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Suspects: White, Chechen, Muslim or All the Above?

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Writers Say Labels Matter as Americans Judge Them

Boston Post-Mortems Apportion Praise, Criticism

Rookie TV Anchor’s Profane Debut Goes Viral

Prime Movers High School Program Ending After Nine Years

AP’s Honduras Writer Honored, Covers “Failing State”

NAACP’s Crisis Magazine Responds to Justice Scalia in Kind

Ann Curry “Professionally Tortured” Before Leaving “Today”

Short Takes

Writers Say Labels Matter as Americans Judge Them

“Since the identification and apprehension (both dead and alive) of Boston Marathon bombing suspects Tamerlan Tsarnaev (reportedly shot and run over with explosives strapped to him, amid unconfirmed reports he was clutching an ‘ACME Co.’ receipt) and [Dzhokhar] Tsarnaev (apprehended as a result of history’s first heroic nicotine fit), there has been a rush to triumphantly point and laugh at liberal commentator David Sirota’s preference that the bombers turn out to be like the cheese on his ham sandwich: white and American,” Tommy Christopher wrote Sunday for Mediaite.

“As it happens, both of them turned out to be Caucasian, and one of them was American, but we can’t allow their actions to define all Caucasian-Americans.

“Lucky for white Americans, Sirota was at least half-right: when perpetrators of horrific acts turn out to be white, there is some phenomenon that causes their whiteness to become completely irrelevant, even if they are actually from the place where whiteness gets its name. Until Friday, I always thought ‘caucasian’ was just a name that some fancy racist thought up to make white people sound better than ‘negroids’ and ‘mongoloids,’ but it turns out there’s a real place called Caucasia, and the Boston bombing suspects are from it.

“Despite that fact, and despite the fact that their region of origin has been heavily reported as ‘the Caucasas,’ you would never know that these guys were Caucasian, let alone white, from the way cable news has been reporting on them. With the exception of Sunday morning’s Melissa Harris-Perry show, the only cable news description of the suspects as ‘Caucasian’ came from Massachusetts State Police Col. Tim Alben, during a press conference.

“That’s because David Sirota didn’t count on the one possibility that could nullify a white American bomber: a white American Muslim bomber. . . .”

The issue of racial and religious profiling was one of the themes that followed the capture Friday of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the death of his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Muslims with Chechen origins.

Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of the New York Times, wrote Monday, “The Boston Marathon bombings are closer to the colloquial and legal definitions of terrorism than the Aurora shooting, but not the Oklahoma bombing, or the Arizona attack.

“The real difference is that Mr. Tsarnaev is a Muslim, and the United States has since the 9/11 terrorist attacks constructed a separate and profoundly unequal system of detention and punishment that essentially applies only to Muslims. . . . “

Jelani Cobb, associate professor of history and director of the Institute of African American Studies at the University of Connecticut, ruminated on the subject of collective guilt in writing Saturday for the New Yorker website:

“And though we think of ourselves as a nation of immigrants, many Americans are removed enough from identity-based communities to recoil at the idea that they’d be held accountable for someone else’s crimes,” Cobb wrote. “But recent immigrants know that, even in a country founded upon the premise of individual rights, there is no guarantee that a person will be treated as an individual. This isn’t solely a dynamic about immigration. For those with long enough memories, the ambiguous description of a ‘dark-skinned male’ suspect brought to mind the 1989 Charles Stuart case — itself a case study in collective suspicion and guilt in the city of Boston. . . .”

Sarah Kendzior, an anthropologist who recently received her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, wrote for Al Jazeera Sunday that Muslims are owed an apology:

“American Muslims have long had to deal with ignorance and prejudice in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. ‘Please don’t be Muslims or Arabs,’ goes the refrain, as unnecessary demands for a public apology from Muslims emerge. This week made it clear that it is Muslims who are owed the apology. After wild speculation from CNN about a ‘dark-skinned suspect’, on Thursday the New York Post published a cover photo falsely suggesting a Moroccan-American high school track star, Salah Barhoun, was one of the bombers. ‘Jogging while Arab’ has become the new ‘driving while black.'”

Kendzior added, “It is easy to criticise the media, and after this disastrous week, there is much to criticise. But the consequences of the casual racism launched at Chechens — and by association, all other Muslims from the former Soviet Union, who are rarely distinguished from one another by the public — are serious. By emphasising the Tsarnaevs’ ethnicity over their individual choices, and portraying that ethnicity as barbaric and violent, the media creates a false image of a people destined by their names and their ‘culture of terror’ to kill. There are no people in Chechnya, only symbols. There are no Chechen-Americans, only threats. . . .”

Boston Post-Mortems Apportion Praise, Criticism

In a flood of post-mortems on the Boston Marathon killings and subsequent manhunt, the Associated Press said, “We made mistakes because we didn’t follow our own very good guidelines”; CNN President Jeff Zucker, whose network was faulted for wrong judgment calls, praised his team; and Callie Crossley, a local critic, said of the Boston media, “in an ever evolving fast-moving situation, I thought they were brilliant.

“I was with a group of friends not in business last night,” Crossley, host of “Under The Radar” on Boston’s WGBH-FM, told Howard Kurtz Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” “I asked what they thought about the coverage.

“These are people who keep up with news and information. They said . . . what they most appreciated was a lack of hyping what was already a heightened situation. They said inform me, don’t scare me. That was the highest compliment they could give local reporters here in town and I have to agree. . . .”

In a memo to Associated Press staffers, Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll said, “There was much great work from AP staffers and we celebrate that. But we had some missteps, too. And that’s what we want to talk about here today.

“Tom Kent, our Deputy Managing Editor for Standards, finished a thoughtful breakdown of where our standards served us well and where we fell short. Two issues stand out.

“We made mistakes because we didn’t follow our own very good guidelines.

“And in one important case, we did not move quickly enough to clearly to fix that mistake. . . .” In particular, Kent said, “The AP routinely seeks and requires more than one source. . . .”

While CNN was widely mocked for its mistakes, including premature reports that a suspect had been captured (a mistake others made as well), and John King’s statement that a “dark-skinned male” had been identified as the suspect, CNN president Jeff Zucker heaped praise on his team Friday:

“You have worked tirelessly, around the clock, to share these stories. And our audiences have responded, making it clear that they rely on us in ever increasing ways,” Zucker wrote, according to the Hollywood Reporter. “In front of the cameras and behind the scenes, you have shown the world what makes us CNN. . . .”

A.J. Clemente, rookie TV anchor, said he has been fired for using profanity on the air. (Video)

Rookie TV Anchor’s Profane Debut Goes Viral

“There are likely some professors at the University of West Virginia red-faced today after a recent graduate made his TV debut by dropping a string of obscenities,” John Landsberg wrote Monday for Bottom Line Communications.

“A.J. Clemente went on the air for the first time at NBC North Dakota affiliate KFYR-TV and almost immediately blurted out a string of obscenities that left him looking like he was learning disabled.

” ‘Say hello to the most disastrous start to a television career in the history of moving pictures inside little boxes and/or flat screens,’ noted the Awful Announcing site.

“Clemente, who must have missed the ‘assume the microphone is always on’ lesson in school, has already been suspended (UPDATE: He has been fired.)

“His co-anchor was so flustered by his actions she sounded worse than a high school broadcaster. Clemente’s performance has gone viral around the country. . . .”

Mike Allen of Politico joins other White House correspondents teaching Prime Movers Media students. (Video)

Prime Movers High School Program Ending After Nine Years

The Prime Movers Media program, “the first intensive journalism mentoring and news literacy program targeting students within urban high schools,” is sunsetting after nine successful school years, Dorothy Gilliam, the program’s founder and director, announced on Monday.

The program, based at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, was established for its first three years with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and supported in more recent years by a contract with the District of Columbia Public Schools.

“Financial support from George Washington University and the School of Media and Public Affairs, along with news organizations, individuals and smaller foundations has provided supplemental funding for the program,” the announcement continued. “The completion of this year’s contract with the D.C. Public School system (D.C.P.S.) left too large a gap without new sources of funding to sustain the program. Without new funding, it has become difficult to sustain and administer the Prime Movers program so the program will close at the end of this academic year.

“Prime Movers Media has brought 80 interns from the George Washington University together with 60 professional journalists to train more than 4,000 students in 28 schools in the Washington area. Along with the White House Correspondents’ Association and AOL, Prime Movers Media has facilitated college scholarships for students to study journalism and mass communications.”

Gilliam added that the program’s legacy would continue as D.C. students study a mass media/journalism education curriculum that Prime Movers wrote for D.C. Public Schools. A branch of the program in Philadelphia co-founded with Acel Moore, former Philadelphia Inquirer associate editor and columnist, will continue.

According to the program’s website, its genesis dates to 1997, when Gilliam learned “that none of Washington D.C’’s public high schools had produced student newspapers.

“Believing that students should have opportunities to communicate and develop journalistic skills, she obtained Washington Post support to launch a project called the Young Journalists Development Program through which journalists from the newspaper served as mentors and coaches to help urban high school students learn about journalism and produce newspapers for their schools.“

Gilliam started Prime Movers in 2004.

AP’s Honduras Writer Honored, Covers “Failing State”

Alberto Arce, a correspondent in Honduras for the Associated Press, has won a National Headliner Award for news beat coverage or continuing story by an individual or team [PDF], the Press Club of Atlantic City announced.

In December, Arce wrote a first-person dispatch about his life as a correspondent. “Every Saturday morning, one of my taxi drivers pays about $12 for the right to park his cab near a hospital, about two blocks from a police station,” it began.

“But it’s not the government that’s charging.

“An unidentified man pulls up in a large SUV, usually brandishing an AK-47, and accepts an envelope of cash without saying a word. Jose and nine other drivers who pay the extortionists estimate that it amounts to more than $500 a year to park on public property. During Christmas, the cabbies dish out another $500 each in holiday ‘bonuses.’

“Meanwhile, Jose pays the city $30 a year for his taxi license.

” ‘Who do you think is really in charge here?’ Jose asked me.

“It is an interesting question, one I have been trying to answer since I arrived here a year ago as a correspondent for The Associated Press. Is the government in charge? The drug traffickers? The gangs? This curious capital of 1.3 million people is a lawless place, but it does seem to have its own set of unwritten rules for living with the daily dangers.”

Arce added, “I am the only foreign correspondent here, with no press pack to consult on questions of security, or to rely on for safety in numbers. I fall back on instincts honed in war zones, but they are not always sufficient when you are covering a failing state. . . .”

NAACP’s Crisis Magazine Responds to Justice Scalia in Kind

“Anyone keen on the Supreme Court’s on-going arguments over the legality of certain parts of the Voter Rights Act surely has not forgotten Justice Antonio Scalia‘s ‘racial entitlement’ remarks from earlier this year — especially ‘The Crisis,’ the NAACP’s flagship publication,” Terrell Jermaine Starr reported Monday for News One.

” ‘I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It’s been written about, Scalia said of the Act during a hearing back in February. ‘Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.

“The award-winning magazine pulled no punches with its response, using its cover to feature an illustration of Justice Scalia with a Confederate flag bandana wrapped around his mouth. The conservative’s eyes peer ominously through his thinly-framed eye glasses, evoking worst memories from the era in which the original [Voting Rights] Act was born.

“The cover is very hard-hitting, but The Crisis’ Editor-in-Chief, Jabari Asim, told NewsOne, ‘we thought his comments were hard-hitting and deserved that kind of response. I think that voting rights is one of those principles that the Crisis, African-Americans, and the NAACP all hold sacred. The memory of people who died for our right to vote remains fresh in many of our consciences and I think in that instance when you dare to be that irreverent and that disrespectful of the lessons of history that’s the kind of response you earn.’ . . .”

Short Takes

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