By Davey D
Special to the Mercury News
In the aftermath of the Don Imus controversy, hip-hop remains at center stage, as everyone from Oprah to local church groups holds town hall meetings, round-table discussions and seminars on why and how hip-hop should be cleaned up.
I have been part of the discussion on radio shows from here to Chicago and New York. It is clear that significant numbers of people are tired of song after song with misogynistic, violent and materialistic themes. And, as I noted in my April 12 column, the majority of hip-hoppers also are tired of these themes. Many have been protesting and working diligently for change.
One discussion topic has been a call for personal responsibility. I've heard everyone from Al Sharpton to women at Atlanta's Spelman College, where a protest against degrading hip-hop themes demanded that Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Nelly and other artists behave more responsibly.
And, yes, ideally these men should regret the hurt and angst their lyrics cause. But sadly, their ideas of responsibility are not always the same as ours. Having met and interviewed many of them, I know they often equate "being responsible" with "being true to their artistic vision" and with making money to care for their families and loved ones. For some artists, delivering a shock to the senses of the audience is the whole point.
Complicating the issue are the millions of corporate dollars pumped into marketing some of the offensive songs and
artists. While I agree that artists should be responsible for what they say, I also believe music industry executives need to be held accountable for what they promote and play. There are dozens of Snoop Dogg wannabes in every community. There's only one Sumner Redstone, whose Viacom is home to VH1, MTV and BET, which reach millions of people daily.
When Nelly was shown in his "Tip Drill" video on BET swiping a card between the buttocks of a woman, we must remember that occurred on Redstone's watch. It was his executive team, which includes BET president Debra Lee and vice president Stephen Hill, who allowed those images to go on the airwaves.
Ironically, this is the same Redstone who has censored words or images of then-popular performers such as Public Enemy, Brand Nubian and Paris when they made statements about police brutality or racism. This is the same Redstone whose company censored Kanye West for rapping about how white men profit from black pathologies in "All Falls Down." But Redstone is just the tip of the iceberg.
Def Jam Records founder Russell Simmons, who recently reversed an earlier stand by calling for a ban on words such as "bitch" and "ho" in rap songs, told viewers of the Oprah show that artists should be allowed to say whatever is on their hearts and minds, but that radio should not play their excesses on the airwaves.
It's interesting that hardly any of hip-hop's harshest critics, including Bill O'Reilly, seem eager to blame radio executives such as Lowry Mays and Mark P. Mays of Clear Channel; or Jeffrey H. Smulyan and Rick Cummings of Emmis Broadcasting; or Dan Mason and Richard Lobel at CBS Radio; or Robert F. Neil and Marc W. Morgan of Cox Radio; or Cathy Hughes and Alfred C. Liggins at Radio One, to name a few.
But shouldn't we be holding their feet to the fire, and asking why they play salacious material with little or no balance? Instead of the O'Reilly types asking Ludacris about a song where he brags about having "hos in different area codes," shouldn't they be asking Cathy Hughes or Jeff Smulyan why their stations kept playing it?
I recall an incident that showed just how far removed from reality some of these executives were. Several years ago, comedian Steve Harvey started working for Radio One, the largest black-owned radio network. On a panel, he spoke about leading a listener mutiny of sorts against his bosses, who had refused to play artists such as Jill Scott, Erykah Badu and India.Irie. Harvey found their music uplifting, and argued it gave some balance to the playlist. But his bosses told him black women didn't want to hear that sort of stuff and refused to play it. Harvey appealed to listeners, asking them to call in and protest. It was a bold move that would have resulted in the immediate dismissal of any other DJ, but Harvey was the talk of the town then, just too popular to fire.
In a recent letter to U.S. senators, Lisa Fager, president and co-founder of the media-watch group Industry Ears, posed this question: If NBC were to show a porn movie at 5 p.m., would you call porn star Jenna Jameson or NBC President and CEO Jeff Zucker on the carpet?
Misogyny and violence are persistent problems that need to be addressed wherever they occur, including hip-hop. But we have to be diligent about cleaning up this mess at all levels, including the corporate boardroom as well as the studio.
By Vanessa Hua, Chronicle Staff Writer
SAN FRANCISCO -- CBS Radio suspended two New York City radio hosts on Monday for their prank phone call to a Chinese restaurant that Asian American advocacy groups across the country decried as racist, sexist and vulgar.
"In my 20 years of civil rights work, I have rarely seen something as serious as this," said Frank Lee, president of the Organization for Justice and Equality, a Bay Area advocacy group that expressed outrage, along with the Organization of Chinese Americans in Washington, D.C., Bay Area politicians and others.
Jeff Vandergrift and Dan Lay of WFNY-FM, who go by the monikers "JV" and "Elvis" on their show The Dog House, placed a six-minute call Friday to a Chinese restaurant requesting "flied lice" and using sexually explicit language to proposition the waitress.
The station suspended the pair without pay and until further notice.
Vandergrift and Lay performed in the same show format on Bay Area radio stations starting in the early 1990s. In 2005, Clear Channel Communications fired the duo from Wild 94.9 after they made offensive remarks after an appearance by a local drum and bugle corps.
They filled in at KIFR, an FM station in San Francisco, before moving to New York.
Their suspension follows the firing of New York radio host Don Imus in mid-April after he made racist and sexist comments about Rutgers University's women's basketball team on his news and talk show.
L.A. Times Editorial
By Jeff Chang and Dave Zirin
MUCH OF THE criticism of commercial rap music - that it's homophobic and
sexist and celebrates violence - is well-founded. But most of the carping
we've heard against hip-hop in the wake of the Don Imus affair is more
scapegoating than serious.
Who is being challenged here? It's not the media oligarchs, which twist an
art form into an orgy of materialism, violence and misogyny by spending
millions to sign a few artists willing to spout cartoon violence on
command. Rather, it's a small number of black artists - Snoop Dogg,
Ludacris and 50 Cent, to name some - who are paid large amounts to
perpetuate some of America's oldest racial and sexual stereotypes.
But none of the critics who accuse hip-hop of single-handedly coarsening
the culture think to speak with members of the hip-hop generation, who are
supposedly both targets and victims of the rap culture. They might be
surprised at what this generation is saying.
In his recent PBS documentary "Beyond Beats and Rhymes," filmmaker Byron
Hurt made clear that rap music can be as sexist and homophobic as it can be
positive and enlightening. Marginalized young women and men have found
their voices in hip-hop arts, gathering to share culture at b-girl
conventions around the world or reading for each other in after-school
poetry classes. Hurt's film pointed the finger where it needs to be pointed
- at American popular culture, which has trafficked in racist and sexist
images and language for centuries and provides all sorts of incentives for
young men of color to act out a hard-core masculinity.
If all the overnight anti-hip-hop crusaders really cared about the
generation they want to save, they would support the growing Media Justice
movement led by hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa and such outspoken women
activists as Malkia Cyril and Rosa Clemente. The group contends that such
media powers as Emmis Communications and Clear Channel have corrupted
hip-hop radio.
The critics would engage young public intellectuals like Joan Morgan ("When
Chickenheads Come Home to Roost"), Gwendolyn D. Pough ("Check It While I
Wreck It") and Mark Anthony Neal ("That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies
Reader"), who are defining what they call a new hip-hop feminism.
The gap between the programming on Viacom's MTV and BET and young people's
interests seems never to have been bigger. According to the Black Youth
Project, a University of Chicago study released in January, the
overwhelming majority of young people, especially blacks, believe rap
videos portray black women negatively. That's one reason rap music sales
declined 20% last year and remain down 16% this year.
Yet sales are a poor indicator of what is really happening in hip-hop.
Local hip-hop scenes are thriving. Great art is being made not just in
music but in visual arts, film, theater, dance and poetry. It can be seen
in the works of Sarah Jones, Nadine Robinson, Rennie Harris, Kehinde Wiley
and Danny Hoch. Hip-hop studies is a rapidly growing and popular field at
colleges and universities, with more than 300 classes offered. In hip-hop
after-school programs, voter registration groups, feminist gatherings and
public forums, the future of hip-hop is under discussion. These hip-hop
thinkers want to take the culture that unites many young people and channel
it toward political engagement. In 2004, voter registration campaigns using
hip-hop to target youth produced more than 2 million new voters under the
age of 30.
To confuse commercial rap made by a few artists with how hip-hop is
actually lived by millions is to miss the good that hip-hop does. If
hip-hop's critics paid attention to the hip-hop generation, they would
learn that the discussion has already begun without them and that they
might need to listen. Then a real intergenerational conversation could
begin.
JEFF CHANG is the editor of "Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of
Hip-Hop." DAVE ZIRIN is the author of the forthcoming "Welcome to the
Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports." Contact Zirin at
edgeofsports@gmail.com
The Debate In Hollywood And on the Hill
John Eggerton, Broadcasting and Cable
The Columbine murders ultimately led to a push by legislators to crack down on media violence. The killings at Virginia Tech are expected to put an exclamation point on a renewed call for action on the issue.
The timing of the events places it front and center in the minds of legislators for more reasons than just pure tragedy. The shooting came only days after a Federal Trade Commission report on marketing of violent content to children, days after the powerful chairman of the Senate Energy & Commerce Committee, Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), claimed that thousands of people are being murdered as the result of violent TV, and mere hours before a media-violence summit was convened in Indianapolis by the National League of Cities—"on the heels of the tragedy at Virginia Tech," as the conference organizers put it.
And a two-year–delayed FCC report on TV violence is daily rumored to be ready to send over to the Hill. (It had not been released at press time.)
Although FCC Commissioner Michael Copps and his ally on the TV-violence issue, Tim Winter of the Parents Television Council, didn't tie the tragedy to TV, both suggested it was a discussion for another day.
It is hard to judge the ultimate effect that the tragedy will have beyond the brick walls of the Virginia Tech campus. But here's an easier call: It will continue to be an agenda-based rallying point for everyone from legislators to candidates to lobbying groups.
The shootings are likely to add fuel to Sen. Jay Rockefeller's (D-W.Va.) effort to give the FCC power to regulate media violence, a power the FCC is expected to say it is ready to use. He is preparing to reintroduce a bill to that effect, perhaps two or three weeks after the FCC report is released. "Once we see the report and get a chance to digest it," says a top Rockefeller aide, Steve Broderick. "We'll look at our legislation and go from there."
Media-content critic Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) didn't make explicit connections between the Virginia Tech shootings and the media but did say, "It is my hope that we'll be able to develop policy proposals to address this situation to see that it never happens again in America." Perhaps those proposals will form a platform in his 2008 presidential run.
Even if there is ultimately more light than heat given the difficulties of defining violence—Rockefeller's bill was introduced in the previous Congress to no avail—media companies may not wait to find out. In the wake of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident, broadcast networks made very public moves to self-regulate after legislators first complained and then brought executives to the Hill to read them the riot act.
Hollywood appears unlikely to stand still for any attempts by Washington to link it to the Virginia Tech massacre.
"I think, for the most part, filmed entertainment mirrors society. It doesn't move society that much," says producer Gavin Polone (Curb Your Enthusiasm). "This is not an entertainment-industry issue. It is a civil rights issue about mental illness, a court system that has gone overboard, and universities under such pressure not to be sued that they don't take the necessary steps to save peoples' lives."
Reports that killer Cho Seung-Hui may have watched South Korean revenge film Oldboy several times in preparation for the massacre could, however, put the issue on the front burner. While none of Cho's written or video material reference the film, photos he included in his package to NBC mimicked poses from it.
Networks were reluctant to address what, if any, impact the shootings could have on programming, but some short-term reaction may be inevitable. Following Columbine, Columbia Pictures put a 12-month ban on the waving of guns in the air in print advertising for movies.
While TV executives remained silent, one group, the Washington-based Asian American Justice Center (AAJC), which bills itself as a national civil- and human-rights organization, was on heightened alert after the killer was identified as a native of South Korea.
"Asian men particularly are being shown as killing machines," said a concerned AAJC Executive Director Karen K. Narasaki.
The group plans to address the violent portrayal of Asians on TV during regularly scheduled network diversity meetings in June. Its immediate attention has been focused on changing the tone of media reports that referred to the 23-year-old shooter as a "resident alien," even though he had been living in the U.S. since he was 8.
"There is a lot of concern about what kind of stereotype this will feed into," Narasaki said.
Indeed, applying an oversimplified standard to anything is a too-convenient, short-sighted practice. It's a concept that parties on all sides of the media-violence issue may find themselves grappling with in the months to come.
Ken Burns Agrees To Expand Documentary;
Inclusion of Minority WWII Service Members Follows Latino Protests
By Paul Farhi, Washington Post Staff Writer
[Note: Burns has clarified he will not "re-cut" the documentary but will somehow add content "seamlessly" to include the voices of Latinos in the broadcast.]
Filmmaker Ken Burns agreed yesterday to re-cut his PBS documentary on World War II to include footage about the contributions of Latino and American Indian service members -- and not to present the material apart from his 14 1/2 -hour series.
Burns's pledge to integrate an unspecified amount of footage into "The War" was made yesterday at a meeting in Washington with representatives of several organizations that have protested the film, which is scheduled to air in September. They contend that the series underplays the role of Latinos and American Indians in the war effort.
This is the first time that Burns -- who produced such PBS documentaries as "Baseball," "Jazz" and the monumental "Civil War" -- has agreed to alter one of his films as a result of public pressure.
The organizations -- including the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Council of La Raza -- were not mollified by PBS's pledge last week that Burns would add material. PBS had declared that the film already was complete.
PBS's statement last week raised concerns that new material would appear "as an add-on before a break," said Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a University of Texas journalism professor who earlier this year helped rally a coalition of groups.
"We didn't want it to be an afterthought," said Rivas-Rodriguez, who directs the university's U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project.
"When he started he had one idea, but he's been questioned about it and made to realize that doing it between breaks was not really going to cut it."
During yesterday's afternoon meeting, Burns told members of the coalition that wartime contributions of Latinos and American Indians would be incorporated into the film, including the DVD version, and in teaching materials that will accompany it.
At an earlier meeting yesterday with Latino leaders and members of Congress, Burns and PBS President Paula Kerger introduced Austin documentarian Hector Galan, who will work with Burns to produce additional footage. Galan has produced several documentaries, including "Chicano! History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement" in 1996 for PBS.
Galan offered few specifics on what might be added, but his hiring was a welcome step, said Ivan Roman, the executive director of the Hispanic journalists' association. "He's very well-respected," Roman said. "Whatever it's going to be, it's not going to be a patch or something just slapped together."
Roman called the meeting "a good-faith effort." Still, he cautioned that "the proof will be in the pudding."
Although "The War" isn't scheduled to air till the fall, the deadline for the DVD version is mid-June, giving Burns and Galan limited time to interview, shoot, write and reedit the documentary.
Burns and his crew spoke with more than 500 people for the project, but apparently no Latino or Native American veterans were interviewed. The narrative is weaved around the wartime experiences of people in four towns: Sacramento; Waterbury, Conn.; Mobile, Ala.; and Luverne, Minn.
Burns was not available for comment yesterday. PBS spokeswoman Lea Sloan, who attended the private meetings, said Burns's statements yesterday should clear up any confusion about how the new material would be used.
Sloan said the decision to change the film was based on a number of conversations with the various groups. "We listened," she said. "It's a judgment call. We judge [complaints] on the merits and decide."
Last week, PBS programming chief John Wilson said that Burns's film was complete and that new material would be placed within the documentary's "footprint" -- raising concerns among some advocates.
Sloan said new material would be "seamlessly" integrated into the film. "We hope this clarifies the situation," she said.
In a separate action, Burns and PBS agreed yesterday to help the Library of Congress collect oral histories of the war for the library's Veterans History Project. Since its inception in 2000, the project has collected interviews with about 45,000 veterans. Burns will contribute a "field guide" to the project, providing advice to amateur interviewers on lighting, interviewing and videotaping.
By Philip J. Trounstine
Posted at at GradetheNews.org
[FYI, April 30th is the trial date for Media Alliance's court case with the SF Bay Guardian and Clint Reilly to block the MediaNews merger described here...stay tuned.]
The core counties of the San Francisco Bay Area -- Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara and the contiguous portion of Solano County – have a population of about six million people. In addition to their seven county governments, they include scores of cities, towns, sheriff’s and police departments; school boards, planning commissions, municipal and superior courts; universities and community colleges; water, solid waste and air boards; transportation commissions and public utility, weed-abatement and mosquito control boards, and many more government bodies.
In this region, one newspaper company -- MediaNews -- owns or controls every paid-subscription daily newspaper except for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Should the San Francisco Chronicle become a part or party to this news consortium, coverage of virtually every level of government, education, sports, criminal justice, arts and business would be in the hands of one organization with a single set of principles, perspectives and purposes.
This is the situation one expects in a totalitarian regime, not in pluralistic America. It poses the frightening notion that the commonly accepted narrative of public life is written by one subjective – and often interested -- perspective.
Even without the Chronicle, the unprecedented Bay Area concentration of ownership under MediaNews and its partners has had a deleterious effect on news coverage.
The media outlets already under one ownership include the Alameda Times-Star, Fremont Argus, Hayward Daily Review, Marin Independent Journal, Milpitas Post, Oakland Tribune, Pacifica Tribune, Palo Alto Daily News, Vacaville Reporter, San Mateo County Times, Vallejo Times-Herald, Tri-Valley Herald in Pleasanton, Contra Costa Times and the San Jose Mercury News, not to mention myriad other free weeklies and the Monterey County Herald and Santa Cruz Sentinel, just outside of the Bay Area..
This has led to the diminution of competition and diversity in the coverage of the news. In reporting on politics, sports, the arts, business and much more, MediaNews has demonstrated it believes there is no reason – given joint ownership and the demands of economic efficiency – for more than one outlet to spend resources covering any major story that cuts across regional lines.
What is lost by this singular approach to news coverage is the plurality of perspectives, viewpoints and backgrounds from which citizens would otherwise have an opportunity to discover what is and what is not true.
Why should each of the major dailies, for example, send a reporter to San Francisco Giants games, a speech by Gov. Schwarzenegger at Stanford, the opening of a new exhibit at the de Young Museum or a major product announcement by Intel or Apple when each newspaper can share a report written by one writer from any one of the news outlets?
What is lost by this singular approach to news coverage is the plurality of perspectives, viewpoints and backgrounds from which citizens would otherwise have an opportunity to discover what is and what is not true.
News professionals long ago abandoned the conceit of pure objectivity. It is widely admitted to be both philosophically and practically impossible. As Walter Lippmann wrote in Public Opinion 75 years ago:
“A report is the joint product of the knower and the known, in which the role of the observer is always selective and usually creative. The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.”
Instead, news professionals have sought to eliminate bias by being thorough, fair and even-handed; by doing their best to adopt a civic perspective; by avoiding loaded language, and by recognizing that a variety of professionals will bring to each story their individual perspective that – in the aggregate – will render something akin to the truth.
But this reliance on multiple viewpoints breaks down when only one news organization commits the resources to report on significant events. When that occurs, every report is filtered through the lens of just one world view, which – as neutral as it may be – can never be wholly objective or free of individual perspective.
Ironically, as alternative sources of information have grown by leaps and bounds – with myriad Internet blogs, cable news, podcasting and other new platforms – the problem of concentrated ownership of traditional news outlets has become even more acute.
That is because the alternate forms of news information are, almost exclusively, news aggregators, not news gatherers. They rely, with few exceptions, on the reporting done by the traditional news organizations funded, by and large, by newspapers.
There are, indeed, ever more places and avenues where individual citizens may read the news. But there are fewer and fewer reporters writing original news reports because newspapers and news conglomerates are cutting back on resources and seeking efficiencies – sending only one reporter to cover an event that, in the past, might have been covered by two or three or four reporters.
As the Project for Excellence in Journalism 2007 report put it:
“There is more evidence now that new technology companies have had either limited success in news gathering (Yahoo, AOL), or have avoided it altogether (Google). Whoever owns them, old newsrooms now seem more likely than a few years ago to be the foundations for the newsrooms of the future.”
But, as newspapers retrench, combine and consolidate, the report went on:
“The outline of what readers might be losing in coverage is still emerging. For now, metro [dailies] have pulled way back from coverage of more remote areas. Unglamorous watchdog coverage of council and school board meetings appears to be suffering. Copy editing is being reduced. Already in 2007, several papers have collapsed business news and metro into a single department.”
Consider one potential example. The San Francisco 49ers are considering moving to Santa Clara, which is working on plans for a new stadium. Many San Franciscans, including U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, are acutely opposed to the 49ers moving to Santa Clara County. The San Francisco Chronicle is loath to see its hometown professional football team move into the home territory of the San Jose Mercury News, which covets the team.
Should the Chronicle and Mercury News become part of the same news operation, coverage of this issue would almost certainly be written from one perspective – from the perspective of San Francisco or San Jose/Santa Clara. What one community might consider an investigative report, the other might consider a hatchet job. Who is the honest watchdog of the public’s interest? Who is under pressure to expose upsides and/or downsides to the move? And from whose perspective?
Political coverage is another area where the singular approach to the news would have a harmful impact on the public interest. No area of news reporting is more prone to a priori bias than political coverage. Deciding what to emphasize, what tone to employ, which facts to report and which facts to ignore – all of these decisions and more are part of the process of covering a political story. That is why the public interest is best served by having reports from a variety of writers from various backgrounds and geographic and cultural perspectives.
If the San Francisco Chronicle and MediaNews are allowed to form a partnership, it is a near certainty that coverage of political news in Sacramento, for example, will be consolidated under one news operation, which will feed stories to all of the conglomerate’s outlets. The same will be true for campaign coverage. One reporter, not several, will cover presidential candidates when they make appearances in the Bay Area. Whether that reporter is versed in the software piracy issues facing Silicon Valley, the inner-city poverty and homelessness of Oakland or San Francisco or suburban environmentalism in Contra Costa County and Marin will help shape his or her news report.
Whether or not the most important issue to discuss with former Sen. John Edwards when he appears in San Francisco is his wife’s recurring cancer, if the singular reporter assigned to the story decides that’s the issue, then that’s all the public will know about. Edwards may have something to say about the environment, poverty and the war in Iraq, but his thoughts may never be covered in a story from a reporter who is focused on Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer.
In actual practice, MediaNews now assigns just one reporter routinely to stories such as the Field Poll or polling released by the Survey and Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University. Instead of fielding calls from the Oakland Tribune, the Contra Costa Times and the San Jose Mercury News, pollsters at these institutions now receive just one call from the MediaNews reporter assigned to the story for publication in all the MediaNews outlets that decide to carry the story.
Newspaper groups assign only one reporter to cover regional stories for all their outlets because in the face of declining circulation and classified advertising revenues (lost to online outlets such as CraigsList), their only hope for survival is to increase their penetration of the local market. An increase in circulation locally can help drive up display advertising rates and income.
That means refocusing resources on local stories at the expense of regional, statewide, national and international reporting. If one reporter can file a story on an event or issue for all the newspapers in the media conglomerate, and if quality of the coverage is not a concern, then it makes no pure economic sense for several newspapers to assign reporters to the same event or issue. The bottom line is served at the expense of the public’s opportunity for a variety of perspectives on that event or issue.
The tragedy for the public interest is that instead of reallocating resources to increased local coverage, newspapers across the country and throughout the region are instead using the economic gains made from consolidation for short-term gains in profitability.
With no meaningful daily competition on significant regional and statewide stories, there is no pressure on news operations to intensify coverage of any issue or event. Just the opposite in fact: consolidation ushers in the decline in the range and depth of information that citizens need to make intelligent civic decisions.
________________________
Philip J. Trounstine is founder and director of the Survey and Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University. He is the former political editor of the San Jose Mercury News and former communications director for Gov. Gray Davis of California. He wrote this paper as a consultant to the plaintiff in the U.S. District Court case of Clinton Reilly vs. MediaNews Group Inc. et. al.
By Jeff Perlstein, Media Alliance
Often when I've asked our e-list members to take action to address racist/sexist/homophobic hate speech on our publicly-owned airwaves, a number of people write in suggesting that I'm advocating censorship and impinging on the freedom of speech of the "target" of the action.
The Imus controversy has stirred this pot once again.
What are your thoughts on what should be done moving forward?
Please use the comment function below to share your thoughts. To keep the discussion flowing, I've excerpted comments from two prominent media policy scholars, who for the record, are both white men: Bob McChesney, founder of Free Press and Mark Cooper, at Consumer Federation of America.
McChesney: "Imus still is a free person. He can start a blog or, in all likelihood, find another media company willing to employ him. He has as many free speech rights as you or me. If someone suggests the government should remove his free speech rights, I will be the first to defend him.
But that does not mean Imus has a First Amendment right to a national radio or TV program, any more than you and I have a right to demand we get a national program on a TV network or radio network. When it comes to freedom of the press, the right and responsibility for what is produced, published and broadcast rests with the institution. MSNBC and CBS hold that First Amendment privilege, for the most part. The government cannot and should not force MSNBC or CBS to hire or fire a specific person. And if you feel strongly that MSNBC and CBS should retain Imus, or hire someone else to provide his style of humor, you should tell them."
Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation of America:
"As a practical matter, Don Imus had a privileged position in America. He had a citizen’s right to speak on a soap box in central park or a blog on the Internet, as we all do. He also had a government-issued-licensed right to broadcast his views (at least the holders of broadcast licenses chose to give him that opportunity).
As a factual matter, the Supreme Court has long accepted the proposition that when broadcast licenses are issued, the speech rights that go along with them are abridged. The effectiveness of this abridgement in promoting democratic discourse has been questionable in the past, but if there is one thing a license should not be used for, it is hate speech.
In the long run, we would hope that structural reform of the media and the growth of alternatives will diminish the power and influence of these licenses, but until they do, we do have to confront the abuse of this power.
Even if one has trepidation about censoring hate speech on governmentally licensed broadcasts through government action, it is odd to suggest that civil action (organizing an advertiser boycott) is an illegitimate response to the airing of hate speech.
Are we to have no means of protecting ourselves against the abuse of power?
More importantly, even if we had the media system we need and want, civil action to influence its content will remain legitimate."
What do you think? Add your comments below:
By FAIR - Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
'Rallying Around Their Racist Friend"
4/11/07
In the aftermath of the racial outburst that got talkshow host Don Imus dropped from MSNBC--referring to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos"-- a Washington Post editorial (4/10/07) posed a question many critics have been asking for years: How do prestigious journalists defend their cozy relationship with a well-known bigot?
As the Post put it: "But those who bask in the glow of his radio show ought to consider whether they should continue doing so. After all, you're judged by the company you keep." Since discovering Imus' long record of bigotry, misogyny and homophobia is not difficult (Slate, 4/10/07), it's a question reporters should have been asking long ago—FAIR posed the very same question to NBC's Tim Russert six years ago, for example (Action Alert, 3/1/00).
When journalist Phil Nobile (TomPaine.com, 6/28/01) presented many top pundits with evidence of Imus' bigotry, few (of the white ones, anyway) seemed to think what Imus was saying should affect their decisions to appear on his program. Nobile noted that Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz wrote in his 1996 book Hot Air that "Imus's sexist, homophobic and politically incorrect routines echo what many journalists joke about in private."
Really? Do Washington journalists really call people "thieving Jews"--and then make mock apologies, saying that the phrase is "redundant" (Imus in the Morning, 12/15/04)? Did they really call Clinton's attorney general "old Bigfoot shaky Janet Reno," taunting her for her Parkinson's disease (Imus in the Morning, 6/12/01)? Do they really laugh uproariously at the news of hundreds of Haitians drowning (Imus in the Morning, 3/20-24/00)? If so, Kurtz has been sitting on a great many scoops.
Whatever their private conversations, many pundits are now being forced to answer questions about their associations with Imus, and those answers are worth documenting. Appearing on the Imus in the Morning show on April 9, Newsweek's Howard Fineman explained:
You know, it's a different time, Imus. You know, it's different than it was even a few years ago, politically.... And some of the stuff that you used to do, you probably can't do anymore.... You just can't. Because the times have changed. I mean, just looking specifically at the African-American situation. I mean, hello, Barack Obama's got twice the number of contributors as anybody else in the race.... I mean, you know, things have changed. And the kind of—some of the kind of humor that you used to do you can't do anymore. And that's just the way it is.
Fineman's suggestion, clearly, is that Imus' brand of racism was acceptable not too long ago— at least before Barack Obama was able to raise significant campaign donations.
On PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer (4/9/07), Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant rejected the notion that appearing with Imus gave some form of cover to his bigotry:
I don't consider myself an enabler. But I recognize--and one reason I feel that it's possible to be this tough on him is that I think he understands that those of us from politics and public affairs and whatever who work with him are going to be seen as enabling. And if that's the case, then his conduct is of interest to me as much as it is to you.
Those words stand in contrast with what Oliphant said on Imus' show that very morning:
The train went off the tracks, which, you know, can happen to anybody. And, of course, what counts when the train goes off the tracks is what you then do.... Those of us... who know better, have a moral obligation to stand up and say to you, "Solidarity forever, pal."
That's not enabling?
Other media defenders point out that Imus does charity work, as if this gives him more room to be a racist. As USA Today's Peter Johnson noted (4/10/07), "His politically incorrect satire has been tempered by an intellectual and considerate side: He runs a camp for sick kids, cares about politics and has an eye for books that can catapult them onto the best-seller list." (As the Wall Street Journal has pointed out—3/24/05—Imus' ranch spends $3,000 a night to host each child; other organizations that do similar work spend about one-tenth as much.)
Appearing on the CBS Early Show (4/10/07), CNN host Lou Dobbs said much the same. While calling Imus' remarks "inexcusable," Dobbs went to offer what sounded very much like an excuse:
These calls for his resignation, frankly, in my opinion, this is a man you have to take into account. He does more public service, works with kids, he is an absolutely exemplary person in terms of his humanitarianism. And those who suggest you can't take into account the broader man for these, as I say, ignorant and inexcusable remarks, I don't think is adequate.
NBC reporter David Gregory (MSNBC, 4/9/07) stressed that "Imus is a good man," and that "this is a difficult time, not just because of the hurt that he has inflicted and what he said, as he tries to deal with it, but for all of us who are on the program and certainly don't want to be associated with this kind of thing that he's done, as all of this plays out." Gregory apparently wasn't so bothered with his association with Imus before this latest controversy.
Others made it seem as if deciding not to appear on the Imus show would be a problem. Newsweek editor Evan Thomas told the New York Times (4/9/07), "He should not have said what he said, obviously. I am going on the show, though. I think if I didn't, it would be posturing." To which the Charlotte Observer editorialized (4/10/07), "Which raises this question for Mr. Thomas: What posture would that be--upright?"
In a Los Angeles Times report (4/11/07), some Imus guests appeared to have second thoughts about their silence. CBS reporter Jeff Greenfield said, "That's something people like me should have challenged him on." (Greenfield, to his partial credit, did try to raise the issue when he interviewed Imus on Larry King Live--2/24/00.)
Others, meanwhile, seem to think Imus really means it when he says he's sorry. CBS host Bob Schieffer condemned Imus' remarks, but "said he would probably go on Imus' show again, noting that they had been friends for 15 years." The Times quoted Schieffer: "There's probably a good lesson for all of us in this. We all need to refocus and be sensitive to these things. Maybe sometimes he's gone too far and some of us really haven't been paying attention." Newsweek editor Jon Meacham (Washington Post, 4/11/07) said: "We don't want to rush to judgment.... Imus appears genuine about changing the tone, but if there's any backsliding, then it's over as far as we're concerned."
Pundits making such assessments might consider that this was not the first time Imus has appeared to sound contrite about his words, so it's hard to know why to believe him this time around. In a recent Vanity Fair profile (2/06), Imus said: "I regret the times I've been mean to people.… It's fine to pick on people who can defend themselves and deserve it. Some people don't deserve to be picked on who I picked on, so I don't do it anymore."
He made a similar pledge on his show years earlier (3/4/00):
"There's no reason to hurt people's feelings. In some cases I have, and I'm not going to do it anymore. I get accused of being a racist all the time, but I'm not. I realize that we do things here that are misconstrued and frankly I regret it. People have criticized me and they're right."
Given Imus' repeatedly violated vows to rein in his racist schtick, one has to look to his pundit friends—his enablers—to show more resolve. Unfortunately, given their co-dependent relationship with the talk host, such resolve is unlikely. As Newsweek's Fineman put it (Imus in the Morning, 4/9/07): "You know, all of us who do your show, you know, we're part of the gang. And we rely on you the way you rely on us."
From DemocracyNow.org transcript
April 4th, 2007
Below is an excerpt from the interview with Bay Area journalist Josh Wolf following his release from federal prison after 226 days, which made him the longest jailed U.S. journalist in history for refusing to reveal his sources.
AMY GOODMAN: And just to explain, you were protected by the California journalist shield law, but we don't have a federal journalist shield law. And because -- at least the argument the US attorney used, because there was some money that went into the buying of the police car that they say there was an alleged arson against, then that put you in a different category?
JOSH WOLF: Right, it's not exactly that it put me in a different category. That's what allowed the federal government to get involved, because the 14th Amendment says that there are certain things that are the state's matter of order, and there are certain things that are within federal limits. And this shouldn’t have been able to even be accessible by the federal government. They basically used this whole “well, there's some money in the police department” as a crux to get their hands into the situation and to circumvent the California State shield law.
So that further shows why we need a federal shield law. If it's protected in forty-nine states and the federal government can just make an inroad around the federal shield law, then this can affect independent journalists like myself, but also mainstream media just as equally. In fact, the argument that I wasn't a journalist, which the US attorney tried to put forward, didn't even come about until after I had been incarcerated.
AMY GOODMAN: Last twenty seconds, Josh, your thoughts to share with people in this country and around the world about your prison experience and now what your plans are?
JOSH WOLF: It's been quite a dramatic series of events, which I’m finally glad has come to its conclusion. I think it demonstrates to the public that their media is really under attack.
A free press is not something that the government is very fond of, and they're going to do everything to try to stop that. And it's time for us to realize how important it is for the free flow of information, because news is what you don't -- what people don't want you to know. Everything else is PR. And we're moving more and more towards a PR-based press, and that's a very scary thought.
AMY GOODMAN: Josh Wolf, independent video blogger, recently released from jail, he was the longest imprisoned journalist in this country for refusing to testify before a grand jury, speaking to us in San Francisco. And we will link to his website.
By Sasha Magee
In my fantasy world, Gavin Newsom would read my recent SF Bay Guardian op-ed and think, “damn, he’s right. I need to work with the Board on the wi-fi deal.” If he did that, here are some ways the concerns I listed in my article could be addressed. If we could solve most–or all–of these concerns it’d make the contract much easier to support.
The service will be too slow. I’m speaking here of the free service, which is supposed to be 300kbps, or about half the speed of the slowest DSL. You could address this by either raising the speed of the free connection (to, say, half the speed of the paid service) or by making the high-speed service more affordable.
There’s no enforceable guarantee the service will reach those who need it most. The proposed contract does not ensure that Earthlink maintain the same levels of service in neighborhoods where they have fewer paying customers as the neighborhoods where they have more of them. The contract should have requirements that the service cover equal proportions of the neighborhoods and that the level of service be the same.
The contract is effectively a monopoly, and we’re likely to be stuck with it for 16 years. The Supervisors have an understandable reluctance to enter into long-term franchise-like agreements. The contract could be limited to two four-year terms instead of four terms, or could allow for either party to terminate the deal at the end of each four-year term (or beginning at the end of the second four-year term).
Coverage into apartment buildings and above second floors will be virtually nonexistent without the purchase of expensive extra equipment. Although this is the most knotty technical problem, it’s an area where you could do some interesting things. First, you could figure out ways to get affordable repeater boxes to low-income folks. It looks like Houston’s deal with Earthlink provides for $4 a month rental of them. Alternatively, particularly with taller buildings, the city could provide them, possibly at a discount. Some folks have suggested tax credits for building owners who make their buildings network-friendly.
I do think that many of the problems with the deal are potentially fixable, were Newsom willing to work with the Board on this. He hasn’t seemed to want to, though, reacting to criticism with temper tantrums from the very beginning.
A year and a half ago, I wrote that I thought the Mayor’s Tech Connect proposal “hit all the right notes.” As has become increasingly clear, however, he’s good at proposals that sound good, but when it comes to the work of actually working with the Board or the community to get things done, he does not follow through.
http://leftinsf.com/blog/index.php/archives/1770