Dubious Responses Jacqueline Bacon’s article on the debates (“Dubious Debates,” Extra!, 7-8/08) only further documents my reaction as I watched them. My question, however, is: Why did the candidates meekly put up with those questions? When someone is asked why he still runs when polls show he has very weak support, the answer should have been something like this: That’s a question only the voters can, and should, answer. They want to know what my positions are. Then they can decide if they want to support me. Ask questions about what I want to do about healthcare, the economy, or [...]
Search Results for: Jacqueline Bacon
Aug
01
2008
Dubious Debates
How media moderators lowered the level of Election ’08
Given the early start and lengthy run of Election 2008’s presidential primaries, the full slates of candidates in both the Democratic and Republican parties, and voters’ concerns with pressing issues, it is not surprising that the media featured a large number of debates. Roughly 40 were held between April 2007 and May 2008 (depending upon whether so-called “forums” and an interactive “mashup” online debate created by Yahoo! and the Huffington Post are included). The volume at times seemed overwhelming, as in January 2008, when six debates (one called a forum) were held. Despite the potential for voter exhaustion, we might [...]
Nov
01
2007
Miseducation
The media and the Supreme Court on race and public education
The June 2007 Supreme Court decision sharply limiting the use of race in public school admissions was viewed with dismay by many educators, civil rights activists and others who support diversity in our nation’s public schools. As Ted Shaw, the director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, explained, “In the context of segregated public schools in this country, our experience, almost without exception, is that segregation has always been a prelude to other forms of deprivation, educational and otherwise, for black [people]” (Black Enterprise, 9/07). While segregated public schools mean unequal resources and opportunities, education researchers and social [...]
Feb
01
2006
The Language of Extra!
Reflections on fairness and accuracy
A major focus of my research is the way language can be used to oppress or empower, and I have applied this perspective to media discourse in my writing for Extra! magazine. This has given me an opportunity to reflect on what it means—for media critics as well as for those we scrutinize—to be precise, independent, reasonable and evenhanded. By examining the work of fellow writers for Extra! over the past 20 years and in learning from my own assignments, I have altered both my own approach to criticism and my definitions of key terms. My first project for Extra! [...]
Nov
01
2005
'Saying What They've Been Thinking'
Racial stereotypes in Katrina commentary
As columnist Dawn Turner Trice remarked (Chicago Tribune, 9/12/05), Hurricane Katrina “shed a light” on the often unspoken racist assumptions of many Americans. In particular, she noted, many of the elite have, through their comments about the tragedy, “unwittingly reveal[ed] themselves” and their fundamental prejudices. Of course, many pundits attacked the idea that racism had anything to do with Katrina at all. To suggest race affected the response to the hurricane, Reason magazine’s Cathy Young (Boston Globe, 9/12/05) charged, was “irresponsible.” Jeff Jacoby decried in the Boston Globe (9/14/05) the invocation after Katrina of the “America-as-lethally-racist theme” that “is as [...]
Sep
01
2005
Letters to the Editor
Missing the Point of Torture Jacqueline Bacon’s article “Torturing Language” (Extra!, 7-8/05) is a very good review of how language can be used to confuse and mislead people, but it misses the main point. The torture of prisoners is not some closely guarded secret; the people of Iraq and Afghanistan know perfectly well what’s going on. And the fact that the U.S. military allows all kinds of pictures to be taken in maximum security military prisons in war zones shows that they want the information on torture to get out. It’s not an effective way to get information, so what’s [...]
Aug
01
2005
Torturing Language
Definitions, defenses and dirty work
In the past year and a half, the Bush administration has engaged in elaborate rhetorical gymnastics when addressing the use and authorization of torture by American forces and leaders. Under increasing fire for its conduct of the war in Iraq, the scandal of Abu Ghraib and the alarming implications of defenses such as the August 2002 Bybee memo (which stated that “physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death”), various administration spokespeople have publicly disavowed torture. At the same time, [...]
