Archive for January, 2009
Friday, January 30th, 2009 by Joe Torres
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”
Growing up, how often did your parents tell you this in their effort to protect you from school-yard bullies?
Despite their best intentions, you knew better. You learned that words can hurt. Now as an adult, you know that words have the power to inspire, as well as the power to tear people apart.
Many in the Latino community understand firsthand the power of words to bring out the worst in people. In recent years, hate crimes against Latinos have spiked by 40 percent sparked, in large part, by the hostile public debate over immigration. And many Latino leaders believe that right-wing talk shows have played a primary role in igniting the growing violence against their community.
This week, the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), working with the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown University Law Center, filed a petition for inquiry that called on the FCC to investigate the pervasiveness of hate speech on the public airwaves and its impact on the Latino community. The groups also called on the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to update its 1993 Hate Speech report. At the time, the NTIA expressed concern that “the media may be creating an “atmosphere that encourages and legitimizes violence against minority groups.” But the report stopped short, stating “the available data linking the problem of hate crimes to telecommunications remains scattered and largely anecdotal.”
But the media landscape has been transformed since 1993. The NHMC’s petition provides several examples of the kinds of hate speech that are polluting the airwaves and creating a toxic environment that motivates violence.
Talk-show host Michael Savage ranted last year that undocumented immigrants have “raped” the Statue of Liberty and that the United States is being “overrun” by an “invading horde from another nation that wants to sweep you off the map.” Montana radio host John Stokes called for cutting off the limbs of anyone who cannot not speak English: “Romans 15:19 says that if they break into your country, chop off their leg. We have to forcibly get rid of them.”
It is this kind of rhetoric that the NHMC believes has fueled a recent string of hate crimes that ended in horrific murders.
Last year, 31-year-old Jose Sucuzhanay, a legal resident and a father of two, was beaten to death in Brooklyn, N.Y., by four men who hit him in the head with a bottle because of his ethnicity and because they believed he was gay. In Shenandoah, Penn., teenagers yelled racial epithets at 25-year-old Luis Eduardo Ramirez Zavala, saying, “Go Back to Mexico,” while beating him to death. In Patchogue, N.Y., several teenagers killed 37-year-old Marcelo Lucero after they spent a day targeting Hispanics, including firing a BB gun at a Hispanic man in a car and beating up another Hispanic man who was fortunate to escape.
NHMC is optimistic that with Obama’s election, the FCC will examine the issue of hate speech on the public airwaves. Last September, Obama told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus during a campaign appearance:
This election is about the 12 million people living in the shadows, the communities taking immigration enforcement into their own hands. … They’re counting on us to stop the hateful rhetoric filling our airwaves, rise above the fear and demagoguery, and finally enact comprehensive immigration reform.
Obama should understand as well as anyone how words can stoke hatred and threats of violence. Newsweek reported that in the lead-up to the presidential election, death threats against Obama spiked. It was during this time that conservative TV and radio talk-show hosts pounded away daily at Obama, claiming he wasn’t coming clean about his relationship with William Ayers of the Weather Underground. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin even accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists.”
The rise in hate speech also coincides with an increase in the number of hate groups in the country. The Southern Poverty Law Center found that close to 900 hate groups now exist and that 250 nativist groups have been founded in recent years. In addition, the Anti-Defamation League found that nativist groups have increasingly appeared on news programs as legitimate opponents of immigration.
The NHMC petition is NOT asking for the FCC to pass new rules that regulate speech or to bring back the Fairness Doctrine. Rather, the group is seeking to shed light on the connection between hate speech and hate crimes.
One area that needs to be examined is the impact of media consolidation on the increase in hate speech. The 1996 Telecommunications Act led to massive consolidation in the radio industry, lifting the cap on the number of stations a company can own. Consequently, the consolidation reduced the diversity of voices on the air and made it easier for a syndicated talk program to be carried on more stations.
For example, a study conducted by the Center for American Progress and Free Press in 2007 found that 91 percent of the talk programming that airs on the top five commercial radio station owners — CBS, Clear Channel, Citadel, Cumulus and Salem — is conservative.
The FCC should not delay in investigating the link between hate speech and hate crimes. As it turns out, sticks and stones may break my bones, but name calling may also kill me.
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Monday, January 19th, 2009 by Jordan Berg
Three months after his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was frustrated by the government’s inaction on civil rights. Worried about President Lyndon Johnson’s unwillingness to move on the issue, he is said to have told fellow Southern Christian Leadership Conference minister Rev.Walter Fauntroy, “We are still a 10-day nation, Walter.”
King was frustrated that the media – and by default the nation – had an attention span of only 10 days.
As we commemorate King’s birthday, we are once again reminded not just of the moral vision he set for this country, but the power of the news media to alter, manipulate and relay important stories to the public. King’s skepticism of the news media is still relevant today. With only a few corporations controlling our media, we have not progressed to a media system that values depth in its news cycle.
Hundreds of stories have been buried or unreported this year alone as the media spews out content that is cheap, easy to produce, and doesn’t upset stakeholders. These lost stories include the massacres in Darfur and Liberia, the detainment of human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, the ongoing civil wars in Colombia and the Congo, the Tsunami in southeast Asia, the recovery effort in the Gulf Coast following Katrina, and the failure to care for our returned men and women in the armed services — just to name a very few.
But even in King’s day, the news media was still giving the public hard-hitting news stories and gripping images of the civil rights struggle. What would the civil rights moment have been if we had not seen King’s speech on the National Mall in its full 17 minutes? Would it be as powerful in the 30 second soundbites we get today? Would the Birmingham boycotts, the desegregation of lunch counters and bus terminals, and the fight for voting equality have succeed if not for these printed and broadcast images: dogs attacking people, cops spraying protesters with water hoses, and the faces of the murdered innocent Americans fighting for their freedom?
The drive to increase profits and decrease any possibility of offending the all-mighty advertising dollars would have silenced any of the stories that gave credence to the civil rights struggle; they wouldn’t even make it onto the airwaves and pages of today’s news media.
Because of the power of King’s message and the eloquence with which he declared it, we often forget how long and tirelessly many Americans worked to achieve his vision. King understood the power of the media to transmit and translate the Black American struggle, but he was worried that the press’ short attention span held back the movement.
How many equally important movements and issues are being held back by an even more sensationalistic and less substantive corporate media?
In today’s media consolidated America, the next fight for progress must be the media, because through reforming our information system, we can transform our democracy.
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Monday, January 19th, 2009 by Joe Torres
When Barack Obama is sworn in as our nation’s first black president on Tuesday, it will represent a triumph for millions of people who have fought to overcome racial injustice in our society for more than two centuries.
The press will focus on the civil rights leaders who have paved the way to make this moment possible, reminding us of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream a day after we celebrated the slain leader’s birth.
But the day also belongs to all those whose names we may not remember, who by raising their voices knocked down racial barriers in their communities, in their neighborhoods and in their workplaces, forcing our country to change. For me, this means this day also belongs to the thousands of minority and white journalists who challenged their newsrooms to improve coverage of communities of color.
While the mainstream media still too often marginalize people of color in their coverage, I believe Obama would not have been elected president if the press did not cover him as a legitimate candidate. And this would not have happened if newsrooms were not forced to integrate their work force 40 years ago.
Few people know that Dr. King actually played a direct role in helping to inspire media activists to challenge our nation’s racist media institutions.
As Mark Lloyd wrote in his book a Prologue to A Farce, Dr. Everett Parker, head of the Office of Communications for the United Church of Christ (UCC), attended a meeting with King in New York City in 1963. During the meeting, King told the gathering he could use help dealing with the racism of Southern broadcast stations.
Following the meeting, Parker focused on finding a Southern station to monitor in an effort to challenge its license with the FCC. He settled on WLBT in Jackson, Miss., a city with a 40 percent Black population. But you would not have known the city’s demographics by watching WLBT, a racist station that was run by a member of a white supremacist group.
Blacks were not featured in news programming except crime stories; the airwaves often carried the views of white supremacist leaders on racial issues; and the station often pre-empted network programming that featured civil rights leaders talking about racial injustice.
The UCC challenged the station’s license, even though citizens had no legal right at the time to contest a broadcast license. In a historic decision in 1966, a federal appeals court ruled that the public did indeed have a right to challenge a license, giving citizens legal standing before the FCC for the first time.
Another critical event occurred in 1968 when the Kerner Commission released its landmark report on the causes of riots that tore apart cities that summer. The commission found that “by failing to portray the Negro as a matter of routine and in the context of the total society, the news media have … contributed to the black-white schism in the country.”
As a result of the Kerner Commission report and the WLBT case, the FCC was forced to adopt Equal Employment Opportunity rules in 1969 that banned discrimination in the broadcast industry and required broadcasters to hire a diverse work force that was reflective of the communities they serve.
The new rule and court decision inspired a citizen’s movement, led mostly by black and Latino organizations, to challenge the license of hundreds of broadcast stations across the country in the early 1970s, thereby bolstering newsroom integration. These events led to the founding of our nation’s first minority journalist associations, as well as the FCC adopting its first policies to increase minority ownership of media.
The journalists who have worked in our nation’s newsrooms during the past 40 years have helped prepare the editorial ground for the day when the press had to take the candidacy of a black president seriously. In addition, the ethnic press has and continues to play a critical role in covering issues critical to communities ignored by the mainstream media.
Despite these steps, I do not believe we are living in a post-racial America. The press did a terrible job covering race during the election. I am not sure what the country learned about the profound issues affecting black America except whether white Americans would vote for a black candidate. There is an inherent contradiction in Obama’s presidency. While his election is a sign of racial progress, the conditions for so many people of color continue to worsen — just look at the latest unemployment figures to see that real disparities exist.
And those disparities are also impacting journalists of color during the current crisis in the journalism industry. Last year, more journalists of color working at daily newspapers left the industry than entered for the first time in 20 years. The presence of minority journalists is declining. So is minority ownership of broadcast stations. Meanwhile, people of color are far less likely to have a broadband connection to connect to the Internet and are unable to participate in the nation’s 21st-century communications system. Look no further than coverage of immigration to see that people of color are still being marginalized in news coverage.
The dwindling presence of journalists of color working in newsrooms across the country has real consequences for the future of our country. Will the media be willing to cover legitimate voices of change in our country, regardless of the color of those leading the way? Or was coverage of an Obama candidacy just an anomaly? Stay tuned.
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