Culture

New Yorker Cover Imagines the Unimaginable for 2020 ‘Kanye West’s announcement of his intention to seek the Presidency reminds us that it’s not too early to start thinking about the 2020 campaign. (2016’s already old hat by now, anyway),’ Barry Blitt says about ‘2020 Vision,’ his cover for next week’s issue,” Mina Kaneko and Françoise…

Weatherman Challenged Downplaying of Anniversary Weatherman Al Roker’s “Wake Up With Al” show on the Weather Channel is being canceled. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the cancellation followed a dispute between Roker and David Clark, president of The Weather Company’s TV division, over a decision to downplay the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall. The station…

Some on Right Link Reporting to Texas Deputy’s Slaying “Texas deputy Darren Goforth was shot ‘execution-style’ fifteen times while he was pumping gas on Friday night,” Aviva Shen wrote Monday for the progressive website ThinkProgress. “A suspect, who is black, is in custody and has been charged with capital murder. No motive has yet been…

News Director: “New Level of Expectation for Myself . . .” Just after midnight on the Gulf Coast 10 years ago on Friday, Hurricane Katrina reached Category 4 intensity with 145 mph winds. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin declared a mandatory evacuation order for the parish of Orleans. More than 1,800 people died after the…

The tragic killing of two Virginia television reporters Monday prompted commentaries reaffirming the need for gun control, bemoaning the frightening “dark side” of social media and noting the vulnerability of television news crews. But it was attention to the mental health of black journalists that prompted Jeffrey Ballou, a news editor at Al Jazeera English,…

New Yorker Magazine Is Latest to Explore Ties “Ever since the Tea Party’s peak, in 2010, and its fade, citizens on the American far right — Patriot militias, border vigilantes, white supremacists — have searched for a standard-bearer, and now they’d found him,” Evan Osnos wrote for the Aug. 31 issue of the New Yorker.…

More Newsroom Diversity Would Ease the Burden “As calls for newsroom diversity get louder and louder — and rightly so — we might do well to consider what it means that there’s an emerging, highly valued professional class of black reporters at boldface publications reporting on the shortchanging of black life in this country,” Gene…

Civil Rights Icon, 75, Gravitated Toward Media Julian Bond is rightfully being mourned as an iconic civil rights leader, but he also gravitated toward the media. Judging from comments since his death on Saturday from vascular disease at age 75, media members likewise took to him. “He was typically wise, never boring, always eloquent,” Kevin…

Atlantic Writer Has Defended Term, but Not Used Like That “On July 31, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad published a review of several books on race and racism in the United States,” Karen Attiah reported Thursday for the Washington Post. “The series, written by the paper’s Washington correspondent Guus Valk, leads with a review of…

In ’65 Watts Coverage, Race Complexities Eluded L.A. Times “Almost all of them are dead now,” the Los Angeles Times’ Doug Smith began his story Wednesday evaluating his paper’s coverage of the Watts uprising of 1965. “When I joined The Times in 1970, they were the giants of the newsroom, still sharing the glow of…