Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 677

Amazon to test full-time, full-salaried 30-hour work week

FILE - In this June 30, 2011 file photo, a United Parcel Service driver delivers packages from Amazon.com in Palo Alto, Calif. Amazon is offering deals July 12, 2016, for the second edition of its annual "Prime Day" promotion. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File) (Credit: AP)

Online retail giant Amazon announced a pilot program in which full-time employees would have their work-weeks cut to 30 hours without seeing an equivalent cut in pay.

The workers will continue to receive the same benefits and salaries as their 40-hour colleagues, and they will be expected to perform at the same levels they currently are — however, the company is banking that the reduced hours will increase the productivity and creativity of those involved.

“We want to create a work environment that is tailored to a reduced schedule and still fosters success and career growth,” Amazon said in a statement. “This initiative was created with Amazon’s diverse workforce in mind and the realization that the traditional full-time schedule may not be a ‘one size fits all’ model.”

Ellen Galinsky, the president of the Families and Work Institute, told The Post’s Karen Turner that “[t]here has for a very long time been a stigma against working reduced hours, or part-time work. Even names like that, ‘part-time’ or ‘reduced,’ make it seem like a deviation from the norm, like you’re doing less.”

The initiative was first announced at a seminar entitled “Reinventing the Work-Life Ratio for Tech Talent,” a clear reference to The New York Times’ devastating 2015 expose on the company’s work culture.

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A life in limbo: The ‘doubly invisible’ Mexican immigrants

Fidencio Luna (left) sits with his wife and the executive director of the immigrant rights organization El Centro in Staten Island as he fills out paperwork to receive his first Mexican passport. Photo courtesy of Amy Lieberman. (Credit: Amy Lieberman)

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

For the past 10 years, Fidencio Luna maintained a set routine — work, home, then work again — that sometimes expanded to include the occasional bar visit with friends. He never once strayed beyond the perimeters of New York City.

Traveling was complicated because up until June, Luna, 26, did not have any form of official photo identification, neither from the Mexican nor the U.S. governments. That changed after a debilitating hit-and-run accident left Luna with severe injuries, and captured the attention of local media and the Mexican Consulate. The Mexican government issued Luna his first passport soon after the accident and also helped him process forms for an emergency protection visa.

The visa will pave a path to legal residency in the United States for Luna. Even just the Mexican passport could be transformative for immigrants, however. It will help Luna open a bank account and travel more widely beyond his base of Staten Island, a New York borough dense with immigrants.

Lack of identification

But the unrecognized existence is all Luna has known in the United States and he questions how much these documents can turn his life around. Up until recently, he was bound by a fake identification card and cash-only transactions, placing him in a vulnerable situation.

He remains unemployed from his off-the-books construction job following his accident, and he now faces sustained injuries and medical debt with dwindling savings and no health care. He is not sure how the Mexican passport can solve these problems, since it still will not grant him access to health care or disability benefits. Still, the passport can bring longer-term benefits, which Luna had long ago given up on.

“Years ago I went to the Mexican Consulate for a passport and I didn’t have the right documents to prove my identity,” explained Luna while waiting in the office of a Staten Island-based non-profit, El Centro, for his new passport. “I didn’t have anything to prove my identity. And then it wasn’t important. No one asked for my ID. I couldn’t find a reason to want one.”

Upwards of 700,000 Mexican immigrants living in the United States lack birth certificates or valid photo identification, according to the Mexico City-based Be Foundation. These are the “doubly invisible,” unrecognized in both their native and adopted countries. They represent a portion of the estimated 7 to 10 million Mexicans who live without birth certificates, as the Be Foundation estimates.

“The reason they are not being registered is that up until a year ago, it cost about $45 to register a child, which can be a huge amount for people,” said Karen Mercado, president of the Be Foundation, which has lobbied for registration reform in Mexico.

“Now, it’s free, but we have all of these people who have been living their lives without any fundamental rights to anything, lacking opportunities. They essentially don’t exist,” Mercado said.

The problem is universal and not concentrated in Latin America. South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa report the lowest rates of birth registration, while just 65 percent of all births are registered globally, according to United Nations figures. Contributing to this trend are the cost to register a child — as once was the case in Mexico — inaccessibility to government offices and lack of awareness.

The challenges of living without any state recognition can infringe upon daily life in the United States, restricting access to everything from library cards to bus tickets. These effects are felt most acutely among the country’s nearly 12 million Mexican immigrants, accounting for its largest percentage of foreign-born residents.

Across the United States, 50 Mexican Consulate branches routinely dispatch mobile units to connect with Mexican nationals and issue passports, or in rare cases, birth certificates. The Mexican government prides itself on its ability to issue a passport within an hour, faster than almost all other foreign consulates.

Proof of identity

Yet the bureaucratic process can be tricky for some immigrants to navigate, especially when they are presented with a nearly impossible scenario: Many, like Luna initially, do not have the proper forms, such as a school diploma or ID cards to prove they are who they say they are. Others might not be registered at all in the government’s database.

The New Jersey-based non-profit Mi Casa Es Puebla works for months with clients to build their paper trail back in Mexico. Documents proving a person’s baptism and military service, or even a note from a local mayor verifying a one-time residency, can help form the case for identity.

“People might have been born at home and then later were registered or not, so we try to find pieces of information that show they were actually born in their city or town,” said Patricia Ruiz-Navarro, director of the Puebla-funded organization that works closely alongside the Mexican state and federal government.

Each month the Mexican Consulate issues more than 1,000 passports and Mexican state ID cards in Mi Casa Es Puebla’s Passaic, N.J., office. Not all passports go to first-time holders. Attendees at a mobile consulate session on a recent Saturday morning said they were seeking passport renewals or IDs to replace lost cards.

The consulate in New York and Los Angeles said it does not formally track how many people seek brand-new birth certificates or passports.

“We can give them both passports and birth certificates. It happens often that people come without any form of identification. We try to help them. Sometimes they really do not have anything and we try to help them. Other times we refer them to the localities where they were born, to speak with a mayor of their village, maybe,” said Carlos Gerardo Izzo, the spokesperson for the Mexican Consulate in New York.

Fear of deportation

The immigrants in the most vulnerable positions likely do not wind up at one of these mobile consulate events, filled with rows of government officials at tables and patiently waiting visitors armed with papers and pens. The issue has also not caught on with major immigrant rights groups in the United States, said Don Kerwin, the executive director of the New York-based Center for Migration Studies, as immigration reform has dominated policy work.

“For the most part a document is not always something that rises to the top of the list for Mexican people, unless they really find themselves in a position of vulnerability,” Ruiz-Navarro explained. “Many people go about their days just hustling and working. It’s about social capital and some people have that, and others might not be so exposed to it.”

Lack of registration has rippled political effects. The phenomenon is likely limiting applications from immigrant children seeking deportation relief, said Robert Smith, the director of the New York-based Mexican Initiative for Deferred Action, an initiative that promotes Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). An expansion of DACA, President Barack Obama’s relief program for children, was stalled in June in the Supreme Court. The initiative could still benefit as many as 2.3 million brought to the United States as children.

“People who are eligible are not applying,” said Smith, noting some are afraid they’ll be deported.

Federal legislation now pending implementation in Mexico would push Mexican Consulates to identify populations who are entirely unregistered, not detectable in their database.

“We have a 1-800 number so people can call us and help us find them,” Mercado said.

“It would be impossible for us to say how many people would fall in this category. It could go up to a million. There are an incredible amount of people in this situation and what is most interesting is when you talk to them, people will say, ‘I thought I was the only person like this.'”

Luna says that it’s normal among his friends in Staten Island to live without an ID. It took several letters from Luna’s primary school and local municipality to help piece his case together, said Favio Ramirez-Caminatti, director of the immigrant rights and community group El Centro in Staten Island.

Now, Luna’s focus is on a slow physical recovery, following serious injury to his ankle. He’s hopeful he will eventually visit his parents back in Mexico, but is still unable to walk without the aid of his crutches.

“We’ll have to see if it [the passport] can fix things and how it will change my life.”

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My face is catfish bait: I’m the “40-year-old man” face of deceptive online dating — and I think I know why they do it

The author in one of his stolen photos

“I honestly can’t believe I am even emailing you, but your face has meant a lot to me. And now I’ve found out it’s a lie.”

The note came from a woman I had never met. I would have considered it spam, but it was too well written and there were no links for erectile dysfunction pills. She read my blog, she looked at my pictures and she was devastated.

She was not, in fact, the first woman to contact me about this. The Facebook friend request icon had glowed red the night before, and behind door number one was another stranger, Helen. I did what I always do first and expanded her profile picture, my willingness to accept someone’s friendship based on the openness of their face and the shape of their smile. Head tilted slightly to the side, a few strands of blonde hair falling gracefully over one eye, a wistful smile, and all of it softened with a forgiving filter; it was a textbook selfie. I’ve watched my youngest daughter strike this pose so many times, I’m convinced she can do it in her sleep. Once, when we were engaged in an argument, she wedged a selfie in between the words, “You’ve ruined”— head tilt, smile, click— “my life!” But, I didn’t recognize this woman from Canada, so I waited a respectable 30 minutes before clicking confirm.

“Are you familiar with POF?”

The message appeared almost as soon as I accepted the friend request.

“I am not,” I replied.

“Plenty of Fish is a free online dating site.”

I unfriended her. I blocked her. I checked to make certain my anti-virus settings were up to date. We had no mutual friends. She must have been a Canadian sex line operator, eh?

But, now here was this email from another woman describing how she had had a four-year online relationship with someone who assumed the identity of a 43-year-old man, grieving the death of his wife.

“I probably sound crazy. But after a short Google image search, I came across you.”

When I put two and two together, I unblocked Helen on Facebook and sent an apology. I told her I thought I knew why she contacted me and she replied by sending a URL. After I clicked on the link, I expanded the profile picture, head tilted toward the camera, chin down to strengthen the bearded jawline, eyes slightly scrunched. It was a textbook selfie, and it was me.

But it was not me. He listed his age as 10 years younger than mine and his height three inches taller. He was single, not looking for anything serious. His personality was inexplicably listed as “Athletic.” I felt flattered. I felt creeped out. I felt like someone had broken into my home, but I didn’t know what he had touched or stolen, other than my face. If two women within 24 hours had contacted me, how many others had he scammed?

I right-clicked my profile picture and selected “Search Google for images.” That’s when I discovered my face floats to the top for the search phrase “40 year old white man.”

I was Dieter Falk on the social network VK in Berlin, and I was John, the president of a luxury property management company, in Kentucky. On LinkedIn, I was Richard, a car dealer in the Greater Boston area, and I was Peter, an IT consultant in Melbourne, Australia. On Yelp, I was Alfonso in Waterbury, Connecticut, griping about the local Kmart — one star. I was Kalledsson on a Swedish dating website and IsThisHowYouDoItNow, a single divorced Canadian man on Plenty of Fish. It was not just one man, but many who had robbed me of my face. I was every man and no man and I was freaked out.

But the most common link to my picture was one that led back to me, the real me, the one who had been writing about his life and posting it online, the one who shared intimate details with a world of strangers on his blog, “The Authentic Life.” The one, who 10 years ago, before the TV series and the term catfish even existed, came out as gay to his wife in the punchline of all American tales — a Walmart.

“I’ve grieved to the depths of my soul over someone who never even existed.”

After my make-believe world fell apart and my wife and I divorced, she packed up our daughters and moved 700 miles away. I started therapy. I began to date. I created a profile on Yahoo Personals. This was in the era of flip phones and BlackBerries, before anonymous sex could be ordered up by browsing through a menu of headless torsos on Grindr and Ubered over piping-hot in less than 10 minutes.

I chose a photograph of myself that was truthful, and the only one I thought flattering. It was one my daughter Marisa had taken of me. In it, I am standing in a church parking lot, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a clean-shaven, pensive look. It was taken six months before our small family disintegrated. In the background, you could see a church steeple in a slice of blue sky surrounded by thunderhead clouds. But the photograph was less about what was behind me and more about what was in front of me. Marisa, from her diminutive angle, captured someone who appeared solid, tall and ready to move forward.

I briefly dated a guy from the tony town of Lexington, Massachusetts, who wondered aloud if I might look gayer if I shaved my head and grew a goatee, so I did, and then never heard from him again. At a gay father’s support group, I hooked up with a man who was not a father, but was looking for a Daddy. When he asked me if I wanted to see his collection of vintage washing machines in the basement, I decided to find it cute and quirky. After we had sex, he immediately stripped the sheets off the bed, walked down the cellar steps and shouted up, “I’ll call you later.” But he never did.

When I met Paul at a Cheesecake Factory in the Burlington Mall a week after Thanksgiving, I looked nothing like my profile picture. I was 30 pounds heavier, my head was shaved bald and my goatee dyed jet black.

“I sent an updated picture to you this afternoon,” I offered, by way of an apology.

Paul looked like his pictures, actually better. He was the tall, handsome, preppy soccer dad type with a ready smile and thick salt-and-pepper hair. It’s confounding to find someone so attractive while simultaneously feeling envious of their beauty.

“I didn’t get your updated picture,” he said “But I recognized that smile.”

When the hostess led us to our table, Paul allowed me to go first, guiding me by placing his hand on the small of my back.

“Still, and especially after all that has happened, I am so glad to see you happy in your everyday life.”

I fell hard in love with Paul, before he fell in love with me. I know this, because a month after we began dating, I was still so riddled with insecurity that I created a fake profile on Yahoo Personals and assumed the identity of Bob Smith, a transplant from Michigan. With a name so generic, I thought, he had to believe it was real. I sent a message to Paul from Bob and when he responded that he “still hadn’t found Mr. Right,” I was devastated.

I broke down in my therapist’s office and his brow became wrinkled with concern.

“Bill, that’s not you,” he said.

What he meant was that my actions were not me, that I was acting figuratively and quite literally out of character. But, wasn’t that who I was? For my entire life, I had pretended to be someone else. Hadn’t I always been an impostor? I was playing cat and mouse with the only person I had ever truly romantically loved and so I extinguished Bob Smith and became me, the real me. And I became happy. And I became happily married to Paul.

“Social media makes connecting with a random stranger pretty easy to do.”

When I asked the two women why they contacted me, their answers were startlingly similar. The catfisher had chosen to use one of my photographs with my hand to my forehead, wedding ring exposed. When they found out who I had been and who I had become and that he was compromising my new authenticity, they felt protective. They connected with the better part of him and in their minds that was me.

Why did this man, and all the others choose my likeness? What did they see and who did they hope to become? A friend told me that my profile image “really is a good picture,” which means it doesn’t really look like me, and I’m OK with that, because it’s not me. It’s a static image of my face taken at a good angle. Perhaps it was the universe’s poetic response, the man who pretended to be another becomes the one others pretend to be.

I think most of us fool the world a little bit each day. On social media we choose the most flattering photos, smoothing a wrinkle here, whitening a smile there and applying a soft filter. We share the good and hide the bad. This is not something new. We’ve been doing it for ages; now we have better tools.

But there is a difference between putting your best face forward and assuming an entirely different one. Catfishing is reprehensible, make no mistake about it, but I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t understand their motives. Exhibit A stares back at me through the camera lens and my past actions often haunt my dreams. I have contacted the websites and most of the pictures of me have been removed, but there is still an active profile on Plenty of Fish with my likeness. I have toyed with the idea of setting up a fake profile, posing as someone else and ensnaring him. But I can’t. That’s not me.

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Ranking the best TV shows: “I certainly could have been talked into ‘The Wire’ or ‘The Sopranos'”

"Deadwood" (Credit: HBO)

How does television history look from 2016, more than a decade into what many are hailing as a new golden age? That’s the subtext of “TV (The Book),” which is far more engaging than its clumsy title implies. Essentially an enormous annotated list, the volume aims to come up with the best narrative television programs of all time, ranked from acknowledged winners like “The Sopranos” and “The Simpsons” to less obvious choices like “Terriers” and “WKRP in Cincinnati.” The book only considers U.S.-based series and miniseries, though several shows with international casts like “Game of Thrones” are included.

The book’s authors, longtime TV critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, assessed each show they considered using six criteria: innovation, influence, consistency, performance, storytelling and peak (which refers to how good the show was at its absolute best.) When they counted the  scores, the top spot became a five-way tie between “The Simpsons,” “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Cheers” and “Breaking Bad.” The next five are “Mad Men,” “Seinfeld,” “I Love Lucy,” “Deadwood” and “All in the Family.”

Salon spoke to Sepinwall, who began his career at The Newark Star-Ledger and is the author of “The Revolution Was Televised.” The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

This seems like a book designed to spark arguments. You approached it in a semi-scientific way, setting up criteria for what made these shows great and enduring. Was that the original vision for the book?

Matt and I actually resisted the idea of ranking for a very long time. Our original editor on the project — who left before we wound up writing it — was the one who really pushed us and said, No, you want to rank it, and we eventually sort of saw the light in that way. Our fear was basically: We don’t want to spark arguments; we don’t want to make people angry. Then we realized at a certain point how much we personally enjoyed arguing over what should be in, what should be out and tiers and everything else.

So once we went with that, our thoughts were, OK, what do we value in TV? What are some things that we feel the very best shows ever have in common? What are different ways that you can identify this show is great or, in certain cases, this show is important? So there are some shows that are ranked a little higher or lower because of importance. Like “I Love Lucy,” because it’s so hugely influential to every comedy that was made after it, even if it wasn’t funny, and it’s funny, would have ranked pretty highly just based on those first couple of categories.

On the flip side, you have a show like “Parks & Recreation,” which was not influential at all and was not doing anything new and was just so good at it that it wound up in the list. We just sort of said, What are things we value and can we quantify that? Eventually we had five categories, which we expanded to six, and that’s how it happened.

So you’ve got a bunch of different ways of looking at these shows. Interestingly, even with this rigorous approach, you ended up with five shows tied at the top: “The Simpsons,” “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Cheers” and “Breaking Bad.” How did you figure out which one was your personal favorite, and how did it come out differently for each of you?

When we had the five-way tie, we thought — and this is something we did with every other show in the pantheon once we were done writing — that maybe what we should do is go through these five, category by category and say, Well, really do I think that “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” are equally innovative or whatever? Have the scores go head to head and maybe move some things up and maybe move some things down, and if we did it that way, maybe we would wind up with a clear winner.

We thought about that for a long time and then eventually we felt like no, when you have shows at this level, it’s no longer about the numbers: It’s about something less quantifiable. Let’s argue it out. And that’s what led to our decision to just get in Gchat for a couple of days and just talk out. Why do I value this show? I imagine Matt went into it convinced that “The Sopranos” was gonna be the No. 1 show. I felt pretty good about “The Simpsons” as my idea. But I certainly could have been talked into “The Wire” or “The Sopranos” and eventually we went with “The Simpsons.”

One interesting thing about the book that, I think, could throw some older people is that, while there are exceptions like “I Love Lucy” and “All in the Family,” most of the shows up in the top ten and the next tier are from the last decade or so — the post-“Sopranos” period. I don’t disagree that this has been a great era for television, but is that fair? Have you gotten any resistance from older people who have read your rankings?

My mom has gone through the book and is very upset that a lot of her favorite shows from the ’50s and ’60s are not in there and said of a lot of these, “I’ve never heard of this; I’ve never heard of that.” That’s just among people who have seen advance copies. We were really mindful, because we’re both in our 40s, we didn’t want to be afflicted by recency bias. I said that so much that Matt got sick of me saying it.

There are probably some older shows that should be in there. “Naked City” is probably a blind spot that just neither of us had watched enough episodes of. So it didn’t get in there. I think, for the most part, TV’s just better now and it’s more in the drama than in the comedy.

When I was doing interviews for “The Revolution Was Televised,” people would ask me if I could do an equivalent version for comedy, and I said not really, because you could make a plausible list of the best TV dramas of all time and not have a single one that predates “The Sopranos,” and it would be a plausible list. If you did the same for comedy, you’d be leaving out “Lucy.” You’d be leaving out “The Honeymooners.” You’d be leaving out “Dick van Dyke” and “All in the Family” and “M*A*S*H” and “Mary Tyler Moore” and a bunch of other things. Then you’d just look like the young punk who says that all the new stuff is good and the old stuff isn’t.

So we tried our best, but I do think that — as we articulate at one point in the introduction — there’s more freedom in TV to do more kinds of things now and to aspire to more than there was in the early days. So when a show was great in the ’50s or ’60s or even ’70s, it was more of a miracle than it is now because the creators had to fight against so many forces that were pushing against the idea that TV even should try to be great.

I did an unscientific poll on Facebook the other day, and it was interesting how it broke down generationally. The older people felt the need to sort of champion older shows, like “don’t forget” and then they’d name their favorite series from the ’50s or ’60s. They were swamped by Gen Xers writing in “Breaking Bad” and “The Wire” and so on.

One of my favorite running experiences when we were both at The Star-Ledger together was that any time I would write about “The Sopranos” and talk about it like it’s one of the greatest things ever, which it is and was, there was this one guy who called himself the “Criterion Kid” and he’d write these long, dismissive slug screeds about how “The Sopranos” is so overrated and it’s no “Berlin Alexanderplatz.” And he always mentioned “Berlin Alexanderplatz.” And the fact that I had not seen the miniseries version of “Berlin Alexanderplatz” was proof that I was a bad critic and that none of the modern stuff could hold a candle to the better things that had been made either earlier or overseas.

That’s great, but it’s just sort of a different genre.

One of the reasons we have that section on the live plays of the 1950s is to sort of make the argument that, yes, there was great drama back then. It looked and sounded very different from what we think of as “quality drama” now, but there was that at the start of the medium. That was referred to for so long as “the golden age,” so if you call now “the golden age,” it’s at most TV’s second, and probably, TV’s third golden age because the “Hill Street Blues” period got called the second golden age by people.

In the top ten, what you call “The Inner Circle,” one show pleasantly surprised me. We have things like “The Simpsons,” “The Sopranos” and “The Wire,” which are talked about all the time and which I knew would be on there, and then you have shows that were critically acclaimed decades ago like “All in the Family” and “Cheers.” In any case, the show here that surprised me was “Deadwood.”

You are not the first to make that observation.

I don’t challenge it at all, but it feels like the least likely of that top ten, right?

If you had ever worked with us or spent more than five minutes with Matt and me, this would not have been a surprise to you. It’s the show both of us, but Matt especially, can’t stop talking about. It’s always been a very special little pet of ours. I think the reason it seems surprising to people, and this has come up when I talk to other TV critics too, they can get dismissive of it because it didn’t have an ending — or allegedly didn’t have an ending. That’s all it is. “The Sopranos” finished. “The Wire” finished. “Six Feet Under” finished. All these other shows finished, and sometimes people didn’t like the ending. They don’t like the ending of “Battlestar Galactica” or “Lost.” Or some people hate the ending of “The Sopranos,” frankly. But they ended the way the creators wanted them to.

“Deadwood” — everybody knew that HBO cut it off for whatever reason, and therefore can an unfinished masterpiece be held up on the same level as the others? The argument that we would make is (a) The actual ending that Milch was forced to shoot is the perfect ending for the show — even if there’s more story he could have told. The actual final scene of Swearengen scrubbing out the blood — there is no possible better end to everything that “Deadwood” was about than that scene and (b) even if you accept that it’s unfinished, it’s so good in those three seasons that if it actually did have a fourth that went through the fire and the rebuilding of the Gem and Bullock meeting Teddy Roosevelt and all the other stuff that it could have been about, it would have been in an argument for the top spot.

You say it’s downgraded by some people for not having an ending. But I think it also, more than any of these shows at the top with one exception, it didn’t really have an audience?

If you look at those ratings, especially compared to a lot of what’s on now, it did pretty well. There was even one year where it aired back to back with “The Sopranos.” In that year I think it did very well. That’s probably the greatest two-hour block of dramatic television in the history of the medium, even though that wasn’t necessarily the best “Sopranos” season. But it definitely wasn’t as watched as the others; that’s for sure. But nobody watched “The Wire” when it was on. No one did. That show has had sort of this huge afterlife in a way that “Deadwood” hasn’t necessarily.

One of the things we’re hoping that happens with this book is not just “Deadwood” but “Frank’s Place” and “Easy Street” and “Terriers” and some of the other lesser-known shows — I hope that they get rediscovered. Or in some cases, when there’s not even a home-video version, like “Frank’s Place,” maybe somebody pushes to finally have it released.

A lot of the shows in this book are gimmies. At least half of what’s in the top 100, if you ask any semiserious TV fan to guess what we put on it, they’d be able to very easily. Those shows should be in there and I’m happy they’re there and I think a lot of the writing we did about those is great. But what I hope is a bigger impact of the book ultimately is things like that or “In Treatment,” where they’ve been forgotten and they certainly shouldn’t be.

What makes “Deadwood” so indelible for you?

It has among the richest characters in the history of the medium, especially Al Swearengen, but really everybody. The dialogue is astonishingly good. Every time I go back and revisit it, I sort of discover new lines that I had just forgotten because they get buried under the metric tonnage of every other great line in it. There are certain moments in it of some sort of elemental power like when Swearengen euthanizes the Reverend Smith — I’ve seen it a million times and it still leaves me shaking every time. There are only a handful of other TV shows ever, including “The Wire” and “The Sopranos,” which it was contemporaneous with, that make me feel that way.

One show that I thought would be in the top ten, and it’s very close, is “M*A*S*H.” If you’re my age, it was known as being the great show of the period when we were growing up. And it was a show that a lot of kids and their parents had in common. I think it still has a real meaning for people looking back, and I say that without having watched an episode of it for many years. How do you think it stands up? What’s its place in television history?

“M*A*S*H” was actually originally in the top ten. When I mentioned before that at the last second we re-ranked things, “M*A*S*H” was the most notable victim in that it slid I think from 10 to 11 and switched places with “All in the Family.” I can’t remember exactly what scores got altered that ultimately changed it, but I think part of it was just consistency.

It ran for so long and there were so many different version of “M*A*S*H.” You have some people who adore the Larry Gelbart version where it’s just sort of straight comedy, and some who prefer the much more dramatic Alan Alda-driven version or they like the version in the middle by Ken Levine and David Isaacs that’s sort of a blending of the two. It’s kind of three or four different shows in one. Sometimes you can pull that off — like “Cheers” is two shows in one, but they’re both great shows. So I think that’s probably what elbowed it out. But it’s certainly no sin to be the 11th greatest show of all time by our ranking.

Parts of it have aged well; parts of it haven’t. Matt wrote about the treatment of women and the fact that even though it’s a feminist show and Alan Alda was like almost infamously feminist, the female characters other than Margaret are essentially just sort of there to help Hawkeye realize his own awesomeness.

Yeah, they’re sort of sex objects or prudes or some kind of female stereotype.

One of the things we did when we started splitting off to write the essays is we would start queueing up episodes of the shows. For instance, I watched “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet” again, which is the one where Hawkeye’s childhood friend dies in the operating room. And I rewatched “POV,” which is the one that’s shot as if you’re seeing through the eyes of the soldier who has gone temporarily mute. Those are like 40-year-old shows and they hold up incredibly well and don’t feel dated. It’s impressive.

When you went back to watch older shows were there any surprises that really didn’t stand up?

Not necessarily for the process of this. That’s happened with some other things. Like I go back sometimes and I watch old “SNL” sketches, and they seem much flabbier. They feel guilty of all of the sins that I accuse the current “SNL” of.

But in terms of this, not really. But we were also sort of mainly looking at the cream of the crop. It’s not like we went back and watched the full run of “M*A*S*H” or the full run of “Cheers” or, god help us, the full run of “Gunsmoke.” We were looking at memorable episodes or sometimes just memorable scenes to pull a quote or look for some sort of thematic thing. 

We did the rankings before we went back and rewatched things. Our feeling was, we’ve done this long enough, both professionally and amateurishly, to feel like we knew the shows without that. So we were able to score them up on that level.

When you started at the Star-Ledger in 1996, would you have guess at that point that television would be as good and as varied and complex as it is now?

I kind of stumbled into TV criticism through the side door. I was a summer intern at the Star-Ledger and the paper’s TV critic couldn’t go to press tour so I got sent instead. It was sort of a whole series of happy accidents. But I felt like I had sort of gotten in at the best possible moment, because this was the era of “Seinfeld” of “Frasier,” “The Simpsons” at its peak. “NYPD Blue,” “ER,” “Homicide,” things like that. “X-Files.” I’m like, Wow, this is the best TV’s ever been! It can’t possibly get any better than this.

Then a couple of years later, one of our editors says, “Hey, this guy I went to college with, James Gandolfini, is gonna be in some new show about the Jersey mob. I think we should do something about that.”

So we had a front-row seat for everything that happened afterward. But certainly I could not have imagined the TV of today, like any part of it. If you had traveled back in time and handed me an iPhone and said, “Here’s 13 episodes of a show about a daredevil that was all released at once, streaming, and you can watch it on this phone right now,” I probably would have had a coronary.

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The great Mexican wall deception: Trump’s America already exists on the border

The Arizona-Mexico border fence near Naco, Arizona. (Credit: Reuters/Samantha Sais)

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

At the federal courthouse, Ignacio Sarabia asks the magistrate judge, Jacqueline Rateau, if he can explain why he crossed the international boundary between the two countries without authorization. He has already pleaded guilty to the federal misdemeanor commonly known as “illegal entry” and is about to receive a prison sentence. On either side of him are eight men in the same predicament, all still sunburned, all in the same ripped, soiled clothes they were wearing when arrested in the Arizona desert by agents of the U.S. Border Patrol.

Once again, the zero tolerance border enforcement program known as Operation Streamline has unfolded just as it always does here in Tucson, Ariz. Close to 60 people have already approached the judge in groups of seven or eight, their heads bowed submissively, their bodies weighed down by shackles and chains around wrists, waists and ankles. The judge has handed out the requisite prison sentences in quick succession — 180 days, 60 days, 90 days, 30 days.

On and on it goes, day-in, day-out. Like so many meals served in fast-food restaurants, 750,000 prison sentences of this sort have been handed down since Operation Streamline was launched in 2005. This mass prosecution of undocumented border crossers has become so much the norm that one report concluded it is now a “driving force in mass incarceration” in the United States. Yet it is but a single program among many overseen by the massive U.S. border enforcement and incarceration regime that has developed during the last two decades, particularly in the post-9/11 era.

Sarabia takes a half-step forward. “My infant is four months old,” he tells the judge in Spanish. The baby was, he assures her, born with a heart condition and is a U.S. citizen. They have no option but to operate. This is the reason, he says, that “I’m here before you.” He pauses.

“I want to be with my child, who is in the United States.”

It’s clear that Sarabia would like to gesture emphatically as he speaks, but that’s difficult, thanks to the shackles that constrain him. Rateau fills her coffee cup as she waits for his comments to be translated into English.

Earlier in April 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, still in the heat of his primary campaign, stated once again that he would build a massive concrete border wall towering 30 (or, depending on the moment, 55) feet high along the 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexican border. He would, he insisted, force Mexico to pay for the $8 billion to $10 billion barrier. Repeatedly throwing such red meat into the gaping jaws of nativism, he has over these last months also announced that he would create a major “deportation force,” repeatedly sworn that he would ban Muslims from entering the country (a position that he regularly revises), and most recently, that he would institute an “extreme vetting” process for foreign nationals arriving in the United States.

In June 2015, when he rode a Trump Tower escalator into the presidential campaign, among his initial promises was the building of a “great” and “beautiful” wall on the border. (“And no one builds walls better than me, believe me. I will do it very inexpensively. I will have Mexico pay for that wall.”)  As he pulled that promise out of a hat with a magician’s flair, the actual history of the border disappeared. From then on in Election 2016, there was just empty desert and Donald Trump.

Suddenly, there hadn’t been a bipartisan government effort over the last quarter-century to put in place an unprecedented array of walls, detection systems and guards for that southern border. In those years, the number of Border Patrol agents had, in fact, quintupled from 4,000 to more than 21,000, while Customs and Border Protection became the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country with more than 60,000 agents. The annual budget for border and immigration enforcement went from $1.5 to $19.5 billion, a more than 12-fold increase. By 2016, federal government funding of border and immigration enforcement added up to $5 billion more than that for all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.

Operation Streamline, a cornerstone program in the “Consequence Delivery System,” part of a broader Border Patrol deterrence strategy for stopping undocumented immigration, is just one part of a vast enforcement-incarceration-deportation machine. The program is as no-nonsense as its name suggests. It’s not The Wall, but it embodies the logic of the wall: either you crossed “illegally” or you didn’t. It doesn’t matter why, or whether you lost your job, or if you’ve had to skip meals to feed your kids. It doesn’t matter if your house was flooded or the drought dried up your fields. It doesn’t matter if you’re running for your life from drug cartel gunmen or the very army and police forces that are supposed to protect you.

This system was what Ignacio Sarabia faced a few months ago in a Tucson court.  His tragedy is one that plays out so many times daily a mere seven blocks from where I live.

Before I tell you how the judge responded to his plea, it’s important to understand Sarabia’s journey and that of so many thousands like him who end up in this federal courthouse day after day. As he pleads to be with his newborn son, his voice cracking with emotion, his story catches the already Trumpian-style of border enforcement — both the pain and suffering it has caused, and the strategy and massive build-up behind it — in ways that the campaign rhetoric of both parties and the reporting on it doesn’t. As reporters chase their tails attempting to explain Trump’s wild and often unfounded claims and declarations, the on-the-ground border reality goes unreported. Indeed, one of the greatest “secrets” of the 2016 election campaign (though it should be common knowledge) is that the border wall already exists. It has for years and the fingerprints all over it aren’t Donald Trump’s but the Clintons’, both Bill’s and Hillary’s.

The wall that already exists

Twenty-one years before Trump’s wall-building promise (and seven years before the 9/11 attacks), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began to replace the chain link fence that separated Nogales, Sonora, in Mexico from Nogales, Ariz., in the United States with a wall built of rusty landing mats from the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. Although there had been various half-hearted attempts at building border walls throughout the twentieth century, this was the first true effort to build a barrier of what might now be called Trumpian magnitude.

That rusty, towering wall snaked through the hills and canyons of northern Sonora and southern Arizona forever deranging a world that, given cross-border familial and community ties, then considered itself one. At the time, who could have known that the strategy the first wall embodied would still be the model for today’s massive system of exclusion.

In 1994, the threat wasn’t “terrorism.” In part, the call for more hardened, militarized borders came in response, among other things, to a never-ending drug war.  It also came from U.S. officials who anticipated the displacement of millions of Mexicans after the implementation of the new North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which, ironically, was aimed at eliminating barriers to trade and investment across North America.

And the expectations of those officials proved well justified. The ensuing upheavals in Mexico, as analyst Marco Antonio Velázquez Navarrete explained to me, were like the aftermath of a war or natural disaster. Small farmers couldn’t compete against highly subsidized U.S. agribusiness giants like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. Mexican small business owners were bankrupted by the likes of Walmart, Sam’s Club and other corporate powers. Mining by foreign companies extended across vast swaths of Mexico, causing territorial conflicts and poisoning the land. The unprecedented and desperate migration that followed came up against what might be considered the other side of the Clinton doctrine of open trade: walls, increased border agents, increased patrolling and new surveillance technologies meant to cut off traditional crossing spots in urban areas like El Paso, San Diego, Brownsville and Nogales.

“This administration has taken a strong stand to stiffen the protection of our borders,” President Bill Clinton said in 1996. “We are increasing border controls by fifty percent.”

Over the next 20 years, that border apparatus would expand exponentially in terms of personnel, resources and geographic reach, but the central strategy of the 1990s (labeled “Prevention Through Deterrence”) remained the same. The ever-increasing border policing and militarization funneled desperate migrants into remote locations like the Arizona desert where temperatures can soar to 120 degrees in the summer heat.

The first U.S. border strategy memorandum in 1994 predicted the tragic future we now have. “Illegal entrants crossing through remote, uninhabited expanses of land and sea along the border can find themselves in mortal danger,” it stated.

Twenty years later, more than 6,000 remains have been found in the desert borderlands of the United States. Hundreds of families continue to search for disappeared loved ones. The Colibri Center for Human Rights has records for more than 2,500 missing people last seen crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. In other words, that border has become a graveyard of bones and sadness.

Despite all the attention given to the wall and the border this election season, neither the Trump nor Clinton campaigns have mentioned “Prevention Through Deterrence,” nor the subsequent border deaths. Not once. The same goes for the establishment media that can’t stop talking about Trump’s wall. There has been little or no mention of what border groups have long called a “humanitarian crisis” of deaths that have increased five-fold over the last decade, thanks, in part, to a wall that already exists. (If the people dying were Canadians or Europeans, attention would, of course, be paid.)

Although wall construction began during Bill Clinton’s administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) built most of the approximately 700 miles of fencing after the Secure Fence Act of 2006 was passed. At the time, Senator Hillary Clinton voted in favor of that Republican-introduced bill, along with 26 other Democrats. “I voted numerous times when I was a senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in,” she commented at one 2015 campaign event, “and I do think you have to control your borders.”

The 2006 wall-building project was expected to be so environmentally destructive that homeland security chief Michael Chertoff waived 37 environmental and cultural laws in the name of national security. In this way, he allowed Border Patrol bulldozers to desecrate protected wilderness and sacred land.

“Imagine a bulldozer parking in your family graveyard, turning up bones,” Chairman Ned Norris, Jr., of the Tohono O’odham Nation (a Native American tribe whose original land was cut in half by the U.S. border) told Congress in 2008. “This is our reality.”

With a price tag of, on average, $4 million a mile, these border walls, barriers and fences have proven to be one of the costliest border infrastructure projects undertaken by the United States. For private border contractors, on the other hand, it’s the gift that just keeps on giving. In 2011, for example, the DHS granted Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, one of our “warrior corporations,” a $24.4 million upkeep contract.

In Tucson in early August, Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence looked out over a sea of red “Make America Great Again” caps and t-shirts and said, “We will secure our border. Donald Trump will build that wall.”  He would be met with roaring applause, even though his statement made no sense at all.

Should Trump actually win, how could he build something that already exists? Indeed, for all practical purposes, the “Great Wall” that Trump talks about may, by January 2017, be as antiquated as the Great Wall of China given the new high-tech surveillance methods now coming on the market. These are being developed in a major way and on a regular basis by a booming border techno-surveillance industry.

The 21st-century border is no longer just about walls; it’s about biometrics and drones. It’s about a “layered approach to national security,” given that, as former Border Patrol Chief Mike Fisher has put it, “the international boundary is no longer the first or last line of defense, but one of many.” Hillary Clinton’s promise of “comprehensive immigration reform” — to be introduced within 100 days of her entering the Oval Office — is a much more reliable guide than Trump’s wall to our grim immigration future. If her bill follows the pattern of previous ones, as it surely will, an increasingly weaponized, privatized, high-tech, layered border regime, increasingly dangerous to future Ignacio Sarabias, will continue to be a priority of the federal government.

On the surface, there are important differences between Clinton’s and Trump’s immigration platforms. Trump’s wildly xenophobic comments and declarations are well known, and Clinton claims that she will, among other things, fight for family unity for those forcibly separated by deportation and enact “humane” immigration enforcement. Yet deep down, the policies of the two candidates are far more similar than they might at first appear.

Navigating Donald Trump’s borderlands now

That April day, only one bit of information about Ignacio Sarabia’s border crossing to reunite with his wife and newborn child was available at the Tucson federal courthouse. He had entered the United States “near Nogales.” Most likely, he circumvented the wall first started during the Clinton administration, like most immigrants do, by making his way through the potentially treacherous canyons that surround that border town.

If his experience was typical, he probably didn’t have enough water or food, and suffered some physical woe like large, painful blisters on his feet. Certainly, he wasn’t atypical in trying to reunite with loved ones. After all, more than 2.5 million people have been expelled from the country by the Obama administration, an average annual deportation rate of close to 400,000 people. This was, by the way, only possible thanks to laws signed by Bill Clinton in 1996 and meant to burnish his legacy. They vastly expanded the government’s deportation powers.

In 2013 alone, Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out 72,000 deportations of parents who said that their children were U.S.-born. And many of them are likely to try to cross that dangerous southern border again to reunite with their families.

The enforcement landscape Sarabia faced has changed drastically since that first wall was built in 1994. The post-9/11 border is now both a war zone and a showcase for corporate surveillance. It represents, according to Border Patrol agent Felix Chavez,  an “unprecedented deployment of resources,” any of which could have led to Sarabia’s capture. It could have been one of the hundreds of remote video or mobile surveillance systems, or one of the more than 12,000 implanted motion sensors that set off alarms in hidden operational control rooms where agents stare into large monitors.

It could have been the spy towers made by the Israeli company Elbit Systems that spotted him, or Predator B drones built by General Atomics, or VADER radar systems manufactured by the defense giant Northrup Grumman that, like so many similar technologies, have been transported from the battlefields of Afghanistan or Iraq to the U.S. border.

If the comprehensive immigration reform that Hillary Clinton pledges to introduce as president is based on the already existing bipartisan Senate package, as has been indicated, then this corporate-enforcement landscape will be significantly bolstered and reinforced. There will be 19,000 more Border Patrol agents in roving patrols throughout “border enforcement jurisdictions” that extend up to 100 miles inland. More F-150 trucks and all-terrain vehicles will rumble through and, at times, tear up the desert. There will be more Blackhawk helicopters, flying low, their propellers dusting groups of scattering migrants, many of them already lost in the vast, parched desert.

If such a package passes the next Congress, up to $46 billion could be slated to go into more of all of this, including funding for hundreds of miles of new walls. Corporate vendors are salivating at the thought of such a future and in a visible state of elation at homeland security tradeshows across the globe.

The 2013 bill that passed in the Senate but failed in the House of Representatives also included a process of legalization for the millions of undocumented people living in the United States. It maintained programs that will grant legal residence for children who came to the United States at a young age and their parents. Odds are that a comprehensive reform bill in a Clinton presidency would be similar.

Included in that bill was, of course, funding to bolster Operation Streamline. The Evo A. DeConcini Federal Courthouse in Tucson would then have the capacity to prosecute triple the number of people it deals with at present.

After taking a sip from her coffee and listening to the translation of Ignacio Sarabia’s comments, the magistrate judge looks at him and says she’s sorry for his predicament.

Personally, I’m mesmerized by his story as I sit on a wooden bench at the back of the court. I have a child the same age as his son. I can’t imagine his predicament. Not once while he talks does it leave my mind that my child might even have the same birthday as his.

The judge then looks directly at Sarabia and tells him that he can’t just come here “illegally,” that he has to find a “legal way” (highly unlikely, given the criminal conviction that will now be on his record). “Your son,” she says, “when he gets better, and his mother, can visit you where you are in Mexico.”

“Otherwise,” she adds, he’ll be “visiting you in prison” — not exactly, she points out, an appealing scenario: seeing your father in a prison where he will be “locked away for a very long time.”

She then sentences the nine men standing side by side in front of her for periods ranging from 60 days to 180 days for the crime of crossing an international border without proper documents. Sarabia receives a 60-day sentence.

Next, armed guards from G4S — the private contractor that once employed Omar Mateen (the Pulse nightclub killer) and has a lucrative quarter-billion-dollar border contract with Customs and Border Protection — will transport each of the shackled prisoners to a Corrections Corporation of America private prison in Florence, Ariz. It is there that Sarabia will think about his child’s endangered heart from behind layers of coiled razor wire, while the corporation that runs the prison makes $124 per day for incarcerating him.

Indeed, Donald Trump’s United States doesn’t await his presidency. It’s already laid out before us, and one place it’s happening every single day is in Tucson, only seven blocks from my house.

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Inclusion is key to better TV: It’s time to reframe the “diversity” conversation

Rutina Wesley in "Queen Sugar," Minnie Driver and Micah Fowler in "Speechless" (Credit: OWN/ABC)

Diversity is having its moment again in Hollywood.

If you’re a person who champions the idea that the shows you’re watching should more accurately reflect the varied experiences of the country’s population, that sentence should irritate you. It may be especially vexing for people with long memories, who recall the last time Hollywood made an effort to put diversity at the forefront of its hiring and development efforts. And the time before that.

As this Christian Science Monitor piece published 1982 shows us, diversity in Hollywood is a little like flared jeans, cycling in and out of fashion every few years.

The Writers Guild of America and/or the Directors Guild of America releases a report, or a major media outlet publishes a story on the paucity of minority leads, directors and writers working during a specific television season. Audiences and organizations such as the NAACP express outrage.

Television networks reply with a form of “We need to do better!” after which black, Latino, Asian and a couple of Native American actors and actresses suddenly pop up as series regulars on several popular shows. In particularly fashion-forward years, maybe a network will take a chance on greenlighting a series starring a person of color. Ta-dah! Diversity! Audiences and the media are appeased. Executives pat themselves on the back.

But like every pair of comfortable jeans, it only takes a few passes through the laundry cycle before the color fades out. Eventually every one of these “diverse” shows ends and, season by season, the schedule gets whiter. Then a new series of reports emerges. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Inclusion, not diversity

There are many reasons that the hiring rate of minority writers, directors and talent waxes and wanes over the years, all of which start with industry attitudes and practices that are perpetuated by the people at the top and trickle down.

But what would happen if we examined the impact of the word “diversity” itself? What if, instead, the industry were to reframe the conversation to prioritize inclusion?

Looking at one term versus another may seem like a matter of semantics. But for an industry that has long placated audiences by moving the needle based on data, it’s a radically different way of thinking.

Paying attention to diversity makes good business sense in the long run. According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, ethnic minorities will become the majority of the U.S. population in 2044. More than half of the births in the U.S. since 2013 have been to people of color.

Networks don’t even have to look to the future to find reasons for investing in inclusivity now: African-Americans, Asians, Latinos and Native Americans currently wield a combined purchasing power of $3.4 trillion — a huge incentive for advertisers.

Even so, in industry terms, showing a commitment to diversity tends to mean scanning the roster and adding a bit more melanin into a few casts. For a time, that was enough — and for people of color struggling to get a foot in the door, it means finding more work.

Satisfying basic diversity requirements does not necessarily translate to audiences seeing an increase in broadly appealing stories that reflect the people and the world around us, though. Adopting an attitude of inclusion does.

“We have to move past the ‘ticking a box’ stage into proper hires,” said Victoria Mahoney, who has directed several episodes of the Starz comedy “Survivor’s Remorse.” Speaking to reporters at the Television Critics Association’s summer Press Tour in Los Angeles, the veteran director explained that the difficulty she faces is twofold.

First, in spite of having directed television for five years, her experience is still doubted by those who would hire her. Second, she must constantly battle the misrepresentation that directors of color aren’t available or don’t exist.

“My interest isn’t to go out and meet people who are curious to meet the unicorn,” she said. “My interest is to meet people who say, ‘I am going to hire a woman of color for this film or this TV show, full stop.’”

Director Ava DuVernay, who serves as executive producer of OWN’s upcoming “Queen Sugar,” cited the difference between the two concepts in a recent interview featured in The Hollywood Reporter.

Where diversity pushes to get more men and women of color into director’s chairs and writers’ rooms, inclusion is about keeping those people in those positions, promoting them to the head of table or making them the star of the show. It means letting their perspectives add fascinating new tones to established storytelling formats.

DuVernay demonstrates what inclusion means by staffing the majority of “Queen Sugar’s” writers’ room with people of color and women, and ensuring that each of the first season’s 13 episodes was directed by a woman, including Mahoney.

“I believe there’s a special value in work that is a reflection of oneself as opposed to interpretation,” DuVernay told THR. “When I see a film or a TV show about black people not written by someone who’s black, it’s an interpretation of that life.”

On cable, it’s starting to happen 

Making the transition from an environment that opens and closes the diversity spigot every so often, into one that practices inclusion as a matter of course, may be moving forward more quickly on cable. Credit the niche nature of subscription-based channels for this, as well as cable’s ever-growing need to find fresh content.

In addition to OWN’s content, WGN America has “Underground,” co-created by a black woman, Misha Green. In two weeks MTV will premiere “Loosely Exactly Nicole,” starring comedian Nicole Byer.

Starz has “Power” and “Survivor’s Remorse” in its roster, both anchored by African-American ensembles, with a superhero series, “Tomorrow Today,” on the way from “Power” executive producer Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. Also in the works is a series adaptation of Alisa Valdes’s novel “Dirty Girls Social Club,” and the highly anticipated “American Gods,” featuring an international multi-ethnic cast.

Speaking to the success of “Power” and “Survivor’s Remorse,” Starz CEO Chris Albrecht touted the fact that black, Asian-American and Latino people play significant roles in front of and behind the cameras of both shows.

“Their incredible season over season growth is a testament to how vital diversity is in entertainment and to our success as a programmer,” Albrecht told reporters.

Elsewhere, FX president and CEO John Landgraf recently revealed the steps his network has taken to increase the hiring of female and minority directors. At a press tour, Landgraf touted that FX increased its minority and female director hires from 12 percent in the 2014-2015 television season to 51 percent at present.

Again, that’s diversification. However, this fall FX is debuting “Atlanta” from Donald Glover, who created, produces, writes, stars in and directs the comedy along with director Hiro Murai. Eschewing glamour, “Atlanta” depicts what life is like for the city’s poorer residents through the eyes of Glover’s character Earn Marks.

FX also is introducing “Better Things,” from “Louie” alum Pamela Adlon, about a single mom raising three daughters. Adlon serves as the show’s co-creator, writer, director, executive producer and star, intimately shaping its stories.

Elsewhere, both HBO and Showtime have series on deck starring men and women of color; HBO scored a coup in “Insecure,” which was created and is executive produced by its star, Issa Rae.

Showtime, meanwhile, will debut the limited series “Guerrilla” in the spring, which is written, directed and produced by Oscar winner and Emmy nominee John Ridley, with Idris Elba producing and co-starring. It also greenlit a pilot based on an idea from executive producer Jamie Foxx, with former “Saturday Night Live” player Jay Pharoah in the lead role.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and by adding in streaming services such as Hulu (home of “The Mindy Project”), Netflix (“Marvel’s Luke Cage”), and Amazon (“Transparent”), one sees even greater opportunities for creatives and executives to champion inclusive hiring and storytelling.

A tale of two networks

On broadcast, meanwhile, there are fewer new series starring men and women of color, although a number of new series on Fox, NBC and ABC feature minorities as co-leads or in prominent supporting roles.

For his part, Kenya Barris, creator and showrunner of ABC’s Emmy-nominated comedy “black-ish,” is flat-out tired of talking about “diversity.” The strength of his series is the way that it mines comedy from universal situations that grow out of his own experiences, or those of his writing staff. That there are episodes that happen to deal with racial profiling or using the “N” word reflect the perspective he brings to the script as a black man in America, but it doesn’t exclude the wider audience from enjoying itself.

“I would be so happy when diversity is not a word,” Barris said with a note of fatigue during a Television Critics Association press conference. “I have the best job in the world, and I am constantly having to talk about diversity … These are amazing talented actors and amazing writers who give their all … and it’s clouding the conversation.”

He’s not wrong.

For another illustration of the difference between “diversity” and “inclusion,” take a look at CBS’s fall line-up versus ABC’s.

When CBS Entertainment President Glenn Geller appeared before the Television Critics Association earlier this month, his press conference was loaded with mentions of diversity, diversifying and being diverse. A combination of those terms was used by Geller and reporters 34 times in all, in less than 30 minutes. If those in attendance had been playing a “diversity” drinking game, scores of reporters and industry reps would have died of alcohol poisoning before 10 a.m.

Geller was quick to announce a slew of actors and actresses of color who had been bumped up to series regulars or were joining veteran shows as proof of the network’s commitment to diversity. The network also paneled midseason series “Doubt,” which co-stars transgender actress Laverne Cox, part of an ensemble led by Katherine Heigl and Dulé Hill.

However, long before “Doubt” premieres, CBS will introduce three new comedies: “Kevin Can Wait,” “Man with a Plan” and “The Great Indoors,” starring Kevin James, Matt LeBlanc and Joe McHale. It’s also debuting three dramas: “Bull,” starring “NCIS” alum Michael Weatherly, “Pure Genius,” starring Dermot Mulroney, and a remake of “MacGyver.”

White actors headline all of these series, joining a schedule very much lacking in diversity, to use the term intentionally.

All 10 of the showrunners for the network’s fall programs are white, and the majority of the scribes in the networks’ writers’ rooms are also white. In fairness, CBS isn’t alone in this territory. Variety recently crunched the numbers for a fall across all broadcast networks, and found that 80 percent of the showrunners for all new broadcast network programs are male, and 90 percent are white.

ABC can’t brag about adding any minority male or female showrunners to its lineup either; then again, it already has “black-ish,” and “Fresh Off the Boat,” which features an Asian-American family and was created by Nahnatchka Khan. It’s also home to “The Real O’Neals,” with stories told from the perspective of a gay teen.

Joining that lineup is “Speechless,” a new comedy with Minnie Driver portraying the driven, overbearing mother to a teenager with cerebral palsy, played by Micah Fowler. “Speechless” is one of two ABC series featuring children with special needs; the other is “American Housewife.”

“Speechless,” though, is remarkable for a number of reasons, foremost being that it is written to showcase Fowler’s comedic abilities.

“If you just hear the logline of a show with a kid with a disability, it suggests that ‘after school special’-ness. And that’s why we were really vigilant about doing everything we could to subvert that as early as possible in the pilot,” explained Scott Silveri, the comedy’s creator and executive producer. “…We’re very aware of the tropes and wanted to make it as active as possible.”

Emphasizing Fowler’s contribution to the show’s playful tone is notable, given the delicacy with which television has long treated characters with disabilities. One of the more winning aspects of his character, JJ, is how ruthlessly acerbic he can be without saying a word. Fowler appreciates that as well. Asked what the biggest difference is between past roles and his “Speechless” character, he simply replied, “JJ is funny.”

That, too, is an example of what’s great about inclusion.

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Where’s the diversity in media? How newsrooms fail to reflect America and why it matters

This piece originally appeared on BillMoyers.com.

This ad in The Washington Post jumped out at me. In one tight photograph, it quickly telegraphs what’s wrong with the news media today and why the audience isn’t growing.

Yes, it’s great to see young women flourishing on the campaign trail. Yes, the casual chic may appeal to some millennials. But given that our country is on its way to the long-dominant white majority becoming the minority, this photo doesn’t reflect society. If I were an African-American or Hispanic — and I’m not — I would not see myself in this photo. (OK maybe if you look really closely you might discern that Kristen Welker, second from right, is biracial. Her mother is black and her father white.)

It’s photos like this and census data about the news industry that prompted the National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists to make continued lack of diversity in newsrooms a topic at their recent joint convention in Washington.

Currently, minorities make up 37.02 percent of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. No newsrooms match this.

For more than a decade, the number of journalists of color in daily newspaper newsrooms has hovered between 12 and 14 percent, according to the American Society of News Editors, which began a newsroom newspaper employment census in 1978. (That year, only 3.95 percent of full-time journalists were minorities.)

“Minority representation in the newsroom and digital properties are still shockingly low,” said Donna Byrd, publisher of TheRoot.com, which has an African-American-centric focus, at the convention. “There’s still quite a lot of room for opportunity and growth. There’s progress being made but there’s a long way to go.” She added that “masthead” management still tends to hire voices they are used to seeing.

There is good news when it comes to television, according to the Radio-Television Digital News Association. Its survey with Hofstra University found the minority workforce in local TV news rose to 23.1 percent. Percentages are highest in the top 25 markets. Television tends to better reflect the population because it’s a visual medium and viewers can plainly see the ethnicity and gender of a reporter or anchor.

The minority breakdown at non-Spanish language TV stations, according to the survey, is 11.4 percent African-American, 6.7 percent Hispanic, 2.7 percent Asian American and 0.4 percent Native American.

The numbers were doing better until 2008, when the recession started decimating newsrooms, and minorities were disproportionately affected,” said Eric Deggans, author of “Race Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation.” “Newsrooms have a set of priorities. Diversity is ninth or tenth and when the downturn came, it slid off the table.” The 2008 downturn largely hurt minorities because “last hired” is often “first fired.”

When we asked MSNBC about the lack of diversity in its “road warriors” ad, the network responded by providing a list of its on-air talent of color, a list of eight that includes Welker and José Diaz-Balart, although he has for a seat at the NBC Nightly News anchor desk (weekend edition). A promised breakdown of MSNBC’s staff demographics didn’t arrive by deadline.

Census projections indicate that minorities will become a majority in the United States by 2044, which makes it imperative to have more diverse voices and perspective in traditional and digital media.

Why does it matter?

For starters, diversity is good for business. If the audience doesn’t see itself reflected in news stories, then minorities often think their interests are being ignored, misinterpreted, distorted or undervalued. The downside is the audience goes elsewhere at a time when growing the audience is critical to a news operation’s sustainability.

If I see a panel on Sunday morning political chat shows with mostly white men, I’ll turn the channel. Producers of Sunday shows are slowly filling chairs with more women and people of color, but they still tilt largely to white males.

Kevin Riley, editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, told Nieman Reports that a diverse staff results in better journalism for readers. “That’s sort of the business payoff,” he said. “This is beyond just a nice idea, beyond the right thing to do, and beyond recognizing our troubled history around race. It’s a business imperative.”

If the minority population is growing steadily, then common sense would say news organizations should be doing everything they can to attract minority audiences and better explain the complex issues America faces.

But in a 2014 study by the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, only 25 percent of African-Americans and 33 percent of Hispanics said they felt the media accurately reflected their community.

How can any news organization reflect a community if there aren’t a variety of non-white voices inside the newsroom?  Diverse voices often conquer a common newsroom malady: groupthink.

For Deggans, there’s an ethical value connected to accuracy. To accurately cover immigration, policing in poor communities, rising incarceration rates and the #BlackLivesMatter movement, you need the input of a diverse staff — staff members with firsthand experience with these issues.

“That level of coverage is much, much more difficult without a diversity of staff at all levels of the news organization,” Deggans said. “So even though there’s a fairness and social justice component to giving women and journalists of color equal opportunities in newsrooms, the overriding issue in my estimation, is the increased fairness and accuracy of coverage which results from a staff whose diversity matches the community it is covering.”

What stories aren’t getting told?

Art Holiday is an African-American who has worked for 37 years at KSDK, a TV station in St. Louis. Right now there are no people of color in his newsroom management team, he said at a panel on race in the newsroom at the NABJ/NAHJ convention.

“That presents a challenge in our newsroom — especially during Ferguson,” said Holiday. He’s referring to police in Ferguson, Mo., shooting unarmed, black, 18-year-old Michael Brown two years ago, sparking massive demonstrations. After an editorial meeting at that time, Holiday’s associate news director took him aside.

“I was asked if I ever had any run-ins with the police,” said Holiday. “It caught me off guard. I knew she grew up in a rural, predominantly white St. Louis.”

He shared a story of driving to work for an early morning shift when the police pulled him over. He began his mental checklist. Keep your hands up. No sudden movements. Be polite.

“She was fascinated,” he recalled. “I told her most black men in America have had experiences like that and that’s why we are covering Ferguson and the interaction of the police and people. She agreed. That’s an example where diversity of age, race, socio-economic and gender backgrounds all make us better able to reflect the issues and stories in our communities. As a senior on-air person, I feel it’s my duty to speak up.“

There’s still too much pressure on the lone minority voice to speak up in most newsrooms.

“I am constantly having to speak up for all women if I’m the ‘only’ at the table — the only person of color, the only woman,” said S. Mitra Kalita, vice president for programming, CNN digital. “Sometimes I’m the only, only, only at the table. I do feel this need to speak up for women holistically and I hope women in positions of power feel a similar feeling of responsibility.”

But speak up they must, because telling stories about communities and issues we rarely hear about and reaching those communities is critical to better understanding and respecting one another. And, it negates the necessity of a story on TheRoot.com we shouldn’t need: How to Explain Black Lives Matter to White People.

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MTV’s VMAs and me: A music writer’s long journey from wow to meh

Madonna; Macy Gray; Miley Cyrus (Credit: AP/Reuters/Gary Hershorn/Frank Micelotta)

I was walking in Times Square a few days ago and I happened to pass 1515 Broadway, the offices of MTV. The windows were blocked out with posters promoting Sunday night’s Video Music Awards. They were somewhat muted, and it was difficult to make out where the awards were taking place, who the host was going to be and what artists, other than Rihanna and Britney Spears, were scheduled to perform. It seemed to me a bit perfunctory: It’s the end of the summer, so we gotta do these VMAs again.

I could be completely wrong. Somewhere in some bedroom, there might be a teenager counting down the days to the big night. It would not be appropriate for a 46-year-old man to gear up hard for this spectacle, but to go from all-in to ho-hum, especially when I still follow and often write about music and culture, seems odd. Have the VMAs changed or have I changed?

Once, they mattered. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because back in 1984, when I watched the inaugural awards, it all seemed so new and thrilling. They were, then, a legitimate alternative to the standard awards show. You could tell by the statue: an ungainly Moonman. And at that point in time, there were still few places you could actually see your favorite stars talk or wear clothes that they didn’t wear in their videos. Celebrity culture was still relatively narrow.

In 1984, I watched from this little guest bedroom in my parents’ house on Long Island, sitting on the back of a chair with my face pressed against the small screen. I know that Madonna’s performance of “Like a Virgin” was the wow moment of the night, and probably remains the most talked-about performance in VMA history, but I was there for David Bowie. His Serious Moonlight Tour had just wound down and he was in the process of yet another reinvention, his bleached-blond hair dyed brown. It was the start of something new. He wasn’t in New York City, where the awards were held, but live via satellite from London, and after he greeted the crowd he performed a live version of his new single “Blue Jean.”

Through the ’90s, I watched diligently. I screamed for Pee-wee Herman when he took the stage in costume and asked the crowd, “Heard any good jokes lately?” I rooted for Nirvana (and Ru Paul) over Guns N’ Roses (and Ru Paul over Milton Berle). I felt imbued with the holy spirit when Pearl Jam and Neil Young thrashed out “Rockin’ in the Free World.” I wanted to believe that Michael and Lisa Marie were going to make it work somehow. Back then, there were still only about 30 cable channels. For pop culture fanatics, the VMAs were un-missable. Long before live-tweeting, the VMAs gave us a sense of community — something to talk about.

Something happened to me in the very late ’90s and the ’00s — I found myself working a job that required me to cover the awards show. I had been hired as a news and content writer for Spin magazine’s website, and before moving laterally, or perhaps even backwards (although at the time I thought it was moving way, way up) to their print edition, I had to post six stories a day, no matter what. The job was like the “Fuck you — pay me,” sequence in “Goodfellas.” “What, you’re hung-over? Fuck you — six stories.” “Your tropical fish died? Fuck you — six stories.”

So I covered the shit out of the VMAs, from the very first announcement to each additional news nugget. If they were held in New York City, I was in the press room, eating cruddy six-inch Subway sandwiches and waiting in the queue to get a quick quote from Busta Rhymes or Tom Green. Soon I got savvy and realized that the actual press events meant nothing. Everyone could use your quote, and you could steal one from some schnook at Rolling Stone if you needed to. The real action took place at the after-parties. The record industry had a lot of money then. This was still the pre-Napster era when albums routinely sold a million-plus units a week. There were a lot of after-parties. The drinks were free and the food was a lot better than Subway. Like better rock journalists before me, I left with a lot of it jammed into my pockets.

The real stars were at these parties, the ones too big to work the lines: Eminem, Gwen Stefani, Beck, Fred Durst (hey, it was the ’90s), Lauryn Hill. I would watch the awards on television, then throw on a suit and head out in a cab to talk my way into four or five different parties, and it worked for a while. But something was missing. Those first few VMAs had a spirit of anarchy and fun. From my perspective at 27, 28, 29, 30, the awards started to look like just another business venture, obscured by a few outrageous diversions. Maybe artists had always shamelessly plugged their upcoming albums, but I’d never noticed it before. Now, it was impossible to miss and somehow enervating. Was Macy Gray only in attendance to let the world know when she was dropping a new one? Wasn’t this supposed to be fun? Spontaneous? I guess it would be tacky to plug your new album from the Grammys stage, but the VMAs were fair game.

I think the moment I sat the awards down and said, “This isn’t working, I’d like to see other shows” was not after the weird Guns N’ Roses reunion, or following one too many calculated Madonna appearances (when compared with the sheer what-the-fuck beauty of her debut) or even the infamous “Battle of the Garage Rock Bands” (AKA “We couldn’t get the Strokes”). It was when Puff Daddy hosted in 2005 and backed up his thin claim that “anything could happen” that night by giving away his wristwatch to a member of the crowd. I was 20 years in at that point, and it was a hard swallow.

I left Spin the following year and stopped attending the VMAs on assignment, and from there they became something of a big blur. Wasn’t there one that they tried to turn into a big house party, with cameras in every room and remote performances abounding? In the Kanye era, it was fair game to take the original spirit of the ’80s VMAs and port them anywhere you went. Life is an awards show for some people.

There were times when I DVR’d them and left them in my queue for weeks, feeling a little guilty that I couldn’t even fast-forward through the show. But there was nobody to talk to about it anymore, either. They were live-tweeted already, and every wow moment was processed and deconstructed, then forgotten moments after it occurred. Did Russell Brand host one of them? Two maybe? Who can remember?

Listen to me. I sound like an old man. But now that my eyes are officially open and I can chart this slow fade from mind-blown teen to exhausted Generation X-er, I might tune in tonight and do some forensic exploration, have some hard discussions with myself, and determine if the VMAs have declined noticeably in spirit and style or if it is me who lost respect for the Moonman somewhere down the rope line.

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Why can’t our economy promote equality and shared prosperity?

(Credit: Richie Chan via Shutterstock/Salon)

Instead of griping about the greed-heads of Wall Street and the rip-off financial system they’ve hung around our necks, why don’t we take on wall street?

You don’t have to be in “Who’s Who” to know what’s what. For example, if tiny groups of Wall Street bankers, billionaires and their political puppets are allowed to write the rules that govern our economy and elections, guess what? Only bankers, billionaires and puppets will profit from those rules.

That’s exactly why our land of opportunity has become today’s land of inequality. Corporate elites have bought their way into the policymaking backrooms of Washington, where they’ve rigged the rules to let them feast freely on our jobs, devour our country’s wealth and impoverish the middle class.

Take On Wall Street is both the name and the feisty attitude of a nationwide campaign that a coalition of grassroots groups has launched to do just that: take on Wall Street. The coalition, spearheaded by the Communication Workers of America, points out there is nothing natural or sacred about today’s money-grabbing financial complex. Far from sacrosanct, the system of finance that now rules over us has been designed by and for Wall Street speculators, money managers and big bank flimflammers. So, big surprise, rather than serving our common good, the system is corrupt, routinely serving their uncommon greed at everyone else’s expense.

There’s good news, however, because a growing grassroots coalition of churches, unions, civil rights groups, citizen activists and many others is organizing and mobilizing to crash through those closed doors, write new rules and reverse America’s plunge into plutocracy. The Take On campaign has the guts and gumption to say, Enough! Instead of continuing to accept Wall Street’s plutocratic perversion of our democracy, we the people can rewrite their rules and reorder their structures so the system serves us.

For starters, the campaign has laid out a five-point people’s reform agenda is now taking it to the countryside to rally the voices, anger and grassroots power of workers, consumers, communities of color, Main Street, the poor, people of faith — and just plain folks. The coalition is holding information and training sessions to spread the word, forge local coalitions and learn how we can get right in the face of power to create a fair finance system that works for all.

The coalition’s structural reforms include:

1. Getting the corrupting cash of corporations and the superrich out of politics with an overturning of Citizens United v. FEC and providing a public system for financing America’s elections.

2. Stopping “too big to fail” banks from subsidizing their high-risk speculative gambling with the deposits of  ordinary customers. Make them choose to be a consumer bank or a casino, but not both.

3. Institute a tiny “Robin Hood tax” on Wall Street speculators to discourage their computerized gaming of the system, while also generating hundreds of billions of tax dollars to invest in America’s real economy.

4. Restore low-cost, convenient “postal banking” in our post offices to serve millions of Americans who’re now at the mercy of predatory payday lenders and check-cashing chains.

There’s an old truism about negotiating that says: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” The Take On Wall Street campaign intends to put you and me — and the people — at the table for a change.

 

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The architect of Brexit has joined Trump on the campaign trail. Don’t pay him any attention, America

Donald Trump welcomes Nigel Farage to speak at a rally in Jackson, Miss., Aug. 24, 2016. (Credit: AP/Gerald Herbert)

In the U.S., he’s just another obscure British politician. In the U.K., however, he’s as famously divisive as Donald Trump is in America.

Nigel Farage is the former leader of the hard-right U.K. Independence Party and the most powerful politician who’s not been elected to hold office in the United Kingdom. You might be tempted to think, because you’ve (probably) never heard of him, that Farage must not be all that significant. But don’t be fooled. This is the chief architect of Brexit, the man who more than anyone convinced British voters to take their country out of the European Union in June. And now he’s joined Donald Trump to recruit American voters on the campaign trail.

On Wednesday evening, Farage flew to Mississippi to appear before a crowd of Trumpeteers and sound off in his typically offbeat, clamorous style. Many of those in the audience probably knew little to nothing about Farage, had likely never even heard him speak before. This was helpful for him because it meant he could do what he has always done best: tell a story based on half-truths and lies and not have to deal with the inconvenience of being corrected.

Farage didn’t explicitly endorse Trump last week, but he came close. In boasting of his own “success” story, he explained that the political underdog can indeed overcome the odds (and the polls) and be crowned a winner. “I wouldn’t vote for Clinton if you paid me,” Farage said. Brexit, Britain’s bid for “independence,” had liberated the nation, he said; it had allowed the British people to “take back control of their country, take back control of their borders and restore their pride and self-respect.” He was, in his own eccentrically compelling way, implicitly urging U.S. voters to vote for someone who has throughout the 2016 election cycle promised to give them the same.

Don’t pay any attention, America. For while Nigel Farage, often seen in press photos quaffing pints and smoking cigs in a range of sweat-soaked suits, has an honest, ordinary-bloke quality that endears him to voters, that image does not reflect the reality. Farage has not had the success that Trump has had, but there are still broad parallels. Farage was privately educated in his youth, then entered adult life as a Reagan-era businessman — a London stockbroker to be specific — before cashing in and becoming a populist, isolationist, tax-avoiding politician. Quick to criticize the European Union for wasteful spending from Day One, Farage has unbeknown to his ardent followers often treated the EU as a cash cow, pocketing millions in expenses and using EU taxpayer money to employ friends and family, as well as set up new U.K. Independence Party-fronted parties.

Similar what’s true about Donald Trump, there is a vast difference between Nigel Farage’s “regular guy” image and the man he really is. Guardian columnist Nick Cohen once described Farage as “England’s greatest living hypocrite.” He’s a Eurosceptic with a German wife, a self-confessed “poor” politician who also happens to be a millionaire. It’s probable only a few Trump supporters know enough about this fake common man, but Nigel Farage has never known what it’s like to truly be an underdog. And because tales of his exploits rarely cross the pond, those same Trump supporters may be unaware that Farage is also greatly overstating his achievements.

Farage’s talk of Brexit “success” is based on a fantasy of a glorious latter-day British Empire he has been peddling since well before the EU vote. Farage wants American voters to think Brexit is a reason to cast their own radical vote in November. But those same voters should know that Brexit has objectively been a disaster. Like Trump, Farage has taken advantage of the present post-truth climate to lie and emotionally manipulate his way to victory. This is how he and the “leave” campaign managed to take Britain out of the European Union. Now Farage finds himself in a new land, confident that his words have the power to change nations.

Farage stood alongside Donald Trump on Wednesday and claimed to be bringing a “message of hope and optimism” for voters aiming to “stand up against the establishment.” But Farage is the establishment, and his message has never been hopeful. Like Trump, he has exploited voter fears by stoking anti-immigrant sentiment, even going further than Trump by using posters apparently inspired by Nazi propaganda in his campaigns.

Away from Britain, Nigel Farage now presents himself as a trustworthy beacon of success. But the outcome of Brexit, his brainchild, reveals him as nothing but a failure, one whose own former party has already begun to disown him. Farage isn’t offering a real “revolution,” America. U.K. Independence Party officials in the past have described Farage as a “dictator” who only sees his political career “as a means for getting power.” The day after the Brexit vote, the pound was plummeting, the United Kingdom was divided and ready to split and Farage had resigned his post as U.K. Independence Party leader, leaving Britain to clean up the mess he had convinced it to make.

Donald Trump has been called the most dangerous man in the world, but he’s still yet to break any countries. Nigel Farage, on the other hand, already has. Don’t trust him for a second.

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