Friday Reads: All the news that the Media Routinely Ignores
Posted: April 17, 2015 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, prisons for profits. innocents on death row, The Taylor Leak |
Good Morning!
I found some interesting, overlooked stories that I thought I’d share with you because some of them are 
radically important. BB’s post yesterday inspired me! Why is it that some stories never really see the light of day or stay on the front page for very long?
This story of an oil leak from a toppled platform in the Gulf is a stunner. It comes from the local statewide paper, The Advocate, and details a spill that’s been going on for 10 years.
A blanket of fog lifts, exposing a band of rainbow sheen that stretches for miles off the coast of Louisiana. From the vantage point of an airplane, it’s easy to see gas bubbles in the slick that mark the spot where an oil platform toppled during a 2004 hurricane, triggering what might be the longest-running commercial oil spill ever to pollute the Gulf of Mexico.
Yet more than a decade after crude started leaking at the site formerly operated by Taylor Energy Company, few people even know of its existence. The company has downplayed the leak’s extent and environmental impact, likening it to scores of minor spills and natural seeps the Gulf routinely absorbs.
An Associated Press investigation has revealed evidence that the spill is far worse than what Taylor — or the government — have publicly reported during their secretive, and costly, effort to halt the leak. Presented with AP’s findings, that the sheen recently averaged about 91 gallons of oil per day across eight square miles, the Coast Guard provided a new leak estimate that is about 20 times greater than one recently touted by the company.
Outside experts say the spill could be even worse — possibly one of the largest ever in the Gulf.
Taylor, a company renowned in Louisiana for the philanthropy of its deceased founder, Patrick Taylor, has kept documents secret that would shed light on what it has done to stop the leak and eliminate the persistent sheen.
The Coast Guard said in 2008 the leak posed a “significant threat” to the environment, though there is no evidence oil from the site has reached shore. Ian MacDonald, a Florida State University biological oceanography professor and expert witness in a lawsuit against Taylor, said the sheen “presents a substantial threat to the environment” and is capable of harming birds, fish and other marine life.
Using satellite images and pollution reports, the watchdog group SkyTruth estimates between 300,000 and 1.4 million gallons of oil has spilled from the site since 2004, with an annual average daily leak rate between 37 and 900 gallons.
If SkyTruth’s high-end estimate of 1.4 million gallons is accurate, Taylor’s spill would be about 1 percent the size of BP’s, which a judge ruled amounted to 134 million gallons. That would still make the Taylor spill the 8th largest in the Gulf since 1970, according to a list compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“The Taylor leak is just a great example of what I call a dirty little secret in plain sight,” said SkyTruth President John Amos.
Taylor has spent tens of millions of dollars to contain and stop its leak, but it says nothing can be done to completely halt the chronic slicks.
Here’s an amazing story that I got from Project Censored. We talked a lot about sexual assault last year. We were astounded at the cavalier attitude towards rape shown in a lot of reporting. Well, this shouldn’t be surprising then: “Corporate News Media Understate Rape, Sexual Violence.”
Media analysts observe how journalists refrain from using the word “rape” to describe incidents of sexual assault. Instead, news outlets downplay the humiliation and cruelty entailed in these acts by referring to them as “sex crimes,” “inappropriate sexual activity,” or “forced sex,” even though such acts are legally recognized as “rape.”
“‘Rape,’ along with the images it conjures, is an ugly, nasty word,” artist and writer Wasi Daniju observed. “Uglier and nastier still, though, is the experience of each and every person that experiences it. Their experience warrants, at the very least, the respect and truth of being accurately labeled and recognized.”
A report released by Legal Momentum, a New York City–based feminist advocacy law group, titled Raped or “Seduced”? How Language Helps Shape Our Response to Sexual Violence, addressed what it terms the “linguistic avoidance” of such concerns. For example, when the media uses the language of consensual sex—terms like “recruited” rather than “kidnapped” or “took by force,” and phrases like “performed oral sex” or “engaged in sexual activity” instead of writing that “he forcefully penetrated her vagina with his penis”—they do more than use euphemisms to distort reality; they essentially mislead, misdirect, and diminish the violation. Such accounts also suggest that both parties were willing participants.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) pointed to the Los Angeles Times to illustrate one example of this phenomenon. In January 2013, the Times published an important story addressing how two Los Angeles police officers were accused of using the threat of imprisonment to force several women they previously arrested to have sex with them. This is recognized under law as “rape.” “But the Times avoided using that term,” FAIR noted, “inexplicably employing every other word and phrase imaginable—including ‘sex crimes,’ ‘sexual favors’ and ‘forced sex’—to describe what the officers were accused of.”
Read a lot more of the news that basically goes ignored or unreported at Project Censor. Did you know that 
around a 170,000 people try to escape a variety of African nations by boat and head for places like Italy? Here’s a BBC report on what happened on one such voyage. Muslims started tossing Christians overboard. It seems that the religious violence shows up just about everywhere.
Italian police say they have arrested 15 Muslim migrants after they allegedly threw 12 Christians overboard following a row on a boat heading to Italy.
The Christian migrants, said to be from Ghana and Nigeria, are all feared dead.
In a separate incident, more than 40 people drowned after another migrant boat sank between Libya and Italy.
Almost 10,000 migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean have been rescued in recent days. Italy has called for more help from the EU to handle the crisis.
More than 500 people from Africa and the Middle East have died making the perilous crossing since the start of the year. Earlier this week, 400 people were believed to have drowned when their boat capsized.
The 15 Muslim migrants involved in the row with Christians were arrested in the Sicilian city of Palermo and charged with “multiple aggravated murder motivated by religious hate”.
The suspects, who are from the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali and Guinea, were among 105 migrants travelling in an inflatable boat that left Libya on Tuesday.
Eyewitnesses told police how the altercation resulted in Christians being thrown overboard, and that some of the survivors had formed human chains to avoid a similar fate.
Of course, all we ever hear about is the number of people that show up at our border trying to escape the violence from South America. We aren’t the only country besieged with refugees.
The news media frequently overlooks many things have to do with Africa including the role of many African 
nations in fighting the recent Ebola Outbreak.
Africa’s efforts to tackle the Ebola crisis have been largely overlooked even though Africans have taken the lead in providing frontline staff and shown themselves “better placed to fight infectious diseases in their continent than outsiders”, according to the African Union (AU).
Dr Olawale Maiyegun, director of social affairs at the AU commission, said that despite the fact that Africans had proved both willing and able to deal with Ebola, the focus had been on the work of international agencies and those with the greatest media clout.
“Unfortunately, Africans do not have the international voice of CNN, BBC and France 24, therefore much of our work is overlooked in the western media,” he said. “Most of the assistance provided by the international community is in the areas of finance and infrastructure. In the most critical human resources for health, Africans – including the affected countries – have had to take the lead.”
His comments come six months after Nelson Mandela’s widow, Graça Machel,accused African leaders of failing to do enough to address the health crisis. “Ebola has exposed the extreme weaknesses of our institutions as governments; countries which are affected were found totally unprepared,” she told African business leaders in November last year. “It’s time Africa began to give real value to human life, in other words African human lives.”
Others have criticised the AU for waiting 10 months before holding an emergency summit on the outbreak.
However, Maiyegun argued that the AU and the Economic Community of West African States had reacted well to the crisis, with the AU deploying more than 835 African health workers to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea at the peak of the epidemic. “The success of African health workers – including the heroic health workers of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea – shows one thing: African health workers are better placed to fight infectious diseases in their continent than outsiders,” he said.
Maiyegun said the AU’s response had been guided by the philosophy that it should not dictate how the the affected countries should run their fight against Ebola. “We put volunteers at the disposal of the governments of the affected countries,” he said. “They told us what to do and we have performed creditably.”
He added: “The people of the affected countries must be given credit for doing a good job. With so many actors in the field, it’s important that it’s not just those with the loudest voices who are credited in the press for bringing Ebola under control.”
Very few media outlets are writing about the problem with our criminal justices system from our
current police state to the privatization of prisons. Here’s another excellent series of articles I found at Project Censored on our battered and broken legal/criminal justice system. This is from the blog of professor Nolan Higden writing at Thought Catalogue.
The demand for “justice” by the American people has created a profit making opportunity in the capitalist United States. An irrational fear over crime (discussed in Part 1) has allowed for an expansion of the US prison system. In fact the US now has more prisons than colleges. Big 2 profits for the few in the prison industry have resulted in little justice and increased costs and suffering for US citizens. The prison industry increased their revenue by investing in neo-liberal politicians, lobbying for stricter sentencing laws, and hoodwinking tax payers with iron-clad prison contracts. The result is that the US has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. One percent of the US population is currently incarcerated, a larger percent than any 3 other western industrialized nation. Incarceration is on the rise in 36 states. If one adds in the 4 5 citizens on probation or parole; about 2.9% of the adult population are under some form of correctional supervision. Another 70,792 children are in juvenile detention. In 2012, the 6 7 Supreme Court ruled that the US needed to stop sending minors to jail for life.
This mass incarceration is made worse by the high recidivism rate in the US. Recidivism is the rate at which those incarcerated are re-incarcerated for crimes committed upon release. In the US, two-thirds of inmates are incarcerated after being released. Thus, the prisons system does not provide rehabilitation, it provides a stop for offenders in between crimes. In fact, in 9 Wisconsin, over half of the inmates are incarcerated for parole violations.
One sign of hope for some justice came on Monday as the NYT’s editorial board called for the end of the death penalty because of the significant number of people on death row that were found to be innocent. We rarely hear the stories of individuals killed and freed by DNA testing. The headline says it all “152 Innocents, Marked for Death.” Indeed if there was a death penalty for wrongly killing people, Rick Perry should be on Death Row. That’s 152 marked for death wrongly since 1973. These are only the folks that lived to tell the tale too.
… far too often, people end up on death row after being convicted of horrific crimes they did not commit. The lucky ones are exonerated while they are still alive — a macabre club that has grown to include 152 members since 1973.
The rest remain locked up for life in closet-size cells. Some die there of natural causes; in at least twodocumented cases, inmates who were almost certainly innocent were put to death.
How many more innocent people have met the same fate, or are awaiting it? That may never be known. But over the past 42 years, someone on death row has been exonerated, on average, every three months. According to one study, at least 4 percent of all death-row inmates in the United States have been wrongfully convicted. That is far more than often enough to conclude that the death penalty — besides being cruel, immoral, and ineffective at reducing crime — is so riddled with error that no civilized nation should tolerate its use.
Innocent people get convicted for many reasons, including bad lawyering, mistaken identifications and false confessions made under duress. But as advances in DNA analysis have accelerated the pace of exonerations, it has also become clear that prosecutorial misconduct is at the heart of an alarming number of these cases.
In the past year alone, nine people who had been sentenced to death were released — and in all but one case, prosecutors’ wrongdoing played a key role.
Here’s a breakdown of some of Project Innocence’s findings on their clients.
Of 329 exonerations aided by the Innocence Project, roughly 70% are people of color; 62% of the total number of people are African American. The disproportionate rate of wrongfully convicted African Americans correlates strongly with the overall incarceration rate of about 2,207 per 100,000 people in that group. The End Racial Profiling Act broadly calls for greater accountability to people who have suffered due to racism in law enforcement and the justice system and while it’s a proactive bill that calls for measures to reduce racial profiling, if passed, it could also be a hopeful resource for mending some of the wrongs already done, particularly for innocent people of color.
Minors are especially vulnerable to falsely confessing to crimes that they didn’t commit. The JJDPA, which has had its funding cut significantly over the last decade, is integral to providing resources for the prevention of juvenile incarceration and providing fair treatment and support to incarcerated minors. Minors are one of the most susceptible groups to negligence and rights violations—the recent exposure of the use of solitary confinement for minors at Rikers Island is a prominent example.
As I read these stories and wonder how many more that I have missed, I can’t help but be struck by the concentration of news media outlets into the hands of a few and how those few are profit-seeking above all other things.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today? This is an open thread.
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Thank you for including the piece on the media substituting euphemisms for rape when reporting on it. I’ve been frustrated reading about “sexual assaults” on campuses and elsewhere when in fact they are talking about rape. Minimizing what happened to victims of rape to make it more palatable to readers is disgraceful but as mentioned in your post, using the term “sexual favors” when police rape, goes beyond the pale.
I agree the term “sexual assault” grossly understates the nature of the crime. The word used to describe the assault is Rape, nothing else can describe it.
I’ve noticed the same thing.
Yup. I agree completely.
Here’s what I’m reading about today:
Jindal defends religious objections bill that would allow anti-LGBT discrimination
http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2015/04/jindal-vehemently-defends-religious-objections-bill-that-would-allow-anti-lgbt-discrimination/
IBM and other businesses are warning him against this bill. NOLA is warning him about the impact this bill will have on tourism. Apparently Jindal didn’t learn from Indiana.
I hope he gets the same treatment Mike Pence did!
He deserves worse.
Jindal doesn’t care about the state and hasn’t for years. He’s been AWOL.
At least you can find comfort in the knowledge that he’ll never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, never, ever, ever, ever be POTUS!!
Dak….Thought you might like to know this bit of info
“No one knew how anti-Christian IBM had become until it unleashed its fury against a religious-liberty bill in Louisiana. Its governor, Bobby Jindal, is a practicing Catholic, and he plans to sign a law that protects religious liberty from its enemies. Those enemies now include IBM. If IBM wants to relocate from Louisiana, it should consider Cuba. But it needs to move fast: Cuba is showing signs of renewed respect for religious liberty, and if conditions improve, the capitalist elites may find themselves sitting to the left of the communists.” – Bill Donohue, writing for the Catholic League.”
In other words, the Catholic League says, fuck Louisiana.
Wow, that’s really crazy! Bill boy is even crazier than I thought. We already have a document that protects the church from the state. It’s called the US Constitution. Donohue wants to bring back witch trials and burnings. Perhaps he should work on a time machine and return to the dark ages.
The GOP and it’s friends are a bunch of Assorted Nuts.
Bill Donohue is ghastly and insane. But the Catholic League actually has no connection to or approval from the Catholic church. He shouldn’t be using that name for his wacko organization.
I love the newsboy and news girl photos, Dak.
Thx. I have a thing for those old newsies for some reason.
Listen to this convoluted analogy between spray painting another persons car and protecting religious conscience
Wtf!
This is the batshittery that the LGBT community is bombarded with every day. We could choose to ignore it and allow them to turn back the clock on our community to 1950, or we can fight back. Most of us have chosen to fight back.
And we’re going to have Hillary fighting for us too!
Obviously this LOGO is courtesy of the LGBT community. I hope it doesn’t offend any one. I had to post it because I KNOW JJ will love it.
I love that one Mouse, damn you know me so well. 😘 oh wait 😷.
The winning Clown Car Candidate will have that look on his face when debating Hillary!
I knew you’d love it JJ because our sense of humor is a lot alike. We may be decades apart in age, but our spirits are kick ass.
When is your conscious and your religion private property? I’m still trying to figure how he jumped that river of logic.
That was the strangest argument I’ve ever heard. I can’t even understand what analogy he is trying to draw. Who is that guy?
Wow. That was a hell of a word salad he spewed. I have no idea what any of it meant but there were a lot of words.
There were a lot of words and none of them made any sense. All I got out of it was “if you want a red car don’t paint your neighbors car because if you do you violate my religious freedom” or something like that.
I think I’m going to paint my neighbors car GAY because just my being gay can make my neighbors car look gay, like a Subaru. And hell, you know since I’m gay just being in the same room with me at a restaurant might expose someone to TEH GAY and then it’s all over. Before you know it the entire country is gay and then no more babies and the End of the World and Armageddon.
LMAO! Now “GAY” is that color carried by Sherwin Williams or is it one of those boutique brands like Martha Stewart or Ralph Lauren? I need to know because I totally want to paint my house that color. Or maybe my neighbor’s house. Dammit, I’m confused again. 😀
I’m not free to talk about the paint. It’s classified information available only to the lesbians and the gay men, we don’t even share it with the bisexuals. You know they can turn on dime!
Here’s what will happen when SCOTUS finds that Same Sex Marriage is protected under the 14th Amendment.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you. We have the paint and we’re not afraid to use it.
I might have trouble getting it approved by the HOA. I might just go ahead and do it without their consent!