Trying to Clue-in the Naperville Sun

Jennifer Golz and her editor at the Naperville Sun could benefit from reviewing the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association’s Stylebook Supplement on LGBT Terminology. In reporting on a fairly standard theft conviction, Golz thinks it’s sooo weird to discover someone who prefers to live as a woman. In Male defendant’s lipstick, ponytail don’t deter judge at sentencing, Golz writes,

Taylur Harkless is a young man from Naperville…..Harkless donned a fitted black sweater and patent handbag, with his black hair pulled high atop his head in a ponytail. His lips quivered in red lipstick as Judge Kathryn Creswell sentenced the 18-year-old man for his role in the theft…He will join his accomplice and “lover,” Luis A. Aguilar, 21, of Aurora, who was sentenced to four years in prison

Besides the egregious use of inverted commas to refer to Harkless’s boyfriend, twice, (recalling some of Mike Royko’s most loathsome comments 20 years or so ago), the Sun doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of being transgendered, which the NLGJA defines as “people whose biological and gender identity or expression may not be the same. ” The Stylebook Supplement suggests “when writing about a transgender person, use the name and personal pronouns that are consistent with the way the individual lives publicly.”  Oh well, Naperville Sun, better luck next time you write about a  transgender resident of your community . As Sassafras points out, it doesn’t have to be that way.

LA Times can’t quite blog Tom Hanks’ endorsement

Do I detect a tone of curmudgeonly resentment in the LA Times’ Andrew Malcolm’s recent Top of the Ticket “blog” post?

In an obvious attempt to be ignored for a while, Tom Hanks with no fanfare, news release or hoopla, late tonight put up a video on his MySpace page endorsing Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for president.

“Blogger” Malcolm refuses to actually link to the video, and also fails to point out the self-declared history buff Hanks’ error– neither Obama nor anyone else will take the oath of office “in November.”

Why Won’t NBC Disclose that Carville is a Clinton Advisor?

CNN is being called to the mat for its failure to disclose its election analyst Bill Bennett’s support for and advisory role to the McCain campaign and recently said it would stop pretending that Clinton advisors Paul Begala and James Carville are neutral observers. NBC and Tim Russert do not see a need to inform its viewers that today’s guest James Carville is advising the Clinton campaign. On today’s Meet the Press, Carville was more a Clinton advocate than he was an objective pundit.

Of course, NBC and Russert don’t talk much about Carville’s ties to Russert.

Super-mega Tuesday Newspaper Endorsements– relevant in “highly visible races?”

The NYT endorsements of HRC, and McCain, made news on Friday; today we see that the largest papers in Illinois, Arizona and Washington all endorsed Obama on Sunday; as did the San Jose Mercury News.

The more interesting question to me is how helpful, and whether they’re a good idea. Tim Porter, in AJR in 2004, noted:

They have some value to some people some of the time in some circumstances, but no one can say how much to whom and when–for sure.

CQ:

Research suggests that newspaper endorsements have only a slight impact on election results. From 1940 to 2002, newspaper endorsements changed perhaps 1 percentage point of the vote, according to a 2004 study by Steve Ansolabehere, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, former dean of and now a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied the issue over time and found that “the more visible the race, the less impact the endorsement has.”

Dean Jamieson, again, on the NewsHour in 04:

Kathleen Hall Jamieson… noted that endorsements are less important to readers than they are for the campaigns, which often use them as proof of their superiority over their rival. “The effect of the editorials doesn’t come out of people reading them, they come out of the ads by the candidates saying ‘I’ve been endorsed,’” Jamieson recently told UPI.

La Opinion Grows By Focussing on Community

The ongoing fall in newspaper circulation was widely reported earlier this month. What received less attention, at least within my Google Reader universe, is the fact that the numbers for Spanish-language dailies continue to grow. La Opinion, Los Angeles’ Spanish-language daily, is the nation’s fastest growing large paper. While circulation of large dailies dropped 2.9%, La Opinion increased its numbers by 3.57% (a number that does not include pass-around figures, which is believed to be higher for Spanish-language dailies.) New York’s El Diario la Prensa also grew by 1.1%.

La Opinion is growing because it tells important stories about Los Angeles. A pair of articles from Thanksgiving Day stand as examples, on the National Transgender Day of Remembrance and the Thanksgiving/protest march by day laborers in the San Fernando Valley. (Neither event was mentioned by the LA Times.)

I lack the skills, and the patience, to adequately translate the two articles– perhaps at some point La Opinion, which is vital for those who care about LA news, will publish include translations for those that don’t read Spanish.

From the article on the jornaloers, Día de agradecer y protestar en LA:

Pablo Alvarado, coordinador de la Red Nacional de Jornaleros, señaló que este año los trabajadores de las esquinas han logrado ganar varias batallas legales ante ordenanzas municipales que les prohibían trabajar.

Destacó también que este año se han abierto cuatro centros de trabajo para los jornaleros, que se han organizado más esquinas, que han marchado y que han llegado a los recintos del poder para demandar y exigir sus derechos y un paro a las redadas.

“Estamos peleando, estamos luchando y estamos ganando, sin embargo, a pesar de que nuestra lucha va a seguir, no va a parar; todavía hay muchas peleas que librar, todavía hay muchas municipalidades que están obsesionadas con terquedad en pasar leyes que criminalicen al trabajador jornalero y a las jornaleras”, dijo Alvarado. “Creemos que este año habrá un aumento de ese tipo de leyes, con la falla de la reforma migratoria en Washington, D.C., este número de ataques va a continuar, pero ante el alza de esos ataques, también va a incrementar nuestra lucha”.

Debido a que los jornaleros son el rostro visible del inmigrante en las esquinas, comentó Alvarado, se han convertido en el blanco favorito de los “minutemen”.

“Pero nosotros venimos a este país a trabajar”, insistió Diego Cap, un jornalero más de los aproximadamente 200 participantes en la marcha. “El único interés de nosotros como jornaleros es venir a este país para trabajar, para llevar el sustento a nuestra familia, no hemos venido aquí a quitarle ni a robarle a nadie, hemos venido aquí a trabajar, los que hemos venido esta mañana aquí, somos la voz de todos los jornaleros de esta nación”.

From Transgéneros piden alto a intolerancia:

En la ceremonia recordaron la historia de Víctor Arellano, o “Victoria”, un joven hispano de 23 años quien decidió vivir plenamente su identidad femenina y que murió tras los barrotes de un centro de deportación en la ciudad de San Pedro.

También la vida de Gwen Araújo fue motivo de lágrimas. Araújo, un estudiante de 17 años, perdió la vida en 2002 tras la golpiza que le dieron cuatro hombres después de que éstos descubrieran que es transgénero.

“La realidad es que por lo menos una vez a la semana me doy cuenta de que una de mis amistades fue públicamente hostigada y hasta atacada físicamente, simplemente por ser quien es”, dijo Victoria Ortega, activista transgénero…

“Para las transgéneros hispanas la lucha es aún más difícil. No sólo nos atacan por vivir nuestra feminidad sino por nuestra identidad latina. A nosotras se nos presentan nuevos obstáculos, como el dominio del inglés, la estrechez de la situación económica, el racismo y todo eso se suma para que nos sea más imposible alcanzar una justicia social”, declaró Victoria.

Sin embargo, las transgénero hispanas son el grupo de más amplio crecimiento en el sur de California. Tan sólo en el grupo de Bienestar hay cerca de 300 miembros de esta comunidad.

“Llegamos a este país en busca de la libertad que se nos niega en nuestros países y nos duele escuchar que aún aquí nuestras hermanas son golpeadas o asesinadas sólo por vivir esta verdadera identidad”, comentó Cristal del Toro, la primer transgénero hispana del condado de Los Ángeles en dirigir una campaña nacional contra el virus del VIH.

Contravia: When Journalism Really Matters

This week I have had the honor to hear Colombian journalist Hollman Morris speak during his visit to Chicago. Morris is being honored by Human Rights Watch for his work on Contravia, a unique Colombian TV news magazine that covers the victims of the civil war. Morris said he conceived of Contravia, and longform journalism, when he realized that armed conflict could not be reported in customary 120 second soundbites.

From the introduction to an interview with Justin Podur in Znet:

As producer for CONTRAVIA, Hollman Morris gave visibility to the most marginalized voices of Colombian society, the peasants, the Afro-Colombians, the indigenous people, and their movements. He has demonstrated courage and integrity that puts most North American journalists, who work out of offices or, when they go to the field, hotels, to shame. In addition to awards, Morris’s work has earned him threats, including threats from the very President of Colombia.

Contravia is often forced into hiatus for lack of funds– it’s not a popular vehicle for advertising in Colombia, go figure. Thus, he speaks movingly of the importance of public broadcasting:

In 1998 there were two public channels that had daily debate programs in prime time and news and analysis from different perspectives. With privatization in 1999 things got steadily worse. Private television captured 90% of the audience. Now it’s reality shows and soap operas. That’s happening all over the world. But in the developed world, you usually have one solid public station: BBC in the UK is the best example. In Colombia there is only private television.

Morris makes our worries about the quality of online comments, participatory media and file-sharing seem utterly trivial.

I’m not interested in objectivity. I am interested in impartiality, but I believe my job is to defend life. Facing attacks on people’s lives one can’t be objective. They accuse me of that and much worse. A country where the president calls human rights defenders terrorists, there will be these sorts of accusations from various sectors. When a president accuses hundreds peasants of being terrorists, a program like ours that shows their intelligence, what they are building, their proposals for the future, will be attacked as ‘biased’. And a sector of society will even believe the accusations that we’re ‘terrorists’.