Category: The press
Gang initiations and NPR
Belated nod to the Banner
Me versus the press
I’ve stopped reading Bay Windows. Not because of editor Sue O’Connell’s political missteps; frankly, it would take a lot more offensiveness to get me to abandon the LBGT weekly I’ve been picking up for fifteen years. And not merely because of the atrocious copyediting. No, I’ve stopped reading Bay Windows because the atrocious copyediting plus the evident carelessness with which the paper is assembled make me feel deeply disrespected as a reader. All too often, it’s obvious that articles have been cut and pasted from e-mails or internet posts, like the item about a voicemail left by the Southie St. Patrick’s parade organizers for a gay group which included the words “audio attached,” or the news briefing which read: “. . . and makes crimes committed against guest blog transgender people subject to treatment as hate crimes.” And, of course, this (the glaring error appeared twice, once on the front page and once in the headline of the editorial). Read more
Letter to Bay Windows
As a white lesbian and longtime reader of Bay Windows, I was dismayed by Sue O’Connell’s August 8 editorial, “Sharing our Experience.” Ms. O’Connell equates the struggle of the GLBT community with that of people of color. In a country where black people were enslaved for three hundred years, lynched, and oppressed under Jim Crow, and today are disproportionately poor, in ill health and incarcerated, this comparison is senseless. Ms. O’Connell suggests—despite her disclaimers to the contrary—that young black men should overcome racism by showing the dominant culture how “presentable” they can be. This is a losing proposition. No degree of “presentability” (read: assimilation to white norms) will keep a young man of color from being judged as less than equal in this society. The problem is not young black men, it is white America. Racism is a white problem and we are the ones who must change, not the victims of our personal and, more importantly, institutional biases.
Sincerely,
Cathy Jacobowitz
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This used to be a five-newspaper town
Perhaps the most obvious question is what is there for Mindich to celebrate in the financial necessity of having to combine two publications—one for bougie young professionals with too much money to spend and another for armchair revolutionary hipsters—without alienating either audience?
Magazine roundup
For an item about Gabby Douglas, Us Weekly went the euphemism route:
GABBY’S SAD PAST
Before Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas, 16, won gold, she nearly quit the sport because of bullying. In 2010, she says, a staffer at Excalibur Gymnastics in Virginia Beach told her to get a nose job . . .
I believe that kind of bullying is called “racism.” Read more
Letter to the Phoenix
Elite-media whitewash!
Here’s your cotton-pickin’ Sunday
Russia’s Parliament rejected more substantive oversight [of the police]. Proposals included bans on entering homes without warrants or beating women with rubber batons at street protests. Russian lawmakers discussed the second item, but eventually dismissed it as discriminatory towards men.
Meanwhile, in small house in East Austin: Read more