Tag: coverage

Open letter to media takes issue with coverage of Latin America

Media
by Compiled for GJR

COMPILED FOR GJR / The supposed “irony” of whistleblower Edward Snowden seeking asylum in countries such as Ecuador and Venezuela has become a media meme. Numerous articles, op-eds, reports and editorials in outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR and MSNBC have hammered on this idea since the news first broke that Snowden was seeking asylum in Ecuador. It was a predictable retread of the same meme last year, when Julian Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and the Ecuadorian government deliberated his asylum request for months. Of course, any such “ironies” would be irrelevant even if they were based on factual considerations.

The Zimmerman trial and race in the media: The usual soapbox derby

Media
by George Salamon

BY GEORGE SALAMON / On July 16, after the Zimmerman trial had concluded with a “not guilty” verdict and a small army of experts and selected citizens were wrangling over the implications on television, you could have found these two statements in the media: “We’ve Had Our Conversation on Race. Now We Need One on Guns,” Alec Macgillis proclaimed in the New Republic. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Ekon N. Yankah, a professor of law at the Cordoza School of Law in New York, complained that “we are tired of hearing that race is a conversation for another day.” I have to agree with the professor.

The courage of one columnist

Media
by George Salamon

“We still don’t know the first thing about terrorists.” That was the title of last week’s column in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper now available in English and Hebrew on the Internet, by American-born (Los Angeles) and educated (UC Berkeley) Bradley Burston. I have not read or heard an American journalist or TV host make a similar comment, but I wish I had.

Chicago murder coverage isn’t stopping the bullets

Media
by John McCarron

CHICAGO – Back in the early ’70s, as a cub working off the overnight city desk at the Chicago Tribune, you learned fast that all murders were not equal. Sure, all were listed methodically on the deputy superintendent’s logbook at the old police headquarters at 11th and State streets. But while killings on the city’s predominantly white North Side were almost always pursued by our small band of nocturnal newsmen, the more numerous homicides in the black neighborhoods of the South and West Sides most often were ignored. There was even a winking code word for the latter category. They were “blue.” Blue, as in “cheap domestic,” where a drunken live-in boyfriend kills his common-law mate. Blue, as in someone shot in the face after a street-corner dice game gone awry. Judging by how the other four daily newspapers (yes, four!) covered and displayed their homicides, it’s safe to assume the same double standard applied.

Good news, bad news from Cleveland

Media
by William A. Babcock

Cleveland is used to bad press. First there was the water: The Cuyahoga River caught on fire in the1960s and Lake Erie was pronounced “dead.” Then there’s sports: LeBron James flees the city, the Browns fail to win a single Super Bowl and the Indians are the second-worst baseball team on the planet. Then along comes Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight. Theirs should be a happy-ending story to end all happy-ending stories. Held captive in a Cleveland house for some 10 years, they finally escape. Alas, it’s not that simple.