Amy Goodman has an article in CommonDreams this week. In it, she gives an interesting historical fact of the White House, future home of Barack Obama – it was built by slaves. At first, I thought Amy may have been caught up in the whole “this is evidence we live in a post-racial society” crap – but of course, Amy delivered.
The way the article is written is great – Goodman manages to tell a story, add interesting research and call on Obama to ban torture in only a page of captivating reading (and I have a hard time reading online, too!) Okay, enough with the Amy Goodman gushing though….
She interviewed Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a professor at Princeton, for the piece. Lacewell is quoted as saying:
“There are two African-American girls, little girl children, who are going to grow up with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as their home address. That's an astonishing difference for our country. It does not mean the end of racial inequality. It does not mean that most little black girls growing up with their residence on the south side of Chicago or in Harlem, or Latino boys and girls growing up at their addresses, that the world is all better for them. But it does mean that there is something possible here."
I think this quote does what the media glosses over: elucidates the fact that this DOES NOT MEAN THE END OF RACIAL INEQUALITY.
I’m sick of hearing that Barack Obama’s future presidency is “proof” that the different faces that make up our nation can get along with each other. I agree that it is proof that the nation has changed, but it would take a lot more to prove to me that we’re no longer a country deeply divided because of the color of our peoples’ skin.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Keith Olbermann on Prop 8
As we all unfortunately know, Prop 8 - banning gay marriage - passed in California last Tuesday. One of my friends sent me an e-mail with this video link in it, a "special comment" clip from Countdown. In it, Keith Olbermann gives his personal opinion on how tragic the passing of Prop 8 really is and challenges supporters of the ballot measure to think of gay marriage in a different way.
I think this move by Olbermann to be pretty interesting. I have yet to do extensive research on it, but I'm kind of curious to see if conservative media critics are labelling this as proof of "liberal media bias," ignoring it, or praising it for an open admittance to bias.
It's also become somewhat of a viral video hit - this version of the video has gotten 300,000 views alone. It's also everywhere on Facebook. Viral videos have become invariably interesting to me in the past week+ as I've been doing research for articles (hearing Ari Melber speak, too, was great). It really is amazing how quickly these things spread.
I think this move by Olbermann to be pretty interesting. I have yet to do extensive research on it, but I'm kind of curious to see if conservative media critics are labelling this as proof of "liberal media bias," ignoring it, or praising it for an open admittance to bias.
It's also become somewhat of a viral video hit - this version of the video has gotten 300,000 views alone. It's also everywhere on Facebook. Viral videos have become invariably interesting to me in the past week+ as I've been doing research for articles (hearing Ari Melber speak, too, was great). It really is amazing how quickly these things spread.
McCain All Over NBC
When I'm checking out the media I've been following (NBC/MSNBC and CommonDreams), I generally watch MSNBC at my home. However, my cable has been out and there's what? like an hour of news on NBC all day and so I've been browsing the NBC site lately. Firstly, I am quite astonished at how much the site is dominated by the TV shows they air, which I suppose is not surprising since it's the sitcoms, not the news that make them the dollahs. It was still amazed, partly because I watch NBC for news not for sitcoms, and partly because to see these two purposes together on the same site (ie: pure entertainment and NEWS) it's almost completely understandable that network news can be so...bad. This, of course, is inexcusable when you're running the journalistic section of the network but it just drove home the point for me that NBC has two goals in mind for their network: to entertain and to inform - and they've apparently learned to do both at the same time.
A second, somewhat surprising thing I noticed is that, when on the News section of the NBC page, 5 out of 7 total stories are about McCain. Only one mention of Obama and it's in a comparison piece between Obama and McCain. McCain is definitely not off of the radar just yet, and it seems that Palin hasn't even thought about disappearing.
This article, which lasts a whole five paragraphs, outlines the difference between Cindy McCain and Sarah Palin's views on abortion. I have two points of contention here:
1. Who cares?
2. If you're going to cover differing viewpoints on something as controversial as abortion, at least explain them a bit better and oh, I don't know, maybe point out the dangers in both views?
Another article I was potentially interested, titled "In a diverse U.S., a mostly white RNC" isn't even on the site anymore. The rest of the articles are all babble about this little girl that wrote to Barack Obama, or the "wackiest" stories of the election.
Oh boy. I think I'm going back to watching Olbermann and Maddow tonight if my cable is repared. Let's keep the fingers crossed, or I may just have to watch that stupid Obama penpal girl.
A second, somewhat surprising thing I noticed is that, when on the News section of the NBC page, 5 out of 7 total stories are about McCain. Only one mention of Obama and it's in a comparison piece between Obama and McCain. McCain is definitely not off of the radar just yet, and it seems that Palin hasn't even thought about disappearing.
This article, which lasts a whole five paragraphs, outlines the difference between Cindy McCain and Sarah Palin's views on abortion. I have two points of contention here:
1. Who cares?
2. If you're going to cover differing viewpoints on something as controversial as abortion, at least explain them a bit better and oh, I don't know, maybe point out the dangers in both views?
Another article I was potentially interested, titled "In a diverse U.S., a mostly white RNC" isn't even on the site anymore. The rest of the articles are all babble about this little girl that wrote to Barack Obama, or the "wackiest" stories of the election.
Oh boy. I think I'm going back to watching Olbermann and Maddow tonight if my cable is repared. Let's keep the fingers crossed, or I may just have to watch that stupid Obama penpal girl.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Some Interesting Pieces...
First, some thoughts on a topic we discussed in class today. After watching the ThinkProgress video on how much of the mainstream media are insisting that America is a center-right country, I’ve become a bit confused about how America views President-elect Obama. Karl Rove seems to suggest that the American public was willing to vote for Obama because of his “center-right” platform and yet it was ultra-conservatives like Rove who attacked Obama the entire election for secretly harboring extremist, socialist views. I can’t get these two portrayals of Obama to add up. It’s as if conservatives are now re-painting Obama as a centrist candidate, something they probably would have been reluctant to say during his actual campaign. So if the public voted for Obama because he was a center-right candidate, then what should one make out of the former portrayals of Obama as a dangerous radical? Did they simply not work? Or what if the public really did think of Obama as an ultra-liberal, socialist, “spread the wealth around” candidate? Why the need to re-posit him? I guess the question is: Why did America vote for Obama, anyway?
Norm Solomon has an article on CommonDreams this week called “A Mandate for Spreading the Wealth.” Since I had the opportunity to have dinner with Norm Soloman (with a number of other Park students) when I was a freshman, I’ve been kinda-sorta-sometimes following his writing. In his piece, he claims that Barack Obama does, indeed, have a responsibility to redistribute the incredibly unbalanced location of wealth in this country and also seems to think that this is the reason America voted for him.
Solomon writes:
This fall, the candidates and their surrogates endlessly repeated such arguments. As much as anything else, the presidential campaign turned into a dispute over the wisdom of "spreading the wealth." Most voters were comfortable enough with the concept to send its leading advocate to the Oval Office.
And later:
Obama and his activist base won a mandate for strong government action on behalf of economic fairness. But since election night, countless pundits and politicians have somberly warned the president-elect to govern from "the center." Presumably, such governance would preclude doing much to spread the wealth. Before that sort of conventional wisdom further hardens like political cement, national discussions should highlight options for moving toward a more egalitarian society.
For the most part, I’d say I have to agree. Perhaps McCain’s attack ads just weren’t scary enough for America. I hope we’re at a point where re-distributing the wealth is no longer a smear, but a reason to vote for a candidate.
Another writer I semi-regularly follow and who semi-regularly writes has a piece that I found interesting. Katha Pollitt has “Sayonara, Sarah” in The Nation this week. Pollitt begins in her typical sarcastic voice but moves to a semi-serious question: What did Palin do for women? I’m not sure I agree with all her points, nor am I confident in my understanding of where Pollitt crosses the line between sarcasm and seriousness, but I really liked parts of her last paragraph, namely:
It is hard even to remember now how iconoclastic Hillary was--how hard it was for her to negotiate femininity and ambition, to be warm but not weak, smart but not cold, attractive but not sexy, dynamic but not threatening. Only a year ago, it was a real question whether men would vote for a woman or, for that matter, whether women would. Palin may have been unfit for high office, but just by running she showed there was more than one mode for a female politician.
This, however, I’m not sure I agree with:
After almost two years of the whole country watching two very different women in the White House race, it finally seems normal.
Norm Solomon has an article on CommonDreams this week called “A Mandate for Spreading the Wealth.” Since I had the opportunity to have dinner with Norm Soloman (with a number of other Park students) when I was a freshman, I’ve been kinda-sorta-sometimes following his writing. In his piece, he claims that Barack Obama does, indeed, have a responsibility to redistribute the incredibly unbalanced location of wealth in this country and also seems to think that this is the reason America voted for him.
Solomon writes:
This fall, the candidates and their surrogates endlessly repeated such arguments. As much as anything else, the presidential campaign turned into a dispute over the wisdom of "spreading the wealth." Most voters were comfortable enough with the concept to send its leading advocate to the Oval Office.
And later:
Obama and his activist base won a mandate for strong government action on behalf of economic fairness. But since election night, countless pundits and politicians have somberly warned the president-elect to govern from "the center." Presumably, such governance would preclude doing much to spread the wealth. Before that sort of conventional wisdom further hardens like political cement, national discussions should highlight options for moving toward a more egalitarian society.
For the most part, I’d say I have to agree. Perhaps McCain’s attack ads just weren’t scary enough for America. I hope we’re at a point where re-distributing the wealth is no longer a smear, but a reason to vote for a candidate.
Another writer I semi-regularly follow and who semi-regularly writes has a piece that I found interesting. Katha Pollitt has “Sayonara, Sarah” in The Nation this week. Pollitt begins in her typical sarcastic voice but moves to a semi-serious question: What did Palin do for women? I’m not sure I agree with all her points, nor am I confident in my understanding of where Pollitt crosses the line between sarcasm and seriousness, but I really liked parts of her last paragraph, namely:
It is hard even to remember now how iconoclastic Hillary was--how hard it was for her to negotiate femininity and ambition, to be warm but not weak, smart but not cold, attractive but not sexy, dynamic but not threatening. Only a year ago, it was a real question whether men would vote for a woman or, for that matter, whether women would. Palin may have been unfit for high office, but just by running she showed there was more than one mode for a female politician.
This, however, I’m not sure I agree with:
After almost two years of the whole country watching two very different women in the White House race, it finally seems normal.
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