|
|
|
Media
The fallout from former Philadelphia Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman's implosion now reaches all the way to Louisville, Kentucky.
Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Donna Hargens has hired former Ackerman communications aide Jamilah Fraser as her chief diversity, community relations and communications officer. But School Board members have demanded more information as to why Fraser left her job in Philly.
The Courier-Journal cites City Paper's reporting that Fraser was part of a “communications team dedicated to promoting and defending [Superintendent Arlene Ackerman] personally, and which coordinated and assisted public rallies in her favor, communicated regularly with private supporters, and spent taxpayer time and money on various kinds of ‘propaganda,’ including protest signs and a farewell tribute video.”
In December, Philadelphia-area pundit and motivational writer-speaker Gene Marks wrote to Forbes.com readers: “I am not a poor black kid.” Yet, in his nationally infamous essay “If I Were a Poor Black Kid,” he had plenty of advice for poor black kids: 1) stop complaining about your crappy schools and study harder 2) use a lot of technology, like having Skype conversations with other go-getter ghetto youth!
Now Marks has been hired by a second publication known for its diverse readership: Philadelphia Magazine [Note: sorry for not making this clear earlier—hired as a blogger for Philly Post]. So I asked editor Tom McGrath, who I thank for his candor, why it is “appropriate to hire the person in this city who has written the most racially-insensitive article of the year?”
“We don't,” responds McGrath, “base our hiring decisions―we don't stick our finger to the wind and say, 'Has this person offended anybody?”
Illegal immigrants are flooding your doorsteps with mail!
Today's Stu Bykofsky column in the Daily News is not only mean-spirited but contains a number of glaring factual errors. The entirely speculative premise of his column is that a guy in South Philly gets a lot of mail at his house addressed to other people who have Hispanic surnames. While this may seem like a small annoyance best resolved via the recycling bin, Bykofsky boldly conveys the suggestion that the government might place a lien on this guy's house because undocumented immigrants are tax dodgers not paying their fair share for the public benefits they greedily consume.
“He's frustrated and afraid that he may somehow get entangled in this, worried that he may open the mail to find a lien against his property.”
You may not envision Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky as some rootless cosmopolitan. After all, save for his paranoid fixation on the undocumented masses flooding across our nation's southern border, Byko prefers to fix his ire on pressing local matters such as the existence of bicyclists in designated lanes or the scheming atheist plot against the city's Christmas market.
But you, fellow Philadelphians, are wrong: Byko is downright smitten with international affairs.
Last week, he dedicated the allotted real estate to abusing pro-Palestinian activists at Penn, smearing last weekend's Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) conference as a “carnival of hate,” which “immorally equates Israel with white-dominated South Africa, and even Nazi Germany. That's what follows when you ally yourself with those who deny the Holocaust.”
This morning's headline was: “Pa., N.J., and Del. all get lower grades on charter school ranking.”
What WHYY didn't tell listeners was that the study authors, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), are a staunchly pro-charter organization.
At its worst Twitter is a lot like television news: sensational, no-context hysteria about sex, violence and sports. The trials related to Penn State coach and alleged sexual abuser Jerry Sandusky are one such lowly occasion, with all three subjects enticingly packaged into the perfect synthesis for bated-breath media thrill-seeking. Today, reporters are live-tweeting the graphic details of sexual assault. It is plain disgusting, does nothing to educate readers about the horrors of sexual violence and has zero journalistic merit.
“I am not a poor black kid,” writes Philadelphia small business motivational writer-speaker Gene Marks near the beginning of a Forbes screed entitled “If I Was a Poor Black Kid.”
Marks writes books with charming titles like “In God We Trust: Everyone Else Pays Cash” and “The Complete Idiot's Guide To Successful Outsourcing.” He is a board member of the National Speaker’s Association and gives a speech titled “Quicker! Better! Wiser!” and his biography states that he is a “short, balding and mediocre certified public accountant.”
Philadelphia magazine certainly aims to please a high-end suburban readership (Top Doctors, Top Dentists, Top Homes! And newsflash: wealthy moms think smoking pot is cool). But they have perhaps never pissed off city-dwellers as much as when they decided to include the Mummers on their “10 Things We Need To Get Rid Of” list—part of December's mind-numbing “List Issue.”
A big new industry-backed study landed on the front page of today's Inquirer: “Industry study touts large economic impact of shale-gas drilling.”
But this report, like other industry-backed reports, failed to take into account the environmental impact of fracking — which is, you know, the very issue that makes natural gas drilling is so damn controversial in the first place.
Why? John Larson, vice president of IHS Global Insight and and study's lead author, told the Inquirer that pollution is “not in our area of expertise."
Well that's convenient. The natural gas industry has spent loads of money to buy our state's political process (former Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, who rejected a severance tax on the industry until his last minute in office; and current Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, who's been fighting one since). And they've spent heavily on advertising too: all to convince the public that fracking is a “jobs” issue and not an “environmental” issue.
It's not clear why the New York Times feels compelled to offer op-ed space to purveyors of the punditocracy's conventional wisdom when it has so many—like Bill Keller, Thomas Friedman, and David Brooks—on staff. Today, University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutman and Harvard professor of government Dennis Thompson spent nearly 800 words reiterating the every-day-more cliched and plain wrong idea that Washington is 'broken' because 'both sides' 'fail to compromise':
The exercise proved that the capital is caught in a centrifuge that allows those with an uncompromising mind-set to chase the tantalizing partisan dream: My party will gain control, and push through its agenda, undiluted. This is a fantasy. It is highly unlikely that one party will gain complete control. It would have to secure the 60 votes to overcome the filibuster, and it would still face the task of making compromises within its own ranks.
What enabled the uncompromising mind-set to dominate our politics? We live in the era of the permanent campaign, and the uncompromising approach is designed for campaigning: voters are inspired by high-flying promises never to give in on their favorite causes, while the news media thrive on low-lying attacks, endlessly repeated even (or especially) if they are mendacious.
- ActiVman
- adventures
- Arts
- Ask A Man-About-Town
- Award Tour
- Awards
- Bad Idea Factory
- Beer
- Below the Curve
- Bikes
- Booze
- Brian Hickey
- BRT
- Budget
- Budget Fuss
- Business
- Casinos
- City Council
- City Hall
- CouncilMANIC
- CP Abroad
- CP in the Community
- Criminal Justice System
- Day Tripper
- Death and Taxes
- Delaware River
- Design
- DROP
- Drugs
- Dubious Distinction
- Elections
- End of Days
- Environment
- Fashion
- Film Fest
- Financial Meltdown
- FrackTrack
- Free Library
- Gambling
- Gay Stuff
- Get Lit
- Greenstorming
- guns
- Hall Monitor
- Health
- Health Care
- Hello, Kitty
- Holidays
- Ice Cubes
- Iggles
- Immigration
- In Memoriam
- Labor
- Lawsuits
- Letters
- LGBTQ
- Maps
- Marcellus Shale
- Media
- MMA
- Mummers
- Music
- MUST READ
- Mysterious Mysteries
- Nation
- News
- Non Sequitur
- Opinion
- PA politics 2010
- Parking Wars
- Parks and Recreation
- People Send Us This Stuff
- Philadelphia Police
- Philadelphia Union
- Philaphemera
- Philly From Scratch
- philly madness
- Photos
- Poverty
- PPA
- President Obama
- Print Edition
- Prisons
- Protest
- Readers Write
- Real Estate
- Rock Bottom
- Schools
- Science
- Screwing Philly
- SEPTA
- snow
- So Lush
- Soccer
- Sporting Life
- Sports Complex
- State Politicians
- State Politics
- Street Art
- Strike
- Stuff We Like
- Taxes
- Taxi Drivers
- Tech Fetish
- television
- The Budget Crisis
- The City Paper
- The CLOG
- The Human Condition
- The Mayor
- The Phightin Phils
- The World
- Things that make you go hm
- Tinfoil Hats Off
- Under the Table
- Under the Tables
- Urban Development
- Urban Planning
- urban wildlife
- Video Poker
- We Call Shenanigans
- Weather
- Web Junk
- Weekend Omnibus
- White House
- What We've Found
- Women's Issues
- Flyered Up!
- How 'Bout That Weather?
- it's always sunny in philadelphia
- Stu!
- Shopping
- get out
- 10-track mind
- ArtsFlash
- Bloggity
- Bruce Being Bruce
- Colleges
- Comedy
- Gigantic Surprises
- Hello Canary
- Hello Puppy
- errata
- get lost
- Inside The Fishbowl
- Library Closings
- Local Support
- Movies
- Murder
- Night Moves
- Recycling
- radio
- Scientology
- Sex
- Sixers
- Skeeze Police
- State Politicians Screwing Philly
- That's a cool stencil!
- Theater
- Things We See
- This Week
- This Week in Oates
- University City
- WIN
- What we don't heart
- trailer!
- what we heart
- Feeling Guilty
- Askadelphia.
- Broke in Philly
- Contest
- Dance
- Dear Paper Doll
- Do A Good Thing
- Education
- Film Fest Schism
- G20-20 Vision
- Goodbye
- Gossip
- Great American Heroes
- PATCO
- Pearl Jam Week
- Puppy
- Stars of the Photostream
- sustainability
- Lower Merion Webcam-Gate
- The Cycle
- Equality Forum
- Bureaucrat of the Week
- Animals
- ElectionEar
- Photostream
