The media isn’t diverse – and this leads to appalling reporting | The Guardian |
The well-deserved outcry regarding the New York Times’ insufficiently critical profile [NYT] about a Nazi in the American heartland has exposed a commonly held myth about journalism: that our profession is objective. This is a lie.
When a reporter at the American “paper of record” can admit [NYT] that his story didn’t hold up and their editor chose to assign significant resources towards it and published it anyway, journalism is clearly not based on meritocracy or neutrality.
Rather, with journalism jobs going to white people 87% of the time in the US and a staggering 94% in Britain, journalism is practically a white-people-only club that will reward mediocre white journalists before it will advance excellent journalists of color who can bring needed perspectives.
Our racially monolithic mainstream press is particularly ill equipped to cover an increasingly non-white world when it declares itself to be “objective”. Like other parts of the society, journalism operates within an ideology which Bell Hooks Institute describes as “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.
Through different means, Breitbart and the New York Times can both reinforce this ideology when they write about Nazis. But all liberal media outlets (it’s not just the Times) are more dangerous in doing this work, because they refuse to wrestle with their own subjectivity.
[About the author: Steven William Thrasher, a contributing editor at BuzzFeed, is the 2012 National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association’s Journalist of the Year. Steven spent three years as a staff writer for the Village Voice, where he wrote long format features and investigative articles, including 20 cover stories. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Out, Rolling Stone, the Daily Beast, the Advocate, and Time Out New York.]
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“The Schneerson Collection belongs to Russia,” Putin says | Reuters | Feb. 19, 2013 |
Dispute over the Jewish books and documents claimed by the Chabad-Lubavitch group adds to tensions between Moscow and Washington, which have seen ties deteriorate over human rights and security issues since Putin’s return to the Kremlin in May.
“The Schneerson Collection belongs to Russia,” Putin said in a grand new Jewish museum in Moscow, in referring to texts held in Russian libraries and archives, some of them confiscated by the Soviet Union from Nazi forces during World War Two.
An excellent read in The Atlantic which I hope to cover later …
An extraordinary journey across the globe by Andrew Anglin from being an antiracist vegan to the alt-right’s most vicious troll and propagandist.
On this journey reporter Luke O’Brien is himself targeted …
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After a year of terror, the Jews of Whitefish, Montana, look ahead (Photo credit: JTA)
Key words: Whitefish Montana – Jewish community Gersh – Richard Spencer – psychopath trolls – sex with under-age girls in Philippines – village of Duterte – Krasnodar Krai – Cossacks Nationalists – Ukraine and Weev – Alt-right useful idiots – death of Peter Smit
