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.
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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