Maynard Institute archives

Connecting Trump With White Supremacists

by richard0609

New Yorker Magazine Is Latest to Explore Ties

NAHJ Knocks “Anchor” Term; Bush Says He Means Asians

Birmingham News Sheds Last Black City Desk Reporter

Right-Wing Sites Force Activist to Disclose Private Past

“News One Now” to Air at 4 a.m. on West Coast

Debating “Black,” Refugee/Migrant and Latino/Hispanic

Why Writers, Publications Still Need Copy Editors

NABJ Unhappy After Meeting in Chicago Over Column

Tony Gleaton Dies, Photographed African Diaspora

Short Takes

Richard Spencer, who promotes “white racial consciousness,” said, “I don’t think Trump is a white nationalist,” but he did believe that Trump reflected “an unconscious vision that white people have . . .” (video)

New Yorker Magazine Is Latest to Explore Ties

“Ever since the Tea Party’s peak, in 2010, and its fade, citizens on the American far right — Patriot militias, border vigilantes, white supremacists — have searched for a standard-bearer, and now they’d found him,” Evan Osnos wrote for the Aug. 31 issue of the New Yorker.

“In the past, ‘white nationalists,’ as they call themselves, had described [Donald] Trump as a ‘Jew-lover,’ but the new tone of his campaign was a revelation. Richard Spencer is a self-described ‘identitarian’ who lives in Whitefish, Montana, and promotes ‘white racial consciousness.’

“At thirty-six, Spencer is trim and preppy, with degrees from the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago. He is the president and director of the National Policy Institute, a think tank, co-founded by William Regnery, a member of the conservative publishing family, that is ‘dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of European people in the United States and around the world.’

“The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Spencer ‘a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old.’

“Spencer told me that he had expected the Presidential campaign to be an ‘amusing freak show,’ but that Trump was ‘refreshing.’ He went on, ‘Trump, on a gut level, kind of senses that this is about demographics, ultimately. We’re moving into a new America.’

“He said, ‘I don’t think Trump is a white nationalist,’ but he did believe that Trump reflected ‘an unconscious vision that white people have — that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country. I think that scares us. They probably aren’t able to articulate it. I think it’s there. I think that, to a great degree, explains the Trump phenomenon. I think he is the one person who can tap into it.’

“Jared Taylor, the editor of American Renaissance, a white-nationalist magazine and Web site based in Oakton, Virginia, told me, in regard to Trump, ‘I’m sure he would repudiate any association with people like me, but his support comes from people who are more like me than he might like to admit.’ . . .”

NAHJ Knocks “Anchor” Term; Bush Says He Means Asians

No sooner had the National Association of Hispanic Journalists on Monday called for presidential candidates and the news media to drop the term “anchor babies” than former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said that in using the term he was referring to Asians, not Hispanics.

The term has been used to describe American children born to undocumented immigrants.

The Daily Kos reported this exchange between Bush and reporters Monday in McAllen, Texas:

REPORTER: Do you worry that using the term “anchor babies” could affect your ability to win the Hispanic vote?

BUSH: No. Look, as I said in Spanish, my background, my life, uhh, the fact that I’m immersed in the immigrant experience…this is, this is ludicrous for the Clinton Campaign and others to suggest that somehow I’m using a derogatory term.

“What I was talking about was the specific case of fraud being committed, where there’s organized efforts, and frankly, it’s more related to Asian people coming into our country, having children in that organized efforts, taking advantage of a noble concept with birthright citizenship. I support the fourteenth amendment. Nothing about what I’ve said should be viewed as derogatory towards immigrants at all. This is all how politics plays, and by the way, I think we need to take a step back and chill out a little bit as it relates to the political correctness. . . .”

In its statement earlier Monday, NAHJ said:

“This term belittles these children and triggers hate and threats towards their parents. ‘American children of undocumented immigrants’ is an accurate term that does not incite and sets the stage for reasonable dialogue about the issue.

” ‘This is not about being politically correct. This is about respect for human beings. It’s about being decent enough to give them an ounce of dignity instead of dwindling them down to a political potshot,’ said Mekahlo Medina, NAHJ President. ‘The issue of immigration and American children born to undocumented immigrants are topics the American people and candidates for president should discuss as they campaign to lead our country, but they should do it in a way that doesn’t belittle, incite and stir hate.’ “

Birmingham News Sheds Last Black City Desk Reporter

The Birmingham (Ala.) News has laid off its last black city desk reporter, Barnett Wright, but the company insists that it is seeking journalists of color for digital jobs in the parent Alabama Media Group.

The News, based in a city that is predominantly African American, is not alone in backsliding on diversity as legacy media shift toward digital operations that fail to employ as many journalists as full-scale print operations.

The News did not participate in the annual newsroom diversity survey of the American Society of News Editors, but six other Alabama newspapers that did reported no journalists of color.

Last December, Vernon Clark, the remaining African American city desk reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, took a buyout and left after 33 years at the paper.

As Benét J. Wilson, who has been following the story for alldigitocracy.org, reported, “AMG, a subsidiary of Advance Publications, has disrupted its news operations across the country. In Cleveland, for example, Advance took away several beats from The Cleveland Plain Dealer, including the police beat, but left behind the more experienced reporters who covered the beats. The beats were moved to cleveland.com, where younger reporters were put in charge of them.”

Three years ago, 62 of 102 positions in the Birmingham newsroom were slated for layoffs, according to a document circulating then in the newsroom. “I’m the only black business writer,” Roy Williams told Journal-isms at the time. He ticked off the losses, including his own job. “The only two black editors. All five black zone reporters. All three black copy editors. The only black editorial writer, who has been here 30 years. It hit us really hard.”

Williams messaged Journal-isms Monday, “though a black photographer, 2 sports writers & columnist are left there are no black news reporters there to cover issues important to the community in city 75% black. . . . I worked at bham news 23 years before being among 61% laid off in oct 2012 – none of the black business issues I championed for 18 years as a business writer are covered anymore.”

Wilson quoted Michelle Holmes, Alabama Media Group’s vice president of content. “Holmes noted that AMG is looking for diverse journalists, including ones for its new AL.com Studios, a digital video platform. ‘For those positions, we are seeking video journalists with proven ability in digital storytelling, and advanced shooting and editing experience,’ she wrote. ‘In general, for all our roles, we are looking for journalists with strong digital acumen who are committed to storytelling, experimentation, and a willingness to deliver significant journalism on multiple platforms. . . .”

Right-Wing Sites Force Activist to Disclose Private Past

Shaun King, a columnist for Daily Kos, an active and widely followed Twitter user and a prominent member of the Black Lives Matter movement, “was forced yesterday to share some of his most painful family secrets with the world,” Jack Mirkinson wrote Saturday for Salon.

“This is thanks to a monumentally squalid series of articles by conservative site Breitbart that questioned whether or not King was actually a black man — an assertion that was thoroughly discredited by King. Normally, I’d advise you to avoid reading any further, but the King saga is a perfect symbol of some of the worst tendencies currently found in both the dankest corners of the conservative media and the shamelessly trigger-happy world of the mainstream media.

“Breitbart’s ‘scoop’ about King came from Vicki Pate, a blogger who runs a truly startling website called ‘Re-NewsIt!’ The site is the kind of typo-ridden bile factory that would normally be dismissed without a second glance. Its sole aim appears to be to ‘expose the truth’ about the nefarious charlatans at the heart of the Black Lives Matter Movement, as well as to smear any black victims of crime. . . .”

Mirkinson also wrote, “What defies all comprehension is why reputable news outlets ran with this sorry excuse of a story. CNN’s Don Lemon — who always seems to be at the center of the network’s most journalistically dubious decisions — breathlessly told his viewers that family members had sworn exclusively to him that King was white. (Never mind King’s own statement that his family was a complex, tangled ball – making it entirely possible that some family members didn’t know what the hell they were talking about when it came to his racial background.)

“The Daily News [in New York] ran multiple stories with headlines like ‘Rachel Dolezal 2.0? Shaun King, activist for the Black Lives Matter movement, outed as a white man.’

“It’s bad enough that sites like Breitbart are peddling this nonsense. But for CNN to use its still-considerable authority to drive such a clearly malicious smear campaign forward is something else entirely. CNN should have taken one look at both the Breitbart story and its source and known to stay away. That it chose not to do so is basic journalistic malpractice. . . .”

“News One Now” to Air at 4 a.m. on West Coast

When TV One’s “News One Now” daily news panel show moves from 9 a.m. ET to 7 a.m. ET on Sept. 14, it will air on the West Coast at 4 a.m., host Roland S. Martin told viewers on Monday. He advised those viewers to set their digital video recorders (DVRs) to watch it later.

“With this move, we are expanding the show’s potential to reach additional viewers by moving it to the 7 a.m. ET/4 a.m. PT hour,” TV One spokeswoman Brandii Toby-Leon messaged Journal-isms on Monday. “Following the 7 a.m. ET broadcast, we will be airing entertainment programming for the rest of the day. At this time, we do not have any plans to encore News One Now at 10 a.m. ET/7 a.m. PT.”

Toby-Leon added, “We will be hitting viewers while they are still at home, before their commute, and when they really prefer to watch the news during the weekday. It also provides us with a greater opportunity to reach more African American morning news viewers in the time period.”

“News One Now’s” broadcast network competitors, such at NBC’s “Today” show, “CBS This Morning” and ABC’s “Good Morning America,” will be airing simultaneously at 7 a.m. on both coasts. “In total, we have 3 feeds of the TODAY Show: Eastern, Central and Pacific,” NBC spokeswoman Nicole Enberg told Journal-isms by email. “During the 7 o’clock hour, TODAY reaches more than 5 million people through the broadcast (and millions more online).”

“News One Now” has averaged 105,000 viewers per episode this year, according to the Nielsen research company, although TV One prefers to say that “News One Now has grossed almost 2 million total viewers since its inception in November 2013.”

Debating “Black,” Refugee/Migrant and Latino/Hispanic

The decision by Associated Press Stylebook editors to keep “black” lowercase when referring to African Americans and other black people “is a niggling reminder of the pervasive issues of Black underrepresentation in the newsroom and its effects: tone-deaf and/or anemic coverage of Black individuals and communities,” Meredith D. Clark wrote Sunday for the Poynter Institute.

“As media coverage of networked activism in the #BlackLivesMatter movement revives discussions of how media talk about race, the question persists: Why won’t mainstream news outlets capitalize the b in Black?” said Clark, an assistant professor at the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas.

“It’s a question of social and political will. . . . “

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Jensen, ombudsman at NPR, reminded listeners Friday about when the network uses “refugees” and when “migrants.” She referred to an April discussion between Mark Memmott, standards editor, and Scott Simon, “Weekend Edition Saturday” host:

“MEMMOTT: Well, let’s work through the words. Refugees leave their homes or their countries to escape persecution, or they might be seeking safety because of wars, as you said. Some may have been forced from their homes by armed forces. Certainly, many of the people who we’ve been hearing or reading about are refugees, but they’ve been coming from more than a dozen countries, and they’ve been coming for many different reasons; some of them maybe just to seek better lives.

“The word migrants fits for them all. As the dictionary says, a migrant is a person who moves from one place to another, and in particular, it’s a word applied to those who leave one country to settle in another. We haven’t been using the word immigrants for a very sad reason. The people who didn’t make it to Europe — the hundreds who drowned — never got the chance to immigrate. One immigrates when you arrive in a new country. . . .”

On vox.com Thursday, Terry Blas, a Portland, Ore.-based writer/cartoonist and creator of the web series “Briar Hollow,” drew a mini-comic to explain the difference between “Latino” and “Hispanic.”

“Latino is a term that is telling you about geography,” he wrote. “Hispanic is a term that is telling you about language. It’s easy to remember if you dissect the words. . . .”

NABJ Unhappy After Meeting in Chicago Over Column

The National Association of Black Journalists said Monday that it “is disappointed with the response by the Chicago Tribune editorial board to the public outcry over a column by editorial board member Kristen McQueary, who called for a Hurricane Katrina-like storm as a starting point for fixing Chicago’s ills.

“McQueary wrote on Aug. 13 that she was ‘praying for a storm’ in reference to Hurricane Katrina. She then wrote a second column on Aug. 14 after negative comments online and on social media circulated, saying readers simply missed the point of the first op-ed.

“The Hurricane Katrina analogy ‘lacks news judgment,’ said Sarah Glover, NABJ’s 21st president. ‘Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.’ . . .”

In a letter Aug. 14 to the editorial board, the NABJ-Chicago Chapter requested a public apology and a two-week suspension for McQueary.

Glover and Kathy Chaney, president of NABJ-Chicago, met Thursday with McQueary; John P. McCormick, deputy editorial page editor; and Marcia Lythcott, editor of the Commentary page, Bruce Dold, the editorial page editor, told Journal-isms by telephone on Monday.

“They had a good conversation,” Dold said. “I fully support Kristen. She’s an excellent writer and columnist.”

McQueary wrote Aug. 14, “When I wrote a column Thursday about Hurricane Katrina, and how I wished Chicago could face a similar storm — to be jolted in a new direction — I offended the entire city of New Orleans and beyond. I used the hurricane as a metaphor for the urgent and dramatic change needed in Chicago: at City Hall, at the Chicago City Council, at Chicago Public Schools. Our school system is about to go bankrupt, and the city’s pension costs and other massive debts have squeezed out money for basic services.

“I wrote what I did not out of lack of empathy, or racism, but out of long-standing frustration with Chicago’s poorly managed finances. . . .”

Tony Gleaton Dies, Photographed African Diaspora

“Photographer Tony Gleaton died last Friday at the age of 67 after struggling with a particularly aggressive cancer for 18 months,” Karen Grigsby Bates wrote Sunday for NPR’s “Code Switch.”

“He was working, signing prints, talking to museums (several have his work in their collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem) and checking in with his friends right up to the last day. I admired his work, but also treasured his friendship.”

Bates also wrote, “His subjects tend to be people who are usually invisible to the rest of society, and who are outside of the mainstream aesthetic. He saw his work as a way to correct that marginalization, at least for a moment: beautiful portraits of beautiful people, taken with respect.

“In the beginning, he got a lot of pushback. ‘Why do you want to take our picture?’ the villagers would ask, warily. ‘We have no money to pay you.’

“When Tony would explain that he was documenting the African Diaspora around the world, and that they and he were both part of it, the conversation often became even harder.

” ‘You want to take pictures of black people?’ they’d ask.

” ‘Yes, like you and me … ‘ he’d [begin.]

” ‘Well,’ they’d respond, looking at his fair skin, light hair and blue-green eyes. ‘You’re not black. And we’re certainly not black. So you need to do that somewhere else.’

“Eventually he learned to refine his approach . . . “

Short Takes

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