Articles Feature

Racist Trump Ad Pulled Too Late

by richard02534

Only CNN Rejected Commercial From the Beginning

U.S. Slow to Act Against White Nationalists

An Issue Devoted to Race, the Press, Untold Stories

Younger Newsroom Staffers Show Greater Diversity

System Discourages Young People From Voting

Is National Geographic Back to Outdated Tropes?

Short Takes

Support Journal-isms

CNN refused to run Trump ad; "CNN has made it abundantly clear in its editorial coverage that this ad is racist,” the network’s public relations account posted on Twitter. “When presented with an opportunity to be paid to take a version of this ad, we declined.”
CNN refused to run Trump ad. “CNN has made it abundantly clear in its editorial coverage that this ad is racist,” the network said in its public relations account posted on Twitter. “When presented with an opportunity to be paid to take a version of this ad, we declined.” (screen grab)

Only CNN Rejected Commercial From the Beginning

“Facebook on Monday pulled down advertisements from President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign that sought to fire up conservative voters in two midterm battleground states with an ad deemed ‘racist’ by major television broadcasters,” Lachlan Markay reported for the Daily Beast.

“The company’s decision came after CNN, NBC, and Fox News had all pulled down the ad, which features a convicted cop-killer who was deported multiple times before he shot and killed two California sheriff’s deputies. The ad was released as a video by the Trump campaign last week. . . .”

That the ad aired at all on NBC and Fox, and appeared on Facebook — only CNN never ran the ad — is disgraceful, some critics said.

Luis Bracamontes
Luis Bracamontes, convicted killer of sheriff’s deputies, has nothing to do with caravan.

“It’s tempting to credit these organizations for reaching the right decision,” Erik Wemple wrote Monday for the Washington Post. “But such temptation should be resisted here.

“The flow of the ad itself — knitting together the horror of murder with images of Central American migrants — leaves little room for interpretation. It’s prima facie racism — worse, even, than the famous ‘Willie Horton‘ ad from George H.W. Bush’s presidential run in 1988.

“On this front, CNN continues to speak with clarity: ‘Facebook has stopped the Trump campaign from running its racist anti-immigration commercial as an ad on the site,’ reads the lead sentence in its story on the social media giant’s approach to the backlash.

“Another consideration is timing. When the Trump people launched the ad, the clear intent was to reach folks on the weekend before the midterms. These organizations assisted in that effort. NBC’s audience for the ‘Sunday Night Football’ clash between two top National Football League teams fetched a generous 21 million viewers. The ad aired as well on MSNBC.


The Hollywood Reporter reports on decisions to pull Trump commercial. (video)

“So these pullbacks come a bit late. . . .”

Wemple also wrote, “Take a close look at the statements from the organizations that have now rejected the ad. NBC cited the ad’s ‘insensitive nature’; Facebook cited ‘sensational content,’ as befits a tech titan; Fox News didn’t characterize the ad. As with all corporate statements, these examples are carefully lawyered, carefully PR’d. The companies aren’t calling the ad ‘racist,’ even as they bail on it.

“To do so would be to admit that they’ve profited from racism. Far preferable to profit from ‘sensational content.’ ”


A crowd approaching 3,000 blanketed the Cathedral of Learning lawn on the University of Pittsburgh campus Monday to remember victims of the Tree of Life synagogue mass shooting and, more broadly, to decry hate. (Credit: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) (video)

U.S. Slow to Act Against White Nationalists

“White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist,” Janet Reitman wrote Saturday for the New York Times Magazine, in what is to be its print-edition cover story. It is headlined, “U.S. Law Enforcement Failed to See the Threat of White Nationalism. Now They Don’t Know How to Stop It.”

“The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has reported that 71 percent of the extremist-related fatalities in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of the far right or white-supremacist movements. Islamic extremists were responsible for just 26 percent.

“Data compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled.

“In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.

“These statistics belie the strident rhetoric around ‘foreign-born’ terrorists that the Trump administration has used to drive its anti-immigration agenda.

“They also raise questions about the United States’ counterterrorism strategy, which for nearly two decades has been focused almost exclusively on American and foreign-born jihadists, overshadowing right-wing extremism as a legitimate national-security threat. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center, between 2002 and 2017, the United States spent $2.8 trillion — 16 percent of the overall federal budget — on counterterrorism.

“Terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists killed 100 people in the United States during that time. Between 2008 and 2017, domestic extremists killed 387 in the United States, according to the 2018 Anti-Defamation League report.

“ ‘We’re actually seeing all the same phenomena of what was happening with groups like ISIS, same tactics, but no one talks about it because it’s far-right extremism,’ says the national-security strategist P.W. Singer, a senior fellow at the New America think tank. . . .”


Jelani Cobb of Columbia Journalism School discussed race and the news media with HuffPost Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen; Errin Haines Whack of the Associated Press; Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer; Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review; and former CJR Delacorte Fellow Karen K. Ho. (video)

An Issue Devoted to Race, the Press, Untold Stories

“Unfinished.” That’s the title of CJR’s latest print issue, released today, which focuses on race in journalism and “the stories left untold in America’s newsrooms,’ ” Jon Allsop reported Monday for Columbia Journalism Review.

“The Race Issue features a range of perspectives on the continued under-representation of people of color in the media — situating the problem in its historical context, sizing up its statistical scale, and outlining the holes in coverage that result.

“Contributors include Vann R. Newkirk II, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Errin Haines Whack, the Associated Press’s National Writer for Race and Ethnicity; and Rebecca Carroll, special projects editor for WNYC and a critic-at-large for the LA Times.

“Also in the issue, Gustavo Arellano tackles the uncertain fate of Spanish-language news networks, E. Tammy Kim reflects on lopsided US media coverage of the Koreas, and Eric Deggans interviews David Simon, creator of The Wire, on how journalists could better cover the race beat.

“CJR’s website will roll out all the columns and features in the issue over the next two weeks. First up this morning, Guest Editor Jelani Cobb, a New Yorker staff writer and director of Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, discusses ‘the cost of the status quo’ when it comes to race in the media.

“At a launch event at Columbia Journalism School later today, Cobb will sit down with HuffPost Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen (who serves on CJR’s Board of Overseers) following a roundtable discussion featuring Haines Whack, Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope, and former CJR Delacorte Fellow Karen K. Ho.” The event was streamed and can be seen here.

In another piece released online, Gabriel Arana writes, “Among the editors in chief at media outlets that have succeeded in cultivating diverse staffs — and in turn, telling rich stories about life in America that draw broad audiences — the key, they say, is leadership. . . .”

Arana quotes newsroom and/or diversity leaders Karen Pensiero of the Wall Street Journal, Melissa Bell of Vox Media, Lydia Polgreen of HuffPost, Tracy Grant of the Washington Post, Carolyn Ryan of the New York Times, Ben Smith of BuzzFeed News, Keith Woods of NPR, Yvette Miley of MSNBC, Kevin Lord of Fox News, Ramon Escobar of CNN, David Remnick of the New Yorker and Julia Turner of Slate.

Pew-diversity

Younger Newsroom Staffers Show Greater Diversity

“Newsroom employees are more likely to be white and male than U.S. workers overall,” Elizabeth Grieco reported Friday for the Pew Research Center.

“There are signs, though, of a turning tide: Younger newsroom employees show greater racial, ethnic and gender diversity than their older colleagues, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.

“More than three-quarters (77%) of newsroom employees — those who work as reporters, editors, photographers and videographers in the newspaper, broadcasting and internet publishing industries — are non-Hispanic whites, according to the analysis of 2012-2016 American Community Survey data. That is true of 65% of U.S. workers in all occupations and industries combined.

“Newsroom employees are also more likely than workers overall to be male. About six-in-ten newsroom employees (61%) are men, compared with 53% of all workers. When combining race/ethnicity and gender, almost half (48%) of newsroom employees are non-Hispanic white men compared with about a third (34%) of workers overall. . . .”

System Discourages Young People From Voting

“To vote in the United States, you can’t simply go cast a ballot,” Jamelle Bouie wrote Monday for Slate. “In most states, you first have to register. If you’ve registered, you have to have state-issued identification to then actually vote.

“If you don’t have identification, you might have to pay a fee to obtain it. If you don’t live in an early voting state — or one with flexible absentee rules — you have to take time from work to cast your ballot. If you live in states like Georgia or Florida, you may have to wait for hours before you can step into a voting booth. If you can’t drive or aren’t mobile, you may have to find a ride.

“If you’re middle-aged with a stable job and a fixed-address, this is straightforward. If you’re anyone else, it’s less so. And if your life is defined by instability — in location, in housing, in employment — any single obstacle might be enough to discourage you from voting altogether. That might be why turnout for the youngest voters in the electorate is lower than most other groups. . . .”

Bouie also wrote, “It’s not a difficult one to solve. Automatic, universal registration would obviate the need for any action from individual voters, who would be registered upon contact with state agencies like the DMV; pre-registration of older teenagers would prepare the youngest voters for political participation; and Election Day registration would open the doors to anyone eligible to cast a ballot.

“If bundled with vote by mail (with a stamp provided by the government), states could eliminate most obstacles to participation, with no obvious downsides. (Voter fraud, after all, is practically nonexistent.) . . .”

 

cowboy_indians_lead_art_1.0-2a
From National Geographic’s November issue. (Credit: vox.com)

Is National Geographic Back to Outdated Tropes?

“This month’s cover of National Geographic depicts a lone white cowboy looking out over the American West, with the question: Whose land is it anyway?” Kainaz Amaria wrote Nov. 1 for vox.com.

“The Instagram promotion of the cover juxtaposes the American cowboy and the words ‘Battle for the American West’ with a Native American, dressed in full regalia in front of a Utah state building.

“This visual framing — the heroic white savior versus the savage native — is not new to the American imagination or to the magazine. For decades, National Geographic has been criticized for its colonialist approach to nonwhite cultures, specifically indigenous communities. Critics argue that it has been peddling visual tropes of ‘savage’ or ‘uncivilized’ brown and black people for more than a century.

“As part of the magazine’s April 2018 ‘The Race Issue,’ Susan Goldberg — the publication’s first woman and first Jewish editor-in-chief, since its founding in 1888 — flatly denounced National Geographic’s troubled history. Her mea culpa was headlined, ‘For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.’

“As part of the story, Goldberg hired John Edwin Mason, a University of Virginia professor specializing in the history of photography and the history of Africa, to examine how the magazine pushed readers toward racist stereotypes and tropes. . . .

“I corresponded with Mason to inquire about his work with the famed publication, whether he sees progress, and how he felt when he first saw the magazine’s November cover. . . .”

Mason said, in part, “I was as disappointed by what the cover didn’t do as by what it does. The magazine missed an opportunity to disrupt entrenched ways of seeing the West. Why didn’t it use a portrait of a Native American? Or if you wanted to stay with the theme of conquest, why not an image of a white pioneer woman? At least it would be a reminder that the West wasn’t simply a white man’s world. Or if the theme of the cowboy was important, why not a dark-skinned cowboy? . . .”

Short Takes

CNN's Brian Stelter wrote Monday in his "Reliable Sources" newsletter, "Bobbie Nickel emails: 'Trump has gone from an average of 5 false or misleading statements a day… to 30. Per the WaPo's fact-check team, on Saturday CNN’s Victor Blackwell gave us a visual representation of the 6,420 falsehoods... Each gumball is a bogus claim'" (Credit: CNN)
CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote Monday in his “Reliable Sources” newsletter, “Bobbie Nickel emails: ‘Trump has gone from an average of 5 false or misleading statements a day… to 30. Per the WaPo’s fact-check team, on Saturday CNN’s Victor Blackwell gave us a visual representation of the 6,420 falsehoods… Each gumball is a bogus claim'” (Credit: CNN)
Patrick Gaspard
Patrick Gaspard

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