The Curry Report  Sept. 2, 2015
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In This Issue
Double Standard When Covering Violent Tragedies
'...He was the Human Tape Recorder'
Are We Afraid to Watch White People Dying?
Amelia Boynton Remembered as the 'Rosa Parks' of Selma Movement.
Julian Bond: A Dedicated Life of Service
Times Regrets 'Slave Mistress' in Julian Bond's Obituary
Texas Cop Killing Could Spark National Backlash Against #BlackLivesMatter
The Cold Cases of the Jim Crow Era
Blind people can be racist, too
Judges: Does race affect how often rulings are reversed?
The Confederacy's 'Heritage' of Slavery
An Answer for Confederate Apologists
Double Standard When Covering Violent Tragedies
Curry Headshot  
 
  
By George E. Curry
NNPA Columnist 

It's sad enough when a violent crime mesmerizes the nation - such as the murder of nine African Americans in a Charleston, S.C. church, a fleeing Walter L. Scott being fatally shot in the back by North Charleston Patrolman Michael T. Slager, or two young, White journalists, Alison Parker and Adam Ward, gunned down on live television - but those tragedies are compounded by the media's double standard.
 
Let's begin with how the initial crime is reported.
 
How many times have we seen the graphic video of a uniformed Michael Slager in South Carolina remove his gun from his holster on April 4 and shoot 50-year-old Walter Scott as he was running away? With two huge trees in the foreground, we heard eight shots, four of them striking Scott in the back and one lodging in an ear.
 
Contrast that with the coverage of two promising White journalists in Roanoke, Va. Because it was what is called a live shot, we have even more graphic footage of their actual murders. The shooter also filmed his dastardly crime, later posting it on social media before committing suicide.
 
Did we see repeated clips of the two White journalists being murdered? No, we saw some freeze-frames just before the act. And when the New York Daily News published freeze-frame photographs of Alison Parker as she was shot, there was widespread condemnation.
 
USAToday reported, "The New York Daily News ... published three still images from a video uploaded by suspected shooter Vester L. Flanagan II. The graphic images show reporter Alison Parker of WDBJ-TV seconds before she was shot up until the moment when it appears the first bullet hits her body."
 
The newspaper reported, "Mike Drago, a commentary editor at the Dallas Morning News, called the The New York Daily News decision to post the stills 'death porn,' in an email to the Washington Post."
 
An article by Leon Neyfakh on Slate.com observed, "By isolating the seconds before, during, and after Flanagan pulls the trigger, the Daily News is indulging in - and prompting others to indulge in - a morbid fascination with what it's like to kill someone."
 
Social media was also ablaze with criticism of the Daily News and how the decision would bring further grief to the families.
 
Where was the concern for the family of Walter Scott in South Carolina? Why was it okay to show him over and over in his dying seconds?
 
You could make arguments for and against the Daily News' decision. But whatever the standard, it should be applied fairly.
 
The Los Angles Times came closest in pointing out this obvious double standard when it asked in a headline:  "Are we afraid to watch white people dying?"
 
It noted, "Online, some are questioning the conversations that happen in newsrooms before we post, share or edit videos. Are news outlets simply less troubled by the deaths of black people, and thus making the rest of America so?"
 
The newspaper recounted, "We saw Walter Scott collapse when he was shot in April in South Carolina - from a distance, but the video is steady and clear. We saw and heard Eric Garner gasp, 'I can't breathe' as a New York Police Department officer put him in an apparent chokehold. And we saw a first-person view of Sam DuBose's head exploding when he was shot by the University of Cincinnati police officer." 
 
This double standard is evident in how the crimes are described in the media.
 
A Media Matters headline declared: "Whether Fox News Acknowledges A Hate Crime Depends On The Race Of The Shooter."
 
After the Charleston shootings, Fox & Friends' co-host Steve Doocy said: "It was released earlier - And extraordinarily they called it a hate crime - And some look at it as, well, it's because it was a white guy apparently in a black church. But you made a great point just a moment ago about the hostility against Christians, and it was a church, so maybe that's what they're talking about..."
 
More than a half-dozen Fox hosts and guests suggested the killings in Roanoke was a hate crime.
 
When one guest suggested it would be more accurate to characterize the shootings as workplace violence, Gretchen Carlson countered, "But it says in the manifesto that - he wrote 23 pages and faxed to ABC News and now in the hands of Fox - he talks about race a lot. He put the initials of the Charleston church shooting victims on the bullets that he used today. He praised the Virginia Tech mass killer, the Columbine high school killers, says he was being attacked for being a gay black man. He shot three white people today. Why is that not a hate crime?"
 
Fox commentators deny racism is a serious problem in the U.S.
 
Fox's Steve Doocy said, "If we were a racist nation, Barack Obama would not have been elected president of the United States twice..."
 
He failed to mention that most Whites voted against Obama.
 


 
George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine, is editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service (NNPA) and BlackPressUSA.com. He is a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. Curry can be reached through his Web site, www.georgecurry.com. You can also follow him at www.twitter.com/currygeorge and George E. Curry Fan Page on Facebook. See previous columns at http://www.georgecurry.com/columns.
 



'He was the Human Tape Recorder'


 
 

 By Ben Ashford
© Daily Mail
 
Warped TV reporter Vester Lee Flanagan exasperated bosses with his 'stiff and nervous' delivery, his inability to use a teleprompter - and by wearing a President Obama badge during an election report, Daily Mail Online can reveal.

Management at WDBJ dubbed the failed newsman the 'human tape recorder' because he frequently parroted what interviewees had told him rather than doing his own journalism.
 
 



Are We Afraid to Watch White People Dying?
 
 


By Dexter Thomas
© Los Angeles Times
 
Are we being selective about the videos that traumatize us? 
 
On Wednesday morning, a man identifying himself as former TV reporter Bryce Williams posted a first-person video of himself shooting two Virginia journalists. The shooting was also broadcast live on television. The victims, a cameraman and a reporter at WDBJ-TV in Roanoke, were killed. The shooter, whom police identified by his given name of Vester Lee Flanagan II, later died of self-inflicted wounds.

  
READ MORE




Amelia Boynton Remembered as the 'Rosa Parks' of Selma Movement

  
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
(Photo by: Stephonia Taylor McLinn)

By George E. Curry
NNPA Editor-in-Chief
 
WASHINGTON (NNPA) - Amelia Boynton Robinson, who died Wednesday in Montgomery, Ala. at the age of 104, is being praised as the 'Rosa Parks' of the Selma voting rights movement.
 
Mrs. Boynton, as she was known throughout the movement, had been hospitalized since suffering a stroke in July. She was a courageous voting rights crusader who was brutally beaten on "Bloody Sunday" on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the first leg of the Selma to Montgomery, Ala. March that provided the impetus for passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
 
She and her late husband, Sam Boynton, opened their home to Atlanta-based voting rights organizers representing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also conducted many of his strategy sessions in the Boynton home.
 


 
 


Julian Bond: A Dedicated Life of Service
 
  
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
 
By George E. Curry
NNPA Columnist
 
Horace Julian Bond was born Jan. 14, 1940 in Nashville, Tenn. into a family of privilege. His father, Horace Mann Bond, was a noted educator who served as president of Fort Valley State University in Georgia, where such notables as W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson were frequent guests. During their formative years, most Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), established during the Reconstruction Era to provide higher education for formerly enslaved African Americans, were headed by Whites.
 
Bond's father was the first Black president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, his alma mater. His mother, Julia, was a librarian. Young Julian was sent off to George School, a private Quaker boarding school near Philadelphia, and later enrolled in Morehouse College. At Morehouse, Bond chose a life of activism that would become the hallmark of his life.
 
READ MORE 



Times Regrets 'Slave Mistress' in Julian Bond's Obituary
 









By Margaret Sullivan
© New York Times
 
After Julian Bond's death on Saturday, The Times published a lengthy and well-written obituary summing up the life and work of the civil rights champion. But many readers were bothered by a single sentence in the front-page article: "Julian Bond's great-grandmother Jane Bond was the slave mistress of a Kentucky farmer."

Many readers wrote to me to protest the phrase, on the grounds that a slave, by definition, can't be in the kind of consensual or romantic relationship that the word "mistress" suggests.

READ MORE 


Texas Cop Killing Could Spark National Backlash Against #BlackLivesMatter
 
 
 By Charles P. Pierce
© Esquire
August 31, 2012
 
The barbaric execution of Harris County Deputy Darren Goforth at a gas station in Houston on Friday night is an inexcusable act of (at best) vigilante violence and it should be condemned roundly by anyone with any humanity in their souls. For the people in the #blacklivesmatter movement, and for the people in the wider political community who believe that militarized police power that is allowed to kill virtually at will-and, in the case of Tasers, torture with impunity-this is now a critical moment in history
 

  
   


The Cold Cases of the Jim Crow Era
    
 


 
By Margaret A. Burnham
and Margaret M. Russell
© New York Times
August 28, 2015
 
IN March 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt received a letter from a desperate mother. Her son, who was black, had been killed two years earlier, his body pulled from a river near Pickens, Miss.
 
"I am sending a contract in regards to the lynching of my son Willie Jack Heggard," wrote Jane Heggard. "I have tried every way to have a trial, but no lawyer will accept the case, because a white man killed an innocent man."
 
Despite her plea, it is unlikely we will ever know who killed Ms. Heggard's son.
 
Blind people can be racist, too, study says











By Carina Storrs
© CNN
August 30, 2015
 
(CNN) - A person may not have to "see color" to be racist. Some blind people, just like sighted people, make judgments about others based on their race, according to a new study.
 
The findings come from interviews conducted in person and over the phone with 25 people who were either born blind or severely visually impaired, or who lost their sight as children or adults. A researcher asked the participants, most of whom lived in the northeast United States, about whether they thought about race and also how it affected their feelings about a person.


Judges: Does race affect how often rulings are reversed?






 

 

 

 
http://journalistsresource.org/
 
News coverage often focuses on the racial composition of juries when minority defendants are on trial in the U.S. justice system, and some analytical reporting has examined larger patterns and the fairness of judges' sentencing decisions for minority defendants in general. However, the importance of diversity on the bench and the relationship between a judge's background and legal outcomes attract more infrequent consideration and investigation.


The Confederacy's 'Heritage' of Slavery
Confederate flag








By George E. Curry
NNPA Columnist
 
The disclosure that Dylann Roof, the admitted killer of nine unarmed African Americans attending Bible study at Emanuel A.M.E. Church June 17 in Charleston, S.C., was photographed dozens of times holstering the rebel flag ignited a long overdue discussion on what that flag represents and prompted the removal of the flag from the state Capitol grounds in Columbia, S.C. after more than 50 years.

An examination of the documents of the states that seceded from the Union, beginning with South Carolina, as well as the statements and documents surrounding those traitorous acts made clear the rebels were primarily worried about one thing - their ability to maintain and expand the institution of slavery.


An Answer for Confederate Apologists

 

By George E. Curry

NNPA Columnist

 

Someone identifying himself as Jimmy Oliver sent me an email objecting to a column I wrote under the headline, "Confederate Traitors Don't Deserve to be Honored." I presume he wrote to get a reply, so here it is, with Oliver's words in italics.

 

I do not appreciate you calling my ancestors traitors, Benedict Arnold or traitors.


 

Well, I do not appreciate your ancestors enslaving my ancestors. I do not appreciate your White ancestors thinking they were superior to my ancestors solely because God created us a different color. I do not appreciate your ancestors forcing my ancestors to work long hours for free. I do not appreciate your ancestors treating mine like property, buying and selling them at will. I do not appreciate your ancestors breaking up African families whenever they wanted to and I do not appreciate your male ancestors raping my powerless female ancestors.


 

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