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Local News Army Ethnic Media continued from page 1 The News Tribune. The ombudsman investigation resulted in more than a dozen soldiers getting a chance for a second PTSD screening by doctors from Walter Reed National Military Med- ical Center outside Washington, D.C. Fourteen of those soldiers will have the results of their Walter Reed reviews detailed in individual meetings at Madigan with Col. Rebecca Porter, chief of behavioral health, Office of the U.S. Army Surgeon General. © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be pub- lished, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Media PHOTO BY SUSAN FRIED member of the forensic psychiatric team talked about the need to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars and not rubber stamp PTSD diagnoses that could result in a sol- dier earning $1.5 million in benefits over a lifetime. The memo also drew the attention of law- makers. “This is an investigation that has only just begun,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who chairs the Senate Committee on Veter- ans Affairs. “The most important thing is that these service members and their families are pro- vided with answers on why cost was a fac- tor in the treatment they sought for the invisible wounds of war, and that the Army takes the right steps to fix it,” Murray told Lourdes Sampera Tsukada introduces the new Sea Beez website February 16th at a reunion dinner at Henry’s Taiwanese Restaurant. The Sea Beez is an organization of ethnic media in the Seattle/King County area. continued from page 1 She cited examples of photos of George W Bush cutting brush in a cowboy hat and the “Mission Accomplished” moment when Bush wore a pilot suit, as well as a lot of fighting language coming from the adminis- tration as examples of hyper-masculinity. “Despite the showroom presences of Con- doleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, girls and women were especially and utterly irrele- vant,” Douglas said. “We had no role in judging or influencing what the government did. “But we are still part of the nation,” she added, “and common-shared sto- ries about which we have strong opin- ions, are part of the glue that binds us together.” While celebrity journalism provided universal stories for women to discuss their values, Douglas feels the vast majority of what is communicated to women in celebrity journalism is neg- ative. On the screen she presented many magazine covers with strict messages about how women should be judged. “Women are to be judged first and fore- most by their appearances,” Douglas said. “The corporately defined standards of beau- ty remain very narrow, very white, and impossible to achieve. “[T]he line between being too thin and too fat is razor thin,” Douglas continued, “a policing and disciplining regime of body surveillance [...] has utterly naturalized in celebrity journalism.” Many readers consume celebrity content with a grain of salt, but the messages are very strong. For example, she said, these magazines prescribe that all female celebri- ties, and therefore women in general, should base their happiness on having a husband and children. “No woman is treated as complete with- lecture a Q-and-A session led by Professor David Domke, chair of the UW Department of Communication, focused on celebrity culture and social media. “I’ve seen a number of people comment on how they felt more connected to Whit- ney Houston’s death through their Face- book communities than any kind of traditional media environment,” Domke said. “So it seems that there is a relational capital with celebri- ties, that’s greater than it’s ever been, because everyone can quick- ly post something that is about that person.” With celebrity news more domi- nant, Douglas said, there has been a decrease in international news. “The great irony of our time,” Douglas said, “is that just when a globe-encircling grid of communications technology sys- tems, satellites, light-weight digital cam- eras, and the like indeed make it possible for Americans to see and learn more than ever before about the rest of the world, Americans have been rendered more isolat- ed and less informed about global politics by our media institutions.” Randal Beam, UW communication pro- fessor, asked Douglas: “I’m sort of wonder- ing if the impression you’re getting about the availability of international news has more to do with what you looked at as potential sources than what’s actually out there,” mentioning that sources like (Eng- lish-language) Al-Jazeera are available to most people now. Douglas responded by saying she is more interested, rightly or wrongly, in common experiences that people share through the media, and that what we have today with the web is much different than when Amer- icans watched three TV stations and heard a common story. Our common story, according to Douglas, covers in much more detail in the lives of celebrities than international events, and this trend is detrimental to American socie- ty. To learn more about Susan Douglas, check out her website at http://www.susanj- douglas.com minority kids with disabilities. Losen’s most recent study also looks at what works in terms of discipline of stu- dents. “It shows that there are alternatives to kicking kids out of school and onto the streets that work much better, and that in fact when you suspend large numbers it’s a predictor of kids dropping out,” he said. “In other words it’s contributing to our low graduation rates, this advent of zero tol- erance,” Losen says. “And so what it really suggests is that this kind of suspension is not educationally sound, it’s not good for any kids but this unsound practice is bur- dening kids of color a lot more than other kids. “And it can be replaced, there are more effective ways to do it and therefore really suggests as a matter of policy and practice that things have got to change.” Parents Unite Change? Tammy Tarver is already work- ing on it. We’ve got a group of parents – there are some whose kids are on an IEP (Individual- ized Education Plan), but it’s an old IEP and it has not been updated. There are parents who their kids are also on an IEP and they’re getting suspended on a regular basis too, or referrals. Getting some type of disci- plinary action. “For me I think it’s a low tolerance of kids that are different. Kids with different abili- ties. Those kids who can’t come and be a clone to the other ones, who can’t be still and shut up and just listen. Okay now we’re going to let you jump around for a bit, take five minutes and get up and jump around and then come back and sit down. “I’m telling them – my son has sensory processing disorder,” Tarver told The Skan- ner News. “The way he takes in the infor- mation, he may misinterpret what’s going on, he may not understand it, there may be too much information coming towards him – it could be a number of different things. “But they’re the ones with the profession- als with the letters after their names, you know?” Women are to be judged first and foremost by their appearances out a guy,” Douglas said. “Losing your man is a big tragedy, but remaining childless is a gigantic atomic disaster. “Julia Roberts was constantly hounded about having kids until her twins arrived,” Douglas explained. “George Clooney, by contrast, is not hounded about when he will reproduce.” Douglas’ talk focused on an era when social media were not yet popular; after the Sean Duncan is a student in the Univer- sity of Washington Department of Commu- nication News Laboratory. Suspensions continued from page 2 ring agent. And, on a national level, stu- dents of color facing discipline for the first time are typically given harsher, out-of- school suspension, rather than in-school suspensions, more often than white stu- dents,” according to the report. This definitely describes kindergarten mom Tarver’s experience at her son’s school. The boy was well-behaved during his mom’s interview with the Skanner News despite the fact that the game he brought to play with didn’t work. “I feel that as an educator, if you’re deal- ing with my child, you should have some type of understanding of what he is doing with himself and how you can accommo- date that,” Tarver says. “Not just that you see a kid who doesn’t want to do the assign- ment, well he throws it on the floor. To them that is being defiant; to him it means I can’t do this writing assignment, my hand hurts because I’ve been writing this long sentence with a lot of letters and my skills aren’t up to par. That’s what that means to him. “But to the teacher, he just doesn’t want to do the work, he’s not listening. ‘I told him to sit down and do his work and he threw the paper on the floor; he got up and walked away.’ But they’re two different things, but unless you take the time and know that – they’re in charge, and that’s a go home offense. That’s open defiance, that’s insub- ordination, that’s all kind of things. They’re all about do what I say and do it now.” Drop Outs Daniel Losen is the director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the UCLA Civil Rights Project. His most recent research in October of 2011 was called, “Kicked Out and Then a Dropout.” The study was a compilation of research showing the extent of discipline for “mostly mundane kinds of offenses like truancy, dress code violations, insubordination, foul language, that sort of thing — minor nonvi- olent offenses.” Over and over again Losen’s research reveals elementary, middle and high schools suspending kids at very high rates, but it also shows that among those high rates the highest are often for African American kids, other students of color, kids with disabilities, especially Next: Part 2: Solutions – and Failures February 22, 2012 The Seattle Skanner Page 3
