newsweek

Is the economy coming back--or is our debt going to sink us? Are people who don't pay taxes this year just freeloading? Did Virginia's governor really forget that slavery was a big part of the Civil war? Who's fact-checking the news, and what about that WikiLeaks tape, anyway? Danny Schechter, News Dissector, and Lizz Winstead, cofounder of the Daily Show, join us in studio to answer these and other pressing questions about the week in news.

Have you read the Newsweek article, “Are We There Yet?”? It is a milestone. It explores the 40th anniversary of 46 women at Newsweek who filed a sex discrimination case with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. What the article uncovers is that room still exists for improvement despite the progress from the 1970 action. Acknowledging that women's rights are far from won is a major admission within mainstream media. It usually bends over backwards to declare feminism dead. The most startling fact is that young women at Newsweek had no inkling of the 1970 discrimination case. Feminists—old and young alike—have to ask, "How did this happen?" How is our collective memory lost so readily? If no women's history is taught in high schools or colleges, how can we, in a feminist consciousness-raising way, fill this void? Maria Frazer Dougherty, my paternal grandmother, died in 1959. I was eleven. Not until the 1980s did I learn about her Votes for Women work or her activism in the “wets” campaign to repeal prohibition. Today, women who waged the discrimination case at Newsweek are still alive. Much of the activism that surged then has participants available for live history lessons. There are five documentary films about the Second Wave struggle for completion funds. But here, too, discrimination is great. “The theme is not universal,” the filmmakers are told repeatedly by funders. Young women are deprived of seeing this vital era on celluloid. In the 1970s, we resurrected the stories of women who went before us. We built institutions in order to share those stories---The Feminist Press, Triple Jeopardy, Olivia Records. While we did not always succeed, when we did, it was joyous. Yes, much work still needs to be done. Here, stand on my shoulders. But, please, avoid my toes. Ariel Dougherty is the Director of the Media Equity Collaborative. GRITtv with Laura Flanders. Watch any show, at any time: http://grittv.org Distributed by Tubemogul.

Every week on GRITtv, we discuss the week in news: stories that made a splash, stories that were ignored, stories that were covered well, or stories that were covered badly. This week, guest host Esther Armah is joined by Rosalind McLymont, Editor in Chief of The Network Journal and author of Africa: Strictly Business, The Steady March to Prosperity, Karen Hunter, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the upcoming Stop Being Niggardly: And Nine Other Things Black People Need to Stop Doing, and Akiba Solomon, freelance reporter and author of Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts. They discuss Black History Month and Raina Kelley's Newsweek piece, The Nation's piece on the media-lobbying complex, and Ishmael Reed's New York Times op-ed about the film Precious.

The Copenhagen climate talks, Obama's Nobel peace prize, jobless numbers, a proposed compromise in the Senate on health care reform, or Tiger Woods' sex life: which is the most-covered story this week? You'd probably be right if you guessed Tiger Woods. We don't have statistics, but we do have a panel of journalists joining us in the studio to discuss the way the media did--and didn't--cover the biggest news of the day. Nation contributor Joseph Huff-Hannon, Rana Foroohar of Newsweek and Lionel of Air America critique coverage of Copenhagen, Obama, health care, the economy, and yes, even Tiger.