Adventures of the Coconut Caucus

OK, so you may wonder why still like only 0.3 % of journalists in any important jobs are minorities. (We are basically stuck with Geraldo Rivera, Connie Chung (where is she now anyway?), Juan Williams (closet Latino from Panamá) and of course Mirthala Salinas)

Here may be a clue from the pan-racial rainbow of journalists of color Unity…. (better know for parties than for getting jobs for anybody….)

This super urgent message came out today…

(BTW Dow Jones had this story on the 17th)

To: RADIO-TELEVISION EDITORS

UNITY urges participants to take action

MCLEAN, Va., Jan. 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Federal Communications

Commission´s December 18th vote to relax its newspaper-broadcast

cross-ownership rule is a huge disappointment to all minority owned media,

according to UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc.

In a recent study released by Free Press, a national media policy organization, found that even though people of color comprise 33 percent of the U.S. population, they only account for 3.15 percent of commercial broadcast television station owners.

UNITY, representing more than 10,000 journalists from the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Native American Journalists Association, responded to the study by supporting FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein’s call for an independent task force that would examine the effects of media consolidation and oppose the FCC ruling until it addresses how to increase minority broadcast ownership.

The vote went forward without the creation of the task force to address these crucial issues. etc, etc, etc.

WOW, a task force!!!!! this must be some kind of radical organization…. what will they demand next? A multilingual poll about the ethnic identity of Soledad O´Brien?

AND in a totally unrelated story…. because you have to be on crack to be a Hispanic working at the Washington Post…

So by now you may have seen our sporadic section of press conferences you can totally skip, because we already know everything that is going to be said, or they are soooo boring you shouldn´t go unless you need a nap or something….

Well today we came across a press conference about racial harassment, of course one of our favorite topics, and we were totally going to ignore it until we noticed the location… (FYI: this is from the AP Washington daybook)

3 p.m. EEOC-RACIAL HARASSMENT _ The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will hold a press conference in Hawaii to announce the settlement of a racial harassment lawsuit against an internationally-known “Fortune 100” corporation.

Notes: Media unable to travel to Hawaii will have access to the press briefing via teleconference. Please RSVP for the teleconference phone number and access code….etc.

I of course feel racially harassed that I wasn´t invited….