Culture

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…

NABJ, Unity Join Media Outlets in Expressing Outrage “Reporters from The Huffington Post and Washington Post have been charged with trespassing and interfering with a police officer’s performance, a chilling setback for press freedom coming nearly a year after their arrests in Ferguson, Missouri,” Michael Calderone reported Monday for the Huffington Post. “The Huffington Post’s Ryan J.…

Busloads Travel to Paisley Park Studio Complex At least 650 members of the National Association of Black Journalists accepted an invitation from Prince to pay $20 apiece to visit the Paisley Park studio complex used by the entertainer outside Minneapolis Saturday night in hopes of seeing the star himself. But the NABJ members — and…

A Gallup poll released Tuesday shows that Americans’ satisfaction with how blacks are treated in the U.S. has dropped to an all-time low,” Scott Sutton reported Tuesday for the Chicago Sun-Times. The next day, Jesse J. Holland reported for the Associated Press that “A majority of blacks in the United States — more than 3…

Media Begin Commemorations of Portentous Shooting As the news media began to commemorate the first anniversary of the fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., that reverberated around the nation, St. Louis County police “agreed as part of two federal court settlements not to seek charges against a pair of journalists who were arrested for allegedly…

Were Media Really Out to Make Black People Look Bad? “If social media has proved one thing, it’s that visuals matter. A lot,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported on Friday. “On Wednesday, national news outlets including NBC and CNN juxtaposed an image of murder suspect Ray Tensing in front of a flag with a police mugshot…

Body-Camera Footage Fuels Viewers’ Outrage Networks Show Video of Fatal Cincinnati Encounter Despite competing news from a heat wave and the discovery of  possible debris from the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared last year, the indictment of a University of Cincinnati police officer for fatally shooting an unarmed black man commanded prime real estate on…

From ASNE: “Our Industry Isn’t Making Progress” The percentage of journalists of color in newspaper and online newsrooms declined from 13.34 percent to 12.76 percent, the American Society of News Editors reported Tuesday, with the percentages down among Asian Americans, blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans, but a slight increase among those identifying as multiracial [PDF]. “The…

Hulk Hogan Fired After Reporters Expose Racist Rant Reporting by the National Enquirer — a supermarket tabloid long scorned by the mainstream media for its sensationalistic stories and questionable journalistic practices — was credited Friday with prompting World Wrestling Entertainment to terminate the contract of its star Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan. “Hulk…

Interaction in Police Stop, Past Suicide Attempt at Issue The ABC, CBS and NBC evening news programs led with new reports Wednesday about the death in jail of Sandra Bland after police released a video of her interaction with a Texas state trooper that prompted criticism that the officer had acted improperly. David Montgomery and Michael…