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Voting Rights: The Elephant (and Donkey) in the Room

by richard2 662

Thousands of Color Might be Disenfranchised in ’16

Obama Urges Political Reporters to Dig More Deeply

Obama on Aretha: She ‘Just Sounds So Damn Good’

Harder to Interest Readers in Bombings in Pakistan

OWN Lineup Resonating With Blacks, Women

Short Takes

Voters wait in line to cast their ballots at Pilgrim Evangelical Lutheran Church last week in Mesa, Ariz.. Lines in the evening were around three hours. (Photo: Michael Chow/The Republic)
Voters waited in line for about three hours to cast their ballots at Pilgrim Evangelical Lutheran Church last week in Mesa, Ariz. (Credit: Michael Chow/Arizona Republic)

Thousands of Color Might be Disenfranchised in ’16

“It’s bad enough that an outrage was perpetrated last week against the voters of Maricopa County, Ariz.,” columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote Sunday in the Washington Post.

“It would be far worse if we ignore the warning that the disenfranchisement of thousands of its citizens offers our nation. In November, one of the most contentious campaigns in our history could end in a catastrophe for our democracy.”

Are the media sounding the alarm?

“A major culprit would be the U.S. Supreme Court,” Dionne continued, “and specifically the conservative majority that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013.”

Well, perhaps something that sounds less urgent than an alarm. “The facts of what happened in Arizona’s presidential primary are gradually penetrating the nation’s consciousness,” Dionne wrote. “In a move rationalized as an attempt to save money, officials of Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, cut the number of polling places by 70 percent, from 200 in the last presidential election to 60 this time around.

“Maricopa includes Phoenix, the state’s largest city, which happens to have a non-white majority and is a Democratic island in an otherwise Republican county.

“What did the cutbacks mean? As the Arizona Republic reported, the county’s move left one polling place for every 21,000 voters — compared with one polling place for every 2,500 voters in the rest of the state. . . .”

The media gave the 2013 Supreme Court decision its due, but in the first presidential campaign since then, news organizations have been inconsistent in covering the fallout.

Ari Berman, a senior contributing writer for the Nation and author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” is convinced that the Arizona cutbacks would not have passed muster with the U.S. Justice Department if the Voting Rights Act were fully intact. The changes had a disproportionate impact on people of color. He also says the news media are “not committed to covering this story.” He asks, “How many hours has CNN devoted to Donald Trump? How many on voting rights?”

When billmoyers.com asked reporters and editors in December to name the most undercovered stories of 2015, Berman nominated voting rights. “August 6, 2015, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the country’s most important civil rights law,” he wrote. “It was also the date of the first Republican presidential debate. Yet the subject of voting rights never came up — and hasn’t been mentioned in seven subsequent presidential debates. . . .” Nor has it come up since.

In November, voters in 16 states will head to the polls with new voting restrictions in place. “The 2016 election is the first in 50 years without the full protections of the VRA,” Berman wrote Wednesday in the Nation. “Widespread voting problems during the primaries in states like Arizona and North Carolina are a disturbing preview of what could happen in November.”

And even before. “On April 5, when voters cast ballots in Wisconsin’s Republican and Democratic primaries, the state’s controversial voter ID bill will face its biggest test since Governor Scott Walker signed it into law in 2011,” Sarah Smith wrote Thursday for ProPublica.

“For the first time in a major election, citizens will be required to show approved forms of identification in order to vote. The law mandates that the state run a public-service campaign ‘in conjunction with the first regularly scheduled primary and election’ to educate voters on what forms of ID are acceptable.

“But Wisconsin has failed to appropriate funds for the public education campaign. The result is that thousands of citizens may be turned away from the polls simply because they did not understand what form of identification they needed to vote. . . .”

Berman spoke with Journal-isms by telephone Monday while traveling to a speaking engagement in Cleveland, Miss. Since his book was published last summer, he has been on the road speaking about voting rights and the damage the Supreme Court decision has wrought.

Ari Berman
Ari Berman

“There has been sporadic good coverage,” Berman conceded. In July, the New York Times Magazine published “A Dream Undone,” a lengthy report by Jim Rutenberg that caught the attention of President Obama, who responded with a letter to the editor.

But more is needed. “In every state where there’s a primary,” the networks should spend at least five minutes on what the voting rights are, Berman said. Are there new restrictions? What are critics saying? Interview actual voters.

“Everybody was shocked” by the long lines in Arizona because “nobody prepared people” for what the cuts might mean.

Why are the media coming up short? Berman offered several reasons:

“The media is so focused on the horse race” among the candidates.

“They are afraid of how to handle the partisan dimensions, or of reinforcing the ‘liberal-media’ stereotypes.

“They are reluctant to get into matters of race.”

They think that voting rights is an issue of the past.

They are unwilling to do the reporting that’s required.

“Sometimes you have to dig to figure out who is affected,” Berman said. “That’s more work than writing about the latest polls.”

President Obama told journalists Monday, " “For all the sideshows in a political season, Americans are still hungry for the truth. It’s just hard to find. It’s hard to wade through. The curating function has diminished in this smartphone age. [But] people still want to know what’s true." (Credit: Pool photo)
President Obama told journalists Monday, “For all the sideshows in a political season, Americans are still hungry for the truth. It’s just hard to find. It’s hard to wade through. The curating function has diminished in this smartphone age. [But] people still want to know what’s true.” (Credit: Pool photo)

Obama Urges Political Reporters to Dig More Deeply

“President Obama challenged journalists to maintain high standards and rigorous scrutiny of political figures despite increased competition and the pressures of the smartphone age, warning of the cost to the nation’s democratic system if the press prioritized profit over the public good,” Michael A. Memoli reported from Washington Monday for the Los Angeles Times.

“ ‘When our elected officials and political campaigns become entirely untethered to reason and facts and analysis, when it doesn’t matter what’s true and what’s not, that makes it all but impossible for us to make good decisions on behalf of future generations,’ the president said at a political journalism award ceremony Monday.

“ ‘A well-informed electorate depends on you, and our democracy depends on a well-informed electorate,’ he added.

“The speech at an event awarding the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, awarded by Syracuse University to honor the late New York Times reporter Robin Toner, offered Obama another opportunity to reflect on the presidential campaign, as he laid some blame on the news industry for what he called the coarsening of the political debate.

“Without naming Donald Trump, the political outsider whose domination of the airwaves preceded his amassing of a delegate lead in the GOP race, Obama again expressed dismay at ‘vulgar rhetoric’ often targeting women and minorities, and called on journalists to do more to question the feasibility of candidates’ platforms.

“ ‘A job well done is about more than just handing someone a microphone,’ he said, challenging reporters ‘to probe and to question and to dig deeper.’ . . .”

Meanwhile, news organizations continued to reflect on their role in elevating Trump to Republican front-runner status and questioned why they missed his appeal to voters.

At the Tucson Festival of Books, aired on C-SPAN over the weekend, author John Nichols said that he had attended a conference in Europe with CEOs and “big thinkers,” and “I was struck by the fact that everyone was talking about eliminating jobs (video). Everybody was going to make more money in the next stage of our digital advancement by getting rid of immense numbers of workers.”

Nichols, co-author with Robert W. McChesney of “People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy” noted a Time magazine cover story on driverless cars, then said that “the number one job for men in America is driving. They drive trucks, they drive cabs, they drive buses. . . . They used to do things like manufacturing and mining and stuff like that but we’ve pretty much eliminated those jobs. . . .

“We found example after example after example of automation changes that are going to eliminate massive numbers of jobs.

“And, interestingly enough, the media in this campaign — You talk about voting rights not coming up, you’re talking about an issue that is huge, that is not just the bells and whistles oh wow of the driverless car or something like that or my new iPhone 17, an issue that is huge that is just discussed by our media, is what everybody in power discusses all the time, that this will be the next major issue in the next 25 years in this country — the critical issue.”

Nichols said his editor told him and McChesney that “When this stuff starts to hit, and people become conscious of it, they may go to very extreme places, politically. In some places in the past, when moments like this have come, you’ve actually had the possibility of fascism, and people exploring dangerous, rabid, horrific responses. . . you actually have politicians start to blame others, like immigrants or something like that . . .”

He said that at rallies for Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders, young people are aware of the trend and approach the future with trepidation.

Obama on Aretha: She ‘Just Sounds So Damn Good’

“David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor since 1982, has profiled Aretha Franklin for the magazine’s Food and Travel issue,” Chris O’Shea reported Monday for FishbowlNY.

“That should be enough to get you interested, but if not, he also emailed President Obama for his thoughts on the Queen of Soul.

“ ‘You can hear Aretha’s influence across the landscape of American music, no matter the genre,’ Obama told Remnick. ‘What other artist had that kind of impact? Dylan.

“Maybe Stevie, Ray Charles. The Beatles and the Stones—but, of course, they’re imports. The jazz giants like Armstrong. But it’s a short list. And if I’m stranded on a desert island, and have ten records to take, I know she’s in the collection. For she’ll remind me of my humanity. What’s essential in all of us. And she just sounds so damn good.’ ”

“The New Yorker’s latest issue hits newsstands today.”

Harder to Interest Readers in Bombings in Pakistan

“My heart goes out to the families affected by the bombings in the last couple of days in Pakistan and Iraq,” Martin Belam, social and new formats editor for the Guardian in London, wrote Monday for Medium.com. “As a father of young children myself, I struggle to comprehend the callous viciousness of deliberately targeting children playing football in Al-Asriya, or out for a day with their families in Lahore.

“And social media is littered today with people complaining that the media has not been giving these stories the attention they deserve.

“It’s undoubtedly true that there is less coverage, but it is also regretfully true that there seems to be less of an audience.

“It’s a Bank Holiday today in the UK, and I’m not working, but I’m also a complete news geek so obviously started the day with listening to the Radio 4 Today programme and with a quick look at the Guardian’s real-time web stats tool, Ophan.

“I was struck by the fact that despite leading the site with several stories about the Lahore attacks, it was not our most read story. . . .”

Belam also wrote, “But what you will probably see over the next few days is that there will be a lot less follow up coverage from the media as a whole than there was follow up coverage of Brussels.

“In part, for us in Western Europe, that will be about logistics. It is a lot easier — and cheaper — to send a couple of reporters over to Brussels than it would be to get a team into Lahore.

“I find it a bit depressing really, but unsurprising.

“It’s harder to get mainstream reader empathy and interest in terrorism attacks that occur further from our shores. Many, many of our readers will have visited Brussels or Paris. Far fewer will have ever ventured to Pakistan. . . .”

Separately, Dunya News, which covers Pakistan, reported, “The figurative yet very literal heart of the country was drenched in blood as a suicide bomber blew himself up, taking away 74 innocent lives and injuring at least 300 people, who were at the Gulshan-Iqbal park celebrating the Easter holiday and for general recreational purposes.

“The jovial background froze into itself and a carnage erupted; dead bodies and rubble, the injured writhing in pain and a sight of utter chaos. . . .”

The Dunya News report also said, “Multiple Anjuman Tulba Islam (ATI) protestors were arrested as they attacked the Karachi press club. These miscreants resorted to aerial firing, assaulting journalists and also set a vehicle belonging to a private television channel on fire. . . .”

OWN Lineup Resonating With Blacks, Women

“When Oprah Winfrey invited director Ava DuVernay to her Hawaii home in the summer of 2014, after the two had completed filming the movie ‘Selma,’ they got to talking on her porch about the novel ‘Queen Sugar,’ ” Nick Niedzwiadek reported March 20 for the Wall Street Journal.

“Then and there, Ms. Winfrey decided to turn the book — about a mother and daughter who leave Los Angeles for a Louisiana sugar-cane farm they inherit — into a TV series for her OWN cable network.

“The series, which is expected to premiere later this year, reflects the transformation of OWN’s programming over the past few years. The network, a joint venture with Discovery Communications Inc., was built around self-improvement talk shows, but has shifted toward increasingly ambitious dramas, with Ms. Winfrey taking a bigger role in its creative decisions.

“The overhaul coincided with a ratings surge, as the network’s new lineup resonated with women and black audiences. OWN’s average prime-time viewership has grown roughly 30% in the past two years to 537,000, according to Nielsen, even as many cable networks have suffered declines.

“Those figures represent a remarkable turnaround for OWN, which made its debut in 2011 and initially struggled to attract an audience. . . .”

Although Niedzwiadek reported that “OWN is now the highest-rated cable network among African-American women, and in the top 20 among all women, according to Discovery,” an OWN spokeswoman told Journal-isms she could not confirm that. Citing Nielsen, spokeswoman Chelsea Hettrick said, “This year to date, OWN is the #25 ad-supported cable network among W18+ (0.38 rtg) [ratings points]. OWN is a close second among A.A. W18+ (1.74), narrowly trailing BET (1.78).”

Short Takes

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2 comments

John McClelland March 29, 2016 at 12:09 pm

Re Donkey and Elephant in the room (Voting Rights Act):

Candidates and incumbents at every level, from my absentee state rep (Chicago-suburb gerrymander) to possibly all of the prez wannabes and their fellow fanatics, remind me of: “Once the camel gets its nose in the tent, the rest of the beast is sure soon to follow.” And once the other end is in, guess what plops out.

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Fan Torrent April 16, 2016 at 12:21 am

Appreciate you sharing, great blog article.Thanks Again. Awesome.

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