Paper Urges Calm After Decision Not to Indict in Ferguson
Cosby Accusers Speak on the Record to Washington Post
Indy Star Tweaks, Then Removes Cartoon on Immigration
Somali Journalist, Shot Twice, Denied Asylum in U.S.
Paper Urges Calm After Decision Not to Indict in Ferguson
“After three months of hearing testimony and viewing evidence, a St. Louis County grand jury chose not to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of unarmed black teen Michael Brown Jr. St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert M. McCulloch announced their decision Monday, November 24 in a courtroom in Clayton, the county seat,” Rebecca Rivas reported for the St. Louis American.
CNN’s Don Lemon immediately drew fire in social media and online.
“How long you think it took for Don Lemon to say something infuriatingly dumb and insensitive on this rotten night? ” Rich Juzwiak asked on Gawker.com. “If you guessed less than a minute after Anderson Cooper threw to him, you guessed right.
” ‘Obviously, there’s a smell of marijuana in the air.’
“Obviously.
“Don Lemon can’t not. . . .”
In an editorial headlined, “The grand jury says no. Now St. Louis must make the most of it the St. Louis Post-Dispatch joined others in urging calm.
“Too many people know they’re right,” it said. “They don’t want to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. They’re happy with their own shoes, thank you very much.
“Confirmation bias is also a big problem in picking jurors. That’s why defense attorneys and prosecutors are so careful during the trial jury selection process. They look for people who might be leaning their way. At the very least, they look for people with an open mind.
“Grand jurors don’t get to hear defense lawyers. They hear what prosecutors want them to hear. The system can be abused, but given the extraordinary attention devoted to Mr. Wilson’s actions, it’s likely that every stone was turned over in this case.
“If there are holes in the evidence, it will be up to [Gov. Jay] Nixon, or the U.S. Department of Justice, to seek a remedy.
“The various communities that make up St. Louis don’t have to like the grand jury decision. But they must abide by it. Difficult as it will be, we should all try to do what the grand jurors had to do: Open our minds.
“The sort of real and permanent change that St. Louis needs is going to require quiet, sustained cooperation, not just loud protests. If we can open our minds, if we can find empathy with our fellow man, we can get to work healing the wounds that led to the tragedy on Canfield Drive.”
- Jarvis DeBerry, NOLA.com | the Times-Picayune: Before Ferguson grand jury announcement, civil rights group has a request of media: Jarvis DeBerry
- Lewis Diuguid, Kansas City Star: Educators at national convention discuss ways that Ferguson should change the U.S.
- Editorial, Plain Dealer, Cleveland: Cleveland police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice demands a transparent, thorough investigation and — if warranted — prosecution: editorial
- The Grio: TV anchors have met with Darren Wilson
- James Ragland, Dallas Morning News: What happens in Ferguson won’t stay there
- Ryan J. Reilly, Huffington Post: On A Night Of Peaceful Protests In Ferguson, One Reporter’s Arrest Breaks The Calm
Cosby Accusers Speak on the Record to Washington Post
“Sixteen women have publicly stated that [Bill] Cosby, now 77, sexually assaulted them, with 12 saying he drugged them first and another saying he tried to drug her,” the Washington Post said in an extensively reported story in Sunday’s print edition. “The Washington Post has interviewed five of those women, including a former Playboy Playmate who has never spoken publicly about her allegations. The women agreed to speak on the record and to have their identities revealed. The Post also has reviewed court records that shed light on the accusations of a former director of women’s basketball operations at Temple University who assembled 13 ‘Jane Doe’ accusers in 2005 to testify on her behalf about their allegations against Cosby.
The story, by Manuel Roig-Franzia, Scott Higham, Paul Farhi and Mary Pat Flaherty also said, “The allegations are strung together by perceptible patterns that appear and reappear with remarkable consistency: mostly young, white women without family nearby; drugs offered as palliatives; resistance and pursuit; accusers worrying that no one would believe them; lifelong trauma. There is also a pattern of intense response by Cosby’s team of attorneys and publicists, who have used the media and the courts to attack the credibility of his accusers.
“Martin Singer, an attorney for Cosby, issued a statement Friday defending his client and assailing the news media. . . .”
- David Carr, New York Times: Calling Out Bill Cosby’s Media Enablers, Including Myself
- Tammerlin Drummond, Oakland Tribune: Bill Cosby sexual assault allegations finally getting deserved attention
- Josh Feldman, Mediaite: TheWrap Apologizes for Controversial ‘The Rape of Bill Cosby’ Guest Column
- Eugene Kane, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: This is the Bill Cosby I know
- Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald: Please say it ain’t so, Bill Cosby — or is it?
Indy Star Tweaks, Then Removes Cartoon on Immigration
The Indianapolis Star removed a cartoon from its website over the weekend after readers complained that the drawing was racist for depicting an immigrant family climbing through a window to crash a white family’s Thanksgiving dinner,”
Emma G. Fitzsimmons reported Sunday for the New York Times.
“The newspaper should not have published the cartoon, the paper’s executive editor, Jeff Taylor, said in a statement on Saturday. The cartoon, by the artist Gary Varvel, featured a white father unhappily telling his family, ‘Thanks to the president’s immigration order, we’ll be having extra guests this Thanksgiving.’
“Mr. Taylor said that he was uncomfortable with the depiction when he saw it online, but editors decided to leave it up to allow readers to comment on it, and ‘because material can never truly be eliminated once it is circulating on the web.’
“They decided to remove it on Saturday, he said. . . .”
- Charles M. Blow, New York Times: Bigger Than Immigration
- Esther J. Cepeda, Washington Post Writers Group: Melting right in
- Meredith Dost, Pew Research Center: Immigration changes draw broad public interest
- Ryan Grenoble, Huffington Post: Indianapolis Star Alters Racist Thanksgiving Cartoon, Then Deletes It And Apologizes
- Jens Manuel Krogstad and Jeffrey S. Passel, Pew Research Center: Those from Mexico will benefit most from Obama’s executive action
- Ruben Navarrette Jr., Washington Post Writers Group: Dropping the anchor on immigration
- Latino Rebels: The Dumbest Apology Ever From Indy Star About Racist Immigration Cartoon
- Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune: ‘Emperor’ Obama’s immigration frustration
- Mary Sanchez, Kansas City Star: The moral wisdom of President Obama’s executive action
- Barry Saunders, Kansas City Star: Obama’s immigration action helps some, but not all
Somali Journalist, Shot Twice, Denied Asylum in U.S.
“As his friend Ali lay dying in the back of a car, Said Muse Dahir thought it might be time to leave Somalia,” John Stanton reported Sunday for BuzzFeed.
“The 22-year-old journalist had already been shot twice himself by an al-Shabaab gunman. He said he realized the group’s attacks on journalists in his hometown of Galkayo were becoming more frequent, and deadly.
“ ‘They force us to leave the country,’ Dahir told BuzzFeed News. Within months, Dahir would begin a journey in search of ‘first a safe place, and then a place to have free speech’ that would take him across three continents to the southern border of the United States.
“Instead of a safe place, he found himself in in an El Paso, Texas, detention center fighting an ultimately losing battle against federal attorneys arguing for his deportation.
“After the judge overseeing his case read her verdict, Dahir told her, ‘You are ordering me to be dead, and you will be responsible for my death.’ According to Dahir, the judge simply responded: ‘Good luck.’ . . .”
Short Takes
- ” Ten media organizations, including The News & Observer, sued the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Monday to get names of faculty and staff disciplined in the wake of the athletic and academic scandal,” Anne Blythe reported Monday for the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. She also wrote, “On Oct. 22, Kenneth Wainstein, a former federal prosecutor hired to investigate allegations of academic and athletic fraud, released a 131-page report disclosing that more than 3,100 students — about half of them athletes — took bogus classes in African and Afro-American Studies over an 18-year period that ended in 2011. . . .”
- In California, the Oakland Unified School District has reinstated curriculum comparing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with Mumia Abu-Jamal, the prison journalist who is serving a life sentence for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer, Chip Johnson reported Thursday for the San Francisco Chronicle. Johnson wrote, “The so-called classroom lesson is a transparent attempt to recast Abu-Jamal as something other than a cop killer. It’s not academic exploration, as supporters suggest, it’s another attempt by Abu-Jamal’s idiosyncratic loyalists to muddle the historical record in his favor. . . .”
- The New York Times published this correction on Saturday below a column by Joyce Wadler about Kim Kardashian: “An earlier version of this column was published in error. That version included what purported to be an interview that Kanye West gave to a Chicago radio station in which he compared his own derrière to that of his wife, Kim Kardashian. Mr. West’s quotes were taken, without attribution, from the satirical website The Daily Currant. There is no radio station WGYN in Chicago; the interview was fictitious, and should not have been included in the column.”
- ” A Libyan criminal court’s imposition of a five-year prison term on Al-Ummah newspaper editor Amara al-Khatabi for allegedly defaming public officials is a serious blow to free speech that should not be allowed to stand,” Human Rights Watch said on Friday. “The court convicted al-Khatabi for an article published in the November 21, 2012 edition of Al-Ummah. The article, ‘The Black List of the Judiciary,’ named 87 judges and prosecutors, all members of the public judiciary, whom it accused of accepting bribes and other illicit earnings, and of loyalty to the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. . . .”
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