Category Archives: journalism

blog, diversity, journalism, news, politics, race, sports

ESPN reaches limit of Linsanity; No excuse for racist headline

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We were all having so much fun, too. Doesn’t mean it’s time to break out the racism.

I was wondering when someone would use a “Chink in the Armor” reference.

I’m sure many Asian Americans thought about it before ESPN did.  But only the most screwed up Asian American self-hater would use it in public to describe the basketball flaws of Jeremy Lin.

It’s not so bad if we were all living in Medieval America and people  actually bought their chain maille and armor from Barney’s  and Macy’s.  Then, hey, sure, it might be OK. When you get a ding in your metal suit, that’s a drag. We all can relate.

But the dark ages are gone. We live in a diverse America, and when you say “Chink,” you are not bringing the love. Nor are you talking about the flaws of Sir Lancelot, real or imagined. Besides, you play basketball in your underwear.

Still, if someone likened Lin’s ball-handling to Lancelot trying a crossover move in full armor, you might make a case for “plausible deniability.”

At least in a metaphorical sense.

But let’s face it.

The ESPN headline was not poetry. We all know what someone means when they say “Chink” in reference to Jeremy Lin.

The media, in this case the headline writers at ESPN,  have been so giddy with Linsanity, they must have thought it gave everyone the green light to have some racist fun.

Editors surely would have taken more care before blurting the “N” word.  But evidently  not the “C” word.

The good fun of Linsanity is intended to make people realize how inclusive the world has become.

It’s not intended to desensitize us all to the racist sentiments of the past.

ESPN has apologized for the slur, but that isn’t enough.

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund is calling for full apologies on ESPN cablecasts.  The network needs to set the record straight for all to hear, lest anyone get the idea that Linsanity is a good excuse to turn racist.

blog, diversity, journalism, movies, news, politics, race

No”yahoo!” for a “Yahoo-less” Yang; He’s free, but the internet may not be

Seems odd that on the day  we protest the corporate driven legislation that threatens the web, we  find ourselves contemplating the resignation of Chief Yahoo and pioneering web organizer, Jerry Yang.

Read my take Yang’s future on  the Asian American Legal Defense and Education blog at www.aaldef.org/blog

Yang resigned yesterday, leaving the company he founded while a student at Stanford in 1995.

It was a very different world  and a very different internet back then.

Of course, the business and the corporate world remains the same. Heartless, cold, money-driven.

Given that, how did Yang ever survive his biggest faux pas?   After all, his success has  nothing to do with cool technology or intricate algorithms.  In 2008, it wall about simple math.

That’s when he blew it on the Microsoft deal.

Rejecting the Microsoft take-over bid at more than$30 a share, nearly twice what the company was worth, was a tad naive for our country’s brand of  hard-ass capitalism.

Yang didn’t want to take the money and run. He had a dream, after all. But even after that, he stayed. When he was ousted as CEO, he hung around.  And now he’s gone from Yahoo for good.

I’ve got some suggestions for Yang 5.0. on my blog at  the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund:

 http://aaldef.org/blog/bye-bye-yahoo-hello-jerry-yang-50.html

Yang at 43 is a bit of a throwback,  a geek’s geek, less corporate money guy. And certainly less political.

If the web’s old values are to be enshrined as “the way,” it’s going to take a lot more political might from web veterans like Yang to protect it.

The fight over SOPA and PIPA is about how old media companies are trying to take back their old monopolies.And they’re using tried and true methods, the kind of special interest lobbying that produces legislation that protects the likes of Big Pharma, Big Auto, Big Oil, etc. 

SOPA and PIPA would have the effect of changing the democratizing nature of the web.  It’s got nothing to do with privacy. Just money and control. A taming of the world wide web? That’s way different from scouring and searching the web for whatever cool stuff was on it.

That was what a younger Yang was all about when he was a graduate student and Yahoo was his baby.

blog, diversity, journalism, news, politics, race

Wake of the week: Lowe’s “Muslim Interruptus,” NDAA, and a farewell to Christopher Hitchens

My amok column on Lowe’s and its ad pullout, which I call an example of “Muslim Interruptus,” is up on

www.aaldef.org/blog

Frankly, the issue is worth making a big deal about, though its a basic capitalistic right to pull out whenever you feel like it. Barring contracts, free markets are free, right?

Taking that tack  just means you have to be ready for the political firestorm, and the potential loss in dollars. Though right now, Lowe’s seems to be positioning itself well to be the hardware store of choice for bigots, racists, and haters. Where do I get the supplies I need for the next cross-burning, hate-graffiti spree, or anti-diversity celebration requiring mild incendiary devices? 

I bet at Lowe’s, it’s service with a smile.

www.aaldef.org

The Lowe’s issue was a nice distraction from the The National Defense Authorization Bill, which passed this week with only minor changes that doesn’t really wipe out all the civil liberties concerns.

Maybe the payroll tax issue was used as a smokescreen to further distract attention.

Doesn’t anyone care the law would enable government to detain indefinitely anyone with suspected terrorisist ties, specifically to Al Qaeda, but given loopholes,  likely to include any terrorist organization the government wants to link you to.

The bigger deal is if it’s in the law and “codified.”  That’s the thing that makes all the gatekeepers sleep well  at night, because now they can pretty use this as a starting point for more extreme actions, and feel totally justified. They can lock you up, and now they can throw away the key. Before they had to at least remember there was a key.

Seems like with the NDAA, the American people lose a  whole lot more than Al Qaeda does.

And I thought the Iraq war ended this week.

When it did, I had no feeling. The war destroyed a presidency, our economy, and a sense of what our democracy’s all about. 

Maybe that’s why people aren’t up in arms about the NDAA.

But then there’s another distraction this week… at least for me.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

I was privileged to have Hitchens as a guest on my AM radio show in Washington, DC back in the ’90s. He was intelligent, brash, and provocative. The kind of guest that made radio fun and automatic. He’d call in and I could picture him with the tie undone,  ready with a snarky comment at my prompting.  I know he could seem like a pompous ass at times. But he could turn on the charm when his brilliance failed. And fortunately, or unfortunately,  it rarely did.  And he knew it.

When I moved on from D.C., we  never spoke again. But in recent years because of his writing, I knew he was sick and knew it was all coming to an end. But it doesn’t make it any less shocking when the news arrives via e-alert as it did last night, how the bad boy was quieted once and for all. I preferred the New York Times lead line to the Post’s. You can describe him as a great acerbic writer, but the Times put it in context by mentioning him in the same breath as Thomas Paine and George Orwell.

In the opinion ranks, those two are the Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. They’re not in heaven, but in the great Hall of Peruasive Essayists, somewhere in the equivalent of Cooperstown or Canton, a place where most of us who toil as columnists and bloggers hope to be laid to rest when we no longer have a pulse to register our opinion any longer. 

Hitchens knew the next stop is not a weekly column for a publication in the after life.

That’s the finality of this final deadline for Hitchens. Spirituality? Religion? Death bed conversion? Are you kidding.

So here’s where I just flat out say I hope he was wrong. 

I hope in the end, his belief system was turned upside down, and that faith turned out be fact.

That would have been a ripe opportunity for Hitchens. Because now he would know,or not know,the answer for real. 

 It would have made the utmost tragedy and shame his inability to share the truth with us all, one last time.

blog, journalism, news

Ode to Andy: CBS,”60 Minutes” commentator Andy Rooney was my broadcast hero

I was saddened by the news early this morning when CBS alerted the world that Andy Rooney died Friday night.

I actually got word of his death on my Blackberry (yes, I still have one) as an alert from the Washington Post. That probably would have rated a sentimental jab from Rooney about the demise of the teletype and cable wire as the main bearer of bad news, but I digress.

The 92-year-old was one of my broadcast heroes throughout my career.

It was tough going to want to be a curmudgeon when you’re  just in your twenties, which I suppose explains my career arc, or lack of one.  You spend your life in punk purgatory before anyone lets you curmudge for a living.

But CBS seemed to have all the broadcast oddballs.  Kuralt, Osgood, Rooney. They were the guys allowed to be a little more than a minute-and-a-half would allow. They had personality and more.  They weren’t the hard-ass stand up guys with the Capitol sticking out of their head. Oh,they were good reporters, too. But Kuralt was folksy. Osgood was witty and bow-tied. Rooney was, well you know what he was.  Eyebrowed. None of those guys  were the prettiest things on TV. But they were the writers on TV, the literary stars who could turn a phrase when there were no pictures. 

Rooney was the most daring.  More often than not it was just him staring into the camera like an aging bullfighter, or  doing a show-and tell, holding up an example of his  ironic subject and point of his ire. One commentary that made an impression was where he held up a Sunday paper and started cleaning it as if it were a fish.  I never quite looked at another Sunday paper the same way again.

Not many places let you do the kind of thing Rooney did. And there was a time I could tell the TV guys made him throw more pictures in. That’s when I first thought maybe Old Eyebrows was  failing. But he still had the  look and the sound. He could still pose the rhetorical “nagging question” better than anyone.  When you’re a professional curmudgeon, fine wine is for sissies. Curmudgeons age like an old boot.

When everyone said goodbye a month ago, I resisted joining in on the tributes back then, knowing he was just reaching his  curmudgeonly prime, hoping that all the retirement talk was premature, and that, indeed, he’d be back for more. They always say that, and  then it never happens.

My regret is that I never got to meet him, though I suspect it’s better that way.  I would probably have done something non-pre-curmudgeon-like  like ask  for an autograph.  And we all know how much he liked that. 

The closest I came to him was working briefly with his daughter Emily in Boston.  Now there’s a tough cookie.

My condolences to the family.  

So long Andy. And don’t worry,  after you get past the gates, there are few autograph seekers in the after-life.