http://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/pageSearch/updatedRecently Updated Pages on http://mediacrit.wetpaint.comen-usinfo@wetpaint.comTue, 18 Dec 2007 11:48:42 CSTTue, 18 Dec 2007 11:48:42 CSTwetpaint.com60http://www.wetpaint.com/img/logo.gifhttp://mediacrit.wetpaint.comWritten by Professor Mark Dery’s students in the Department of Journalism at NYU, Media Crit draws on press criticism, media theory, and cultural studies to examine the social roles, cultural effects, and ideological agendas of the media.http://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/%22World+Music%22+Journalism+%26+the+Marketing+of+MythsNashwaGhttp://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/%22World+Music%22+Journalism+%26+the+Marketing+of+Mythsre-added last set of changes that didn't save properlyTue, 18 Dec 2007 11:48:42 CSTby Nashwa Gewaily December 12, 2007

In an incisive 1999 Op/Ed piece in The New York Times titled “I Hate World Music,” former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne assailed the use of the term “world music” as “a way of relegating this ‘thing’ into the realm of something exotic and therefore cute, weird but safe, because exotica is beautiful but irrelevant.” Extending this observation to newspaper and magazine reporting on the wide array of music from around the globe highlights the exoticizing tendencies that still persist in American media approaches to foreign coverage. By preserving prototypical, generalized imagining of non-Western cultures and adhering to fixed ideas of national character, mainstream media in the U.S. oftentimes reinforce, with varying degrees of subtlety, the notion inherent to the American/“world” music dichotomy that “they are, by definition, not like us” (Byrne).

A common thread in problematic reporting in much of “world mus ic”
journalism is the reliance on pre-established narratives of the nature of a country and its people. A look at the reinforcement of widely disseminated cultural stereotypes associated with Brazil provides a classic example of the ethnic mythography underpinning frequent media depictions. Though the “myth of tropical exuberance” as part of Brazil’s fixed character has been tempered significantly over time since it was famously epitomized by Carmen Miranda’s iconic 1940s Hollywood persona as “Lady in the Tutti-Fruitti Hat,” this image “established a stereotype that lingers today — the vulgar, flashy, hyperkinetic…Latin”—a representation that continues to reverberate in American press (Dunn and Perrone 13).

This does not mean that all music journalism reduces “world music” genres to clichés of cultural objectification. In the case of Brazil, many articles in major publications touch upon or directly make reference to its large African population and its impact on aspects of Brazilian heritage, adding a layer of insight into the complex interweaving of ethnic influences on the development of sounds associated with the country. The Boston Globe, for instance, sheds light on this African presence within the variety of regional forms of samba in a February 2006 article titled “Lights! Music! Samba!; Carnaval Brasileiro Comes to Town,” which describes the group featured in the festival as performing “both the frenetic Rio style of samba and the slower Bahia style, which is imbued with the African heritage of the Brazilian northeast.” The New York Times similarly highlights distinctions within the samba genre itself in an April 2004 concert review, providing a comprehensive introduction to the role of samba in Brazilian life: “It can be a parade song pounded and shouted by thousands of people in a carnival procession, or it can be an intimate ballad. It can be a love song, a proclamation of local pride, an exploration of nostalgia or a subtle protest. It can be a pop ditty, a jazz exploration and an Afro-Brazilian celebration; it's almost always dance music.”

On the other end of the spectrum, however, are several instances of oversimplified characterizations and romanticized depictions of Brazilian music and the environment in which it is bred. Such inadequate and frequently misleading coverage ranges from flagrant typecasting to the questionable implications of descriptors commonly employed in association with Brazilian arts. A movie review featured in The Washington Post in July 2006 provides a clear example of indiscreet cultural essentialism in the frame it offers in understanding the milieu of the film’s setting: “Now, since it's set in Brazil, throw in Afro-Brazilian music, torrid weather, scabby buildings, a lot of beer and sweat and not much modesty. These are the people, after all, who invented the thong.”

Nation in a Nutshell
Seemingly more benign is the way in which Brazil and its musical exports are depicted as an intriguingly different, or “exotic,” foil to familiar Western/American ways. The “sultry, tropical, musical” Salvador, Bahia, presented in the Washington Post movie review conjures up an image of a city that parallels the “exotic journey to Rio de Janeiro” one can expect to take when listening to the bossa nova jazz of Philadelphia-based Mamaluco, according to an April 2006 feature in The Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Get a Taste of the Tropics.” In a similar style of semantic cliché, The Boston Globe promotes a concert by Brazilian singer CeU in its April 2007 events calendar, reducing the image of the Grammy-nominee to that of one of many “sultry Brazilian chanteuses,” and lauding the strength of her album as favoring alternative styles to the “ethereal junglism popular in Brazil.”

By repeating such tried-and-true descriptors as “sultry,” “seductive,” “tropical,” and “exotic,” in reference to Brazilian arts, mainstream American news outlets reinforce associations of the nation and its people with imagery that fits neatly into a simplified, pre-conceived rendering of Brazil as a far-removed but enticing locale, unique in its ubiquitous and uninhibited sensuality.

The pattern observed here extends well beyond popular conceptions of Brazilians alone. An article in The New York Times, for instance, is representative of the endless stream of Orientalist clichés all too frequently employed in describing music and culture exported from the Middle East. Focusing on the presence of Arab culture in France (“In the Heart of Paris, An African Beat”), the feature sets the scene with a crowd that “swirls like charmed snakes to arabesque club beats” and “sultry, electro-Oriental” rhythms. The author invokes imagery of “desert decadence” and “1001 Nights,” drawing from a canon of “various patterns (images, clichés, abstractions) by which the Orient is represented” (Said 291). It goes on to describe the “first few seductive notes” of an Egyptian club hit while “the small dance floor becomes a blur of whirling dervishes,” in reference to ascetic Sufi followers of a mystical sect of Islam and their tradition of whirling to achieve a state of higher spiritual consciousness. The irrelevance and incongruence of re-imagining the dance floor as a site of both Arab decadence and spiritual mystique is disregarded in favor of constructing a scene that, wittingly or not, plays to classic archetypes of the Arab “Oriental other.” As with familiar representations of Brazilian unbridled sexuality, the idea of a fixed, timeless, “mysteriously known essence” informs much of the language chosen in portraying art forms originating in non-Western regions of the world (Said 305).

From Bali to Bollywood
Similar indifference is evident in journalism that takes interpretations of “world music” as an amorphous, all-encompassing category to an extreme, indiscriminately lumping together disparate genres as a singular, vaguely “Eastern” sound. A prime example of this is found in music reviews of hip hop artist Jay-Z’s 1999 hit “Big Pimpin’,” which heavily sampled 1957’s “Khosara” by Abdel Halim Hafez, an Egyptian singer who “achieved Elvis Presley-like stature” in his home country. The album’s liner notes credit nearly every sampled hook except for “Big Pimpin’,” “which is silent about the song's musical origins.” Shirking the obligation of extra research due to the omission, music journalists have peppered their reviews with erroneous descriptions of the composition as far-flung as“a South-Seas flavoured groove that's a happy musical marriage of Brooklyn and Bali” and “Bollywood-wigged NOLA bounce stutter-stepping," according to an article in Egypt's Al-Ahram Weekly called "Pimpin' a Classic."

Distinct cultures are conflated in a comparable manner in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, which explains that ska developed when Jamaicans combined “American R&B and jazz, and calypso/mento from Trinidad to create their own music.” While calypso and mento both emerged out of the Caribbean, the two genres are not similar enough to be collapsed as one, particularly since mento originated in Jamaica – not in Trinidad, as the article indicates. In fact, according to Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, mento was so integral to Jamaican culture as its “first indigenous popular music form” that it became the national music of the country for a time before it was eclipsed by ska in the 1960s. The style is “similar to up-tempo calypso,” which likely explains the misperception, “although its heritage is far too complex to be considered derivative” (Appiah and Gates 1289).

Such instances amusingly echo the cultural confusion found in an episode of The Simpsons that aired in 2002, titled “Blame it on Lisa” (“a take on the 1984 film Blame it on Rio”). In addition to playing off less lighthearted stereotypes of Brazil, the satire presents Rio in a way that mirrors common American misperceptions of South American cultures on the whole. Notably, the Simpsons family is shown taking a conga line as a form of transport to the hotel, later visiting a samba school to learn the “Macarena” and the “penetrada, a fictitious and lascivious dance shown them by the teacher.” The extent of the episode’s negative connotations prompted Rio’s tourist board to consider a lawsuit against Fox producers, with at least some of the offense stemming from the reckless fusion of the Cuban conga and the Spanish “Macarena” with notions of quintessentially Brazilian culture as one broad, south-of-the-border conception.

Rest-of-the-World Music Journalism
The maintenance of what Byrne calls a “world music ghetto” leaves little room for discerning between “‘oppositional’ cultures (cultures that seem to be ‘different’ and ‘marginal’, that is, from a Western perspective)” that are “introduced to the audience via ‘world music’ for the sake of their marketability” (Mert 114). By using the catch-all tag – which has been widely adopted by American press in its form as a “marketing as well as a pseudomusical term” – to refer to an amalgamated heap of non-Western produced music ranging from “the most blatantly commercial music produced by a country, like Hindi film music…to the ultra-sophisticated, super-cosmopolitan art-pop of Brazil,” it contributes to reductive imagining of “otherized” cultures as monolithic and unchanging, as upheld by some media in the U.S (Byrne).

Though ethnomusicologist Steven Feld argues in “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” “that any and every hybrid or traditional style could so successfully be lumped together by the single market label world music signified the commercial triumph of global musical industrialization” and has had the effect of “banalizing difference” among cultures with ease, widespread approaches to marketing and reporting alike also rest on “fetishizing” and exoticizing the “West’s ethnic others” as they are partitioned off in the “binary reproduced by the world music concept.” As articulated by Keith Negus in Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, “there is no doubt that the presentation of world music often involves an exoticism and romanticization of music from ‘other’ places” (167).

The continued reliance on this framework in some music journalism can partially be attributed to the status of global music in the hierarchy of news coverage within large publications, where “the arts section is not taken as seriously as hard news,” according to Cindy Byram, publicist and member of the Board of Directors for the World Music Institute. Regarding the staff writers and reviewers hired by newspapers to cover international music, Byram ascribes frequently inadequate portrayals to a lack of specialization, leading journalists to operate “out of their element” as “general practitioners -- they know a little about everything and not a lot about one thing, so they’re going to fall back on a lot of clichés.”

While Byram makes clear that the current state of world music journalism “is not a golden age by any means,” a broader societal reading of embedded values that allow “the myths and clichés of national and cultural traits” to flourish can be gleaned from David Byrne’s explanation that “white folks needed to see Leadbelly in prison garb to feel they were getting the real thing. They need to be assured that rappers are ‘keeping it real,’ they need their Cuban musicians old and sweet, their Eastern and Asian artists ‘spiritual’.”

Sources:

Appiah, Kwame Anthony and Henry Louis Gates. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999.

Byram, Cindy. Telephone Interview. 11 December 2007.

Dunn, Christopher and Charles A. Perrone. “Chiclete Com Banana.” Brazilian Music and
Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Feld, Steven. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture. 12.1 (2000) 145-171.

Mert, Ceren. “The Vigorous Local: Culture Industry, Hip Hop and the Politics of
Resistance in the Age of Globalization.” MA thesis. Middle East Technical
Institute, 2003.

Negus, Keith. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge, 1999.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.

---

]]>http://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/Finding+A+War+Amid+the+Peace+ProcessHamadAltourahhttp://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/Finding+A+War+Amid+the+Peace+ProcessRenameWed, 12 Dec 2007 16:01:59 CST
posted By Hamad Al-Tourah on December 12, 2007

After the public outcry charging the elite media, lead by the New York Times, in wrongly leading the charge to war, you would think that the paper would reconsider leading a similar charge. Instead, the audible new drum beat against Iran is being heard across its coverage of the Annapolis Conference. Littering its Op-Ed and editorial pages, the coverage confounds all logic. To think that a “peace process” of all events accompanies a lead on war, instead of informing the public of the significant proceedings of such a conference, certainly kicks the ideals of investigative, critical journalism out the window. This kind of coverage damages public concern for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and undermines the conference’s ability to consummate peace. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky trace a line around this logic. “The media do, in fact suppress a great deal of information, but even more important is the way they present a particular fact – its placement, tone, and frequency of repetition – and the framework of analysis in which it is placed”(Chomsky and Herman 407) The media suppression of the factual proceedings of the conference undermine public knowledge of the failings of peace conferences like that came before it, making it impossible to highlight development in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. At the same time, this void allows reports to more conveniently place the current conference into a larger framework of analysis that highlights Iran and the strategic significance of national security regularly used in the current administrations war narratives.
During the week leading up to the conference, Times contributor Denielle Pletka left readers with this final word of Condoleezza’s Rice involvement in the process: “Rice is making her legacy dependent on the future behavior of … Palestinian pretenders. Ultimately, that will serve neither selfish nor national interests.” This precedent allows reporters to take up space not with conclusive data about the conference, but to actually avoid reporting on the matter. It is appropriate then that a sister article printed on December 3, days after the conference, doesn’t take up a portrait of the conference at all, but places Bush’s photo-op alongside the photos of Carter and Clinton, notorious for their failed attempts at brokering the same peace. The headline, “Peace? Sure, I’ll See What I Can Do,” insinuates the weak impetus at achieving peace while synonymizing the failed attempts at Camp David with Annapolis.
The media failure to report on and encourage development in this arena can be assessed by simply looking at the way in which the conferences’ aims are detailed. The Baltimore Sun, reporting on the story because of the “local aspect of this event,” makes only one mention of the proceedings of the conference in its reporting(“…an agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to create a democratic Palestinian state…”). Such reports do nothing to develop the detail’s of the conference as delivered by President Bush in his address in the White House Press Room. By pairing historical repetition of news with coverage that blatantly undermines any detailed analysis of the conferences’ provisions, these reports are non-committal to actually developing the conference itself as a news item. An explanation of this refusal to report can be explained using a concern voiced by Gaye Tuchman when she notes “there is a possibility that there are questions and answers they do not know, reporters may not be able to get a handle on innovation….To make it a suitable topic of news, they may dismiss it, mock it or otherwise transform it”(Tuchman 404). The coverage of the Annapolis conference only naturalizes a status quo of failure of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, at the same time downplaying the need for progress in coverage that under-informs the public.
A dearth of knowledge on the conference itself allows attention to the Annapolis Conference to shift to the attempts of the Bush Administration at “saving face” in lieu of their failed foreign policy in the Middle East. Commonly, reports give credit to the strengthening of a “coalition of countries”, such as Syria, once in direct opposition to American political affairs. In this way, the media partakes in solidifying a positive representation of the current administration by constructing the narrative of “a positive war, a war more easily constructed by the dualism of good versus evil…eliding all other narratives”(Shohat 136). Article after article, we are seeing a press that undermines the peace process as politically viable solution while dually playing an active role alongside an administration whose public support continues to wane. By placing the president and his call for alarm against Iran at the center of a peace conference, the press continues to play a complicit role with the current administration. The precedence for the war narrative is built into the infrastructure of American media organizations, specifically because of the ease in which international events can be framed as American foreign policy concerns.
Media creates neat narratives for current administrations by shedding light on the failure of previous peace conferences, with special regard to a failure ensured by Israel’s earnest attempts at peace met with Palestinian’s stingy refusal to accept it. At once, this kind of coverage only frames the current peace conference in a more positive light, assuming that in this case of political déjà vu, nothing could be worse than Camp David, an example of “the failure of the peace process and the eruption of the intifada in the Fall of 2000”(Reinhart 16). Paradoxically, the media coverage of the current conference is surprisingly unwelcome to peace prospects, characterized by a mood of disillusionment in response to the futility of conferences passed. This constant recycling of responses conference after conference is atavistic, a term used by Martin McLoone in his essay, “Traditions of Representation: Political Violence and the Myth of Atavism.” His essay chronicles representation trends in the film industry as a response to noted conflicts. Of note is his discussion of “the cinema of the peace process” whereby “the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s and the subsequent need for American genre cinema to find new ‘villains’ to sustain the conventions of the thriller narrative” (McLoone 213). McLoone establishes a useful framework for reading media representations to sustain audience attention. In this sense, we can interpret the news media coverage trends following the Middle and Near East as once dominated by the war narrative against Afghanistan and the Taliban, then by Iraq and now in its increasing attention to an impending war against Iran. All these trends closely concern the tie between the United States and its democratic ally in Israel with Israel’s shared interests in the current administrations war on Iraq embodied by Minister of Defenses Yitzhak Mordechai’s interview on Israeli television, saying, “Israel can not rest unless Saddam Hussein is eliminated.” In the current tide rising against Iran, the American media has been more active in placing Iran at the core of the Annapolis Conference to fit into these war narratives, alongside Israeli and American administrations. Al-Jazeera’s cognizance of these narratives were published in a recent report criticizing Israel for, “hyping the intelligence about an Iraq nuclear threat prior to the invasion…a recent example of Israel's disinformation.Iran is another.”
This is not to say that Israel and its press is fueling the flames of the media drum beat for a war on the Middle East. Quite the opposite, the Israeli press has been instrumental in providing a counter-narrative to the American press – at times much more critical to American and Israeli policy. Writers for the leading Israeli publication have challenged American press concerns throughout the Annapolis Conference with statements and questions positing that, “Iran is … losing its status as a strategic threat because of the report, and Israel will find it difficult to ‘enlist’ Iran to promote its regional policy… What good can come from emphasizing the ties between Iran and Hamas or Hezbollah when Iran is now portrayed as a state that no longer threatens the region? And why should the Annapolis conference be described as designed to stymie Iran?” This contrast points greater blame on those American newspapers and broadcast news networks that insist on framing the Annapolis Conference not on its ideal intention, finding a lasting peace in a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, but in the Conference’s importance in gearing up against Iran in a string of events that can only recycle the consequences of the press’s drum beat to war in Iraq. In the week’s following the conference, the New York Times published several articles epitomizing such charges. “For the first time a coalition of Western and modern Arab leaders has coalesced and declared its commitment to resist ‘extremism’ in the Middle East – a well-known euphemism for Iran,” wrote Op-Ed contributor Michael B. Oren. Just prior to the conference, Roger Cohen also wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed that, “The rising Middle Eastern power, Iran, has not been invited. Nor has Hamas. What’s present in abundance is desperation. Bush must use it.” The latter example set a precedence inserting Iran into the grain of the conference, suggesting to readers that the conference has only led a wave of resistance against Iran. The former example allows that shadow to linger in the absence of the conference, so that what is left is not the proceedings of a U.S. brokered peace agreement between Israel and Palestine, but a call to action against the threats, though absent in this conference, still looming in the Middle East.
What the Annapolis should have opened up in the press is a space whereby the failure of peace processes passed could be opened up and dissected by the print and broadcast media in order to project how the possibility for peace in the current process could be realized. Instead, the recycling of the political myth of atavism as it relates to McLoone’s war narratives undercuts the presses efforts in detailed analysis and diagnosis in these matters. It only harkens back to the threat of war and “so underpins the necessity for continuing the search for peace”(McLoone 231). Norman Soloman accurately and succinctly points out this presidential spin and the medias complicity with it. While reading the New York Times on October 29, 2005, he spots two contradictory claims laying side by side, “‘there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,’” read one headline just above an editorial below, where “the Times flatly stated conjecture as fact: ‘Iran has a nuclear weapons program.’” These contradictions are subtly placed in the midst of current political affairs, so only after the political proceedings have been emptied out as insignificant, can they take a larger precedence as an indicator of the looming conflict against Iran.
An article from the Los Angeles Times, published after the end of the conference on December 2, mimics this model, emptying out the possibility for peace before ending its coverage with a return to this Iran narrative. After outlining Bush’s approach of non-intervention in the peace talks, the article criticizes “the administrations insistence on a limited U.S. role” because of the “skepticism about the likelihood of the talks resulting in a peace agreement.” Not long before the article’s end do we see the predictable return to the Iran narrative, pointing out Rice’s intention of strengthening a coalition in the Middle East against Iran as an “initiative that could ‘change the narrative of the administrations foreign policy in that region.’” The blogging world, in addition to what we have already seen in the Israeli press, puts the mainstream newspaper coverage of the event into even greater perspective. In a Huffington Post article, Bruce Feiler frames the events critically between the press coverage inevitably turning to recycle formula’s already recycled in its predictable move “portraying the summit in Annapolis in strictly Bush v. Clinton terms…” He ends the article by recalling that this is the first “event of the post-war-Iraq-Middle East. The presence of these dissenting voices alongside those of Israel’s Haaratz and Qatar’s Al-Jazeera critically aim at dissecting a conference that the elite newspapers have only used to push forward news items that will last in the nation’s foreign relations conflicts with Iran.

Sources
Derian, James Der. “9/11: Before, After and In Between." Terrorism, Media, Liberation. Ed. J. David Slocum. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005.


Du Bois, W.E.B.. “On the Collection of Honest News.” 1953. . Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism. Ed. Robert W. McChesney and Ben Scott. New York: The New Press, 2004.


Du Bois, W.E.B.. “On the Right to Express and Hear Unpopular Opinion.” 1953. . Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism. Ed. Robert W. McChesney and Ben Scott. New York: The New Press, 2004.


Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. “Propaganda Mill.” 1988. . Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism. Ed. Robert W. McChesney and Ben Scott. New York: The New Press, 2004.


McLoone, Martin. “Traditions of Representation: Political Violence and the Myth of Atavism.” 2000. Terrorism, Media, Liberation. Ed. J. David Slocum. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005.


Reinhart, Tanya. Israel/Palestine. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005.
Shohat, Ella. “The Media’s War.” Social Text, No. 28. (1991), pp. 135-141.


Tuchman, Gaye. “News as the Reproduction of the Status Quo: A Summary.” 1978. Our Nacos, Brigitte L. Nacos. “Mass Mediated Terrorism in the New World (Dis)Order.” 2002. Terrorism, Media, Liberation. Ed. J. David Slocum. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism. Ed. Robert W. McChesney and Ben Scott. New York: The New Press, 2004.

---

]]>http://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/Minorities+and+Women+in+the+BlogosphereJaclynSakowhttp://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/Minorities+and+Women+in+the+BlogosphereWed, 12 Dec 2007 08:38:21 CST posted by Jaclyn Sakow on December 12, 2007

Ray Oldenburg’s book, The Great Good Place, outlines a problem in America’s suburban communities. We are desperately missing a “third place” away from home and work, such as a pub or coffee shop. He argues that third places are “essential to the political processes of a democracy (67)” because they allow people to come together as a community and openly express any political idea. He notes, “More than anywhere else in colonial America, the taverns offered a democratic forum. There protest gelled into action and the organization of the revolution and the society to follow were agreed upon (67)”. While suburban sprawl may have done away with physical “third places” in American society, the virtual communities of blogs have taken over as a forum for public discussion. Much like American suburbs after the 1950’s “white flight” movement, the blogosphere tends to be a place that is overwhelmingly white. Another thing it has in common with communities of the 1950’s is its lack of outspoken women.

These factors seem strange when one thinks about the democratic nature of blogging. Anyone who has an idea and a computer with an internet connection can do it. So why is it that the blogosphere tends to be predominately white males? Wouldn’t those who are represented the least in mainstream media, like minorities and women, be the most eager to engage in blogging?

While blog culture functions in a way that seems open and democratic, it is actually exclusive for a variety of reasons. Newsweek technology columnist Stephen Levy argued that “some clubbiness is involved” in his 2005 article “Blogging Beyond the Men’s Club”. He makes the point that many top tier white male bloggers provide links on their pages to other white male bloggers. Yet, in the title of his column he alludes to a type of organized front that white men use to keep women and minorities out of the blogosphere. Rather than being a conscious act of racism or sexism, I argue that the “show and tell” culture of blogging itself leads to a homogenous top tier.

White men who blog probably like to read the blogs of people with an outlook on life and politics similar to their own. Consequently, they link to these sites because of their shared interests… and a cycle forms. White men were at the top to begin with because they were the demographic at the forefront of web technology. In addition to this, major media coverage of blogging usually mentions only established blogs like Daily Kos or Instapundit – feeding this cycle and determining which blogs get read.

This blogging cycle is detrimental, especially in light of a 2007 ASNE survey which found that diversity in the traditional newsroom is slipping. It pointed out that the percentage of minorities and women in daily newsrooms decreased slightly in 2007. If the populations who distribute both mainstream media and blogs are not heterogeneous, then it would follow that the news produced does not offer an accurate depiction of these communities or news that is consistently geared towards them. Much of mainstream media is downright offensive to minorities; depicting black men as constant threats to the safety of others, when more often than not they are the victims of violent crime. With few black men in the media industry, little of the information that is distributed ever gets disputed publicly and myths ensue.

With no real entry barriers, blogging is an open mike to dispute any dubious notions or half truths provided by mass media. While this is true, few want to spend time and effort to write something that will collect dust in the recesses of cyberspace and have little or no impact on the intended cause. While cyberspace can have colossal impact on a grass-roots level -as seen in Howard Dean’s meteoric rise and fall during the 2004 Presidential race – it is only as good as the amount of people it reaches.

Although it is clear that blogging can be a powerful mechanism for change, it needs to be able to reach a large enough audience or be picked up by mass media to really diffuse information among the populous. Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga’s book, Crashing the Gate, discusses “people-powered activism” (172) which melds traditional grassroots efforts and “netroots activism” (172) stirred up by blogs and websites. They cite an effort against Wal-Mart which used the websites WalmartWatch.com and WakeupWalmart.com as an example of “people-powered activism”. “A Zogby poll in November 2005, found unfavorable opinion of Wal-Mart soaring. A large majority of Americans (65 percent) agreed that Wal-Mart had a more negative public image now than compared to the previous year” (172). So the potential for minority groups or women to change public opinion and dispute negative stereotypes is there, yet the information does not often get enough distribution.

Black bloggers are getting a meaningful message across, but the problem is that it’s mostly falling on deaf ears. While a study undertaken by Brown University researcher, Antoinette Pole, found that “blacks comprise less than 1 percent of political bloggers”; it also found that a majority of black bloggers use their blog to engage in political advocacy, raise money for charitable causes, or encourage readers to vote. They also cover a wide variety of mainstream news in a way that is more meaningful or pertinent to them by giving a minority perspective on events.

Heather MacDonald of National Review wrote a downright racist article outlining her thoughts on why many minority blogs do not reach many people. “As for minorities, the skills gap in reading and writing means that, at the moments, a lower percentage of blacks and Hispanics possess the verbal acumen to produce a cutting-edge blog. For decades, blacks and Hispanics have scored 200 points below whites on the SAT’s verbal section. Black high-school seniors on average read less competently than white 8th graders; Hispanic 12th graders read only slightly better than white 8th graders. And those are just the ones who are graduating”. MacDonald’s point is marred by her inappropriate jab at minority teenagers and vast generalization. Just because many minorities are educationally disadvantaged, does not mean that there aren’t some who are eloquent and well educated. And there are no minority bloggers who constitute household names.

One power that does seem to be emerging is a type of synergy between different groups who are underrepresented by mass media. Many minority blogs link to other minority blogs. For instance, the blogger on theunapologeticmexican.org includes a section on his website called “companeras” where links to Asian American, African American, feminist, and other Latino blogs are found. This is a unique act of solidarity among the distinct racial groups and an idea that could eventually make a minority bloc into a majority of readers.


Women’s entrance into the rough and tumble world of blogging has been especially difficult given the macho “smackdown” attitude many bloggers take towards each other. I thought most journalists or other females in high ranking professional careers were self assured and seasoned enough to take the criticism of op-ed or blog writing. To my surprise, many women bloggers had reservations about becoming part of blog culture because of its harsh nature.

New York Times op-ed contributor Maureen Dowd, who I had always imagined to be an exceptionally brazen woman wrote, “In 1996, after six months on the job, I went to Howell Raines, the editorial page editor, to try to get out of the column. I was a bundle of frayed nerves. I felt as though I were in a ‘Godfather’ movie, shooting and getting shot at. Men enjoy verbal dueling. As a woman, I told Howell, I wanted to be liked – not attacked.”

Another notable female blogger, Ann Althouse, hits the nail on the head when she wrote that “we [women] (generally) feel worse when we are attacked, but that we are (generally) more likely to be perceived in a negative light if we do attack.” It is not only that women are sometimes more sensitive to the vitriolic remarks made by other bloggers, but that they are treated more harshly than men for the comments they make. Traditionally, women have been raised to be sweet, kind beings to others. To nod, smile, and play a subservient role to men; and I think most of the women who are bloggers today were subject to this school of thought. While girls today are still likely to be socialized into the role of passive observer, I think this is beginning to change. Many women are taking important roles in the workforce and the classroom, the only way to access most of these roles is to step out of the female norm and speak up for beliefs or ideals.

A female blogger and lawyer, Christine Hurt, says, “we should teach our girls to speak up without fear. To raise their hands and volunteer, even though they may be completely wrong. To disagree with each other without fear of losing respect or friendship. To not fear having others disagree with them. I have noticed that although there are few female law professor blawgs, there are plenty of female law student blawgs.”

In addition to the fact that most white male bloggers don’t include links to women and females are often intimidated by the blogosphere, there is also the fear of sexual threats that stifle and may scare away some female bloggers. A Washington Post article describes, “As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms – a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990’s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said”. A professor of information science at Indiana University, Susan Herring, thought that early adopters of blogging were not as nasty as they have become today, “Even as recently as 2003, it was relatively rare to find negativity on blogs”. This trend may be part of the cultural borrowing that seems to be occurring between blog culture and cable news “Crossfire” culture, both of which involve more verbal battle than academic debate.

And the nature of verbal abuse is something that is distructive and a force that is tearing political parties and neighbors apart in this country. The new blogosphere frontier is exciting because it’s still in a developmental phase. If we learn to nurture this environment and use it for all it’s glorious democratic potential, the blogosphere could be a “third place” worth keeping.

Like Steven Levy, who called out to the unheard minority in his Newsweek article, I would also urge some of the top tier bloggers to participate in a more inclusive community and link some sources other than white males. There is a desperate need for community cohesion in a society as fragmented in space and political ideology as ours is at the current moment. Adding to the diversity of opinions represented would do nothing to Daily Kos or Instapundit, except make them fresher sources which relate to a wider audience.


Works Cited:

Armstrong, Jerome and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People Powered Politics. Chelsea Green Publishing Company: White River Junction, VT. 2006.

Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place. Marlow and Company. New York. 1999.

---

]]>http://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/The+Partcipant+Presslp824http://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/The+Partcipant+PressWed, 12 Dec 2007 07:17:10 CST

Lauren Passalacqua, Posted December 12, 2007

Earlier this month, Jay Rosen met, at New York University, with Professor Mark Dery’s undergraduate media criticism class, in which this reporter is enrolled. Rosen’s an associate professor at NYU’s journalism department and the prolific author of the blog, PressThink. His inaugural post in 2003 expressed interest in “the consequences in the world that result from having the kind of press we do.” He’s written about the industry’s struggle and change like the decline of newspapers, citizen journalism, or the new press. But, before students could ask about these issues, Rosen posed a question of his own: “how participatory does the press have to be to be strong in a participatory country?”

Rosen’s notion of a participatory press inverts the usual talk about journalism and society. The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) and its former affiliate, the Committee of Concerned Journalists (CCJ), identify professional goals and principles that they describe as “the theory of journalism.” Their website states that “the central purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society.” This treatise on journalists’ work for the public does not make the public part of news-making process. The distinct flow of information from reporter to audience indicates that participation may include reading, listening, and viewing, but not producing the news.

The PEJ and CCJ’s “theory of journalism” mirrors the traditional press scheme that took hold in the early twentieth century. Media critics and scholars, Robert McChesney and Ben Scott, map the development of media in their introductory chapter of Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism. By the late 1920s, muckrakers’ social critiques, like those of Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair, had lost the spotlight. Special interest journalism that promoted publishers’ interests took their place (McChesney and Scott 13). McChesney and Scott connect this change with the public’s view of the press: “In short, it was widely thought that journalism was corrupt and straightforward class propaganda” (14).

Without the public trust, the papers would not sell and advertisers would not pay, presenting a problem to owners like Joseph Pulitzer. “[He] realized,” write McChesney and Scott, “that journalism needed to have the trappings of neutrality and balance in order to regain its sullied credibility” (15). The authors relate commercial motives with the start of formal press training; overt special interest reporting gave way to professional objectivity. The concentration of ownership reduced the number of newspapers; but professionalism justified this diminution of sources because the media that remained allegedly improved on earlier forms. In the newsroom “a wall stood between the interests of the publisher (both commercial and political) and the integrity of the news column” (15). In essence, journalists were trained represent only the public’s interest.

McChesney and Scott refer to “the idea of professionalism” as an enduring legacy in American journalism (15). It’s one part of the debate surrounding the participatory press.
Neil Henry, professor and interim dean at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, wrote about the effects of informal “new” media in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed. He mourns the decline of newspapers, distinguishing them and their reporters from the “idolaters of web-based news and information sites, ‘citizen’-produced journalism, and the blogosphere.” His message: “new” media, “including bloggers opining about the news,” think they can replace traditional journalism. Henry worries for “the craft of reporting the news fairly and independently” and foresees the decline of “professional journalism, practiced according to widely accepted ethical values.” He echoes the PEJ and CCJ that uphold the boundaries between reporter and public.

The State of News Media 2007 supports Henry’s point that paper’s have cut their staff because of lost revenue, notably the Dallas Morning News (111 staff members), The Washington Post (70 senior staff), and The Philadelphia Inquirer (68 staff members). Yet, as Rosen notes in this PressThink reply to Henry, no one “advances the [replacement] thesis” that bloggers can and will unseat news organizations.

Nor, writes Slate Editor Jack Shafer, should “we mistake the decline of newspapers with the decline of journalism.” Blog anxiety provided the topic for another PressThink entry. Rosen makes it clear that bloggers aren’t necessarily journalists, but they “are speakers and writers of their own invention, at large in the public square. They’re participating in the great game of influence called public opinion.”

This is participatory journalism’s most revolutionary feature: it breaks down the monopoly on public opinion. This potential– more than redefining the journalist or rethinking newspapers – poses the greatest threat to what we’ve called mass media.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky don’t see the press that the PEJ and CCJ strive for in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Instead, the two media analysts count at least five constrictions, called filters, “that narrow the range of news that passes through the gates” and comprise their “propaganda model” (31). Instead of supplying the public with an array of sources and diverse opinions, the propaganda model depicts the effects of “wealth and power … on mass-media interests and choices” (2). Accordingly, traditional media like the network and cable channels, radio, and newspapers and magazines, fall prey to these filters and compromise their intended public service.

Yet, as residents and neighbors of Brookyln’s Atlantic Yards know, the participatory press can undermine the filters’ effectiveness. In 2003, New York City real estate company Forest City Ratner announced it plansTo return to Professor Rosen’s question. It’s more than a strong participatory press – it’s also that a strong participatory press that fortifies its participatory country. to develop a 22-acre section of downtown Brooklyn called Atlantic Yards. Residents like Norman Oder and Jonathan Cohn grew frustrated with the lack of press coverage that the project received and filled the void themselves. Oder’s Atlantic Yards Report offers extensive coverage of the project and events surrounding it, from public hearings to newspaper clippings. Cohn’s Brooklyn Views blog also features “ideas about the proposed Atlantic Yards project,” focusing on the architectural design and its implications for Brooklyn residents. Both their archives date from late 2005 though this year and boast well over the 69 articles that The New York Times logged during the same period. Incidentally, the Times joined with Forest City Ratner in the development of The New York Times Building that opened this past November.

The Times featured the people behind the Atlantic Yards counter-attack. Reporter Nicholas Confessore wrote about “the first large-scale urban real estate venture in New York City where opposition has coalesced most visibly in the blogosphere.” Joining Oder and Cohn were a variety of participant-press who worked independent of a formal news agency in the service of informing, including Lumi Michelle Rolley for her work on nolandgrab.org.

Participant press like Oder, Cohn, and Rolley break free from Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model.

The first filter, limiting media ownership to the very wealthy does not constrain what the authors write (Herman and Chomsky 3). The Internet provides a low-cost, accessible forum to post their investigation and initiate discussion. Outside of the time and resources they invest in their stories, Oder, Cohn, and Rolley maintain low operating costs as compared to that of mass media companies. The participant press is also free from the investor’s profit expectations. The bloggers may focus on their subjects and proceed without the effect of the first filter.

The second filter’s reliance on advertisements as means of income also misses its mark with the participatory press (Herman and Chomsky 14). Chomsky and Herman argue that because advertisers look for media with the highest circulation or audience, smaller operations are effectively squeezed out. Advertisers may influence media content – limiting what’s said to ensure wide appeal or focusing on topics that appeals to an audience with buying power (Herman and Chomsky 16). Again, these bloggers aren’t dependent on advertising revenue and may focus on their specific beat, the Atlantic Yards. The bloggers produce, collect, and check on news that’s relevant to a specific geographic region. Still, the specificity and readership buying power do not factor into these talks.

The third filter may affect the blogs’ operations referring to the reliance on “expert” or “official” primary sources (Herman and Chomsky 9). Covering a public project involves local and state representation, public and private figures, as well as professional commentaries from law to design. The lack of accreditation could prevent the participant press from accessing sources reserved for professional journalists. However, their investigations remain thorough and integrate their own expertise. Oder closely follows what the Ratner group says and does, as with his latest post, to point out any discrepancy. As an architect, Cohn’s uniquely suited to critique the Atlantic Yards project and assess its design. All three bloggers include data and document their sources.

The final two filters, the discipline of flak and the anticommunist value-system express the vulnerabilities all media have to the public opinion (Herman and Chomsky 21, 26). Media giants would avoid the controversy that public backlash and unpopular belief systems would produce. Oder, Cohn and Rolley are susceptible to their readers’ viewpoints, but remain activist in the campaign against the Atlantic Yards project.

The participant press that cover the Atlantic Yards show that nonprofessional reporters and journalists complete real acts of journalism. More importantly, they also invigorate participation. Confessore marvels at the “ferment of community advocacy” in the wake of the blogs.”

Though construction at the Atlantic Yards site began earlier this year, the Brooklyn bloggers continue to report on events and happenings related to the sight. Their awareness challenges their neighbors, press, and government to remain knowledgeable about the site and its controversy.

The participatory press does not answer the questions about who qualifies as a journalist or what ethics remain applicable in a changing media world. It doesn’t even abolish the Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model. But it does make it better. Participant journalism legitimizes the content, discussion and attention paid to issues. It continues to educate, but broadens the scope of the educator and invites collaboration with more people and more knowledge.

In answer to Rosen's question. It isn’t just that the participatory press has the potential to make jouralism stronger is a participatory country. It's that the participatory press can also enliven a neighbor, engage a state and make for a more participatory country.

Sources

Herman, Edward and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

McChesney, Robert W. and Ben Scott. “Introduction” Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism. Eds Robert McChesney and Ben Scott. New York: New York Press, 2004. 1-30.

---

]]>http://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/Define+Then+Blame+Them%3A+How+The+New+York+Times+Covers+Census+Reportslaurengregoryhttp://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/Define+Then+Blame+Them%3A+How+The+New+York+Times+Covers+Census+ReportsWed, 12 Dec 2007 06:59:42 CST

by Lauren Gregory, posted December 12, 2007

The New York Times articles on the U.S. Census Bureau’s reports provide meager coverage on poverty and are duly reported with misleading and distorted impressions. The coverage on censuses pertaining to poverty ultimately dehumanizes the issue by emphasizing statistics, not connecting trends, ignoring human tragedy, and creating a scenario for readers to disconnect themselves from the matter. These articles do not delve into the discourses and institutions behind the numbers. Their lack of aptness to connect the issues and statistics legitimizes a homogeneous way of thinking about people.

Census reports are generally viewed as matters of bureaucratic routine and a type of national accounting (Kertzer and Arel 2). The census pigeonholes people into categories, like race and class (Kertzer and Arel 2). Articles on the census have the ability to not only reflect on the social reality that is created but they play a key role in the construction of that reality.

The mass media is arguably the most influential in molding public consciousness and therefore has a responsibility to correctly define and report on matters of public discourse (Mantsios 636). The NYT has the highest regular readership and reaches over 1.1 million readers during the week and over 1.6 million readers on Sunday. Their influence is enormous as both their Sunday and Weekday Times rank in the top 10 media that is consider to be “influential,” “credible,” and “objective” by opinion leaders.

The NYT has the ability to select the information they provide and promote certain values and ideas that shape our definition of community (Rothenberg 594). This definition is furthered by articles that cover the census reports as they create a divide in society between “us” and “them." The NYT makes inequities appear to be the result of “personal group deficiency rather than the consequences of injustice, stereotyping and ideology” (Rothenberg 594).

Defining “Them”: Word Choice

The NYT strives to develop a strong sense of “us” in their audience and consequentially a “them” is created. The “us” is composed of the people in power reflecting the interests of white, upper class, heterosexual males (Van Voorhis). The “them,” including the 36.5 million Americans in poverty, become faceless, undeserving, and inferior (Mantsios 639).

Words are vehicles for journalists to cover the news and those chosen by NYT journalists have a crucial role in setting a specific course of thinking (Cunningham). When reporting on the census, journalists should not only challenge the definitions that are given but they should consciously be aware of their own choice of words. The NYT articles covering the recent census reports are consistently written with words that “activate a mental frame or perception” (Cunningham).

Corrupt language was used in every NYT article that covered the census within the last six months and such words were prevalently used in the most recent 10 articles on the census that featured a focus on poverty and income.

For example, in Sam Robert’s August 29, 2007 article, “New York’s Gap Between Rich and Poor is Nation’s Widest, Census Says,” his choice of verbs were slanted. Low- and middle-income New Yorkers were "priced" out of Manhattan compared to poor people who were “driven” to the outer boroughs. Roberts gives an implication that the poor were not wanted and thus pushed and urged out of the city.

In Robert’s September 12, 2007 article, “Census Shows More Black Residents are Leaving New York and Other Cities,” he again uses verbs to explain the transition of moving out of the city: “Black “flight” has exceeded the “departure” of whites.” The verbs used for blacks, the “other,” define their move as an escape rather than a withdrawal like that of white people.

Defining “Them”: The Other

The ideology of racial categorization has tremendous social and political consequences and the media’s reports on the census often characterize the poor as a non-white race (Kertzer and Arel 11). The NYT census coverage helps constitute racial discourse and continues to relay an “us” versus “them” mentality because they routinely compare statistics of poor black, Hispanics, and immigrants aginst that of whites. These articles allow white people to feel superior while choosing to displace the blame for poverty on cultural traits rather then racism (Berger 610).

In Robert’s November 1, 2007 article “Census Reveals Fear Over Neighborhoods,” he alludes to the connotation of race and violence. “Over all, more than one in five children are kept indoors because they live in dangerous neighborhoods, according to the survey,” Roberts writes. “That proportion rises to 34 percent among blacks and 37 percent among Hispanics surveyed.” By not mentioning the percent of whites or the stereotyes that exist about blacks and Hispanics being crime ridden, the reader connects race with dangerous neighborhoods without any context. This leads to a disconnection between the number and racist discourses.

In Robert’s September 12, 2007 article “Census Shows More Black Residents Are Leaving New York and Other Cities” he reports on the higher costs of living but juxtaposes his statements by implying that the loss of black residents is due to the growing attractiveness it has to young white people. By not directly relating that black people are moving out of the city because of a higher cost of living he conceives an impression that their race is the factor for their move.

Robert’s article title also creates an “us” versus “them” theme but is furthered when he includes immigration, Hispanic, and Asian statistics from the census in his article. His lack of clarification in his title implies the signalization among all non-white races.
Ford Fessenden also falsely titles his article on September 16, 2007 as “Suburbs Gaining Asians and Hispanics” and creates a binary comparison when he adds the statistic: “In the suburbs, the percentage of the population that is black also increased in 2006” but does not include them in the title.

Roberts opening lines to his November 17, 2007 article “In U.S. Name Count, Garcias Are Catching Up With Joneses,” exemplifies the tendency for NYT to depict scenarios of “us” versus “them” when reporting on immigrant census statistics. “Smith remains the most common surname in the United States, according to a new analysis released yesterday by the Census Bureau,” Robert reports. “But for the first time two Hispanic surnames – Garcia and Rodriguez – are among the top 10 most common in the nation.” Defining the origin of Garcia and Rodriguez and not defining the origin of Smith labels Hispanics as the “other” and does not focus on the trend of immigration just alludes to an invisible white standard.

Jackie Bacon, author and writer for a variety of audiences including Extra!, the magazine of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, said in an email interview that “a responsible journalist needs not just to report what numbers emerge from data but what the larger context for the data is and how and why trends emerge and persist.”

Immigrants are also placed in the “them” category as they are frequently attributed in NYT coverage of the census as the reason for the drop in wages. In both August 29, 2007 articles by Goodnough and Roberts they report that competition for low-wage jobs in the city depresses incomes because immigrants are willing to work for less. By not explaining the pretext as to why immigrants take low paying jobs due to reasons such as legal status and language barriers the journalists are not fulfilling their responsibilities to fully report the news (McGoldrick 233).

Meghan Daum, op-ed writer for LA Times, said in an email interview, “it's the job of the columnist to synthesize the data and extrapolate as to what it might or might not say about the cultural and social climate. That's true for census data as much as it's true for any other news item or topic.”

Blaming “Them”:

Institutions and discourses fabricate class distinctions in almost all aspects of life, which help determine work, schooling, health, and the availability of resources. When journalists report on the statistics and ratios of poverty from the census they create a notion that the poor are accountable for their own plight and the poor become undeserving.

The January 25, 2007 article “Childhood Poverty is Found to Portend High Adult Costs” by Erik Eckholm opens with a loaded statement on a census report that found that “children who grow up poor cost the economy $500 billion a year because they are less productive, earn less money, commute more crimes, and have more health related expenses.” This statement generates a feeling of resentment to the poor because they drain societal resources. Later in the article Eckholm quotes Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who explained his solution to this problem, which is not giving “a bunch of money to poor people”, but instead the poor need to change their “behavior, neighborhoods and parents’ actions.” Eckholm never gives an alternate solution to help stop the trend of poor children becoming inadequate later in life nor does he look into institutions that do not provide the resources needed to help unlock this social pattern. By giving such weighted statements without follow up, Eckholm leads the reader into finding justification for blaming the poor.

Eckholm in an email interview defended his writing by stating that he thought it was “natural that many immediate news stories on census findings about poverty might just focus on the numbers.” When asked about delving into issues not the numbers he responded: “When there is a striking trend – or lack of progress or backward slippage, then it makes sense to go out and find the affected people and write about their lives, and...to explore the causes.”

In Abby Goodnough’s August 29, 2007 article “Census Shows a Modest Rise in U.S. Income,” she conveys an “us” versus “them” scenario by noting that the uninsured need help from “us”: “The new data on the rise in the number of those uninsured prompted advocates for the poor to step up their call for Congress to reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides subsidized insurance to children of the working poor.”

Fessenden in his September 2, 2007 article “Rich Get Richer While Poor Hold Their Own,” gives statistics and summaries on the census income data. He then states that “people with means move to places that have better services, paid for by higher taxes, stratifying income and privilege by geography.” Although stated, Fessenden does not explore how these geographic areas that are filled with better resources are a direct result from wealth. By not further addressing this reality Fessenden hurts his readers into believing that the answer is simple: move to a better area and you won’t be poor. The limited mindset does not mention that many people do not have the means to move to such places and instead the outlet for reasoning blames the poor’s immobility as the reason for their cycle of poverty.

Nicholas Katers, a media criticism writer and historian on 451press believes readers “want food for thought in trying to explain why America is facing a problem with poverty” and not articles that only editorialize in explaining data because they “fail to follow a story beyond the superficial.” In an email interview Katers vented his frustration on such newspaper articles featured in the NYT by stating, “census numbers, polling data and other figures are given to the public without analysis is irrefutable proof of an empirical truth.”

Conclusion:

These NYT articles on the census present their readers with an idea that poverty is either an “aberration of the American way of life” by becoming just another number or “an end product of the poor themselves” because they have brought their predicament upon themselves (Mantsios 638-639). The “us” versus “them” ideology has dominated the NYT coverage of the census in recent months and has created a reality where privilege and power are perpetuated for some and deprived to others. Journalists should work to keep political and social discourses clear and make readers aware of the issues behind the numbers.

Sources:

Bacon, Jackie. Email interview. 3-4, December 2007.

Daum, Meghan. Email interview. 3-4 December 2007.

Eckholm, Erik. Email interview. 4, December 2007.

Katers, Nicholas. Email interview. 2-4, December 2007.

Kertzer, David, and Dominique Arel, eds. Census and Identity – The politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Mantsios, Gregory. "Media Magic: Making Class Invisible." Eds. David Kertzer and Dominique Arel. Census and Identity – The politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

McGoldrick, Monica, Joe Giordano, and Nydia Garcia-Preto, eds. Ethnicity and Family Therapy. 3rd ed. New York: The Guilford Press, 2005.

Rothenberg, Paula S. Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study. 7th ed. New York: Worth Publishers, 2007.

Van Voorhis, Rebecca. "Journal of Social Work Education." Culturally Relevant Practice: A Framework For Teaching The Psychosocial Dynamics of Oppression 32(1998): 121-133.

---

]]>http://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/Unconventional+Business+Models+in+Independent+Magazine+Publishingbrm237http://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/Unconventional+Business+Models+in+Independent+Magazine+PublishingFINALIZED!Wed, 12 Dec 2007 06:45:24 CSTby Ben Muessig

So you want to start a magazine? Don't you realize it's two thousand and freaking seven?

A decade ago, when the internet was nascent and the economy was strong, the magazine business wasn't a safe industry. Way back in 1998, when Slate was groundbreaking and blogging hadn't yet replaced Geocities.com, media scholar Christopher Harper wrote that "only 1 in 10 new magazines will succeed and hundreds each year don’t even get off the drawing board. Dozens of publishers never produce a first issue, either because of dismal test results or a lack of money. Dozens more fail in their first couple of years" (29).

Magazines do not fail because of their content. They fail when they lose money. Magazines "are subject to factors of success or failure much as are other commercial enterprises" (Wollesly, 51). So far this year, 20 magazines have gone defunct or suspended publishing. In 2006, 36 magazines went under.

Considering the climate for print media today, it's surprising that the number of casualties isn't greater. According to this year's Project for Excellence In Journalism's "State of the News Media," the foreseeable future looks no brighter: "After a series of down years, there is no projected upturn on the horizon, and falling subscriber bases may be leading advertisers to look elsewhere to spend their dollars."

In recent years, magazines large and small have been ambushed from all fronts by losses in readership , declining ad sales, and increased postage rates.

For an independent magazine publisher, the traditional profit structure of the magazine industry is no longer solvent. The classic two-tiered business plan of ad sales and magazine sales is no longer viable. If you intend to start a new magazine, you'll have to find a different profit orientation.

Sponsors

The easiest way to put out an independent magazine is with a trust fund. If you don't have one, seek investors. When looking for investors, follow Slate's model and aim high. The online political and cultural magazine survived on a stipend from Bill Gates' for eight years. In a 2002 interview with CNET, former Slate editor Michael Kinsey admited that Slate had never been profitable. "It just hasn't gotten there yet," he said.

Microsoft funded Slate until 2004.
-image from www.slate.com

When Microsoft sold Slate to the Washington Post two years later, the magazine had only yielded one quarter in the black and was a "break-even proposition on revenue of about $6 million." Yet with Microsoft's funding, Slate was able to persist a prolonged and unprofitable adolescence that allowed it to mature into a successful magazine. A publication with smaller pockets could never survive eight years in the red.

If you can't find a multi-billionaire to keep your magazine afloat, look for different kinds of investors. Vice Magazine, the hip lifestyle glossy that has defined cool for the better part of the decade, debuted in Montreal, Canada in 1994, funded bywelfare money.

If you can't find an investor, the rational progression would be to seek money through advertising. But why waste your time trying to make hard sells? You could always go with…

No Advertising

Some publications have achieved relative success nixing ads entirely. With a hefty $10 cover price, The Believer, the lit mag published by lit magnates Dave Eggers and Heidi Julavitz, survived sans print advertisements from 2003 until this summer, when the indie mag "began running one tastefully designed ad per issue."


Until 2003, The Believer did not run advertisements.
-image from www.believermag.com

The Sun Magazine, which retails for $7, has been running ad-free since 1990. After 16 years taking advertisements, the Sun cut ads because its editor "wanted the magazine to be like an intimate conversation between reader and writer, and he didn't want that conversation to be interrupted by a sales pitch." With a high enough cover price, it's possible for a magazine to cover costs without advertising. Not to say you'll be rolling in money – this sidebar requesting tax-deductible donations says enough.

There's an audience that seeks ad-free media and it's not just Noam Chomsky and Marshall McLuhan. By coming out ad-free, a magazine can reach a demographic that is sick of advertising. Considering the success of magazines like Adbusters (which is almost entirely free of ads), and recent legislation in Sao Paolo, Brazil that banned all outdoor advertisements, it seems that an anti-advertising movement is gaining momentum.

Creating a magazine without ads does more than just build a niche audience – it makes life as a publisher easier. Without needing to sell ads, you might have enough time to actually be involved in the part of magazine production that drew you to the field in the first place. If you're planning to start a magazine with a larger staff, cut the business department out of your budget. Going ad-free can save you time and money in everything from office space to salaries – just make sure you're making enough from retail to support your costs and pay your employees.

If you've built a solid brand, you'd be surprised how much people will pay for an ad-free magazine. The most recent issue of the Soho-based fashion mag, Visionaire, retailed for $250. A four-issue subscription costs $675. Although the magazine includes no traditional ads, it accepts sponsorship from high-end brands including Gucci and Hermes. Visionaire also limits its circulation, printing between 1000 and 6000 copies per issue.

"Making your magazine limited run will make your fanbase feel that that print version is important – that they need to own it themselves," said Fubz, the publisher of the independent art and culture magazine Beautiful/Decay.

By removing advertising, charging such a steep cover price and limiting its circulation, Visionaire has become more of a luxury item than a magazine. Yet even with its expensive price tag, Visionaire barely breaks even and never pays its contributors(considering that the contributors include fashion icon Marc Jacobs, musicians David Byrne and Michael Stipe, and film directors Wong Kar Wai and Pedro Almodovar, that might not be a big deal).

If you try going ad-free, but your retail sales aren't covering your costs of production, make your magazine…

A Jack of All Trades

In 1998, Harper wrote that at the helm of "most magazine start-ups is a young, energetic, never-say-die individual who, if he or she weren't selling a magazine, might enthusiastically be selling something else; someone who would sell the house, sell the car, sell the home-heating oil, if need be, to make his or her magazine go" (54).

This might have been true a few years ago, but today, to make a magazine survive, you have to sell all of these things and more.

"Unless you have a backer, it's impossible to create a real, fully functioning print magazine in 2007 without numerous streams of revenue," Fubz said. "We don't profit on our magazine, I mean we barely do, but it's nothing to talk about. The money comes from the apparel and the online store. We started selling things online, making t-shirts and throwing parties because it was a good stream of revenue."

Beautiful/Decay makes most of its money from its clothing line and its online store. These revenue sources rely on the strength of the brand that Beautiful/Decay has built since its first issue in 1996. The website and online store are viable because visitors trust the magazine's content. The clothing line thrives only because it reflects the styles of graphic design and contemporary art depicted in the print magazine. Although the magazine is by no means an afterthought, economically it is the least productive part of the Beautiful/Decay brand.


Beautiful/Decay also sells clothing and promotes parties.
-image from www.beautifuldecay.com

Magazines such as Vice make most of their profits from alternate sources of revenue. Alongside the print magazine, Vice Records releases scenester music from artists including Bloc Party, The Streets and Justice. Vice publishes fashion books available at Barnes and Nobles. Recently, Vice launched VBS TV, an internet television venture funded by Viacom that targets Vice Magazine's demographic with programming about skateboarding, independent music, and environmental issues. A staffer who wished to remain anonymous recently explained to me that Vice makes a significant chunk of its money from its marketing arm, Virtue, which offers "traditional ad agency services" to other brands, looking to cash in on Vice's edgy appeal.

The hip, downtown magazine Frank151runs a barber shop on Essex St., in the Lower East Side. "The Chop Shop" creates an alternate revenue stream and allows the magazine to add cool points by blogging about the cultural icons who show up for trims and shape-ups. Frank151 also profits from its marketing branch, Malbon Bros Farms, which promotes brandssuck as Coca Cola and Ride Snowboards.

If you make enough money off of alternate streams of revenue, you can release your magazine at a loss. When the magazine doesn't need to be profitable, you can print whatever kind of content you'd like. Just remember, if you choose to incorporate alternate streams of revenue, they'll only succeed so long as your magazine remains relevant. The only way to keep your magazine relevant is to keep people reading it. If you're having a hard time maintaining readers, why don't you just…

Give it away

Free magazines aren't exactly a new idea. Reader's Digest operated as a take-one from 1922-1955, but rising production cost forced ads back into its pages (Wolseley, 50). In recent years, plenty of independent magazines have adopted free models.

"The thing with free media, is that if you do it right, it's much more effective," Fubz said. "When you have a free magazine you take yourself out of bookstores and big chains, but you put yourself into other markets that mags can't penetrate, like coffeeshops, clubs, and skateshops."

Reaching these markets gives your magazine access to a youthful demographic without the competition you'd face at newsstands and bookstores. If you can draw these readers, you should have a solid chance to land advertisers who want to reach this exact demographic. Now all you've got to do is pray that the kids take some of your take-ones.

"Most free magazines don't get looked at all. It's almost impossible to create something national and free," Fubz said.

Vice Magazine and Arthur, a Los Angeles-based music magazine, are two of the few free, indepenent magazines that are national.


As a free magazine, Vice reaches a different audience than retail publications.
-image from www.viceland.com

If you're set on free content and you want a wide audience, why don't you just take it...

Online

The future of the magazine will be online. Today's tweens have never lived without the internet. With adolescents choosing the net over the mags, now is the time to start an online magazine.

"Unlike their print counterparts," write Randy Reddick and Eliott King, "Web magazines can be "published" incrementally as different sections are updated or changed. A weekly or monthly magazine may be changed virtually every day or even several times a day. Moreover, magazines can experiment with different types of information such as audio and video. Finally, since print magazines generally carry longer articles than newspapers, online magazine publishers seem to have been bolder in experimenting with new methods of gathering and reporting information (231).

Web magazines, especially those that cover specific niches, have proven to be influential, if not wildly profitable. Perhaps more surprising than the success of Slate and Salon has been Pitchforkmedia's arrival as anincreasingly relevant music magazine, deemed by the music blog Stereogum to be the "The New Rolling Stone."

The web allows magazines to take new shapes. Perhaps more importantly, the web gives magazines a means of cuttings costs and making profits. Magazines no longer have to waste their money onpaper, ink and shipping, nor must they limit advertising to a set number of pages.

Due to their short history, there are few rules when making an online magazine. Just keep this in mind – online users expect free content. When Slate removed a paid-subscription mondel, the website's "readership grew tenfold and advertisers six times over."

Otherwise, just be creative and capitalistic.

"When you do your website, do what nobody else is doing," Fubz said. "And find a way that there's always a commodity that you can sell."

Bibliography

Harper, Christopher. And That's the Way It Will Be: News and Information in a Digital World. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Randy Reddick and Elliot King. The Online Journ@list: Using the Internet and Other Electronic Resources. New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1997.

Wolseley, Roland. Understanding Magazines. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1965.

---

]]>http://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/Blogs+and+Citizen+Journalism%3A+The+Effect+on+Our+Culturelar294http://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/Blogs+and+Citizen+Journalism%3A+The+Effect+on+Our+CultureWed, 12 Dec 2007 06:37:46 CST by Laura Riggio

Web 2.0, the second generation of web communities that encourage user participation, has changed our lives dramatically. It has made our world smaller by connecting people with the same interests and it has made our possibilities endless with the amount of information available. It has also made our lives easier than we could have ever imagined by saving us time and money. Why pay $250 for a subscription to The New York Times when it could be emailed to your inbox for free? Why pay for a classified ad in a newspaper when there’s Craigslist? And why buy a CD when you can download it faster and cheaper on iTunes? The point is, the web is changing our culture. It is making our lives easier, faster, and cheaper. And while the web is definitely saving us something, whether it be time, money, or confusion, what are we paying for in the end?

This question becomes particularly important when it comes to the news media. News has been gravitating online and blogs have enabled more selection, opinion, links, and user commentary--leaving print journalism and the news“paper” in the dust. The loss of a traditional newspaper to online media, blogs and citizen journalism is making us lose more than just paper and ink. It is making us lose a tradition of long form writing, prose that has been nurtured and perfected, real shoe-leather reporting that takes time and for those nostalgists, the thing we read while drinking coffee and eating breakfast. The web is costing us something and it might be traditions and values rooted in our culture.

BLOGS AND CITIZEN JOURNALISTS: THE DEBATE

The whole idea behind citizen journalism is that anyone can be a journalist—it doesn’t have to be left to the professionals. The ability to blog allows access to a medium that was traditionally dominated by big business and the elite few. Blogging's low barrier to entry, meaning that anyone can start a blog in a matter of minutes without cost, is appealing. Blogging gives the amateur a chance to voice his or her opinions, ideas, and thoughts without an editor. And now blogging has turned into something else, something that can even make a profit, with the help of a few banner ads and links from Google.

Today, blogs are more popular than ever and some blogs are considered news sources to many people who get their news on the internet.

A PEW Internet study in 2006 found that 73 percent of all internet users get their news from the internet. Eight percent of internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog and 39 percent or about 57 million American adults read blogs. Whether reading or writing, blogs are part of American life and this is only increasing.

NYU Professor Jay Rosen writes in his blog PressThink that "the people formally known as the audience" are taking a permanent seat in the changing world of journalism and we need to focus on that.

In some ways, citizen journalism can make traditional journalism stronger. There is the idea of power in numbers, which was shown in the Rathergate scandal, when within hours of PBS posting the documents Dan Rather used on 60 minutes to suggest President Bush got special treatment in the Texas Air National Guard, bloggers called into question whether the documents were forgeries. The idea here is that no one knows everything but everyone knows something. This can be particularly useful, especially with fact-checking.

Sometimes, citizen journalists are even able to give us something traditional journalists just can’t because of money and time constraints. During the tsunami in 2004, bloggers were able to give better accounts than some news outlets because they were on the scene and could offer photos, videos, and first-person accounts. Bloggers quickly became the source of information for some news outlets as well as the public.

The value of citizen journalism also lies in the fact that they can cater to niche markets that the mainstream media just can’t, whether it’s because of money or because of staff. People will be able to get the news that they want regardless if the mainstream media covers it.

Even though citizen journalism can be effective,there is the looming question of how to distinguish between the work of an expert and the work of an amateur. There are blogs that have risen to the top and become reputable. Arianna Huffington launched her blog The Huffington Post in 2005 and now has one of the most widely read liberal blogs on the web. She was even named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2006. Her website is only growing bigger and more reputable and she even told Time that she wanted to add more video and investigative pieces to the site.

But even if bloggers haven’t been so reputable and gotten some stories wrong, they--like the mainstream media--have been able to redeem themselves. Matt Drudge's Drudge Report, has made countless mistakes, claiming in the past that Sen. John Kerry had an affair with an intern or recently writing a false headline about Sen. Hilary Clinton and her health plan. Yet his website is stil checked for updates by everyone on capitol hill on an hourly basis.


EFFECTS ON CULTURE

The reality is, as Jack Shafer writes on Slate, newspapers have been dying for eighty years and news organizations must make the shift to become multi-platform. Columnist Mark Morford, of SF Gate wrote that newspapers are making a shift. “They are merely shifting, peeling back, juggling approaches and reorganizing ideas, all in order to be reborn, In order to adapt. In order to compete and breathe and thrive and become the new-thing.”

But with this shift and rebirth, will come a transformation in writing and traditional journalistic values. Short prose that the reader can scan is preferred online. With blogging, short posts, written several times a day and filled with opinion is the norm (excluding, Rosen's PressThink, which goes against the grain by featuring a longer form). It’s not preferred to read something long form on a computer screen--at least until eINK, a company that produces flexible e-paper, has come up with something worthwhile.

And its not just Strunk and White's values that will disappear. Bloggers and citizen journalists aren’t held to the same standards as professional journalists are. In In Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, he writes that bloggers aren’t held accountable for their work. They don’t go to jail to protect a source and they are rarely sued or prosecuted because the government and corporations don’t seem to care what they write.

The Dean of Columbia University and skeptic of citizen journalism, Nicholas Lemann wrote an article for The New Yorker a year ago titled “Amateur Hour: Journalism without Journalists,” saying that he doesn’t feel blogs rise to the level of a “journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media—to function as a replacement rather than an addendum.

Keen explains in his book that “this blurring of lines between the audience and the author, between fact and fiction, between invention and reality further obscures objectivity. The cult of the amateur has made it increasingly difficult to determine the difference between reader and writer, between artist and spin doctor…between amateur and expert.”

The result? Keen writes, the decline in quality and reliability of information we receive. The web will make a different form of journalism the norm, not because it's trying to, but because it is easier, faster, and cheaper. Short writing takes less time to read and opinion is easier than objective reporting to write. Readers will come to expect a different quality in their news. A quality in which the writer might not stand up for his/her work, in which sources are not valued, and in which they might not have gone to great lengths to produce accurate and reliable information.

If our traditional form of journalism is not preserved, will the former ethics and values simply disappear? Will journalism become sloppy and lazy in order to conform to our fast and easy lifestyle and most importantly, what kind of effect will this have on our society?

Perspective is reality and if our perspective changes, how can traditions and values be preserved. Hal Crowther, columnist of The Independent weekly (North Carolina) writes that “while the newspaper is expendable, the tradition it represents and the information it supplies are not…if professional journalism vanishes along with the newspapers, this thing we call a constitutional democracy becomes a banana republic.”

SOLUTIONS

So what is the solution to all this? There may not be one and it just might take time to see where everything is going.

Rosen wrote on PressThink that “the question now isn’t whether blogs can be journalism. They can be, sometimes. It isn’t whether bloggers ‘are’ journalists. They apparently are, sometimes….They’re even capable at times, and perhaps only in special circumstances, of beating Big journalism at its own game.” He suggests pro-am (professional-amateur journalism)as a solution and has his own project, Newassignment.net, does just that.

Rosen explained on his blog that the site uses open source methods to develop assignments that could be completed by both professional journalists, who set high standards for the work, as well as people who donate to works they like and see are advancing. Most "donators" would be people who are interested in the news. They would also want to contribute because Newassignment.net would do journalism that the mainstream media doesn't do.

Newassignment.net said on its website that its mission is to "spark innovation in 'open platform' journalism, distributed reporting and what’s now called crowd sourcing...We think the hybrid forms—mixing professional journalists and amateur contributors—are going to be the strongest forms, and we’re attempting to show they have potential."

One of their first assignments, called Assignment Zero was with Wired and upon completion it was termed, a "a highly satisfying failure." Rosen wrote that they ran into organizational and inspirational problems as well as how to assign people tasks. He noted that just because contributers signed up, doesn't mean they will participate..."You still have to convince them that participating is a good option, that it won’t waste their time, that they will know what to do, or be able to figure it out."

Rosen also wrote that the project was well worth it and that, "At the end I felt I had the challenge more squarely in my sights and I am not nearly so clueless now."

What can be learned with Rosen's project is that there is still a need for professional journalism--for many reasons, down to the most obvious: a simple interest in doing it.

Although the web is growing at a fast pace, there may be time for journalism to catch up and preserve all the things we have held so highly in the past. Keen writes that there is a need to control it so that it "enriches and doesn’t undermine our economy, culture, and values."

And that “web 2.0 participatory media is reshaping our intellectual, political, and commercial landscape…Our challenge…is to protect the legacy of our mainstream media and two hundred years of copyright protections within the context of twenty-first-century digital technology. Our goal should be to preserve our culture, and our values, while enjoying the benefits of today’s internet capabilities. We need to find a way to balance the best of the digital future without destroying the institutions of the past.”

Additional Resources

Keen, Andrew, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture. New York: Doubleday 2007

---

]]>http://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/Sexist+Language+in+Media+Coverage+of+Hillary+ClintonAshleighChttp://mediacrit.wetpaint.com/page/Sexist+Language+in+Media+Coverage+of+Hillary+ClintonMoved from: HomeWed, 12 Dec 2007 04:13:58 CST
By Ashleigh Crowther, posted December 12, 2007

Image: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2005. Public domain.


Whether she's a First Lady, a Senator or a presidential candidate, the media has always had a love-hate relationship with Hillary Rodham Clinton. Coverage of Clinton is complex, unpredictable, and highly inconsistent. The one thing that the media never forgets, however, is the fact that Clinton is a woman.

In Postfeminist News, Mary Douglas Vavrus comments that "Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to inspire a mixture of respect and disdain from media personel, and this mixture is more often than not strutured by patterned references that reveal their creators' perspectives on women, power, and public life" (130). Press coverage of Clinton has exposed journalists' sexist ideas about gender and politics.

As early as 1992, media critics had begun noticing that the press' attitude toward Clinton was complex and ambivalent. In an October 30, 1992