May 4th FCM Event Coming Up

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                                                                                                        

PEACE ACTIVIST FROM PALESTINE LEADS WORKSHOP IN MAY

Kansas City, Missouri – 4/20/24

Doctor Mubarak Awad from Jerusalem and Spencer Graves, president of Friends of Community Media will lead a workshop on the role of the media in peace and standing up for Palestinians.  The event will be from 2-4 PM, on Saturday, April 4th at All-Souls  Unitarian Universalist Church, 4501 Walnut in Kansas City, with a Q&A session followed by a reception.  Dr. Awad will also speak at the 9:30 All-Souls forum on Sunday, May 5 to be broadcast later on community radio station KKFI 90.1 FM.

Mubarak is Palestinian, born in Jerusalem in 1943. He has a PhD in psychology and has US citizenship. In 1983 he founded the Palestinian Centre for the Study of Nonviolence in Jerusalem. He was expelled by Israel in 1988 for organizing nonviolent civil disobedience in the First Intifada.  He then founded Nonviolence International, advocating for active nonviolence and nonviolent campaigns worldwide.

Friends of Community Media is a Kansas City non-profit organization with a goal of promoting community-based media.  It also assists local groups to create independent media, influence existing media, and promote diverse media ownership.

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Contact Spencer Graves (408) 655-4567

More information on this event and on Spencer Graves may be found at this link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w2jA8KWMSSI0MIjcKAByCAJhvTjlAAykQxr6pZeAgb4/edit

Photo of Mubarak Awad

4/20/24 – Information is also available at the PeaceWorks Kansas City Website:

https://peaceworkskc.org/standing-up-for-palestinians-the-role-of-the-media/

Journalists – Endangered Species Due to Onset of AI?

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From the Guardian 4/17/24 by Arwa Mahdawi

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/17/the-media-industry-is-dying-but-i-can-still-get-paid-to-train-ai-to-replace-me

HEADLINE: “The media industry is dying – but I can still get paid to train AI to replace me”

“I could get paid less than the the New York Minimum to train an AI model to take over my job. Is there a . . . word to describe that particular situation, I wonder? I’ll have to ask ChatGPT.”

Although Some Have Called NPR “National Petroleum Radio”, it Can Also Eat Itself for Being “Too Liberal”.

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From the New York Times article on 4/16/24 by Benjamin Mullen.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/business/media/npr-suspends-business-editor.html

Headline: “NPR Suspends Editor Whose Essay Criticized the Broadcaster”

“Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, said the public radio network’s liberal bias had tainted its coverage of important stories.”

Read the essay that caused the furor by Uri Berliner on an article in The Free Press on Substack om 4/9/24 headlined:
“I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust

Update from Associated Press article by David Bauder 4/17/24 – Berliner is gone.

https://apnews.com/article/npr-editor-resigns-conservative-liberal-c259642e3920e99d5f05a7fe1a90012e

HEADLINE: “An NPR editor who wrote a critical essay on company has resigned after being suspended”

Journalist Was Among Those Who Were Innocent & Tortured at Abu Ghraib.

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Article by Alice Speri in the Guardian 4/14/24. Headline: “Correct a black mark in US history’: former prisoners of Abu Ghraib get day in court”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2024/apr/14/abu-ghraib-iraq-torture-abuse

Who can forget the AP photo exposing the torture in Abu Ghraib in Iraq?

An image obtained by The Associated Press shows an unidentified detainee standing on a box with a bag on his head and wires attached to him in late 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq. – from NPR.

Journalism Dies in Rwanda

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This week marked the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. This book describes what happened when it was stopped and a new government took over. Another casualty was a free and vibrant press.

Media Layoffs in U.S. – A Crisis?

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Article from AlJezeera By Andy Hirschfeld 3/27/24

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/3/27/is-the-us-media-layoffs-phenomenon-the-next-housing-crisis

“In the past few months, the media sector in the United States has gone through one of its worst rounds of layoffs in decades, with some voices within the sector even asking if journalism is a viable career path despite surging subscriptions at publications like The New York Times.”