BirminghamWatch

If you’re a reporter, how sneaky are you willing to be? Here’s an exercise.

I’ve never seen “sneakiness” listed among the requirements for any reporter jobs but maybe it should be. A reporter for the McCurtain (Oklahoma) Gazette-News ended up with a flabbergasting story when he secretly left a voice-activated audio recorder in a public meeting room after citizens were told to leave a session of the McCurtain County Commission. The reporter, believing county officials had a practice of continuing to discuss government business in violation of the state open meetings law, retrieved the recorder and discovered comments lamenting that Black criminals couldn’t be lynched anymore and talk of killing local reporters. Read more and take the test..

by Tom Arenberg

A Demon and a Lemon: Big-Name Firings Were Not the Same

You ought to do some soul-searching if you’re a big-time media figure who gets fired and the media reporters have to offer possible reasons in list form But that won’t happen with Tucker Carlson, who, despite being fired by MSNBC, CNN and now Fox, is incapable of shame. And maybe he couldn’t find his soul anyway. One remarkable aspect is that Fox even did this to its biggest ratings winner. Read more.

by Tom Arenberg

Monuments Commemorating Confederacy Persist in Alabama

About 48 memorials honoring the Confederacy were removed in 2022, according to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. However, the report noted that many southern states, including Alabama, make it a crime to remove the monuments, most of which went up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to celebrate white supremacy. “This is not what democracy looks like,” said Susan Corke, director of the Intelligence Project for SPLC. Read more.

by Ralph Chapoco, Alabama Reflector

In Brandon Miller Case, Blaming the Media Is Way Too Simple

The University of Alabama men’s basketball program ended its season Friday having squandered its national championship chances and its good reputation. In the same process, the reputation of the news media took a thorough pounding, as well. Many UA fans blamed the press — mostly the press outside of Tuscaloosa — for sparking national hatred of the program that showed itself in arena chants and on social media, culminating with death threats and armed security for star player Brandon Miller, who was part of the chain of events that led to the shooting death of a young mother. I got to wondering if the blame was valid. Read more.

by Tom Arenberg

A Speculative Top 10 List of Fox News’ “Journalistic Processes”

Fox News may not be capable of shame, but the public humiliation of it from the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit just keeps getting better. Dominion claims Fox News damaged it by knowingly broadcasting false claims that Dominion engaged in vote fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Among the current legal contests in the case is whether to protect or reveal some internal Fox communications that are currently blacked out in legal filings. On March 10, Fox lawyers argued for continued secrecy because “prematurely disclosing these other details on Fox’s internal and proprietary journalistic processes may allow competitors to appropriate these processes for their own competitive advantage.” Just goes to show that you can find good comedy anywhere. Read more.

by Tom Arenberg

Big, Unanswered Questions Don’t Have a Statute of Limitations

After Alabama basketball player Darius Miles was charged with capital murder, coach Nate Oats called NFL Hall of Famer Ray Lewis for advice. I don’t know what Lewis might have told Oats beyond what has been reported, but he might have said: “The damn news media will never let it go.” Read more.

by Tom Arenberg

I’m Failing to Get Outraged About the Death of The Birmingham News

Gonna make this short because, as grateful as I am for every wonderful person who has ever read an Arenblog post, I write primarily for my students, and I can assure you they don’t give a sheet* about the end of newspapers in three of Alabama’s largest cities. Today marked the end of The Huntsville Times, The Mobile Press-Register and The Birmingham News, for which I busted my tail for 30 years and in which I took enormous pride (on its good days, anyway). Read more.

by Tom Arenberg

New Book Offers Glimpse Into the Life of Harper Lee

“Afternoons with Harper Lee” (NewSouth Books, 2022) by Wayne Flynt Among the millions of documents preserved in the Birmingham Public Library Archives, there is a brief, handwritten letter from Harper Lee to a fellow writer. In the letter, Lee explains that she cannot read a book that has been sent to her and lists a variety of ailments that have made reading difficult. “As Gilda Radner would say.” Lee writes, “It’s always something.” This is one of the items that archives staff regularly bring out to show visitors, although it is wasted on 21st century college and high school students, who rarely have a clue who Gilda Radner was or that she was one of the comic geniuses of the last century. But what makes this letter intriguing is that it tells us something about the life and tastes of a widely beloved but intensely private author. Like many people, Harper Lee watched Saturday Night Live and quoted lines from the show. Small nuggets like this are at the heart of Wayne Flynt’s new book, “Afternoons with Harper Lee.” Flynt, a professor of history at Auburn University, and his wife Dartie, befriended Lee after a stroke forced her to leave New York and return to her hometown in Monroeville. Read more.

by James L. Baggett

New Book Explores Stories of Early African American Activists in Birmingham

Segregation in the New South: Birmingham, Alabama, 1871-1901 (Louisiana State University Press, 2023) by Carl V. Harris Birmingham is known around the world as a place where African Americans fought and sometimes died to secure their rights as citizens and dismantle Jim Crow segregation. But Jim Crow did not spring up fully formed, nor was it a system that had always existed. It was the product of a long and tortuous push and pull between blacks seeking justice and whites seeking control. At its birth in 1871, Birmingham was a Reconstruction-era city, and Birmingham came of age in a time when white Southerners and African American Southerners, many only a few years removed from enslavement, were struggling to find their places in a new post-war racial order. This is the story, and the stories of early African American activists who are largely unknown today, that Carl V. Harris tells in his new book Segregation in the New South: Birmingham, Alabama, 1871-1901. Harris, who taught history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, died before completing this book. His colleague, W. Elliott Brownlee, edited and finished the manuscript. Harris’ earlier book, Political Power in Birmingham, 1871-1921 (University of Tennessee Press, 1977), was the first scholarly book on Birmingham’s history and it is still indispensable for anyone wanting to understand the political dynamics of Birmingham’s early decades. Read more.

by James L. Baggett

Sometimes You Shouldn’t Stay Out of the Story

In late December, a reporter for the Bend (Oregon) Bulletin who was assigned to report on dangerously cold weather wrote a first-person account of his decision to summon help for a shivering woman living in a tent. He feared she might not survive the night. Compassionate and heroic, is it not? Apparently not, because he got torn to shreds on Twitter – so much so that the next day he posted that he was taking a break from the “unrelenting hatred” on the platform. Read more.

by Tom Arenberg