journalism – praag.org

Fewer black US reporters than in 1968

America’s newspapers, including many that for years decried the lack of black representation in Congress, on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms, have not increased the percentage of African-Americans in newsrooms above 1968 levels — and may have even cut the numbers.

According to a report on the Columbia Journalism Review and census data from the American Society of News Editors, blacks in newsrooms represent 4.78 percent of the staff. In 1968, the year of race riots following the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., LBJ’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders put the number of blacks in newsrooms at “less than 5 percent.”

CJR’s Alex T. Williams said the numbers are higher when all minorities are included, according the ASNE survey, but still a tiny 13.34 percent.

“The percentage of minorities employed in daily newspapers (the ASNE looks at black, Hispanic, Asian American, Native American, and multiracial populations) has increased from 3.95 percent in 1978, when the ASNE began conducting the census, to 13.34 percent in 2014. The Radio Television Digital News Association estimates that in 2014, minorities made up 13 percent of journalists in radio and 22.4 percent of journalists in television,” wrote Williams.

“Still, these figures are a far cry from the 37.4 percent of Americans that are minorities,” Williams added.

The figures for Washington reporters aren’t much different. Secrets recently interviewed American Urban Radio Networks White House correspondent April Ryan who determined that just 10 percent of White House regulars are black.

The author of The Presidency in Black and White said, “I’ve come out of that lower press room door, past the podium, or walked by and looked into that crowd. It shocks me sometimes. I’m like, ‘Wow!'”

It’s not an education thing. Other figures in the report said that minorities account for 24.2 percent of journalism or communications majors at colleges and universities. And they accounted for 21 percent of graduates from those programs.

The problem seems to be that minorities don’t get the job offers.

Overall, 49 percent of minority graduates found jobs versus 66 percent of white graduates.

Source: The Examiner

Sunday Times stands by Trevor Noah murder story

Sunday Times editor Phylicia Oppelt on Monday said she stands by an article stating that comedian Trevor Noah’s cousin was murdered and buried in KwaZulu-Natal at the weekend.

On Sunday night, Trevor Noah tweeted: “Thanks to some crafty journalism my family and I have spent the whole day trying to figure out which one of us died #awkward”.

He later tweeted: “Don’t always believe what you read. This is something I learned from aliens when I travelled to Mars last year.”

“We had several interviews with Mr Noah’s grandmother at her home in Soweto. We attended the funeral in KwaZulu-Natal at the family’s invitation,” Oppelt told News24.

The newspaper reported that Cebisile Happiness Khoza disappeared a day after travelling from her home town of Msinga to Greytown, where she was preparing for a ceremony to receive her postgraduate certificate in education.

Farmworkers found her burnt body in a sugar-cane field in a village near Wasbank. She had been stabbed several times.

According to the article, Nomalizo Noah had been emotional on Saturday when talking about Khoza’s death. She believed the women in her family were cursed.

She reportedly told the Sunday Times she received news of Khoza’s death via a phone call from a relative in Pietermaritzburg.

She was quoted as saying Trevor and the murdered student had not been close as they lived in different provinces, but that they knew each other.

On Monday afternoon, the 88-year-old told News24 she did not know any relatives named Khoza.

She said her children, including Noah’s mother Patricia, had warned her to turn journalists away from her Soweto home.

The comedian had asked his mother to ask her to stop speaking to reporters.

“Tell granny not to talk to all these reporters because they are making news out of nothing,” he had told his mother, she said.

Katie Hopkins’ ‘viscous, xenophobic & racist’ journalism referred to ICC

A UK law society has stepped up its pursuit of the Sun and its ‘Nazi propaganda’ spouting columnist Katie Hopkins over alleged anti-migrant hate speech, referring both to a powerful international court usually reserved for war criminals.

The Society of Black Lawyers, which originally reported the column written by Hopkins and published by the Sun just hours before 800 migrants drowned in the Mediterranean, has referred the case to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The SBL’s efforts come after UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said the column – in which Hopkins referred to migrants as “cockroaches” – recalled Europe’s darkest days of fascist hate speech and “Nazi propaganda.”

“The case is an exceptionally strong one as the incitement of racial hatred in Hopkins’ unfounded rant illustrated her xenophobic views on the issue surrounding migrants in general,” SBL committee member Shireen Khan told RT.

“This is further portrayed from the numerous articles that are published by the Sun newspaper that are anti-immigrant and majority of the time simply untrue.”

Khan is confident the ICC, which is best known for investigating atrocities in the Balkans and Africa, will take SBL’s referral very seriously.

“I believe that the ICC will take up this case fully as they have a duty to investigate such matters especially the seriousness of this case, which is further emphasized by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ endorsement of our report.

“There is also a strong evidential basis on which SBL have brought this claim. It is quite a sad reality that [the] majority of the time racist abuse is unreported as a crime and secondly is hidden behind the ideas surrounding freedom of speech.”

Khan said the legitimization of anti-immigrant rhetoric under the banner of free speech was a scourge that had become all too common.

She pointed out that Hopkins’ controversial views proved infectious in some quarters, saying they were almost immediately echoed on LBC radio.

“Katie Hopkins’ column was published in the paper but it was then echoed in a viscous, xenophobic and racist tirade on radio, which led to exposure to further parts of society who may be disillusioned in thinking that immigrants are the cause of all destruction our country is facing.

“This has led to some of the most vulnerable people in the world being turned away from the support that they are entitled to under international law. These migrants trying to come to the EU are fleeing persecution, war and death.”

“Immigrants do not deserve to be the scapegoat of this country’s problems and it’s about time we stopped making them it.”

She blasted reactionary anti-immigrant elements within UK politics, arguing they were to blame for creating the political space in which such views could be aired without due criticism.

Sanef urges police to protect journalists

The South African National Editors Forum (Sanef) has come out to condemn the intimidation of journalists as well as the confiscation of their footage by law enforcement officers.

This follows the incident in Alexandra during which Mozambican national, Emmanuel Sithole, was killed.

As a result, Sanef has approached Police Commissioner, Riah Phiyega, to raise their concerns over such incidents.

Sanef’s Mpumelelo Mkhabela says the concern is that the confiscation of cameras and the deleting of images is continuing and now taking a different turn as the media reports on xenophobic attacks around the country.

Mkhabela urges police to protect journalists when under attack, and not to take part in the attacking of the media personnel.

He tells SAfm’s AM Live that such incidents by the police should stop as they have no right to be confiscating material from the media.

China ready to shut down foreign NGOs

New law that would allow Beijing to filter out foreign funding of groups, seen as a matter of national security

After years of operating in a precarious legal limbo, foreign non-governmental organizations in China are facing a moment of truth that could force many of them to close their doors.

The Chinese government is drafting a new foreign NGO law that is widely expected to make work more difficult, if not impossible, for many of the 6,000 overseas non-profits that operate here in a broad range of fields from education and the environment to HIV-Aids and legal education.

Under the new law, foreign non-profits would not be allowed to open more than one office, or to raise funds locally, or be allowed to fund projects deemed counter to what is being called “Chinese society’s moral customs,” according to excerpts seen by The Christian Science Monitor of the still unpublished bill.

At the heart of the proposed law is a view that foreign non-profits are a potential threat to national security.

“We need to protect their legitimate interests, to let them play a greater role, but on the other hand they need more effective management, to sufficiently protect our national security and social stability,” said Fu Ying, spokeswoman for the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s parliament, before it opened its annual session last week.

The bill was presented last December to the Standing Committee of the NPC by Yang Huanning, Vice Minister of Public Security. It came on the heels of a survey of foreign-funded NGOs ordered last summer by the National Security Commission, headed by President Xi Jinping.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs, traditionally responsible for non-governmental organizations, appears to play no role in the drafting of the legal text, according to people familiar with the situation.

The draft law puts the Ministry of Public Security in charge of registering foreign NGOs, which are obliged to find a government agency to sponsor them. They would also have to submit annual work plans, including all funding proposals, in advance to their sponsoring agency such as a ministry or local government authority.

NGO’s, especially those who work in politically sensitive areas such as gay rights, journalism training or labor relations fear that the new law will be used to shut them down. “This law, from what we have heard, gives unprecedented power to the police,” says one activist with a foreign NGO in Beijing. “They want to show a heavy hand.”

The new bill, now under closed-door discussion, is expected to pass by the end of this year.

Source: csmonitor.com

Daily Show: Brainwashing a generation with lies

Brian Williams lied about his personal exploits many times, but Jon Stewart was unabashedly and habitually dishonest. Any standard liberal publication was as likely to contain an unflattering thought about Stewart as L’Osservatore Romano is to run a hit piece on the pope.

Though Stewart has often claimed he does a “fake news show,” “The Daily Show” isn’t that. It’s a real news show punctuated with puns, jokes, asides and the occasional moment of staged sanctimony.

It contains real, unstaged sound bites about the days’ events and interviews about important policy matters.

Stewart is a journalist: an irresponsible and unprofessional one.

Stewart uses his funnyman status as a license to dispense with even the most minimal journalistic standards. Get both sides of the story?

Hey, I’m just a comedian, man. Try to be responsible about what the real issues are? Dude, that’s too heavy, we just want to set up the next d- -k joke.

Stewart is often derided by the right as having minimal impact and low ratings. That’s not true. He and Stephen Colbert ruled the late-night ratings among 18-to 34-year-olds for most of the last five years, though Jimmy Fallon has lately surpassed both.

About 522,000 Americans in that age range watch “The Daily Show” on an average night, but that means many millions of occasional viewers, with millions more watching clips online.

To a key audience, he was a strong influence. Longtime Cooper Union history professor Fred Siegel says his students constantly came to him repeating Stewart’s talking points.

College students, of course, are both little acquainted with realities of adult existence and walled off from conservative views, so they’re the perfect audience for Stewart’s shtick, which depends on assumptions that are as unquestioned as they are false.

Jon Stewart’s defense of Brian Williams was “The Daily Show” in a nutshell – laugh off a scandal and change the subject.

Brian Williams has become a joke for telling lies, but Jon Stewart is a liar for the way he told jokes.

Source: NYP

AfriLeaks launched in Africa

AfriLeaks, an anonymous whistleblowing platform for Africa, has been launched today, the Guardian reports.

The platform is designed to securely connect whistleblowers with media organizations across Africa and to teach journalists how to effectively verify and investigate the quality of leaked information, the Guardian says.

“AfriLeaks allows you to leak confidential documents of public interest. We’ve designed a system that helps you to share these materials while protecting your own identity, so that it becomes impossible to identify you as the source of the leak.” – says a statement of the platform.

The difference between WikiLeaks and AfriLeaks is that the former publishes secret information, news and classified media taken from anonymous sources, while the latter will act only as a facilitator without publishing any secret information itself, Deutsche Welle reported.

The idea is that a whistleblower sends files to AfriLeaks securely and nominates a media organization he/she wants to investigate the information. The whistleblower can choose to remain anonymous. In other words, the leak itself is not a story, but the lead to a potential story, according to the Guardian.

So far, the media outlets that have signed up to the initiative are South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, Botswana’s Guardian, The Zimbabwean and Mozambique’s Verdade, the Guardian says.

“Whistleblowers that we spoke with were not aware of measures such as encrypted email,” says Khadija Sharife, an investigative journalist based in South Africa, as quoted by the Guardian. “Nor did many have the experience to pursue the safest means of transmitting information.”

Source: Sputnik

Bawbawa’s journalistic porn

by Ilana Mercer

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Barbara Walters has promised to retire. But then so did that lip-licking lizard, Larry King. You can’t take them at their word.

In my journalism school days, one looked up to the legendary, late Oriana Fallaci. These days, it’s mediocrities like Walters and colorectal crusader Katie Couric who’re considered cutting-edge clever. And they’ve sired a new crop of talking coifs.

Although they’re walking clichés – and there’s little they can say that’ll edify or enlighten – the likes of Brook Baldwin and Erin Burnett of CNN are regularly invited to deliver commencement addresses to university graduates! “Remember, it’s not about you,” Baldwin lectured students at her journalism and communications school alma mater. Yet journalistic evenhandedness regularly tips into self-serving advocacy under the direction of this feminist front-woman. “As a woman, I get frustrated, protested, as she browbeat a British reporter for daring to criticize Kate Middleton’s barely there underwear.

Coming as she did from a background in “women’s interest stories,” it was only natural for Walters to bring the same one-dimensional perspective to “The View,” a roundtable dominated by women and aimed at the same demographic. “The View” was “charitably” punctured by the occasional “Guy Day Friday.” So successful was Barbara’s formula, that it has been copied by Fox News (where, with exceptions like Gerri Willis, Elizabeth MacDonald, Melissa Francis and Kennedy of the Business channel – the babes are not much better). “Outnumbered” (but not outfoxed) is “The View,” but with a better view of legs and cleavage. Views voiced by the self-congratulatory cyphers in short skirts on the GOP network, however, are just as formulaic as Barbara’s Democrat-friendly debates.

Another of Barbara’s brainchildren was the much-anticipated, annual “Most Fascinating People List,” for which she redefined the concept of “fascinating.” Yes, Walters has been a cog in a coarsening culture. Some of her past picks for “The Most Fascinating List” included Paris Hilton, KimYe (Kim Kardashian and Kanye West) and twerker Miley Cyrus.

All Walters’ interviews make the flesh crawl. Paris Hilton made a porn debut, in which she made love to the camera (i.e. herself). Walters’ syrupy “journalism” transformed the narcissistic specter into a PG-rated tale of innocence betrayed. Well, of course: Paris was led astray by a man.

And the broadcaster’s empathic posturing concealed a good deal of cattiness, even cruelty. Her idea of getting to the guts of a story: Bring a supremely vulnerable celebrity to tears. Wicked Walters once prefaced an interview with singer Celine Dion by pronouncing, “You are not beautiful.” She then paused to watch, gleefully, as tears welled in Dion’s beautiful eyes. Now that’s what I call a scoop!

The one person to rival Barbara’s bitchiness is sly Katie Couric. She interviewed Hillary Clinton while drunk with love for Obama. Couric’s below-the-belt barbs made Hillary appear elevated by comparison. The former “first housewife” was courteous where Katie was unkind. “Someone told me your nickname in school was Miss Frigidaire. Is that true?” Couric inquired. “Only with some boys,” Clinton replied, laughing. Couric makes Clinton seem quick and classy.

Years back, Walters was granted an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. To Walters, complexity has always been a cuss word. Her approach was to stick to the inane and the mundane, while lobbing an occasional misguided missile. Out of the blue – and true to her sensation-driven style – Walters asked the former KGB operative if he’d ever killed anyone. Putin’s mouth said no; his eyes seemed to be saying, “I feel a strong urge rising.”

Contrast the typical Walters tête-à-tête with the fusillade of irreverent questions and scalding ripostes Fallaci fired on Muammar Gadhafi in 1979. As the New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot tells it, at one point, the colonel complains that she must not have read his manifesto, “The Green Book.” “Her answer is pure Fallaci, and very satisfying: ‘On the contrary, I read it. It doesn’t take very long, you know, 15 minutes at the most. It’s so small. My powder compact is bigger than your little ‘Green Book.’”

Good newsmen are a dying breed. Good newswomen are mostly dead already. (For reasons not mysterious, mainstream mediocrities are doing their utmost to marginalize sleuths like Sharyl Attkisson, formerly of CBS, and Laura Poitras, the documentarian who helped Edward Snowden expose the National Security Agency.) By the time she died, the brilliant and brave Oriana Fallaci had long since been buried professionally by the likes of Barbara Walters. For her unabashed contempt of Islam, Fallaci was forced to flee her native Italy. She came to America, where, needless to say, she never made it onto Barbara’s List.

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What is a journalist?

The Senate Judiciary Committee, looking to provide protections for journalists and their sources, ran into a roadblock Thursday when lawmakers couldn’t agree on the definition of “journalist.”

Under the legislation, journalists wouldn’t have to comply with subpoenas or court orders forcing them to reveal sources or confidential information unless a judge first determines there’s reason to think that a crime has occurred and government officials have exhausted all other alternatives.

It’s the third time Congress has considered a “shield law” for journalists. Similar bills have failed despite bipartisan support.

“I’m hoping the third time’s a charm,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the committee’s chairman.

The bill defines a journalist as a person who has a “primary intent to investigate events and procure material” in order to inform the public by regularly gathering information through interviews and observations. The person also must intend to report on the news at the start of obtaining any protected information and must plan to publish that news.

But senators disagreed on how to define journalists, since some thought the bill’s definition wasn’t specific enough.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., wondered whether it could be used to provide protections to employees of WikiLeaks, an organization that allows anonymous sources to leak information to the public.

“I’m concerned this would provide special privilege to those who are not reporters at all,” Klobuchar said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., suggested that the definition comprise only journalists who make salaries, saying it should be applied just to “real reporters.” The sponsor of the bill, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., was against that idea, since there are bloggers and others in the Internet age who don’t necessarily receive salaries.

“The world has changed. We’re very careful in this bill to distinguish journalists from those who shouldn’t be protected, WikiLeaks and all those, and we’ve ensured that,” Schumer said. “But there are people who write and do real journalism, in different ways than we’re used to. They should not be excluded from this bill.”

The Standing Committee of Correspondents, a group of reporters that issues congressional press passes, requires that reporters be full time and paid in order to receive passes.

The reconsideration of a shield law comes on the heels of media controversies that came to light in May. The Justice Department had seized the phone records of 20 Associated Press reporters over two months without giving them prior notice and had traced the phone calls and emails of a Fox News reporter.

The bill also would require the Justice Department to notify any reporters it chose to monitor. It allows Justice officials to delay that notice by 45 days and permits them to ask for an extension of another 45 days.

Most states have their own shield laws for journalists, but those laws don’t apply in federal court. That means any monitoring of reporters by the federal government would be covered only under a federal shield law.

The committee will continue debating the bill when it reconvenes in September, and Schumer said he hoped it would head to the Senate floor by the end of the year. – McClatchy Washington Bureau

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/01/198338/senators-spar-over-definition.html#storylink=cpy

Drone media?

Here comes the fly-by media. Preliminary use of diminutive drones is under way among those who see the potential of drones in news gathering, not to mention invasive “gotcha”-style journalism. Deadline Detroit — “a homegrown media revolution” manned by former veteran journalists — has already used footage made by “Tretch5000,” an anonymous hobbyist who used a camera-mounted drone to peek inside abandoned housing and old civic buildings, producing a telling video vignette.

“There’s a part of me that finds this kind of creepy and fraught with ‘big brother is watching’ issues. While we might trust public radio journalists and academics, there were rumors earlier this week that TMZ had purchased a drone to assist in its paparazzi-style coverage of celebrities,” says Vince Duffy, chairman of the Radio Television Digital News Association.

“But why wouldn’t they get one? Could websites that cover celebrities resist the urge to fly drones over celebrity weddings, outdoor red carpets, and beaches where starlets might be caught topless?” Mr. Duffy asks.

The University of Missouri has awarded a $25,000 grant to public radio station KBIA to explore drone journalism in places “reporters can’t go or reach,” while the University of Nebraska has won $50,000 from the Knight Foundation for a new Drone Journalism Lab.Mr. Duffy points out that the Federal Aviation Administration requires unmanned aircraft systems to be within the operator’s line of sight, cruise below 400 feet during daylight hours and avoid airports, among other things.

“Journalism organizations would certainly have many reasons to fly drones far from the person controlling it, or on some type of preprogrammed autopilot course,” Mr. Duffy says. “The FAA is looking into how it can regulate the coming ‘drone age’ safely. They expect to have new rules by 2015. The ethical issues for using drones for journalism will probably be up in the air much after that.” – Washington Times

Thanksgiving ‘White-Supremacist Holiday’, Founders ‘Nazis’

Forget all that turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie, today should be a day of fasting and atonement for American “sin.” That’s according to Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Jensen, known for his hard-left politics, also calls Thanksgiving a “white-supremacist holiday.”

Jensen’s opinion piece “No Thanks for Thanksgiving,” appeared on the far-left, Soros-connected website Alternet on Thanksgiving eve. In it, he wrote how Native Americans suffered because of the “European invasion of the Americas.” He went on to compare the Founding Fathers to Nazi Germany. “How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis?” he asked.

According to Jensen, Thanksgiving is “at the heart of U.S. myth-building. “But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin — the genocide of indigenous people — is of special importance today,” he explained.

Jensen has a long career in both working journalism and academia, including work as a copy editor at The St. Paul Pioneer Press and the St. Petersburg Times, as well as “volunteer editing and writing for the Texas Triangle, Austin (weekly statewide lesbian/gay paper).”

This wasn’t the first time Jensen has bashed America. He does so on a regular basis. Other Alternet pieces include headlines like “The Painful Collapse of Empire: How the ‘American Dream’ and American Exceptionalism Wreck Havoc on the World” or “What White People Fear.”

Alternet is part of the George-Soros-supported Media Consortium. It is one of 58 left-wing media operations that aim to create a progressive “echo chamber.” – CNSNews