Policy Issues

You want them to change the name? Hit the NFL in the wallet: boycott the Washington Redskins broadcasts #RedskinsPride

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The management of the Washington Redskins has asked fans to tweet their #RedskinsPride to Sen. Harry Reid and tell him just what the team name means to them, as a PR campaign response to the letter from Reid and 49 other Democratic Senators who wrote letters last week to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell urging him and the league to endorse a name change by the Redskins.

What could possibly go wrong? Twitter, that’s what. The hashtag was hijacked by an overwhelming majority of protestors who told Harry Reid exactly what the team name meant to them: racism. As I said in an earlier post,

It is troubling that owner Dan Snyder, a person who made his fortune in marketing and product positioning, can’t figure out how to position his organization better.

But venting on Twitter is not going to get the team owners to change their stance on changing the name. For them to do that, it has got to cost them more to keep the name than to change it. To get that to happen, you have got to Continue reading →

American babies are in Sudan prison because mother won’t recant Christianity. Where’s the Fox News – or any media – outrage?

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The story is heavily covered in international media. A 27-year-old pregnant Sudanese woman married to an American has been held shackled in prison for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. Amnesty International calls it a “flagrant breach of international human rights law”. New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte and Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri have written to Secretary of State John Kerry urging him to grant political asylum. Other representatives and senators have taken similar actions.

Yet a quick search through Google News yields very few results from American mainstream media sources. Why?

The Daily Mail reports that Meriam Ibrahim (also referred to as Mariam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag) a Sudanese doctor, was sentenced in a Khartoum court to death earlier this month after being found guilty of converting from Islam to Christianity and marrying in 2011 a Christian man, Continue reading →

When headlines undermine news content: Detroit, abortion rates, poverty, and Third-World references

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The bold story headline: “Doctor: Detroit abortion stats ‘like some Third World country'”

The quote: “We’re seeing a picture that looks more like some Third-World country than someplace in the United States,” said Dr. Susan Schooley, chairwoman of the Department of Family Medicine at Henry Ford Hospital.

The meme: “Third-World” as code for “African”.

The article: policy advocacy, or selling news?

The Detroit News published a provocative article this week about abortion rates in Detroit. The facts may be true (I would still want to verify them), but is the article being truthful in its presentation? Yes, technically, the abortion rate in Detroit as calculated is similar to that in some developing countries. But at 37.9%, one could also say that it is similar to the 2008 rates in Latin America (32%) or Asia (28%), or that it’s better than (gasp!) Europe in the 1990s (48%). However, presenting the information that way wouldn’t Continue reading →

Getting it right but missing the whole picture: the coverage of NBA Los Angeles Clippers owner Don Sterling’s racist remarks

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Yes, we can say with near-certainty that Los Angeles Clippers basketball team owner Don Sterling is a racist. You don’t even have to believe that the audio tape published by TMZ is in fact Sterling talking (but it sure does sound like him); there have been other lawsuits alleging discrimination, such as the 2009 wrongful termination lawsuit by the Clippers’ general manager, African-American Elgin Baylor, who claimed that Sterling said he wanted the team to be composed of “poor black boys from the South and a white head coach” (the suit was later dropped), and, that same year, the settlement of a Justice Department lawsuit alleging discrimination under the Fair Housing Act (this article provides a good picture of the Slumlord Billionaire), which was the largest housing discrimination settlement ever obtained by the Justice Department. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But this latest example has had the effect of focusing attention on Sterling’s entire racist oeuvre, along with the question of the scope of legal and moral responsibility to the public that a sports team and a league might have.

Predictably, politics has entered it, with some Republican pundits trying to confuse and defuse the Cliven Bundy issues by tying the two racists together to cancel them out, shouting that Democrats are keeping quiet about Sterling’s racism because he’s a Democrat! Democrat pundits shout: no, wait, Sterling’s a Republican! Others chime in: no, wait, he contributes to both parties!

This issue has nothing to do with partisan politics or Continue reading →

Equal opportunity offense: Washington Redskins, a humor parody that wasn’t, and #hashtagactivism

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updated 5/28 re: Native Americans: As I said earlier….

Slate’s Dave Weigel wrote today that If you managed to avoid the Internet last night, you missed a crash course in hashtag activism.” Yes, I did. I had better things to do, like declaring a news-free night and nostalgically leafing through some of my food porn cookbook collection. (We’ll talk about that another time.)

But today I’ve got nothing better to do than to vent my spleen on trivia. (Well, actually, that’s not true. I have a stack of things-to-do that are carefully leaned up against each other in dynamic isometric nonmovement. If I moved one, another would demand attention…then another…and another…and eventually the whole stack would vanish – poof! – and then I would have to wander aimlessly, searching for purpose  and meaning, or finally start binge-watching The Newsroom. –Wait! I can put that on the to-do stack. The pressure’s back on; I feel better already.)

So, what’d I miss? Something something Washington Redskins name offensive; something something foundation Native Americans; something Colbert parody; Suzy somebody-or-other gets offended, gets her #HASHTAG up, gets either interviewed or ignored (start at 32:00) then gets really offended; something something #MOREHASHTAG #takingittothetwitterstreets; people getting all #tweetdefensive with their mile-wide and inch-deep #USELESSHASHTAGOUTRAGE and racist/sexist hate, rape, and death threats; and…um…what were we tweeting about again? Continue reading →

NJ teen sues parents for support. Call me cynical, but I sense this is really a battle of the dads….

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An 18 year old NJ teenager is suing her parents for kicking her out and not paying her tuition.

The issues apparently revolve around Rachel Canning’s choice of friends and boyfriend, and her adherence to the rules at home. Smells like typical teen spirit to me. What makes this story titillating, though, is that she’s suing her parents for child support. Using the long arm of the law against your parents – the dream of rebellious teenagers everywhere. But is she right in doing so? Is Rachel Canning an unemancipated minor who should still be supported by her parents, or a selfish, entitled child?

For the moment, a judge has ruled against her petition for support. but has scheduled a hearing in April to decide whether she was “constructively abandoned“ or emancipated herself.

You know what? That’s all beside the point. My spidey sense tells me this just might be a battle of the dads.

Meet Sean Canning, father of Rachel. He has been Continue reading →

“Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by GCHQ” gasped the Guardian. But that’s not really the problem.

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“Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by GCHQ” gasped the Guardian headline.

The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell’s 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ’s existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs.

This is not reporting, it is manipulative commentary. “[E]erily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell’s 1984” is a prairie dog-whistle phrase designed to make you pop up out of your hole in fear. Which in and of itself is kind of Orwellian manipulation, if you think about it.

The privacy risks of mass collection from video sources have long been known to the NSA and GCHQ, as a research document from the mid-2000s noted: “One of the greatest hindrances to exploiting video data is the fact that the vast majority of videos received have no intelligence value whatsoever, such as pornography, commercials, movie clips and family home movies.”

That’s a pretty neat trick: what they say they’re saying is that the videos have no intelligence value, but what the article is really trying to communicate is: they can see your naughty bits. Although only between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains “undesirable nudity”, most of the rest of the article is devoted to discussion of the policies and restrictions around viewing it. The article is preying on people’s fears of having their homemade porn discovered in order to gin up protest that this kind of surveillance is utterly intolerable and must be stopped.

Don’t take this personally, people, but your webchat porn – no matter how talented you think you are – Continue reading →

Bulletproof whiteboards in schools: preying on fear and child safety to separate school districts from their dollars.

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I just had the misfortune of turning on the tv only to see Piers Morgan interviewing someone about the use of bulletproof whiteboards in schools. (Of course, seeing him in and of itself was a misfortune – but, that’s what channel was on when I turned on the tv.) WHAAAAAAT??? What an utter absurdity: the notion that somehow all of our nation’s children will be so much safer if ONLY school districts would make an investment in these educational latter-day chalkboards-cum-shields.

As it turns out NPR did a story on them back in May. School safety consultant Kenneth Trump’s take: “The vendors may be opportunistic, but the people on the purchasing end aren’t thinking it through, either.”

It is a very poor risk assessment: the likelihood of a lone shooter coming into any particular school is small, and if he (it is invariably a he) gets that far – past door buzzers and scanners – the likelihood of a teacher being able to deploy the whiteboard as a personal shield in time is small to nonexistent. But, people do make money preying on and exaggerating other people’s fears.

The title of this post says it all.

Why words matter: shaping public opinion about the NSA

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“NSA Analysts Intentionally Abused Spying Powers Multiple Times” blared the Bloomberg article headline. The article’s tone suggests that deliberate and willful violations of American’s privacy were made by “people with access to the NSA’s vast electronic surveillance systems” and “were the work of overzealous NSA employees or contractors”. The NSA, it clearly should be inferred from the language in this article, is a nefarious organization that Must Be Reined In.

But a closer read of the article, stripped of its shellacking, shows that:

“The deliberate actions didn’t violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or the USA Patriot Act, the NSA said in its statement. Instead, they overstepped the 1981 Executive Order 12333, issued by President Ronald Reagan, which governs U.S. intelligence operations.”

Executive Order 12333 outlines the authorities and responsibilities of the various intelligence agencies. It marks the boundaries of each agency’s scope of work. In other words, it’s a who-does-what document. The careful quote by an official who spoke on condition of anonymity makes it clear that that’s what’s important:

“The agency has taken steps to ensure that everyone understands legal and administrative boundaries….”

In other words, it’s a turf battle, folks. Note that no one is saying that these actions couldn’t/wouldn’t/shouldn’t have been undertaken by another agency; they are only saying that the NSA overstepped its bounds. The reader is left to leap to the conclusion that the violations would not have happened otherwise. If the “correct” agency had undertaken those actions, it is quite probable that no privacy right would have been violated because there would have been no privacy right: the “correct” agency would have been acting within its authority.

The Bloomberg article is not so much reporting news as it is shaping the news: attempting to Continue reading →