Prometheus 6

I don't pay much attention to web awards, but the 2010 Black Weblog Award winners were just posted, and, well...

 

And the winner of the Aaron Hawkins Award is…

Earl Dunovant!

Earl Dunovant is a web developer and political activist who has blogged at Prometheus 6 since January 2004. Dunovant is also a member of the Media Bloggers Association, has attended presidential debates as a credentialed blogger, and has been featured on NPR as part of News and Notes‘ Bloggers Roundtable.

 

Aaron's blog, Uppity-Negro.com, is still on my blogroll, and will remain there. Here's why.

Why Americans believe Obama is a Muslim

Published: Aug. 31, 2010

EAST LANSING, Mich. — There’s something beyond plain old ignorance that motivates Americans to believe President Obama is a Muslim, according to a first-of-its-kind study of smear campaigns led by a Michigan State University psychologist.

The research by Spee Kosloff and colleagues suggests people are most likely to accept such falsehoods, both consciously and unconsciously, when subtle clues remind them of ways in which Obama is different from them, whether because of race, social class or other ideological differences.

These judgments, Kosloff argues, are irrational. He also suggests they are fueled by an “irresponsible” media culture that allows political pundits and “talking heads” to perpetuate the lies.

“Careless or biased media outlets are largely responsible for the propagation of these falsehoods, which catch on like wildfire,” said Kosloff, visiting assistant professor of psychology. “And then social differences can motivate acceptance of these lies.”

Civil rights' new 'owner': Glenn Beck
By Dana Milbank
Sunday, August 29, 2010; A15

It's been just over a year since Beck famously called the first African American president a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people." And now, accused of racial pot-stirring, he apparently has determined that the best defense is to be patently offensive.

"Blacks don't own Martin Luther King," he tells us, any more than whites own Lincoln or Washington. "The left" doesn't own King, either, he says.

No, Beck owns King. "This is the moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement," he said this spring. "We are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and, damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement because we are the people that did it in the first place."

We are? Let's review Beck's history as a civil rights pioneer, a history I've studied while writing a book about Beck.

When Beck was a radio host in Connecticut in the 1990s, his station apologized for an on-air skit in which Beck and his partner mocked an Asian American caller and used their version of an Asian accent. As a CNN host a couple of years ago, Beck interviewed Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the first Muslim elected to Congress, and challenged him to "prove to me that you are not working with our enemies."

President Obama, who Beck says was elected because he isn't white, is "moving all of us quickly in slavery," Beck has asserted. On his radio show, he declared that "you don't take the name Barack to identify with America. . . . You take the name Barack to identify with . . . the heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical." He accused Obama of seeking "reparations" from white America, seeking to "settle old racial scores."

Beck has spoken on air about "radical black nationalism" in the White House and "Marxist black liberation theology" influencing Obama. He has further determined that the New Black Panthers have "ties to the White House in a myriad of ways" and are part of Obama's "army of thugs."

This is not quite the ideal background for a man who would claim to be King's heir

Thirty-five minutes, which should include some of the post-appearance calls.

To embed it, I'd have to post it to YouTube.

I want you to see it, so I'll be back with a link, if not an video.

America Is Better Than This
By BOB HERBERT

America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure. On the anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington he will stand in the shadows of giants — Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who do you think is more representative of this nation?

Consider a brief sampling of their rhetoric.

Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

King: “Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter.”

Beck: “I think the president is a racist.”

I mean this false assumption in particular.

Murkowski Is Locked in a Tight Senate Race in Alaska
By DAMIEN CAVE

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, whose family has held a decades-long grip on one of the state’s two Senate seats, was in a surprisingly tight race Wednesday morning against an insurgent candidate, a Tea Party favorite who received the backing of Sarah Palin....

The Alaska results contrasted with other races around the nation Tuesday in which established politicians managed to easily prevail. In Arizona, Senator John McCain handily dispatched his Republican challenger, J. D. Hayworth, and Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, was also victorious, as was Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.

And in Florida, the site of some pitched primary battles, Kendrick B. Meek, 43, a congressman from Miami, defeated Jeff Greene, a 55-year-old real estate mogul, in the Democratic primary for the United States Senate.

See? Props for the Palin Index, though.

Schlessinger used the N-word 11 times after being asked a question about mixed-race dating.

Schlessinger has apologized for her outburst. But in an interview with CNN’s Larry King, she claimed her First Amendment rights were being violated because she was being widely criticized for using the term.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech.

Freedom of Speech ≠ Freedom from Criticism.

Hong Kong film hopes to break new ground with 3-D porn
By Stefanie McIntyre and James Pomfret

HONG KONG (Reuters) - On the leafy fringes of Hong Kong in a shabby film studio, a nude ponytailed actor stretched out on animal-skins with his lover as the cameras rolled in a set evoking a subterranean sex lair in ancient China.

Turning away from a slightly blurred high definition TV screen as the actors writhed, director Christopher Sun shouted "cut" whilst yanking off his 3-D glasses. "Good" he yelled.

No ordinary porn flick, "3-D Sex & Zen: Extreme Ecstasy" is being touted as the world's first IMAX-3-D erotic film.

Race and Beyond: Editorializing While Black

Walter Williams is an economist who writes a weekly syndicated column that appears in nearly 150 newspapers and websites across the United States. He’s also an African American and very, very conservative. These last two personal attributes make it possible for him to draw attention to the former two qualities. And that makes Williams very popular with some right-wing zealots.

Virtually everything that Williams writes is an unrelenting, negative rant on black leaders, black lifestyles, and black people. No matter that much of it is factually inaccurate or that his logic is intellectually dishonest. He’s a black man saying out loud what some conservatives already believe. For those who agree with him, he speaks the truth. End of story.

But for those newspaper editors who are running Williams’s syndicated columns, there is much more to their decisions. So let’s take a look at one of his recent opinion pieces—and then at the reasons so many newspapers serving mostly smaller communities around the country run his columns.

The interview is interesting in its own right, too.

God, Government, and the Ghetto: An Interview with Michael Leo Owens
By The Good Doctor – August 10, 2010

To many people, black politics and the black church is synonymous. But the relationship between black churches and politics has changed over the years, in partial response to changes in local, and national political priorities, and also in response to changes in black communities. Going beyond analyses that examine how churches engage members in political activity, Michael Leo Owens, Associate Professor of Political Science at Emory University, studies church-state collaboration in the post-civil rights era. I had the opportunity to interview him about his book God and Government in the Ghetto.

“We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer, so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported,” declared Ms. Angle

Even Fox News laughed at her.

I tend not to sign petitions involving Fox, since no one pays attention to them.

The bid from Fox for a front-row seat sparked a protest from some over the network's perceived right-wing leanings. The advocacy groups Working Assets and MoveOn.org launched an online campaign through social media website Facebook to lobby the WHCA to give the seat to NPR.

In a statement posted on the Working Assets website Credo Action on Sunday, the group said, "While we're disappointed that the seat did not go to NPR, we're delighted the board found a way to avoid giving the coveted front-row center seat to Fox."

Fox gets front-row seat in White House press room
By ANDREW VANACORE
The Associated Press
Sunday, August 1, 2010; 8:29 PM

NEW YORK -- Fox News Channel has been granted a much-coveted front-row seat in the White House briefing room.

The White House Correspondents Association said Sunday that The Associated Press' reporter has been moved to the front-row center seat previously occupied by Helen Thomas. Fox's correspondent will take the AP's former front-row seat, and National Public Radio's correspondent will move up one row to Fox's old second-row seat.

The center seat was long held by Thomas, a United Press International and Hearst News Service writer. The 89-year-old columnist resigned abruptly in June amid controversy over videotaped remarks she made calling on Israelis to get "out of Palestine." Fox, Bloomberg News (also seated in the second row) and NPR had lobbied for Thomas' seat.

Fox's upgrade is an acknowledgment of its "length of service and commitment," the association's board said in a statement.

Who woulda thunk it?

Fox News Audience Just 1.38% Black
Huffington Post   |  Danny Shea First Posted: 07-26-10 05:44 PM   |   Updated: 07-26-10 06:22 PM

Fox News may be the undisputed ratings champion in cable news, but not among black viewers.

The New York Times' Brian Stelter tweeted that, according to Nielsen Media Research, Fox News has averaged just 29,000 black viewers in primetime so far this television season (9/09-7/10). That represents just 1.38% of its 2.102 million total viewer audience.

CNN and MSNBC, meanwhile, both have far more black viewers, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of their overall audiences.

MSNBC has averaged 145,000 black viewers, representing 19.3% of its 751,000 total viewer audience.

CNN has averaged 134,000 black viewers, representing 20.7% of its 648,000 total viewer audience.

When Race Is the Issue, Misleading Coverage Sets Off an Uproar
By BRIAN STELTER

David Frum, a former fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who now edits FrumForum.com, said some conservatives argue that the ends justify the means in cases of faulty journalism.

“Many conservatives have worked themselves into such fear that Barack Obama is not only wasting our money but actually trying to overthrow the Constitution that those fears can justify almost anything,” he said in an interview on Friday.

Scurrilous stories meant to taint the Obama administration regularly take root online before gaining traction on television and radio. Mr. Breitbart calls this the “undermedia.”

“It’s my business model to craft strategies to make sure that the mainstream media is forced to reckon with stories that it would love to ignore because it doesn’t fit their narrative,” he said.

Equal parts a culture warrior and businessman, Mr. Breitbart is the person who last fall released the Acorn tapes to Fox News.

The video of Ms. Sherrod, the agriculture official, emerged on BigGovernment early on July 19. Mr. Breitbart said that in featuring the video of Ms. Sherrod speaking at an N.A.A.C.P. event, he was trying to defend the Tea Party movement against the N.A.A.C.P.’s claims of racism. That explanation was largely lost in translation, however.

That explanation wasn't lost. It was unnecessary.

But let us note that the N.A.A.C.P.'s "claims of racism" aren't just claims. They "claimed" there are racist elements in the Teabagger Movement, and that the movement welcomes people who join them for racist reasons. It never said the whole Teabagger movement is racist.

I think the Teabaggers's reaction to all this, insisting that charging any Teabagger with racism is a charge against ALL teabaggers, is strong evidence (though not yet proof) that hey hold the race-based perspective they so strongly deny. After all, if they see themselves as a monolith, they're really likely to see others the same way.

If these ain't what you want, go to http://www.cnn.com/video/. Beneath the video player is a set of "tabs" which categorize the videos broadly. Looks like this

Only bigger, as you'll see if you click that picture.

Click the On TV tab. Go down the list of shows on the leftmost column and pick the one that showed the clip you're looking for. Profit.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

White House Apologizes to Fired Official
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and SARAH WHEATON

WASHINGTON — The White House formally apologized on Wednesday to a black civil servant who was fired for making racially tinged remarks that were taken out of context, just hours after top aides to President Obama pressed Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to reconsider his decision to dismiss her.

“Without a doubt, Ms. Sherrod is owed an apology,” the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said Wednesday in his daily briefing, referring to Shirley Sherrod, who until Monday was the rural development director for the Agriculture Department’s state office in Georgia. “I will do so certainly on behalf of this administration.”

The apology capped what had been a humiliating and fast-paced turn of events for the White House, the national media and the N.A.A.C.P., all of whom, Mr. Gibbs said, overreacted to a video that appeared to show Ms. Sherrod saying that she had discriminated against a white farmer. The remarks were taken out of context from a longer speech in which she said she learned to overcome her own biases.

Later, Mr. Vilsack held his own news briefing to say that he had called Ms. Sherrod to apologize and had offered her a new position with the agency.

"She was extraordinarily gracious," he said.