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Claims Of ‘Fake News’ Are An Insult To An Institution That Has Risked Lives To Advance Liberty
BY MARC H. MORIAL President and CEO National Urban League
"The brutality with which officials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and re- main unobserved. It was caught — as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught— in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a lumi- nous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world." -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
n 1955, Jet Magazine and
the Chicago Defender published photographs of Emmett Till’s mutilated corpse, igniting international interest in the American Civil Rights Movement. Defender reporter Mattie Colin, who covered the return of the teenager’s body to Chicago, captured his mother’s anguish in her poignant articles:
"Oh, God, Oh God, my only boy," Mrs. Mamie (Till) Bradley wailed as five men lifted a soiled paper-wrapped bundle from a brown, wooden mid-Victorian box at the Illinois Central Station in Chicago Friday and put it into a waiting hearse. The bundle was the bruised and bullet- ridden body of little 14-year- old Emmett L. Till of Chicago, who had been lynched down in Money, Mississippi.
For many in the north, the brutality of the Jim Crow-era south was an abstract and dis- tant concept. Reporters like
Mamie Colin made it horri- fyingly real. And no one dared demean it by calling it “fake news.”
Friction between the White House and the journal- ists tasked with holding offi- cials to account is part of a healthy democracy. But re- cent concerted efforts to dele- gitimize the news media are destructive and demoralizing. Among the low points of the recent presidential campaign were the vicious attacks on in- dividual reporters which were a regular part of some rallies. White House press confer- ences, which should be a source of lively give-and-take, have devolved into ad hominem attacks.
"The civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings if it hadn't been for the news media," Rep. John Lewis has said.
Newspapers and the newly-popular medium of tel- evision brought into American homes disturbing scenes of ac- tivists in Birmingham and Selma being attacked by with dogs and fire hoses, beaten and tear-gassed by state troopers and sheriff's deputies. A photograph of Selma activist Amelia Boyn- ton, beaten unconscious, ran on the front page of newspa- pers and news magazines around the world.
Among the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement is Paul Guihard, a reporter for a French news service, who was shot to death in 1962 dur- ing protests over the admis- sion of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi.
Newspaper offices were the targets of shootings and bombing attempts.
The men and women of the Fourth Estate continue to risk their lives in the performance of their duties. In the last quarter century, at least seven journalists have been killed in the line of duty in the United States, four of them murdered. One of the first important American journalists to face death threats for her reporting was Ida Wells, a trailblazing African-American woman who documented the savage practice of lynching in the 1890s.
The work of America’s journalists has resulted in some of our nation’s most im- portant reforms. Upton Sin- clair’s expose of unsanitary practices in meatpacking led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and Fed- eral Meat Inspection Act. Sey- more Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre and the Army’s subsequent cover-up.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate reporting led to the indict- ments of 40 Nixon Adminis- tration officials and the eventual resignation of Pres- ident Nixon. The Washing- ton Post’s publication of Florence Graves’ investiga- tion into sexual misconduct on Capitol Hill led to the passage of the Congressional Account- ability Act.
Even the staunchest de- fenders of freedom of the press were not always happy with its results. As a delegate to the Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a gov- ernment without newspapers or newspapers without a gov- ernment, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
As President, Jefferson blasted the press. But he never changed his position: “It is, however, an evil for which there is no remedy; our liberty depends on the freedom of the press and that cannot be lim- ited without being lost.”
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VP Mike Pence Visits Dachau
hame on your history teachers if they never told you
about Dachau (pronounced “dah-kow”), Treblinka, Buchenwald, or a list of other names of places that to this day go unrivaled as the symbols of humanity’s barbarous inhu- manity to its own kind.
Concentration camps is what they were called . . . death camps, smoldering crematoriums where more than six mil- lion human beings (gypsies, Jews, gays and lesbians, free thinkers, and political dissidents) were exterminated like common rats or cockroaches during the darkest days of Nazi- tainted World War Two.
Search your memories once again to make sure you’ve never heard of Dachau. And when you are certain one way or another, then recall the fact that America’s newest vice pres- ident, Michael Pence, his wife, Karen and their daughter, Charlotte were recently invited to that still-gruesome place. Escorted by a Holocaust survivor, they toured where men, women and children were gassed then burned to ashes and charcoal.
Making perfunctory remarks and placing a wreath on the wall of that horrendous human slag-heap seemed perhaps, a welcomed contradiction to President-Elect Trump’s unwill- ingness to disavow anti-Semitism even though his daughter (a converted Jew) had recently received anti-Semitic death threats.
Nevertheless, it wasn’t what Pence said at the site of hor- ror, nor what he promised at NATO meetings which he also attended. But it was the look on his face and his wife and daughter’s faces as they crept silently through that ghost-in- fested museum as the cries of the dead made American spirits respond like tuning forks.
And what were the dead saying as they walked with Pence and family? No doubt, in one voice they wailed, “NEVER AGAIN! Take our warning back to America.”
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TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2017 FLORIDA SENTINEL BULLETIN PUBLISHED EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY PAGE 5
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wall on the Mexican-American border), cuts are being planned that will include the Corpora- tion for Public Broadcasting (CPB), The National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
Locally, television stations WEDU and WUSF are among eleven noncommercial educa- tional broadcast stations in Florida that will face CPB cuts. Among the 21 Florida NPR public radio stations that will face severe cuts are our own WMNF (88.5FM) and WUSF (89.7FM) radio stations.
National Endowment for the Arts grants for at least 58 Florida State and regional partner- ships, research, and nonprofit organizations could be reduced by spending cuts. Among them are: University of South Florida, VSA Florida and Moving Current, Inc.
Among the many Florida organizational recipients of National Endowment for the Hu- manities grants that could be affected are: Bethune-Cookman University, FAMU, Eckerd Col- lege, USF, Stetson, Tampa History Center, Plant City Archives, and the St. Petersburg, Florida Humanities Council.
By the way, poets get paid for writing books, making presentations, television commer- cials, creating greeting cards, and recording Grammy albums.
Obviously, someone in the present presidential administration isn’t hip to the majesty of HBCUs, Humanities, and the Arts.
HBCUs, Arts, Humanities Face Budget Cuts
poet once shared her dismay about the lack of respect for poets, writers, artists, and people whose careers are in the field of humanities. When a man she had recently met asked him, “What do you do?” She replied, “I’m a poet.” The man laughed, “Well, what do you do for a living?” Quite clearly, the man did not consider writing poetry as “re-
spectable work.”
This scenario sums up the way many Americans see the
arts and humanities, and is reflected in some of the programs targeted for federal budget cuts. In a GOP plan to slash $10.5 trillion from the federal budget (and probably build Trump’s
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