Kim Pearson's blog

What Does Cleveland's House of Horrors Reveal About Us?

2009-11-21T21:10:13-06:00

Funerals were held this weekend for four of the 11 women whose bodies were found in a Cleveland, Ohio row house earlier this month, apparent victims of convicted sex offender Anthony Sowell. Sowell, 50, has been charged with multiple counts of rape and murder as investigators continue to dig around his former residence. Meanwhile, the gruesome discovery has sparked questions and soul-searching in some corners - and protests over excessive media coverage in others.

But for a few hundred people in churches across the city, the dead were remembered as people. According to news report on the Cleveland Plain Dealer's website, LaShonda Long, 24, loved to braid her daughter's hair. Crystal Dozier, mother of seven who had been missing since 2007, was quick to say, "I love you." Amelda Hunter, 47, was going to beauty school and had an adoring younger brother who remembered a time when she nursed him through a serious illness.

I'm glad that a public record is emerging about the people these women were, because for the past two weeks, they have been objects -- objects of pity, curiosity, horror and debate. Some of that is inevitable, given the horrific circumstances of their murders. But some of it reflects upon our understanding or ignorance of the struggles that families endure when someone they love has fallen prey to addiction. And yes, there is the fact that these women were black and poor.

Michel Martin devoted a segment of her Nov. 4 show to the murders, asking a Cleveland-based NPR reporter Bill Rice and city councilman Zack Reed how in the world so many women from the same neighborhood could go missing for so long. Reed speculated that it had something to do with the reports that some of the women had drug problems:

"[I]n our families we don't like the aspect that they come around because we know they steal. We know that they do things that we don't like. When they go missing, they go missing sometimes for three or four days because they're out looking for their addiction tools."

Reed also confirmed that neighbors had complained for more than a year about a stench of decaying flesh hanging over the neighborhood. While the smell had been blamed on a nearby sausage factory, Reed said he told the Health Department that neighbors said the odor reeked of decaying human remains.

Plain Dealer columnist Connie Shulz has been writing steadily about the murders for the last two weeks, and drawing plenty of fire because of it. On Nov. 4, she wrote about the murders as an example of the larger problem of violence against women:

"[...H]ere's the question that haunts: Why do we continue to allow sexual predators to terrorize women?

"...For all our activism, all our vows to Take Back the Night and End Domestic Violence Now, we are still the weaker sex, and too many of our sisters pay the price."

Some of Schulz's commenters argued that the victims bore part of the blame for what happened to them. This one's a pretty good example:

It is undeniable that EVERY ONE of these women had certain behavioral characteristics. That's their choice. What makes me fuming, fuming mad is that many of these women had children they abandoned to relatives or foster homes so they could smoke crack and drink 40s with some random guy they don't know from Adam who turns out to be the Grim Reaper. Then the paper has the gall to call them "caring, wonderful mothers" and delete posts of those who inject truth into the coversation.

Last week, Schulz reported that some readers had been complaining about the the paper's prominent coverage of the murders:

As Managing Editor Debra Adams Simmons told me, the theme has been essentially this: Stop putting these stories on Page One. They are not relevant to the majority of your readers.

She went on to explain why she thought those readers were wrong:

"They" are poor black women who ended up dead and buried at the home of Anthony Sowell because of addictions, troubled pasts and lousy judgment. We are white suburban women who'd never dream of becoming addicted or succumb to mental illness. And we certainly would never let ourselves be lured into a false sense of security by a man with ill intentions.
No elixir is more intoxicating than self-delusion. It's so comforting to think life metes out justice according to one's privilege and smarts. So dangerous, too.

This time, the criticisms didn't just come from commenters. Cleveland Scene columnist Frank Lewis accused Schulz of race-baiting:

"Despite the headline — "When other women join in blaming the victims of a killer, we're in real trouble" — Schultz never states or even implies that the callers in fact blamed the victims. Nor does she give any indication that they mentioned race. But this does not slow her rush to judgment. Her take on these people she's never met, whose backgrounds and true feelings she's guessing at based on the area codes and exchanges that showed up on caller ID — as she revealed later in a comment on the web site — is that they're cold-hearted bigots."

and Lewis goes on to argue that the compaining readers have a point:

"The callers, Schultz writes, complained that the coverage is "not relevant to the majority of your readers." And her loathing aside, that's correct. This isn't an election or a government corruption scandal; there is very little to be learned from endless reporting on Sowell and his deeds. We all know that at the fringes of society are the poor and addicted and mentally ill, and the soulless creatures who prey on them..."

Permit me a digression so that I can explain my revulsion at Lewis' words? I read Schulz column and was haunted by the memory of a young woman who grew up in the suburb in which I now live. She was a star at the local high school and came to our college with thousands of dollars in competitive scholarships she'd won, to no one's surprise. Talented, beautiful and popular, she fell in love with the wrong person -- a person who introduced her to heroin, among other things. She tried rehab, then relapsed. She went missing. Nearly two years later, the police turned her skeletonized remains over to her family. She was 21 years old when she died.

So the stories of these women in Cleveland as an uncomfortably familiar ring to me.

Columnist Richard Prince reported the concerns of Cleveland journalist Justice Hill about the fact that it's took so long for the story to become national news:

"[H]ad they been white women who disappeared in Aruba or in Beverly Hills, their stories would have dominated national and local news."

Meanwhile, veteran journalist Jill Nelson agrees with Schulz that this bizarre episode has a sad familiarity to it:

Invisible and erased, alive or dead we hardly matter. How else to explain Anthony Sowell, a registered sex offender who served 15 years for rape and after his release in 2004 killed at least 11 black women in his home on a busy Cleveland street? Some of these women were never reported missing by their families. One woman who Sowell beat and attempted to rape escaped, went to the police, and was ignored.

There will surely be investigations of whether and how the police and the health departments responded to information that they might have been given earlier in this case. I hope that there will also be more discussion about how we deal with the serious problems that led these women down the path that ended in the house of horrors on Imperial Street. There are many more women like these 11, no doubt with families in crisis, in neighborhoods that can't provide the services they and their families desperately need. This is our challenge, and it won't go away just by turning off the news.

Journalism professor, students face subpoenas and accusations - what does it mean for the rest of us?

2009-11-17T23:03:55-06:00

At the same time that leading journalists and scholars are calling on college journalism programs to help fill the void left by the decline of newspapers, a court case in Illinois is raising questions about the legal status of student journalists that could have a chilling effect on the risks that journalism professors will ask their students to take.

The court case involves an effort by Cook County prosecutors to obtain student grades, emails and other correspondence from Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess, founder of the Medill Innocence Project. Protess and his colleagues founded the project in 1999 to investigate cases of convicts who might have been wrongfully incarcerated. Over the last decade, their findings have led to the exoneration of 11 men - five of them liberated from death row. Last November, they announced that after a three-year probe, they'd found enough evidence to warrant a new trial for death row inmate Anthony McKinney. McKinney has been imprisoned since 1978 for the murder of a security guard.

According to the Medill investigators, people who say that they saw the crime assert that McKinney was not at the scene. One witness said he had been beaten by police until he made a statement implicating McKinney.

County prosecutors alleged that to get good grades, the students paid witnesses to make statements supporting McKinney's claim of innocence. They claim that one witness was given money to buy drugs. Protess and the students deny the charges. They acknowledge having paid for cab fare for one witness, and say they have receipts for all of their expenses.

At the hearing, attorneys for Protess and Northwestern insisted (.pdf) that the state's shield law (.pdf) allowed them to keep their correspondence private. That law defines a journalists as:
"any person regularly engaged in the business of collecting, writing or
editing news for publication through a news medium on a full-time or part-time basis; and
includes any person who was a reporter at the time the information sought was procured
or obtained."

County Attorney Anita Alvarez and her staff argued that the shield law only applies to confidential sources, not to documents.

At a Nov. 20 hearing on a motion by Northwestern's attorneys to quash the subpoena, Cook County Circuit judge Dianne Gordon Cannon sharply criticized the Medill attorneys for the tone of their brief. Among other things, the brief accuses the County Attorney's office of:

a surprising lack of comprehension of the requirements of the Illinois Reporter's Privileges Act and an equally surprising lack of affinity for the First Amendment values that underlie the Act and the role of investigative reporting in promoting those values.

According to Lynne Marek of the National Law Journal, Judge Cannon told the Medill attorneys that their brief was "dripping with sarcasm" and "reprehensible." Some of the criticisms seemed odd - for example, Cannon said the brief lacked requisite attorneys' signatures, but that turned out to be incorrect. Another hearing has been scheduled for January.

According to Erin Geiger Smith of the Business Insider Law Review, Protess said the prosecutor's brief was:

so filled with factual errors that if my students had done this kind of reporting or investigating, I would have given them an F

The National Review has more details on what Protess says the prosecutors got wrong.

I think Smith has it right when she says:

Payment to a witness is of course relevant information and, if it happened, prosecutors are rightly interested in that information, as long as getting it does not violate any press shield laws.
Students' grades, however, still seem outside the scope, as do their off-the-record notes not directly relevant to any payment. It just is not the job of the students to do the work for the prosecutors. The state should be able to "solve" the case in the same way the students did -- or, if is the case may, didn't -- and should be able to get the relevant information without crossing the line into attacking the student-journalists.

This is a case that's going to be watched closely not only by pros, but by journalism professors like me. Will we need to "lawyer up" to do the kind of investigative reporting that's increasingly becoming our responsibility?

Anna Deavere Smith "Lets Us Down Easy" in the Health Care Debate

2009-11-15T11:02:52-06:00

"When I hear the official language [of the health care debate] it makes me suppose that this is a time when we need a lot more art that's not going to have answers that are in black and white. "

Anna Deavere Smith to Bill Moyers, November 13, 2009

Back in 2000, Danny Schecter published notes from a presentation by Jake Lynch and Anna McGoldrick about peace journalism - a mode of practice that encourages us to think about current events and issues with an eye toward what can unite, instead of what divides. There's one point in his notes that speaks so wisely to the fractious debate over health care reform taking place across the nation:

AVOID accepting stark distinctions between "self" and "other." These can be used to build the sense that another party is a "threat" or "beyond the pale" of civilized behavior — both key justifications for violence. INSTEAD, seek the "other" in the "self" and vice versa. If a party is presenting itself as "the goodies," ask questions about how different its behavior really is to that it ascribes to "the baddies" — isn't it ashamed of itself?

No one does a better job of showing us the "self" in our various "others" than Anna Deavere Smith, the astonishing writer and actress whose decades-long quest to understand and portray the American character has resulted in some of the most remarkable theater, and yes, journalism of the last 20 years. Smith's method qualifies as literary journalism not only because her monologues are excerpts of verbatim transcripts of interviews with her subjects, but also because the narrative that she constructs and performs from those vignettes is as subtle and densely layered in ways that Tom Wolfe never imagined. As Blogher CE Gena Haskett put it back in 2007, Smith " carries on the traditions of our ancestors in telling the tales of others as we participate in the resonance of being human."

Smith's latest one-woman show, "Let Me Down Easy," , offers us the opportunity to resonate with the experiences of 20 humans navigating the shoals of life, death and the health care system. Critics, audience members and bloggers talk about the off-Broadway in such superlative terms that it's not surprising that its run has been extended weeks beyond its original closing date, to December 6. What makes the piece so interesting to me right now, though, is the hope that this kind of art really can help promote genuine civic dialog.

First, here's a bit of Smith talking about her work and this new production:

As Smith has explained in multiple interviews about the show, the project began with an invitation from the Yale Medical School about a decade to create a piece based on interviews of doctors and patients for their "Grand Rounds." Smith told Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales of Democracy Now!

I went to Yale at a time well before what we now think of as the healthcare debate, but the doctor who invited me to come, Dr. Ralph Horowitz, who’s now at Stanford as head of medicine there, saw, you know, the problem then, as I’m sure many doctors did, but also was looking at a critical moment in medicine, where the twentieth century had delivered a lot of science, but the whole idea of healing had kind of gone away, under the weight of that science, and so leaving me, as I left Yale, with a question about where is care in our society? We’re smarter, but are we more caring? Do we know how to heal? And that’s what really catapulted me into this investigation of doing over 300 interviews on three continents.

During the Democracy Now! interview, Goodman describes the play as, "incredibly moving." It also highlights ways in which our access to health care really isn't equal. For example, here is part of the transcript of her monologue as Ruth Katz, a dean at Yale Medical School.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: [as Ruth Katz] And an oncology fellow, who’s—which is not one of our full-time faculty, but someone who’s in training here, specializing in oncology, came into my room. “I want to apologize, but we can’t find your records. Could you tell me what kind of cancer you have?” I said, “This is appalling.” He said, “No, hey, it’s not just you. It happens here quite a bit.” I said, “I am appalled for every patient who comes on this unit.” And I had to go through, from like the beginning, my whole story.

Well, eventually, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you as an aside, eventually I knew—I could tell by his question—that he was going to get to the question of, do you work? And I’ve never advertised my position around here. I just wanted to be treated like everybody else. And so, you know, he says, “Do you work?” you know, about midway through his questions. And I said, “I do.” And he said, “Are you working full time?” And I said, “I am.” And he said, “Where are you working?” I said, “I’m associate dean at the medical school.” Now he looks up. “At this medical school?” I said, “At the Yale School of Medicine.” He found my files within a half an hour.

Writing for Pyschology Today, Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, said she started out identifying with Smith's portrayal of a young physician marooned at Charity Hospital during Hurricane Katrina, and then:

"[I]n Deveare Smith's rendering of Dr. Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, we see the rawest ulceration of our society, worse than anything I'd ever experienced or ever imagined."

Linda at the Critic-O-Meter noted that the critical acclaim isn't universal. While Newsday's Linda Winer lauded Smith's "curiosity about - and empathy for - multiple points of view," Time Out New York's Helen Shaw laments that "the tidy snippets of experience, the deliberate emotional tugs and the high celeb quotient feel a little easy." And the Wall Street Journali's Terry Teachout doesn't even give the piece that much credit.

But I relate most to what Amy Goodman said to Smith at the end of the DN interview, perhaps because like Goodman, my mother died recently:

"[T]his play definitely, I think, spoke to... the two issues patients need the most: one, time with their doctor, which they so rarely get; and pain management, how to deal with pain, and that takes listening to a patient, caring about a patient, and spending time with that patient. I think you conveyed that in this play. I want to thank you.

If we can only remind ourselves of such simple, universal needs as the political debate over health care moves forward, maybe we can come closer to really does improve access and affordability. At least one can hope.

Smith uses an interview with theologian James Cone to explain the show's title, "Let Me Down Easy." In the play, Cone is quoted as saying that the title "are the words of a broken heart" -- broken by the loss of love, but also perhaps by a broken social contract, or even by death. In that vein, it seems appropriate to include the Isley Brothers' 1975 ballad of the same name in this post:
Melissa Silverstein is glad that Smith's show is one of two currently New York theater offerings currently being headlined by African American women.
Jadedj at Banquet of Consequences commends this NPR interview with Smith about the show, suggesting:

A note, the interview is 28 minutes long, if you don't have that kind of time, forward to about the 18 minute mark, or maybe a little before, for the last 10 minutes.

John Allen Muhammad, "Beltway Sniper" and Gulf War Veteran, Is Executed

2009-11-10T14:43:01-06:00

UPDATE 9/25 PM: The Washington Post reports that John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection tonight as family members of his victims watched.
He maintained his innocence until the end.

ORIGINAL POST

John Allen Muhammad, the Gulf War veteran turned serial murderer who terrorized the Washington DC area in 2002 with his teenage accomplice, is scheduled for execution in a Virginia prison at 9 pm EST. Gov. Tim Kaine, who says he personally opposes capital punishment, denied a last-minute request for clemency this afternoon. Yesterday, the Supreme Court said it would not intervene.

Muhammad, 48, was convicted of capital murder in 2003. He is thought to be the mastermind of a serial shooting spree in September and October 2002 that killed 10 people and left six wounded. Most of the shootings occurred in Washington DC and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs, but Muhammad and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, were also tied to killings in Alabama and Louisiana as well. Malvo was also convicted of murder in 2003, but was spared the death penalty because of his age.

The gravity of Muhammad's crimes has even death penalty opponents ready to give him the needle.

"Muhammad is the sort of soulless killer who puts death penalty opponents like me in a moral bind. We don’t believe in the state putting anybody to death, including irredeemable thugs like Muhammad, but we—or at least I—wish they were dead. I resent expending millions of tax dollars to support a wretch like Muhammad as his appeal winds through the courts. I detest the notion that as long as he lives, he can still hope for a delay of his rendezvous with lethal injection. It troubles me that our legal system affords him mercy that he denied his victims and their families."

According to news reports, Malvo testified at one of Muhammad's two trials, detailing plans for far more extensive killings. Prosecutors and Muhammad's ex-wife Mildred said the killings were a smokescreen for Mildred's murder -- intended as the last in an apparently random series of shootings.

Mildred Muhammad said her ex-husband's murder plot was the culmination of years of domestic violence for which she could get no help.

She has since become an advocate for domestic violence victims, detailing her story in a new book, Scared Silent.

In this interview with Bill Thompson, Mildred Muhammad described the horror of finding out that the man she had become someone she didn't recognize after serving in the Gulf War:

Law professor Ann Althouse noted this bit of ironic commentary from Muhammad's lawyer:

"In its effort to race John Allen Muhammad to his death before his appeals could be pursued, the state of Virginia will execute a severely mentally ill man who also suffered from Gulf War Syndrome the day before Veterans day."

Muhammad's attorneys have been pursuing the mental illness appeal for some time, to no avail. Amnesty International reported the results of a psychiatric evaluation arranged by his attorneys (.pdf):

"A psychiatric evaluation obtained by his lawyers determined that despite an “ability to sometimes show a superficial brightness,” Muhammad did not have “a reasonable degree of rational understanding.” The psychiatrist concluded that he “was not competent to stand trial,” that his “ability to make decisions and understand the proceedings was impaired,” and that his “judgment and ability to think logically were severely compromised.” Magnetic Resonance Imaging revealed that John Muhammad’s brain had serious abnormalities, including a shrunken cortex, indicating a loss of brain tissue likely to have been caused by a severe injury to the head. Another abnormality found in his brain is sometimes associated with schizophrenia, and two experts retained concluded that Muhammad probably suffered from this serious mental illness. This opinion was consistent with indications that John Muhammad suffered from delusional and bizarre thinking. Other testing indicated that he had severe cognitive impairments."

AI said that the trial judge rejected evidence about Muhammad's mental state because he refused to be examined by a prison psychiatrist.

Jeralyn Merrit notes that former Attorney General John Ashcroft chose to try Muhammad in Virginia to ensure that he would be executed. She notes that the prosecution also benefitted from a 2003 ruling that it didn't matter whether Muhammad or Malvo was the actual "triggerman" in the shootings.

Michelle Malkin is among those who believe that the Muhammad-Malvo case is of a piece with last week's killing rampage at Fort Hood, Texas. Malkin notes that the alleged Ft. Hood killer, Malik Nidal Hasan is a Muslim who reportedly had contact with al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists. Muhammad, she said was a Nation of Islam convert who, according to Malvo, justified his crimes with anti-American and anti-white rants. (The Nation of Islam is not considered a terrorist organization.) Malkin also posted drawings by Malvo that were used as defense exhibits at his trial to show how he was brainwashed by Muhammad. Other defense exhibits include letters from teachers at his Tacoma Washington high school attesting to his intelligence and good behavior. A psychiatrist who evaluated Malvo had this to say:

"By concluding that Lee Malvo was indoctrinated ("brainwashed") into his role as John Muhammad's loyal co-perpetrator, it was my professional opinion that Lee was not capable of freely forming an intent, and his young, budding sense of right and wrong had become thoroughly appropriated by and subsumed under John Muhammad's inverted "morality." In essence, Lee's "old" self (a highly vulnerable boy who was and is quite bright, personable and troubled by a traumatic past) became engulfed by his "new" self (he even took a new name, as many cultists do, and became "John Malvo"), a pseudo identity that was capable of committing horrendous crimes for the "cause" of his leader, John Muhammad. (Muhammad claimed the killings were part of a just and righteous holy war that would ultimately lead to a Utopian enclave in southern Canada open only to a select group of African-Americans who had been liberated from their "slave mentality.") For procedural reasons, I was not actually able to testify to my ultimate conclusion, but rather was only allowed to testify about my conclusion that Lee had/has a dissociative disorder (not otherwise specified) as a result of extreme indoctrination."

The state killing of John Muhammad will leave many questions unanswered. For my money, the most important of those questions is, could this tragedy have been averted by proper mental health screening and treatment when Muhammad returned from the Persian Gulf? Last week's horror at Ft. Hood may also be a warning that we need to elevate mental health care for our veterans and and military personnel to a much higher priority than it currently occupies - including care for the caregivers as well.

Memo to Rep. Joe Barton: Young adults need health insurance, too.

2009-11-08T08:34:33-06:00

Of all of the claims and counterclaims spouted during yesterday's floor debate in the House of Representatives, I was most stunned by Rep. Joe Barton's assertion that 10-15 million uninsured young adults don't want health insurance:

"Congressman [George] Miller talked about the 40 to 50 million Americans who are uninsured, and he’s right. But of those 40 to 50 million, 15 to 20 million are in this country illegally. Ten to 15 million are young Americans who don’t want insurance. When you really boil it down, there are five to 10 million Americans that have a pre-existing condition or work where the insurance is not provided and they can’t afford it. Our plan covers them."

I immediately thought of the dozens of young people I've encountered at work, in my family and in my community over the last several years who are stressed out because they don't have health coverage. Some of them have chronic conditions that are going unattended. Some find themselves with acute health problems that they hope will go away because they can't pay a doctor. Others don't have a particular health problem, but live in fear of getting sick or having an accident. I remembered my own time in grad school, when I could not longer make my COBRA payments, and I prayed every day that nothing would happen before I got a job with benefits. It was the early 1980s and I was able-bodied then.

In fact, scholars say that historically, younger people tend to favor public spending on social goods such as health care. So when I heard Rep. Barton's declaration, I couldn't help but wonder, "Where are these young people who don't want health insurance?"

It turns out there's a term for this group of uninsured Americans - the "young invincibles," and partisans on each side of the health care debate have been battling for their support. Like the young people I've known, they have some pretty harrowing tales to tell:

Brandon is part of an organization, Young Invincibles, lobbying in favor of the Democrats' health care reform proposals:

"Young Invincibles is a new group of 18 to 34 year-olds across the country who are committed to making sure young people are heard in the debate about the future of our country. Our campaign will tell the truth about how the current system fails young people, dispel the myth that we don’t care about health care, and add our voices to the millions of Americans demanding change. You will be hearing a lot from us in the weeks and months to come."

A February, 2009 New York Times story details the lengths that some uninsured young adults are going to in order to get their health care needs met:

They borrow leftover prescription drugs from friends, attempt to self-diagnose ailments online, stretch their diabetes and asthma medicines for as long as possible and set their own broken bones. When emergencies strike, they rarely can afford the bills that follow.

When those emergencies do strike, these young adults end up in the emergency room -- getting the most expensive care, often for conditions that could have been treated more easily and cheaply with regular medical care. When they can't pay their hospital bills, the weight falls on the rest of us, through already over-burdened state charitable care funds that are financed by our taxes and insurance premiums. In my home state, New Jersey, charitable care funding hasn't kept pace with rising hospital costs, as this April, 2009 article about Gov. Corzine's most recent budget from NJBiz makes clear:

"The good news for [New Jersey Hospital Association] is the state is not slashing charity care funding by 15.5 percent, as it did last budget season. The bad news is the $605 million in proposed funding will still reimburse hospitals for less than half the roughly $1.3 billion in annual charity care they provide to uninsured patients."

Despite those grim realities, not all young voters support health care reform. Young Americans For Freedom, an organization of conservative campus activists, issued this action alert last Wednesday:

Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) Chairman Erik Johnson urges all Americans to take a stand against Nancy Pelosi’s liberal dogma of government controlled universal health care. Universal health care will cost Americans greatly, in terms of their physical and financial health.

Apart from their ideological opposition, [erhaps part of what has the YAF activists in a twirl is a recent study by Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield finding that under the proposed health care reforms, healthy young workers will pay higher premiums to offset the cost of supporting older, sicker citizens. A Colorado Springs Business Journal news story on the report said that researchers found the universal coverage mandate could force premiums up by 140 percent. Researchers quoted in the story argued over the validity of the assumptions underlying the study's calculations. For one thing, it didn't factor in projected savings from the planned health care exchanges and other reforms. But Ralph Pollock, Executive Director of the Business Health Forum, drew a different lesson for reporter Amy Gillentine:

“As we work through the reform process it is evident that money needs to be taken out of the system — period. That’s going to take sacrifice on all parts: insurers, health providers and consumers. Individuals and employers must stop accepting health care and coverage prices at face value, and demand health providers and insurers bring down costs in the system. As consumers, we should take a hard look at what we demand out of our health care system and use it wisely.”

That may mean that young adults will have to become more engaged than ever in the policy debates over health care, especially in the next crucial few weeks as the final bill takes form.

AP: Chris Christie Wins New Jersey Governor's Race

2009-11-03T21:15:34-06:00

UPDATE: At 10:07 pm, the Newark Star-Ledger announced over its live stream that the Associated Press has called the New Jersey Governor's race for Chris Christie.

The polls are closed in New Jersey, and the news is favorable for the Republican challenger, former US Attorney Chris Christie. With 70 percent of the precincts reporting, just under half of the votes are going to Christie, versus 43.8 percent for incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine, according to a 10 pm update from the New York Times and the Newark Star-Ledger below. Independent Chris Daggett is polling at 5.4%.

According to the Star-Ledger's exit polls, voters were motivated primarily by concerns over high property taxes and dim economic prospects. Both the Star-Ledger and the New York Times' exit polls suggest that Corzine failed to carry moderate and independent voters. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com reports that Corzine's showing across the state was significantly weaker than in his successful 2005 bid.

In the end, heavy campaigning by Pres. Barack Obama had no effect on voter's decisions, according to exit polls.

Via twitter, Princeton University politics professor Melissa Harris Lacewell observed that property tax rates are set by municipalities, not the Governor. However, conservatives have been blaming the state's property tax rates on New Jersey Supreme Court decisions requiring that school funding be equalized between wealthier and poorer school districts. It's likely that Christie will face pressure to cut aid to urban schools - a prospect that led Harris Lacewell to tweet: "Keep eyes on the racial achievement gap in the next 4 years."

http://www.blogher.com/new-jerseys-topsy-turvy-race-governor

New Jersey's Topsy-Turvy Race for Governor

2009-11-01T17:15:06-06:00

For a lot of national political operatives, the New Jersey governor's race, which wraps up next Tuesday, is a high-stakes game of poker, a test of Pres. Barack Obama's coattails, and a possible foreshadowing of the 2010 Congressional campaigns. For this New Jersey voter, and, I suspect, many others, it's a welcome end to a largely uninspiring partisan snipefest. The mudslinging between incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine and Republican nominee Chris Christie has so tedious that an upstart independent bid by veteran policy wonk Chris Daggett has got some folks thinking he could be the Brooks-Brothers version of Ross Perot.

The White House is sufficiently nervous about losing this reliable blue state that Pres. Obama is stumping for Corzine today as I write this. Both he and Vice President Biden have been here quite a bit. Live streaming video by Ustream

Politico.com reports that one of Obama's senior political advisorsrecently took over Corzine's campaign. It's telling that after nearly four years in the Governor's office, Corzine's campaign looks as if Barack Obama's at the top of the ticket. Crowds hold "Obama Corzine" signs aloft, and the video slide show on the campaign website features the president and governor side-by-side, touting their partnership.

I don't think too many people thought Jon Corzine would have been in this position when he was first elected in 2005. The multimillionaire former CEO of Goldman-Sachs had been successful in the US Senate, and his self-funded campaign seemed to lift him above the usual questions surrounding candidates' campaign donors. Like his Republican opponent, Doug Forrester, he promised to raise ethics standards, cut taxes and create jobs. I endorsed Corzine in 2005, but not because I believed anything that he or his opponent claimed they were going to do:

"I think that Washington's budget woes, made worse by the cost of hurricane cleanup and the ever-rising price tag for the Iraq War, mean that less federal money will be coming to the states for the forseeable future. That means less state aid to municipalities, and the money has to be made up somehow. I have already watched taxpayers in my own community cut off their noses to spite their faces by voting down increases for public education. I expect the quality of life in New Jersey to further deteriorate as the impact of federal cuts trickle down....

"So for me, the question is not, which candidate will spur growth by reducing taxes, but which candidate will make an effort to ensure that we do the best job that we can to protect the most vulnerable during the inevitable belt-tightening of the next few years...."

The economic downturn turned out to be worse than I could have anticipated. The northern part of the state is full of suburban bedroom communities for New York commuters, so Wall Street's losses hit New Jersey hard. People who've never seen a pink slip before are scrambling for jobs. Corzine argues that he has been a fiscally responsible progressive:

Because of Jon Corzine’s strong leadership, New Jersey is already gaining thousands of new private sector jobs; our median family income leads the nation; and, our public school students rank at the top of the country in reading and math. Governor Corzine reshaped and resized state government.

He eliminated and consolidated departments, sold state cars, tore up gas cards and closed office buildings. He reduced the state workforce by 7,000 employees and achieved additional savings by increasing the retirement age from 55 to 62, capping pensions, and asking state workers to contribute for the first time toward the cost of their health care. This year, he even negotiated a 7.5 percent wage cut for public employees.

These aren't exactly the kinds of accomplishments that get folks jazzed up about campaigning for you. And Corzine's opponents, Republican Chris Christie and independent Chris Daggett, only have to point to the state's employment picture to support their contention that Corzine's stewardship of the economy has failed:

Christie, a former US attorney who touts his record for putting corrupt politicians behind bars, says his program of tax and spending cuts will improve the state's business climate and create jobs:

New Jersey has the highest tax burden in the country, the highest property taxes in the nation and our highest unemployment in 33 years. Last year alone, nearly 200,000 jobs were lost, we have the highest home foreclosure rate in the region and Jon Corzine eliminated property tax rebates from 1.2 million New Jerseyans. New Jerseyans are at a breaking point. Our families are suffocating as each day gets harder and harder.

At the same time, Christie promises to protect vulnerable programs such as the Educational Opportunity Fund, which provides scholarships and mentoring to college students who are academically underprepared and financially disadvantaged. Christie has some big Republican guns on his side - most notably, former New York City mayor and presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. The Republican Governors' Association has been ponied up the cash for last-minute attack ads.

Independent Chris Daggett faults Corzine's leadership, but insists that Christie's numbers don't add up. His signature idea is a tax reform plan that would cap local spending and limit property taxes to a maximum of $2500 annually:

Under the plan, the $1.6 billion spent in this year’s budget for property tax relief programs—including homestead rebates, the senior citizen property tax freeze and the income tax write-off for property taxes—would be folded into a property tax cut that would be deducted directly from homeowners’ property tax bills, as proposed by the Legislature’s Property Tax Study Commission three years ago.

Daggett’s tax reform plan would extend the existing 7 percent sales tax to a wide range of personal, professional and household services, including services provided to individuals by professionals such as lawyers, accountants and architects. The sales tax extension would not include business-to-business services. The expansion would add $3.9 billion in tax revenue.

The $3.9 billion in new sales tax revenue would be combined with the $1.6 billion from existing property relief programs to fund the $4 billion property tax cut, a $620 million reduction in the income tax surcharge, a $750 million drop in corporate income taxes and a permanent source of funding for open space to cut future debt.

Daggett's needling of Corzine and Christie is mild compared to what the two leading candidates have spent most of the campaign doing to each other. Neither side is exactly smelling like roses:

Carla Katz, the state's former head of the Communications Workers of America and Corzine's controversial ex-girlfriend. has a brilliant commentary for PolitickerNJ likening the candidates' fear-mongering to the latest popular horror flicks:

Maybe the candidates are holding a dusty mirror to the emotions of a recession-weary electorate suffering actual dread as family members and friends lose jobs, go bankrupt, and fall prey to health care crises or foreclosures. It can be no mistake that two of this year' top-grossing and frightening films are set in and about suburban, middle class America. In the terrifying "Paranormal Activity", a young couple buys a ‘starter home' only to find it terrifyingly possessed by a demonic presence. We are no longer safe in our own homes (foreclosures, predatory lenders). Meanwhile, in "Stepfather", a young man returns from military school to find that his single mother is happily in love with a seemingly all-too-perfect boyfriend-a husband and father wannabe who turns out to be--spoiler alert--a vicious killer. We cannot trust strangers with our family.

Pollsters see a close race. Rasmussen says its telephone polls have showed Christie with a slight but persistent lead. Their latest poll, released October 30, breaks 46-43 % for Christie, with Daggett at 8 percent. Quinnipiac College's October 28 survey of likely voters give Corzine the edge over Christie at 41-36 %, but with a 2.8 % margin of error, that means it's a toss-up. Quinnipiac pegs support for Daggett at 13 %. FiveThirtyEight.com notes an interesting discrepancy in the poll results based on whether a person or machine is asking the questions.

Meanwhile, Daggett snagged an endorsement from the state's largest newspaper, the Star-Ledger. He's also got uber-blogger Jeff Jarvis on his side:

Daggett is the one candidate making the tough decisions about the budget and taxation. He has a plan to reduce property taxes while also holding down local spending, which will force municipalities to find new efficiencies through collaboration. He holds a doctorate in education and I trust him to work to improve the schools. Daggett is an experienced manager and a good man. So he has my vote.

NARAL is urging support for Corzine because he's pro-choice. Fausta's not happy about it, but she expects Corzine to win:

After living here in this state for over twenty years, I don’t expect that anyone other than Corzine will win. The unions will come through for him in the end and put him over the top.

No matter who wins,I still don't expect life to get any easier in the Garden State any time soon. New Jersey's economy will turn around when the national economy does. Right now, I'm one of the state employees whose dealing with furloughs and benefit cuts, but at least I have a job. Whoever the next Governor is, we're all going to have to have our work cut out for us.

Adventures in Autism: Chris Christie Supporting Parental Choice in Vaccination in His Bid for Governor of New Jersey
Paul Mulshine: Property Taxes Could Sink Chris Christie in New Jersey
The Hall Institute's virtual online governor's debate
Jersey News Views: I'd vote for Chris Daggett but...

As for me,

How Journalism's Changes are Changing Our Ways of Knowing

2009-10-27T22:24:03-05:00

Something has been missing from our conversations about the changing nature of news and journalism education, and after gnawing on it for months, I think I finally have the words. Of course teaching students to tell stories across platforms is essential, and so is understanding the impact of new technologies on business models. But we also have to research and teach about how these new tools affect the epistemology of journalism.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with what we know, how we know it, and how we decide what’s worth knowing. Because journalists are concerned with finding, as Bob Woodward put it, “the best available version of the truth,” the processes and tools that we use to establish truth are central concerns to our profession. Truth, of course, is a contested ideal that journalists try to achieve through a discipline of verification.

[Now, I’m not a trained philosopher or scholar of rhetoric, so I’ve been reading someone who is, rhetoric professor Andrew Cline. His 2004 essay,
“Toward a field theory of journalism,” concisely describes the prevailing journalistic ways of knowing in news reporting:

“Reporters observe events and other physical data and/or speak to those who have. The meaning of events (a concept slipping dangerously close to the subjective) is limited to a narrow range of contemporary issues and relationships.

Because it is empirically verifiable that humans disagree about events (our opinions), reporters collect data from ╘both sides╒ and present these data without comment, allowing readers to apply their own reasoning to discover the incorrect opinion versus the correct representation of events.]

The technologies we use affect our understanding of the fact-patterns that determine whether we have a story, as well as how that story is presented.
Ideally, we only report what we can verify. Increasingly, we really upon computing technologies in order to detect, organize, and present the facts that we offer up as news stories. It seems reasonable to ask how the changing tools of newsgathering, presentation and delivery affect the ways that we define, verify and prioritize verifiable facts.

We’ve seen a version of this problem before. Remember when television news stations got those mobile cameras and helicopters? Suddenly, every city had an AC-tion news van zipping around town and every day, the lead story was a fire, massive car crash, major drug bust, or some other visual spectacle. Television demanded pictures. The problem, , is that producers increasingly sacrificed explanatory journalism, depth and context.

Here are some of the places where I think we can see those changes occurring that are fundamentally affecting longstanding journalistic practices and standards. I am not necessarily asserting that all of these changes are bad. Rather they are worth noting in order to understand the role that changing journalistic practice plays in our public discourse.

Who’s at the table?

Over the last 40 years, there has been an increasing emphasis on broadening participation in all aspects of the newsgathering process. In the 70s, that meant improving the race and gender diversity of newsroom staffs and sources. In the 80s, the advent of USA Today brought greater attention to visual journalists. In the 1990s, Poynter Institute started pushing the ”Writing-Editing-Design” concept – bringing the visual journalists and page designers to the table early in the editorial process, instead of calling them just to illustrate and lay out stories that have already been written.

Megan Taylor has written an invaluable series of essays about the increasing centrality of computing professionals in the newsroom. She traced the evolution of the “programmer-journalist” from the era of the programmers and journogeeks who built databases of public records for investigative reporting to the today’s cadre of game-builders, infographic designers and content management system developers. But according to Taylor, programmers and journalists often struggle with miscommunication:

This problem comes from a common feature of project development in the programming culture -- the requirements document. This tells the programmer exactly what is needed. A programmer without media experience will do just what they've been trained to do -- build a project to meet these specifications.
However, the programmer/journalist often knows the difference between what is needed and what's in the requirements document.

What the programmer/journalist won’t necessarily know, though, is how technology development affects other news values and priorities, such as diversity. That’s why it’s important to have a cadre of tech-savvy editors and managers. I’m not finding much discussion about diversity in discussions about the new business and technology models for news, aside from efforts to make sure websites and apps comply with accessibility standards. I’m all for that, but what about ensuring that the pool and pipeline of programming talent is diverse? Can we think about mobile news apps for people who can’t afford iPhones?

Mashups that pull information from public records can misrepresent facts if the software is buggy.

Last April, Amy Gahran blogged a Los Angeles Times story revealing that a crime map featured on the Los Angeles police department website was producing faulty data because of an error in the software that plotted the locations of specific crime. Thus, crime clusters were showing up in low-crime neighborhoods, and some high-crime areas appeared deceptively safe. The error was particularly vexing for the high-profile news aggregator, Everyblock.com, which relied on the maps and as part of its coverage. In response, Everyblock’s founder, Adrian Holovaty, announced that they were implementing their own software to verify the accuracy of the LAPD data.

Gahran draws a clear lesson for newsrooms from the episode:

“If your news organization is using geodata to create interactive online features, you might want to consider ways to double-check for possible accuracy issues, perhaps by checking the results yielded by a different tool set to see if and how it handled the data differently.”

What all of this means is that we ought to be training the next generation of news managers not only to make editorial decisions, but also as reflective technology managers as well. What do you think?

Journalism is dead. Long live journalism!

2009-10-20T20:44:41-05:00

A new report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism -- the home of the Pulitzer prizes, no less -- suggests that government funding might be a necessary part of the solution for preserving independent local news reporting. The report has been greeted by reactions ranging from interest to skepticism and outright dismissal.

The need to preserve independent journalism

The 96-page report by former Washington Post managing editor Len Downie and scholar Michael Schudson includes a concise and comprehensive review of the industry's evolution over the last 40 years. As of a decade ago, they noted:

"Newspapers [had] moved from a preoccupation with government, usually in response to specific events, to a much broader understanding of public life that included not just events, but also patterns and trends, and not just in politics, but also in science, medicine, business, sports, education, religion, culture, and entertainment.
"These developments were driven in part by the market. Editors sought to slow the loss of readers turning to broadcast or cable television, or to magazines that appealed to niche audiences. The changes also were driven by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The civil rights movement taught journalists in what had been overwhelmingly white and male newsrooms about minority communities that they hadn’t covered well or at all. The women’s movement successfully asserted that “the personal is political” and ushered in such topics as sexuality, gender equity, birth control, abortion, childhood, and parenthood. Environmentalists helped to make scientific and medical questions part of everyday news reporting."

The recommendations

The authors argue that the question we face is whether that kind of informed reporting and analysis is so essential to democratic functioning that it should be treated as "a significant public good whose diminution requires urgent attention?" The authors' answer is a resounding, "yes." After reviewing the range of existing and emerging business models for funding independent local journalism, they recommend:

Having the IRS or Congress allow news organizations doing public service journalism to organize themselves as tax-exempt non-profits or low-profit limited liability corporations (called L3Cs). This is similar to a legislative proposal by Sen. Ben Cardin, the Newspaper Preservation Act of 2009, which is currently under consideration by the Senate Finance Committee.
Increasing donations from philanthropists and foundations supporting journalism.
That Congress direct the government-subsidized Corporation for Public Broadcasting to invest in local news reporting
That universities start news organizations and run them as labs for innovation. (For what it's worth, I've been in favor of that one for a while now.
That a government-backed fund for local news be established to support local reporting. To those who fear that this constitutes undue government involvement in journalism, they argue:

The federal government already provides assistance to the arts, humanities, and sciences through independent agencies that include the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. The arts and humanities endowments each have budgets under $200 million. The National Science Foundation, with a budget of $6 billion, gives out about 10,000 grants a year. The National Institutes of Health has a budget of $28 billion and gives 50,000 grants. In these and other ways, the federal government gives significant support to individuals and organizations whose work creates new knowledge that contributes to the public good.

Journalists, non-profits and government agencies should support the effort to make more public records accessible to citizens.

They conclude on an optimistic note:

"At many of the news organizations we visited, new and old, we have seen the beginnings of a genuine reconstruction of what journalism can and should be..."

The feedback

Here's a sampling of some of the reviews.

Jan Schaeffer, the executive director of J-Lab, which supports experiments in journalistic innovation, said Downie and Schudson were focused on the wrong thing:

"In looking to reconstruct journalism, I’d start not by asking how do we get money for what we’ve always done. I’d ask instead: How do we provide something worth paying for? As a long-time news consumer, I have recoiled at much of what we are rendering as 'journalism.'”

Journalism student Paige Hansen said she and her fellow students are eager to help fill the void in local reporting:

"Students in the newsroom could work for both the print medium and the broadcast medium. I think this option is a lot better than having the government financially support local broadcast news, even if Downie says, 'it can be done with safeguards to ensure that the government doesn't become the yard boss of what constitutes worthy news.' "

Journalism professor Michael Bugeja said the authors mean well, but they "gloss over" the fact that technology is no substitute for experienced shoe-leather reporting:

"Technology surveils and sells; without reporters on the street, where the disenfranchised dwell--from homeless to HUD--you get surface reporting. The solution? Try hiring more investigative reporters who can file online or in print; the platform doesn't matter. The training, however, does."

Jeff Jarvis said the call for government support was "dangerous," adding:

"Just because newspapers put themselves at risk, it does not follow that journalism is at risk. Newspapers no longer own journalism. As too often happens in this discussion, they focus only on the revenue side of the business ledger of news – advertising falling from monopolistic heights – and not on the cost side and the efficiency new technology – and thus collaboration – that technology allows."

But journalist Bernice Yeung says there's no reason to get into a "tizzy" over the prospect of government support for local journalism:

"What I’m in a tizzy about is this continued insistence on a purely market-driven model of journalism."

The Knight Foundation's Eric Newton noted their report on citizens' information needs in a democracy revealed the importance of, "universal broadband access, digital literacy and greater news innovation in both the public and private sector."

Finally, journalism professor Michelle Ferrier criticized the report for its failure to address the needs of diverse communities. For example, she noted:

While the J-Lab report about foundation funding cites $128 million to news nonprofits, just a small percentage of that funding went directly to people of color for projects related to underrepresented populations. Of that $128 million, about 10 percent or $12 million went to one project called New American Media, according to Jan Schaffer, director of J-Lab.

I think Downie and Schudson's argument for direct subsidies for local journalism is a bit thin. Yes, the FCC funds the expansion of broadband access, but the idea that its funding should extend to funding news content leaves me queasy. Government funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and specific National Endowment of Humanities projects are different from the kinds of local news reporting grants that Downie and Schudson advocate. For one thing, those CPB and NEH aren't funding watchdog journalism.

Then again, government funding works for the BBC. What do you think?

Soledad O'Brien, Lou Dobbs, CNN and "Latino in America"

2009-10-19T00:56:07-05:00

This week, CNN's Soledad O'Brien will anchor "Latino in America," the latest installment of her multi-year in-depth reports on America's multicultural identity. According to Baltimore Sun television critic David Zurawik, it's some of her best work:

"She is in total command of the subject matter and seems so finely tuned to the nuances of assimilation, multiculturalism and changing notions of identity that you can't help but trust her after just a few minutes of watching. And she forges that same kind of bond with the people she is interviewing and reporting on in the film, getting sullen-looking teenage boys to confess their ethnic insecurities and clinically depressed adolescent girls to talk openly about the pain they feel in being caught between two cultures.

"Conversations about race and identity do not come easily in this country, and members of the media do not achieve the kind of rapport O'Brien does by hot-dogging in for on-camera interviews after all the documentary grunt work has been done by producers and other reporters."

Unfortunately for O'Brien, her colleague Lou Dobbs has so angered Latino activists and bloggers that her quality work is at risk of being ignored. For years, Dobbs has been pushing the narrative that that porous borders and uncontrolled immigration, primarily from Mexico, has weakened the US economy and made us more vulnerable to crime and terrorism. Here is Dobbs debating the president of the National Council of La Raza, Janet Murguia in 2006, after NCLR objected to an episode of Dobbs' show suggesting the NCLR helps illegal immigrants evade law enforcement.

Civil rights groups have been trying to get CNN to can Dobbs. When Latino leaders who saw a preview of the Latino in America series noted that Dobbs' controversial coverage is not addressed, the immigrant advocacy group America's Voice tried to buy airtime during the show to run this anti-Dobbs ad:

CNN rejected the ad. A longer video running on the DropDobbs.com website accuses CNN of trying to have it both ways: wooing Latino ad dollars with programming directed toward them, but disrespecting Latinos by keeping Dobbs' race-baiting reporting and commentary on the air:

For his part, Dobbs insists that his attackers are marginal ideologues funded by liberal billionaire George Soros and working at the behest of the White House(?)

I've got to be honest with you, folks, that strikes me as more than a little loopy. Then again, Dobbs lost all credibility as a journalist when he started passing along bogus data from the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group with strong links to white supremacist organizations. CCC is noted for its opposition to interracial marriage and "forced integration" among other things. Then there was that silly nonsense about President Obama's birth certificate:

(By the way, the birth certificate that I was issued by the State of New Jersey doesn't list the attending physician, either.)

Rumor has it that Dobbs is headed to Fox Business News, so maybe CNN's problem will take care of itself. In the meantime, Vivir Latino won't be tuning in for Latino in America:

Claro the show will be surrounded by Spanglish ads urging you to buy from Walmart with it’s horrible treatment of workers and eat McDonald’s with it’s horrible treatment of animals and your body. But air an ad that has something to say and is trying to sell a message of truth? Not CNN. They rejected America’s Voice money and ad.

I don’t have cable so I don’t watch CNN and I had no intention of watching the series, Latino in America

And LatinoPoliticsBlog says maybe it's time to give the boob tube a rest:

I think that Latinos should reconsider the role of television in their lives. Imagine what could be accomplished if we tuned out this noisy, unrepresentative medium altogether and instead focused on reading to our children, watching film, and becoming more physically active.

Related:

Lou Dobbs Confronts Latino Activists Seeking to Dislodge Him From CNN

Sorry, Soledad.

Youth Violence is a Public Health Issue. Why Don't We Treat It that Way?

2009-10-13T21:30:31-05:00

It has been several weeks since the nation recoiled in horror at the videotaped brutal beating death of 16-year-old Derrion Albert, the Chicago honor student who was caught in a melee between two factions of warring youth. Last week, President Obama dispatched Attorney General Eric Holder to the city to declare that he understood the urgency of the problem:

“The Department of Justice is releasing a new study today that measures the effects of youth violence in America, and the results are staggering. More than 60 percent of the children surveyed were exposed to violence in the past year, either directly or indirectly. Nearly half of children and adolescents were assaulted at least once, and more than one in ten were injured as a result. Nearly one-quarter were the victim of a robbery, vandalism or theft, and one in sixteen were victimized sexually.” (Emphasis mine.)

The Attorney General went on to discuss the need for coordinated solutions:

Our responses to this issue in the past have been fragmented. The federal government does one thing, states do another, and localities do a third. We need a comprehensive, coordinated approach to address youth violence, one that encompasses the latest research and the freshest approaches. Our administration is committed to implementing such strategies, which is why we've asked for $24 million in next year's budget for community-based crime prevention programs such as Ceasefire and Project Safe Neighborhood. And it's why our Office of Justice Programs is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to provide support and assistance to communities affected by violence.

Hear, hear! But I'm wondering -- where are the public health experts are in this discussion?

Why a public health approach matters

A comprehensive study done under Clinton administration Surgeon General David Satcher argued forcefully that youth violence is not only a public safety issue; it's a public health issue. One key conclusion from that 2001 report suggests the road not taken:

The most important conclusion of this report is that youth violence is not an intractable problem. We now have the knowledge and tools needed to reduce or even prevent much of the most serious youth violence, with the added benefit of reducing less dangerous, but still serious problem behaviors and promoting healthy development. Scientists from many disciplines, working in a variety of settings with public and private agencies, are generating needed information and putting it to use in designing, testing, and evaluating intervention programs. ... Thus, the most urgent need is a national resolve to confront the problem of youth violence systematically, using research-based approaches, and to correct damaging myths and stereotypes that interfere with the task at hand

The Satcher report advocated a public health approach to the problem of youth violence that:

Defines the problem, using surveillance processes designed to gather data that establish the nature of the problem and the trends in its incidence and prevalence;
Identifies potential causes, through epidemiological analyses that identify risk and protective factors associated with the problem;
Designs, develops, and evaluates the effectiveness and generalizability of interventions; and
Disseminates successful models as part of a coordinated effort to educate and reach out to the public (Hamburg, 1998; Mercy et al., 1993).

I've taken the liberty of quoting the Satcher report extensively because it's worth asking whatever happened to its recommendations. A 2005 study by criminologist Brandon C. Welsh suggests that there were those in the criminal justice community who were still unaware of the value of this approach to the youth violence problem. From the abstract:

The increasingly punitive response to juvenile criminal violence is an unsustainable approach to reducing juvenile violence, according to the author. The sole reliance on a law-and-order approach is at the center of the problem. However, the public health perspective represents a promising approach to the reduction and prevention of juvenile violence and should be considered as a complement to the traditional law-and-order approach, rather than an alternative.

Children in crisis

The sheer magnitude of post-traumatic stress being experienced by Chicago's children alone makes health policy an essential part of the solution to youth violence in that city. Listen to Trinity United Church of Christ's pastor, Rev. Otis Moss III, as he talks about what the children in his congregation are experiencing:

Rapper Killer Mike's XXL magazine blog post about his reactions to Albert's murder attests to the breadth and depth of the problem. Watching the video of the murder brought "20 ghosts" to his mind of victims and perpetrators of violence that he knew from his own youth, he said, adding:

Dozens of children have died this year in Chicago, and we did nothing. Atlanta, D.C, Detroit, Newark, Miami, N.O., Baton Rouge, Lil Rock, Oakland, thousands are dead and we did and do nothing! We watch the victims and families on local news, CNN and FOX and watch the offenders on 48hrs and American Gangster and Gangland and still we do nothing!
We feel a tinge of sadness for the children that die. We feel bone deep anguish and hurt for those black mamas. We look and feel lucky not to live “there.” We thank God our kid are ok and we resume life in this broken model of a village. We do nothing more! By doing nothing more we keep KILLING OUR CHILDREN!?!?!

"Mike's" cri de coeur elicited an impressive response, and we can only hope that his call to adult responsibility will be heeded.

Blogher CE Nordette Adams is watching the same tragedies unfold in her own city, New Orleans:

The level of stress on people here as we watch our own city, New Orleans, buckle under violence that often involves people under 25 is sometimes unbearable, which is why I address it in poetry and poem-prayers. Some days the bad news is so overwhelming I feel like we're drowning in blood, and I wonder how do they get their hands on so many guns. Why is it so many young people seem consumed with the need for revenge?

What we can do

However, we more than cries of righteous indignation. We need to bring the same level of informed citizen activism to this problem that we bring to every other pressing issue we face. With that in mind, here are some tentative thoughts about questions we should be asking and solutions we should be considering:

1. We need to ask HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius what role her agency is playing in shaping policy on youth violence. I searched the HHS website with the term "youth violence" this evening and got no results. A search of the website of the Surgeon General brought up the Satcher report.

2. Speaking of Surgeon Generals, we don't have one. Pres. Obama's nominee, Dr. Regina Benjamin, only cleared the Senate Health Committee last week and reports are that Republican lawmakers are holding up a Senate floor vote because of an unrelated dispute with the Administration over Medicare contractors. The Surgeon General can play a valuable role in inter-agency policy coordination. What can be done to fill this key vacancy?

3. What's happening with the S.A.F.E.T.Y. (Securing America's Families by Educating and Training Youth Through Nonviolence) Act? Civil rights veteran John Lewis advanced this bill last May and so far, it has yet to receive consideration. It would create a grant program to train young people in non-violent conflict resolution.

4. We need new approaches to breaking the school-to-prison pipeline. My colleague, Dr. Deborah Thompson, a professor of education at The College of New Jersey has often referred to the correlation between poor reading skills, the likelihood of school failure, and future incarceration. Indeed, a study reported just a few days ago in the New York Times, The Consequences of Dropping Out of High School (.pdf) makes it clear that we pay a high price for failing to keep kids in school. Not only do we see higher rates of unemployment and incarceration, we see greater expenses for taxpayers.

5. Let's delve more into what works. The Department of Justice has a links to case studies of successful programs. I wonder about the fact that only two of the studies cited were published after 2000.

Here's one example of an approach that might be worth some formal study. I have a former student, Amy Stein, who is a social worker treating young people classified as emotionally and behaviorally disturbed. Using a combination of environmental education and arts therapy, Amy reports success in helping get kids back on track both psychologically and academically. As she chronicled in her 2002 book, Fragments: Coping With Attention Deficit Disorder, her creative approach to working with young people stems from a combination of personal and professional experience. Stein found that organic gardening and artistic expression helped her in her own battles with ADHD and other issues.

My interest in Stein's approach was buttressed by a speech that I covered last year for Blogher by activist and scholar Angela Davis spoke about a successful prison gardening project that she observed. She said the women participating in the project had learned new skills, improved their outlook on life and become healthier by changing their diets. They dreaded having to return to their communities, though, where the triggers remained that led to their incarceration, but constructive outlets such as community gardens were lacking.

What kinds of creative approaches do you think communities and policymakers can enact to combat youth violence?

BlogHer CE LainaD: The Murder of Derrion Albert: Do We Pay More Attention to Digital Documented Crimes?

What About Our Daughters? Mother of Teens That Beat Derrion Albert Wants to Speak to You (Actually, the whole blog is relevant, not just this post.)

Obama Administration Support for PATRIOT ACT Renewal Worries Civil Libertarians

2009-10-11T19:14:01-05:00

Last week, the US Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill reauthorizing controversial provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act that, according to civil libertarians, unnecessarily compromise American citizens' privacy rights. What's worse, the legislation reportedly has the support of the Obama administration, despite the fact that its most troubling provisions were opposed by then-Sen. Obama in 2005.

The PATRIOT ACT (full name: Uniting and Strengthening America By Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001) was first enacted in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The law gives government unprecedented powers to intercept and monitor American citizens' private communications, often without being required to obtain court approval or disclose the activity to the persons being monitored. Civil liberties advocates sought to check some of the most intrusive provisions by inserting sunset clauses. Three of those provisions were set to expire this year -- including the power given to the FBI to obtain our financial records simply by issuing a National Security Letter (NSL) stating that the records are relevant to an investigation.

Leslie Harris, who heads the Center for Democracy and Technology, recalls that in 2005, Sen. Obama supported higher standards for issuing NSLs, but Pres. Obama's administration urged the Senate to leave things be:

As a Senator, Obama favored raising the standard for issuing an NSL to require a link between the records sought and a terrorist, spy, or other agent of a foreign power. Yet the Obama Administration opposed an even weaker standard – one that would require that the government draft an internal statement of "specific and articulable facts" showing that the information sought was somehow relevant to an investigation. Instead, according to the deliberations of the Judiciary Committee, the Administration favored a mere relevance standard.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leslie-harris/obama-versus-obama-on-the_b_315638.html

Another expiring provision, known as Section 215, allows the FBI to obtain a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court demanding records that are deemed relevant to an investigation. The FBI could get court authorization to demand certain private records before, but Section 215 expanded that power while requiring less in the way of justification. A few years ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued:

Section 215 violates your Constitutional right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment, by allowing the FBI to search through your most personal information -- including financial records, medical records, student records, even your library records -- without ever having to prove that they have probable cause to suspect you of a crime, or even that your records are relevant to an investigation.

The third provision has to do with something called "pen registers" and "trap and trace devices. (TATD)" Pen registers record electronic pulses, and are used to collect numbers from outgoing phone calls. TATDs capture "non-content" information from telecommunications systems, such as IP addresses and routing information. Law enforcement officials can get orders for these devices without a warrant under current law.

Marcy Wheeler reports that the definition of "non-content" is becoming slippery, since it includes, for example, the subject lines of emails.

Now here is the crazy part of all of this. Wheeler cites reporting by the New York Times that the Obama administration worked with administration critic Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to insert provisions into the Senate bill that limited judges' discretion in evaluating the FBI's justification for installing pen registers and TATD devices. Another Sessions amendment made it harder to protect library records from investigation. Wheeler sounds the alarm:

They absolutely gutted the minimization procedures tied to pen registers! Pen registers are almost certainly the means by which the government is conducting the data mining of American people (using the meta-data from their calls and emails to decide whether to tap them fully). And Jeff Sesssions–I mean Barack Obama–simply gutted any requirement that the government get rid of all this meta-data when they’re done with it. They gutted any prohibitions against sharing this information widely. In fact, they’ve specified that judges should only require minimization procedures in extraordinary circumstances. Otherwise, there is very little limiting what they can do with your data and mine once they’ve collected it.

Patrick Leahy, (D-VT) issued a statement calling attention to provisions in the bill that protect civil liberties:

I remain mindful of our responsibility to ensure both security and liberty as we proceed. All of us know that the threats to Americans’ safety are real and continuing. Our bill will provide the tools that are being used to protect us, while increasing the protections of our vital constitutional rights, as well. The bill we consider today will serve to extend the authorization of the three expiring Patriot Act provisions requested by the administration. We also provide for increased Government accountability requiring audits and reviews of how these vast authorities are being used. I will include in the record an outline of the accountability measures we include in the Sunset Extension Act.

But fellow Judiciary Committee member Russ Feingold (D-WI) is disappointed:

“The PATRIOT Act reauthorization bill passed by the Judiciary Committee today falls far short of adequately protecting the rights of innocent Americans. Among the most significant problems is the failure to include an improved standard for Section 215 orders, even though a Republican controlled Judiciary Committee unanimously supported including the same standard in 2005. But what was most upsetting was the apparent willingness of too many members to defer completely to behind the scenes complaints from the FBI and the Justice Department, even though the administration has yet to take a public position on any of the improvements that I and other senators have proposed. We should, of course, carefully consider their perspective, but it is our job to write the law and to exercise independent judgment. After all, it is not the Prosecutors’ Committee; it is the Judiciary Committee. And while I am left scratching my head trying to understand how a committee controlled by a wide Democratic margin could support the bill it approved today, I will continue to work with my colleagues to try to make improvements to this bill.”

The next step for the reauthorization bill is a vote before the full Senate. You can track the bill's progress at OpenCongress.org.

Domestic Violence is a "pre-existing condition?" Really?

2009-10-06T22:20:47-05:00

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) is trying to make sure that the health reform legislation under consideration in Congress will finally ban a practice that is legal in eight states: denying health insurance to victims of domestic violence on the grounds that it constitutes a pre-existing condition. It's something that she has been trying to get done for years, as she explained on CNN today:

When I first heard about this, I was as incredulous as Murray was, and I checked it out as well. Here is what I learned.

First, according the White-House sponsored site HealthReform.gov confirms that it is legal in nine states to deny coverage to victims of domestic violence. The SEIU blog names names: Idaho, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Wyoming and the District of Columbia.

Next, University of Dayton Law school student Linda Noll researched the insurance companies' rationale: The basic argument is that insurance companies don't want to insure domestic violence victims because they are more likely to need it:

From the health insurance companies’ perspective, the domestic violence victim has a potentially increased use of medical facilities because of the assaults from their abuser. The insurance companies view the increased use as the increased cost in providing for that individual which would be an increased cost to the consumer or a reduction in coverage as they do with many other conditions.

The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim reported last month that several big insurance companies have promised to stop denying coverage to domestic violence victims in the past, only to renege:

n 1994, then-Rep. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), now a member of Senate leadership, had his staff survey 16 insurance companies. He found that eight would not write health, life or disability policies for women who have been abused. In 1995, the Boston Globefound that Nationwide, Allstate, State Farm, Aetna, Metropolitan Life, The Equitable Companies, First Colony Life, The Prudential and the Principal Financial Group had all either canceled or denied coverage to women who'd been beaten.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/14/when-getting-beaten-by-yo_n_286029.html

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon suspects that health care practitioners might avoid screening for possible domestic violence for fear that noting the questions in a patient's medical records might endanger her coverage. Of course, failing to identify and help abuse victims can endanger their lives.

Back to Senator Murray, who has actually been trying to get a law passed on this issue since 2001. On October 1, she introduced the Security and Financial Empowerment Act (SAFE) with cosponsors Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) . A companion bill was introduced on the House side last January. In addition to the insurance protections, the bill's other benefits include ensuring that someone who loses a job because of the need to escape an abuser can still collect unemployment.

The SEIU urges voters to write their Congressional representatives urging them to ban the practice of denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions, including domestic violence. They provide a handy online form as well.

Do you know of anyone who has been denied insurance coverage for this reason? What did they do? Do you support Murray's effort?

Once Again, Food Safety is an Urgent Concern

2009-10-04T23:30:30-05:00

Let's get one thing straight; I love a good, juicy, flame-grilled burger, preferably with cheese. But I'm not dying for one.

Unfortunately, a story in today's New York Times reveals that after years of industry self-regulation, tens of thousands of people are sickened every year by E. Coli. a bacteria commonly found in animal feces. In a small percentage of those cases, people are sickened to the point of paralysis or death.

The Times story focused on the story of Stephanie Smith, a 22-year-old dancer from Minnesota, who spent weeks in a coma and became paralyzed from the waist down after eating a grilled hamburger in 2007. They traced the patty that Smith ate to a meat processor, Cargill, and three separate suppliers, in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay. While they were unable to pinpoint the precise source of the contamination, they did find that both Cargill one of its suppliers have been accused of failing to follow proper safety procedures. What's worse, the Times reported, at the time of the 2007 outbreak that injured Smith, USDA officials found "serious problems" 55 out of 224 meat processing plants that were subjected to impromptu inspections.

Xeni Jardin at Boingboing captured what a lot of readers most likely felt:

"Ground beef is not a completely safe product," one food safety expert in the article is quoted. Well, no s***."

Why is that -- and how serious is the problem of meat contamination? A 2002 PBS Frontline docmentary found an array of experts who agreed that despite disturbing incidents such as the E. coli outbreak that paralyzed Stephanie Smith, the meat supply is basically safe. Preliminary 2008 data from the Center for Disease Control indicates that the rate of contamination by E Coli and other food-borne pathogens hasn't changed much in the last three years.

Since 1998, meat suppliers have been required to subject their products to scientific examination in order to detect microbial contaminants. This system of industry self-regulation, known as HACCP, was part of the response to the fatal 1993 E. coli outbreak that killed several children who ate Jack-In-the-Box hamburgers. However, while experts agree that HACCP is an improvement over the old system that depended primarily on the eyes and noses of USDA inspectors, it's basically up to suppliers to decide how closely they want to examine their product.

The Times story quoted the food safety director at Costco as saying that some suppliers won't sell them meat because they insist on inspecting the product. While Costco's vigilance is commendable, a 2008 study by the Food Safety Inspection Service found that it's especially important to inspect for contamination when the animal is slaughtered.

Connecticut Congresswoman Rosa de Laura has been arguing for years that we need to strengthen and streamline federal oversight of the food supply, In a 2007 speech, she argued for passage of her Food Safety Modernization Act:

Today, there are 15 different agencies currently responsible for administering 30 laws related to food safety. It is time to consolidate many of these functions and provide a regulatory structure that takes full advantage of the great work being done by the scientists at the FDA and state laboratories as well.
It is possible, through a streamlined regulatory structure to require regular inspections of all food processing plants, increase oversight of imported foods, provide for outbreak surveillance, require the tracing of foods to point of origin, and ensure effective public communication.

According to Govtrack.us, De Lauro's Food Safety Modernization Act was re-introduced in February, 2009, awaiting consideration by three House committees. Critics have unleashed such vigorous attacks on the bill, Snopes.com put up a page to debunk outlandish claims that if passed, the bill would outlaw organic farming.

In March, Pres. Obama announced the creation of a Food Safety Working Group, led by the Secretaries of the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services. He also sought a $1 billion increase for food safety inspectors. Food safety, Obama argued, "is one of the things government can do." At the time, Huffington Post writer Paula Crossfield warned that instituting meaningful reform won't be easy:

For food policy advocates, the Food Safety Working Group is cause for a huge sigh of relief. It appears that food safety was the way to get the public's attention on the issues facing our food system all along, as its plays right into our inherent ability to respond to fear. Everywhere you look these days the talk is e. coli, salmonella and now MRSA contamination via pigs. As a result, people are reading labels and questioning the food supply more than ever before.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paula-crossfield/will-obamas-food-safety-w_b_175032.html

In July, the Administration announced several policy initiatives

that it said would improve the safety of the food supply, including, "stepping up enforcement in beef facilities." It remains to be seen how effective that stepped up enforcement will be.

For now, though, consumers are worried. Southern Liberal feels safest buying "local ground beef that is grass-fed." JanieC52 is buying local too, and reminding everyone to cook their meat to the proper temperature.

As for me, I'll lay low on the burgers for a while. I need to eat more veggies anyway.

Is your food safe? 2007 BlogHer post on the difficulty of tracking the source of our produce.

FoodSafety.gov Federal portal with food safety information

Hamburgers, Food Safety and Network Economics A roundup of scholarship on the economics of making food supply chains more transparent and accountable.

E Coli blog Law firm blog tracking incidences of contamination and litigation

How Will Health Care Reform Address the Shortage of Health Care Workers?

2009-09-20T22:01:43-05:00

We don't have enough doctors, nurses or allied health personnel in the United States, and many are worried that health care reform will exacerbate existing shortages by bringing millions more patients into an already-overburdened system. That's why I'm surprised that there isn't more discussion about the provisions in the proposed legislation that are intended to increase the ranks of health care professionals.

There's no debate about the problem. The US Department of Health and Human Resources' Health Resources and Services Administration reports that "[a]s of March 31, 2009, there are:

6,080 Primary Care HPSAs with 65 million people living in them. It would take 16,585 practitioners to meet their need for primary care providers (a population to practitioner ratio of 2,000:1.

4,091 Dental HPSAs with 49 million people living in them. It would take 9,579 practitioners to meet their need for dental providers (a population to practitioner ratio of 3,000:1).

3,132 Mental Health HPSAs with 80 million people living in them. It would take 5,352 practitioners to meet their need for mental health providers (a population to practitioner ratio of 10,000:1).

The reasons for concern about the likely impact of health care reform are also well-documented also. An article published September 10 by the Kaiser Health Foundation reports:

"The shortage of primary care physicians could prove a major challenge to health reform. To make matters worse, some doctors are considering early retirement because of the high cost of practicing medicine."

So the challenge is not only to increase the numbers of doctors, but to give them reasons to stay in practice. There are already loan repayment and financial incentive programs designed to attract doctors and nurses to under-served communities. The House health reform bill includes incentives the following provisions to boost the health care workforce:

Establishment of an Advisory Committee on Health Workforce Evaluation and Assessment to monitor size and stability of the health care workforce
Expands scholarship incentives for medical students to become primary care practitioners working in community settings.
Expands scholarships for nursing students to enhance the diversity and cultural competency of the nursing corps.
Incentives to boost interdisciplinary training

Is this the right mix of incentives? Fausta says it's all moot without tort reform:

A couple of years ago, a pediatrician told me that he had to pay $250,000 per year in malpractice insurance coverage. The amount of money that his practice had to spend on that added to over a million dollars a year.

The Kaiser report points to this CNN article confirming that the cost of malpractice insurance is driving doctors out of medicine:

A first-ever survey of 12,000 primary care physicians conducted last October by Merritt Hawkins and the Physicians' Foundation, an organization that represent the interests of physicians, showed that 10.1% of respondents planned to seek a job outside of health care in the next one to three years.

When it comes to encouraging more women to enter demanding careers such as medicine, the obstacles are not just financial, but cultural. Back in 2007, The Curvature derided a culture that discouraged from pursuing high-powered careers because the pursuit might lessen the chances of finding a husband.

Personally, I'm interested in understanding what works. We've had the National Public Health Corps for decades; we've been trying to get more kids into science-related fields since Sputnik was launched, and we've had scads of school-based and community programs aimed at getting kids in the health professions pipeline. What are the best practices emerging from those efforts? I'd like to see that wisdom incorporated into any final legislation or programmatic initiatives.

What do you think we can do to address the need for more health care workers, particularly if health reform passes?