Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

What's wrong with this ballot?

What’s wrong with this ballot? Still haven’t figured it out?

Assemblywoman Nettie Mayersohn has been representing my neighborhood since 1982. In the past 8 Assembly elections, only once did Ms. Mayersohn have a challenger (and he was nowhere to be seen). Otherwise, her election is guaranteed every time.

Such one-person elections remind me of Russia. So why isn’t anyone willing to challenge Mayersohn? Is she that popular? Is it apathy? Lack of funds? Legal challenges? Even Harlem has a token Republican presence, so why not Fresh Meadows?

I have nothing personal against Ms. Mayersohn, but I find her effortless reelection to be an insult to democracy. I took a pencil and nominated my best friend as a write-in candidate. In a few weeks, his name will appear on the Board of Elections website, where Mayersohn will receive several thousand votes, and my best friend will receive one. This is what Queens democracy looks like.

The media has the power to chronicle American history by using journalism as a tool to break down stereotypes, help educate, present the truth and influence the public. The media also can educate people about other cultures and create bridges between people that would otherwise have nothing in common.

Journalists have the ability to change people’s lives every day, but how they use their power to influence is crucial. Congressman John Lewis remark about John McCain and Sarah Palin made me think about the history of the Civil Rights Movement and the impact it left on the nation.

Although I was not born in the United States, I feel I can relate to the struggles that African-Americans have endured. During the Civil Rights Movement, the media helped to show the whole country and the world the racial chaos in the South, and people began to demand changes in the laws.

Jack Nelson, a Los Angeles Times’ chief Washington correspondent who covered civil rights in the South for The New York Times, said in an article for Human Rights magazine that before the civil rights movement, the way blacks were treated by the law and most news organizations contradicted the principles lawyers and journalists claimed they believed in.

Nelson said that eventually the news media helped to influence changes in the laws to end injustices in society. Nelson complained that not enough credit has been given to the press for the coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, but plenty has been said about how the media helped end the Vietnam War by showing the public the results of the war.

Nelson also stated that except for The New York Times, the national media hardly paid attention to civil rights issues; that is until 1954 when the Supreme Court’s decision was made in Brown v. Board of Education about school segregation. Nelson said that The New York Times reported about social problems that caused injustices in the black community, but that most of the media had no interest in covering those kind of issues in the South. He claimed that the press would cover civil rights only as breaking news stories and would not consider them as stories that could expose the injustices and social problems blacks faced.

In the book “The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History,” Steven Kasher explained that before the Civil Rights Movement, the white news press did not report positive stories about the way blacks lived and their political movement. Kasher pointed out that press of civil rights changed after the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, which received extensive media coverage.

Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old black schoolboy, who was visiting relatives in Mississippi. Till was brutally beaten and shot because he had flirted with a white shopkeeper. His body was later found in the Tallahatchie River with a barbwire around his neck. His body was shipped back home to Chicago, where it was displayed in an open coffin for four days. More than a hundred thousand blacks stood in line to view his body.

Emmett Till before and after he was murdered.

Kasher explained that the black press, including Jet magazine and The Chicago Defender, showed photographs of Till in shirt and tie next to the picture of his bashed and bloated face. He added that Till’s story gained sympathy even by the white press.

Kasher also said that the Civil Rights Movement “flourished in the age of television.” Kasher added that in 1956, over 83 percent of American households had televisions and that the Telstar I communications satellite was able to provide worldwide television linkups in 1962. Kasher pointed out that the March on Washington of 1963 was the first event to be broadcast live around the world. He disclosed that on March 7, 1965, ABC interrupted the film “Judgment at Nuremberg” with footage from Selma of state troopers stampeding and beating peaceful marchers, which caused a heavy impression on Americans about the civil rights situation.

The media helped to chronicle the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Journalists during the Civil Rights Movement had the ability to change the way blacks in the United States lived because they were able use their power to influence the public to demand change. This is what journalism should really be about and this is why I want to pursue a career as a journalist. I hope that my work will one day change the way people view themselves and other cultures.

For more information about the media coverage of the Civil Rights Movement visit:

Jack Nelson’s article “The Civil Rights Movement: A Press Perspective”

Steven Kasher’s book “The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History”

Courtesy of the New York Daily News

According to a Washington Post article published Saturday, an Anchorage judge ordered Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to preserve private e-mails from her privately created accounts used to conduct state business.

If you remember, a computer hacker infiltrated her private Yahoo account last month and published pictures of her Inbox’s sensitive contents.  Many opponents of the Alaskan governor rejoiced for they felt that her account contained important government information and vital candid correspondences written during the “Trooper-gate” scandal.  Her reaction to the cyber-attack?  She immediately had the account deleted and the contents of the emails were supposedly lost in the wind.

However, this wasn’t her only private email account she used for public business. The Washington Post published another article stating that Palin, her husband and close aides established other e-mail accounts known only to one another.  The accounts were nested within an Internet domain maintained by a Wasilla computer company.

The McCain campaign and the computer company both confirmed the existence of the accounts, although it was denied by Frank Bailey, the Palin aide who set up the accounts and had the authority to administer them.

According to the Post, the McCain campaign ordered those e-mail accounts for Palin and her husband frozen after the Yahoo hacking became known.

“Until she was hacked, we were communicating just about daily,” Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell told the Associated Press the following week.  “Now I’m talking with her chief of staff.”

What can one say about all this?  Well, let’s get the elephant out of the room right at the get go: she’s attractive, very pleasing to the eyes.  Alright I said it.  But, that is not the end-all, be-all criteria for a vice-presidential candidate.  Frankly, between her lack of ability to answer a simple question like “What newspapers do you read?” . . .

To her lack of foreign policy experience . . .

She’s obviously someone capable of rational decision making and holding a conversation with foreign diplomats, right?

The great Bubba the Love Sponge said on his radio show recently that if McCain is elected, that we should be worried because “she’ll be a grabber away from being the President.”

So true.  So true.

The body count grows.

Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, and now Washington Mutual, all now succumbed to the panic that sudden, monumental financial loss instigates.

Thousands upon thousands of very smart people are now unemployed, and thousands more are expected to join them before year’s end.

In the meantime, other smart people are attempting to contain the crisis by throwing hopefully good borrowed money after the bad borrowed money. (more…)

Remember HAM radio? Imagine if the nerdy determination that once earned a staticy Morse Code exchange with a 12-year-old in Canada could get you online at high speeds, no monthly service charge, institutional affiliation or urban infrastructure required.

Now, consider this bit of randomness: which do you trust more, Google or the New York City Council?

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Sometimes it’s exciting, breathtaking even, to stand on the media’s rooftop and watch the fiery implosions of our economy.

Today, I found that the bank I keep my money in, Washington Mutual, has fallen. The government seized the enormous thrift on its birthday and quickly sold it off to JP Morgan & Chase. This is the biggest banking collapse in U.S. history.

The recent failures reminded me of stories of earlier decades, about how people would gather on a mesa somewhere and watch the U.S. military conduct nuclear tests. First there was the flash, then the picturesque cloud formation. Then the echo of the blast wave struck, dousing the hapless observers with radiation.

The Washington Mutual collapse is nothing I didn’t see coming. But before, I was merely watching the devastation from afar. Now, I finally feel its heat.

The FDIC says that my money is secure. They did not have to reach into their coffers for the (how strange it is to say this) measly $45 billion. Though consolidation continues on Wall Street with JP Morgan and Bank of America reaching supergiant status, I wonder how long the mightiest pillars can continue to stand.

It’s strange. I’d heard about panicked citizens standing in lines, waiting for their money in the decades gone by. I could never imagine what that must be like. Now, that situation actually has a chance of happening. Today, some of WaMu’s legion of customers will be at their branches, pulling out hard. I will be among them.

Other questions smolder in my mind – what will happen to my student loans? Will I be able to receive the amount I need? How will New York handle the cut in social services? And will other nations, tired of United States’ fading superpower status smell blood in the water and assert themselves?

I don’t know. No one knows. The bailout is in limbo with Democratic and Republican opposition to Paulson’s plan. Apparently the treasurer got down on one knee in front of Pelosi, which, while a joke, symbolizes the entire predicament of taxpayers being asked to pick up the unfortunately necessary bill.

Allright. Enough doom and gloom out of me. Here are some cheering news about smaller banks apparently thriving through the crisis. If we survive this one without a depression, the fall of the investment banks and centralized risk players may even be a good thing. With all the consolidation, however, the number of players had diminished and their power, greatly increased.

The silver Subaru had been parked -- upon impact two tons of vehicle moved five feet onto the sidewalk

Early Sunday morning I woke up early to get a head start on my reading. Forty-five minutes later, I heard a loud screech and then a BOOM!– then a car alarm … Car accident … I could tell the sound came from my block, right in front. When I looked out the window, I saw that one of the vehicles had smashed my parents’ parked car, which was now at least five feet up on the sidewalk. After hustling to get dressed, I grabbed my notebook and press pass, and then I ran out the front door. Suddenly, I was reporting.

Police, Fire, and ambulances had gotten there by this point. First I stood about ten feet away from where firefighters cracked open the doors of the car and rescued the driver and passenger (they were lucky they weren’t killed, and looked as if they may have only been whip lashed and were clearly in shock). After they were taken away on stretchers, I began to try to find out what happened.

Eyewitness Louis Gallo told me that while he was walking his dog on 6th Avenue near the corner of 1st Street, he saw a burgundy Nissan Maxima heading south on 6th attempt to pass a white livery cab going in the same direction. As the livery cab slowed at the intersection, the Nissan accelerated to pass it on the left across the double yellow line. The livery cab began to take a left turn, which clipped the Nissan, causing its driver to completely lose control of her vehicle.

She most likely cut the steering wheel sharply to the right to compensate for being knocked to the left and also to avoid colliding head-on with the parked car pointing in the opposite direction. Simultaneously, she must have slammed the brakes. Gallo told me she was going at least 40 mph.

And she must have been going at least that fast. After getting hit, her momentum carried her another 100 feet slamming into my parents’ silver Subaru Forester and then spinning out (fishtailing) almost 180 degrees.

The burgundy Nissan was actually coming towards the camera when it collided with the white livery cab in the intersection

So my folks and I, who were in shock, then dealt with our “insurance” company. My parents have been paying Geico thousands upon thousands of dollars in car insurance premiums for twenty years in Brooklyn (which has exorbitant car insurance costs compared to the rest of the country). As I know from dealing with health insurance companies, Medicaid, and Healthy NY, insurance businesses are not there to truly provide a safety net– they’re trying to get away with paying as little as possible if anything at all.

But here’s my question: if the car is totaled, you get the worth of the car in the used market, but no car to drive. But if the damage is not past the threshold of “now totaled,” insurance pays for the repairs, and then you have your car back, good as new. This, I suppose, is understandable. But if you were no where near the vehicle when it gets destroyed, how is it that the worse the damage to your car is, the worse off you are? I thought that’s why you have insurance.

I asked someone about this and she told me that it was the same thing with Hurricane Katrina. If your house was damaged and could be repaired, insurance covered it and you had a house to live in. If your house was beyond repair, you got a check (valued at well below the actual value of the house) and then you became homeless. Am I the only one that this doesn’t sit very well with? Let me know your insurance stories if you have them, whether it be auto, health, home, life, etc.

It seems that Sarah Palin just had one more bad day with another incident notched under her belt. 

Several days ago, a group of hackers got a hold of Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account and posted screenshots on a site called WikiLeakS that was immediately shut down after gaining attention. The group known as “Anonymous” , if many are not aware of , proclaimed war on the Church of Scientology earlier this year by prohibiting access to one of its websites.

Here is a video they posted on YouTube.

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Some people have the misconception that all Muslims are violent terrorists. Those are the people I worry about. I know that if they only took a glance at my name they would think I must be a terrorist too.

I was born in the Republic of Panama, located in Central America, where Spanish is the official language. I am an Afro-Panamanian and I was baptized as a Catholic, although my name would never provide any hints of that.

“Aisha Al-Muslim,” I say, as I introduce myself, and most people automatically assume that I am a Muslim.

(more…)

I’ll be the first to admit it: Enough ink has been spilled about Sarah Palin.  Still, one of the best editorials so far has been Judith Warner’s “The Mirrored Ceiling,” which appeared in her New York Times blog “Domestic Disturbances” on Sept. 4.

Warner dedicates the “Domestic Disturbances” blog to parenting.  And she tears into Palin for this.  Some of the most troubling and confusing praise of the wannabe-veep has been of her family values.  When I write this, I’m not thinking about her pregnant and unmarried 17-year-old daughter Bristol, or the rumors that her 19-year-old son Track was a drug addict.  

Yet Palin willingly sacrifices the dignity of her family to her own raw ambition.  And this ambition remains unjustified by the paucity of her record as a mayor and governor.  I can’t say it better than Warner:

Why does this woman – who to some of us seems as fake as they can come, with her delicate infant son hauled out night after night under the klieg lights and her pregnant teenage daughter shamelessly instrumentalized for political purposes [italics mine] — deserve, to a unique extent among political women, to rank as so “real”?

While Republicans cry foul about liberals’ supposed sexist remarks about Palin, let’s remember what Republicans think of her:

Thanks to the level of general esteem that greeted her ascent to the podium, it seems we’ve all got to celebrate the fact that America’s Hottest Governor (Princess of the Fur Rendezvous 1983, Miss Wasilla 1984) could speak at all.

Could there be a more thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women?

It’s as humiliating as the implication that American women are too stupid to look beyond Palin’s gender to her political positions.  But I can think of a more “thoroughgoing humiliation” for American women: having the grossly unqualified Palin represent us as Vice President.