Man dead, media silent

On Saturday, March 27, a man named Clyde Ratcliff was allegedly speed and not long after was pursued by Springfield police.  Mr. Ratcliff lost control of his car and it crashed into a fence.  Police broke a car window and pulled Mr. Ratcliff from the car.  Everything that happened after that is in dispute.  The outcome, however, is not: Mr. Ratcliffe is dead.


Many questions will be raised in the weeks to come, and whether they will be answered to the community's satisfaction, I don't know, but right now I just have one question:  where the hell was the media?  Four days passed and the Springfield Republican and our three television stations, WWLP 22, CBS 3 and ABC 40 were silent.

Now, there is no doubt that Mr. Ratcliff's death after an encounter with the Springfield police would be of immediate and great interest to the residents of Springfield.   Since November numerous accusations of police brutality that have rolled through this city starting with the beating of Melvin Jones III by Springfield police which was recorded on a cellphone.  Much has happened since then, including the firing of two police officers just yesterday.  Masslive.

But the media was silent for four days, until today, when member of the African-American Clergy Alliance and family members of Clyde Ratcliff paid an unannounced visit to Mayor Domenic Sarno.  . Someone told me that the night Mr. Ratcliff died, Channel 40 did a preview of upcoming news and said something about a man chased by police who had crashed his car-- but that no news story ever followed.  I didn't see that for myself and if anyone knows of any media coverage of Mr. Ratcliff's death that took place before today, I'd like to know.  I do know for sure that the Republican wrote nothing, and before this evening, found nothing on the local stations..

Now, just how does something like that happen?

It could be incompetence, but how does incompetence happen to affect one newspaper and three TV stations at the same time?

How does the media get this kind of news?  Obviously police scanners play a role.  What other ways is information communicated?  Did all these methods break down at the same time?

Or was the media asked to sit on this story for a while?

Homeless girl tells her story in new street newspaper

The Philadelphia Enquirer has a story about a thirteen year old girl who kept the fact she lived in a homeless shelter a secret-- until she was asked to write her story for a new street newspaper, One Step Away.  Then she was able to have the kind of opportunity for personal empowerment and political growth that we would wish for every homeless kid and adult.  You can read her story here.

St. Petersburg, Florida has a new street paper, also, the St. Petersburg Homeless Image.  The blog Pushing Rope covers the story.

What's a street newspaper?  According to the North American Street Newspaper Association:

A street newspaper is a newspaper that primarily addresses issues related to poverty and homelessness and is distributed by poor or homeless vendors. Vendors sell the newspaper for a set price, usually $1, and have to pay the organization a fraction of the price (20% to 40%) for each paper up front. The self-employed vendor sells the papers on the street and keeps the money he or she makes. For many people, this is the opportunity they need to get back on their feet and into permanent housing.
 

The benefits of street papers go far beyond economic opportunity. For the vendor, they offer a positive experience of self-help that breaks through the isolation that many homeless people experience. They offer the public a means to reach out with their dollar to help a homeless person directly and, over time, form a caring relationship.

Most street newspapers also provide homeless and/or those living on the margins of society the opportunities for expression by publishing their articles, letters and artwork. These publications build a bridge between the very poor and the wider public by helping people to understand the issues and the personal stories of those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder.

For a look at street newspapers around the world, check out Homeless Street Newspapers.

Photo from debcha's photostream at Flickr.

Prize-winning story on student poverty a hoax

Moments before they accepted the top prize in journalism from the French magazine Paris Match, two students admitted that their story on student poverty was entirely faked.

There is student poverty in France, but the photos of students dumpster diving for food or selling themselves on the street were staged.

"We pushed the clichés to the limit. We thought the whole thing was so hackneyed that it could never win ... We wanted to call into question the inner-workings of the attitude of the kind of media which portrays human distress with complacency and voyeurism," they said. UKIndependent.

The war that keeps on giving-- when will it end?

Joseph Patrick Dwyer died in a Pinehurst, NJ hospital last week at the age of 31. He was a former Army medic who served in Iraq. He was killed by Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome in the form of a drug overdose. There's more about him at AP.

Joseph Dwyer became well-known-- at least an image of him-- when, during the first week of the Iraq War, he was photographed carrying an injured Iraqi boy to a makeshift hospital. Dwyer's mother says the photo embarrassed him.

Millions of refugees, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, tens of thousands of U.S. military killed and wounded-- and for the most part, we in this country are so insulated from this war that opposition to it is an exercise of intellectual will-- unless you are a family member or a friend of someone serving in the military, and then the war is never far from your mind. How clever this administration has been in hiding the reality of war from our eyes: remember the flag-draped coffins we weren't allowed to see, the embedded reporters, the media's complicity and all the dirty secrets-- the lies, the torture-- that seem like an episode of 24?

On and off through much of my adult life I flashed on two black and white images, both involving hands. First, the white flash of an explosion, then two hands, torn from a body, gripping barbed wire. Next, a butterfly drifts near a trench. A hand comes out tremulously, reaching toward the butterfly. A shot rings out; the hand recoils, loosens in death.

Ten years ago I watched All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1930 movie version of Erich Maria Remarque's novel of World War One, and recognized those hands in an early scene and then in the final scene. It is war as we need to understand it if we are ever to end it.

"It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour's bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck." Paul , who once was a boy who collected butterflies before he was a soldier.

Bill O'Reilly can't find homeless veterans

Fox News "pundit" Bill O'Reilly needs a midnight visit from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who could make him write "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." a thousand times...

Responding to a John Edwards statement that there are homeless veterans sleeping under bridges, O'Reilly said, "Come on. The only thing sleeping under bridges is [Edwards'] brain ... We're still looking for all the vets under the bridges, so if you find one, let me know." according to the The NY Daily News.

I know this is stating the obvious, but seeing as Fox News describes the O'Reilly Factor as news, shouldn't there be some fact checking, here?

Whale vs Boar

My car was down yesterday and so I worked at home, which made my cats happy. I had CNN on in the background, trying to catch up on the news.

About once an hour, we'd be given a report on the progress of the mother and baby whale trying to make their way under the Golden Gate bridge and back to the ocean, and whenever that segment aired, the news anchors would express admiration for the whales and concern for their well-being.

Some time during the morning, another segment entered the story rotation-- that of a thousand pound boar who was killed by an eleven year old hunter in Alabama. Each time it aired, the anchors expressed admiration for the killer and treated the whole story as humorous.

What a remarkable creature that boar must have been!-- how intelligent and crafty, to survive so long and grow so big! But his death was treated as a joke. I grew sadder and more furious throughout the day.

Meanwhile, given in about as much time as the boar and whale segments, we learned that another 10 military personnel were killed in Iraq, bringing the total for the month to 118 and for the war to 3,504.