Category: Media

Clinton courts the heartland

Media
by George Salamon

By GEORGE SALAMON / Soon after Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy on April 12 for the 2016 presidential race, Rebecca Traister reported for the New Republic: “So what could possibly go wrong? Everything. Anything. Anything and everything. Hillary Clinton has loomed so powerfully in the American consciousness for so long that it’s hard to remember how delicate, how combustible, how ultimately improbable the project of electing her president is likely to be.” Traister paid too little attention to Clinton’s individual flaws that could propel “anything” and “everything” to go wrong.

A new niche for traditional journalism in the digital age

Media
by Kurt Shillinger

By KURT SHILLINGER / In the aftermath of the killing of a black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last August, St. Louis Public Radio launched an ongoing series of conversations about race called We Live Here. The first full-length program traversed Lindbergh Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare arching through a diversity of the 90 municipalities that make up St. Louis County. Two comments stood out in the broadcast, which aired in early March. The first was by a prominent businessman in Melville, a predominantly white suburb in the southern reaches of the county. “It sickens me,” James Sinclair told the program, ‘to see St. Louis on the national news the way we have been portrayed. There are issues that need to be addressed. But the need to be addressed, they don’t need to be shouted at. And they certainly don’t need to take it out on the police.” The second was by Chris Kerr, who lives on an exclusive six-acre family homestead in tony Frontenac. “I don’t follow these types of cases,” Kerr said. “Whatever it is, the national case, the new case, the next one that comes up. Whatever agenda that somebody’s running that wants to do it. I don’t care. It’s not relevant to my life. So I just – I hear it on the news, but I stay out of it.”

Trevor Noah: treading carefully as the new Daily Show host

Media
by Lindani Memani

By LINDANI MEMANI / As soon as news in March of Trevor Noah’s appointment to replace Jon Stewart of the Daily Show became public, online spaces flooded with calls for his axing. While the news in South Africa was met with an explosion of excitement and pride, the same cannot be said about the reception to the news in America. The NPR headline “Trevor Noah, Jon Stewart’s replacement, goes from hero to villain In 24 hours” succinctly captured the speed at which the news story was developing. Noah, a 31-year-old South African comedian, was tossed to the middle of a whirlwind over jokes he had made on Twitter as far back as 2011. In some of these jokes, which were included in most online news sites ranging from blogs to CNN, Noah disparaged Jews, African Americans and fat women. Writing for Vox, Kelsey McKinney labeled Noah’s jokes as “misogyny, fat-shaming, anti-Semitism, and a large dose of homophobia,” something she said she found “upsetting.” McKinney then suggested that a comedian hosting the Daily Show “should be held to a higher standard than other comedians.”

Freelance journalists cover global hot spots

Media
by Jackie Spinner

The last time Achilleas Zavallis packed his camera gear for Syria, he changed his airline ticket twice within 48 hours because he couldn’t make up his mind whether he should go to a country considered the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. His stomach was tied “in a million knots,” he recalled, as it is every time he travels to a war zone. A photographer based in Greece, Zavallis is a freelance journalist. When he goes into danger, it is nearly always “on spec,” freelance parlance for covering a story and then trying to find someone to publish his work. But in November 2013, after changing his ticket and second-guessing his motives and re-assessing the risks, Zavallis went anyway, traveling to northern Syria to document the country’s Christian minority. He stayed for about two weeks. A photo essay from the trip was published three months later in the National, an English-language publication in Abu Dhabi. “I believe that the story must be told,” Zavallis said, “so that no one can come after 100 years and say that in Syria nothing happened and that no one died.”