On CNN: It Seems You Can’t Even Buy a Balanced Debate

On Twitter, @mediajustice just shared this: CNN rejected a television ad from immigrant reform advocates. The ad, critical of CNN’s own Lou Dobbs for his anti-immigrant and patently inaccurate tirades, was produced and sponsored by Media Matters and America’s Voice.

Dobbs’ hour-long show airs daily and has also been the target of the grassroots Basta Dobbs campaign in recent weeks. Ironically, that campaign is asking the show’s advertisers not to lend credibility to sensationalist, and racially hateful, journalism. While media outlets always reserve the right to reject ads, CNN seems to be sending the message that Dobbs deserves his pulpit while his critics do not. Yes, not even if they buy it.

From a public debate standpoint there are many nuances to this campaign and the Dobbs criticism. I plan to address those in future posts. But, for now, I will say: We need to understand media accountability as distinct from censorship, and journalistic speech as a powerful form of speech that can and should be held to a high standard by the public. If a journalist, even in an editorial form, is being irresponsible with their influence it’s the public’s right to challenge that influence, especially when lies are let to stand by a media outlet. Some would say this is a slippery slope to free speech infringement. I disagree. It’s a matter of understanding media accountability models developed within a human and civil rights framework — frameworks that inherently value freedom of speech and information (more on this in later posts). Further, just like book challenges provide a pulse-check on ideological debates (information we need!), media accountability campaigns bring necessary perspectives to the surface. It’s only then that we can engage the questions, “Are all ideas created equal?” and “Whose agenda is reflected in the criticism?” In the Dobbs case, does a major media megaphone for this particular man’s ideas create more danger and inequity than social good? And finally, if media outlets must operate in the public interest, is Dobbs’ particular brand of punditry in the public interest? Do we define that interest, or does the corporate outlet?

More on this story from the Huffington Post.

Watch the Media Matters ad.

Amazon Censors LGBTQ Lit

During the last few days, thousands of LGBTQ titles were demoted by Amazon.com including my young adult anthology Revolutionary Voices.

The mega-store removed rankings from titles deemed “adult” — seemingly as part of a sweeping effort to remove erotica. It is unclear what “offending” keywords they used to strip books of their findability but the impacts were extensive. As of tonight many of the rankings have reappeared after massive public response. (Read background here).

But the issue is not resolved. Amazon originally claimed this was a “glitch” in its filtering effort. Today, Feministing.com confirmed that this is untrue, but a result of decentralized tagging for which “no human is responsible.” Regardless, we should keep pressure to find out how Amazon is filtering material, how decisions are made, and what will be done to prevent such “glitches” in intellectual freedom in the future. Let the letter writing continue! Amazon should not get off the hook for this one, and they are not the only major company blocking access to books. Content filtering is an ongoing issue among libraries, bookstores, schools, internet-service-providers, et al.

For Amazon’s contact info see this post from Sunday’s Daily Kos.

UPDATE from Monday 3/13: It’s true that a hacker claimed responsibility. Many are questioning the truth of that explanation as well. No matter the outcome, this incident still illustrates the general need for more transparency among information sellers/providers re: their search functionality and filters. (Last year, the medical database POPLINE blocked all searches for the word “abortion.”)

UPDATE 2: Decent article summing up controversy in New York Times.

For those in the San Jose area, there is a city council meeting on the issue of filtering in the public library next week:
TENTATIVE:
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
7:00 PM to 10:00 PM [Evening session]
Location: Wing Public Rooms Council Chambers
200 E Santa Clara Street
San Jose, CA

Banned & Recovered: Oakland Art Exhibit

Today I saw a great art exhibit at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO): Banned & Recovered: Artists Respond to Censorship. The show includes some truly beautiful pieces including an installation by Oakland artist Victor Cartagena in tribute to one of my favorite poets, Roque Dalton. Dalton’s poems rain down from the ceiling and cover the walls, while the doorway to the room reminds us: “Yes, we are not made of ‘words alone,’ but Dalton’s words were banned and he lost his life because of them.” Another great piece brings Toni Morrison’s Beloved to life, and another depicts the burning of Harry Potter books in cities across the U.S.

Co-presented with the San Francisco Center for the Book, the exhibit runs until December 31, 2008.

AAMLO 659 14th Street, Oakland , CA

Gallery hours: Tues-Sat, 12-5:30

Preview:

Artist: Liz Hager

Artist: Victor Cartagena

Librarian Gets Award for Protecting Reproductive Rights

San Jose, CA — Gloria Won, a medical librarian at the University of California, San Francisco, and library director Gail Sorrough received the Zoia Horn Intellectual Freedom Award on Friday night from the California Library Association for challenging government censorship of reproductive health information.

In her day-to-day work as a medical librarian Won noticed that the word “abortion” retrieved fewer and fewer results in the POPLINE (POPulation Information OnLINE) reproductive health database, which is federally funded. She found out that “abortion” and terms related to it had been turned into stopwords. (For those of you not familiar with stopwords, they are usually limited to words like “but,” or “and” that a database should skip over when processing a search request). In Spring 2008, Won wrote to POPLINE database manager Debra L. Dickson:

Even more troubling is the implications for the average user – eliminating this term essentially blocks access to the reports in the database and ultimately to information about abortion. ‘Unwanted w2 pregnancy’ is not a synonym for abortion.

Radical Reference helped get the word out about this blatant affront to information access, asking concerned librarians to contact POPLINE. The block was soon removed on the terms. Congratulations and thank you Gloria!

Ban Prisons, Not Books

Click here for a videocast of my Banned Book Week speech, San Jose, CA, October 4, 2008.

[excerpt] “The rise in book challenges and successful book removals is a sign of our larger political times. To me, it’s no coincidence that we’ve seen a tenfold increase in book challenges and an 800% increase in the number of people in prison over the last two decades. The two issues are directly related. In municipalities across the U.S., libraries (even schools from Seattle to Contra Costa) are closing, but prison expansion is still on the rise (despite falling violent crime rates). Last time I checked, the need for education was not suddenly declining — on the contrary, it’s only literacy rates that fall when we invest more in prisons than in schools or libraries. So how is it that Banned Book Week, budget cuts affecting literacy and educational programs and our nation’s prison priorities are related? Because: more than 60 percent of prison inmates are illiterate. 85 percent among juveniles. This is a problem that starts in our communities, not the jails. It’s disturbing, but states have been planning the number of new prison beds to build based on the number of children who are reading below average by the 2nd to 4th grade. Think about this. States do not use this information to channel money into prevention and literacy programs. They budget to expand prisons. This is a terrifyingly backwards cycle….” watch the full speech.

GetActive: http://www.criticalresistance.org

RadReads: Revolutionary Voices

It’s a dubious honor to be the author/editor of a banned book. My first book, Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology (Alyson, 2000), was banned by the Texas Youth Commission in 2004. According to TYC the book is “inconsistent with the educational goals of the state.” Makes you wonder what these goals are when a book written to break the isolation many young people feel is considered too dangerous.

Contributor Margot Kelley Rodriguez writes in the book’s introduction:

As artists, we come together in this book to share ourselves with each other and with you….Included here are stories of loss (how religion can force a grandmother to turn her back on her granddaughter), stories of rage (against our parents, against hunger, against the state of things), and stories of love (about the awesome power of desire, about the beauty of touch). Throughout these testimonials runs a thread of hope; hope in love, hope that by writing this down we can help some other queer kid out there. We know the answer to June Jordan’s question, “Where Is the Love?” The answer is us. “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

We are still the ones. Young and old.

The ACLU of Texas reported on this and other removals in their invaluable annual edition of Free People Read Freely.