Advocacy Groups, Writers Called Dolls Inappropriate “The controversial ‘Django Unchained’ action figures have officially been DISCONTINUED … after several African American groups called for a boycott of the dolls … TMZ has learned,” the TMZ website reported Friday. Later in the day, the Weinstein Co., the film’s producer, said in a statement, “We have tremendous…

Author Says Southerners Wanted to Keep Slave Patrols As Hollywood puts slavery back in the American consciousness and the reaction to the Newtown, Conn., shootings has the Second Amendment on the front burner, an author and talk-show host links the two in an intriguing way. “The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery,” reads the…

“Author Sabrina Lamb was looking forward to kicking off her New Year with a bottle of champagne and a quiet walk on the beach. Instead, on the first day of January she was greeted with a video link from a friend of a brand-new reality show that sent chills down her spine,” Allison Samuels wrote…

Cops Gave Rivals Questions Asked by Post-Gazette The mayor of Pittsburgh called the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and “professed outrage” that the city’s police chief had distributed to other reporters the questions Post-Gazette journalists were asking about police conduct in the slaying of a young woman and the suicide of the man police…

MSNBC “. . . enjoyed significant (around 20%) ratings increases across the board” in 2012, “but made astonishing gains with their already-large African American audience, growing that audience by 60.5% for the Mon-Sun 8pm-11pm period,” Tommy Christopher reported Monday for Mediaite. “MSNBC President Phil Griffin told me, in a phone interview, that he is ‘thrilled’…

Some Editors Failed to See No-Brainer Story The controversy over Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” in which slavery is the backdrop for a spaghetti Western, ratcheted up a notch over the weekend when freelance entertainment journalist Karu F. Daniels, writing in the Daily Beast, reported that the movie characters — slaves and slavemaster — are being…

Pulitzer Winner to Devote More Time to Grantland Website Wesley Morris, the African-American film critic for the Boston Globe who won a Pulitzer Prize last year, is leaving for Grantland, the ESPN-affiliated sports/pop culture website that specializes in longform journalism, his Globe editor told staffers Thursday night. “I just didn’t have a reason to say…

“Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’ has become embroiled in the second major controversy of awards season,” Steve Pond wrote Wednesday for the Wrap. “The director’s liberal use of the N-word, and his temerity in tackling the issue of slavery, has drawn fire from some prominent African-Americans and impassioned defenses from others. “Like the turmoil stirred up…

Diversity’s Greatest Hits, 2012 1. Neither GOP Nor News Media Looked Like America 2. Social Media Can Mean Trouble: Ask Martin, Whitlock, Lee or Williams 3. Trayvon Martin Case 4. Unity Coalition Changes Course 5. New NAHJ Leadership After Brutal Campaign 6. The Numbers 7. Fellowship Breakthrough at Stanford 8. NBC News to Pay Its…

The National Rifle Association was inspired by the Black Panthers? Yes, according to Adam Winkler, a professor of 
constitutional law at UCLA School of Law and author of “Gunfight: The 
Battle Over  the Right to Bear Arms in America.” Winkler said over the weekend on NPR’s “On the Media”: “One of the surprising things I…