The GFEM Media database just launched:
“Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media (GFEM.org) is a new online portal that allows media funders to learn about quality media projects. Our intent is to create a destination site for grantmakers who want to support public interest media.”
Check our HV entry.
[More from Mexico. This is last story by slain newspaper journalist Armando Rodriguez, of El Diario de Juárez , translated by Molly Molloy, research librarian at New Mexico State University- Las Cruces…]
The man assassinated
Tuesday night in the Diaz Ordaz viaduct
was
a street clown,
according to the state authority.
Nevertheless, this person has not been identified,
but it was reported
that he was between 25 and 30 years old,
1.77 meters tall,
delicate,
light brown complexion,
short black hair.
The victim’s face was painted as a clown,
green with a red nose,
reported the State Prosecutor’s office.
He wore a red polo shirt,
a navy blue sweatshirt, blue jeans,
white underwear,
gray socks labeled USA,
gray and white Converse tennis
and a dark beret.
The body was found in the Diaz Ordaz viaduct,
at Norzagaray Blvd in the colonia Bellavista, on November 11 at 9:40 pm.
The body was found on its side,
with bullet wounds in the right side,
chest and head.
At this time, the motive for the murder is unknown as well as the
identities of the murderers.
[Scott Carrier is working on an HV Hour about the murders in Juárez, Mexico, starting with his NPR series, then moving onto the current much, much worse situation. The following are some emails from Scott…]
Yesterday Armando Rodriguez, the journalist who’d written most of the stories (901) on this year’s executions in Juárez Mexico, was himself executed:
Juarez journalist slain
El Pasa Times staff report 11/13/2008
A Juarez journalist known for his work as a crime reporter for El Diario de Juarez was gunned down Thursday morning in front of his home, the newsapaper’s Web site reported.
Armando Rodriguez was preparing to take his daughter to school in Juarez when a gunman approached his car and fired several shots at point-blank range, according to accounts provided by the newspaper. Rodriguez reportedly died at the scene.
The assailant then fled to a waiting car carrying other men and sped off in an unknown direction.
Rodriguez was the police beat reporter for El Diario de Juarez and had become an expert on the brutal drug cartel violence that has gripped Juarez for the last several years.
“He was a good person and a good reporter,” said KINT-TV (Univision Ch. 26) reporter Pedro Villagrana, who has worked closely with Rodriguez for more than a decade.
Word of Rodriguez’ slaying quickly spread throughout the Juarez and El Paso journalism community. Some members of the Juarez media including his colleagues at El Diario de Juarez gathered at the crime scene to mourn his death, according to the newspaper Web site.
Juárez has always been a violent place. No rule of law. People get killed and nobody is arrested, not even an investigation. What’s new now is the rate of murders. There are more than 100 executions each month in Juárez, 1300 this year alone. Last year there were about 300.
Paula Flores attends the burial of her daughter Sagrario Gonzalez,
a maquiladora worker abducted and killed in April 1998.
(Photo © Julián Cardona)
(anyone know the source of this?…)
Demographics of American Newspapers:
1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country
2. People who think they run can the country read the Washington Post.
3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and are very good at crossword puzzles.
4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but do not really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.
5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who would not mind running the country — if they could find the time — and if they did not have to leave Southern California to do it.
6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a poor job of it, thank you very much.
7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
8 The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running (from) another country but need the baseball scores.
10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it, but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist gay dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided of course, that they are not Republicans.
11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.
12. The Bozeman Daily Chronicle is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something to wrap it in.
…none of these is read by the guy in the big white building in the nation’s capital.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
026 Prime Candidates: Portraits of Past Presidential Primaries
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-12-28 (Originally: 2008-08-27)
“Prime Candidates” (52:00 mp3):
The plight of pols on the campaign trail:
From the 1980 primary: politicians who fancy themselves president tromp thru the mill town of Claremont, New Hampshire. Produced for NPR by Larry Massett and Art Silverman, with Betty Rogers.
From the 2000 primary: The media spin myths out of misquotes; produced by Alex Blumberg and Ira Glass for the “Primary” episode of This American Life.
From the 2003 California Gubernatorial Recall: Douglas Fleishut and the Language Removal Service concoct the world’s first wordless political debate in their “California Recall Project.”
From the 2008 primary: Losers in the March “Super Tuesday” vote re-appear, w/ music by Robert Wyatt and Bruce Springsteen, from Peter Bochan‘s series Presidential Shortcuts.
Photo: Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller administering the oath of office to Benjamin Harrison on the east portico of the U. S. Capitol, March 4, 1889; from the Library of Congress “I Do Solemnly Swear…”: Presidential Inaugurations.
Every once in a while an interview approaches audio art. This interviewee is Don Liljenquist, the elderly homeless man Bob Novak hit (& run) with his black Corvette. Liljenquist was at George Washington University Medical Center. He’s questioned by WMAL-AM DC reporter Troy Russell; “Novak Victim” (2:09 mp3):
The new book by Bush’s ex-spokseman, Scott McClellen (What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception) has the press blaming the Bush admin and blaming the author, but nary a news item about where the real blame lies in misleading America on the facts of Iraq: “”And through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers… The national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.”
Scottie’s book has little new about how the White House sold the War or outed CIA-op Ms. Plame. What is new is his opinion that the people he saw daily on the other side of podium, i.e. the DC press corps, weren’t doing their jobs: “The media would neglect their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding”
The media have rose as one to ignore the the accusations in their typical hear-no-evil fashion; as in this from the LA Times, D.C. journalists to Scott McClellan: Huh?.
There are a few exceptions:
Editor & Publisher, Media, Who Got War Wrong, Take Exception to Scott McClellan’s Charges— “Most, on Wednesday, still defended their coverage. But few have ever really come to terms with the magnitude of their failure.”
CJR, Pre-Iraq War Coverage: “Pretty Good Job†or “Embarrassing?†and Yellin: News Execs Pushed For Positive Bush Stories— “When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings.”
Salon, Scott McClellan on the “liberal media”— “The New York Times and The Washington Post both trumpet the fact that McClellan made statements harshly critical of Bush. But they completely ignore McClellan’s far more significant indictment of their ‘deferential,’ Bush-enabling conduct. Isn’t it rather self-evidently newsworthy that Bush’s own press secretary blamed the American media for allowing Bush to get away with all sorts of falsehoods?”
The Salon article refers to an excellent earlier press self-eval by Howard Kurtz:
WA Post (2004), The Post on WMDs An Inside Story: Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn’t Make Front Page— “‘The paper was not front-paging stuff,’ said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. ‘Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?'”
And congrats to Jake Tapper for extensive press-related quotes from the book:
ABC News, McClellan: Media During Run-Up to Iraq Were “Complicit Enablers”—
“And through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers. Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it… the media would neglect their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding. Was the president winning or losing the argument? How were Democrats responding? What were the electoral implications? What did the polls say? And the truth–about the actual nature of the threat posed by Saddam, the right way to confront it, and the possible risks of military conflict–would get largely left behind…”
“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should have never come as such a surprise. The public should have been made much more aware, before the fact, of the uncertainties, doubts, and caveats that underlay the intelligence about the regime of Saddam hussein. The administration did little to convey those nuances to the people, the press should have picked up the slack but largely failed to do so because their focus was elsewhere–on covering the march to war, instead of the necessity of war.
In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”
“The network that can find a way to shift from excessively covering controversy, the conventional horse race and image-driven coverage to give a greater emphasis to who is right and who is wrong, who is telling the truth and who is not, and the larger truths about our society and our world might achieve some amazing results in our fast-changing media environment.”
The press is likely comforatable continuing to pretend it wasn’t the principle percussionist beating the 2003 war-drum. The public, however, may not be: Make Mainstream Media Answer for Spreading Propaganda.
Terry Gross (Fresh Air host) delivers some humble, humorous, and educational remarks to the 2008 Graduates of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
By respecting a guest’s right to decline to answer a personal question, by giving him or her the responsibility to define what’s going too far, I’m giving myself the freedom to ask absolutely anything. Having been assured that I won’t invade his or her privacy, a guest is more likely to answer seemingly personal questions than he or she might have been otherwise.
[Mr. Massett explains why the media explanations of the mortgage crisis explain nothing.]
When the US credit markets began to blow up last year, every newspaper in the country served up two explanations for the mess: “sub-prime mortgage” and “collaterized debt obligation,” or “CDO.”
A sub-prime mortgage sounds bad on the face of it, so no problem there. But CDO has no obvious meaning. Only a few days ago I watched an NPR journalist try to figure it out from the words themselves (“let’s see, ‘collateralized’ refers to ‘collateral,’ so there must be a thing like a house or a car someplace, and ‘debt’ means, well, debt, and an ‘obligation’ means, um, you have to do something, right?”) The usual fudge is to drape the riddle with adjectives like “opaque,” “complex,” and “hard to understand,” as if these were explanatory principles. The phrase “complex and opaque financial instruments known as CDO’s” doesn’t tell you anything, really, but at least it sounds bad. Dern near as bad as a sub-prime mortgage. Moving right along, in other news…
The trouble is CDO’s were never meant for the average investor, or the average journalist. They are Wall Street inventions designed for the big players, investment banks like Citi or Merill or Bear Sterns. To understand them you have to think like an investment bank. This is no harder than thinking like a Martian. More…
MediaStorm: Iraqi Kurdistan by Ed Kashi is a photo-portrait of Iraqi Kurdistan made from photo stills into a flipbook-style animation .
“Iraqi Kurdistan is an expansive look into the daily lives of the Kurdish people of northern Iraq. These images provide an alternative perspective on a changing culture, one different from the destruction and discord that dominates so much media coverage of the region. Here are policemen seated on the floor, eating lunch and laughing, old men taking care of their fields and young girls celebrating at a suburban birthday party.
There is also hardship and tribulation, to be sure; the Iraqi Kurds endured generations of brutality under Saddam Hussein. His genocidal campaigns cost close to 200,000 lives.
Think MTV Street Team ’08:
“MTV’s Choose or Lose and the John S and James L Knight Foundation present Street Team ’08: 51 state-based citizen journalists covering election ’08 from a youth perspective. Armed with laptops and video cameras, and charged with uncovering the untold political stories that matter most to young people in their states, they will submit weekly reports online and via mobile.”
Philanthropy News Digest “MTV Taps Citizen Journalists to Cover Youth-Centric Election Issues:”
“We hope to find out whether or not our most important political event — the election of a president —matters to young people, and whether or not if matters more when it comes to them through the lens of their issues and the screen of their cell phone,” said Eric Newton, vice president of journalism at the Knight Foundation. “We also hope to find out what important youth issues are being overlooked by traditional media as the Street Team coverage goes beyond the presidential horse race.”
Graham Smith (aka, the athenian), one of NPR’s Iraq inquisitors, observes a disturbing “journalistic tic” wherein the newscaster segues from bloody-to-bloody story with “In other violence….” Next, it’ll be “In Ultra Violence….”
From 2004, a phone message left by a WHYY reporter to laptoplobbyist.com. She was frustrated with their spam. Her apology wasn’t enuf to get her job back after getting fired for (0:16 mp3):
Turning on the news yesterday I couldn’t help notice that LA is on fire…again. All my life it seems LA has been on fire–in one way or another. Floods, fires, mudslides, celebrity antics and the slow disaster of constant traffic—a theme park of natural, and un-natural, disasters. I’m not too worried when I see Southern California’s flirtation with the apocalypse continuing, because I know it’s prepared. I’ll never forget, growing-up in North Hollywood, all the preparedness drills we went through in school.
More…
NPR reporter Tom Bullock had a nice music-laden commentary this Morning Edition about leaving Baghdad for the last time, “Journalist’s Assignment in Iraq Ends” (5:47 mp3):
Military crackdown on protestors in Rangoon, journalist shot:
From This Just In via Funny or Die, “Bullies Vs. Sissies:”
The LA Weekly article, “Night of the Living Dead,” is an unflattering portrait of Pacifica station KPFK, “where North Korea meets North Hollywood,” and its outgoing GM. For those who enjoy heavy doses of bile and vitriol with your journalism:
During her more than five-year tenure, Georgia has plunged the listener-run station into a dark hole, alienated its staff, pared down its already marginal audience, allowed its signal to decay, and filled the airtime with loonies, ranters and fringies… Not that any of the above made much difference, as Georgia’s bosses – those who run the local station’s board as well as the Pacifica network’s national board – are even loopier and less competent than she is. They’re a crew of slogan-chanting zombies, nary a one with any professional understanding of radio.
The Knight Citizen News Network has just published Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive, A digital literacy guide for the information age. Available as a free pdf or $10 dead-tree vers. The book fears not the feature; the chapters flow from “Digital Audio and Podcasting” and “How to Report News for the Web” to “FTP, MB, RSS, oh My!” (did you know a YottaByte is 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes, page 17) and even “How to Blog.”
via PRX Jake.
Just got reminded of this nice article Adam Burke wrote about our little HV operation: High Country News, “Radio: Spice for the ears,” October 2, 2006.
