Many years ago I launched a doc series called Latino in America. It was built off of a successful franchise doc series called Black in America. It was created for cnn and the goal was to report under-covered stories on Latinos. (How this connects to this bad tweet will be clear)1
The doing of the doc was not fun. Cnn did not employ very many latinos and While there were about 20 people on the doc, only two had spent much time covering these issues. Needless to say, the first attempt was a mess. There was a re-boot. 2/
Eventually the doc turned out really well—@rosemarce and I worked on it together and still work together to this day. The dilemma: how to promote the doc when cnn also employed notorious latino-hater Lou Dobbs. 3/
Every screening was met by protesters calling out the hypocrisy of cnn funding and platforming the anti-immigrant racism of dobbs. Protesters blocked entrances to cnn at columbus circle. They were always nice to me, but the jist was: at some point you need to call out the BS. 4
The protesters would shout me down in the q and a portion of the screenings. Rarely were there questions about thedoc—only, how can you create this content while ignoring the bullshit that your bosses are doing. I mean, we wanted to grow our Latino audience but... 5
..we also wanted to appeal to the people who enjoyed the racism of lou dobbs. Many in leadership knew tvey were supporting vile rhetoric but they were afraid of losing that audience, over latinos 6
I wanted to keep my job—which I liked—so I said nothing publicly. Tried to muddle thru tough screenings where I couldn’t help but agree with the people shouting at me. I basically thought: “I try to do my stuff well!” But of course that never frees one from responsibility 8
So back to this terrible @nytimes tweet. At some point when you work for a company that chronically fails on the journalism front—you might want to say—“this is a problem”. Maybe it’s eugenics. Or bad headlines. Or access-y coverage. But at some point you’ll see, your good job..9
...and doing that job well, isn’t enough to inoculate you from the bigger errors. Cnn never grew it’s latino audience btw—people could see that hypocrisy from a mile away.
Normalizing a pardoned war criminal’s clothing line is not normal... 10
Normalizing a pardoned war criminal’s clothing line is not normal... 10
...a @nytimes columnist citing studies from a white nationalist is not normal. You don’t have to sit quietly by, while sloppy journalism happens around you.
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[Sorry that thread took so long I’m on a train with bad service. As per usual, sorry for typos.]
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[Sorry that thread took so long I’m on a train with bad service. As per usual, sorry for typos.]
