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Who’s Watching Below the Supreme Court?

by richard0834

Trump Has Already Changed Much of the Judiciary

Native Lawyer Won’t Miss Justice Kennedy

Trump’s Racist Statements Become Policy

Black-Press Group Warns That Tariffs Are a Threat

Lice Story Tops Family-Separation Heartbreakers

Journalist Links His Arrest by ICE to His Reporting

TV Reporters Out After False Representations

Has Netflix Revealed Who Killed Tupac?

2 Acquitted in ‘Huge Victory’ for Press Freedom

Short Takes

Trump Has Already Changed Much of the Judiciary

Amid the news media’s countdown Monday for President Trump’s 9 p.m. ET announcement that his choice for the Supreme Court would be federal judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report made an overlooked point on the “PBS NewsHour”:

“I think it’s also important to recognize that, while we’re going to put a whole lot of attention, as it should get, on the Supreme Court, because it’s obviously the highest court in the land, what the president has done at the lower court level also needs to be mentioned.

“All the other federal courts and the appellate courts.

“He has appointed more judges to the appellate courts than any other first-term president in history. The judicial — the actual structure of the judiciary has already been transformed. And, remember, most cases don’t make it to the Supreme Court. They get decided at this lower court level.

“So regardless of who’s picked up the Supreme Court, there is already generational change happening below that.”

Native Lawyer Won’t Miss Justice Kennedy

While some commentators lamented the decision of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to step down because it would cement the high court’s rightward turn, a Native American law professor wasn’t shedding many tears.

Matthew L.M. Fletcher
Matthew L.M. Fletcher

“My most enduring memory of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is watching him lean over the bench, red-faced and angry, lecturing attorney Neal Katyal during the Dollar General Corp. v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians oral argument,” Matthew L.M. Fletcher of Michigan State University College of Law and director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center, wrote Friday for High Country News.

“At issue in that case was whether tribal courts had jurisdiction over civil claims: Dollar General had opened a store on the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians’ reservation and signed a lease saying that legal disputes would be tried in Choctaw court. When the store’s non-Indian manager made sexual advances toward a 13-year-old Choctaw boy, the boy’s family took the matter to tribal court. Dollar General decided that tribal court was unacceptable and took the matter to the Supreme Court.

“That day, I finally understood that Kennedy was so disturbed by tribal jurisdiction over non-Indians that he would angrily protect a sexual predator from the horror of being subject to a tribal court, a position completely in line with his previous stands on Indian cases.

“Kennedy, who announced his retirement in June, was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 1988. He heard around 60 Indian law cases, and during his tenure, tribal interests won 15 cases and lost 40. Just under 30 percent of cases were won by tribal interests, making Kennedy’s time on the court a bad time for Indian people and Indian tribes. . . .” Fletcher is a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.

Trump’s Racist Statements Become Policy

“It started during the campaign,” Annie Linskey reported Monday for the Boston Globe.

“Donald Trump said ‘Islam hates us,’ he called Mexicans ‘rapists,’ and he tweeted a photo of a taco bowl to demonstrate his appreciation for Hispanic culture.

“As president, he said the crowd at the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., included ‘some very fine people.’ He dismissed majority black nations as ‘shithole countries.’ He mocked Senator Elizabeth Warren as ‘Pocahontas.’ He labeled an African-American member of Congress ‘low IQ’ and warned illegal immigrants will ‘infest’ the country.

“What’s emerged in recent months is the degree to which Trump has put some of those verbal sentiments into policy, crafting initiatives that critics call bigoted, dangerous, and sending a troubling signal to white, far right voters.

“The country is watching: Forty-nine percent of respondents said Trump is ‘a racist’ according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll of American voters. In that survey, 79 percent of blacks said he is ‘a racist’ while 44 percent of whites came to that conclusion.

“ ‘He reflects a 1950s culture and mindset that many Americans still hold on to,’ said former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, who is black. ‘They still fight in so many respects battles that were lost a generation ago. . . . He’s found a way to tap into that vein and feed fears and concerns in a way that frees people up to act on those impulses and to speak aloud about those impulses.’

“And with Trump, pontification becomes policy. . . .”

Black-Press Group Warns That Tariffs Are a Threat

The trade association representing black-newspaper publishers is joining others in protesting the Trump administration’s moves to raise tariffs on Canadian newsprint, saying the survival of smaller newspapers is at stake.

“Amid the rush to comprehend the ramifications of a full-scale international trade war initiated by the errant and backward tariff policies of the Trump Administration, there are results of the tariffs that need to be challenged by Black America,” Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, wrote. “The financial sustainability of the Black Press of America is now facing a catastrophic and a possible deadly impact, because of these new tariffs.

“The current dispute over the rising costs of the paper product termed ‘newsprint,’ because of tariffs on Canadian newsprint threatens the future of member publishers of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) and could further isolate and disenfranchise African American businesses and communities in cities and towns across the United States.

“Import duties the U.S. Commerce Department is now applying to Canadian-made newsprint is already increasing costs enough to prompt layoffs and scaled-back news coverage by some of the nation’s major dailies and weekly publications. If these tariffs remain in place, scores of newspapers with smaller circulations, notably those that serve African American communities, could be forced to cease publishing a print edition or close altogether. . . .”

Family separation lawsuit offers chilling details (Credit: PBS “NewsHour”) (video)

Lice Story Tops Family-Separation Heartbreakers

“One of the children separated from his parents at the US-Mexico border was returned months later with lice, looking as if he hadn’t been bathed in weeks, and with irrevocable changes to his personality, his mother said, according to documents filed in a lawsuit against the Trump administration,” Jennie Neufeld reported Friday for vox.com.

“That detail comes from PBS’s Lisa Desjardins reporting for [PBS NewsHour]. The lawsuit, from 17 states and the District of Columbia, calls for an end to Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy and demands the administration reunite all families that were separated at the border. . . .”

Desjardins’ reporting was among an aggressive push by news outlets on the story of family separations.

“Two weeks after arriving in the US seeking asylum, E, 23, found herself in a detention cell in San Luis, Arizona, bleeding profusely and begging for help from staff at the facility,” Ema O’Connor and Nidhi Prakash reported Monday for BuzzFeed. “She was four months pregnant and felt like she was losing her baby. She had come to the US from El Salvador after finding out she was pregnant, in the hopes of raising her son in a safer home.

“ ‘An official arrived and they said it was not a hospital and they weren’t doctors. They wouldn’t look after me,’ she told BuzzFeed News, speaking by phone from another detention center, Otay Mesa in San Diego. ‘I realized I was losing my son. It was his life that I was bleeding out. I was staining everything. I spent about eight days just lying down. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do anything. I started crying and crying and crying.’

“Stuck in detention and having lost her baby, E says she wouldn’t have come to the US seeking a safer life if she’d known what would happen. . . . My soul aches that there are many pregnant women coming who could lose their babies like I did and that they will do nothing to help them,” she said.

“About a week after speaking with BuzzFeed News, E gave up her fight for asylum, accepted voluntary departure, and was deported back to El Salvador. . . .”

Mark L. Schneider, former director of the U.S. Peace Corps, wrote Friday in the Washington Post, “If you think the last few weeks of separating 2,300 children from their migrant parents along the southern border were heart-wrenching, imagine if 273,000 American-born children are separated from parents whose temporary protected status (TPS) is terminated.

“That is what could happen if the Trump administration’s decision to revoke TPS for Haitians, Salvadorans and Hondurans is allowed to take effect.

“Despite President Trump’s executive order reversing his policy of separating migrant families, most of those 2,300 children have not been returned to their parents. That is truly unconscionable.

“More than 100 times that number of children — all U.S. citizens — will be placed in similar jeopardy if the Department of Homeland Security begins programs to deport more than 58,000 Haitians on July 22, 2019, more than 262,000 Salvadorans on Sept. 9, 2019, and 86,000 Hondurans on Jan. 5, 2020. Parents will be faced with the decision of whether to take their children — most of whom speak mainly English and know only life in this country — back to countries deemed by the State Department as not safe for travel, some with the highest homicide rates in the hemisphere. . . .”

On Thursday, Neena Satija  reported for the Texas Tribune and Reveal of the Center for Investigative Reporting, “In the weeks since President Donald Trump’s now-rescinded family separation policy created chaos and confusion across the country, the messages from his administration and prominent Republican members of Congress have been clear: Seek asylum legally at official ports of entry and you won’t lose your kids.

“There may be armed Customs and Border Protection agents standing at the halfway points of bridges — but simply wait a few days, declare to them that you are seeking asylum, and you’ll get a fair shake.

“A recent Department of Homeland Security news release says it’s a ‘myth’ that the agency ‘separates families who entered at the ports of entry and who are seeking asylum — even though they have not broken the law.’ The release also says the agency ‘is [not] turning away asylum seekers at ports of entry.’

“But there’s ample evidence to suggest otherwise. Court records and individual cases discovered by The Texas Tribune indicate that a number of asylum seekers who came to international bridges in Texas and California were separated from their children anyway — or were not able to cross the bridge at all after encountering armed Customs and Border Protection agents on the bridge. And experts argue there’s no basis to the government’s claim that there aren’t enough resources to process asylum seekers. . . .”

Despite these stories, “It’s hard, . . . to escape the feeling that the spotlight has dimmed slightly on an ongoing human-rights crisis directly caused by the actions of the US government,” John Allsop wrote Monday for Columbia Journalism Review. “Much of this feeling isn’t to do with coverage of the border itself, but rather the tenor of what’s dislodged it from the top of the news cycle. Speaking with Brian Stelter on CNN’s Reliable Sources yesterday, Vox Editor-at-Large Ezra Klein, for example, complained that the media over-indulged repetitive attacks emanating from Trump’s rally in Montana last Thursday. ‘Whenever Donald Trump wants to change a subject, he just sets up a rally and goes and says a bunch of crazy stuff,’ Klein said. ‘What are we crowding out, when we let him decide what we cover?’ . . .”

Memphis police arrest Manuel Duran, the reporter for Spanish-language media during a Memphis protest last week. (Credit: Jim Weber/Commercial Appeal)
Memphis police arrest Manuel Duran during a Memphis protest in April. (Credit: Jim Weber/Commercial Appeal)

Journalist Links His Arrest by ICE to His Reporting

“What started out as a ‘just another day’ in Memphis-based journalist Manuel Duran’s life ended in his arrest by local police and transfer to Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” Rachel Frazin reported Monday for the Daily Beast.

“The arrest, Duran claims, was retaliation for his reporting about local police actions.

“Duran, 42, who is sometimes listed as Duran Ortega, was covering a Memphis protest in April when he was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and obstructing a highway or passageway.

In a video taken of the incident, Duran appears to be wearing a press badge and was not the only journalist in the street.

“After the charges were dropped, Duran was released from the Shelby County jail and ICE agents were there waiting to arrest him, the county sheriff’s spokesperson Earle Farrell said. A Memphis Police arrest report claimed that Duran’s refusal to get out of the road ’caused a hazard.’ It also mentioned that he did not have a U.S. identification.

“Duran believes his arrest wasn’t over a simple hazard, but that he was targeted for his coverage of the Memphis Police Department in Memphis Noticias, the online publication he founded. . . .”

TV Reporters Out After False Representations

Esmeralda Cisneros
Esmeralda Cisneros

Two reporters for KYMA-TV in Yuma, Ariz., are no longer with the station, the general manager told Journal-isms Monday, after being accused by U.S. Customs and Border Protection of posing as translators in order to enter a processing facility.

While General Manager Dave Miller messaged that “Per company policy, KYMA does not discuss specific personnel matters,” the subscription-only website NewsBlues noted Monday, “The website bio page has been scrubbed of any mention of Esmeralda Cisneros (top) and Fernanda Robles (lower).

“Cisneros has been a reporter with the station for the past two years. Robles is a three-year veteran who worked primarily with the Telemundo sister station in the market.”

Fernanda Robles
Fernanda Robles

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement June 26, “Yesterday, several journalists attempted to gain access to the Yuma Centralized Processing Center by representing themselves as translators during a previously-scheduled attorney-client privileged visitation. Two of them were identified as journalists and turned away at the door however, the third subject fraudulently gained access into the facility. . . .”

Two days later, the station apologized and said two of the journalists had been suspended.

“The employees did attempt to work through proper channels leading up to their arrival, but there is no excuse for them failing to be completely transparent once on site,” the station statement said.

Has Netflix Revealed Who Killed Tupac?

“A former gang member claims to know who really killed legendary hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur and has spelled it out in a Netflix documentary series,” Ryan Gaydos reported July 4 for Fox News.

‘

Tupac Shakur
Tupac Shakur

“Duane Keith Davis, a former member of the Los Angeles-based gang The Crips, said in an interview for ‘Unsolved, the Tupac and Biggie Murders’ that it was his nephew Orlando ‘Baby Lane’ Anderson who killed Tupac in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996.

“Tupac was shot four times and died six days later.

“Davis, aka ‘Keefe D,‘ spoke about the murder under immunity from the prosecution, according to The Daily Mail.

“Davis said that earlier on the day of the shooting, his nephew, also a Crips member, had tried to steal a Death Row Records medallion from a member of Tupac’s entourage who was reportedly affiliated with the rival gang Bloods. Tupac and his team allegedly beat up Anderson after the incident.

“Davis went on to say that later that night he, Anderson and two other people waited around for Tupac to leave a boxing match. . . .”

Citing the documentary, Mahsa Saeidi of Las Vegas station KTNV-TV reported July 3, updated Friday, that an arrest was imminent in the case. But Matt Miller reported Thursday for Esquire, ” Las Vegas police, however, say that the case remains an open homicide case.”

Separately, Nancy Dillon reported Thursday for the Daily News in New York, “Keffe D gave an on-camera confession to BET’s ‘Death Row Chronicles’ documentary series, released in February. “ ‘Going to keep it for the code of the streets. It just came from the backseat, bro,’ Keffe D said in the interview when asked the identity of the shooter. . . .”

Nevertheless, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement, ‘We are aware of the statements made in a BET interview regarding the Tupac case. As a result of those statements we have spent the last several months reviewing the case in its entirety.’ ”

Rafael Marques (Credit: International Press Institute)
Rafael Marques (Credit: International Press Institute)

2 Acquitted in ‘Huge Victory’ for Press Freedom

“A court in Luanda, Angola’s capital, today acquitted investigative journalist Rafael Marques and editor Mariano Bras on accusations of insulting the state, a huge victory for press freedom in a country where the media have often been targets of government repression,” Zenaida Machado reported Friday for Human Rights Watch.

“The two journalists were charged on June 21, 2017 with ‘outrage to a body of sovereignty and injury against public authority,’ under Angola’s Law on Crimes against State Security, after publishing an article about an alleged illegal land acquisition involving the attorney general, João Maria de Sousa.

“The article — first published on Marques’ website MakaAngola in November 2016 and re-published by O Crime, edited by Bras — alleged that de Sousa unlawfully acted as a property and real estate developer in addition to his official duties. It also suggested that former President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos supported the attorney general’s actions.

“State prosecutors argued that the journalists acted in bad faith and violated the ethical principles of journalism. But the judge disagreed.

“In reading the almost three-hour long verdict, judge Josina Ferreira Falcão highlighted the importance of public servants being exposed to criticism and scrutiny. ‘This court believes that we would be doing very bad as a society that wants to progress, if we punished the messengers of bad news,’ she said. . . .”

Short Takes

  • “Why are some events forgotten while others loom large in national memory? . . .” historian Amanda Bellows asked Sunday in the New York Times. ” [T]he fundamental story of the 14th Amendment, which extended citizenship to African-Americans, has been overlooked. One hundred and fifty years since the amendment’s ratification, that story is worth remembering. . . .” Bellows also wrote, “On July 9, 1868, the required majority of states ratified the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to anyone born in the country, including African-Americans. . . .”
  • Eight students from the communication/broadcast department of William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., “returned to Vieques, Puerto Rico, to follow up on the work they started in January to restore the small island’s radio station, WVQR 90.1 FM Radio Vieques, that was unusable after Hurricane Maria,” Radio Ink reported Friday. “During their June follow-up mission, WVQR and the University’s radio station — 88.7 WPSC-FM Brave New Radio — signed a memorandum of understanding, establishing an official sister-station relationship.” The station “will create original programming to be carried by both stations. The content will be designed for young bilingual audiences in Puerto Rico and the New York metro area. . . .” Video. More from university
  • Andrea Parquet-Taylor
    Andrea Parquet-Taylor

    “CBS has named Andrea Parquet-Taylor VP and station manager of its TV stations in the Dallas-Fort Worth market,” Jon Lafayette reported Monday for Broadcasting & Cable. She had been vice president and news director for the stations, KTVT-TV and KTXA-TV. “Before coming to CBS’s Dallas stations in 2017, Parquet-Taylor was news director at WNCN-TV, the CBS affiliate in Raleigh-Durham; WXYZ-TV in Detroit; WRAL-TV and WRAZ-TV in Raleigh-Durham and WMAR-TV in Baltimore.”

  • Queen Latifah plans to fund and produce two independent projects created by women, the actress and musician announced Friday at a private dinner during the 2018 Essence Festival in New Orleans, Selena Hill reported for the Shadow League. The festival “attracted more than [510,000] attendees to New Orleans this past weekend, making it one of the largest gatherings in the event’s 24-year history,” Melinda Morris reported Monday for NOLA.com | the Times-Picayune. “It comes close to the 20th anniversary Essence Festival in 2014, which holds the record with a reported 550,000 fans. . . .”
  • “For journalist Aaron Cantú, the inauguration is finally over,” the alternative Santa Fe (N.M.) Reporter reported Friday. “This afternoon, US Prosecutor Jessie K Liu dismissed all the charges against the SFR staff writer, along with the rest of the defendants whose federal criminal cases stemming from the January 2017 event were pending before the court. . . .” Cantú “was among the remaining 38 defendants accused of rioting that day, and who was pending trial in connection with those charges,” Lorenzo Zazueta-Castro reported Saturday for the Monitor in McAllen, Texas.
  • One day after ProPublica and PBS’ “Frontline” exposed aerospace engineer Michael Miselis as a member of a violent white supremacist group who was shown pushing an African American counter-protester to the pavement and punching him during last summer’s Charlotteville, Va., confrontations, Miselis has lost his job. Company spokesman Tim Paynter told ProPublica and “Frontline” that Miselis “is no longer an employee of Northrop Grumman,” the news organizations reported Friday. . . .”
  • Juliana Barbassa
    Juliana Barbassa

    “Juliana Barbassa, most recently the managing editor of Americas Quarterly, will help shape and edit our reporting on Latin America,” the New York Times announced Thursday. “Juliana will start with The Times on Aug. 1.  . . . She was named Emerging Journalist of the year in 2005 by the National Association of Hispanic [Journalists] and in 2004 received the John L. Dougherty Award from The Associated Press for outstanding work by a journalist 30 years old or younger. . . .”

  • “For the past decade, I have been working to educate our nation on the Doctrine of Discovery and the white supremacists’ influence it has on the foundations of our nation,” Mark Charles, the son of an American woman of Dutch heritage and a Navajo man, wrote for indianz.com on July 5. “This is especially evident in the Declaration of Independence, where, 30 lines below the inclusive and benevolent statement ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal’, that document refers to the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island as ‘merciless Indian savages.’ Demonstrating very clearly, that the only reason the founding fathers used the inclusive term ‘all men’ is because they had a very narrow definition of who was actually human. . . .”
  • “Ever heard of Blackdom in New Mexico? Dearfield in Colorado? What about DeWitty in Nebraska? Didn’t think so,” Richard Edwards wrote Thursday for the Washington Post. “Neither had I several years ago. But they were once vibrant African American homesteading communities. Today their buildings are falling to ruin, their locations are mostly unmarked, and the achievements of their pioneers are mostly forgotten. . . .” Edwards directs the Black Homesteaders in the Great Plains project at the University of Nebraska.
  • Phil Yu, editor and founder of the popular blog Angry Asian Man, Juan Felipe Herrera, 2015 U.S. poet laureate and novelist, and Helen Zia, journalist who has covered issues related to Asian Americans, American political movements and LGBTQ rights, are among the first honorees chosen for the Frederick Douglass 200, “a project to honor the impact of 200 living individuals who best embody the work and spirit” of the 19th century abolitionist and journalist. Kenneth Morris, Douglass’ great-great-great grandson, made the announcement Thursday in the Guardian. This year marks the 200th anniversary of Douglass’ birth.
  • “Weijia Jiang has been named a CBS News correspondent covering the White House, . . .” Lisa de Moraes reported Monday for Deadline Hollywood. “Jiang joined CBS News in 2015 as a correspondent for Newspath, the Network’s 24-hour television newsgathering service for CBS stations and broadcasters around the world. . . .”
  • O, the Oprah Magazine, Roll Call columnist Mary C. Curtis, “Under the Radar With Callie Crossley” at WGBH-FM in Boston, a radio commercial from the Chikasaw Nation and Al Jazeera documentaries on “National War in the Koreas” and “The Fight for Land” in Hawaii were among the winners in the annual Association for Women in Communications Clarion Award competition.
  • “Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace and Urban One founder Cathy Hughes will be honored by the Media Institute this fall (Oct. 24) at its annual Friends and Benefactors Awards banquet,” John Eggerton reported Monday for Broadcasting & Cable. “Wallace will be getting the Freedom of Speech Award, while Hughes will be honored with the American Horizon Award. The speech award is for advancing the First Amendment, which is essentially the institute’s charter, while the Horizon award is for visionary leadership. . . .”
  • Stephanie Mehta
    Stephanie Mehta

    Asked what it is like being a woman leading a business publication, Stephanie Mehta, named editor in chief of business and innovation glossy Fast Company in late February, told Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke of wwd.com on Monday, “I think in light of the bias and discrimination cases that we’ve seen in the news, the fact that so many more women feel they can step forward, the examples out there of the blatant discrimination against women because of gender, I think it’s emboldened a lot of female founders to say, ‘I’m not only happy to talk about gender, but I’m going to lead my conversation with gender.’ For me, there’s no question that being a woman of color, I really do strive to be as inclusive as I can in the way I try to interface with the team. My goal is to make sure that Fast Company feels inclusive. . . .”

  • “Jazmin Goodwin has been named recipient of the inaugural Ida B. Wells Society Scholarship, which will give her a full ride for the 2018-2019 M.A. in Journalism degree program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism . . . ,” Amy Dunkin wrote Monday for CUNY. “Earlier this year, the CUNY J-School decided to offer one full-tuition award per year to a member of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting. To help raise the funds, the school allowed donors at its 11th Annual Awards for Excellence in Journalism in April to earmark a portion of their pledge to the scholarship. . . .”
  • In Society for Features Journalism awards announced June 15, “Writer Cassandra Jaramillo captured first place in General Commentary for her essays on changing her name, holding Selena as a bicultural role model and watching the movie Coco with her parents,” the Dallas Morning News reported. The News won first place in Best Podcast for “My Aryan Princess.” First place in “diversity in digital features” went to Ann Maloney of NOLA.com | the Times-Picayune for “New Orleans-Area Muslims Invite Community to Share Nightly Ramadan Feast”; Laura Bauer of the Kansas City Star for “Secrecy Inside Child Welfare System Can Kill: ‘God Help the Children of Kansas’ ”; and Panama Jackson of the Root for “How Trump Ruined My Relationship With My White Mother.”
  • “Atlanta has also given rise to a new generation hoping to plant their feet firmly in the media scene,” Sierra Porter wrote Saturday for Rolling Out. Ravin Williams, a multimedia journalist; LaDarrius Heath, a part-time associate producer at WAGA-TV in Atlanta; Cecil Bjorn Hannibal III, president of the National Association of Black Journalists chapter at Georgia State University and an intern for WLKY-TV in Louisville, Ky.; and Tony Betton Jr., founder of the Rep Zone, his own media company.
  • “A judge in Myanmar ruled on Monday that two jailed Reuters reporters would face trial, a decision widely seen as a setback for free speech in a country led by the onetime democracy icon Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,” Mike Ives reported Monday for the New York Times. “The judge’s decision to charge the reporters with obtaining state secrets dashed any lingering hope that the reporters might be freed without having to go on trial. The reporters, U Wa Lone, 32, and U Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, face up to 14 years in prison under Myanmar’s colonial-era Official Secrets Act, and their case had been in a pretrial phase since their arrest in December. . . “
  • In Nicaragua, “Radio Darío workers are, understandably, spooked,” John Otis reported Monday for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “About a dozen of them were caught inside the station’s original headquarters on April 20 when it was set on fire by a pro-government mob. They escaped, but the building was destroyed, a security guard was hospitalized with burns, and two of the arsonists died in the flames, according to news reports. . . . The attack was part of a wave of violence against Nicaragua’s independent media as they cover a three-month-old uprising against President Daniel Ortega. . . .”
  • “A new video emerged Friday of kidnapped Japanese journalist Jumpei Yasuda, who was abducted by an armed group in Syria just over three years ago while reporting on the country’s bloody civil war,” Jesse Johnson reported Friday for Japan Times. “In the video, dated Oct. 17, 2017, Yasuda, 44, says in English that he is ‘fine’ and adds that he hopes his family is doing well and wishes to see them soon. . . .”
  • In Tanzania, regulations that require “traditional media websites, online TV and radio channels, but also individual bloggers and podcasters — to pay roughly two million Tanzanian shillings (930 US dollars) in registration and licensing fees . . . are already forcing young content creators — and often poorer ones — offline,” Shayera Dark reported Friday for the Verge. “For a country like Tanzania, whose GDP per capita is 879 US dollars — and where approximately 70 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day — the financial burden of these new laws threatens to widen the internet-access gap.. . .”
  • In Japan, “A recent study of implicit bias by Matsumoto University psychologist Kazuo Mori notes that Japanese have an implicit bias against blacks, concluding that ‘Japanese participants showed an implicit preference for “white people” over “black people,” John G. Russell reported June 3 for Japan Times. “Mori suggests that this bias may be the product of the ‘media in which whites are used “for delivering a good message.” ‘ “

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