Online excellence in journalism

In spite of the hysterical cries that new media is the death of journalism, I have found several sites that truly excel at news delivery and always improve understanding of the issues. My current favorite is the non-profit ProPublica. Even their "About Us" page is awesome:

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.

I am particularly addicted to their Eye on the Bailout coverage, where they give us an excellent illustration of how much has been repaid to government to date. ProPublica also links to investigative work done by other organizations, making it a great source for your daily outrage (guaranteed to have a story near you!)

Pulitzer Prize winner PolitiFact is my other standby. These guys really keep our public officials honest, and manage to do so with a wry sense of humor. Their Truth-O-Meter ranks the veracity of politicians' statements, giving grades like True, Half True, Barely True, and Pants On Fire (for the egregious violations).

Network Femonomics: The Women of V

With Lost nearing the end of its six-season run, ABC has been trying to find an action-packed scifi replacement for primetime. One of these new shows is V, a remake of an eighties series wherein aliens come to Earth purporting to help humanity, but with ulterior sinister motives. We don't know yet what those motives are, but I think they are going to eat people. The show has excellent production values, a super-attractive cast, and plenty action and special effects (also fair-to-middling writing, but you can't have it all.) But by far the most exciting part of this show is that it features three women as starring heroes and villains.

Femonomics reads the internet: playing straight, Hasselbeck's hassle, Madonna, standing up for fat, and more!

Newsweek published an incredibly poorly argued column that basically amounted to the author saying "I can totally tell gay actors are gay when they play straight people."  I guess Newsweek thought this "Yuck, gay" argument was okay because it was written by a gay columnist?  Well, I can totally tell someone's words are homophobic, even when written by a gay writer.  The article singled out Sean Hayes, who plays a lovelorn straight man in Promises, Promises, a role once inhabited by Jerry Orbach.  Luckily, Hayes's costar, Kristin Chenoweth, had something to say about that:

As a longtime fan of Newsweek and as the actress currently starring opposite the incredibly talented (and sexy!) Sean Hayes, ...I was shocked on many levels to see Newsweek publishing Ramin Setoodeh’s horrendously homophobic “Straight Jacket,” which argues that gay actors are simply unfit to play straight.

...Audiences [don't give] a darn about who a person is sleeping with or his personal life. Give me a break! We’re actors first, whether we’re playing prostitutes, baseball players, or the Lion King. Audiences come to theater to go on a journey. It’s a character and it’s called acting, and I’d put Hayes and his brilliance up there with some of the greatest actors period.

Lastly, as someone who’s been proudly advocating for equal rights and supporting GLBT causes for as long as I can remember, I know how much it means to young people struggling with their sexuality to see out & proud actors like Sean Hayes, Jonathan Groff, Neil Patrick Harris and Cynthia Nixon succeeding in their work without having to keep their sexuality a secret. No one needs to see a bigoted, factually inaccurate article that tells people who deviate from heterosexual norms that they can’t be open about who they are and still achieve their dreams.

Three cheers for April Rhodes!

Sooo, last week on The View, Elisabeth Hasselbeck went all victim-blame-y and said something to the effect of, Erin Andrews shouldn't be showing all that skin on Dancing with the Stars after getting stalked.  Jennifer Armstrong showed EW's feminist side in a strong response, saying "I don’t want to make showing a little leg or midriff into the greatest of feminist acts, but I will say this: If a woman tones down and reins in any hint of her sexuality just because she was victimized, well, that means such crimes can be used to tame and control women."  Hasselbeck apologized:

Some TV shows take risks, and I applaud them for it

Network TV is notoriously safe.  But, it's also a huge potential avenue for change.  What we see on TV can affect our impression of "normal."  24 showed us a black president who was an incredible leader--it also subtly reframed the torture debate by making it seem like it was always a case of "OMG bomb!" instead of "intelligence gathering."  What I'm saying is, what we see on TV matters, and that's why I applaud shows that take risks.  I want to talk specifically about network TV because we're used to HBO pushing the envelope, but we forget that network TV brought us things that once seemed radical: Maude getting an abortion, upper class black families on The Cosby Show and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, people who actually had to work for a living on Roseanne (if you forget that that's radical, look at the effortless livings earned by most sitcom stars e.g., Full House, Mad About You, Home Improvement).  So here's a list of the network TV shows that are pushing the envelope, however haltingly, imperfectly, and unfortunately ephemerally. 

NPR reports that repeat offenders are responsible for 90% of sexual assault on campus

In NPR's continued coverage of campus sexual assault, they bust myth that student rapists are making a one-time bad decision that gives administrators a "teachable moment" to reform young minds. In this latest installment they report on psychologist David Lisak's work. He has found an entirely different picture of campus rape from the one administrators choose to believe:

What Lisak found was that students who commit rape on a college campus are pretty much like those rapists in prison. In both groups, many are serial rapists. On college campuses, repeat predators account for 9 out of every 10 rapes.

And these offenders on campuses — just like men in prison for rape — look for the most vulnerable women. Lisak says that on a college campus, the women most likely to be sexually assaulted are freshmen.

"It's quite well-known amongst college administrators that first-year students, freshman women, are particularly at risk for sexual assault," Lisak says. "The predators on campus know that women who are new to campus, they are younger, they're less experienced. They probably have less experience with alcohol, they want to be accepted. They will probably take more risks because they want to be accepted. So for all these reasons, the predators will look particularly for those women."

NPR's ongoing coverage has been a true eye-opener for me, and I hope more people tune in. I am left, unfortunately, with a cynicism for college administrators. It's possible that they are simply naive idealists, but I suspect they have known for a while about this situation. Universities are harboring criminals through their administrative disciplinary procedures, in which rapists are rarely even expelled, no less sent to jail where they belong, and it has got to end.

CSMonitor's Patchwork Nation: A cool new journalistic display of quantitative news stories

Today I discovered Patchwork Nation over at the CSMonitor website. It's a geospatial display of statistics (by US county) that the publication talks about in news articles, and is correlated with demographic characteristics of each county. I'm not sure how accurate the demographic information is, but the stories are pretty compelling. Today's article on the use of payday lending across the US is not particularly surprising, but interesting nevertheless.

Nicholas Kristof's not afraid to take on Haiti myths and misinformation, and I thank him for it

Nicholas Kristof takes on the misconceptions spread by Bill O'Reilly, Pat Robertson, and Rush Limbaugh.  His column is remarkable because it takes on the ugliest and most misinformed reactions of commenters and brings them into a thoughtful, reasoned discussion.  It's a difficult thing to talk to people who only want to spew invective, but somebody needs to do it.

NYT's Nicholas Kristof: Some frank talk about Haiti

Updated: Plus size photo shoot from V magazine (via Jezebel)

From Glamour's body-conscious, but somewhat token, and also self-conscious inclusion of naked plus-size beauties in its November issue, to V magazine's plus size issue, to the inclusion of a (small) handful of plus-size models on the spring catwalks, it seems the fashion industry is finally starting to embrace a (teeny-tiny) bit of diversity.  Earlier Jezebel worried that V's plus-size shoot was more gimmick than revolution.  However, I agree with them that the recently-released shoot for their new issue is absolutely GORGEOUS and a real step forward.  The women just look so luscious, fashionable, and hot hot hot.  The next step is to have a shoot showing off the clothes, rather than the women's bodies, to prove that real-sized women can make just as good mannequins as twigs.

What do you think about this shoot, and the idea of a "plus-size issue" in general?

Update: Tlo have chimed in with their opinion, and I must say it irks me a tad.  They're approaching this primarily from a fashion perspective, and while they echo my desire to see a plus-size spread that shows off the clothes, I think they ignore the fact that a plus-size shoot where the women DON'T look like regular models and where clothes DO fit them in a different way is just as revolutionary.  Those of us who are not 5'11" and 110 pounds have rolls in 90% of our pants.  We could camaflouge our bodies to make you more comfortable, but why should we have to?  This is a different kind of photo shoot than the traditional high-fashion clothes-centric spread, and TLo themselves has documented--and complained about, so at least they're fair--many a similar body-focused part naked photo spread featuring "straight size" gals.  I think this is one step in the right direction, and a truly fashion-focused spread would be another one I'd love to see!

Jezebel: V gives the world a plus size shoot not afraid to flaunt its curves