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How Russians Tried to Suppress Black Vote

richard

Discussion of Interference Overlooked Racial Aspect

Southern Papers Reflect on Complicity With Racism

Bethel McKenzie Joins Report for America

‘What Does It Mean to Have a Multiracial Royal?’

NBC Celebrates Asian Americans’ Own Stories

Wall Trumps Role of Climate in Emigration Stories

Writer Found Racism More Frequent in Journalism

Chokeholds Still Used Despite Eric Garner Death

Kamala Harris Sees ‘Electability’ as Code Word

Farrakhan Separates Out ‘Satanic Jews’ After Ban

‘Countless’ Others Treated Like Freed Reporters

Deadline is May 17 to Nominate a J-Educator

Short Takes


“Russia intended to suppress, discourage, dissuade, African American voters in 2016,” Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, said on MSNBC Monday.

Discussion of Interference Overlooked Racial Aspect

“One of the nation’s oldest civil rights organizations is warning that Russian attempts to interfere in the U.S. political process deliberately targeted African Americans, drawing a link to domestic efforts to curtail voting rights and roll back landmark civil rights protections,” Ariana Freeman and Zoe Poindexter reported Monday for CBS News.

“In its annual ‘State of Black America’ report, the National Urban League found malicious foreign actors’ use of social media to spread disinformation ‘aligns with racially-motivated efforts taking place in state legislatures across the nation’ and recent Supreme Court decisions.

“Unveiling the report at the start of a three-day conference at the National Press Club in Washington, Marc Morial, the group’s president and CEO, highlighted Russia’s use of race as a weapon to divide Americans and dissuade African Americans from voting, a dynamic he said has been overlooked in the public discussion of Russian interference.

” ‘We need to understand how pervasive, pernicious and widespread it was,’ Morial told the group of black community leaders, league members and reporters. . . .”

Annika Merrilees added for ABC News, “Late last year, two reports on Russia’s widespread online influence campaign detailed how purported Russian trolls used social media to target with laser-like precision the African-American vote ahead of the 2016 presidential election, and then continued to sow social and political discord in the U.S. in the months after President Donald Trump was elected.

“According to one of the reports, which were prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee by outside researchers, one goal was to persuade African-Americans to boycott the election or to follow incorrect voting procedures to suppress the vote. The same tactics, the report said, have more recently been employed targeting Mexican-American and Hispanic voters to undermine their faith in U.S. institutions.

Report was released Monday,

“For years, African American lawmakers on Capitol Hill and their adversaries in congressional districts have raised concerns about voter identification laws they worry disenfranchise minority voters and redistricting that marginalizes the impact of their voting power. They point to the striking down of a critical portion of the Voting Rights Act in the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby v. Holder as a pivotal turning point in modern-day voting rights.

“The report makes nearly a dozen policy recommendations, among them a push toward the elimination of the Electoral College, a proposal that has been discussed by some 2020 Democratic hopefuls. The report called for the elimination of strict voter identification requirements and allowing online, same-day and automatic voter registration. It also recommends granting statehood for the District of Columbia and eliminating purges of voter rolls.

In the Washington Informer on Wednesday, D. Kevin McNeir noted, “Morial emphasized that one of the impacts of Russian interference in the 2016 elections that continues to be ignored remains a significant reduction in Blacks who voted because of being fooled by Russian propaganda.

“ ‘Racism was a powerful tool used by Russian and other hostile foreign hackers and troll farms to manipulate the 2016 presidential and 2018 midterm elections,’ he added. ‘A Russian-linked social media campaign, ‘Blacktivist,’ used Facebook and Twitter to ramp up racial tensions during the U.S. presidential election, using the integrity of the Black Lives Matter hashtag to carry out an insidious campaign of voter suppression.’

“ ‘And their efforts apparently worked. Posing as activists, they instructed African Americans not to vote — suppressing, discouraging and dissuading Blacks to stay home on Election Day because politicians had allegedly sold them out.”

McNeir also quoted Morial as saying, “Some of our leaders want to close the books on the Mueller Report. But the light must be cast on how Russia contributed to the suppression of the African-American vote.”

Morial said he hoped Congress would hold hearings on Russian efforts to target black voters, Mihir Zaveri and Jacey Fortin reported in the New York Times.

“ ‘I tell people: Russia today, China tomorrow, Saudi Arabia next week,’ he said. ‘Every country that wants to influence and impact us is going to be playing in our elections.’ ”

In a separate development, Eriq Gardner reported Tuesday for the Hollywood Reporter, “The United States Justice Department has prevailed in a lawsuit against RM Broadcasting, the owner of a Washington, D.C.-based radio station that is broadcasting Sputnik International. On Tuesday, a federal judge in West Palm Beach, Fla., granted a motion for judgment on the pleadings to the DOJ in a groundbreaking case over the Foreign Agents Registration Act. . . .

“The ruling will bolster the Justice Department as it seeks to compel others to register as foreign agents,” Gardner wrote. “The decision may also lead to retaliation. For example, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has already labeled Voice of America and eight other U.S.-backed news stations as ‘foreign agents’ and threatened to do the same against CNN and other prominent America-based outlets.’

When it went on the air in 2017, Sputnik News Radio hired a public relations firm to recruit black journalists in Washington to appear on its programs.

In Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, a mob stands in front of the building that housed a black newspaper, which the mob had burned and destroyed.

Southern Papers Reflect on Complicity With Racism

“Following the Civil War up until the Civil Rights Movement — and beyond — white-owned newspapers across the South served as cheerleaders for white supremacy,” the Poynter Institute wrote Tuesday in a headline above a four-section story by Mark I. Pinsky. The main headline was, “Maligned in black and white: Southern newspapers played a major role in racial violence. Do they owe their communities an apology?”

“Their racist coverage had sometimes fatal consequences for African Americans,” the subhead continued. “Now, some of these papers are accepting responsibility for this coverage and apologizing for it.

“We talked to historians, journalists and other experts to determine the impact that these apologies have — if any — and the lessons for today’s journalists.”

Pinsky’s piece concluded with the question, “So what will today’s journalists have to apologize for in the decades to come?”

Gilbert King, author of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America,” “thinks the wait need not be so long.

“ ‘I think one lesson would be to question everything and be suspicious of seemingly obvious narratives,’ he said. ‘Because today’s stories move so much faster, it’s easier to be influenced by reporting that we can see on video and cell phone cameras. Yet journalists can still get these stories wrong if they are not careful in their reporting. Hopefully, we’ve gotten to a point where apologies will be more immediate.’

“ ‘Owning up to such complicity, and fully admitting it, is in my view a good thing,’ said [Phillip Luke] Sinitiere, who is also a professor of history at the College of Biblical Studies in Houston,” Pinsky continued. Sinitiere is W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“But beyond an apology, how are these newspapers and contemporary journalistic institutions working to repair society in the present day? In other words, how are they working to reverse structural disadvantage in a society to which their previous reporting contributed? And are they commenting on current media organizations whose current reporting imperils the lives of black people in very real ways?”

Willie Griffin, staff historian at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, said, “The newspapers were wildly important in fomenting violence, not something we give a lot of attention to in the 20th century. What is needed is more an acknowledgment, rather than an apology, and a commitment to teaching about it.”

Bethel McKenzie Joins Report for America

Alison Bethel McKenzie, who resigned last week as executive director of the Society for Professional Journalists, has been named director of corps excellence for Report for America, which “places talented journalists into local newsrooms to report on under-covered communities or issues.”

Alison Bethel McKenzie

“Report for America is the real deal. Its mission of connecting emerging journalists to newsrooms across the country to cover under-reported issues and communities speaks to the importance of journalism, especially investigative journalism, as a pillar of democracy, and I cannot be more excited to join them in their endeavor,” Bethel McKenzie said in Thursday’s news release. She expects to be based in Washington.

“Alison is one of the true leaders in our profession,” Steven Waldman, president and co-founder of Report for America, said in the release. “We’re thrilled that she’ll be taking such a crucial leadership role here. Her vision and skills will enable us to ensure that the news organizations and corps members love this program — and that together they really help communities get the journalism they need.”

Report for America recently announced the 61 members of the 2019 corps, 50 of whom will hit the ground for the first time this June.

Meanwhile, SPJ President J. Alex Tarquinio wrote on May 1 what she called “a personal note to members who may have questions regarding this week’s news that Alison Bethel McKenzie resigned as executive director of the Society of Professional Journalists. . . .

“As for SPJ’s valued leaders — whether at the regional, chapter, committee or community levels — the national board is keen to reassure you that the SPJ staff will continue to support our members throughout this transition,” Tarquinio continued.

“When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex named their newborn son Archie Harrison, many people were surprised. None more so than the Archie Harrisons in the UK,” the BBC observed. (Credit: Press Association)

‘What Does It Mean to Have a Multiracial Royal?’

“The Duke And Duchess of Sussex had a son,” Joshua Johnson said Thursday as he hosted NPR’s “1A,” originating at WAMU-FM in Washington. “His name is Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor.”

Johnson also said, “The baby is seventh in line to the British throne. But nearly a year after a royal wedding that captivated the globe, his birth marks the first multiracial baby in the British monarchy’s recent history, according to The New York Times.

“But it’s more than just the ‘royal couple procreates’ kind of story.

“Carla Hall of The Los Angeles Times wondered how the baby might grow up. Just one note: this column was written before his name was released.

” ‘But will the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, whose very marriage was a break from royal traditions, break with the tradition of British royal family life and raise their boy their way? He’ll learn plenty about his royal background, being seventh in line to the throne.

“What will he know about his American family? He’ll know he’s royal when photographers incessantly snap his picture at events. But I’m guessing that one of his first questions to his parents will be: Am I black? The answer: Yes, you are. And if he didn’t guess it from looking at his light-skinned mother, then he need only look at his maternal grandmother, Doria Ragland, who lives in Los Angeles.

“Baby Sussex, as he’s called for the moment, will have an extraordinarily privileged life. We can only hope that he will live, eventually, in a post-racial world. Still, he needs to know about what it means to be a black person in the world today. Of course, it means dozens of things. His life will largely be his to make. There is no one ‘black experience’ — except, perhaps, a cop stopping you because you look like a suspect. I highly doubt that’s going to happen to the young Sussex.’

“What does it mean to have a multiracial royal? And how does one raise a multiracial baby in 2019? . . .”

The Chinese Historical Society of America commemorates the Chinese American role in building the transcontinental railroad. (Credit: Chinese Historical Society of America)

NBC Celebrates Asian Americans’ Own Stories

“This Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, NBC News is highlighting some of the efforts by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to write their stories back into history,” NBC News said in introducing a web page dedicated to such stories that have appeared on the site in the last few years.

Prominent among them was this by Chris Fuchs from Friday: “Railroad descendants, history buffs, dignitaries and elected officials were among the thousands gathered Friday in Promontory, northwest of Salt Lake City, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad.

“Linking together the nation’s coasts, the line was a monumental engineering feat that reduced travel time across the continent from several months to about a week. It was also a boon to the economy of a nation recovering from the Civil War.

“Friday’s anniversary ceremony strove for inclusiveness, billed by organizers as an effort to tell the ‘whole story’ of the railroad that transformed America and those who made that happen. . . .”

Indeed, Alessandra Link reported Friday for the Washington Post, “One year after the rail lines joined in Utah, Walt Whitman celebrated the achievement in ‘Passage to India.’ Thanks to the railroads, he crowed, ‘the distant’ could be ‘brought near/ The lands to be welded together.’

”But for Native nations, the railroads were unwelcome industrial interlopers. The ‘lands’ Whitman referenced were their homelands and hunting grounds, sacred sites and gathering places. These places were ‘welded’ to the United States through force, political chicanery and legal fictions. To Arapahos, Choctaws, Navajos, Osages and others, the railroad meant more U.S. soldiers and land-hungry settlers. It is no wonder that some Cherokees criticized locomotives as ‘the introducers of calamities rather than blessings.’ . . .”

Wall Trumps Role of Climate in Emigration Stories

“Watching television news, and reading immigration news on my computer, one journalistic fact is as obvious as it is devastating: the wall has completely obliterated immigration coverage,” Roberto Lovato wrote Tuesday for Columbia Journalism Review.

“Studies show that the words ‘wall,’ ‘border,’ and ‘borders’ have increasingly replaced the words ‘immigration’ and ‘immigrants’ in global news coverage of immigration. We no longer hear about the DREAMers, immigrant youth whose activism ‘won the nation’s hearts and minds’ just a couple of years ago. Neither do we hear the stories of Temporary Protected Status holders, migrant women fleeing rape and violence, and other, non-Caravan-riding migrants. . . .

“This is part of Trump’s strategy: to separate immigration reporting from the larger, domestic and foreign policy components that define immigration. And it appears to be working: nearly every news story about immigration from Central and South America mentions the wall as a focal point. The wall is a colossal political theater streamed, beamed, and reported so as to distract us from one of the truly colossal failures of the global economic system happening within and beyond this theater: the unprecedented mass global migration whose participants, some experts believe, may number anywhere from 200 million to 1 billion by 2050.

“When we fixate on a physical wall, we also introduce a wall in our thinking. Reporting that simplifies the issue of immigration by literally framing it as one that begins and ends at the US-Mexico border excludes crucial information. Trump’s wall has blocked off the biggest borderless immigration story of our lifetimes: climate migration.

“With some exceptions, the reporting on immigration leaves out experts predicting that the unprecedented global migration will largely be due to the flooding, drought, freezing, desertification, and other climate change-driven uprooting of large swaths of humanity. Research I did following visits to El Salvador and Central America, the Syrian border with Turkey, and Juarez, Mexico, in times of intense violence all pointed to climate change as a major contributor to the violence that is pushing migration. . . .”

Writer Found Racism More Frequent in Journalism

“I have experienced racism in the newsroom,” Kendra Pierre-Louis wrote Tuesday for the Open Notebook. “This hasn’t surprised me. I have been black my whole life, so racism has been a fixture of my whole life.

Kendra Pierre-Louis

“What has surprised me, as someone who transitioned to journalism from other work, is that I’ve encountered racism more frequently in journalism than I did in previous professions.

“I have had colleagues assume I attended schools racked with gun violence. I’ve seen a coworker slip horrifically racist comments into a work chat, only to rapidly delete their words (I can only assume they had meant to send the comments as a direct message to someone else). And I have had to push back against edits that reinforced racist stereotypes.

“My experience is not unusual, as I’ve discovered after talking to other journalists who are of color, queer, or both. Their experiences include colleagues assuming that any person of color in the newsroom must be part of the cleaning staff, aggressive attacks on their background, and unjustified doubts about their professional qualifications.

“I’m lucky to work in a place with strong worker protections; it means that I feel able to speak relatively openly about the experience of what it means to be a minority in journalism. But that isn’t true for everyone. Many people I talked to for this article agreed to comment only anonymously.

“Their worry makes sense: A 2015 Columbia Journalism Review analysis found that minority journalists are more likely to leave the profe­ssion than their white counterparts. Separately, research reported in the Harvard Business Review found that newsroom layoffs disproportionately involve people of color and women, and that people of color are penalized for speaking out about diversity. . . .”

Eric Garner, who was asthmatic and suffered from several other health issues, died in 2014 after police arrested him for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. His final words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement. (Credit: DefenderNetwork.com)

Chokeholds Still Used Despite Eric Garner Death

“In the Bronx, a man was choked from behind as an officer frog-marched him to a squad car,” Ali Winston wrote Thursday for the New York Times. “In Manhattan, a detective responding to a noise complaint wrapped his arm around a man’s neck and squeezed for 22 seconds.

“And in Brooklyn, a plainclothes officer pinned an 18-year-old up against a lamp post, his forearm choking off the teenager’s air supply while he was patted down.

“The incidents all happened in the last three years, after the Police Department spent $35 million to retrain patrol officers not to employ strangleholds in the wake of the death of Eric Garner.

“Records of complaints show the banned holds are still being used by some officers, and only a tiny fraction of officers accused of chokeholds have been found guilty and have faced discipline. When they do, the punishment meted out has been remedial training and the loss of vacation time. None have been fired. . . .”

Kamala Harris Sees ‘Electability’ as Code Word

“Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris went through a laundry list of issues with President Trump while calling on the media to stop overlooking Black voters in their discussions of ‘electability,’ during a Sunday night address in Detroit,” Natasha S. Alford reported Monday for thegrio.com.

“While speaking at the NAACP Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner, an annual event given by the organization’s Detroit chapter which typically attracts major political influentials, Sen. Harris said Trump uses hateful rhetoric to stir the pot. . . .”

Alford also wrote, “Harris went further in her critiques by calling out media pundits who talk about ‘electability’ in the Midwest, by overlooking ‘people in this room who helped build cities like Detroit,’ a likely nod to majority Black populations in the region’s urban areas.

“ ‘There has been a lot of conversation by pundits about the electability and who can speak to the Midwest — and when they say that, they usually put the Midwest in a simplistic box and narrow narrative.’ . . . ”

Farrakhan Separates Out ‘Satanic Jews’ After Ban

“Minister Louis Farrakhan doubled down on past polarizing statements in an impassioned and wide-ranging speech Thursday evening, just one week after Facebook permanently banned him from its social media platforms for violating the tech giant’s policies on hate speech,” Nader Issa reported Thursday for the Chicago Sun-Times.

“Farrakhan, the leader of the Chicago-based Nation of Islam, spoke at the Rev. Michael Pfleger’s St. Sabina Church amid heavy criticism of both men — Farrakhan for his past anti-Semitic and homophobic comments, and Pfleger for welcoming the divisive figurehead into his church.

“ ‘I’m here to separate the good Jews from the Satanic Jews,’ Farrakhan preached at the end of what had been a largely uncontroversial speech. ‘I have not said one word of hate. I do not hate Jewish people. Not one that is with me has ever committed a crime against the Jewish people, black people, white people. As long as you don’t attack us, we won’t bother you. . . .”

‘Countless’ Others Treated Like Freed Reporters

“The prison ordeal of Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo is thankfully over, but their biggest challenges may lie ahead,” Jason Rezaian wrote Tuesday for the Washington Post.

“The two local reporters for Reuters contributed incredibly detailed investigative reporting that uncovered a massacre of Rohingya Muslims in a rural province of Myanmar in September 2017. The journalists obtained photos of the victims shortly before their executions as well as evidence from the mass grave where they were buried. The information they revealed was so shocking that authorities considered it a threat to the country’s national security. Police arrested the two reporters after planting documents on them.

“Last month the two men received the Pulitzer Prize for their work, an award richly deserved. Their release Tuesday came after an awareness-raising campaign with high-profile supporters, much like the one The Post waged when I was unjustly imprisoned in Iran. The authorities released the two men as part of a nationwide amnesty. . . .”

Rezaian also wrote, “Sadly, countless journalists around the world are suffering similar fates — in some cases, far worse — and in the end it’s the public that loses, since those missing voices are rarely replaced with others that are equally committed to telling the difficult truths of illiberal societies. Such people are, after all, relatively rare.

“We see this phenomenon around the world, as local journalists are increasingly taking on the job of bringing us the news from countries whose governments are wary of allowing foreign correspondents to report from within their closed borders.

“I experienced significant difficulties reporting from Iran even before my imprisonment, of course. These days, Turkey, Egypt, India and Mexico are just a few of the countries where practicing journalism has become so hazardous that few souls are willing to take on the risks of doing this essential work. . . .”

Deadline is May 17 to Nominate a J-Educator

Beginning in 1990, the Association of Opinion Journalists, formerly the National Conference of Editorial Writers, annually granted a Barry Bingham Sr. Fellowship — actually an award — “in recognition of an educator’s outstanding efforts to encourage minority students in the field of journalism.”

AOJ merged in 2016 into the American Society of News Editors, which is continuing the Bingham award tradition.

Since 2000, the recipient has been awarded an honorarium of $1,000 to be used to “further work in progress or begin a new project.”

Bill Celis

Past winners include James Hawkins, Florida A&M University (1990); Larry Kaggwa, Howard University (1992); Ben Holman, University of Maryland (1996); Linda Jones, Roosevelt University, Chicago (1998); Ramon Chavez, University of Colorado, Boulder (1999); Erna Smith, San Francisco State (2000); Joseph Selden, Penn State University (2001); Cheryl Smith, Paul Quinn College (2002); Rose Richard, Marquette University (2003).

Also, Leara D. Rhodes, University of Georgia (2004); Denny McAuliffe, University of Montana (2005); Pearl Stewart, Black College Wire (2006); Valerie White, Florida A&M University (2007); Phillip Dixon, Howard University (2008); Bruce dePyssler, North Carolina Central University (2009); Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia University (2010); Yvonne Latty, New York University (2011); Michelle Johnson, Boston University (2012); Vanessa Shelton, University of Iowa (2013); William Drummond, University of California at Berkeley (2014); Julian Rodriguez of the University of Texas at Arlington (2015) (video); David G. Armstrong, Georgia State University (2016) (video); and Gerald Jordan, University of Arkansas (2017); Bill Celis, University of Southern California (2018).

Nominations may be emailed to Richard Prince, ASNE Opinion Journalism Committee, richardprince (at) hotmail.com. The deadline is May 17. Please use that address only for ASNE matters.

Short Takes

DeMarco Morgan

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