reflectivepundit

Golf, U.S. Women’s Open, and Gender Bias in Sports Reporting

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Today, the fourth and last round of the United States Golf Association’s (USGA) U.S. Women’s Open, the most important event of the year for professional female golfers, is being played at the Saucon Valley Country Club in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. But contrary to the complete coverage of the recent U.S. [Men’s] Open Championship at Bethpage, New York, there has been very little media attention to this year’s championship and major ladies’ events in the past. Indeed, whereas literally all major and non-major tournaments of the Professional Golf Association’s (PGA) tour and Senior PGA tour tend to be covered generously, those of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) receive little or no attention at all.

To be sure, this is nothing new. Yet, I found it particularly disconcerting that today’s New York Times “SportsSunday” Section displayed a large, four-column report and picture about next week’s [men’s] British Open site at Turnberry, Scotland, which was continued on an inside page. Taken together with a column by Dave Anderson on the duel between Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus at the 1977 British Open, the Times managed to devote more space to the up-coming men’s major tournament than to the current U.S. Women’s Open.

Yes, the women’s tour does not have stars like Tiger Woods or Phil Michelson, but one reason may well be that the sports media tried too hard to promote Michelle Wie as the female Tiger Woods and more or less ignored the accomplished young players.

Using and Misusing Communication Technology: The Case of Iran

By Brigitte L. Nacos
The propaganda war between the power-holders and the reformers in Iran has not been a one-sided triumph for citizen journalism that overcame the silencing of the mainstream media by Iranian authorities. Instead, the same Internet and global satellite phone systems that have transmitted compelling images from the streets of Tehran and elsewhere are also effective venues for the government to spy and crack down on electronic voices of dissent. As Farhad Manjoo writes in an excellent post at Slate (“The Revolution will not be Digitized”),“The crackdown in Iran shows that, for regimes bent on survival, squashing electronic dissent isn't impossible. In many ways, modern communication tools are easier to suppress than organizing methods of the past.”

Ironically, as Christopher Rhoads and Loretta Chao of the Wall Street Journal revealed, European telecommunication companies were instrumental in helping the Iranian authorities to establish “one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.” Rhoads and Chao identified Germany’s multinational Siemens AG and Finland’s Nokia Corporation as jointly providing the Iranian government with the technological monitoring means. 

The idea of the global village, brought together by advanced communication technology, in which different peoples would learn about and understand and respect each other, was a utopian pipedream all along. Even in Francis Fukuyama’s optimistic picture about the triumph of democracy in “The End of History and the Last Man,” the communication revolution did not figure at all because he recognized that “communication technology itself is value-neutral.” It can be used by those who fight for freedom and human rights but also by those who deny basic liberties.  

Like the well-known practices of the Chinese government, the case of Iran points to the uncomfortable reality: The most advanced communication technologies tend to be more advantageous for oppressive regimes than for dissenters and citizen journalists among them—not the least because of corporations in the West whose profit imperatives trump what one former president called the “value thing.” Siemens and Nokia may have had a particular role in the case of Iran but these two corporations are no exceptions, when it comes to censor the Internet. Just think of Internet providers, such as Google, Yahoo, and  Microsoft and their compliance with the People Republic of China’s censorship policies.   

Post-9/11Torture and the Need for a Truth Commission

By Brigitte L. Nacos 
According to Eric Brahm, a “truth commission's main goal is to establish what happened in the past. Truth commissions do not normally have the power to prosecute.” Such a body typically sheds light on human rights violations, war crimes, and hate crimes that were encouraged, blessed, and perpetrated by officials or agents of the very state that creates a truth commission after the offensive practices have been halted as morally and legally wrong. While the need for truth commissions arises typically in the wake of abuses by authoritarian states, such a body would be well suited to investigate and write the complete chapter of post-9/11 torture in U.S. controlled prisons abroad.

Given the pressing problems on his plate, President Barack Obama has reason tell us that it is more important to look ahead rather than be distracted by problems in the past. But there is a way to keep the eye on the ball of today’s and tomorrow’s decision-making without completely ignoring past wrongdoings. The calls for the prosecution of former officials in the White House, Department of Justice, and Department of Defense are justified in the face of the already available evidence, but I prefer the establishment of a truth commission with full access to all relevant information rather than the prosecution of the by now well-known cast of torture advocates and defenders that would widen the divisive partisan and ideological divide.

If we want to learn from the shocking decisions that involved top-officials in the Bush administration and what was revealed to some members of Congress, including leading Democrats, we need to learn the whole truth and let the chips fall wherever they may. Otherwise former administration officials, such as Vice-President Richard Cheney, can continue their propaganda campaign of fear in defense of the utility of torture in bolstering homeland security.

I agree with David Epstein’s take on the liberal media’s cavalier reporting about the Bush administration’s torture record (as we know it so far) compared to their never-ending attacks on both Bill and Hillary Clinton because of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Remarkably, the same moral guardians in the fourth estate who never tired of condemning the sex scandal in the White House have not shown such such an appetite to denounce the Bush administration’s torture policy. Instead, they continue to avoid the “t” word and report benignly about “enhanced interrogation.”

All the more reason for a truth commission.  

Note to Pres. Obama: Public Diplomacy Must Aim at Largest Audience

By Brigitte L. Nacos
That President Barack Obama is sticking to his campaign promise of changing America’s foreign policy approach was obvious, when he granted his first formal White House interview to the Arab TV-network  al-Arabiya and used the occasion as a platform to address the Arab and Muslim street. As Karen DeYoung reports in the Washington Post, the responses to the president’s outreach “have been largely positive.” But her assessment is not based on polls of or interviews with regular Arabs and Muslims but rather on the reactions of various government officials. While there is no doubt that leaders of governments and of non-governmental groups took notice of Obama’s promise for a new start in America’s relations with the Muslim and Arab world, one wonders how many members of general public in these countries watched the actual interview.

Unfortunately, by selecting the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya network rather than the Qatar-owned al-Jazeera, the White House selected a moderate medium with a rather modest viewership over a more Arab-centric network with the by far largest audience in Arab countries.

This, then, was a missed opportunity in public diplomacy in that it did not aim for and did not get the attention of the largest segment of the targeted audience. As the 2008 Annual Arab Public Opinion Poll of the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland found by surveying representative samples of the public in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, taken together al-Jazeera has 53% of the audience whereas al-Arabiya has only 9%. Similarly, a December 2008 survey found that more than 50% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza al-Jazeera was the most watched satellite television compared to 10% for al-Arabiya.

Unlike traditional diplomacy or government-to-government communications—often during person-to-person contacts--, public diplomacy is directed to foreign publics and therefore must aim at reaching the largest number of people. You do not have to agree with the medium of communication as long as you are assured that an interview, a speech, and messages in whatever form are aired in their original form. In other words, al-Jazeera, not al-Arabiya, is the by far best platform for public diplomacy with Arabs and Muslims.

Israeli-Palestinian Clash: Who Is Winning the PR War?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
The following is the lead in  today’s article by Rachel Shabi published in The Guardian:

“Israel believes its has won broad international support in the media for its actions in Gaza thanks to its PR strategy, which through a new body has for months been concerned with formulating plans and role-playing to ensure that government officials deliver a clear, unified message to the world's press.” Shabi reports furthermore, that “Israeli officials have also enjoyed a clear edge with coverage. An Israeli foreign ministry assessment of eight hours of coverage across international broadcast media reported that Israeli representatives got 58 minutes of airtime while the Palestinians got only 19 minutes.”
If true, such a PR victory would be a remarkable change from the experience during the 2006 conflict with Hezbollah. But a less than cursory review of some media content does not reveal the most important coverage patterns and characteristics and their likely impact on audiences.
For a week now, newspaper headlines and broadcast leads refer typically to Israel’s “assault” or “attack” on Gaza—not to rockets launched from Gaza against Israeli targets as the cause of renewed hostilities. But neither headlines nor the explanations that Israeli officials give in the international broadcast media match the dominance of mass-mediated images of Palestinian children and women killed and injured by Israeli airstrikes. Take today’s online slideshow in the New York Times titled “Seventh Day of Gaza Attack,” eight of the 11 images depict scenes in Gaza, 3 show damage in Israel caused by rockets launched by Hamas. A Washington Post report from Beersheba titled “On Both Sides of the Border, Wounded Bodies and Minds,” is accompanied by the heartbreaking picture of a wounded Palestinian boy being carried into Shifa Hospital after an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City. A comprehensive slide show on the Post’s web site includes several photographs of sites in Israel hit by Hamas rockets and Israelis mourning victims of such attacks but most and the most shocking visuals are of Palestinian victims and their loved-ones.
I mention the Times and Post as examples here because there is no reason to suspect that these newspapers would wittingly slant their headlines, articles, and visuals of this conflict against Israel and in favor of Hamas. It is in the nature of asymmetrical warfare that more harm is inflicted on the weaker side and that this is reflected in the news. More so than in the past, today’s instant and 24/7 global reporting of such conflicts plays into the hands to terrorists, insurgents—the weaker side.

New Medium and New Push to Narrow America's Ideal vs. Reality Gap?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Throughout American history, when the inevitable gap between the declared ideals and the reality established by political institutions was deemed unacceptably wide, movements emerged that fueled creedal passions in favor of narrowing the disparity. In his book American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Samuel Huntington identified four what he called creedal passion periods that produced movements for change--the revolutionary era in the 18th century, the Jacksonian period in the early 19th century, the progressive period in the early 20th century, and the era of civil rights/anti-Vietnam protests in the1960s and 1970s. In all periods, one of the goals was, as Huntington put it, "the opening up of the processes of decision-making to public participation." 

It is particularly striking as Huntington recognized that each of the movements of those times was associated with the emergence of a new type of media. (1)The political pamphlet of the revolutionary period was central to the movement in favor of independence and a republican form of government; (2) the penny press—newspapers cheap enough for the masses—were instrumental in expanding democratic participation--albeit in the limits of the time; (3) the mass newspapers and news magazines with the advent of investigative reporting (muckraking according to Theodore Roosevelt) in the late 19th and early 20th period drove the progressive movement in its fight against corrupt political and business institutions and for participatory democracy; (4) the three national television networks shaped America's attitudes towards the struggle for African-Americans' civil rights and the Vietnam War and protests against.

I have wondered lately whether the new medium of our time, the Internet, would give birth to or facilitate a new popular quest for narrowing the once again widened gap between the promise of America and the performance of its institutions and the leading actors therein.

Reverse Gender Discrimination and the McCain/Palin Camp

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Surveying media coverage of Senator Hillary Clinton during the primary season and the media treatment of Governor Sarah Palin since she became the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate, E.J. Dionne asks in the Washington Post, “Is there one standard for Hillary Clinton -- a tough one -- and another, permissive standard for Sarah Palin?” The answer is crystal clear: Whereas most in the media seemed to compete for the top prize in the destruction of Hillary’s candidacy, they have lost their bark when it comes to Sarah’s run for the second highest office in the land.

During the primary season, I posted repeatedly on the media’ gross gender discrimination against Senator Clinton. Dionne’s example here is instructive: After Hillary falsely claimed that she had come under sniper fire, when she visited Bosnia more than a dozen years ago, the media never let her forget her mistake. There has not been a comparable reaction after it was established that Palin and her handlers lied when they claimed that she visited U.S.troops in Iraq. Never mind that Hillary had actually visited Bosnia at the time but Sarah did not make it into Iraq and counted a stop-over in Ireland as visiting a foreign country.

By labeling even criticism and questioning of Palin by and in the media or from any other quarter as sexist, the McCain/Palin campaign has pulled of an astonishing swift-boating act: they intimidated and pressured the talking and writing fourth estate into practicing reverse discrimination/reverse sexism in favor of the female candidate and at the expense of her male counterparts.

This is the new rule of the general campaign season: simply because she is female, the least known candidate in the race must be treated soft and gentle. When Charles Gibson interviewed Palin last week, he followed that rule and was still attacked for displaying gender bias. From what I saw and heard, Gibson was not at all tough but remained cool and professional in the face of Governor Palin’s—let’s say—inadequate performance.

Some of the media watchdogs are now actually helping to enforce the new female protection tenet by dwelling on remarks that have nothing to do with the untouchable Sarah or express legitimate concerns—but are deemed sexist by a McCain/Palin team whose agenda, ironically, does not promise to end true discrimination against women.  

1976 Croatian Hijacker Busic: Terrorist or Freedom Fighter?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Whether you consider the perpetuator of violence for political reasons a terrorist or a freedom fighter matters: terrorists are loathed; freedom fighters are admired. Zvenko Busic, the mastermind of a 1976 hijacking and bomb explosion, is a case in point: For the family and friends of New York City police officer Brian J. Murray who was killed by an exploding bomb that Busic and his comrades had planted in a locker at Grand Central Terminal, he is a ruthless terrorist; for many fellow-Croatians he is a heroic freedom fighter. Given the different connotations here, it is particularly important what terms news organizations choose, when they report or comment on those who carry out political violence.

The other day, Busic was paroled and deported to Croatia.

This is the lead in the story that The New York Daily News published yesterday: “A Croatian terrorist has been freed from a life sentence and shipped to his homeland - to the disgust of relatives of the city cop he murdered more than 30 years ago.”

In today’s New York Times, the lead is quite different: “After more than three decades in United States prisons — a term punctuated by a brief escape and recapture — a 62-year-old Croatian independence fighter returned to his native country on Thursday, having served his time for a 1976 hijacking and a bombing that killed a police officer. The fighter, Zvonko Busic, led a group that planted a bomb at Grand Central Terminal that later exploded, killing a city police officer, Brian J. Murray.”

I underlined three words in the above leads to contrast the different descriptions of Busic in the two newspapers—for the Daily News he is a terrorist, for the Times an “independence fighter” and a “fighter.” As far as I am concerned, a terrorist commits or threatens violence for political ends—precisely what Busic, his wife Julienne, and three other Croatians did in September 1976, when they hijacked a TWA airliner en route from New York to Chicago with 92 persons abroad. They threatened to blow up the plane unless their conditions were met: prominent publicity for the plight of Croatian independence from then communist Yugoslavia.

Gross Gender Imbalance on the Op-Ed Pages

By Brigitte L. Nacos
While I disagree with New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt’s assessment in his latest column that this newspaper’s primary season coverage of Senator Clinton was by and large free of gender bias, I wholeheartedly agree with his conclusion that Maureen Dowd’s column “by assailing Clintonin gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season.” More specifically, Hoyt concluded,“Dowd’s columns about Clinton’s campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism, right along with the comments of Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Tucker Carlson or, for that matter, Kristol, who made the Hall of Shame for a comment on Fox News, not for his Times work.”

Dowd has a point in arguing that columnists express their opinions or, as she noted according to Hoyt, “she is a columnist who is paid not to be objective.” But even opinion pieces can go too far. And that was certainly the case for Dowd’s relentless “gender-laden assault on Clinton--in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1,” as Hoyt writes.

Since Dowd devoted more than half of her columns in the last six months to sexist anti-Hillary propaganda, it is not surprising that she hasn’t yet found another target for her assaults since Senator Clinton threw the towel.
                           
Decades ago, the op-ed page was introduced by many newspapers to provide the readers with a market place of ideas within the paper of their choice. The opinion pieces by columnists with different ideological and partisan views are one constant feature of these pages. One would expect that in our time, there would be some kind of balance (no, not quotas) in terms of gender among the newspapers’ own columnists. But the reality is far from it—certainly at the New York Times: Of the 11 columnist listed on the newspaper’s website, nine are males and only two are females! There must be an abundance of qualified males and a scarcity of qualified females, when it comes to select columnists!

New York Magazine on Media’s Gender Bias Against Hillary and Her Supporters

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Thanks to John Heilemann and New York magazine, we finally get a serious journalistic treatment of the mainstream media’s gender bias that was unleashed against Hillary Clinton and her female supporters during this year’s primary campaign and continues to be evoked against women that refuse to forget the mistreatment of their candidate. Towards the end of his excellent article on “The Fall and Rise of Hillary Clinton,” Heilemann addresses the Clinton campaign’s and her supporters’ anger towards the media that differs from so many efforts by his colleagues to brush this issue aside as sour grapes by a flawed candidate and bitter female backers.

Here are some excerpts from Heilemann’s article that deserves to be read in full:

“For months now, my e-mail box has been full of messages from women across the country, explaining what Hillary’s run meant to them, why it was so important. The reasons vary depending on age and race and region, but the one element almost all my correspondents express in common is a furious resentment at the press for what they see as blatant misogyny in the coverage of Clinton.

When I mention this to Hillary, she laughs and exclaims, “I’d love to get a look at your e-mail!” And then, more soberly, she goes on, “There’s a reason for the resentment. The level of dismissive and condescending comments, not just about me—what do I care?—but about the people who support me and in particular the women who support me, has been shocking. Shocking to women and to fair-minded men. But what has really been more disappointing to me is how few voices that have a platform have spoken out against it. And that’s really why you seen this enormous grassroots outrage. There is no outlet. It is rare that you have anybody on these shows or in a position of responsibility at major publications who really says, ‘Wait a minute! What are we talking about here? I have a wife! I have a daughter! I want the best for them.’ ”