Media Analysis
Helen Thomas Pays for Crossing a Line Others Trample
originally posted by Michelle Chen for RaceWire [click here]
Jun 8th
By now you’ve heard: pioneering Washington journalist Helen Thomas has, thanks to a viral video interview, been pilloried for offensive comments about Israel and ousted from the press corps’ inner sanctum. Her words were definitely incendiary—Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Europe and America. But the reaction suggests that the Rabbilive ambush was just a catalyst for a gathering storm of political enmity. She was after all, one of the few hard-nosed reporters (and women) in the briefing room who ruthlessly challenged the White House on foreign policy issues.
To George W. Bush’s former press secretary Ari Fleischer, the comments were tantamount to a call for genocide: “She is advocating religious cleansing,” he told Huffington Post. “How can Hearst stand by her? If a journalist, or a columnist, said the same thing about blacks or Hispanics, they would already have lost their jobs.”
Getting fired for bigoted words? Somehow that fate has not befallen the cabal of right-wing bloviators who have literally built their careers pushing the propaganda war against Latinos, other people of color, gay people, liberals and anyone else they disagree with. They’re not journalists in the formal sense, but their frothing tirades, word-for-word, arguably wield more influence over the corporate news cycle. In contrast to Thomas-gate, though, Limbaugh and friends don’t need to be ambushed and exposed by rogue YouTube muckrakers. They’ve spewed their venom to millions daily on television and radio, backed by advertisers, media executives and an audience that happily blinds itself to political hypocrisy.
At HuffPo, some cooler heads have spoken in Thomas’s defense while criticizing her remarks, noting a double standard in how Americans talk about who should “get the hell out.” On moral relativism, Paul Jay of Real News argues:
The obvious comparison is asking all European Americans to “get the hell out”, and leave the land to its rightful owners, Native Americans. One could argue Mexican Americans might have an argument to stay in certain parts of the country.
The European migration to America isn’t such a stretch if one thinks about it. Colonialism makes use of people fleeing religious persecution to populate their new possession . . .
At any rate, we all know what’s going on here. The hyper-pro-Israel lobby, in both parties, hasn’t much liked the fact that Helen Thomas dares to speak up and question that most sacred of topics, and right from the front row of the White House Press Gallery.
James Zogby of the Arab American Institute puts Thomas’s comments in perspective and calls out the right-wingers, embodied in the character assassination of Ari Fleischer, for its far more virulent rhetoric against people of color, gays, and, oops, yes, Jews:
Where was their indignation when Rush Limbaugh was making disgraceful and insulting comments about African Americans, gays, Muslims, and women and then was hosted and toasted at the White House? And did they speak out when Pat Robertson was making bizarre pronouncements connecting the devastation of Katrina or Ariel Sharon’s stroke with God’s justice? If I thought they understood shame, I would advise them to feel some.
When Dobbs, Beck and company have likened immigration to an illegal invasion of America’s god-given dominion, they’re just brandishing their patriotism, right? As opposed to the misguided journalists who dare question an actual occupation, perpetuated by the U.S., in another part of the world. Granted, it’s hard to tell who’s blaming who for what sometimes, as right-wingers tend to employ the same terminology when debating immigration and America’s Muslim and Arab adversaries: invaders, terrorists, conquerors, and the occasional fascism reference.
Language is a funny thing. With all her experience in the White House press corps, Thomas should have known what words are off limits. There are some lines you just can’t cross in the media… unless you’re the one who gets to write the rules.
Rabbi Who Brought Down Helen Thomas Has Great ‘Mexican’ Impression
originally posted by Channing Kennedy for RaceWire [click here]
Jun 7th
UPDATE 1:00PM ET: Though the ‘Holy Weather’ video has been removed from youtube by the uploader, Mediaite has re-posted it. Embedded below.
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This weekend, thirty seconds of video surfaced in which veteran DC reporter Helen Thomas, in a snippet of an informal interview, is asked about her views on Israel. In the uproar that’s followed, the 89-year-old Thomas has announced her retirement, ending a career that spans back to President Eisenhower and opening a literal front-row seat to Fox News.
The Flipcam video in question was shot and posted by Rabbi David Nesenoff, who runs the Geocities-esque fledgling video blog RabbiLive.com. The Helen Thomas video is by far the most visited part of the site, having racked up over a million views since Thursday, with most other videos barely clearing a thousand — and, smartly, it takes up most of the site’s front page, along with a teaser for more forthcoming footage from the same interview.
Nesenoff has stated that he approached Thomas due to her icon status, not due to the common conservative beef with her for her well-known stance on Israel. (That said, the video doesn’t provide context for him asking her about ‘Israel’ in so many words.) But since then, he’s been interviewed on Fox News, and owes much of his sudden web traffic to conservative news curators like Matt Drudge and Andrew Breitbart, the latter of whom is widely credited with bringing down ACORN with a hidden camera and a pimp costume. Never mind that the ACORN ‘pimp’ videos have since been discredited as edit jobs.
Nesenoff’s Thomas video ends with the text “How can Helen possibly report unbiased?” Perhaps a better question is, who polices our press, and for what? We live in an age in which Fox News draws an uneasy distinction between its ‘news’ and ‘opinion’ programming, BP is easily able to limit press access to Gulf beaches, RedState.com’s Erick Erickson is a regular on CNN, and David Gregory shrugs off the idea of factchecking Meet the Press. So who’s in charge of holding our fourth estate to its highest ideals, if not its audience, employers, or advertisers? Well, there’s the Daily Show, and Colbert… and, more and more, there’s random dudes with small cameras and big dreams, and the news brokers who choose to highlight them on an agenda-by-agenda basis. One doesn’t need to justify or condemn the actions of Thomas, or Nesenoff, to question the system that brought us all to Youtube on this day.
Anyway, here’s a video from February of this year in which Rabbi Nesenoff dons a terrible Mexican impression and makes a lot of jokes about being detained by ICE. You’ve got a stronger stomach than me if you can make it past the one about being a dishwasher. What is it with these gotcha-guys and wigs?
Friday Twitterbreak: We’ll ‘Oilwells’ Love BP.
May 28th
With regards to the Dolly Parton song.
Catch us on Twitter @racialjustice; there’s also a handy directory of our staff tweeters. And our Tumblr is just bristling with colorful charts and horrifying screengrabs from around the web, for your sharing pleasure.
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“The View” Ladies Take on SB 1070, McCain and the DREAM Act
May 19th
The ladies from The View this morning took up Arizona’s SB 1070 as a hot topic, and while they were at it, they talked about Senator McCain and the DREAM Act too!
The NYT Demonstrates How Not to Talk About Immigration
May 19th
In the wake of last week’s polls around public opinion on Arizona’s SB 1070 law mandating racial profiling, two new published pieces merit your attention. The first is the new polling data from SEIU and NCLR, which addresses many of the questions raised by Pew’s un-raced monolingual landline poll of national attitudes toward the law. This new data tells us, among other things, that 81 percent of Latino voters oppose SB 1070; that half of Latino voters will now think twice before calling the cops to their home if they’re the victim of a crime; and that everyone’s waiting for real policy proposals, from Democrats or Republicans. I cannot encourage you enough to dig into these charts.
The second piece you should read, if it hasn’t already been forwarded to you, is in Monday’s New York Times, “A Generation Gap Over Immigration.” It concludes, somewhat awkwardly, that it’s an age thing; since Baby Boomers grew up in a world with fewer immigrants, they’re unable to cope, unlike kids these days, who had Sesame Street. This article comes three days after the new SEIU/NCLR data, but seems unaware of it.
This is an important read — because its colorblind, white-as-default, fact-phobic approach typifies the many shortcomings of our dialogue around race, values, and immigration policy. And it’s in the New York Times.
For starters, the article muddies its thesis and conclusions by failing to talk about the race of its ‘American’ statistics or interview subjects. Are we meant to read ‘people’ as ‘white natural-born citizens’ in context?
Fears about immigration are printed as facts. A couple of concerned citizens, one an immigrant herself, recite the old chestnuts about immigrants as dangerous criminals who drain public resources. These people are wrong — immigration grows the economy, and it doesn’t bring crime — but I’m yet to read an mainstream publication article titled “SOME OLD PEOPLE WRONG.” For that matter, why not spend a sentence on the effects of NAFTA, and on immigration policy’s merging with criminal law in the last twenty years, if you’re going to let someone regurgitate an email forward about how immigrants these days are “different”? As with so many issues, conservative-mindset ideas are presented as facts, and facts aren’t presented.
Meanwhile, young people like immigrants because they work hard and like The Parent Trap. Kids ages 18-35 these days, with their skateboards and their absence of data-backed policy initiatives! This is worse than the garden-variety equal time fallacy, in which “The Earth is flat” and “The Earth is round” are both validated. This is “The Earth is flat” against “People should just deal with the fact that the Earth is flat.” As far as the media is concerned, the truth about immigration isn’t worth the space to print it.
There’s also a garbled, specious claim that (white) people didn’t live in cities, where the immigrants are, until recently. Presumably, these white people were living in Real America, not New York City. Sound familiar?
All of this is not to say that people of color aren’t mentioned. They are.
Ms. Patrick, 22, said the gap reflected what each group saw as normal. In her view, current immigration levels — legal and illegal — represent “the natural course of history.”
As children, after all, her generation watched “Sesame Street” with Hispanic characters, many of them sat in classrooms that were a virtual United Nations, and now they marry across ethnic lines in record numbers. Their children are even adopting mixed monikers like “Mexipino,” (Mexican and Filipino) and “Blaxican” (black and Mexican).
That “multiculti” (short for multicultural) United States is not without challenges. Aparna Malladi, 31, a graduate student at Florida International University originally from India, said that when she first entered laboratories in Miami, it took a while for her to learn the customs.
“I didn’t know that when I enter a room, I have to greet everyone and say goodbye when I leave,” Ms. Malladi said. “People thought I was being rude.”
Still, in interviews across the nation, young people emphasized the benefits of immigrants.
So, Ms. Patrick, who’s 22 years old, and who may or may not be white, is fine with ‘illegal’ immigration, and the trials of her statistically inferred mixed-race child (who disconcertingly refers to himself or herself as ‘Mexipino’) are illustrated by an Indian grad student not knowing to say goodbye upon leaving a room. And despite this grad student’s rudeness, young people are OK with immigrants. Truly, this is the Sandra Lee Kwanzaa cake of person-of-color profiles.
And finally, research from the Brookings Institution is referenced, showing that cities across the American Southwest have a lower percentage of white kids vs. kids of color than they do of white old people vs. old people of color. It’s not broken down by race or neighborhood or immigration status; it’s just white and non-white. Your guess about what this chart could show, devoid of context, is as good as mine. People of color don’t often retire in the Southwest? It’s hard for old white people to make old non-white friends?
Hey, maybe that last one is an issue. In terms of differences in attitude toward immigration, it seems more useful to discuss it in terms of exposure and personal experience — to say that non-Latino people who know Latinos, or who have seen Latinos somewhere other than on cable news, are less likely to be afraid of them. And as America’s demographics change, and as its cities and suburbs desegregate, it becomes harder to scare voters with racialized terms like “illegal immigration.”
What the article gets right is that the policy dialogue — and, point in fact, the media dialogue — is for and by the old, white, sheltered people. And it’s not enough to wait for them to die; the economic and legislative disparities that segregate our communities and foster racial resentment are still in effect.
And there’s no guarantee that the current anti-immigration wave will just break and dissipate on its own, or that young people will magically get informed about the issues. The principles that guide our work toward humane policies are gut-level. But the policy work itself is very complicated, and it’s easy to get told lies about.
The “age” angle, the “culture war” angle, is cute, because it moves the conversation away from race and away from accountability. That’s only good for people who don’t have to think about race. Immigration is a race issue. Talking about it in any other way is a waste of time. And everyone who says otherwise needs to be pushed back on.
Winning the fight for a just immigration policy may involve engaging with old people. It will definitely involve engaging with old media, and new media. And it won’t happen at all until we put control of the story back in the hands of its main characters.
The Right Says the All-American Girl Isn’t American Enough
May 18th
The ascent of the deceptively beautiful Rima Fakih to the throne of Miss USA is a matter of national security! At least, that’s what the megaphoned culture police would have us all believe. And radio talk show host and commentator Debbi Schlussel is leading the charge:
It’s a sad day in America but a very predictable one, given the politically correct, Islamo-pandering climate in which we’re mired. The Hezbollah-supporting Shi’ite Muslim, Miss Michigan Rima Fakih-whose bid for the pageant was financed by an Islamic terrorist and immigration fraud perpetrator-won the Miss USA contest. I was on top of this story before anyone, telling you about whom Fakih is and her extremist and deadly ties.
Schlussel is joined by Michelle Malkin, Daniel Pipes and a backroom full of conservative bloggers sounding off about the Miss USA winner and the associated perils of public health insurance, affirmative action, open borders and the kitchen sink. But what is this really about?
It’s about apple pie verses baklava. No, really. Fakih is the quintessential assimilation story: the good immigrant who follows the rules, embraces American ideas (the good and the bad) and somehow still falls short being a “real American.”
But according to the Donald Trump Miss USA script book, Fakih is supposed to be the 21st century all-American girl. She’s beautiful, but in that non-threatening, quirky, clumsy romantic comedy kind of way. She has an (albeit imperfectly informed) opinion about hot topics of the day. She has that schoolgirl-makes-good-in-hard-times storyline going for her. And Fakih even has the pre-requisite sex scandal, which requires her to rise above and succeed in the end. But those hard-driving sexist millennial mad men can’t win this time.
If it were anyone else, news of the new Miss USA would be just another water cooler time suck. But the American-identity gatekeepers will have none of that. It’s not conformity for the sake of national unity or cultural cohesiveness they want–Fakih’s story gives the lie to the idea that assimilation will save you. These rightwing voices want cultural dominance. And before you know it, the grotesque stereotype of Fakih they’re peddling will be used in some surreal graphic on the Senate floor to make a spurious point about public health care and immigrants.
Lebanese Immigrant Wins Miss USA and Miss Oklahoma on SB 1070 [Video]
May 17th
A 24-year old Arab-American won the title of Miss USA in the annual beauty pageant held Sunday night in Las Vegas. Rima Fakih, a Lebanese immigrant, who moved to the United States as a baby, is the first woman of Arab descent to win the pageant title.
The Detroit Free Press newspaper reported that a large crowd gathered in Dearborn, which is heavily Arab-American, at a restaurant to watch the contest.
“We have culture. We have beauty. We have history, and today we made history,” Zouheir Alawieh, 51, told the Free Press. “This is the real face of Arab Americans, not the stereotypes you hear about,” he added.
Too bad the only “normal” portrayal of an Arab American in any recent bit of American pop culture had to be in a Donald Trump-produced show with women parading around in bathing suits.
Also, check out Miss Oklahoma voicing her approval of Arizona’s SB 1070 during the interview round, after the cut.
Friday Twitterbreak: Ethnic Studies, Schmethnic Studies
May 14th
I couldn’t find a screengrabbable tweet of my favorite quote of the week, so I just have to tell you about it manually. Here it is:
Nobody taught me anything about my cultural heritage in school.
That’s white right-wing blogger Jammie Wearing Fool, and yes, that link goes to Pandagon blogger Jesse Taylor’s teardown of the statement, rather than to the statement itself. Buffer zones, y’all.
On to the tweets! Law & Order is being canceled after 20 years! Mary J. Blige as Nina Simone! Elena Kagan played softball! And the hits keep coming!
As always, you can follow us on Twitter at @racialjustice. The ColorLines Tumblr is also highly recommended. Like the magazine, but with more charts and funny videos.
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And finally:
Nice work this week, everyone.
5 Real Reasons to Ignore Pew’s Arizona SB1070 Poll
May 13th
As opponents of immigration will happily tell you, polling companies Rasmussen and Pew have both released surveys around Arizona’s SB 1070, the results of which show support for a law which many have said unconstitionally legalizes racial profiling. But is it that simple?
Rasmussen’s in-Arizona poll has already gotten pushback for its methods, and for the company’s right-leaning track record. Pew’s got a good reputation, but its new national poll, conducted last week and showing “broad appeal” (59% approval) for the law, has its problems too — both in execution and concept. Here’s the grains of salt you should be taking with it.
1. Not enough cell phones were called. From Pew’s statement on methodology, “a national sample of 994 adults living in the continental United States, 18 years of age or older, from May 6-9, 2010 (662 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 332 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 123 who had no landline telephone).” Pew itself has done research showing the age-based slant that landline polls exhibit — and on a race-heavy issue like this, we’d do well to remember that people of color, especially Latinos, are some of the biggest cell phone users. How would this survey have turned out if they’d called 994 cell phone numbers? Who couldn’t pay the phone bill this month, and didn’t get called as a result? How many people do you know who only have a landline?
2. Some people have jobs, school, kids, second jobs, and other reasons not to be at home. Some people don’t. Who’s at home in the middle of the day, has a land line, and answers it to talk to a stranger? Retirees. Who watches Glenn Beck? Ding ding ding. I’m not saying your elderly uncle back in Oklahoma is a racist; I’m just saying you delete his email forwards without reading them, so you can be civil at Thanksgiving.
3. The survey was only conducted in English! Self-explanatory, and pretty unforgivable on a topic like this. This scrambles the numbers for Spanish-speaking households across America, of any ethnicity and status, as well as knocking out big chunks of multi-language urban centers like New York, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. Arizona itself spoke more Spanish than English until the 1940s. For that matter, why poll on a subject like this without breaking down the results by race?
4. Phrasing matters. Remember the poll from a couple months back in which respondents supported gays in the military, but not homosexuals? (Yes.) In this survey, Pew asked people if they supported “… allowing police to question anyone they think might be in the country illegally.” What if they had changed “illegally” to “without documents”?
5. and the big one: So what?
I’m not a pollster or a statistician, and my comments shouldn’t be taken as anything more or less scientific than common sense. (If you’re a professional in this area, I’d love to hear from you.) And I know that good pollsters understand the weaknesses they’re up against, and use tested methods of making their work as relevant as possible. And of course, no one poll tells the whole story. Here’s one saying that support in Arizona for SB1070 has dropped from 70% to 52% in just a few weeks. Here’s a poll saying that 70% of Latinos oppose the law. I haven’t seen a poll that compares against political engagement, or familiarity with the issue.
But ultimately, referendums and polls can’t inform issues of human life. The rights of the few are not to be determined by the will of the many. The ideal that guides our society, cynicism aside, is true equality for each member, regardless of frequency of occurrence within a given sample.
Japanese internment camps probably would have polled really well (“Agree or disagree, a nation must protect residents at risk of remote brainwashing by Charlie”), along with the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow, Operation Wetback, the Patriot Act. These initiatives all looked sensible on paper, because they were designed to. They all happened with rational people watching. And the populations they targeted were small, i.e. “minorities.” Which of these small, targeted stains, do you think, will wash clean first?
This Pew poll is something of a gift to those with dogeared Heritage Foundation pamphlets, because it lets them move the conversation away from other, less convenient numbers, and to scare politicians to the right in the 2010 election with phrases like “out of touch with real Americans.” And so, title of this post aside, this poll can’t be dismissed out of hand. Understanding how it was made, and what it says to whom, is a step toward making ‘vulnerable’ a subset of ‘human,’ and in popularizing justice.
1,000,000 FaceBook Users Support Humiliating Welfare Recipients
May 10th
The Facebook fan page “Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!,” which was launched in December 2009, garnered more than 500,000 fans. Its goal, to pressure Saturday Night Live producers to let Golden Girls star Betty White host the show, became a reality this past weekend when she hosted the program.
The Facebook page organizing model is garnering so much media attention and political support that it’s now being replicated for political organizing. In March, a page called “MAKING DRUG TEST MANDATORY FOR WELFARE” was started, and in only a few weeks, they have garnered the support of more than 1,020,000 Facebook users — users that support mandatory drug testing as a prerequisite for public assistance programs.
Part of the success of the page may be that it hosts racist jokes and images and not much else. Other than the title of the page, there is no written description of their campaign.
No one on the page mentions that drug testing welfare recipients is a humiliating invasion of privacy. Or that the proposal is unconstitutional: Michigan is the only state to attempt to impose drug testing of welfare recipients — a policy that was struck down as unconstitutional in 2003.
The ACLU found that drug testing welfare recipients as a condition of eligibility is a policy that is “scientifically, fiscally, and constitutionally unsound.” It also further criminalizes something that should be treated as an illness.
According to a 1996 study by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, differences between the proportion of welfare and non-welfare recipients using illegal drugs are statistically insignificant — which is to say, the success of the fan page is based on prejudice about the people who are on those programs
Images seen on the site:
With the caption: “hes definally on some sort of drug” [sic]