Legacy Admissions Are Actually the Opposite of Affirmative Action
These headlines’ play on “affirmative action” reflects the right wing’s use of the term to mean “unfair advantage.”
‘The History of Affirmative Action Has Asian-American Influence All Over It’
“We’d be going back a century or more in time, to a period in which campuses were less diverse than we could even imagine.”
Jeff Chang & Jeannie Park on Asian Americans and Affirmative Action
Asian-American students are being used as the face of attempts to eliminate affirmative action or race-consciousness in college admissions.
Best of CounterSpin 2022
CounterSpin is thankful to every activist, researcher, reporter and advocate who appeared on the show, of whom this is just a small selection.
‘This Case Was Never About Defending Asian Americans’
“Media need to do a better job of covering the solidarity among Asian Americans and other communities of color in standing against this lawsuit.”
Jake Johnston on Haiti Intervention, Jeannie Park on Harvard Affirmative Action
US news media ignore the role US intervention has played throughout Haitian history in order to push for the same sort of intervention again.
‘The Demonization Was Meant to Pacify Readers to Accept the Brutality’
“Africa, Africans and descendants of Africans, including in this country, were really made into the Other.”
At Vox Media, Workers Win a Voice Beyond Wages
The collective bargaining agreement between Vox Media and the Writers Guild of America East puts an end to one of the more contentious unionization battles that have gone on in US digital media. Vox management took longer to voluntarily recognize the union than other outlets, and workers recently staged a walk-out to protest Vox’s […]
FAIR TV: Iran Nuke Tall Tales, New Benghazi Nonsense, White Guys on Affirmative Action
On the show this week: CNN goes to Iran nuclear expert… Benjamin Netanyahu? Plus new nonsense on Benghazi, and Meet the Press presents a discussion on affirmative action with mostly conservative white guys–showing media’s need for some affirmative action of their own.
Meet the White Guys: NBC Panel Tackles Affirmative Action
An NBC roundtable on affirmative action–dominated by conservative white men.
The Unexplored Questions of Affirmative Action
Against the electric backdrop of electoral polemics, the October 10 Supreme Court session on the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas sent few sparks flying. Zeroed in on the election, the press dutifully reported the tit-for-tat and quips and quibbles around the case (Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin), but left […]
David Roberts on coal, Julianne Hing on affirmative action
If you were unnerved to see Democratic and Republican presidential candidates competing over which was a bigger fan of coal, you weren’t alone. And: Is affirmative action in danger?
Joe Klein Solves the ‘Hot-Button Issues’
There’s almost too much to say about this recent column Joe Klein wrote in Time magazine. But let’s start by parsing this: In the good old days of the last century, the years before the collapse of the economy and the World Trade Center towers, political discourse in the U.S. was, too often, rutted in […]
Sotomayor Coverage the Very ‘Antithesis of Journalism’
Progressive critic Dr. Roberto Rodriguez has a new commentary (New America Media, 6/2/09) demonstrating how the miserable press reaction to Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s U.S. Supreme Court “nomination clearly shows us is that what this nation needs is more incisive journalism, not less.” But, Rodriguez laments, “to be sure, the rise of right-wing media, which include […]
Miseducation
The June 2007 Supreme Court decision sharply limiting the use of race in public school admissions was viewed with dismay by many educators, civil rights activists and others who support diversity in our nation’s public schools. As Ted Shaw, the director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, explained, “In the context of segregated […]
Tammy Johnson on affirmative action and the Supreme Court, Rachel Morris on Sami al-Haj
This week on CounterSpin: The recent June 28 Supreme Court ruling and the media’s response, with Tammy Johnson of the Applied Research Center. Also on the show: Rachel Morris on Al-Jazeera’s Sami al-Haj, a story that has gone largely unnoticed by the U.S. press.
Affirmative Action Coverage Ignores Women—and Discrimination
Mainstream news media are shortchanging the public—especially women—in their coverage of affirmative action. Consideration of affirmative action’s impact and meaning for women of all colors is largely missing from news stories, and women are severely underrepresented on opinion pages. Worse—with a few exceptions, major media are reporting the debate on affirmative action without reference to […]
Media Preferences
“Houston Slows the Tidal Wave.” So said a recent headline in the U.S. News and World Report (11/17/97). But the notion that there is a popular, tidal wave-like movement in the United States, moving inexorably to erase affirmative action for women and racial minorities from the landscape of American life and law, is a myth. […]
‘Spinning the Press’
Even after the California and Houston ballot initiatives demonstrated how language makes a difference in characterizing affirmative action, and despite ample proof in polls of the prejudicial effect that calling affirmative action “preferences” has on the American public (especially whites), the mainstream media continues to equate “preference” with affirmative action and to use the two […]
White Man’s Burden
“Quotas Quashed,” crowed the front page of the June 13 New York Post. “High Court Sinks Most Affirmative Action Programs.” Inside, Post writers described the Adarand v. Pena ruling, in which the Supreme Court tightened criteria for some race-conscious federal programs, as a “bombshell decision” that “dealt a crippling blow to affirmative action.” All the […]
