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Date: Tuesday, December 27, 2011, 5:24 am
By: Jackie Jones, BlackAmericaWeb.com
"Any missing black woman" was the response from a friend asked to suggest some of the most underreported stories for the year.
In fact, missing women, voter suppression, less financial aid for poor students and a black lawmaker likening the Democratic Party to Nazi Joseph Goebbels were among the most underreported stories of 2011.
<span style="font-weight: bold">While the cases of Robyn Gardner, a white woman from Maryland who disappeared in Aruba while vacationing there, and Michelle Parker, the white Florida woman who disappeared after an appearance on “The People’s Court” over a dispute with her ex-fiance, garnered major publicity, the disappearance of Detroiter Kalisha Madden on Nov. 28 did not.</span>
Derrica Wilson, co-founder of Black and Missing Foundation, Inc., a Hyattsville, Maryland-based nonprofit, told BlackAmericaWeb.com, in a story about Madden’s case, that "When there’s a missing person of color, they associate the person with negative information. It just seems like our lives are less valued."
Wilson co-founded BAMFI with her sister-in-law out of concern about the lack of coverage given to Tamika Huston, of Spartansburg, S.C. Huston’s 2004 disappearance – just a year before teenaged Natalee Hollway went missing in Aruba during a class trip – generated little coverage outside of South Carolina. Huston’s family struggled to spread the word about the missing 24-year-old woman, while Holloway became a household name.
<span style="font-weight: bold">According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, approximately 40 percent of all missing persons are people of color.</span>
And it wasn't just in the reporting of missing black women where black Americans felt ignored.
In the “Occupy” movement, for which protesters camped out in various cities to protest economic and political inequity, it became clear that even within the encampments, there was a class/race divide, and participants faced "the prospect of becoming the very thing they were fighting against," said Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” a satiric look at the news.
The show took a look at the differences within the encampment. One section, dubbed Uptown, had participants organized and working on laptops and netbooks and meeting to coordinate what the next move should be. Meanwhile, residents of Downtown were not participating in the discussions, nor asked for input. In fact, a committee was formed, and the “leaders” found space in the atrium at Deutsche Bank to hold strategy sessions. No input from lower-income or protestors of color was seen.
It was, one demonstrator said, a group led by the college-educated elite.
Fewer black Americans will have a chance to join that elite now that students who take longer than six years to obtain their undergraduate degrees likely will have their Pell grants cut off next school year under the $1 trillion budget bill that passed just before the congressional recess.
Pell grants, which are offered to low-income students, don't have to be paid back. The bill keeps the maximum grant award at $5,550, but seeks to save $11 billion over the next decade, in part, by reducing the maximum number of years the grant can be received.
It's estimated that about 100,000 students would be affected by the change, said Amy Wilkins, the vice president for government affairs and communications at the advocacy group Education Trust. Many of these students are working their way through school or lost credits that have to be made up after they transferred from other schools.
Speaking of schools, after five years, a lawsuit filed against the state of Maryland alleging disparities between the state's HBCUs and traditionally white institutions is set to begin trial in January – and could have a major impact on higher education for years to come.
The lawsuit, originally filed in 2006, accuses the state of segregating black and white schools – by its funding of and programs in the institutions – in violation of federal law.
In fact, many black voters across the country are likely to feel cut off, too, under a steady march of electoral law changes that will make it more difficult for African-Americans and Latinos to vote in 2012.
Twenty-five new measures in 14 states have created the largest voter suppression campaign since the civil rights movement, according to the NAACP. The new restrictions range from stricter identification requirements to requiring supporting documentation (i.e., birth certificate, marriage licenses, etc.) and excluding university IDs as legitimate state-issued identification.
Nationwide, about 25 percent of blacks lack a current state ID. The problem is even worse on a state-by-state basis. In Wisconsin, for example, 55 percent of black males and 46 percent of Latino males lack a driver's license, compared to just 15 percent of white males. Among Wisconsin voters between 18 and 24 years old, 78 percent of black males, 66 percent of black women, 59 percent of Latino men and 46 percent of Latina women don't have driver's licenses.
Some say the reason many issues of importance to black Americans don’t get mainstream coverage is because there are increasingly fewer black journalists in those newsrooms.
Case in point: Time magazine will lose its only African-American correspondent early next year when Steven Gray departs.
According to Richard Prince’s "Journal-isms," a column devoted to covering diversity in the news and in the news industry, five years ago, Ali Zelenko, vice president for communications at Time Inc., was asked to name the journalists of color at Time magazine.
At the time, she listed 15, including "black journalists Janice Simpson, assistant managing editor; Ta-Nehisi Coates, staff writer; Perry Bacon Jr., Washington correspondent; and Sonja Steptoe, senior correspondent. Today, all four are gone," Prince wrote. “And the last remaining black correspondent, Steven Gray, who joined the magazine in 2007 and works in the Washington bureau, announced Friday he is leaving."
According to the annual census of the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), the percentage of minorities in newsrooms totaled 12.79 percent, a decline of .47 percentage points from a year ago. It is the third straight year that the percentage of African-American, Asian, Latino, and Native American journalists has declined in U.S. newsrooms.
Further, the report showed:
· Supervisors: Minorities account for 11 percent of all supervisors in newsrooms, which remains virtually unchanged for the past four years. Of all minorities, 22 percent are supervisors.
· Newspapers with no minorities: 441 newspapers responding to the ASNE census had no minorities on their full-time staff. This number has been growing since 2006.
In broadcast, the news is little changed. In the last 21 years, the minority population in the U.S. has risen 9.5 percent; but the minority workforce in TV news is up 2.7 percent, and the minority workforce in radio is actually down from what it was two decades ago.
The minority percentage at non-Hispanic stations again dropped slightly from the year before - down from last year's 19.3 percent (which was down from the previous year's 19.6 percent). This year, the overall rate fell to 19.1 percent. At non-Hispanic stations, black Americans make up 9.4 percent of workforce, down from 10.3 percent a year earlier.
And let’s face it, would you want this next guy to be the top black voice, representing your interests?
Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), a Tea Party congressman, recently compared Democrats’ rhetoric to the Nazi Germany propaganda machine.
When asked in a recent interview about anti-incumbent sentiment, which is running against Republicans, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, West replied, "If Joseph Goebbels was around, he'd be very proud of the Democrat Party because they have an incredible propaganda machine."
"I think that you have, and let's be honest, you know, some of the people in the media," he said, "are complicit in this, in enabling them to get that type of message out."
By: Jackie Jones, BlackAmericaWeb.com
"Any missing black woman" was the response from a friend asked to suggest some of the most underreported stories for the year.
In fact, missing women, voter suppression, less financial aid for poor students and a black lawmaker likening the Democratic Party to Nazi Joseph Goebbels were among the most underreported stories of 2011.
<span style="font-weight: bold">While the cases of Robyn Gardner, a white woman from Maryland who disappeared in Aruba while vacationing there, and Michelle Parker, the white Florida woman who disappeared after an appearance on “The People’s Court” over a dispute with her ex-fiance, garnered major publicity, the disappearance of Detroiter Kalisha Madden on Nov. 28 did not.</span>
Derrica Wilson, co-founder of Black and Missing Foundation, Inc., a Hyattsville, Maryland-based nonprofit, told BlackAmericaWeb.com, in a story about Madden’s case, that "When there’s a missing person of color, they associate the person with negative information. It just seems like our lives are less valued."
Wilson co-founded BAMFI with her sister-in-law out of concern about the lack of coverage given to Tamika Huston, of Spartansburg, S.C. Huston’s 2004 disappearance – just a year before teenaged Natalee Hollway went missing in Aruba during a class trip – generated little coverage outside of South Carolina. Huston’s family struggled to spread the word about the missing 24-year-old woman, while Holloway became a household name.
<span style="font-weight: bold">According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, approximately 40 percent of all missing persons are people of color.</span>
And it wasn't just in the reporting of missing black women where black Americans felt ignored.
In the “Occupy” movement, for which protesters camped out in various cities to protest economic and political inequity, it became clear that even within the encampments, there was a class/race divide, and participants faced "the prospect of becoming the very thing they were fighting against," said Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” a satiric look at the news.
The show took a look at the differences within the encampment. One section, dubbed Uptown, had participants organized and working on laptops and netbooks and meeting to coordinate what the next move should be. Meanwhile, residents of Downtown were not participating in the discussions, nor asked for input. In fact, a committee was formed, and the “leaders” found space in the atrium at Deutsche Bank to hold strategy sessions. No input from lower-income or protestors of color was seen.
It was, one demonstrator said, a group led by the college-educated elite.
Fewer black Americans will have a chance to join that elite now that students who take longer than six years to obtain their undergraduate degrees likely will have their Pell grants cut off next school year under the $1 trillion budget bill that passed just before the congressional recess.
Pell grants, which are offered to low-income students, don't have to be paid back. The bill keeps the maximum grant award at $5,550, but seeks to save $11 billion over the next decade, in part, by reducing the maximum number of years the grant can be received.
It's estimated that about 100,000 students would be affected by the change, said Amy Wilkins, the vice president for government affairs and communications at the advocacy group Education Trust. Many of these students are working their way through school or lost credits that have to be made up after they transferred from other schools.
Speaking of schools, after five years, a lawsuit filed against the state of Maryland alleging disparities between the state's HBCUs and traditionally white institutions is set to begin trial in January – and could have a major impact on higher education for years to come.
The lawsuit, originally filed in 2006, accuses the state of segregating black and white schools – by its funding of and programs in the institutions – in violation of federal law.
In fact, many black voters across the country are likely to feel cut off, too, under a steady march of electoral law changes that will make it more difficult for African-Americans and Latinos to vote in 2012.
Twenty-five new measures in 14 states have created the largest voter suppression campaign since the civil rights movement, according to the NAACP. The new restrictions range from stricter identification requirements to requiring supporting documentation (i.e., birth certificate, marriage licenses, etc.) and excluding university IDs as legitimate state-issued identification.
Nationwide, about 25 percent of blacks lack a current state ID. The problem is even worse on a state-by-state basis. In Wisconsin, for example, 55 percent of black males and 46 percent of Latino males lack a driver's license, compared to just 15 percent of white males. Among Wisconsin voters between 18 and 24 years old, 78 percent of black males, 66 percent of black women, 59 percent of Latino men and 46 percent of Latina women don't have driver's licenses.
Some say the reason many issues of importance to black Americans don’t get mainstream coverage is because there are increasingly fewer black journalists in those newsrooms.
Case in point: Time magazine will lose its only African-American correspondent early next year when Steven Gray departs.
According to Richard Prince’s "Journal-isms," a column devoted to covering diversity in the news and in the news industry, five years ago, Ali Zelenko, vice president for communications at Time Inc., was asked to name the journalists of color at Time magazine.
At the time, she listed 15, including "black journalists Janice Simpson, assistant managing editor; Ta-Nehisi Coates, staff writer; Perry Bacon Jr., Washington correspondent; and Sonja Steptoe, senior correspondent. Today, all four are gone," Prince wrote. “And the last remaining black correspondent, Steven Gray, who joined the magazine in 2007 and works in the Washington bureau, announced Friday he is leaving."
According to the annual census of the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), the percentage of minorities in newsrooms totaled 12.79 percent, a decline of .47 percentage points from a year ago. It is the third straight year that the percentage of African-American, Asian, Latino, and Native American journalists has declined in U.S. newsrooms.
Further, the report showed:
· Supervisors: Minorities account for 11 percent of all supervisors in newsrooms, which remains virtually unchanged for the past four years. Of all minorities, 22 percent are supervisors.
· Newspapers with no minorities: 441 newspapers responding to the ASNE census had no minorities on their full-time staff. This number has been growing since 2006.
In broadcast, the news is little changed. In the last 21 years, the minority population in the U.S. has risen 9.5 percent; but the minority workforce in TV news is up 2.7 percent, and the minority workforce in radio is actually down from what it was two decades ago.
The minority percentage at non-Hispanic stations again dropped slightly from the year before - down from last year's 19.3 percent (which was down from the previous year's 19.6 percent). This year, the overall rate fell to 19.1 percent. At non-Hispanic stations, black Americans make up 9.4 percent of workforce, down from 10.3 percent a year earlier.
And let’s face it, would you want this next guy to be the top black voice, representing your interests?
Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), a Tea Party congressman, recently compared Democrats’ rhetoric to the Nazi Germany propaganda machine.
When asked in a recent interview about anti-incumbent sentiment, which is running against Republicans, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, West replied, "If Joseph Goebbels was around, he'd be very proud of the Democrat Party because they have an incredible propaganda machine."
"I think that you have, and let's be honest, you know, some of the people in the media," he said, "are complicit in this, in enabling them to get that type of message out."