What's on Kushibo's iPod (July 10, 2011 edition)

Every now and then I like to share what I'm listening to on my iPod Shuffle during my daily run. Most of it is from PBS's Newshour, what I consider to be the single best program for getting a thought-provoking, informative, and (most importantly) objective perspective on a wide breadth of political and social issues of the day. Others are from other public broadcasting shows, lately I've been listening a lot to On the Media, which has a unique perspective as well.

• FCC Report says Local Reporting in Crisis

• The Echo Chamber Revisited Transcript

• Oceans Face Mass Extinctions, New Report Warns

• Condolence Letter Policy Shift Opens Conversation on Military Suicides

• Computing “That’s What She Said”

• Schoolhouse Shock: Report Finds Widespread Cheating by Atlanta Educators

• N.Y. Teacher Takes Students on a Virtual Trip to Learn Realities of Refugee Life

• Raze the Roof: Cleveland Levels Vacant Homes to Revive Neighborhoods

• Vietnam's 'Haunting' of Post-War Presidents Explored in New Book

• 'My Perestroika' Reveals Personal History of Last Soviet Generation

• Cambodia Teaches New Generation About Khmer Rouge Atrocities

• How an English Investor Dabbled in Cleveland Real Estate...and Got Burned

• The Dramatic Re-Enactment (this one mentions Korea)

• Protecting Its Fannie: How Mortgage Giant Primed the Bubble, Covered Its Assets

NPR punked

When I heard that James O'Keefe was behind the gotcha video that led to the ouster of a fundraiser of NPR and then the publicly funded network's chief, I figured it would eventually turn out that the video we first saw when this news came out wouldn't quite be the same as the raw video that would be released later, after the damage is done, much like with the videos that took down the mighty oak that was ACORN.

I was not disappointed.

Sure, I'm not going to take NPR's word for it that NPR was wronged, but if the editor-in-chief of Fox News's The Blaze "felt like that wasn't the whole story," I think it lends credibility to NPR's claim of being wronged.

An excerpt of NPR's piece on the NPR fiasco:

Upon their release last week, O'Keefe's videos gave fresh life to the push by Congressional Republicans to strip federal funding for public broadcasting. In the shorter video, Schiller appears to be saying that NPR would do just fine without federal dollars, though some stations would go dark. On the longer tape, it's clear Schiller says it would be disastrous in the short term.

Tompkins said O'Keefe's editing is repeatedly and blatantly unfair.

"Except for a couple of unfortunate forays for political opinion, I think that Ron Schiller actually did a fairly remarkably good job of explaining how NPR works and what you can and cannot expect if you contribute money to the NPR Foundation," Tompkins said.

Blaze editor Baker said he emerged from analyzing the tapes with a surprising degree of respect for the professionalism of the two NPR executives, Ron Schiller and Betsy Liley.

"I think if you look at two hours in total, you largely get an impression that these are pretty — they seem to be fairly balanced people, trying to do a fairly good job," Baker said.

In recent days, several influential journalists have written that they regret giving O'Keefe's NPR videos wider circulation without scrutinizing them for themselves, given his past record and some of the objections that the Blaze first raised. They include Ben Smith of Politico, James Poniewozik of Time magazine and Dave Weigel of Slate.

"The speed at which the media operates when a video comes out is a problem," Weigel said Sunday. "I mean, the rush to be the first to report on a video — and, let's be brutally honest, the rush is to get traffic and to get people booked on [cable TV] shows to talk about it — and that nature leads you to not do the rigor and fact-checking that you would do in other situations."

It seems to me now that neither of the unrelated-to-each-other Schillers should have been fired, not over this anyway. Fundraising Schiller had already been scheduled to leave but now he has lost his job at the Aspen Institute, which doesn't seem right.

Chief Schiller, on the other hand, has been a tad radioactive since the very messy firing of Juan Williams for expressing his opinion that he feels nervous when he sees Muslim-looking people on the plane he's flying in, sort of the way some non-Blacks do when they see people who look like Juan Williams walking toward their car in a parking garage.

Although I have an appreciation for investigative journalism, I'm not a big fan of gotcha media, and I certainly think before people are axed or their organizations slashed — as happened with Shirley Sherrod, ACORN, and now the Schillers and possibly Ms Betsy Liley— someone should be listening to the whole thing.

Show some frickin' backbone. Don't be so afraid of looking soft on your fellow liberals, progressives, or moderates that you'll throw one or two of them under the bus at the first sign of boo! uttered by conservative media outlets.

Oh, and if you found my comment up there about Black people in parking garages a bit over the top, well, that was sort of the point.

UPDATE:
Over at The Marmot's Hole, frequent commenter αβγδε (stress is on the γ) has provided a link to an interesting discussion that itself points to The Blaze's actual piece.

Anju links, Barbara Demick, Juan Williams, and a little stream of consciousness at 7 a.m.

After a nearly 48-hour blackout thanks to my weekly real-world hump of work every Thursday, I was all set to do a bunch of posts on stuff happening in North Korea this week, and then I thought, ah, I'll just point everybody to this post full of links at One Free Korea.

Although I have not yet read her book Nothing to Envy, I'm happy to hear that Barbara Demick is now a finalist for the National Book Award (that's one of the OFK links from above).

On a side note (and this has nothing at all to do with Barbara Demick per se, but it was triggered by the National Book Foundation choosing a book like hers as a finalist), one thing that I've noted lately is that North Korea serves as a convenient whipping boy for the mainstream media that wants to dispel accusations that they are too "liberal." Though there are some news media outlets that have their reporters hop a plane to Pyongyang and then talk about how things in the capital aren't as bad as we've heard, most journalists fall over themselves finding new ways to discuss how strange, scary, oppressive, eerie, or Orwellian the place is. That is, they're clearly bashing a communist government, which gives them or their media outlet cover to say they are not knee-jerk pro-leftist or anti-capitalist or whatever.

Just an observation. We could get in a whole discussion about whether or not the lame-stream MSM (mainstream media, as some conservatives like to call it so they can identify each other in an online crowd) really is liberal, but it's not hard to find a pattern where the media as a whole (or as individuals) show off that they can be tough on a supposedly liberal subject (e.g., Bill Clinton during the impeachment, Obama as out of touch, the NYT in the run-up to the Gulf War, etc.) to prove they're not really liberal mouthpieces.

This kind of thing (i.e., bashing an okay-to-bash group in order to prove you're not a rabid leftist), of course, may have backfired for NPR's Juan Williams, who may have subconsciously employed this tactic on the Bill O'Reilly Show when he honestly said he thinks what many Americans themselves think:

When I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

Juan Williams, a prominent journalist on a network widely reviled by conservatives as the worst of liberal propaganda machines because it's taxpayer-supported, went on a show on the mouthpiece of American conservatives and basically recounted that, "Hey, I'm just like you guys."

And then he was fired. Because NPR isn't scared of being labeled liberal. They're scared of looking insensitive to minorities, especially a religious minority whom much of the country has tacitly given a green light to bashing.

As we like to say here at Monster Island, this is all kinds of stupid. I have not yet watched Juan Williams on the Bill O'Reilly Show (and I'd like to point out that Bill O'Reilly is my favorite among the Faux News talking heads, though lately I'm more likely to see him on The Daily Show than on his own program), but he should realize there would be a backlash for saying, essentially, that looking at any Muslim makes me fear they are a terrorist.

But NPR, instead of taking such rash action, could have used this star journalist of theirs and forged a national teaching moment out of it. Yeah, even this progressive (?) reporter on this supposedly leftist network himself gets sucked into this toxic prejudice about people who are different from him. One could imagine a whole dialogue where the fears of the non-Muslim population are aired and analyzed for what it is, while also addressing, say, what sometimes seem to be the lack of outrage by the Muslim community in America about terrorist activities perpetrated in the name of their faith and by members of their community (even if it is a small handful out of millions and millions of people).

So the opportunity for a great national dialogue was lost. Some have noted that the sacking of Juan Williams has echoes of this summer's firing of Shirley Sherrod. If so, if NPR reviews the tape and realizes that in the bigger picture of Mr Williams's appearance on Bill O'Reilly's program what he said was more tempered, even, and honest, maybe they can hire the guy back and then then begin that dialogue. (I especially don't like the idea of people being fired for honestly revealing their prejudices, though I can understand NPR's point of view that, well, maybe someone who harbors such thoughts — and publicly airs them — isn't really the kind of reporter that belongs in their stable.)

Let the healing begin.

NPR on "an unusual private school" for North Korean defectors

NPR has an interesting piece on a school in Seoul that is designed to help former refugees from North Korea who have made it to the ROK close the gap between what they learned in North Korea and what they need to know to live in South Korea:

In a nondescript building in central Seoul, an unusual private school is trying to teach young North Korean defectors how to survive in the South. The problems suffered by its students adjusting to life in a democratic state offer a window into life in the totalitarian North.

The first thing that is immediately noticeable at Yeomyung school is the disconnect between the age of the students — mostly in their 20s — and the simple subjects they're studying. In one classroom, two students are struggling to understand simple fractions, an elementary school subject.

Woo Kee-sup is the school's president.

"They missed many years of schooling because they [fled North Korea and were hiding] in a third country like China," he says. "And the education system in North Korea is basically demolished."

Formal education in North Korea is largely dedicated to extolling leader Kim Jong Il through songs and ideological classes, and even math problems may use political examples as teaching aids. Its aim: to teach obedience at all costs to maintain the regime, rather than teaching students how to think for themselves.

The piece notes its not just the three R's that require attention:

In drama class, clad in baggy jeans, students fool around, pretending to be robots.

But what may look like goofing off is actually therapy. These students are damaged, from years of hunger and the ever present fear of living in a society where neighbors inform on each other. Add to that the dangerous journey out of North Korea, which can take years living in conditions close to slavery.

"In some sense," says Woo, "their human nature was destroyed and their identity was lost, so we help them find their identity again through classes like this."

As the students laugh and shriek, one girl is noticeable for her lack of participation. She sits alone, lost in thought, her expression bereft, a tissue in her hand. Young defectors suffer from shockingly high rates of depression.

"Ten percent of our students need medicating because they're seriously depressed," says Cho, the teacher. "More than 50 percent have been diagnosed as clinically depressed but don't need medication."

Perhaps it's good that these folks have a built-in reason for having depression, which gives them an excuse to visit mental health professionals, get diagnosed, and get treatment without fear of being stigmatized (a big problem for the general SoKo population).

It breaks my heart to hear about all these horror stories, and I always find it heartening to learn about groups helping them. I can't imagine what they have gone through to get to South Korea or what they're going through after they arrive. But it does give us an inkling of what we're in store for when and if the two Koreans eventually reunify. Imagine a whole country with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Oh, and if you're one of those who doesn't like my use of the word defector, please note that it was in the original NPR piece and, even if it weren't, I don't really see a problem with the word.