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Reporter covering Nashville school shooting makes stunning on-air announcement: ‘I am a survivor’© Provided by NBC News
Story by Danielle Campomoar, TODAY
While covering a deadly school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, a local reporter said that she is also a survivor of a school shooting.
On March 27, a 28-year-old shot and killed three children and three staff members at The Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville for children in preschool through sixth grade. Police shot and killed the shooter.
Joylyn Bukovac, a local reporter for WSMV 4, was on the scene and in the midst of her coverage shared that she had survived a school shooting as a child.
“This is something that hits very close to home for me — many of you might not know this, but I am actually a school shooting survivor,” Bukovac said. “It happened a while ago — I was in middle school.”
Bukovac noted that nearly 380 school shootings have occurred since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado.
Read more here. Shared by Peg Coughlin.
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Opinion | Media coverage of an all-too-familiar tragedy (Poynter)
By: Tom Jones
Another day. Another mass shooting. This one at a private Christian grade school in Nashville.
A 28-year-old carrying two assault-style rifles and a pistol shot and killed three students and three adults on Monday before being killed by police. Law enforcement said all three children were 9 years old.
Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told reporters, “I was literally moved to tears to see this and the kids as they were being ushered out of the building.”
President Joe Biden called it a “family’s worst nightmare.”
Hours earlier, The Washington Post’s Todd C. Frankel, Shawn Boburg, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker and Alex Horton published a story with the headline “The gun that divides a nation.” It was about the AR-15 — the best-selling rifle in America that the Post writes has “gained a polarizing hold on the American imagination.” It added, “It also has become a stark symbol of the nation’s gun violence epidemic. Ten of the 17 deadliest U.S. mass shootings since 2012 have involved AR-15s.”
Read more here.
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Bay Area lawmaker’s bill aims to make Big Tech pay publishers for news (Mercury News)
By JOHN WOOLFOLK
Newsrooms across the country have withered while the stories they produce at great cost enrich big technology companies that pay nothing for sharing them on their platforms.
Despite bipartisan support, attempts to make those companies share advertising dollars with news publishers have sputtered in Congress.
Now, a California lawmaker from the Bay Area is pushing a bill – limited to the state – that would accomplish the same goal using a different approach.
“California has lost more than 100 newspapers in the last decade,” said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat, who plans to introduce the California Journalism Protection Act in the coming week. “Our constitutional founders understood the importance of a free press. And when you have an ecosystem where there’s not a level playing field and newspapers are shutting down left and right, that concerns me from a democracy standpoint.”
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Why journalism schools won’t quit Fox News (Nieman Labs)
By MARK JACOB
Fox News appears to have committed a gross breach of journalism ethics: intentionally lying to its audience about the 2020 election.
This appalls many people in America’s journalism schools. But interviews with three prominent journalism school deans and other news educators showed no interest in an outright ban on dealing with Fox News on internships, job opportunities and campus appearances.
Is this open-mindedness? Timidity? Or simply a combination of the high ideal of academic freedom and the practical necessity of helping students start their careers?
As Fox used to say: We report, you decide.
Fox has been sued by Dominion Voting Systems for falsely linking Dominion to election fraud. Communications among Fox executives and personalities, revealed in court filings, show they knew allegations of election fraud were baseless but spread them anyway to cater to Donald Trump’s supporters. The disinformation stoked right-wing outrage that led to the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Read more here. Shared by Sonya Zalubowski.
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Florida Republicans Want To Make It Easier To Sue Journalists — And Even Right-Wing Outlets Are Nervous (Huffington Post)
By Matt Shuham
Florida Republicans are working to make it a lot easier to sue journalists for defamation, outraging many First Amendment advocates and publishers around the state. If they reach the governor’s desk, a pair of bills currently making their way through the Legislature could fundamentally change how media outlets report on public figures.
Among other things, the bills lower the bar for defamation cases, restrict protections for journalists’ use of anonymous sources in those cases, and limit the circumstances in which media outlets can win attorneys fees if they countersue for legal attacks.
The proposed changes go right to the heart of the U.S. Supreme Court case that defined modern libel law with the “actual malice” standard in 1964, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan — and provoking the court’s conservative majority to radically reconsider American libel law may be part of the goal.
Read more here. Shared by Richard Chady.
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Texas Observer, legendary crusading liberal magazine, is closing and laying off its staff (Texas Tribune)
BY SEWELL CHAN AND BRANDON FORMBY
The Texas Observer, the storied progressive publication known for its feisty, combative and often humorous investigative journalism, is shutting down and will lay off its 17-person staff, including 13 journalists, several members of its board said Sunday.
The decision marks an end to 68 years of publication, starting with its founding in 1954 by Ronnie Dugger and including a six-year period under the helm of the legendary Molly Ivins from 1970 to 1976. The magazine, in its first few decades, represented the liberal wing of the once-conservative Democratic Party. It was a thorn in the side of Lyndon B. Johnson when he was Senate majority leader (before he became president), Govs. Allen Shivers and John B. Connally, and other conservative Democrats. And it chronicled the era in which Texas was remade into a Republican stronghold that sent a governor, George W. Bush, to the White House.
The closing of the Observer raises questions about whether small progressive publications can survive the digital transformation of journalism and the information ecosystem during a time of rapid social, demographic and technological change.
Read more here. Shared by Lindel Hutson.
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