National Geographic acknowledges past racist coverage
March 13, 2018 by admin
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National Geographic acknowledged on Monday that it covered the world through a racist lens for generations, with its magazine portrayals of bare-breasted women and naive brown-skinned tribesmen as savage, unsophisticated and unintelligent.
“We had to own our story to move beyond it,” editor-in-chief Susan Goldberg told The Associated Press in an interview about the yellow-bordered magazine’s April issue, which is devoted to race.
National Geographic first published its magazine in 1888. An investigation conducted last fall by University of Virginia photography historian John Edwin Mason showed that until the 1970s, it virtually ignored people of color in the United States who were not domestics or laborers, and it reinforced repeatedly the idea that people of color from foreign lands were “exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages — every type of cliché.”
For example, in a 1916 article about Australia, the caption on a photo of two Aboriginal people read: “South Australian Blackfellows: These savages rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings.”
In addition, National Geographic perpetuated the cliche of native people fascinated by technology and overloaded the magazine with pictures of beautiful Pacific island women.
This examination comes as other media organizations are also casting a critical eye on their past. The New York Times recently admitted that most of its obituaries chronicled the lives of white men, and began publishing obituaries of famous women in its “Overlooked” section.
In National Geographic’s April issue, Goldberg, who identified herself as National Geographic’s first woman and first Jewish editor, wrote a letter titled “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.”
“I knew when we looked back there would be some storytelling that we obviously would never do today, that we don’t do and we’re not proud of,” she told AP. “But it seemed to me if we want to credibly talk about race, we better look and see how we talked about race.”
Mason said he found an intentional pattern in his review.
“People of color were often scantily clothed, people of color were usually not seen in cities, people of color were not often surrounded by technologies of automobiles, airplanes or trains or factories,” he said. “People of color were often pictured as living as if their ancestors might have lived several hundreds of years ago and that’s in contrast to westerners who are always fully clothed and often carrying technology.”
White teenage boys “could count on every issue or two of National Geographic having some brown skin bare breasts for them to look at, and I think editors at National Geographic knew that was one of the appeals of their magazine, because women, especially Asian women from the pacific islands, were photographed in ways that were almost glamour shots.”
National Geographic, which now reaches 30 million people around the world, was the way that many Americans first learned about the rest of the world, said professor Samir Husni, who heads the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi’s journalism school.
Making sure that kind of coverage never happens again should be paramount, Husni said. “Trying to integrate the magazine media with more hiring of diverse writers and minorities in the magazine field is how we apologize for the past,” Husni said.
Goldberg said she is doing just that, adding that in the past, the magazine has done a better job at gender diversity than racial and ethnic diversity.
“The coverage wasn’t right before because it was told from an elite, white American point of view, and I think it speaks to exactly why we needed a diversity of storytellers,” Goldberg said. “So we need photographers who are African-American and Native American because they are going to capture a different truth and maybe a more accurate story.”
National Geographic was one of the first advocates of using color photography in its pages, and is well known for its coverage of history, science, environmentalism and the far corners of the world. It currently can be found in 172 countries and in 43 languages every month.
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Trump Blocks Broadcom’s Bid for Qualcomm
March 13, 2018 by admin
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“There is a perception within the administration that China does not economically engage fairly with the United States and this action shows it will exercise various remedies to adjust the playing field to even the Sino-U.S. economic relationship,” said Tony Balloon, the head of the China corporate consulting practice at the law firm Alston Bird.
Mr. Trump was given an opening to block Broadcom’s bid for San Diego-based Qualcomm earlier this month. That was when the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, a government panel that typically works behind closed doors and reviews deals only after they are announced, said it would stall Broadcom’s bid because of national security concerns while it examined the deal.
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Broadcom said it was reviewing Mr. Trump’s order, and disputed the notion that the bid posed a security threat.
“Broadcom strongly disagrees that its proposed acquisition of Qualcomm raises any national security concerns,” a company spokesman said in a statement.
While Broadcom is based in Singapore, China was the main concern that drove Mr. Trump’s decision over the Qualcomm deal, because allowing an American technology company to be acquired would cede its primacy in the semiconductor and wireless industry.
Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, said in a statement that the decision was part of the administration’s “commitment to take all actions necessary to protect the national security of the United States.”
He said the order was based “on the facts and national security sensitivities related to this particular transaction only and is not intended to make any other statement about Broadcom or its employees, including its thousands of hard working and highly skilled U.S. employees.”
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Yet the order will undoubtedly raise questions about the extent to which the Trump administration is willing to intervene in private-sector decisions. While Qualcomm opposed Broadcom’s bid and had reached out to the foreign investment committee for a review, the proposal was nonetheless headed to the company’s shareholders for a vote. The foreign investment committee intervened before that could happen, refusing to let the shareholder meeting take place until after it had a chance to investigate.
John P. Kabealo, an attorney who specializes in foreign investment matters, said it was “extraordinary” that Mr. Trump would intervene in the transaction before a full investigation by the government panel was complete.
“It certainly aligns with the administration’s willingness to be more active in trade and implementing protectionist policies,” he said. “It is definitely a much more activist policy than the previous administration.”
Mr. Kabealo said the president’s order could dramatically change the world of mergers and acquisitions and open the door to the possibility that more bankers and lawyers would use reviews by the foreign investment committee to block hostile takeovers on national security grounds.
The president said his decision to block Broadcom’s bid had been based on the review by the foreign investment committee. The panel had said that the leadership of Qualcomm, which makes wireless chips and also licenses key wireless patents, was too important to let go of. The committee argued that economic leadership in next-generation high-speed mobile networks known as 5G, in which Qualcomm is a key player, was also a national security interest.
“China would likely compete robustly to fill any void left by Qualcomm as a result of this hostile takeover,” a United States Treasury official wrote in a letter to the companies last week.
As part of the presidential order, the United States also barred the 15 individuals who Broadcom had proposed for Qualcomm’s board from running, saying they were “disqualified from standing for election as directors of Qualcomm.”
Qualcomm acknowledged receiving the presidential order and said it had been told to reconvene its shareholder meeting at the earliest possible date, March 23.
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A presidential action against foreign investment in an American company is rare and has only taken place four times in the past 30 years, according to the law firm Ropes Gray. Scrutiny of foreign companies buying United States assets ramped up under President Barack Obama, including a presidential order barring a Chinese company from purchasing Aixtron, a German company with American assets, on national security grounds in 2016.
Under Mr. Trump, several deals involving foreign buyers have been squelched after a review by the foreign investment committee, including Moneygram’s sale to an affiliate of the Alibaba Group and Lattice Semiconductor’s sale to an investment firm with reported ties to the Chinese government. But the action against Broadcom was unusual because mergers are rarely killed before a publicly traded company’s shareholders are given the chance to decide on the offer for themselves.
The decision was a blow to Broadcom, which under its chief executive, Hock Tan, has built itself up through several acquisitions. Mr. Tan had gone to great lengths to deflect concerns by American regulators and the Trump administration, including appearing in a televised speech at the White House with Mr. Trump last November, during which Mr. Tan promised to redomicile Broadcom in the United States.
Broadcom had at one point in its negotiations with Qualcomm also offered to up its offer to acquire the company. After the foreign investment committee announced its investigation into the Qualcomm bid this month, Broadcom hastened plans to move its headquarters to the United States and sent a letter to lawmakers promising it would not slow research and development in 5G networking technology if the merger were approved.
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