This Guest Voice post is by journalism professor and author Walter Brasch who is also a syndicated newspaper columnist and radio commentator, and president of the Pennsylvania Press Club. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Moderate Voice or its writers.
The Media and the Bush Wedding
OR
All the News That Fits—In 500 words or a Graphic
by Walter Brasch
The editors of USA Today, as they do every day, had to decide what to make its “Cover Story.”
The death toll from the cyclone in Myanmar was approaching 25,000, with about almost a million homeless, and the ruling military junta was still refusing to accept foreign assistance.
A Pentagon report revealed that about 43,000 medically unfit troops were sent into combat.
In Philadelphia, six police officers were under investigation for beating suspects. And, in Russia a new president was inaugurated.
What the editors chose to dominate the front page was a three-column head photo of presidential daughter Jenna Bush and a story about her forthcoming non-public private wedding. The only reason USA Today didn’t run the story on its front pages Saturday and Sunday is because it doesn’t publish on weekends. But, just about every other news medium gave the wedding heavy play.
When USA Today debuted in 1982, it was a glitzy full color alternative to the average gray newspaper. Focused upon an audience of travelers, and primarily available at airports and hotels, the five day a week newspaper, then as now, had short, quick looks at the news. “Across the USA” is a series of one paragraph stories from every state, plus the territories, something to let the lonely traveler know his home state still exists. A color weather map informs travelers what to expect when they arrive at an airport a dozen states away. Extensive business stories target middle- and upper-management workers who don’t have the time to read that day’s Wall Street Journal.
With an emphasis on polls, USA Today tells us what we think. And what we think is divided into four equal parts—News, Lifestyle, Sports, and Money. Thus, news is one-fourth of the newspaper.
Ridiculed as McPaper, but read by about two million people a day, most of whom get their daily dose from vendor boxes that look like a TV on a stand, USA Today has set the agenda for almost every newspaper in the country. Following the USA Today model, local newspapers have splashed color and graphics on its pages. The stories are shorter, but not necessarily tighter. And, in an era of downsizing, in which publishers who don’t pull in 20 percent a year profits are often reassigned, there are fewer reporters, fewer in-depth stories, fewer and narrower pages, and a greater reliance upon wire service stories. But, celebrity-based stories and increased fluff—what editors wrongly believe the readers want—have taken over the front pages.
USA Today was never designed to replace the local newspaper, nor should it be a model for local newspapers. It has a niche, and serves that niche well. But, local newspapers have become USA Today clones.
That’s why if USA Today places a celebrity wedding as its most important issue of the day, then it’s reasonable to believe that the clones also believe that 25,000 deaths can be relegated to the inside pages.
This Guest Voice post is by journalism professor and author Walter Brasch who is also a syndicated newspaper columnist and radio commentator, and president of the Pennsylvania Press Club. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Moderate Voice or its writers.
People. People Who Don’t Need People
by Walter Brasch
From a pool of about seven billion, those hard-working geniuses at People magazine have managed to find the hundred most beautiful people in the whole wide world. And—get ready for the surprise—almost every one of those beautiful people are rich American celebrities.
For almost two decades, People’s editors believe they have been given the divine right to anoint who they believe to be the most beautiful people on the planet. The ethnocentric celebrity-fawning People editors are so secure in their self-imposed knowledge that they don’t even tell us what criteria they used to make their determinations. Not even an “editor’s note,” common in most magazines.
For the first few years, People etched their version of reality into our minds by attaching cutesy capsulated biographies to full page color pictures of the most beautiful. This year, the writing is minimal, the design is almost to the level that a good college journalism or graphics arts student could create and, except for a few full page and two-page spreads, most pictures are no bigger than thumbnail size.
Leading off the 69-page special section is actress Kate Hudson. Advance stories about her selection appeared in just about every American newspaper and major website, all of which think stories about celebrities are more important than stories about the recession. Also on the list are Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Ashton Kutcher, and Norah Jones. The seven member cast of TV’s “Gossip Girl” made the list. “Onscreen,” People told us, “they are gorgeous, scheming, backstabbing high schoolers.” Just what America needs. More future business executives and politicians.
The first few years, when the magazine editors could find only 50 beautiful people, there was a fairly even split between men and women. This year, about 90 percent are women. Except for six athletes (three men and three women), the rest are actors, singers, dancers, and models.
Three years after the first list came out, People recognized the elderly. Of course, the elderly were Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, and Barbara Babcock. This year, there’s a special two-page spread–it barely got into the magazine, look for it on pages 174-187–for 40 celebrities, 10 in each of the categories of 20s, 30s, 40, and 50s.
People once selected size 5-foot-11 size14 model Emme as a beautiful person. It championed her as representative of the “burgeoning large-size modeling industry.” Of course, these vacuous editors have no idea that a size 14 isn’t large—it is the average size of American women. This year, the only large size models are in full page ads for Jenny Craig diets and Curvation underwear, which declared, “Style starts with the Side Shaper Underwire bra and shaping panty.”
Teachers, social workers, and medical researchers, no matter how beautiful, didn’t make this year’s cut. But, they shouldn’t worry about it. Neither did Miss America, Miss USA, Miss World, Mr. Universe, or, for that matter, Miss Crustacean, Ocean City, New Jersey’s, salty tribute to hermit crabs, and a spoof of the beauty contest that once inhabited next-door Atlantic City.
People magazine may need people to justify its $254,000 full page advertising rate. But, people, even with insatiable curiosity about celebrities, really don’t need People.
Last week it emerged that one of Norman Mailer’s mistresses, former actress and model Carole Mallory, sold her personal papers to Harvard’s Houghton Library. On Friday they gave the UK’s Times OnLine an exclusive preview.
Harvard? Why Harvard?
Leslie Morris, the Harvard library’s curator, said the main reason the university had been interested in so seemingly unacademic an archive was that Mailer’s hand-written amendments appeared on several manuscripts.
“The edits to me were the important things,” said Morris, who lost the biggest Mailer prize when the author sold his manuscripts to the University of Texas for $2.5m three years ago. “We don’t have that kind of money,” she said.
She declined to reveal how much Mallory was paid, but Mailer scholars may conclude it was worth every penny to read some of Norman’s amendments.
If you’re not going to clickthrough to read the lurid and steamy details, the headline claim is that Mallory “suspected him of having an affair with a male friend, was worried that he might contract Aids and refused to indulge his fantasy of three-way sex with a gay man.”
As the craze for Obama spreads across the French countryside, the concern of Democrats Abroad is growing, as fear that Hillary could be doing irreparable harm to the Party’s likely standard-bearer in November starts to take hold.
“She’s playing the Bush card and the politics of fear. It’s because of her that we have the shameful racial bias that has been introduced into the country! It makes me crazy!”
“This election concerns the entire planet … it’s important to us … we are attentive to the emergence of this candidate bearing hope and who is open to the world.” Read the rest of this entry »
Rocker Bruce Springsteen, who has gotten filthy rich (and deservedly so) for his gritty parables of blue-collar Americans, is defending — and endorsing — Barack Obama.
The Boss wrote in a message to fans that Obama’s comments that some small town Americans were “bitter” and so they clung to religion and guns, had been “ripped out of context.”
Wrote Springsteen on his website:
“Like most of you, I’ve been following the campaign and I have now seen and heard enough to know where I stand. Senator Obama, in my view, is head and shoulders above the rest.
“He speaks to the America I’ve envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems.”
Springsteen made his first foray into presidential politics by performing at events for 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry. He pulled huge crowds to hear Kerry speak in Wisconsin, Ohio and other battleground states days before Kerry’s defeat.
April 13th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
How far will the staff of some shows go to get big ratings? This far:
The TV talk show Dr. Phil McGraw confirmed on Saturday the fact that its staff bailed out of Florida jail one of the girls involved in the violent video posted on YouTube. The video depicted several teen girls beating one of their classmates while filming her.
Mercades Nichols is one of the eight teen girls who face charges in the case of the vicious beating posted on YouTube. She was bailed out by a representative of the show on Friday night, MyFOXTampaBay.com reported.
The bails for the violent girls were set on Friday and they are ranging from $30,000 to $37,000. The girls are aged from 14 to 18.
The bailing out was confirmed via E-mail by Terri Corigliano, a show spokeswoman. In his E-mail, Corigliano explained that the show has previously helped other “guests and potential guests” of the show with different needs, but in this case “certain staff members” who were in the process of booking guests for the Dr. Phil McGraw show went a bit too far and broke the rules of the show.
“These staff members have been spoken to and our policies reiterated. In addition, we have decided not to go forward with the story as our guidelines have been compromised,” Corigliano wrote in the statement.
Keep this post and bookmark this story. Will the girl eventually appear on Dr. Phil’s show? If so, the show’s explanation will prove to be….inaccurate.
In an earlier story TMZ noted that when it comes to jumping into big stories, Dr. Phil is a serial offender:
Apparently Dr. Phil didn’t learn much from his interference with Britney Spears. Paging Dr. Fame whore.
The talk show host has allegedly posted bond, which was set at $33,000, for one of the eight teens that was arrested for severely beating another teenager in Florida. The highly publicized case has been in the news for over a week now, and Dr. Phil must want some of that action.
A bail bondsman told several local media outlets that Mercades Nichols, who has been widely reported as the alleged “ringleader,” had her bond paid by the show’s producers. When Nichols left the jail, a man who claimed to be a producer for the Dr. Phil show helped escort Nichols and her mom.
Mercades’s grandmother recently told local reporters that she didn’t have the money to bail her granddaughter out.
According to reports, the producer then told reporters to leave the jail because the Dr. Phil show had exclusive rights to the delinquent’s story. He did not comment on if Dr. Phil had helped pay for her bond.
This was how another earlier story by Fox News described how it was known Dr. Phil’s people bailed the girl out:
Mercades Nichols, one of eight teens charged in the brutal attack which was captured on a YouTube video, was bailed out by a representative of the show on Friday night, according to a report from MyFOXTampaBay.com.
A judge on Friday set bails ranging from $30,000 to $37,000 for the teenagers.
The Dr. Phil representative was waiting by the jail’s exit, and when Nichols walked out, he tried to block Tampa TV station camera people from getting video of Nichols and her family leaving jail.
TV news and TV talk shows are always focused on “the get” which is getting the big news makers who are at the center of flavor-of-the-week huge news stories. The clear reason: to attract big audiences with guests that won’t and can’t appear on other competing shows.
So remember this story — and the show’s statement that it won’t do it now.
But here is the bottom line: when shows get sensational guests, they usually get the ratings, which increases ad revenues…so their behavior (even in bailing out teens accused of beating up another teen) is rewarded when people tune in.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both received glowing endorsements this week, although in a slightly unusual format. Firstly, the endorsements were printed in US Weekly. Secondly, they were from Obama and Clinton’s respective spouses. Spouse Debate 2008! the headline exclaimed. Who Knows The Candidates Best?
Soundbite:
“Entering into a presidential race is a very personal and difficult decision. As you may have read, I was a little hesitant at first. But when I took off my selfish hat, and I put on my mom hat and my professional hat and my woman hat and my citizen hat, I realized that if I weren’t married to him, I’d want a Barack Obama presidency right now.”
To give props to Michelle Obama, her endorsement at least has the ring of personal attachment. Bill Clinton sounds like he’s writing a character reference. For someone he doesn’t know all that well.
“In law school, [Hillary] worked for legal services for poor people, and she took an extra year at the Yale Child Study Center and the Yale University Hospital to study about children and the law, especially how to better protect kids from severe abuse and neglect. When she graduated, she turned down lucrative job offers and instead took a job at the Children’s Defense Fund because she wanted to help poor children.”
US Magazine is owned by Wenner Media. Jann Wenner recently wrote a personal endorsement for Barack Obama in Wenner Media’s flagship publication, Rolling Stone. Is US going to remain neutral for the rest of the race? Possibly not. This week’s issue features a photo slideshow of Barack Obama acting Just Like Us: supermarket shopping, eating hot sauce, riding a tricycle. Hillary Clinton’s slideshow uncharitably features her Worst Outfits Ever.
As yet, there’s been no official endorsement from Cindy McCain.
Too provocative of a title? I’ll let you be the judge, but it calls attention to the unending rhetorical frenzy engendered by the Democratic primary race. The latest example came at a fundraising concert for Hillary Clinton put on by Sir Elton John. Some of his comments caught the attention of the media quickly.
“I never cease to be amazed at the misogynist attitude of some of the people in this country,” he said. “I say to hell with them.”
This was yet another reference to the all too common meme that anyone not supporting or disagreeing with Hillary Clinton is biased against women. So if that is fair game, then clearly we should be able to say that Sir Elton’s lack of support for Barack Obama means he’s a racist, yes? Both arguments fall on their face under the slightest bit of scrutiny.
The problem we seem to have in the commentariat class is that we all decry accusations of either racism or sexism when they are levied at us, but many seem to give at least a tentative nod when such accusations are levied at supporters of the other candidate. As I browsed some of the responses to this event, for example, I noticed Diane Dees at The Democratic Daily posing one of the usual questions.
And bloggers and those who comment on blogs have already begun screaming that not wanting to vote for Hillary does not equal misogyny. Whoever said it did?
Well, Diane, let me think for a moment here. Oh yes, I seem to recall a very recent article about Cokie Roberts and some comments she made. It included the following:
I am not here to say whether superdelegates should or should not be the deciding factor, but I am here to say that, once again, we are being told that it is essential not to give the appearance of racism, but it does not seem to matter if those involved in the process give the appearance of sexism and/or misogyny.
…The Roberts’ rhetoric is no different from the rhetoric of almost all politicians, elected officials, writers, and commentators: Racism is a blot on the society, while sexism and misogyny are “less important” issues, and therefore do not merit the same amount of attention, if indeed, they merit any at all.
This situation also speaks to the “double reverse” version of these claims, where we find assumptions that while opponents of Barack Obama must be racists his supporters must be supporting him because he is black. (As opposed to thinking he is simply the better of the two candidates to take the nomination.) I support Senator Obama, but I am also quite clearly a member of the MOWG class. (That would be “Middle-class Old White Guys” as opposed to the ROWGs, or “Rich Old White Guys” club.) Surely, even in the midst of the silly season, we can leave this behind.
The point is that while racism and misogyny clearly still exist in pockets around our country, they hardly seem to be the prevalent, driving force in our major political campaigns. Otherwise it would be quite difficult to explain the growing numbers of minorities and women filling the ranks of Congress and state governments. There is virtually no daylight to be found between the policy positions of Clinton and Obama and the race truly has become a contest between two opposing cults of personality. Supporters on both sides, however, would be wise to steer clear of (and condemn, Ms. Clinton) these types of blanket accusations when used in their support.
(EDITED because the first post failed to include the second to last paragraph from my original draft.)
Will it be possible to persuade Western governments and public opinion that China is the victim of Tibetan ‘running dogs’? In this op-ed from Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Po, published before the voyage of the Olympic torch began, Hong Kong television commentator Dr. Qiu Zhenhai explains how the Beijing government can turn the public relations battle in its favor. Far more reasonable - even to the point of admitting error on the part of the Chinese government - the key, according to the author, is to understand the flaws and contradictions in Western thinking and to mount a massive new public relations campaign. Read the rest of this entry »
Say what one will about his political positions, especially his staunch defense of the right to bear arms, Charlton Heston meant alot to alot of Americans. In homage to his death, WORLDMEETS.US will be posting foreign press reaction to his death throughout the next few days.
We have begun by posting articles from the British, beginning with the The Times obituary, and from Australia’s The Age.
The Times writes, “Heston was a rare creature in Hollywood, a town of often unthinking democrats. He walked behind Martin Luther King in the march on Washington of 1963, and was president of the Screen Actor’s Guild for six terms during the Sixties. But in the Eighties Heston switched his allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans and from 1998 to 2003 he served as president and spokesman for the National Rifle Association, becoming the rugged public face of rigid opposition to gun control and, more broadly, of a distinctively American spirit of defiant self-reliance.”
Australia’s The Age writes, “He liked his films big and he liked to be big in them. … few actors - of his or any generation - can lay claim to having been responsible for so many of cinema’s definitive big-screen moments.”
READ MORE foreign press reaction to the death of Charlton Heston on WORLDMEETS.US throughout the day
The Nigerian paper This Day reports that the former president all but came out for Obama, speaking to reporters in that country:
We are very interested in the primaries. Don’t forget that Obama won in my state of Georgia. My town, which is home to 625 people, is for Obama, my children and their spouses are pro-Obama. My grandchildren are also pro-Obama. As a superdelegate, I would not disclose who I am rooting for but I leave you to make that guess.
He was in Abuja, the paper reports, for the Carter Center awards for guinea worm eradication.
A famous actress and activist whose very name still distresses my Vietnam veteran friends, Jane Fonda:
Jane Fonda endorses Barack Obama; there goes his crossover vote
Jane Fonda, the actress and ardent anti-Vietnam War advocate who visited North Vietnam during those hostilities, has endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for president.
Actress and anti-war advocate Jane Fonda at a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery in June 1972 singing an anti-war song with soldiers during her visit to North Vietnam in the Vietnam war has just endorsed Democrat Barack Obama of Illinois for president
There were no formal ceremonies for the endorsement. In fact, the Obama campaign may just be learning about the actress’s approval now as word spreads like lit gunpowder via the Internet.
Fonda was eating out last night and exited the restaurant, ignoring as celebrities often do the assembled press contingent.
But a video camera was rolling as she approached the street and someone, perhaps just trying to get her to turn around for a picture, shouted out at her back, “Who are you going to vote for?”
There was a moment of silence. Then, the actress did turn around toward the cameras, paused and with a smile said simply, “Obama!” Then she got into a car and drove away.
The speaker was British actor Paul Scofield, who died today. He posed the question in response to queries as to why he didn’t want to be knighted, gaining the privilege of being called, “Sir.”
In spite of being in a very public profession, Scofield felt no need to be a public personality, a celebrity.
Scofield’s decision for ordinariness, in spite of his extraordinary talent, is a bit damning, however unintentionally, of those marginally talented celebrities with which the tabloids become so obsessed these days. And of the more talented persons who, once their sizzling fame has abated, can’t be content with simply continuing to do work, instead spending millions to remind us that they’re still around and still talented.
Scofield’s stance reminds us that there is a difference between success, on the one hand, and prominence, on the other. Scofield was a successful actor who received an Academy Award for his incredible performance as Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. Yet he never became a celebrity.
His example might well be heeded beyond the field of entertainment. Politics, for example. Gore Vidal, a curmudgeon whose inventive, if destructive, violations of historical fact have sometimes angered me, is often cited as having said, “Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.”
Vidal’s point, of course, is that if anyone has that peculiar combination of megalomania and gnawing insecurity necessary to say, “I want to be President,” they probably aren’t well-suited for the office. Read the rest of this entry »
“The article written by Mia Farrow confuses right and wrong and relentlessly discredits China, but even more frightening, it has begun to change the atmosphere of public opinion in the West. … She has wantonly brainwashed the public’s thinking by seizing the moral high ground. … Now is the time to expose the weaknesses of Mia Farrow and her ilk. They cannot be permitted to wantonly brainwash public opinion. This is not only unfair to China but to the entire world - and especially to Mr. Spielberg.”
By Shan Renping
Translated By Mark Klingman
February 29, 2008
Global Geographic Times - People’s Republic of China - Original Article (Chinese)
For the Beijing Olympic Games, the West seems to be showing us two completely different attitudes. On the one hand, most Western countries have given the Beijing Games a positive evaluation and oppose the “politicization of the Games.” But on the other, some non-governmental organizations and members of civil society still clamor to resist the Beijing Olympic Games.
Among these people, one cause of dissatisfaction is that they believe China hasn’t acted played a positive role in resolving the Darfur problem. So despite the fact that to date, the leaders of over sixty countries have announced that they will attend the Beijing Olympics; and opposing the “politicization of the Games” has become the message of the mainstream of global public opinion - we cannot ignore the voices of average Western people in this matter - especially the negative voices.
Not long ago, American director Steven Spielberg resigned as art director for the Beijing Olympics. On the surface it seems as though he had no choice, and although there is no chance that this will affect the success of the Beijing Olympics - the act does tell us something of the Western misunderstanding of China.
It’s fair to say that for some time now, the director has been under tremendous political pressure. Last year, on March 28, the American actress Mia Farrow wrote a commentary in The Wall Street Journal with language that maliciously accused the Beijing Olympics with being the “Genocide Olympics.” This article was the first time that the Beijing Games and Sudan were hung on the same hook - and beside condemning China, she sought to persuade Spielberg.
She wrote: “That so many corporate sponsors want the world to look away from that atrocity during the Games is bad enough. But equally disappointing is the decision of artists like director Steven Spielberg … to sanitize Beijing’s image.” Even more provocatively, she linked the Beijing Olympics to Spielberg’s own Shoah Foundation for Holocaust-remembrance which he founded in 1994, asking him to be aware that “China is bankrolling Darfur’s genocide.”
Mia Farrow’s article not only confuses right and wrong and relentlessly discredits China, even more frightening is that she has begun to change the atmosphere of public opinion in Western societies: the question of supporting the Beijing Olympic Games has become a moral issue. Once again, Spielberg’s resignation undoubtedly proves that the pressure of public opinion is very strong. It can be inferred that in the next five months, these same people will turn up the pressure on athletes and sponsors alike.
People like Mia Farrow think they have found China’s soft rib - that is, they believe they have found the most opportune place to apply pressure to China. They are wrong! In fact it is their proposed solution to the Darfur problem that is the real soft rib! Now is the time to expose the weaknesses of Mia Farrow and her ilk. They cannot be permitted to wantonly brainwash public opinion …
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated foreign press coverage of issues that involve the United States.
In the Search for Truth, book and magazine publishers are running into a few problems. Herewith two new trends in the reality business:
The continuing hoo-ha over the latest publishing fraud, the Valley girl who posed as a druggie gang member, brings up the question of where to draw the line between writers with vivid imaginations and out-and-out liars.
Truman Capote, who invented the non-fiction novel, was not always the most fact-checkable of journalists. He had a storyteller’s way with the truth. His writing and even his casual conversation abounded in astonishments, wondrous coincidences and weird juxtapositions.
But Capote was a novelist at heart, and his talent earned him some leeway as a fabulist in matters of little moment. In fact, the writing of “In Cold Blood” was, in part, a challenge he set himself to tell a journalistically pure story that would have the richness of his fiction. He knew the difference.
Today’s fake memoirists either don’t know or don’t care.
In an era of fake memoirs, Esquire now gives us a new variation on masturbatory journalism–the fictional diary.
For “a conceivable chronicle of Heath Ledger’s final days,” the editors explain, “writer Lisa Taddeo visited the actor’s neighborhood, talked to the store owners and bartenders who may have seen him during his last week, and read as many accounts and rumors about the events surrounding his death as possible. She filled in the rest with her imagination. The result is what we call reported fiction.”
Graham flips the bird; Fillmore West closing poster
Concert impressario Bill Graham was known for three things: Foul language, picking up trash wherever he encountered it, whether backstage at his own venues or elsewhere, and a deep and abiding love of music — if not necessarily musicians — that he parlayed into what is without question the most extraordinary run of concerts in rock ‘n’ roll history.
To say that the charismatic Graham could be difficult is an understatement. He introduced himself to me by way of asking “What the f*ck are you doing?” the first time I bumped into him back stage at a concert. He was, of course, picking up trash at the time.
It’s not just that Graham caught the counterculture wave in San Francisco at just the right time, he rode it hard, along the way helping introduce and in a few cases promote some of the seminal music acts from that era. They included the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Big Brother, Santana, Country Joe and the Fish and his personal favorite, the Grateful Dead, with whom he had a love-hate relationship for years. (The Dead felt the same way.)
Funny, I’m not much like the folks on the list and dislike or disagree with many of them. I don’t even watch the TV heads (but I do belong to the ACLU)!
Listing all of the top Democratic candidates was not really fair of RWN.
Is the United States truly ready for a Black first family? Quite a few Africans appear to doubt it. This op-ed article from Nigeria’s This Day asks, ‘Has White America truly purged itself of its notorious resistance to interracial harmony? … Obama represents all that White America has been struggling to prevent. … In short, it’s not news that race remains a raging issue in America.’
“If Obama somehow manages to beat Hillary in the race to jump the Democratic hurdles, he may not go much further - unless White America confronts this demon that is ravaging their nation.”
By Tayo Agunbiade
January 3, 2007
Nigeria - This Day - Original Article (English)
Does Senator Barack Obama have all it takes to become the next President of the United States? Media analysts publicly swear by him and think that with no trouble at all, he’ll be able to carry the responsibilities of the White House on his shoulders. They sing about his capacity to hold the audience’s attention during debates and convince people of his genuineness. Although one can’t help but notice that more often than not, a sentence or two about Obama’s experience-deficit emerges at the end of most polling result reports.
As far as Obama’s policies, one news magazine described some of his statements as “bizarre,” noting that he’s unprepared (a euphemism for lacking courage) to disagree with the thinking of the party base. It concludes that he needs to beef up his foreign policy statements to make up for his lack of experience.
If there’s one thing that stands him in good stead with the anti-war lobby, it’s that he has been consistent about his stand against the Iraq War. Others think he has something else that could put him in good stead to win the race: the color of his skin - although the candidate himself doesn’t seem to push this as a unique selling point! One international newspaper says his face offers “an effective potential re-branding of the United States.” In other words, America’s unpopularity around the world can be fixed with a black face. Hence what Americans need at this point in time is a black President.
But just how true is this in present day America, where racial profiling is said to still hold sway? Though it is vehemently denied of being racial profiling, the actions adopted by some law enforcement agencies mean that people - Black and Hispanic men in particular - are more likely to be stopped and searched than their white counterparts.
For fear of being branded racist, many refrain from asking this blunt and pertinent question on a subject that still holds sway in present-day America. Clearly an elephant in the room, pundits deftly avoid the issue. Another up front question is: Is America ripe for a black man to occupy that most powerful office in the world? Are Americans truly ready for a Black first family? Has White America truly purged itself of its notorious resistance to interracial harmony? Read the rest of this entry »
![[The Telegraph, U.K.]](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00322/Cartoon_322830a.jpg)
Rocker Bruce Springsteen, who has gotten filthy rich (and deservedly so) for his gritty parables of blue-collar Americans, is defending — and endorsing — Barack Obama.
‘NO SMOKING’
The speaker was British actor Paul Scofield, ![[The Independent, U.K.]](http://worldmeets.us/images/daliahu_independent.gif)
