Diversity

MacArthur announced $5.7 million in grants to seven organizations to support professional nonfiction media makers from diverse backgrounds. A total of $2.25 million will be re-granted directly to independent film projects over three years, with remaining funds providing support for fellowships, workshops, training programs, and professional development.

The grants include support to both interactive and feature documentary projects through the Sundance Documentary Fund's New Frontier and Native Programs; enable black filmmakers to experiment with non-linear digital storytelling through Black Public Media's 360 Incubator + Lab; provide a new stream of grant funds specifically for filmmakers in the U.S. South through the Southern Documentary Fund; and equip social movements with nonfiction short films created by filmmakers representing and accountable to affected communities through the Docs in Action project at Working Films. These organizations join eight other nonfiction multimedia storytelling institutions already supported by MacArthur, including Firelight Media, American Documentary, ITVS, Kartemquin, Tribeca, AIR, Chicken & Egg, and the recently launched IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund. Over the last two years, the Foundation has been steadily growing its investment in the documentary community through new partnerships with organizations that can provide comprehensive support to a growing number of filmmakers and new media artists.

[Commentary] I was fired by Google Aug 7 for a document that I wrote and circulated internally raising questions about cultural taboos and how they cloud our thinking about gender diversity at the company and in the wider tech sector. I suggested that at least some of the male-female disparity in tech could be attributed to biological differences (and, yes, I said that bias against women was a factor too). Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai declared that portions of my statement violated the company’s code of conduct and “cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

My 10-page document set out what I considered a reasoned, well-researched, good-faith argument, but as I wrote, the viewpoint I was putting forward is generally suppressed at Google because of the company’s “ideological echo chamber.” My firing neatly confirms that point. How did Google, the company that hires the smartest people in the world, become so ideologically driven and intolerant of scientific debate and reasoned argument? If Google continues to ignore the very real issues raised by its diversity policies and corporate culture, it will be walking blind into the future—unable to meet the needs of its remarkable employees and sure to disappoint its billions of users.

[Damore worked as a software engineer at Google’s Mountain View campus from 2013 until this past week.]

[Commentary] In a perplexing dance toward consensus, left and right have united to pour vinegar on Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s effort to add Tribune Media’s 42 television stations to the 173 it already owns. You’d think that Sinclair—which hikes on the conservative side of the news by forcing its stations to air commentaries by former Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn and other right-tilting segments (“Terror Alert Desk”)—would be cheered by its fellow media ideologues. But no. Newsmax, One America News Network and Glenn Beck’s the Blaze have joined with the lefties from Public Knowledge, Common Cause, Free Press and Media Matters for America to decry the $3.9 billion acquisition. The opposition doesn’t stop there. Such businesses as DISH Network and T-Mobile have decanted their protests, too, demanding that the Federal Communications Commission block the deal, as have broadcast trade associations.

The lefty opposition against Sinclair actually seems to be an argument against media diversity and for media homogeneity. Nowhere on television—not even on Fox-owned stations—is the conservative point of view pursued as aggressively as it is at Sinclair. If rejecting what other journalists are doing and following a unique viewpoint isn't the mark of media diversity, I don't know what is. If the left truly wished death upon Sinclair, it would urge the FCC to change ownership rules so that big broadcasters with different news “philosophies”—ABC (Disney), NBC (Comcast), and CBS—could buy more stations. But the left remains too stitched up in its 1950s thinking about consolidation to advocate that. Might Sinclair’s fight for Tribune’s stations turn out to be a fool’s bargain? For the media diversification reason chronicled above, the conventional television business model has passed its golden years. In 2015, the Bernstein research outfit predicted a “period of prolonged structural decline” for the television industry as viewers continue to defect from ad-supported outlets to on-demand services like Netflix and Hulu. Maybe instead of discouraging Sinclair from making the deal, the company’s foes and competitors should encourage them to close it.

The culture wars that have consumed politics in the United States have now landed on Silicon Valley’s doorstep.

That became clear after Google fired a software engineer, James Damore, who had written an internal memo challenging the company’s diversity efforts. The firing set off a furious debate over Google’s handling of the situation, with some accusing the company of silencing the engineer for speaking his mind. Supporters of women in tech praised Google. But for the right, it became a potent symbol of the tech industry’s intolerance of ideological diversity. Silicon Valley’s politics have long skewed left, with a free-markets philosophy and a dash of libertarianism. But that goes only so far, with recent episodes putting the tech industry under the microscope for how it penalizes people for expressing dissenting opinions. Damore’s firing has now plunged the nation’s technology capital into some of the same debates that have engulfed the rest of the country.

Such fractures have been building in Silicon Valley for some time, reaching even into its highest echelons. The tensions became evident with the rise of President Donald Trump, when a handful of people from the industry who publicly supported the then-presidential candidate faced blowback for their political decisions.

We’ve heard lots about Silicon Valley’s toxic culture this summer — its harassing venture capitalists, its man-child CEOs, its abusive nondisparagement agreements. Those stories have focused on how that culture harms those in the industry — the women and people of color who’ve been patronized, passed over, pushed out and, in this latest case, told they’re biologically less capable of doing the work in the first place. But what happens in Silicon Valley doesn’t stay in Silicon Valley. It comes into our homes and onto our screens, affecting all of us who use technology, not just those who make it. It’s bad enough for apps to showcase sexist or racially tone-deaf jokes or biases. But in many cases, those same biases are also embedded somewhere much more sinister — in the powerful (yet invisible) algorithms behind much of today’s software.

Many black-oriented newspapers – some more than a century old – have seen a slow decline in circulation in recent years, mirroring the overall decline in newspaper circulation. Both print and television Hispanic media, on the other hand, have enjoyed relative strength over the last decade, but that growth has now slowed. As the two largest Spanish-language television networks in the US, Univision and Telemundo are key providers of news for Spanish speakers. While viewership for some shows on these networks was roughly flat or even increased in 16, viewership for each network’s largest news program decreased at least slightly.

Black-oriented newspapers are a long-standing minority news sector in the US. The black press trade association (National Newspaper Publishers Association) currently lists around 150 members on its website, but few of these papers have regularly audited circulation figures, making it difficult to acquire audience figures for the sector as a whole. There are, however, some black-oriented newspapers – most of which are weekly or semiweekly – with recent circulation data available through the main audit bureaus that can serve as indicators. Among these, the data show that African American newspapers with a substantial amount of paid circulation either lost circulation or held steady from 2015 to 2016. For a number of mostly free-distribution newspapers, circulation results were more mixed.

House Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) and Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Mike Doyle (D-PA) wrote to Republican Committee leaders with a list of eight additional witnesses that they say should be added for the full committee hearing on the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality hearing. The two Democratic Committee leaders wrote that it is the responsibility of the Minority to balance the panel of witnesses at hearings before the committee. Reps Pallone and Doyle have selected the following individuals to be invited to testify:

Jonathan Jackson is a co-founder and the Head of Corporate Branding for Blavity.
Ruth Livier is an actress, writer, and doctoral student who is a pioneer in the fight for equal representation in media.
Jesse Vollmar is co-founder and CEO of FarmLogs,
Myrna Morales is an expert in library science in Boston.
Johari Farrar is a performer with the Truthworker Theater Company.
Brandi Collins is the Senior Campaign Director for Media and Economic Justice at Color of Change.
Steven Renderos is the Organizing Director at the Center for Media Justice.
Bryan Mercer is the Executive Director of Media Mobilizing Project.

In making decisions about the limits of free speech, Facebook often fails the racial, religious and sexual minorities CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to protect. The 13-year-old social network is wrestling with the hardest questions it has ever faced as the de facto arbiter of speech for the third of the world’s population that now logs on each month. In February, amid mounting concerns over Facebook’s role in the spread of violent live videos and fake news, Zuckerberg said the platform had a responsibility to “mitigate the bad” effects of the service in a more dangerous and divisive political era. In June, he officially changed Facebook’s mission from connecting the world to community-building. The company says it now ­deletes about 288,000 hate-speech posts a month. But activists say that Facebook’s censorship standards are so unclear and biased that it is impossible to know what one can or cannot say.

The result: Minority groups say they are disproportionately censored when they use the ­social-media platform to call out racism or start dialogues. “Facebook is regulating more human speech than any government does now or ever has,” said Susan Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project, a nonprofit group that researches the intersection of harmful online content and free speech. “They are like a de facto body of law, yet that law is a secret.”

A Georgia federal judge dismissed a class-action racial discrimination lawsuit filed by one current and one former CNN employee against the network's parent company Time Warner. The lawsuit had alleged racial discrimination at the news organization for more than 20 years, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The two black men who filed the lawsuit alleged they were compensated less than their white co-workers, were denied promotions and pay increases and that the “Defendants have engaged in a pattern and practice of racial discrimination in performance evaluations, compensations, promotions and terminations."

A diverse group of stakeholders is launching a new foundation to help diverse content creators find distribution. The Creative Thread Foundation is billed as a "a non-profit organization focused on breaking down barriers of entry for underrepresented content creators and those working behind the scenes in media and entertainment."

The coalition was launched in Washington on July 26, with the blessing and support of the Congressional Multicultural Media Caucus chairs Reps Tony Cardenas (D-CA), Yvette Clarke (D-NY), and Judy Chu (D-CA) and with an assist from co-founder and Fusion TV Correspondent Kimberly Brooks. Founding partners, there are over 60 of them, include everyone from Viacom, 21st Century Fox, Disney, Amazon, Fusion, the National Association of Broadcasters and AT&T, to Black Mamas Matter and Green 2.0.