And there’s real reason to be afraid…

NPR last night spoke with Kevin Merida about his piece in the Washington Post on racist incidents on the campaign trail. This is some of what was said:

Mr. JEAN MORRIS(ph): Don’t want Obama in there. I don’t like his background. They’re putting the man in because of his race, and I don’t - I’m not ready for that.

Ms. JOETTA KUHN(ph): Mr. Obama doesn’t have much of a chance here because they will not vote for a black man in West Virginia, and they can’t stand the thoughts of a black man telling a white man what to do.

Mr. THOMAS COLDWELL(ph): Whether he is a Muslim, I guess he’s - I guess it’s just with everything that’s going on in the Middle East, it’s a little scary being unknown.

Mr. MORRIS KING(ph): You know I didn’t vote for no colored. […]

NORRIS: … with all the coverage of the campaign, these stories really have not been talked about. This - your story was somewhat surprising to many readers because we haven’t heard these stories, these kinds of things.

Mr. MERIDA: Well, I think in part that’s because there has been so much euphoria and excitement around Obama’s candidacy. I think also the nature of campaign coverage, it centers on events, rallies, really you have to kind of just be on the ground and, you know, hanging out at the bar at Applebee’s in small towns, going places where you’re not doing anything but just listening to people. But it really it was lying in plain sight.

Whew!

A good and important story. It’s about time that it be told!

I think it is fairly well understood and accepted by now — though I’m not sure how much we are remembering it in the heat of this election season — that those Civil Rights fighters who brought about the end of Jim Crow were helped along in their struggles by bringing the raw, brutal, barbarous injustice of that era into the living rooms of all Americans.

See, for example, The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, And The Awakening of a Nation.

The Obama campaign has been all about hope. One thing it has not been about is addressing our fears. Well, we’ve got some very real fears. Isn’t it time we face up to them?

Read the rest of this entry »

At the close of the second of NPR’s two part look at how parents are addressing their children’s gender-identity issues which aired last week, Robert, the father of Violet, who is “absolutely certain” that she is “genuinely transgender,” explains how he finds himself “almost offended” when people suggest that he and his family have been too quick to embrace a transgender identity:

“It puzzles me because we even have well-intentioned parents who we care about and who know us … say, ‘Well she’s too young to know!’ Well, when did you know you were a girl? When did I know I was a boy? I knew my whole life, I can’t tell you exactly when, but it wasn’t like I was 10 and realized, ‘Oh gee, I must be a boy!’ ” Robert says. “What people fail to realize is they made that decision way earlier than that. It just happened that their gender identity and their anatomy matched.”

The story’s focus is a highly controversial treatment, monthly injections of a medication for preteen kids to postpone puberty and avoid developing the physical attributes of the sex they were born with. The family found a therapist and after a two-month evaluation, a gender identity disorder diagnosis was rendered; on a family vacation, Armand, their son, would “transition” to Violet, their daughter.

When I am asked how old I was when I realized that I was gay, I answer, “five.”  How I knew when I was that young, I do not know, but that’s my honest answer. So my sympathies are with those parents. My sympathies are, however, complicated by the condition known as Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Also called Apotemnophilia, and Amputee Identity Disorder, I first learned of the condition in an 8,800 word Atlantic piece from December 2000, by Carl Elliott, titled A New Way to Be Mad:

I am on the phone with Max Price, a graphic designer in Santa Fe, who has offered to talk to me about apotemnophilia. (He has asked me to change his name and the details of his life and history if I write about him, and I have.) Price is a charming man, articulate and well-read, and despite my initial uneasiness about calling him, I am enjoying our conversation. I had corresponded by e-mail with a number of wannabes, but had not managed to talk to any of them until now. The conversation has taken on an easy intellectual tone, more like a discussion between colleagues than an interview. Price is telling me about his efforts to get doctors to adopt some guidelines for deciding when a person with apotemnophilia should have surgery. I am tossing out ideas, trying out some of my thoughts, and I wonder aloud about a relationship between apotemnophilia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I ask Price whether he feels that his desire is more like an obsession, a fantasy, or a wish. He says, “Well, it was definitely like an obsession. Until I cut my leg off, of course.”

That brings me up short. I had been unaware that he had actually gone ahead with an amputation. “Ah,” I say. I pause. Should I ask? I decide I should. “May I ask how you did it?” Price laughs. “It was kind of messy,” he says. “I did it with a log splitter.” Read the rest of this entry »

NPR has a terrific and nuanced story on a difficult and challenging topic. One issue to dispose of right away, the story is headlined Two Families Grapple with Sons’ Gender Preferences, which may suggest to some that those boys make a choice about their gender identity.

As their story makes clear, little choice is involved. To people of my sexual identity (I self-identify as gay) using the words gender identity in the title would be more precise. Please forgive the quibble and let’s move on… Why on earth would any child ever choose to go through this:

Bradley had always had a preference for girls’ things. From his earliest days he had chosen girls’ dolls, identified with female characters and gravitated toward female children. But Carol had never thought to care. As far as she was concerned, it wasn’t a loaded gun; it wasn’t a lit cigarette. She says it had really never crossed her mind to say, “I’d really rather you played with a truck.” […]

It was a single event that transformed her vague sense of worry into something more serious. One day, Bradley came home from an outing at the local playground with his baby sitter. He was covered in blood. A gash on his forehead ran deep into his hairline.
Read the rest of this entry »

That’s how the Rand Corporation is describing the large-scale intervention we’ve gotten ourselves into in their most recent study. This is from the Rand Corp., which, I am pretty sure, is supposed to skew conservative.

From the press release:

Recognizing that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will not be the last of their kind, a new RAND Corporation study issued today finds that U.S. capabilities to meet the threat of Islamist insurgencies are seriously deficient and out of balance.

The report finds that large-scale U.S. military intervention and occupation in the Muslim world is at best inadequate, at worst counter-productive, and, on the whole, infeasible. The United States should shift its priorities and funding to improve civil governance, build local security forces, and exploit information — capabilities that have been lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Violent extremism in the Muslim world is the gravest national security threat the United States faces,” said David C. Gompert, the report’s lead author and a senior fellow at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. “Because this threat is likely to persist and could grow, it is important to understand the United States is currently not capable of adequately addressing the challenge.”

The findings are from a major review of strategies to combat insurgencies RAND initiated at the request of the Department of Defense.

What is so absolutely, positively, bottomlessly aggravating about these conclusions is that people could have and would have and were telling us this certainly before we entered Iraq and perhaps before we entered Afghanistan (I recall the former, I do not recall the latter). And if you don’t believe me, well, here’s the Rand again:

The authors cite data from some 90 conflicts since World War II that show the surest way to defeat insurgencies is to foster local governments that are seen by their citizens as representative, competent and honest. “Foreign forces cannot substitute for effective local governments, and they can even weaken their legitimacy,” said co-author John Gordon.

Historically, large-scale military intervention against insurgencies — e.g., France in Indochina and Algeria and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan — more often fails than succeeds.

The study finds that because it can take time for a local insurgency to acquire strength and turn jihadist, the chances of defusing an insurgency are better than 90 percent when caught early. But those chances drop to less than 50 percent if the insurgency has the chance to become a full-blown uprising. Thus, the United States needs the ability to interpret “indicators and warnings” so it can act in the early stages of the insurgency.

Sickening. What and who was President Bush and his advisors listening to when making their decisions to begin military incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq? Feh. Don’t bother answering.

If this is the first time you are hearing this news, you aren’t alone - no one seems to have reported it. You know where I heard it, of all places?

Harry Shearer’s Le Show. Oh.My.God.We.Need.A.New.President.NOW.

I just love hearing Sylvia Poggioli say her name - I always have. Doesn’t matter what she’s reporting.

But this morning, she helped Frank Deford preview this weekend’s Super Bowl game during Morning Edition. You can read the “play” here or listen to it here. I have a suspicion that this is going to be one of those Deford pieces that gets a lot of “just give us the sports, would ya?” e-mails, and I actually didn’t understand a lot of the references - sports or Bard.

But as a diversion, it was excellent. And with barely 30 minutes before the Republican debate in the Reagan Library in California, who couldn’t use a good diversion?

On Tuesday of this week (1/15), National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation broadcast a five-minute segment called, “First-Name Basis?”. Here’s the teaser:

Listeners comment on the implications of calling women by their first names and men by their surnames, and NPR Ombudsman Lisa Shepard talks about gender references and reporting.

Shepard and host, Neal Conan, review how, when Hillary Clinton was more or less “just” Bill’s wife, reporters called her “Mrs. Clinton.” Then, when she became a U.S. Senator from New York, reporters referred to her as “Senator Clinton.” Now, in her bid for the White House, her candidate materials typically refer to her as “Hillary.”

Yet, during the Democratic presidential candidate debates, the fact that some of the candidates are being called by their surnames only, as in “Edwards” or “Obama,” while Clinton is called “Hillary” has provoked a variety of reactions. Some NPR listeners’ letters express the feeling that calling her “Hillary” is derogatory, while others think that it’s respectful since it’s how Clinton wants to be addressed.

According to Shepard,

…the safest most correct thing is to call her Senator Clinton…Referring to her as “Mrs” I do think is denigrating. Last week she was referred to on All Things Considered as “Mrs. Clinton” and this was a story about “Mrs. Clinton will go home and huddle with her husband,” and I got a lot of e-mails about that…

Shepard says that people who have covered Clinton since the early 1990s have a hard habit to break because they called her “Mrs. Clinton” for eight years. Now, however, Shepard urges the media to be respectful and “…Call her Senator, which she is.”

This kind of name game is not new and the more permutations we develop, the more questions arise. Read the rest of this entry »

Former OK senator David Boren was on NPR yesterday (audio here) to talk about Monday’s tripartisan conference in Tulsa, where various former and current centrist officeholders will discuss the potential for a “government of national unity.”

I actually heard most of this one while I was out running errands. As a Democrat who is dubious of the new NIE, I am not happy with our candidates’ insistence that the military option be “off the table” with Iran. I hope I don’t have to cast my first vote for a Republican presidential candidate in November of 2008.

You can download and listen to the 2-hour debate from NPR: Iran Sparks Fireworks at Democratic Debate. You can also listen to several brief audio “highlights.”

Debate Transcript

NPR Debate Fact Check

TNR’s The Stump: A Lousy Format for Hillary at the NPR Debate

Chris Cillizza of The Fix gives us NPR’s Democratic Debate: Winners and Losers

CNN Political Ticker

NY Times: For Democrats, a Strained Debate on Immigration

The Caucus Blog of the NY Times Live-Blogged It

It may be the worst news yet for the Burmese military cabal which continues to refuse to relinquish power despite democratic elections voting them out of power in 1990…

The first bad news for the cabal: It can no longer keep its thuggery a worldwide secret… tiny electronic eyes with seven thousand-league reach, are upon them

Equally bad news for the cabal: the citizen-originated news photos and films coming out of Burma have, for the very first time, revealed specifically the individual faces of the armed soldiers and their leaders… down to anomalies of pockmarks, scars, eye placement, skin tone, nose and ear shape. No more generic thugs; now each face clearly identifiable.

When the same military junta murdered over 3000 Burmese men, women and children in 1988 during the people rising up one more time for ‘Democracy and Decency’… back then, the specific faces (and therefore, names) of those in charge, in ‘middle management,’ and those who murdered…. were all hidden from the world.

The junta liked it that way. They could continue to ‘normalize’ diplomatic relations, for there were few proofs of the slaughter they’d engaged in. They denied such had occurred. Among their falsified claims: ‘The government had to kill a few people to defend the lives of other people.’ Counterfeit claims of self-defense. Thus, money continued to flow into their country by and for various means, from other nations. The junta felt secure.

But, today, because of electronically armed dissidents, the Burmese government is unable to hide its atrocities or the faces of the perpetrators from public view.

There’s a tale told in our family when I was a child, about a mythic king who had a golden key that could fit only one door. This mysterious door was lodged in the trunk of a tree. Inside that tree, was the treasure. But the king could use neither the key nor gain the treasure until he found that one transformative tree in the midst of a forest of ten thousand trees… only one tree carried that small golden door.

The Burmese people have always had the golden key; their courage is the proof of that. And now, like that mythic king, the cyber imagists and bloggers of Burma have found in the midst of ten thousand dead ends, exactly the right tree, and unlocked its door, and over its threshold the treasures of intelligence, images, and truth are pouring through into the greater world…

According to my correspondent in Yangon who is of a religious group allied with the Buddhists, the faces Read the rest of this entry »

A journalistic brouhaha has broken out — one that would never have arisen just a few years ago. Slowly, yet inexorably, a basic journalistic tenet has been weakened…but not destroyed.

At issue: whether NPR showed political bias, arrogance, rudeness or professional stupidity in not agreeing to run an interview with President George Bush if the condition was that Bush was allowed to select the interviewer, who in this case would have been Juan Williams.

Crooks and Liars has THIS view of the incident. And Patterico’s Pontifications offers a different one.

Partisans of both sides may not quite agree (when they see an interview conducted by a hostile reporter) but here is a fact of media life:

As any working journalist, editor or journalism professor will attest, news interview subjects are not generally allowed to select the people who will interview them. It is NOT done and for a good reason.

Any news source (including me when I’m on the road and get interviewed) would always love to have a reporter that they know will not just do a good job but be sympathetic to them and their message. That’s human nature.

But it is a FACT that none of the many editors for whom I wrote overseas from India and Spain in the 1970s, and none of the Knight-Ridder editors I worked for in the early 1980s and none of the editors I worked for at Copley Press’ San Diego Union in the 1980s through 1990 would allow a news source to select the person who would write about them.

If someone ever suggested it, the immediate - and probably accurate — reaction would be that Mr. or Ms. X selected Mr. or Ms. Y because they felt they would not be as hard on them and ask them the questions a journalist selected by the news organization would ask in the journalist’s role as a proxy for the public which can’t ask those tough questions itself.

It’s more reliable, and reassuring to put your money and gamble with a stacked deck rather than with a random deck.

What has changed?

When press/White House history is written, the Bush administration will be notable for the way it successfully decided to bypass the mainstream media and all of those pesky reporters who might grill them with extremely tough, perhaps rude, and difficult questions and instead be interviewed by people it considered the “good” new media — such as Fox News. (Just what do you think those conference calls by campaigns to like-minded weblogs are all about?)

It’s notable that Vice President Dick Cheney has probably been interviewed more by Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh over the years than by reporters and journalists who don’t spend their other hours of their working day bashing Democrats and boosting the GOP and the White House and urging people to vote Republican.

It came out later that Dick Cheney often picked NBC’s Tim Russert for A REASON — because he felt his message (read that the talking points he wanted to get across) could be better communicated on Meet The Press than some other shows where perhaps the reporters might be a bit more unwieldy to handle. (In later interviews, Russert seemed to try to correct that impression, which was probably very upsetting to him a journalist).

So the issue is not whether Williams is a bad reporter or writer. He is NOT. And he was reportedly “stunned” that NPR indicated it wanted to pick its own person to interview Bush, not someone whom Bush wanted to interview Bush.

The issue is that the White House wanted to decide who would get to do the interview on NPR.

The sad part about this is that in the end Williams’ interview appeared on Fox News, which is sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy because Williams’ and the White House’s critics on the left will now utter a huge “AHA! We told you so!” A wiser course would have been for Williams to let NPR have someone else do it (after all, Bob Novak created “Crossfire” for CNN and let others become the screaming head stars).

If the White House needed a commentator to do the interview, would it have readily allowed Keith Olbermann to do it? Or Joe Scarborough? One of the 60 Minutes crew? Or progressive talker Ed Schultz? Or even a pure mainstream media anchor such as NBC’s Brian Williams? Katie Couric, maybe?

The answers is no : the White House would have felt they were too hostile. Juan Williams, it felt, would offer it a better forum…a more comfortable, friendlier one…one in which it could more easily get its viewpoint and outright talking points across.

That’s fine and dandy, but that ain’t really looking for journalism.

It’s looking for P.R.

So perhaps it could have made things a lot easier:

It should have offered to let former White House press secretary Tony Snow do the interview for Snow’s return to Fox.

Then all of the cards — marked and unmarked — would have been on the table.

SOME OTHER COVERAGE AND VIEWS ON THIS ISSUE:

Fox News
Red State
Dan Froomkin on Bush’s Media Cherry Picking
The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz
Huffington Post: If The President Can’t Stand Up To NPR?