Dr. Lester K. Spence

Early last week at around the same time that my neighbor fell asleep at the wheel, taking out my mailbox in the process (about 1:30am), I got an email from a friend in Europe. 

News and Notes had been cancelled.

I’ve been a fan of NPR now going back over twenty years. To say I believe in public radio is an understatement. When “smooth jazz” took over the airwaves in Detroit, stifling Miles Davis and John Coltrane in favor of Najee and Kenny G., the only place I could hear bebop, cool, and big band was NPR. When I wanted to hear hard-hitting interviews I’d either listen to Diane Rehm or to Terry Gross. And when I entered the ranks of the gainfully employed, my drive home was always accompanied by All Things Considered.

But there was still something missing. An entire series of voices I felt I wasn’t hearing.

Fast forward. Tavis Smiley creates the black equivalent of a media juggernaut (sad commentary on the state of black media when we think of what Smiley accomplished in those terms). And he comes up with the brilliant idea of expanding NPR’s audience. 

News and Notes was born. Because he felt NPR wasn’t willing to give him the support needed to grow NPR as a brand in black urban communities, he left and was replaced by Ed Gordon. 

And this is when they put me on. No. When Farai put me on. I met Farai through her (equally powerful, equally compassionate) sister. And in talking with Farai she told me that she was working on something that she wanted me to be down with. 

I’d gotten wise enough at that point to smile and graciously say “thanks for thinking of me”, while not putting much stock in it. 

Next thing I know I’m getting a phone call from NPR. And then regularly doing bits on News and Notes, and then later, Tell Me More. Not only was I finally hearing the voices I was missing, I was one of the voices. There are more people who have the integrity to actually speak the truth and WORK the truth they speak…but I only know a few. Farai is one of them.  

In writing about the change, NPR execs focused on the dollars and cents. Whereas a couple of years ago they were 2 million in the red, that figure has jumped to 23 million. And given that a significant chunk of their money comes from corporate donors and philanthropists who have their money in the stock market, it should come as no surprise that they’ve got to make very difficult programming decisions in order to stay on the air. (As an aside this is an important reason why public radio should be PUBLIC radio rather than privately funded radio but I digress.) 

But it’s unfortunate (to say the least) that a show like News and Notes became a casualty. Sounds a bit like the “last hired first fired” line that many of us are used to. 

We’ll see Farai, and though they work behind the scenes, her staff again soon. Here’s hoping it will be VERY soon.

Thank you Farai.

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Note to Andrew Cuomo: This is shuck and jive: This is bob and weave: 

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The recent flap over the apparent use of the southern strategy by the Clinton campaign led me to write a longer piece about the subject that appeared in Salon yesterday.Also, in the barbershop we talked about Gloria Steinem’s recent piece on the race/gender divide in this election. 

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Now that the semester is over, I’m back at the Barbershop. In this episode, me, Jimi Izrael, Reuben Navarette, and Roland Martin talk about among other things the increasing rate babies born to single mothers. It got pretty heated, as this is something I feel pretty strong about. Hopefully they’ll offer the extended version on the web, because we kicked this topic around for at least 20-25 minutes….

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I assigned a midterm for my urban politics class that had the students go into Baltimore and write about their perspective. Here is a video that some of the students made about their experience.

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Ok. So what I meant was there would be less SUBSTANTIVE blogging. (not like there was a lot to begin with.)

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…and Baltimore is the Detroit of the East Coast, which is why I like it here so much.

Knuckle Sandwich brought to light the recent history of homicides in Oakland, pointing to a San Francisco Chronicle series on the murders. What was most interesting to me was the interactive map they’ve developed, plotting the homicides on a map that includes interestingly enough, liquor stores.

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Yesterday while writing about Jena, and Paris, I noted the role of the black media (talk radio, journalists, black bloggers) in rendering rural racism transparent. (As an aside I’d like to check on whether there has been an attempt to differentiate between rural, suburban, and urban racism.) I argued that the white progressive blogosphere are disincentivized to ignore domestic racism, and when it cannot be ignored to use exceedingly high standards in evaluating claims brought by blacks.

In writing about this I made a mistake that is worth acknowledging (and covering in other blogs).

The writer who broke both the Paris and Jena stories, is named Howard Witt. He’s the (white) Southwest Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune. I mistakenly assumed that Witt was an African American. I’m betting that mistake gets made a lot given his writing.

There has been a significant decline in investigative journalism over the last twenty five years, as well as a decline in stories about racism (as opposed to race relations). I’m glad to see there are a few writers who are still fighting the good fight. And that some of them are white.

On that note, I missed Witt’s latest. This is the type of thing that transparency can aid us in uncovering but inevitably what is needed here is a different level of organizing than that used against old-fashioned rural racism.

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We already know that historically speaking whites in general and black elites want blacks to be damn near perfect in order to get the RIGHT of citizenship. We saw this here also with at least one black blogger (who shall remain linkless because I don’t want to embarass him) making some of the same claims about how perhaps the 6 should have just taken consistent beat downs, threats, and symbolic terrorist harassment, in order to make a much better claim.

We also know that significant components of the white progressive blogosphere has been focused on the bush administration in general and on Iraq.

But what I haven’t seen is a discussion about the political-economy of blogging. There are bureaucratic, economic, and ideological determinants of story choice in the media. The media focuses on urban poverty in large part because the victims are black and easily tagged as irresponsible (ideological), but also because they don’t have to spend much money to send reporters to cover urban poverty as opposed to rural poverty (economic).

Check out this quote written about MoveOn:

MoveOn’s management team — led by Eli Pariser, a 25-year-old Internet whiz — runs a sophisticated political operation, and its main preoccupation, beyond ending the Iraq war, is to keep growing. To do that, MoveOn is always looking for what Mr. Pariser and his team call “the message object” — the controversy of the month that will viscerally attract more liberals to sign up and write checks.

An attack on MoveOn from the Bush White House is, of course, the mother of all message objects. Six months after Mr. Bush’s re-election, when opposition to the Iraq war suddenly seemed to be breaking out like a rash around the country, Karl Rove publicly accused MoveOn and its liberal sympathizers of offering “therapy and understanding for our attackers,” and membership soared. That probably explains why MoveOn was eager to run the provocative Petraeus ad in the first place.

In a sense, MoveOn is shrewdly gaming liberal politics in the way the National Rifle Association has long gamed conservative politics; the more controversy, the more members it attracts, and the more power it has to leverage on their behalf.

How much money is MoveOn likely to garner by focusing on Jena 6? On Shaquanda Cotton? Moving from MoveOn which to be fair isn’t a blog, TO blogs….how many more trackbacks and visitors is blogger X likely to garner by focusing on an issue that makes their readers feel uncomfortable? The blindspot they’ve got then isn’t only the function of their own decisions about what is important and what isn’t, what they’d need to see to prove racism and what we’d need to see…it’s also about their assumptions about their readers and the community of bloggers they want to speak to.

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