Articles Feature

Syracuse U. Paper Rips ‘Years of Inaction’

by richard03326

Egyptian Agents Storm Newsroom, Lock Up Staff
3-Year Project Bares L.I. Housing Bias
Public Radio’s Joshua Johnson to Join MSNBC
High Court Might Send Back Byron Allen Case
Fox, CNN Barely Cover Trump Aide’s Racist Emails
TV One Cancels DL Hughley After 7 Months
Laid-Off Journalists Urge Limits on Big Tech
Students of Color Not as Bullish on Free Speech
ACLU Sues DHS on Behalf of 5 Border Journalists
2 Say Comcast Didn’t Fully Back Black Networks
Nunes Joins ‘Universe of Untruth’ in Media Attack

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Students at Syracuse University stage a sit-in protest Nov. 13 against what they see as growing racial bigotry on campus and the school’s slow response to stemming it. The event was triggered by racial graffiti in one of the residence halls on Nov. 7. (Credit: N. Scott Trimble, Post-Standard, Syracuse)

Syracuse U. Paper Rips ‘Years of Inaction’

“When confronted with racism and bigotry on campus in the past, SU officials have repeatedly moved on — condemning racism and committing to do better for a moment, but never taking steps to ensure they are held accountable for creating meaningful change. University officials need to implement systems of accountability that will make it impossible for them to continue sweeping racism on campus under the rug,” the Daily Orange, the student newspaper, editorialized Nov. 18.

“At least 10 racist or bias-related incidents reported on and near the Syracuse University campus since Nov. 7 have prompted student protests, boycotts and a sit-in that’s now in its fifth day. . . .

“It took SU officials four days to craft the vague email they used to publicly notify the student body that racial slurs against black and Asian people were written on two floors in Day Hall. Since then, Chancellor Kent Syverud has spoken with protestors at the Barnes Center at the Arch twice, and university officials have attended a number of forums to hear students’ concerns. SU has released two videos to address the hate speech incidents and to explain actions the university plans to take in response.

“But a weekend’s worth of transparency can’t make up for years of inaction.

“The university’s recent willingness to communicate about racism on campus is encouraging, but the way officials have conducted themselves at critical moments in recent campus controversies is not. . . .”

Mada Masr has produced investigative pieces looking into some of Egypt’s government institutions, including the intelligence agencies, military and presidency. (Credit: Twitter)

Egyptian Agents Storm Newsroom, Lock Up Staff

“Security forces on Sunday raided the offices of one of Egypt’s last remaining independent media outlets, briefly detaining its top editor and two other journalists and later releasing them, the outlet and officials said,” Maggie Hyde reported for the Associated Press. “The raid is the latest in a widening government crackdown on dissent and media.

“The outlet, Mada Masr, has produced investigative pieces looking into some of Egypt’s government institutions, including the intelligence agencies, military and presidency. Such stories are not produced by other local media in the country, where nearly all newspapers and television channels are closely aligned with the government or military.

“A group of plainclothes security agents stormed the outlet’s offices Sunday afternoon and locked staff inside for hours, Mada reported on Twitter.

“During that time, the agents searched through staffers’ laptops and mobile phones and questioned the top editor, Lina Atallah, and other journalists, it said.

“Gamal Eid, head of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, said lawyers from his organization were not allowed to enter Mada Masr’s office.

“After several hours, police left the offices, taking Atallah and two other journalists, Mohamed Hamama and Rana Mamdouh, to the local public prosecutor’s office, Mada said in a tweet. They were later released, according to Sharif Abdel-Koudous, a journalist at the outlet. . . .”

(Credit: New York Times)

3-Year Project Bares L.I. Housing Bias

“In one of the most concentrated investigations of discrimination by real estate agents in the half century since enactment of America’s landmark fair housing law, Newsday found evidence of widespread separate and unequal treatment of minority potential homebuyers and minority communities on Long Island,”  Ann Choi, Keith Herbert, Olivia Winslow and project editor Arthur Browne reported Sunday for the suburban New York newspaper.

“The three-year probe strongly indicates that house hunting in one of the nation’s most segregated suburbs poses substantial risks of discrimination, with black buyers chancing disadvantages almost half the time they enlist brokers.

“Additionally, the investigation reveals that Long Island’s dominant residential brokering firms help solidify racial separations. They frequently directed white customers toward areas with the highest white representations and minority buyers to more integrated neighborhoods.

“They also avoided business in communities with overwhelmingly minority populations.

“The findings are the product of a paired-testing effort comparable on a local scale to once-a-decade testing performed by the federal government in measuring the extent of racial discrimination in housing nationwide. . .”

The newspaper appended this editor’s note: “Newsday has removed its paywall to allow everyone access to this groundbreaking and essential investigative project.”

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Public Radio’s Joshua Johnson to Join MSNBC

“Joshua Johnson said Tuesday he would step down as host of WAMU and NPR’s national radio show 1A to join MSNBC as an anchor early next year,” Mikaela Lefrak reported for Washington’s WAMU-FM, an NPR affiliate.

Joshua Johnson

“ ‘This show is not about me. It’s not about a person,’ Johnson said on-air at the end of Tuesday’s show. ‘It’s about speaking freely, and finding the courage to listen. That principle will remain.’

“His last time in the host chair will be on Dec. 20. He will start in his new role at MSNBC in New York in early February.

“Johnson has been with the two-hour weekday show 1A since it launched on January 2, 2017. Conversations about politics and news-of-the-day are its bread and butter, with topics ranging from the impeachment hearings to the national gun control debate. Johnson and his producers also include segments regularly on pop culture and media trends, including ‘movie club’ conversations and discussions of video games, teen magazines and women in hip-hop. . . .”

Johnson, 39, brought to the table his identities as a native Floridian, a black gay man and one who defied peer pressure to be a curious, avid learner while growing up.  

Lefrak also wrote, “WAMU and NPR launched 1A to fill the programming gap left by ‘The Diane Rehm Show,’ which ended its 37-year run at the end of 2016. . . .

“The two-hour radio show soon outpaced its predecessor in terms of audience and reach. 1A currently airs on more than 360 stations, 75% more stations than the “Diane Rehm Show.” It reaches an estimated 4 million listeners each week and a half million listeners via its podcast. . . .”

Johnson joins Craig Melvin, Kendis Gibson and Al Sharpton as black male anchors at MSNBC. Though Johnson’s role there has not been announced, an anchor is defined as “host of a show or hour.” At WAMU,  Todd Zwillich, a longtime Washington correspondent and periodic fill-in on the show, will serve as the interim host, spokeswoman Julia Slattery messaged Journal-isms.

High Court Might Send Back Byron Allen Case

“The Supreme Court seems likely to overturn a lower court ruling in favor of an African-American media mogul and comedian who’s suing cable giant Comcast for racial discrimination,” the Associated Press reported Nov. 13.

Byron Allen

“The justices appeared to be in broad agreement Wednesday that an appeals court applied the wrong legal standard in allowing business owner Byron Allen’s $20 billion suit against Comcast to go forward. Allen has a separate $10 billion lawsuit against Charter Communications.

“Allen says the cable companies refuse to carry his television channels because he’s black. The companies say his programming isn’t very good.

“The issue at the court is whether Allen needs to show in his complaint that race was among the factors in Comcast’s decision not to offer him a contract or whether it was the decisive factor.

“Alarmed by the Supreme Court’s intervention, civil rights groups have warned that the court could make it much harder to prove race discrimination in contracting under a civil rights law that dates to 1866. . . .”

More than 80 members of the House of Representatives have called on White House senior adviser Stephen Miller to resign after leaked emails showed his affinity for white nationalism, HuffPost reported.

​
Fox, CNN Barely Cover Trump Aide’s Racist Emails

“Fox News and CNN have barely covered leaked emails from White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller that highlighted his affinity for racist rhetoric and white nationalist conspiracy theories, according to a Media Matters review,” Rob Savillo reported Monday for Media Matters for America.

“‘Fox has reported on Miller’s emails for only 42 seconds, while CNN has devoted just seven minutes of coverage to it since November 12, when the emails were revealed by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“According to SPLC’s Hatewatch, a blog that monitors hate speech and activities from the far right, Miller sent more than 900 emails to editors at the conservative website Breitbart between March 4, 2015, and June 27, 2016. More than 80% of the leaked emails appeared in threads about race or immigration in which Miller made references to white nationalist websites VDare and American Renaissance and shared obsessions with ‘white genocide,’ xenophobic conspiracy theories, and eugenics-era immigration policies once supported by Adolf Hitler.

“Miller has been at the center of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, which includes an executive order banning migrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, the policy of family separation at the southern border, and arrest quotas for undocumented immigrants. . . .”

Show is canceled. (Credit: TVOne)


TV One Cancels DL Hughley After 7 Months

“You probably didn’t even notice, but less than a year after ‘The DL Hughley Show’ launched on TV One, the late-night series has already come to an end,” Ny MaGee reported Nov. 12 for eurweb.com.

“The network made the announcement on Twitter October 31, saying that night’s broadcast would be the last, urbanhollywood411.com reports.

“ ‘The DL Hughley Show will air its final episode tonight so DL can focus on his nationally syndicated radio show,’ TV One tweeted at the time. ‘Thank you to all the fans who have watched nightly! And don’t worry, that DL political commentary you love, isn’t going anywhere. Catch DL on a radio station near you!’

“Hughley followed up with a tweet saying his show would be looking for a new home, where ‘nobody can tell me what to do.’ . . . “

TV One debuted comedian Hughley’s show in March, with Alfred Liggins, CEO of Urban One, the parent company of TV One, portraying it to Journal-isms as the successor to Roland Martin’s morning news show, which TV One canceled 15 months before.

Martin, who now has a digital news show, did not buy Liggins’ description. ““No one would say that Seth Meyers is the prime time successor of Lester Holt and Jimmy Kimmel ,” Martin messaged Journal-isms then.

Cristiano Lima of Politico, right, tells the Journal-isms Roundtable, “I look at my beat as one of the greatest of all time because we have such concentrated power in this market and have so little oversight from the U.S. government at this point.” As a result, he said, “I feel that it’s my job to be that watchdog.” With him are, from left, Nicholas Charles, Laura Bassett and John Stanton of savejournalism.org. (Credit: Bonita Bing/Tolbert & Bing Gallery & Studio)

​Laid-Off Journalists Urge Limits on Big Tech

A group of journalists, laid-off and not, are sounding an alarm tying the decline in newsroom jobs to the monster known as Big Tech (Facebook link).

“Over the last 10 years, newspaper newsrooms have declined in size by 45%, and in 2019 so far, the media has shed more than 7,200 jobs,” the group savejournalism.org declares on its website.

And then: “Google, Apple, and Facebook are using their tech muscles to monetize news for their own profit, but at the expense of journalists.”

Four of the journalists, including Nick Charles, a black journalist whose background includes stints at Newsday and the Daily News in New York and who proposed the presentation, spoke in Washington Nov. 14 before the Journal-isms Roundtable. “I don’t need to tell you that in this climate of layoffs and retrenchment who gets let go first,” Charles said.

Cristiano Lima, a tech reporter for Politico who helped moderate the discussion, acknowledged, “I look at my beat as one of the greatest of all time because we have such concentrated power in this market and have so little oversight from the U.S. government at this point.”

As a result, he said, “I feel that it’s my job to be that watchdog.”

The Save Journalism group said its main objective at this point is getting reporters, trained to keep themselves out of the news, to start talking about the relationship of Big Tech and journalism.

It also endorses measures to allow news organizations to bargain with the tech giants collectively without being in violation of antitrust laws. But the members said that is “only one piece” of the problem, like giving the news organizations a bridge loan, Charles said. “But do they get to survive?”

One of the dangers of too much power in the hands of Big Tech is data sharing, John Stanton and Ken Gude noted. “Google has the whole store of information on you that they’re matching everything with,” Gude said, noting new Google partnerships with medical data firms (“Project Nightingale” and Ascension, a major hospital chain). Partnerships with news organizations, such as Facebook’s NewsTab, are mere public relations gambits aimed at buying silence, Laura Gross said.

Asked whether the project is hiring journalists, Charles messaged, “We don’t have any more paid positions right now but [are] always looking for folks to help spread the word/work with us/attend events. And yes the freelance project, where we are soliciting freelancers to pitch stories about Big Tech and media and we pay $2 per word!”

Credit: Knight Foundation

Students of Color Not as Bullish on Free Speech

“Boys and white students are less inclined than girls and students of color to agree with the statement: ‘The First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees,’ ” according to a Knight Foundation study released Wednesday.

Written before the latest issues at Northwestern University, the report notes, “Many schools are seeing tensions between more freewheeling norms around speech and the newer establishment of  ‘safe spaces’ — where the limits of speech are shaped with regard to the overall cultural climate that is created. . . .

“But it has also engendered newer ideas of differentiating learning spaces for varying purposes in this regard; this might include parallel ‘brave spaces,’ which could stand as settings that expose students to the kinds of clashes of ideas one might find in the world outside of academe.”

Students of color were less likely than whites to agree with the statement, “Musicians Should Be Allowed to Sing Songs With Lyrics Others Find Offensive,” but strongly agreed that “professional athletes have the First Amendment right to protest during the playing of the national anthem.” While 52% of white non-Hispanic students supported this right, 81% of black non-Hispanic students and 76% of white Hispanic students did. . . .”

The study also said, “Students who report having taken a class that dealt with the First Amendment are more supportive of various rights and protections, and less likely to think the First Amendment goes too far,” and, citing the Pew Research Center noted that “Social media is the most common source for teenagers to get news, followed by access through websites. All other media forms, including television, radio, and print newspapers, make up only a small portion of their news consumption. . . .”

Leaked documents show the federal government tracking journalists, immigration advocates, KNSD-TV in San Diego reported this year. Emblazoned on this document are the American and Mexican flags. (Credit: KNSD-TV)

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ACLU Sues DHS on Behalf of 5 Border Journalists

“The Department of Homeland Security violated the First Amendment when it allegedly tracked and interrogated five journalists between 2018 and 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a lawsuit filed Wednesday,” Priscilla Alvarez reported for CNN.

“The lawsuit includes accounts by five freelance photojournalists, all of whom are US citizens and were stopped by Customs and Border Protection, an agency within DHS, while traveling to and from Mexico between November 2018 and January 2019.

“At the time, the journalists were documenting a group of migrants who were traveling to the US-Mexico border.

“In March, San Diego’s NBC 7 reported it had obtained documents showing that CBP officials in the San Diego region kept a list of people to pull aside for further screening when crossing the US-Mexico border.

“All five journalists in the filing — Bing Guan, Go Nakamura, Kitra Cahana, Ariana Drehsler and Mark Abramson — were sent to secondary inspection and questioned about their work at least once. Cahana and Drehsler were pulled aside on more than one occasion, according to the lawsuit. . . .”

2 Say Comcast Didn’t Fully Back Black Networks

“A former NBCUniversal executive said Friday that a deal struck by Comcast and civil rights groups never gave minority-owned channels a real chance to succeed, as the cable giant continued to take heat over its racial discrimination case before the U.S. Supreme Court,” Valerie Russ and Christian Hetrick, reported Friday for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Sean “Diddy” Combs

“Before winning federal approval in 2011 to merge with NBCUniversal, Comcast signed a pledge to launch minority-owned television networks in an agreement with the NAACP, National Urban League, and National Action Network.

“But the agreement did not guarantee the channels a minimum number of subscribers, or fees per subscriber, to help the new networks succeed, said Paula Madison, a former executive vice president and chief diversity officer at NBCUniversal. Her statement was released by Entertainment Studios, the company run by Byron Allen, who is suing Comcast for $20 billion in a racial-discrimination lawsuit.

“ ‘Comcast was bound by the agreement to launch the cable networks but was not bound to distribute to a requisite number of households/subscribers so the channels never had a good chance of having a profitable and successful business,’ Madison said. . . .”

On Thursday, Sean “Diddy” Combs, the hip-hop entrepreneur who launched the Revolt network with Comcast backing, criticized the tech company in a statement Thursday.

“Supporting diversity and economic inclusion requires a real partnership. The only way Black owned networks grow and thrive is with meaningful and consistent economic support. Otherwise they are set up to fail.

“REVOLT has never been in a position to truly compete on a fair playing field because it has not received the economic and distribution support necessary for real economic inclusion. Our relationship with Comcast is the illusion of economic inclusion.  . . . ” Combs said.

Rep. Devin Nunes

Nunes Joins ‘Universe of Untruth’ in Media Attack

“Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, opened today with a statement attacking media reporting on the Trump administration. He singled out six stories for attack,” David Frum wrote Wednesday for the Atlantic.

“One of them was retracted by its publisher, CNN — a form of corporate responsibility never seen from a White House notorious for emitting six false statements in a single morning. Another was an opinion piece in New York magazine by Jonathan Chait that did not claim to report news, but instead built known facts into a damning narrative of Donald Trump’s Russia connection. The other four range from the exaggerated to the unverified to the apparently mistaken.

“But let’s take a closer look at those errors and what they mean. One of the stories singled out by Nunes was published by BuzzFeed News. That story asserted that Trump had explicitly directed his then–personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow project. Cohen would ultimately testify to Congress that Trump’s direction was implicit, not explicit.

“The distinction between explicit and implicit certainly matters. But Nunes wants to use BuzzFeed’s error to insinuate that Trump was somehow the victim of a false claim. Nunes is here spreading a bigger untruth than any mistake by any news source. . . .

“Nunes knew that his intended audience would not bother to review the history as you and I just did. Nunes is not interested in talking with anyone who is interested in checking claims, or verifying statements. He is talking only with people locked into a closed and sealed knowledge system.

“This closed knowledge system entraps millions of Americans in a universe of untruth, in which Trump is a victim and the allegations against him are “fake news.” The prisoners and victims of this system live in a dreamworld of lies. Yet it would not quite be accurate to describe them as uninformed. They are disinformed, and on a huge scale. The false-knowledge system supported by Nunes is closed and sealed, but also vast and intricate. . . .

“The job of Republican members of Congress at the hearing was not to win converts. Their job at the hearing was to enforce orthodoxy and punish heresy — not to convince, but to corral. . . . ”

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Richard Prince’s Journal-isms originates from Washington. It began in print before most of us knew what the internet was, and it would like to be referred to as a “column.” Any views expressed in the column are those of the person or organization quoted and not those of any other entity.   Send tips, comments and concerns to Richard Prince at journal-isms-owner@yahoogroups.com

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