Portside

• How an Army of internet Activists Challenged Big Cable and Won Again – Sam Thielman (Guardian)
• ‘Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us.’ – Jay Caspian Kang (New York Times Magazine)
• Behind NPR’s Decision to Remove Its Branding from a Latino USA Episode – Tyler Falk (Current)
• Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook Are at War over the Future News – Alyson Shontell (Leavenworth Times/Business Insider)
• After 9/11, We Were All Judith Miller – Raymond Bonner (Politico)
• How Western media Would Cover Baltimore If It Happened Elsewhere – Karen Attiah (Washington Post)

How an Army of Internet Activists Challenged Big Cable and Won Again
By Sam Thielman
April 24, 2015
Guardian

Not long ago, it would have been unthinkable for a coalition of discontented citizens to challenge the business decisions of multinational company with a market cap of nearly $150bn and a boss who plays golf with the president. Last week it happened, and the grassroots guys won. Again.
The $45bn Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, which would have been the biggest deal in cable history, is officially dead as of Friday morning. That outcome is due in no small part to consumers who managed to make their voices heard to regulators above the lobbying dollars of Big Cable who – in the last year alone – spent a combined $32m making sure they were heard in Washington.
 

‘Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us.’
By Jay Caspian Kang
May 4, 2015
New York Times Magazine

Since Aug. 9, 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department shot and killed Michael Brown, Mckesson and a core group of other activists have built the most formidable American protest movement of the 21st century to date. Their innovation has been to marry the strengths of social media — the swift, morally blunt consensus that can be created by hashtags; the personal connection that a charismatic online persona can make with followers; the broad networks that allow for the easy distribution of documentary photos and videos — with an effort to quickly mobilize protests in each new city where a police shooting occurs.
We often think of online activism as a shallow bid for fleeting attention, but the movement that Mckesson is helping to lead has been able to sustain the country’s focus and reach millions of people. Among many black Americans, long accustomed to mistreatment or worse at the hands of the police, the past year has brought on an incalculable sense of anger and despair. For the nation as a whole, we have come to learn the names of the victims — Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Tony Robinson, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray — because the activists have linked their fates together in our minds, despite their separation by many weeks and thousands of miles.

Behind NPR’s Decision to Remove its Branding from a Latino USA Episode
By Tyler Falk
April 24, 2015
Current

NPR made a rare decision earlier this month to remove its branding from an episode of a show it distributes after determining that an installment of Latino USA failed to meet editorial standards.
NPR asked Futuro Media Group, producer of Latino USA, to remove the NPR brand and logo from digital versions of the episode "Chuy and the Battle for Chicago.” Released four days before Chicago’s mayoral election, the hourlong installment focused on the campaign of Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, who opposed incumbent Rahm Emanuel.
In NPR’s judgment, the show made charges against Emanuel without giving the candidate a chance to respond, according to Mark Memmott, NPR’s supervising senior editor of standards and practices. WBEZ in Chicago replaced the episode with a repeat due to similar concerns.
 

Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook Are at War over the Future News
By Alyson Shontell
May 3, 2015
Leavenworth Times/Business Insider

Every social media platform, from Facebook to Twitter to Snapchat, is trying to find a way to win control over content and its distribution. Even Pinterest is hiring a media team in New York to chat with publications about how they can partner together, a social media executive told Business Insider.
Traditionally, media companies have operated independently and controlled their own destinies. They owned the whole content supply chain, from research to writing to publication to distribution. In the digital era, they built their own web sites, which drew loyal readers (direct traffic), and they sold most of the ads that ran on their sites, keeping 100% of the revenue. 
Those days are gone.

After 9/11, We Were All Judith Miller
By Raymond Bonner
April 21, 2015
Politico

If the sales of Judith Miller’s memoir are commensurate with the vituperation of the attacks on her, the royalties will mount. Her critics—they are many and loud—say the former New York Times reporter bears a responsibility for the Iraq war because the articles she wrote in the lead-up to the invasion advanced the Bush Administration’s contention that the country had weapons of mass destruction.
It’s easy to disparage Miller. Too easy. Censure her and we can sidestep looking at our own reporting, at broader disquieting questions about journalism since 9/11. As journalists, we all let our guard down in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack on American soil. We abandoned some of the most important journalistic principles—speak truth to power; hold governments accountable; display healthy skepticism—at the base of the American flagpole. And I don’t just mean the royal we, the institutional we. I, too, am culpable.  
 

How Western Media Would Cover Baltimore If It Happened Elsewhere
By Karen Attiah
April 30, 2015
Washington Post

If what is happening in Baltimore happened in a foreign country, here is how Western media would cover it:
International leaders expressed concern over the rising tide of racism and state violence in America, especially concerning the treatment of ethnic minorities in the country and the corruption in state security forces around the country when handling cases of police brutality. The latest crisis is taking place in Baltimore, Maryland, a once-bustling city on the country’s Eastern Seaboard, where an unarmed man named Freddie Gray died from a severed spine while in police custody.
Black Americans, a minority ethnic group, are killed by state security forces at a rate higher than the white majority population. Young, black American males are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than white American males.