolina Republican primary. (Credit: donaldtrump.com)

N.Y. Times Analysis of Surveys Finds Staggering Racial Views

“In an election season dominated by racist and xenophobic language on the right, Donald Trump distinguishes himself even among his more outspoken Republican challengers,” Inae Oh reported Wednesday for Mother Jones. “And according to a New York Times analysis of voters, so do his supporters, a majority of whom carry deeply intolerant attitudes toward gay people, Muslims, immigrants, and African Americans.

“In fact, the report found 20 percent of Trump’s base disagree with the freeing of slaves after the Civil War, and a staggering 70 percent would still like to see the Confederate flag flying above official grounds in their states.

“One-third of Trump’s primary supporters in South Carolina favored ‘barring gays and lesbians from entering the country.’ According to the Times, this is more than twice the support this proposal received by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio backers.

“Another third of his supporters think Japanese internment was an appropriate measure. . . .”

Meanwhile, David Weigel reported Tuesday for the Washington Post, “The flip side of Hillary Clinton’s triumph with black voters in the Nevada Democratic caucuses Saturday was her weakness among whites. For the third time, she lost an electorate that had backed her strongly in 2008. Although Clinton is building toward an expected win in South Carolina this weekend, her vulnerability with white voters could reappear three days later, on Super Tuesday, when the primary contest moves to 11 states, including Minnesota. Even more states come after that with large populations of union members and people who lack college degrees. . . .”

The New York Times issued two caveats in its report on intolerance among Trump supporters.

“New data from YouGov and Public Policy Polling show the extent to which he has tapped into a set of deeply rooted racial attitudes,” Lynn Vavreck wrote Tuesday.

“But first, two caveats about these data are worth bearing in mind. The national YouGov survey was done near the middle of January, before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries. Public Policy Polling is a company aligned with the Democratic Party, and some of its results over the years have been suspected of bias. Taken by itself, its conclusions could be doubted. Taken with the YouGov and exit poll data, however, these three surveys can give us a better idea of Mr. Trump’s backers. . . .”

Contempt for Media Is Pillar of Sanders’ Worldview

“More than three decades before he became a familiar face on Sunday morning shows, cable television news and the late-night comedy circuit, Bernie Sanders made no secret of his contempt for commercial TV,” Jason Horowitz reported Tuesday for the New York Times.

“It was not just a profit-making enterprise, he wrote in a 1979 issue of The Vanguard Press, an alternative weekly, but an opiatelike vehicle to subjugate the masses with ‘lies and distortions.’

“And that was just the news programs. Commercials, he went on, employed ‘Hitlerian’ tactics in which the public is ‘bombarded’ with short, simple messages in keeping with the owners’ mission to ‘create a nation of morons who will faithfully go out and buy this or that product, vote for this or that candidate.’

“He may have softened his language, but Mr. Sanders’s critique of the news media, as in nearly everything else, has remained constant as he has risen over the last 40 years from radical protester and protest candidate to mayor, congressman, senator and now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president. Despite the advent of the Internet, the diminishing of traditional news media companies and the emergence of new media Goliaths like Facebook that have helped fuel his rise, Mr. Sanders remains orthodox in his mass media doctrine.

“Antagonism toward the news media is, of course, the standard posture for politicians, especially insurgent candidates. Republicans frequently try to prove their conservative bona fides by bashing the ‘liberal media,’ and Barack Obama tried to circumvent the press filter with his own website. But Mr. Sanders’s dim view of the ‘corporate media,’ as he refers to it, is much more than a campaign tactic; it is a pillar of his anti-establishment, socialist worldview. . . .”

Meanwhile, Christina Pazzanese of the Harvard Gazette at Harvard University quoted analysts of 2016 campaign coverage.

“ ‘I detect a real feeling of press failure in this election cycle,’ said Jill Abramson ’76, a former investigative reporter and executive editor at The New York Times until 2014, during a recent talk at the Shorenstein Center on the Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). ‘Why, when I turn on CNN, isn’t there on-the-ground footage, more talking to voters, rather than just another set of people arguing? We can do better.’ . . .”

While at the Poynter Institute, Kenny Irby, right, directed The Write Field Program, a partnership including Poynter, the Tampa Bay Rays, the Tampa Bay Times, the St. Petersburg Police Department, Wells Fargo and Pinellas County Schools. It is designed to improve the academic performance and life skills of selected middle school boys. Irby is pictured last year as 41 boys became the fourth class to participate in The Write Field’s graduation ceremony.

Irby to Direct Youth Outreach in St. Petersburg

Kenny Irby, a longtime Poynter Institute faculty member who was forced out last year amid financial challenges, has been hired as community intervention director for the city of St. Petersburg, Fla., a newly created post, Charlie Frago reported Tuesday for the Tampa Bay Times.

“Irby, 54, worked for Poynter as a visual journalism and diversity senior faculty member between 1995 and 2015. He is also a pastor at Bethel AMEC who has spent eight years as the state director of men’s ministry and youth outreach for the church, setting up chaplain programs, peer-to-peer mentoring and other programs across the state.

“Most recently, he formed ‘Men in the Making,’ a program which pairs 30 kids with 17 role-models and meets regularly at St. Petersburg College’s Midtown campus.

“Before Poynter, Irby worked as a photojournalist for Newsday and media outlets in Boston and Michigan. . . .”

While at Poynter, Irby founded and led The Write Field program, which uses writing to connect with middle-school African American youths in St. Petersburg, Fla., the Poynter Institute’s hometown. Poynter owns the Tampa Bay Times. Irby had been a fixture at Poynter since 1995.

His departure prompted a backlash in which some black community members objected so much to Poynter’s change in the program that by Irby’s count, all but two of the mentors refused to work without him.

Christopher Warren was chosen as the mentorship program’s new director, hired as a contract worker.

Kelly McBride, Poynter’s vice president for academic programs, told Journal-isms by email, “The program is doing great. Chris’ work on the curriculum is stellar. We have a group of young, committed mentors with deep ties to the community. The students are committed to Chris and the mentors. And we are getting positive feedback from the funders for next year.”

Irby said by email that “Men in the Making” “lives on!” Asked whether he will keep a hand in journalism, he replied, “Only as invited. Finishing up some judging commitments through June.”

Frago’s report continued, “Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at Poynter, said Irby is a perfect fit for a difficult task.

” ‘There is [no] one in the city of St. Petersburg or maybe the state of Florida who is better equipped,’ Clark said. ‘He’s a leader. He’s a motivator… He combines the qualities of toughness and sensitivity that often don’t work together, but with him, they do.’

“Irby said he is ‘extremely excited’ for the opportunity to put 33 years of youth outreach into action for the city.”

In other personnel moves:

Jet magazine displays some of Simeon Booker’s most memorable work in reporting online on his Polk Award.

Simeon Booker, 97, Wins Polk Award for Historic Reporting

“Simeon Booker, who reported on the U. S. Civil Rights movement for more than half a century for Jet Magazine, will be the 34th recipient of the George Polk Career Award,” Long Island University announced on Feb. 14.

“Often masking his identity as a journalist in the segregated South, he covered the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi and the subsequent trial clearing young Till’s presumed killers, as well as the 1961 Freedom Rides to Birmingham and Selma and the 1963 March on Washington. Booker received permission from Till’s mother to have his colleague David Jackson photograph the boy in his coffin, resulting in photos published in Jet and the Chicago Defender that became iconic images of the fight for civil rights.” Booker is 97.

Reporting on his award, the Vindicator in Booker’s hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, noted, “The Vindicator maintains a website chronicling Booker’s life at vindy.com/booker.”A White House petition is linked there in support of the nomination of Booker for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Among other honors:

  • The award for foreign reporting is to be shared by a team of four reporters from the Associated Press, “Margie Mason, Robin McDowell, Martha Mendoza and Esther Htusan, for a series on the Thai fishing industry, ‘Seafood from Slaves,’ and Ian Urbina of The New York Times for ‘The Outlaw Ocean,’ a six-part series that portrayed a largely unchecked pattern of lawlessness on the high seas. “The AP reporters documented the plight of impoverished men from Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand lured into captivity, locked in cages, beaten, and forced to perform dangerous work with little sleep to catch and process seafood destined for U.S. consumers and their pets. They found the graves of some workers who did not survive, buried on a remote island under false names. As a result of the AP reporting, more than 2,000 captives were released, ships were seized, and businesses closed, American companies faced calls to cease selling slave-tainted seafood, and authorities in Washington, at the United Nations, and across Asia began seeking new ways to confront and control the abuses. . . .”
  • “The award for National Reporting will go to The Washington Post for an exhaustive study of killings by police officers. The project found that 990 people were shot and killed by on-duty police officers in the U.S. in 2015 and also produced a trove of original data. After discovering that FBI statistics on deaths at police hands were unreliable and incomplete, the Post assigned staffers from across the newsroom to compile and analyze their own list. Post reporters found that most of those who died were armed white men shot under threatening and sometimes heroic circumstances, but also uncovered some troubling indicators. . . .”
  • Jamie Kalven of Invisible Institute “will be honored with the award for Local Reporting for ‘Sixteen Shots,’ published online by Slate Magazine last February. Operating on a tip about the October 2014 police shooting death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, Kalven located a witness who said McDonald was not lunging at them with a knife as Chicago police reported but ‘shying away’ and that an officer repeatedly fired into his immobilized body. . . .”
  • “Terrence McCoy of The Washington Post will be recognized with the award for Regional Reporting for his series of reports from Maryland and Virginia on companies operating in the shadows of the financial industry that buy the rights to court-ordered compensation from unsophisticated victims for a fraction of their value. McCoy stumbled on the practice, after learning that Freddie Gray, whose death in police custody sparked riots in Baltimore, sold his lead poisoning settlement for dimes on the dollar. . . .”
  • “The award for Education Reporting will recognize Cara Fitzpatrick, Lisa Gartner, and Michael LaForgia of the Tampa Bay Times for ‘Failure Factories,’ a deeply researched series that traced the decline of black student achievement in Pinellas County to a 2007 school board rezoning decision that effectively re-segregated five schools. . . .”
  • “The award for Magazine Reporting will go to reporters Noreen Malone and Jen Kirby and photographer Amanda Demme, working under Jody Quon, photography director, of New York Magazine for ‘Cosby: The Women, An Unwelcome Sisterhood,’ a multimedia story that gathered the accounts of 35 women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault  . . . ‘
  • “The award for Radio Reporting will go to Nikole Hannah-Jones for ‘The Problem We All Live With’ broadcast on This American Life. Hannah-Jones, who is now on the staff of The New York Times, had just spent 18 months studying the re-segregation of American education for ProPublica. Struck that the first reaction of Michael Brown’s mother on learning of his death in Ferguson was how hard it been to get him to graduate from high school, Hannah-Jones decided to investigate Brown’s school district. . . .”
  • “Cartel Land is being presented with the award for Documentary Film. The Oscar-nominated documentary, directed and filmed by Matthew Heineman and produced by Heineman and Tom Yellin, sheds light on the Mexican drug war, specifically two vigilante groups, one on either side of the border, that take on the Mexican drug cartels. . . .”

    Exotic Touches

    The March issue of Architectural Digest features “Khloé and Kourtney Kardashian Realize Their Dream Homes in California.” Chester Higgins Jr., author and photojournalist who took a buyout from the New York Times in December 2014, wrote Journal-isms, “The niche in Khloé’s bedroom is marked by a mix of exotic touches, among them a star-shaped lantern, a photograph by Chester Higgins Jr., and a side table inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Obviously, she listens to her designers.” Higgins calls himself a cultural anthropologist with a camera.
     
     
     
     
     

     
     
     

Short Takes

Richard Prince’s Journal-isms originates from Washington. It began in print before most of us knew what the Internet was, and it would like to be referred to as a “column. Any views expressed in the column are those of the person or organization quoted and not those of any other entity.

Send tips, comments and concerns to Richard Prince.

To be notified of new columns, contact journal-isms-subscribe@yahoogroups.com and tell us who you are.

Related posts

TV One Ending Martin’s “News One Now”

richard

‘Beyoncé Reporter’ Job Goes to TMZ Writer, 28

richard

After 150 Years, Oakland Tribune to Become a Weekly Insert

richard

Leave a Comment

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.