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Children can get vaccinated, and hopefully one day babies will too!

This post was originally published on this site

Children can get vaccinated, and hopefully one day babies will too!

This post was originally published on this site

One of the nation’s top officials, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, was fired by former President Donald Trump because internally, he dared to challenge administration policies rife with prejudice and in public, Trump loyalists saw him as a saboteur in their midst, according to a newly released memo.

The memo was released Wednesday by Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, and comes after Karl published an excerpt on Tuesday from his upcoming book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show in The Atlantic.

The memo, like the excerpt, illuminates the fragile teetering of Trump’s presidency into a full-blown paranoid authoritarian state.

Esper was fired, according to the memo, because he (among a dozen or so other reasons) barred the display of a Confederate flag on a military installation and because he “publicly opposed” Trump’s call for troops to clear out protesters outside of the White House.

Esper “consumed” too much of the Defense Department’s time on Russia and was “actively pushing for ‘diversity and inclusion’” at the department while expressing “disinterest” in supporting Trump’s inhumane military transgender ban.

Even now, a year removed from the 2020 election, when one starts to pull at the threads barely holding together the moldering moth-eaten sweater that was Donald Trump’s single-term, impeachment-marred presidency, the discoveries are deeply unsettling.

Trump’s disdain for even a hint of opposition in his ranks is no surprise. But part of what makes the Esper memo so disturbing is its inception and origin.

The memo, and therefore the decision to fire Esper, was authored and engineered, as Karl reports, by John McEntee, a man most Americans might not have known by name during the Trump years and even up until Tuesday, when the select congressional committee investigating the Capitol insurrection subpoenaed McEntee.

So who is John McEntee?

Karl gives McEntee great scrutiny in the excerpt published Tuesday, exposing how he ascended to power, as Karl wrote, just as “American democracy was falling apart.”

McEntee started out as Trump’s body man, following the president around to carry bags or provide other assistance, but he quickly ascended the ranks to become director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, a tremendously powerful and integral position for an otherwise political and professional neophyte.

In the role, the director of that department both vets and hires personnel “including ambassadors, Cabinet secretaries and top intelligence officials,” Karl points out. Beyond hiring, the director also has a say in firing.  

The power of the position was so great and McEntee such an unconventionalchoice that even Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff at the time, had his own deputy hauled into a meeting with the president to tell Trump he might be making a mistake.

Trump, true to form, was adamant that he wanted McEntee. And as it so often goes with both aspiring and experienced ‘yes men,’ McEntee, at 29 years old, found himself quickly ushered into the directorship.

What followed, according to Karl, was a swift pursuit by McEntee to root out anyone emitting even so much as a whiff of disloyalty to or independence from Trump. He committed to this mission with assistance from a team largely comprised of inexperienced, young, and attractive women—along with men McEntee deemed unthreatening to his pursuit of those women.

As time marched on, McEntee’s influence inside the administration flourished and so began the sequence of events that would lead to Esper’s termination.

McEntee eventually tapped Josh Whitehouse, a 25-year-old who once served as a coalition coordinator for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Whitehouse was elevated, despite a dearth of experience, from the campaign to an assistant role inside of the Department of Agriculture in 2017. But that stint lasted just nine months and as the election loomed in 2020, McEntee called him up to serve as the administration’s liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.

As a liaison, Whitehouse could not fire anyone directly, but he could do McEntee’s bidding—and that bidding he did as he helped the personnel office last October compose “a series of memos identifying nearly two dozen Pentagon officials they thought should be fired, each outlining transgressions allegedly made against Trump,” Karl wrote.

What followed was the Esper memo and with that advice to Trump, the former defense secretary was abruptly removed and replaced with Christopher Miller.

Miller’s senior adviser, Douglas Macgregor, was also selected by McEntee.

McEntee started his professional career as a production assistant for Fox News. He volunteered on Trump’s first presidential campaign and became the president’s body man. That was the extent of his governmental experience. And to boot, he only lasted a short while during that first go-round in the administration because he was fired. Investigators found his rampant gambling debts were a security threat.

But in January 2020, Trump’s reelection campaign scooped their yes man up.

And within a year (and just five days before the insurrection), it was McEntee who sent a text message to then-Vice President Mike Pence offering him bullet points—dripping in falsities and against White House counsel advice—on how Pence could “use his position” to help Trump win and effectively overturn the electoral results.

Karl reports that McEntee still “remains in close contact with Trump” and spent the summer at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, club volunteering with the former president’s political operations.

McEntee, if he complies, may find himself back in Washington soon. The January 6th Committee subpoenaed McEntee Tuesday, seeking records plus a deposition about what he knows of or heard when he stood in the Oval Office with Trump, Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, and campaign counsel Justin Clark as they gamed out an audit of the count in Georgia.

McEntee is scheduled to go before the committee by Dec. 15 and lawmakers have set Nov. 23 as a deadline for McEntee to respond to the subpoena.

This post was originally published on this site

One of the nation’s top officials, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, was fired by former President Donald Trump because internally, he dared to challenge administration policies rife with prejudice and in public, Trump loyalists saw him as a saboteur in their midst, according to a newly released memo.

The memo was released Wednesday by Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, and comes after Karl published an excerpt on Tuesday from his upcoming book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show in The Atlantic.

The memo, like the excerpt, illuminates the fragile teetering of Trump’s presidency into a full-blown paranoid authoritarian state.

Esper was fired, according to the memo, because he (among a dozen or so other reasons) barred the display of a Confederate flag on a military installation and because he “publicly opposed” Trump’s call for troops to clear out protesters outside of the White House.

Esper “consumed” too much of the Defense Department’s time on Russia and was “actively pushing for ‘diversity and inclusion’” at the department while expressing “disinterest” in supporting Trump’s inhumane military transgender ban.

Even now, a year removed from the 2020 election, when one starts to pull at the threads barely holding together the moldering moth-eaten sweater that was Donald Trump’s single-term, impeachment-marred presidency, the discoveries are deeply unsettling.

Trump’s disdain for even a hint of opposition in his ranks is no surprise. But part of what makes the Esper memo so disturbing is its inception and origin.

The memo, and therefore the decision to fire Esper, was authored and engineered, as Karl reports, by John McEntee, a man most Americans might not have known by name during the Trump years and even up until Tuesday, when the select congressional committee investigating the Capitol insurrection subpoenaed McEntee.

So who is John McEntee?

Karl gives McEntee great scrutiny in the excerpt published Tuesday, exposing how he ascended to power, as Karl wrote, just as “American democracy was falling apart.”

McEntee started out as Trump’s body man, following the president around to carry bags or provide other assistance, but he quickly ascended the ranks to become director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, a tremendously powerful and integral position for an otherwise political and professional neophyte.

In the role, the director of that department both vets and hires personnel “including ambassadors, Cabinet secretaries and top intelligence officials,” Karl points out. Beyond hiring, the director also has a say in firing.  

The power of the position was so great and McEntee such an unconventionalchoice that even Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff at the time, had his own deputy hauled into a meeting with the president to tell Trump he might be making a mistake.

Trump, true to form, was adamant that he wanted McEntee. And as it so often goes with both aspiring and experienced ‘yes men,’ McEntee, at 29 years old, found himself quickly ushered into the directorship.

What followed, according to Karl, was a swift pursuit by McEntee to root out anyone emitting even so much as a whiff of disloyalty to or independence from Trump. He committed to this mission with assistance from a team largely comprised of inexperienced, young, and attractive women—along with men McEntee deemed unthreatening to his pursuit of those women.

As time marched on, McEntee’s influence inside the administration flourished and so began the sequence of events that would lead to Esper’s termination.

McEntee eventually tapped Josh Whitehouse, a 25-year-old who once served as a coalition coordinator for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Whitehouse was elevated, despite a dearth of experience, from the campaign to an assistant role inside of the Department of Agriculture in 2017. But that stint lasted just nine months and as the election loomed in 2020, McEntee called him up to serve as the administration’s liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.

As a liaison, Whitehouse could not fire anyone directly, but he could do McEntee’s bidding—and that bidding he did as he helped the personnel office last October compose “a series of memos identifying nearly two dozen Pentagon officials they thought should be fired, each outlining transgressions allegedly made against Trump,” Karl wrote.

What followed was the Esper memo and with that advice to Trump, the former defense secretary was abruptly removed and replaced with Christopher Miller.

Miller’s senior adviser, Douglas Macgregor, was also selected by McEntee.

McEntee started his professional career as a production assistant for Fox News. He volunteered on Trump’s first presidential campaign and became the president’s body man. That was the extent of his governmental experience. And to boot, he only lasted a short while during that first go-round in the administration because he was fired. Investigators found his rampant gambling debts were a security threat.

But in January 2020, Trump’s reelection campaign scooped their yes man up.

And within a year (and just five days before the insurrection), it was McEntee who sent a text message to then-Vice President Mike Pence offering him bullet points—dripping in falsities and against White House counsel advice—on how Pence could “use his position” to help Trump win and effectively overturn the electoral results.

Karl reports that McEntee still “remains in close contact with Trump” and spent the summer at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, club volunteering with the former president’s political operations.

McEntee, if he complies, may find himself back in Washington soon. The January 6th Committee subpoenaed McEntee Tuesday, seeking records plus a deposition about what he knows of or heard when he stood in the Oval Office with Trump, Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, and campaign counsel Justin Clark as they gamed out an audit of the count in Georgia.

McEntee is scheduled to go before the committee by Dec. 15 and lawmakers have set Nov. 23 as a deadline for McEntee to respond to the subpoena.

This post was originally published on this site

Congress is out this week for the Veterans Day holiday, which means a week of posturing and trying to poison the well for next week’s push on President Joe Biden’s family and climate change Build Back Better plan. It’s all about trying to wedge the conservative Democrats even further away from the majority of their colleagues. And in one case, it’s a Democrat doing it.

The Congressional Budget Office advised lawmakers Tuesday that it likely would not be able to provide a full score of the BBB bill by next week, when Speaker Pelosi has said the House will vote. The conservative hold-outs in the caucus had reached an agreement with progressives that if they helped pass the hard infrastructure bill last Friday (which they did), then the conservatives would vote for BBB provided they receive certain “fiscal information” from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Exactly what that information could consist of was not specified, but as of Wednesday, they are apparently not insisting that it be a full score and that they expect “there will likely be enough information available to alleviate“ their concerns.

A couple of Republicans, however, are trying to shoehorn themselves into the situation and make the CBO produce a score that doesn’t actually reflect the legislation. Republican Missouri Rep. Jason Smith (who calls himself a “leader” on his Twitter bio, even if he’s just another Republican no one has heard of) and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have released a letter they sent to the CBO telling them to “produce a score that reflects the full price tag of @POTUS’s agenda.” By that, they mean scoring the key temporary components designed to help working families, as if all of them were going to be permanent. The bill as it stands is paid for, something the Joint Committee on Taxation has already confirmed.

The two Republicans are also demanding that the CBO provide this bogus score “no later than one day after transmittal of the CBO cost estimate for this legislation or 48 hours before the U.S. House of Representatives considers the FY 2022 reconciliation measure, whichever comes first.” That does two things—bogs down the CBO with extraneous work so that it could take them longer to come up with the score for the actual legislation, and thus potentially delay the vote, and come up with a much more expensive score they could point to, scream “but the deficit!” and make the conservative Democrats scared of having Republicans call them “tax-and-spend” Democrats in the next election. As if Republicans weren’t definitely going to do that anyway, no matter how they vote on this bill.

Progressive Democrats are giving their colleagues the benefit of the doubt, at least publicly, expecting that they will continue to act in good faith.

A Democrat definitely not acting in good faith, however, is Sen. Joe Manchin. Surprise, surprise. He’s been yammering on about the inflationary effects of the potential bill, not because he understands the economics in effect, but because it sounds like a thing smart people would say. He was back at it Wednesday.
 

That received a quick response in the form of subtweets from both President Biden and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

They’ve got the backing of Moody’s Analytics on that one. The BBB would “strengthen long-term economic growth, the benefits of which would mostly accrue to lower- and middle-income Americans,” Moody’s analysts say. And answering one of Manchin’s regular excuses for not wanting to do it: “Concerns that the plan will ignite undesirably high inflation and an overheating economy are overdone.”

“The reconciliation package … meaningfully lifts economic growth and jobs and lowers unemployment,” the analysts conclude. “The economy performs best in the final scenario, in which both the bipartisan infrastructure deal and the reconciliation package become law.”

This post was originally published on this site

Congress is out this week for the Veterans Day holiday, which means a week of posturing and trying to poison the well for next week’s push on President Joe Biden’s family and climate change Build Back Better plan. It’s all about trying to wedge the conservative Democrats even further away from the majority of their colleagues. And in one case, it’s a Democrat doing it.

The Congressional Budget Office advised lawmakers Tuesday that it likely would not be able to provide a full score of the BBB bill by next week, when Speaker Pelosi has said the House will vote. The conservative hold-outs in the caucus had reached an agreement with progressives that if they helped pass the hard infrastructure bill last Friday (which they did), then the conservatives would vote for BBB provided they receive certain “fiscal information” from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Exactly what that information could consist of was not specified, but as of Wednesday, they are apparently not insisting that it be a full score and that they expect “there will likely be enough information available to alleviate“ their concerns.

A couple of Republicans, however, are trying to shoehorn themselves into the situation and make the CBO produce a score that doesn’t actually reflect the legislation. Republican Missouri Rep. Jason Smith (who calls himself a “leader” on his Twitter bio, even if he’s just another Republican no one has heard of) and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have released a letter they sent to the CBO telling them to “produce a score that reflects the full price tag of @POTUS’s agenda.” By that, they mean scoring the key temporary components designed to help working families, as if all of them were going to be permanent. The bill as it stands is paid for, something the Joint Committee on Taxation has already confirmed.

The two Republicans are also demanding that the CBO provide this bogus score “no later than one day after transmittal of the CBO cost estimate for this legislation or 48 hours before the U.S. House of Representatives considers the FY 2022 reconciliation measure, whichever comes first.” That does two things—bogs down the CBO with extraneous work so that it could take them longer to come up with the score for the actual legislation, and thus potentially delay the vote, and come up with a much more expensive score they could point to, scream “but the deficit!” and make the conservative Democrats scared of having Republicans call them “tax-and-spend” Democrats in the next election. As if Republicans weren’t definitely going to do that anyway, no matter how they vote on this bill.

Progressive Democrats are giving their colleagues the benefit of the doubt, at least publicly, expecting that they will continue to act in good faith.

A Democrat definitely not acting in good faith, however, is Sen. Joe Manchin. Surprise, surprise. He’s been yammering on about the inflationary effects of the potential bill, not because he understands the economics in effect, but because it sounds like a thing smart people would say. He was back at it Wednesday.
 

That received a quick response in the form of subtweets from both President Biden and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

They’ve got the backing of Moody’s Analytics on that one. The BBB would “strengthen long-term economic growth, the benefits of which would mostly accrue to lower- and middle-income Americans,” Moody’s analysts say. And answering one of Manchin’s regular excuses for not wanting to do it: “Concerns that the plan will ignite undesirably high inflation and an overheating economy are overdone.”

“The reconciliation package … meaningfully lifts economic growth and jobs and lowers unemployment,” the analysts conclude. “The economy performs best in the final scenario, in which both the bipartisan infrastructure deal and the reconciliation package become law.”

This post was originally published on this site

Let’s talk about newspapers, specifically the big-hitters in terms of circulation. Many consider newspapers the most dogged pursuers of truth and accuracy, the originators of journalism, tasked with bringing to light pressing societal issues like workplace inequity. But what few may realize about these media staples is that they often replicate the same destructive cycles in-house that they are quick to call out in other industries, namely inequity in their ranks.  

A study released last month by the nonprofit Women’s Media Center found that on average, top newspapers have tasked men with reporting the news more than twice as much as they have tasked women. Masculine bylines were featured 69% of the time compared to 31% for feminine bylines, the Women’s Media Center found. The narrowest gender gaps were at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today, where feminine bylines were spotted some 40% of the time while masculine bylines were spotted about 60% of the time. The most gaping gender gaps were at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), Newsday, and the Los Angeles Times.

At the AJC, a former employer of mine, women reported the news 16% of the time compared to 84% of the time for men. Newsday’s numbers were 18% to 82%, and the Los Angeles Times‘ stats were 19% to 81%. Formerly on a digital breaking news team, I left the AJC in 2018 after my four-month stint of working from home came to an end. My boss explained at the time that they just weren’t ready to allow remote work, and to do so for me presented a fairness issue. The argument was almost laughable considering the reporters on my team weren’t even given the respect and accompanying benefits of being classified as full-time employees, even though we worked 40-hour weeks. I was one of three female reporters on my team, and all of us have since parted ways with the company.

I left because I didn’t feel comfortable putting my 4-month-old son in daycare, and my salary didn’t justify it. My husband had the better-paying job with benefits, so leaving the AJC was an easy decision for me, though one that left me a bit bitter about my place in journalism now that I had become a mom. I’ve since learned, my story is far from unique.

Journalist Pat Mitchell wrote in Ms. Magazine:

“Newsrooms have always had a 24/7 culture which rewards those who can work long hours and can adjust their schedules on the fly when news breaks. Primary caregivers, who are mostly women, are forced to choose between child care responsibilities and career advancement. I faced this impossible choice many times as a single mother working in media companies at a time when we quite literally ‘hid’ photos of our children and suppressed the struggle. The struggle persists today and many women decide to leave the profession due to burnout.”

Julie Burton, president and chief executive officer of the Women’s Media Center, said in a news release that even “during this moment of newsroom reckoning, men still dominate when reporting the news.” The Women’s Media Center was founded by feminist activist Gloria Steinem, actress Jane Fonda, and poet Robin Morgan in 2005 “to raise the visibility, viability and decision-making power of women and girls in media,” according to the Center. 

“Women are more than half of the population, yet it’s men who are telling most of the stories,” Burton said. “As a result, the news media is missing out on major stories, readers, and viewers and important perspectives.”

Wesley Lowery, a Black Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who left his position at The Washington Post for one at CBS News, wrote in a New York Times op-ed last year that the “views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral.” “When black and brown reporters and editors challenge those conventions, it’s not uncommon for them to be pushed out, reprimanded or robbed of new opportunities,” Lowery wrote. 

If you’re a Black woman, your voice is often so ignored in newsrooms it’s practically nonexistent—so much so that the groundbreaking reporting on race we later celebrate has had to happen during reporters’ days off. Employers just haven’t seen the value when it’s a Black body lying face-down in a pool of blood on the street. Journalist Brittany Noble, a friend of mine, was off work but decided to jump into action to cover the Michael Brown shooting. In 2019, she wrote:

“I was hired at WJTV after breaking one of the biggest stories of the decade. The officer involved shooting death of a teen named Mike Brown in my Ferguson, Missouri neighborhood. His death sparked change and helped ignite the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement that we know today. However, when I pitched stories about race in Mississippi, I was told the stories ‘are not for all people.’”

Noble also filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint after she was fired from her position with the Mississippi news station. She wrote:

“After having my son, I asked my news director if I could stop straightening my hair. A month after giving me the green light I was pulled back into his office. I was told ‘My natural hair is unprofessional and the equivalent to him throwing on a baseball cap to go to the grocery store. He said “Mississippi viewers needed to see a beauty queen.’ He even asked, ‘why my hair doesn’t lay flat.’ When I asked him how I should address the change on social media he told me to write ‘I was told to change my hair back to the way it was because that’s what looks best.’”

The Women’s Media Center wrote in its 2018 report on the status of women of color (WOC) in news media that WOC represent just 7.95% of print newsroom staff members and 12.6% of local TV news staff. “There are so many micro-aggressions that come with being a journalist and female and not White,” journalist Soledad O’Brien said in the report’s news release. “If you spend too much time seeing yourself — in terms of how they see you — as only those things, you will lose your mind. Because there are just a lot of slights.”

Two years later, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette banned two Black journalists from covering protests about the death of George Floyd, who was murdered by a white Minneapolis cop that kneeled on the Black father’s neck for more than nine minutes. According to the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh’s description, an existing clash between management and journalists at the newspaper seemed to have reached a boiling point when Alexis Johnson, a Black member of the guild and a reporter for the paper, posted a tweet May 31. It included photos of tailgating trash left behind after country singer Kenny Chesney’s concert and read: “Horrifying scenes and aftermath from selfish LOOTERS who don’t care about this city!!!!!…. oh wait sorry. No, these are pictures from a Kenny Chesney concert tailgate. Whoops.”

Soon after, management at the paper barred Johnson from protest-related coverage. Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Michael Santiago, who MSNBC’s Joy Reid interviewed, said he was not given a reason when he was pulled off of protest coverage but he vowed that he would stand by Johnson. “There was no way that I was going to let this happen to her,” Santiago said. “I was going to protect her at any cost, and I told her I was going to ride or die for her, and that’s exactly what I did.”

With her tweet, Johnson offered exactly the kind of news analysis more media outlets could stand to learn from instead of simply continuing their one-dimensional framing of Black people in stories. But like all too many newspapers, the Post-Gazette was all too willing to punish Johnson rather than learn from her. And that, for many, is what it means to be a Black woman in journalism—hiding as much of yourself as you can stomach because the second you slip up and express your Blackness, you risk being laid out on the chopping block.  

RELATED: Pittsburgh union fights back when 2 Black journalists banned from covering George Floyd protests

RELATED: Pittsburgh newspaper editor defends banning 2 Black journalists from George Floyd protest coverage

RELATED: Want to be a better progressive? Actively avoid committing microaggressions

This post was originally published on this site

Let’s talk about newspapers, specifically the big-hitters in terms of circulation. Many consider newspapers the most dogged pursuers of truth and accuracy, the originators of journalism, tasked with bringing to light pressing societal issues like workplace inequity. But what few may realize about these media staples is that they often replicate the same destructive cycles in-house that they are quick to call out in other industries, namely inequity in their ranks.  

A study released last month by the nonprofit Women’s Media Center found that on average, top newspapers have tasked men with reporting the news more than twice as much as they have tasked women. Masculine bylines were featured 69% of the time compared to 31% for feminine bylines, the Women’s Media Center found. The narrowest gender gaps were at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today, where feminine bylines were spotted some 40% of the time while masculine bylines were spotted about 60% of the time. The most gaping gender gaps were at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), Newsday, and the Los Angeles Times.

At the AJC, a former employer of mine, women reported the news 16% of the time compared to 84% of the time for men. Newsday’s numbers were 18% to 82%, and the Los Angeles Times‘ stats were 19% to 81%. Formerly on a digital breaking news team, I left the AJC in 2018 after my four-month stint of working from home came to an end. My boss explained at the time that they just weren’t ready to allow remote work, and to do so for me presented a fairness issue. The argument was almost laughable considering the reporters on my team weren’t even given the respect and accompanying benefits of being classified as full-time employees, even though we worked 40-hour weeks. I was one of three female reporters on my team, and all of us have since parted ways with the company.

I left because I didn’t feel comfortable putting my 4-month-old son in daycare, and my salary didn’t justify it. My husband had the better-paying job with benefits, so leaving the AJC was an easy decision for me, though one that left me a bit bitter about my place in journalism now that I had become a mom. I’ve since learned, my story is far from unique.

Journalist Pat Mitchell wrote in Ms. Magazine:

“Newsrooms have always had a 24/7 culture which rewards those who can work long hours and can adjust their schedules on the fly when news breaks. Primary caregivers, who are mostly women, are forced to choose between child care responsibilities and career advancement. I faced this impossible choice many times as a single mother working in media companies at a time when we quite literally ‘hid’ photos of our children and suppressed the struggle. The struggle persists today and many women decide to leave the profession due to burnout.”

Julie Burton, president and chief executive officer of the Women’s Media Center, said in a news release that even “during this moment of newsroom reckoning, men still dominate when reporting the news.” The Women’s Media Center was founded by feminist activist Gloria Steinem, actress Jane Fonda, and poet Robin Morgan in 2005 “to raise the visibility, viability and decision-making power of women and girls in media,” according to the Center. 

“Women are more than half of the population, yet it’s men who are telling most of the stories,” Burton said. “As a result, the news media is missing out on major stories, readers, and viewers and important perspectives.”

Wesley Lowery, a Black Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who left his position at The Washington Post for one at CBS News, wrote in a New York Times op-ed last year that the “views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral.” “When black and brown reporters and editors challenge those conventions, it’s not uncommon for them to be pushed out, reprimanded or robbed of new opportunities,” Lowery wrote. 

If you’re a Black woman, your voice is often so ignored in newsrooms it’s practically nonexistent—so much so that the groundbreaking reporting on race we later celebrate has had to happen during reporters’ days off. Employers just haven’t seen the value when it’s a Black body lying face-down in a pool of blood on the street. Journalist Brittany Noble, a friend of mine, was off work but decided to jump into action to cover the Michael Brown shooting. In 2019, she wrote:

“I was hired at WJTV after breaking one of the biggest stories of the decade. The officer involved shooting death of a teen named Mike Brown in my Ferguson, Missouri neighborhood. His death sparked change and helped ignite the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement that we know today. However, when I pitched stories about race in Mississippi, I was told the stories ‘are not for all people.’”

Noble also filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint after she was fired from her position with the Mississippi news station. She wrote:

“After having my son, I asked my news director if I could stop straightening my hair. A month after giving me the green light I was pulled back into his office. I was told ‘My natural hair is unprofessional and the equivalent to him throwing on a baseball cap to go to the grocery store. He said “Mississippi viewers needed to see a beauty queen.’ He even asked, ‘why my hair doesn’t lay flat.’ When I asked him how I should address the change on social media he told me to write ‘I was told to change my hair back to the way it was because that’s what looks best.’”

The Women’s Media Center wrote in its 2018 report on the status of women of color (WOC) in news media that WOC represent just 7.95% of print newsroom staff members and 12.6% of local TV news staff. “There are so many micro-aggressions that come with being a journalist and female and not White,” journalist Soledad O’Brien said in the report’s news release. “If you spend too much time seeing yourself — in terms of how they see you — as only those things, you will lose your mind. Because there are just a lot of slights.”

Two years later, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette banned two Black journalists from covering protests about the death of George Floyd, who was murdered by a white Minneapolis cop that kneeled on the Black father’s neck for more than nine minutes. According to the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh’s description, an existing clash between management and journalists at the newspaper seemed to have reached a boiling point when Alexis Johnson, a Black member of the guild and a reporter for the paper, posted a tweet May 31. It included photos of tailgating trash left behind after country singer Kenny Chesney’s concert and read: “Horrifying scenes and aftermath from selfish LOOTERS who don’t care about this city!!!!!…. oh wait sorry. No, these are pictures from a Kenny Chesney concert tailgate. Whoops.”

Soon after, management at the paper barred Johnson from protest-related coverage. Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Michael Santiago, who MSNBC’s Joy Reid interviewed, said he was not given a reason when he was pulled off of protest coverage but he vowed that he would stand by Johnson. “There was no way that I was going to let this happen to her,” Santiago said. “I was going to protect her at any cost, and I told her I was going to ride or die for her, and that’s exactly what I did.”

With her tweet, Johnson offered exactly the kind of news analysis more media outlets could stand to learn from instead of simply continuing their one-dimensional framing of Black people in stories. But like all too many newspapers, the Post-Gazette was all too willing to punish Johnson rather than learn from her. And that, for many, is what it means to be a Black woman in journalism—hiding as much of yourself as you can stomach because the second you slip up and express your Blackness, you risk being laid out on the chopping block.  

RELATED: Pittsburgh union fights back when 2 Black journalists banned from covering George Floyd protests

RELATED: Pittsburgh newspaper editor defends banning 2 Black journalists from George Floyd protest coverage

RELATED: Want to be a better progressive? Actively avoid committing microaggressions

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New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu dealt a serious blow to Senate Republicans Tuesday when he took a pass on running for Senate against one of the GOP’s top targets—Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire.

But Sununu is no exception to the rule, and he could very well be the canary in the coal mine for Senate Republicans. While Republicans had been eyeing New Hampshire as a serious pick-up opportunity, they had also dabbled with the idea of making Democrats at least squander some resources on playing defense in blue states like Vermont and Maryland. But as NBC News points out, that GOP aspiration is contingent on one of those state’s popular Republican governors showing any interest at all in signing on to be part of the Senate GOP caucus.

“Vermont Gov. Phil Scott won re-election by 15 percentage points in 2018, the same year his famously progressive state overwhelmingly handed independent Sen. Bernie Sanders a third term,” writes NBC. But Scott—really the only Vermont Republican who could pull off an upset against incumbent Sen. Patrick Leahy—didn’t even vote for Trump and has no interest in running for Senate.

Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan is in the same boat—popular but uninterested in running.

In short, it appears no moderate, sane-ish Republicans are jumping at the chance to join Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s caucus, particularly because Trump is so clearly calling the shots. Sununu’s very public rejection of the Senate GOP also isn’t going to make joining the caucus seem any more appealing to the kinds of candidates who would likely fare better in a general election.

So as moderate Republicans decline to run while fringe GOP candidates dominate the field, the entire Republican line up is getting more extreme.

That has Brian Walsh, a former Senate GOP campaign operative, hearing “echoes of 2010,” when Senate Republicans failed to seize a majority despite the pro-Republican political environment.

“Arguably, Republicans lost five seats between 2010 and 2012 because of bad general election candidates,” Walsh told NBC. “I’m not saying that’s necessarily going to happen here. We don’t know that yet. But broadly, candidates matter.”

Here’s the GOP scorecard so far:

In New Hampshire, which Republicans had slated as a top target for a pick up, they’re now scrambling for a candidate.

In Georgia, another GOP pick-up opportunity, Republicans will likely be saddled with Trump pick Herschel Walker, who has a violent and allegedly abusive history.

In Nevada, which Republicans also hope to flip, the state party is in the midst of an epic meltdown. At the same time, they appear to be rallying around former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt, who made stoking Trump’s Big Lie his life’s mission.

Laxalt sued to stop the ballot counting in the state’s largest county (which Trump lost), sued to overturn Biden’s victory, baselessly claimed votes of dead people had been counted, baselessly claimed votes from undocumented immigrants had tipped the state to Biden, and again filed a post-certification lawsuit alleging the GOP secretary of state had allowed non-citizens to vote.

In Arizona, another GOP flip opportunity, the four-person primary is headed hard right and nasty negative as state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, energy executive Jim Lamon, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Mick McGuire and Blake Masters duke it out. Brnovich (aka nunchuck guy) likely has the highest statewide name recognition outside of GOP Gov. Doug Ducey (who Trump hates and has declined to run). But Masters runs billionaire Peter Thiel’s investment firm and just this week Trump announced a fundraiser for him (because Trump also faults Brnovich for failing to overturn the state’s 2020 results).

In Pennsylvania, one of Democrats’ best pick-up opportunities, the GOP primary for the open seat has turned downright embarrassing. Trump endorsed Army vet Sean Parnell, who is embroiled in an ugly custody battle in which his estranged wife testified that Parnell abused her and one of their children. Senate Republicans are dodging questions about the race as Parnell’s candidacy spirals.

In North Carolina, which also has an open Senate seat, Trump complicated the race with an early endorsement of a lesser-known GOP congressman, Rep. Ted Budd, while former Gov. Pat McCrory has a higher profile and a likely edge among Republican voters. If McCrory triumphs, it remains to be seen whether he can win over Trump voters in the general election.

Other potential Democratic pick ups include Florida and Wisconsin, with incumbent Sens. Marco Rubio and Ron Johnson, and on the outside edge, open seats in Ohio and Missouri, where Republicans just might manage to put the seats in play despite their considerable advantages in each state.

Notably, Trump is playing key role in nearly every one of those Senate contests. In almost every state, Trump has done at least one of several things: repelled a top-tier candidate, made an endorsement, radicalized the GOP field, or become a complicating factor by incessantly pushing his election fraud lies and demanding absolute fealty. 

This post was originally published on this site

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu dealt a serious blow to Senate Republicans Tuesday when he took a pass on running for Senate against one of the GOP’s top targets—Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire.

But Sununu is no exception to the rule, and he could very well be the canary in the coal mine for Senate Republicans. While Republicans had been eyeing New Hampshire as a serious pick-up opportunity, they had also dabbled with the idea of making Democrats at least squander some resources on playing defense in blue states like Vermont and Maryland. But as NBC News points out, that GOP aspiration is contingent on one of those state’s popular Republican governors showing any interest at all in signing on to be part of the Senate GOP caucus.

“Vermont Gov. Phil Scott won re-election by 15 percentage points in 2018, the same year his famously progressive state overwhelmingly handed independent Sen. Bernie Sanders a third term,” writes NBC. But Scott—really the only Vermont Republican who could pull off an upset against incumbent Sen. Patrick Leahy—didn’t even vote for Trump and has no interest in running for Senate.

Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan is in the same boat—popular but uninterested in running.

In short, it appears no moderate, sane-ish Republicans are jumping at the chance to join Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s caucus, particularly because Trump is so clearly calling the shots. Sununu’s very public rejection of the Senate GOP also isn’t going to make joining the caucus seem any more appealing to the kinds of candidates who would likely fare better in a general election.

So as moderate Republicans decline to run while fringe GOP candidates dominate the field, the entire Republican line up is getting more extreme.

That has Brian Walsh, a former Senate GOP campaign operative, hearing “echoes of 2010,” when Senate Republicans failed to seize a majority despite the pro-Republican political environment.

“Arguably, Republicans lost five seats between 2010 and 2012 because of bad general election candidates,” Walsh told NBC. “I’m not saying that’s necessarily going to happen here. We don’t know that yet. But broadly, candidates matter.”

Here’s the GOP scorecard so far:

In New Hampshire, which Republicans had slated as a top target for a pick up, they’re now scrambling for a candidate.

In Georgia, another GOP pick-up opportunity, Republicans will likely be saddled with Trump pick Herschel Walker, who has a violent and allegedly abusive history.

In Nevada, which Republicans also hope to flip, the state party is in the midst of an epic meltdown. At the same time, they appear to be rallying around former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt, who made stoking Trump’s Big Lie his life’s mission.

Laxalt sued to stop the ballot counting in the state’s largest county (which Trump lost), sued to overturn Biden’s victory, baselessly claimed votes of dead people had been counted, baselessly claimed votes from undocumented immigrants had tipped the state to Biden, and again filed a post-certification lawsuit alleging the GOP secretary of state had allowed non-citizens to vote.

In Arizona, another GOP flip opportunity, the four-person primary is headed hard right and nasty negative as state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, energy executive Jim Lamon, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Mick McGuire and Blake Masters duke it out. Brnovich (aka nunchuck guy) likely has the highest statewide name recognition outside of GOP Gov. Doug Ducey (who Trump hates and has declined to run). But Masters runs billionaire Peter Thiel’s investment firm and just this week Trump announced a fundraiser for him (because Trump also faults Brnovich for failing to overturn the state’s 2020 results).

In Pennsylvania, one of Democrats’ best pick-up opportunities, the GOP primary for the open seat has turned downright embarrassing. Trump endorsed Army vet Sean Parnell, who is embroiled in an ugly custody battle in which his estranged wife testified that Parnell abused her and one of their children. Senate Republicans are dodging questions about the race as Parnell’s candidacy spirals.

In North Carolina, which also has an open Senate seat, Trump complicated the race with an early endorsement of a lesser-known GOP congressman, Rep. Ted Budd, while former Gov. Pat McCrory has a higher profile and a likely edge among Republican voters. If McCrory triumphs, it remains to be seen whether he can win over Trump voters in the general election.

Other potential Democratic pick ups include Florida and Wisconsin, with incumbent Sens. Marco Rubio and Ron Johnson, and on the outside edge, open seats in Ohio and Missouri, where Republicans just might manage to put the seats in play despite their considerable advantages in each state.

Notably, Trump is playing key role in nearly every one of those Senate contests. In almost every state, Trump has done at least one of several things: repelled a top-tier candidate, made an endorsement, radicalized the GOP field, or become a complicating factor by incessantly pushing his election fraud lies and demanding absolute fealty.