You'll see some of the posts will be in French and some in English. Most of my posts will be articles about India and any current events. I don't know how far it will go, but I hope this blog will help me become an international correspondent defending Women's rights in India.Bonne lecture a tous ! :)
The World's Journal
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When Phyllis Schlafly is forced to concede that not all feminists are ugly, it’s clear that something has gone awry on the right. Sure enough, in April, Schlafly, a conservative crusader who has been peddling stereotypes of women’s activists as physically and socially unappealing for decades, thought she should warn cadets at the Citadel not to fall for one. “Some of them are pretty,” she said. “They don’t all look like Bella Abzug.”
Schlafly’s anachronistic dig at Abzug, a boisterous New York congresswoman who has been dead for 14 years and whose name and fondness for large hats probably don’t ring alarm bells for many undergrads, betrays the anxiety undergirding her warning. The aged, arid vision of feminism on which conservatives have long relied (and that Abzug embodied only in caricature, never in reality) is finally losing its power.
The image of the feminist as a mirthless, hirsute, sex-averse succubus is a friendly-fire casualty of the Republican “war on women.” It’s a grave loss to conservatives, who have used this faithful foot soldier as a comfortably grotesque stand-in for the real people whose liberties they have sought to conscribe: women.
In a famous 1992 fundraising letter, television evangelist Pat Robertson described feminism as a movement that “encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians,” while conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh has stated that “feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.” The characterization is so potent and pervasive that lefties have also availed themselves of it. In 2005, liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas dismissedfeminist complaints as the “humorless, knee-jerk . . . tedious” stuff of “the sanctimonious women’s-studies set.”
Painting those with a commitment to gender equality as brutish killers of buzzes and babies has been a useful tactic, not only in distracting the public from anti-feminist policy, but in sending messages to young people. Generations of kids, including my own 1990s cohort, have prefaced feminist statements with, “I’m not a feminist, but . . .” Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played girl-power icon Buffy Summers, once told a reporter that she hated the word “feminist” because it “brings up such horrible connotations and makes you think of women who don’t shave their legs.”
In activism, an image problem becomes a structural problem: Twisted but resonant stereotypes make women hesitant to identify with the movement to expand their rights. And if women won’t organize and advocate on their own behalf, the work of anti-feminists is done.
But the recent Republican incursions against women’s rights have been extreme enough to make women finally see beyond the wraith, to recognize that this battle is in fact about them. As presidential candidates sparred over birth control and state legislatures enacted punishing restrictions on reproductive rights and opposed equal-pay protections, newly vocal feminists resisted publicly. By doing so, they transformed the stereotype, putting youth, sex and humor on the side of the long-denigrated women’s movement. Conservatives such as Limbaugh, Foster Friess and Rick Santorum, dealing in sexual censoriousness and musty utterances, suddenly looked like the sexless relics of a bygone era, while the women shouting back at them presented a new, cool model of feminism — young, funny, socially nimble and appealing enough to tempt young men from the Citadel.
The popular dismantling of entrenched feminist stereotypes began, perhaps, not with the feminist movement itself, but in comedy. Performers such as Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Wanda Sykes, Samantha Bee and Kristen Schaal have happily made gender politics part of their acts. In March, Schaal even performed Republican policy as stand-up on “The Daily Show”: “What’s the difference between a fertilized egg, a corporation and a woman? One of them isn’t considered a person in Oklahoma.”
Some of this season’s most furious feminist comedy didn’t come from women at all, but from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, whose steady coverage of misogynist policy highlighted a reassessment of another stale presumption — that feminism is an all-girl ghetto into which no self-respecting man would venture. In Pennsylvania, state Sen. Larry Farnese (D) proposed Viagra restrictions intended to make antiabortion measures look “ridiculous,” joining other lawmakers, such as Oklahoma’s Constance Johnson (D), who proposed banning the deposit of sperm anywhere but a woman’s vagina, in battling Republican misogyny with satire. Meanwhile, two young men launched “Texts from Hillary,” a site that showcased Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s efflorescent cool and stood in bracing contrast to the images of guys holding “Iron My Shirt” signs during her 2008 presidential campaign.
In March, online denizens “sarcasm-bombed” the Facebook pages of conservative officials. Virginia state Sen. Ryan McDougle, who backed a bill that would require women to have an ultrasound before an abortion, received a message about “a possible yeast infection . . . since you’re so tuned [in to women’s] bodies I thought you might have some natural remedies.” Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback got requests to schedule pap smears and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose anti-Planned Parenthood policy cost the women of his state $35 million in health-care services, was asked for his opinion on methods to detect cervical mucus for fertility. So it wasn’t exactly a march on Washington, but it made right-wingers look slow and out of step.
Fighting funny may not be inherently more effective than fighting mad, but it does help correct abiding misapprehensions about feminism as a cheerless vortex: anti-male, anti-sex, anti-porn, anti-fun. In 2012, the anti-everything platform was occupied not by feminist agitators but the GOP politicians they were battling.
It was presidential candidate Santorum and not, say, feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, who complained in March that pornography “contributes to misogyny and violence against women.” Santorum also could be seen, in a widely disseminated interview, barely able to bring himself to say S-E-X, opining instead about how contraception encouraged people to do things “in the sexual realm” that are not “how things are supposed to be.” Virginia Del. David Albo (R), who sponsored the mandatory-ultrasound bill, was too Victorian to utter the word “vaginal,” and spoke instead of “trans-V this” and “trans-V that” in a tale he told on the Virginia House floor . . . about his wife’s decision not to have sex with him after the ultrasound story became news.
Meanwhile, feminists were being credited — by their detractors, no less — with having robust erotic lives. Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke did not say much about sex in her congressional testimony in support of mandated birth control coverage, but her views nonetheless prompted Limbaugh to imagine her carnal activity in florid detail and to suggest that she — and all the other women for whom Limbaugh assumed her to be speaking — were having “so much sex” that they couldn’t pay for it.
Limbaugh made a tone-deaf misstep in his choice of the word “slut,” an epithet around which young feminists have been rallying for more than a year in “Slutwalk” protests against victim-blaming. There was no insult that young women were better equipped to both brush off and to battle, making Limbaugh’s rant not an instance of simply trading one smear (unattractive) for another (loose), but rather a moment that revealed the limits of name-calling. The world had changed; pathologizing female sexuality didn’t do the trick. Limbaugh lost more than 140 advertisers, and Time magazine — not exactly an obscure feminist blog — labeled him a “sad loud man in a small room.”
The 30-year-old Fluke’s eagerness to speak about gender equality — not just in her testimony, but since — further belied the retro view of feminism as the purview of older women. Young women, we’ve repeatedly been told, don’t care about the freedoms won for them by their mothers and grandmothers. But while Republican bankroller Friess’s comment, “Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives; the gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly” made conservative men sound like great-grandpas, young feminist women were getting themselves noticed by the media.
Images of ultrasound wands and all-male congressional hearings and social-media campaigns goosed boycotts, donations to Planned Parenthood and state-house demonstrations nationwide. Youthful engagement zinged through mainstream popular culture; on “The View” in May, 20-year-old actress Eden Sher recommended Jessica Valenti’s “Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters,” raving that the book “makes it absolutely impossible for anyone, but specifically young females, to not want to take action.” Women’s rights activism enlivened even small towns such as Dunkerton, Iowa, where residents protested an appearance by Bradlee Dean, a conservative Christian preacher whose bandhad recently told a group of high school girls that they would “have mud on their wedding dresses if they weren’t virgins”;demonstrators included female students with signs that read: “This is what a feminist looks like.”
This is what feminism looks like, despite generations of having been told something different. While Republicans have been scrubbing their Facebook pages of jokes and decrying the rich sex lives of liberal women, actual feminists — and not just conservative puppeteers — seem at last to have devised a way to wrest control of feminism’s image.
The hairy harridan of yore isn’t totally vanquished. She’s too useful for the right. Without her, it becomes clear that Republicans are fighting not some made-up monster but women themselves. Contemporary activists who have recently replaced the yellowing cartoon of feminism with a living, breathing, nuanced version of what women’s liberation means in 2012 must keep fighting with humor and zeal if they ever want to finish off the old bat.
Perhaps someday they’ll even avenge her by hoisting a banner of their foes as fogeyish, woman-hating, humorless prudes and carrying it into future battles.
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Charges of media bias have been flying like a bloody banner on the campaign trail. Newt Gingrich excoriated the “elite media” in a richly applauded moment during one of the Republican debates. Rick Santorum chewed out a New York Times reporter. Mitt Romneysaid this month that he faces “an uphill battle” against the press in the general election.
Meanwhile, just about every new poll of public sentiment shows that confidence in the news media has hit a new low. Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center in the fall said the media “tend to favor one side” compared with 53 percent who said so in 1985.
But have the media really become more biased? Or is this a case of perception trumping reality?
In fact, there’s little to suggest that over the past few decades news reporting has become more favorable to one party. That’s not to say researchers haven’t found bias in reporting. They have, but they don’t agree that one side is consistently favored or that this favoritism has been growing like a pernicious weed.
On the conservative side, the strongest case might have been made by Tim Groseclose, a political science and economics professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. Groseclose used a three-pronged test to quantify the “slant quotient” of news stories reported by dozens of media sources. He compared these ratings with a statistical analysis of the voting records of various national politicians. In his 2011 book, “Left Turn: How Liberal Bias Distorts the American Mind,” Groseclose concluded that most media organizations aligned with the views of liberal politicians. (Groseclose determined that The Washington Post’s “slant quotient” was less liberal than news coverage in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.)
Even with conservative-leaning sources such as the Drudge Report and the Washington Times factored in, “the aggregate slant is leftward,” said Groseclose, who describes himself as a conservative.
But that’s not the end of the story. A “meta-analysis” of bias studies — that is, a study of studies — shows something different: When all is said and done, left-leaning reporting is balanced by reporting more favorable to conservatives. “The net effect is zero,” said David D’Alessio, a communications sciences professor at the University of Connecticut at Stamford.
D’Alessio drew his conclusion from reviewing 99 studies of campaign news coverage undertaken over six decades for his newly published work, “Media Bias in Presidential Election Coverage 1948-2008: Evaluation via Formal Measurement.” The research, he says, shows that news reporting tends to point toward the middle, “because that’s where the people are, and that’s where the [advertising] money is. . . . There’s nuance there, but when you add it all and subtract it down, you end up with nothing.”
So why the rise in the public’s perception of media bias? A few possibilities:
l T he media landscape has changed.
There’s more media and more overtly partisan media outlets, too. The Internet has given rise to champions of the left — Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc. — as well as more conservative organizations such as Drudge and Free Republic. This means your chance of running into “news” that seems biased has increased exponentially, elevating the impression that “bias” is pervasive throughout all parts of the media.
“There’s a kind of self-fulfilling perception to it,” said Robert Lichter, a pioneering media-bias researcher who heads the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University. “Once people see something they don’t like, they notice things that reinforce the belief that there’s bias” in the media as a whole.
l There are more watchdog groups focused on rooting out media bias.
Long ago, a few watchdog groups, such as the conservative AIM (Accuracy in Media) and its more liberal counterpart FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), kept an eye on reporters’ work. Nowadays, not just politicians criticize the media for their alleged bias; an entire cottage industry exists to highlight the media’s alleged failings. This includes ideological outfits such as Media Matters for America and the Media Research Center; the satirical “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report”; and blogs by the hundreds.
All that scrutiny of the press may suggests an inescapable conclusion: There’s something wrong with the news media. All the time.
Journalists have gotten that message, too. “Reporters have heard the criticism from the right so often that they lean over backwards to be fair to them,” said Eric Alterman, a journalist, college professor and the author of the best-selling “What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News.”
l In the public’s mind, “the news media” encompasses the kitchen sink.
Few people make a distinction between news reporting — which attempts to play it straight — and opinion-mongering, which is designed to provoke and persuade. Tellingly, when asked what they think of when they hear the phrase “news organization,” the majority of respondents (63 percent) in Pew’s news-bias survey cited “cable news,” and specifically Fox News and CNN. But while cable news networks do some straightforward reporting, their most popular programs, by far, are those in which opinionated hosts ask opinionated guests to sling opinions about the day’s news.
“A big part of the conversation on cable is [people] telling you how the rest of the media is getting the story wrong,” said Mark Jurkowitz, a former press critic and newspaper ombudsman who is now associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington-based research group affiliated with Pew. That, he noted, is likely to sow more doubt about the media’s integrity or accuracy.
Of course, reporters have helped blur the very lines they want the public to respect, Lichter said, by writing up news stories and then appearing on TV or going on social media to tell people what to think about their stories.
“The modern way [for journalists] is to be edgy and opinionated and to call attention to yourself,” Lichter said.
l We know more and can second-guess.
Thanks to technology, people have more access to more sources of news than before. Which means they can check several accounts of the same event. This can create its own kind of suspicion; savvy readers often ask reporters why they ignored or played down facts that another reporter emphasized.
l People believe their preferred news sources are objective and fair, while the other guy’s are biased.
Pew’s research suggests that people think the other guy’s media are spreading lies while one’s own are, relatively, a paragon of truth.
A clear majority (66 percent) say news organizations in general are “often inaccurate.” But the figure drops precipitously (to 30 percent) when people are asked the same question about the news organization “you use most.” Jurkowitz said this is the analogue of how people feel about Congress — most give low marks to lawmakers in general, but they vote to reelect their incumbent representative more than 90 percent of the time.
“If you watch the Channel 2 newscast night after night, you trust the people on the air,” he said. “The mere fact that you’re a habituated user makes you think better of them.”
Despite the low esteem the public seems to hold for “the news media,” the good news may be that it’s all relative. Pew found last year that people said they trusted information from the news media more than any other source, including state governments, the Obama administration, federal government agencies, corporations and Congress.
The lowest degree of trust? By far, people named “candidates running for office.”
“His heart was in the Middle East.” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Feb. 17th, the Washington Post
In the summer of 2003, when the rest of the press corps in Baghdad fixated upon the lives of American soldiers in the desert and the nascent efforts to rebuild Iraq’s government,Anthony Shadid jumped into a white Chevy Caprice and headed south to the Shiite holy city of Najaf.
He spent days on end in Najaf’s labyrinthine alleys, gazing into seminaries and seeking out the most influential religious leaders of Iraq’s newly empowered majority sect. He grasped long before any other journalist, and well before the U.S. officials cloistered in the Green Zone, that the new center of power in Iraq rested with the grand ayatollahs of Shiite Islam. He called them the men with “ten-gallon turbans,” and he wrote the most vivid, insightful pieces about them, usually composed on deadline — on a Saturday afternoon for the Sunday Washington Post — fueled by two packs of Marlboro Lights.
He banged out such lines as: “Ahead of him was the future of a country where Sadr’s followers are seeking to turn his legacy into power and, en route, discover the elusive intersection of religion and politics that has bedeviled the Muslim world for a generation.”
It was vintage Shadid. Eloquent and prescient. Graceful and gripping.
His death on Thursday, from an apparent asthma attack while on a reporting trip in Syria, has deprived American journalism of its most gifted foreign correspondent in a generation. His coverage of the Middle East — from Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and beyond — was, simply, the best. He set the standard. If you cared about the region, if you really wanted to understand what was going on, you read Anthony. If you were in his presence, as I was — we were fellow correspondents and housemates in Baghdad — you watched his performances with the awe usually reserved for basketball stars and violin virtuosos.
His colleagues got it. He won two Pulitzer Prizes in a six-year span. His first, in 2004, was a result, according to the Pulitzer board, of “his extraordinary ability to capture, at personal peril, the voices and emotions of Iraqis as their country was invaded, their leader toppled and their way of life upended.”
He found humanity amid the rubble, compassion in the tableau of violence. He wrote about war by focusing on people, with intimate detail, revealing their lives in elegiac prose.
Anthony never let the plaudits go to his head. He could have had his choice of cushy assignments in Europe or the United States. He could have become a successful commentator or analyst. But his heart was in the Middle East — and in the story. He kept going out to report — to talk to people, to observe, to understand. Sometimes, it involved great personal peril — he stayed in Baghdad through the shock-and-awe bombing campaign, he traveled through southern Lebanon during the 2006 war and Israeli invasion, and he was kidnapped in Libya with three other New York Times journalists — but he was no adrenaline junkie. He did it because he wanted to know what was really happening. And that couldn’t be gleaned from a distance.
During the U.S. invasion of Baghdad, when other journalists tried to figure out what was going on from their hotel rooms, Anthony sneaked into the streets and talked to Iraqis. His dispatches were an order of magnitude more illuminating.
His knowledge of Arabic also put him ahead of the pack. Everyone assumed he picked it up as a child, as the son of second-generation Lebanese Americans. But English was the language of his home in Oklahoma. He learned Arabic the hard way: in an immersion program in Cairo, after he had graduated from college.
His fluency meant he could converse with the Iraqis who worked for The Post in ways that no other American staffer could. He befriended them and their families — and they loved him back. When they needed money — for a sick relative, to replace a broken car — Anthony never hesitated. He opened his wallet and fished out a handful of bills. And he never sent an Iraqi colleague to places he wouldn’t travel himself.
He displayed the same open heart with his fellow Americans. He shared his sources and his knowledge. When it was his turn to write the news-of-the-day story — we rotated that thankless assignment in the Baghdad bureau — he launched into it with zeal. Instead of swallowing spoon-fed information from military spokesmen, he summoned Karim, his trusty chauffeur, and they headed off in the Caprice in search of eyewitnesses. If that meant a dicey drive into Fallujah, so be it. He wanted the ground truth.
When he returned to the house we shared with a rotating cast of Post correspondents — we called it “Real World Baghdad,” after the MTV show that was popular at the time — we usually sat together for a family dinner where we swapped stories of the day’s reporting exploits. Anthony listened thoughtfully to what the rest of us had to say. But the truth was that we were skating along the surface of Iraq. Anthony had burrowed deep underground. When he offered his observations, they were trenchant and thoughtful. He didn’t keep the good stuff to himself — he shared. And it made all of our stories better.
Once, on a trip to Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit, he purchased a video disc from a tea shop. Unlike Starbucks, which once sold music intended to relax the listener, the offering in Tikrit was titled “Anger.” It was a compilation of bloody images of U.S. and insurgent attacks that was sickening to watch. Anthony bought it not because of its shock value, but because he knew he needed to see it to understand how Iraqi public opinion was being shaped.
What made him unique was his gift with both languages. He could speak to the Iraqis like a native, and he could pen his stories like few others in American journalism. I’ll never forget the May 2003 story in which he introduced us to Karima, a mother in Baghdad struggling to survive:
“Along Karrada Street, which runs through a spit of land along a bend in the Tigris River, Panasonic televisions, Samsung washing machines, Toshiba refrigerators and a gaggle of air conditioners, ovens and satellite dishes spill into the streets — courtesy of an Iraqi dinar buoyed by a deluge of U.S. dollars and the overnight disappearance of once-steep customs duties and taxes,” Shadid wrote in a front-page Post story. “Overlooking the display is a three-room apartment, where Karima and her family of eight live in envy. ‘From the war until now, I’ve earned nothing,’ she said dolefully, a black veil framing a wizened face that belies her 36 years.”
Then there was the piece he co-wrote with Tom Ricks. It was, I am certain, one of the best stories ever filed from Iraq.
Tom accompanied a U.S. Army patrol in Baghdad that believed it was befriending the locals. A soldier Ricks quoted deemed the neighborhood “95 percent friendly.” Anthony followed along and talked to the same Iraqis who had spoken to the troops. He heard deep suspicion and anger. “We refuse the occupation — not 100 percent, but 1,000 percent,” one man told Shadid. Once again, Anthony was ahead of the pack.
It would be wrong to say that he made it look effortless. His success was the result of grueling work. He spent his days reporting and his evenings writing. While I threw dinner parties, he’d be up in his room, typing away. His downtime would usually come around 3 a.m., after both of us had filed our stories. We’d pour healthy tumblers of single-malt Scotch, light up Marlboros and watch television. DVDs of “Sex and the City” were our favorite. The girls transported us to a world without car bombs and kidnappings. A colleague once brought a season of “The Sopranos.” We watched with morbid fascination for a while before concluding that it was simply too dark for our grim life in Baghdad.
The nocturnal television, the Scotch and smoking were his principal vices back then. He eschewed the parties by the Hamra Hotel pool and other forms of indolence. There always was more reporting to do. Although he had been raised a Lebanese Christian, he told me — only half-joking — that he wanted to spend a year in a Shiite seminary to better understand the religious transformation sweeping Iraq. He collected the embossed clay disks upon which Shiite men press their foreheads while praying. One day, he said, he hoped to have an indentation on his forehead from repeated prayer. Once his head “looked like a raisin,” he said, he’d know he had done enough research.
His cultivation of the Shiite clergy yielded not just long, lyrical tales on the front page. He also nabbed scoops, the greatest of which occurred in November 2003. Ambassador Paul Bremer had proposed that a transitional Iraqi government be selected through caucuses instead of direct elections, which the Americans deemed too difficult and risky to hold. Although a group of Iraqi politicians who had been handpicked by Bremer had approved the plan, Anthony knew that the ultimate arbiter of whether most Shiites would go along with the caucuses was not Bremer’s council but Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential and revered Shiite leader. Anthony had painstakingly cultivated sources in Sistani’s office and managed to get a letter with a few questions into the grand ayatollah’s hands.
A few days later, Sistani issued his response. He rejected Bremer’s plan out of hand. But what was most remarkable was how Sistani conveyed it: scrawled on a large banner that was hung in central Najaf. It began with the words, “In response to the questions of Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post.”
As we gabbed over a Glenlivet late one night in 2003, Anthony dismissed the claims of the U.S. occupation spokesman that Iraq was on the path to peace and stability.
“We’re only in the first chapter,” he insisted.
The Arab Spring was the second or third chapter. Anthony, also an accomplished author, knew the transformation of the modern Middle East would have many more pages. I only wish he could have written them.
The lawyer, Shada Nasser, and Nujood Ali.
The story of the 13 year old girl caught media’s attention back in 2008. Nujood was married at the age of eight to a 30 year old man who raped and beat her. She obtained the divorce two months after the marriage.
Nujood Ali is a good example of forced marriage in poor countries where young girls don’t finish their education and become a mother at a very young age.
Both of them were designated Women of the Year in November 2008 in U.S. women’s magazine Glamour.
