Judith Siers-Poisson's News Articles

Black man, black woman, black baby

White man, white woman, white baby

White man, black woman, black baby

Black man, white woman, black baby.

- Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet

There is no doubt that the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States is historic. But does framing him as America's "first black president" show that we have not come nearly as far as we'd like to think?

The mainstream U.S. news -- and the majority of the American public, whether for or against him -- consider Barack Obama to be the first African American President. While he is certainly a member of the black community (and much more literally African-American due to his father being a Kenyan immigrant), he is also equally part of the white community. His mother was white. The grandmother who helped raise him (and whom he tragically lost to cancer on the eve of his election) was also white. But historically, and apparently to this day, to be black to any degree is to be exclusively black. Is our celebration of Barack Obama as the first black president proof that we haven't moved very far past the "one-drop rule"?

In the spring of 2007, when author Ted Nace set out to profile the emerging No New Coal Plants movement for Orion magazine, he had no idea that the assignment would turn into more than just a single article.

Nace had become interested in the anti-coal movement after reading an article in The Nation magazine, in which NASA's chief climate scientist James E. Hansen warned that another decade of continued growth in greenhouse gases would "guarantee" enough dramatic climate change to produce what Hansen called "a different planet." Hansen made it clear that the most important step that needed to be taken to avoid such a consequence was an immediate moratorium on new coal-fired power plants.

The Power of the Swarm

As Nace explored the anti-coal movement, he found that some of the most effective work was being done by small, rurally-based, grassroots groups linked together informally through computer networks. His Orion article, "Stopping Coal in Its Tracks," noted that in many cases this decentralized "swarm" had been more militant and more effective than the large groups known as Big Green.

Nace set up the website Coal Moratorium Now! to organize the information he was gathering on coal, then recruited two researchers, Meilin Chin and Michelle Chandra, to help him track down the status of every proposed coal plant they could locate. As word of the coal plants database spread, several people proposed moving it onto a wiki so that it could be more easily accessed and edited by multiple researchers.

The Center for Media and Democracy has never been shy about criticizing the public relations industry. That's what we do, and we're proud of it. You'd think that this would give PR people second thoughts before sending us their drivel. Unfortunately, they can't seem to help themselves -- even when that means that they end up tipping us off to their own efforts at sneaking product placements into TV shows such as American Idol.

A few months ago my email address was apparently "discovered" by a bunch of PR flacks. On an almost daily basis now, I receive emails -- often with a large picture file that slows down my email download -- excitedly heralding the latest two-bit client contract won by some PR firm in which I have no interest, and whose information I have certainly never requested. At first I just deleted them, but since they have become more frequent -- and therefore, more annoying -- I have started responding to them with a request to be taken off their list.

The irony of PR firms sending us news releases hit a new high, or low, this week. I received an unsolicited, but also "embargoed" news release, containing more than five megabytes of photo attachments, from Jennifer Windrum of the Swanson Russell Associates PR firm. An embargoed press release is one that is sent out to media outlets before the sender actually wants it to be released to the public. The purpose is to generate media interest and solicit pre-interviews so that when the story is ready to break, reporters are lined up to cover the story. Of course, the premise relies on the recipient having an interest in honoring the embargo. Reporters will honor these sorts of requests if they want to avoid getting on the bad side of the sender so that they can keep receiving additional news releases in the future.

On Wednesday, September, 5, 2007, I was pleased to participate in a panel discussion on The Agenda with Steve Paikin on Ontario Public Television in Toronto, Canada. (You can view the debate by going to this page and selecting the tab that says "Gardasil, Morality and Medicare" and then clicking on "view video" to the right.)

Thanks to the wonders of video uplinks, I was brought in with 2 other remote guests from Ottawa and Montreal. The other three guests were in the Toronto studio.