Check out this brassy clear voice on the Imess

I've just discovered, via a number of trenchant, brassy, and oh-so-cogent comments made on today's To The Point, Jasmyne Cannick, an African American woman blogger and political cauldron stirrer. Her point is: Imus, so what? Sure, the depraved should be deprived of a public, but who in the black community knows, or cares about, Don Imus? More importantly, Cannick pitches, it's the misogynists with currency, like Snoop Doggy Dog and 50Cent, who do the most damage. Oh, how she bewails the sisters bumping Snoop from their car windows, their young daughters captive in the back seat being primed for abuse in perpetuity!

The BLOG
(If you've got the stomach for it, check out the YouTube of a Snoop show. You'll see what Jasmyne means.)

Today's SHOW

NPR : CBS Radio Fires Don Imus in Fallout over Remarks

NPR : CBS Radio Fires Don Imus in Fallout over Remarks:

Background readings from the AP in a supplement, Rutgers v. Imus, this weekend at IMDiversity.com, plus commentaries by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Kam Williams, more at new Media, New Media and Communications Jobs & Readings section

ASNE: Percentages of Women and Minorities in America's Newsrooms Declined

This week on the IMDiversity.com Career Center Home Page:

According to the American Newspaper Editors Association 2007 survey on the representation of minorities in U.S. news media, the percentages of minority and women journalists working in America’s newsrooms both declined in the past year. According to ASNE, it is only the second time since the survey started in 1978 that the percentage of minorities has declined.

In a year marked by news organization layoffs that were headlines in themselves, ASNE’s annual “census” found that the percentage of minorities fell to 13.62 percent, down from 13.87 last year. The percentage of women also dropped from 37.70 to 37.56 percent.

The percentage of minorities in supervisory roles at daily newspapers dropped to 10.9 percent, equal to the percentage from two years ago.

The downward trend holds true for student and entry-level employment as well. According to ASNE’s release, the percentage of minority interns stands at nearly 27 percent, “a number that has continued to fall as newspapers cut back” on internships.

The one silver lining in the report seemed to come from online media. ASNE’s census of daily newspapers for the first time counted full-time staffers who work entirely at online publishing activities by their companies. Among online media staffs, the percentage of minorities on staff was an estimated 16 percent, which helped make the drop in overall employment numbers seem less severe than they might have been.

See a fuller report at IMDiversity, ASNE Report Finds Percentage of Minorities in Newsrooms Declining, or view detailed data tables from the census at the ASNE website.

Weekend Maintenance on IMDiversity

http://asianamericanvillage.blogspot.com/2007/03/weekend-maintenance-on-imdiversity.html:
Our site servers will be undergoing maintenance this weekend, starting midnight Friday. During this period there may brief outages on our sites at IMDiversity.com and the Multicultural Villages, the IMDiversity Career Center and Job Bank, and THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online Job Bank. We apologize for any inconvenience to our visitors and thank you for your patience."

Was Leni Riefenstahl an Alpha Girl?

This week's New Yorker contains a chilling article about Leni Riefenstahl, the icily stunning superwoman who was Adolph Hitler's sidekick and official cinematographer. She was a formidible woman who demonstrated great strength, intelligence, and ability. She was also a woman whose protean ego would crash, from time to time, into breakdowns, and whose narcissism would preclude her ability to form enduring relationships (though what a trail of takers she left in her wake!).
As more and more biographical details emerged in Judith Thurmon's overview of recent Riefenstahl bios, Riefenstahl seemed like a prototype for Dan Kindlon's Alpha Girls, a book I recently critiqued for the Professional Woman's Village. Kindlon's alpha girl is poised to become the defining force in American culture and economy in the short years to come. She's determined to advance her career at all expenses, has an overblown image of her ability and accomplishments, and is taken to boastful swagger.
"I am the marathon," Riefenstahl said before she even put a camera to the 1939 Berlin Olympics. It sounded all too recent, as the alphas' overflow of hubris:--“I will get what I want because I am aggressive” and the like--was still rankling in my brain.
My review seriously questions whether we, as women, want to see our young become super women in the alpha mode, and whether "arrival" means stepping onto and getting stuck in the sorely amiss blueprint for the alpha male, rendering quaint all notions of feminine, and of feminism. Or, should we support in our Generation Next a new paradigm of pride, limelight, and accomplishment that's celebrated in humility and wholeness, with room left over to flaunt our wiles and ways?

Find Is Today’s "Perfect" Seriously Flawed? on the Professional Women's site.

Chinese politician wins in N. Ireland - Yahoo! News

A fitting story following up on International Women's Day, and for our Women's History Month edition, moving toward St. Patty's Day -- this reported by By SHAWN POGATCHNIK of the Associated Press:

Chinese politician wins in N. Ireland

Anna Lo being called the first Chinese elected lawmaker in Europe

"Lo, a Hong Kong native who has lived in Northern Ireland for 32 years, on
Friday became the first ethnic minority to be elected to political office in
this almost exclusively white British territory. Chinese media reports also
described her as the first Chinese person to be elected as a lawmaker anywhere
in Europe."

and this...

"Lo, the 56-year-old chief executive of the Chinese Welfare Association in Belfast, said many of the approximately 10,000 Cantonese-speaking residents of Northern Ireland have lived here for more than three decades — and had never voted before her candidacy."

WHM and Hillary Clinton

Commentary from Hispanic American Village Editor Carol Amoruso, traveling abroad and mulling over...

Thoughts on WHM and the Candidacy of Hillary Clinton
Since 1940, more than 30 women have been elected or appointed heads of countries, often where one might not expect it. Can it happen here? Maybe it depends on our images and stereotypes of women leaders -- and if we want an alpha or nurturer.