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Indybay Feature

Gwen Ifill: The Breakthrough: Politics and race in the Age of Obama

Date:
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Time:
7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Event Type:
Speaker
Organizer/Author:
Ken Preston
Location Details:
First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison St, Oakland

Hosted by Neil Henry

Tickets: $12 advance, $15 door, at supporting bookstores
Or on line: http://www.kpfa.org/events
Benefits KPFA Radio
Info: 510.848-6767X609 or http://www.kpfa.org/events

Gwen Ifill is the well-known PBS moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and senior correspondent of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Before coming to PBS, she was chief congressional and political correspondent for NBC News, and had been a reporter for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and Boston Herald American.

In THE BREAKTHROUGH, this veteran journalist provides an in-depth investigation of black political power in a post-Civil Rights era of promise and peril. She surveys the American political landscape and sheds new light on the impact of Barack Obama's stunning presidential campaign, while introducing the many emerging young African American politicians forging bold new paths to political power.

Ifill argues that the black political structure formed during the Civil Rights movement is giving way to the generation of men and women who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggle of the 1960s. She offers incisive, detailed profiles of such prominent leaders as Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and U.S. Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama, and also covers up-and-coming figures from across the nation. Drawing on interviews with power brokers like Senator Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and many others, as well as her own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as generational conflict and the "black enough" conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in American history.

Neil Henry is a professor and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. His career has included 16 award-winning years at the Washington Post as a metro, national, and investigative reporter, and a foreign correspondent based in Africa. He has written for Newsweek, Mother Jones, and Smithsonian. He earned his BA degree in political science from Princeton, and his Master's in journalism from Columbia. Dean Henry is the author of two books. The first, Pearl's Secret, published in 2001, was a well-received memoir investigating his family's interracial history dating back to the antebellum South. His most recent book was published last year and is entitled: American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media.
Added to the calendar on Sat, Jan 3, 2009 12:30PM

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"Gwen Ifill is the well-known PBS moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and senior correspondent of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Before coming to PBS, she was chief congressional and political correspondent for NBC News, and had been a reporter for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and Boston Herald American."

First, let me say this: I'm a moderately well-known Bay Area African American grassroots progressive activist and occasional sociopolitcal commentary writer for different publications.

Look at Gwen Ifill's "jounalistic credentials" above -- from the same media organs that *LIED* to you, week after week, and month after month, and, notably, *promoted* the war in Iraq.

This national speaking tour of Gwen Ifill's is just PR promotion and advertisement for the MAINSTREAM ESTABLISHMENT CORPORATE MEDIA -- even on PBS(!!) -- and its propaganda machine, and turning yet another one of its reporters into a CELEBRITY.

Whether the corporate -- including PBS -- mainstream news (and so-called "analysis") propaganda is given to you by a *white* face or a *Black* face (and a "two-for" at that: Black *&* female), it's still PROPAGANDA -- but this time also meant to try to beguile minority viewers/listeners too -- just given by a different color corporate (including PBS) mainstream news stenographer, so-called "analyst", and mouthpiece.

Progressives / leftists are hardly going to get any _alternative_ analysis at this event. You're going to get a lot of smooth, trite, mainstream *pablum* presented by a nonthreatening to the system, nonchallenging, mainstream media-friendly, congenial, 'mother figure', voice. An if you have a *brain* you'd realize afterwards (and after you paid your money and spent your time) that you didn't really learn *anything* new that you couldn't have 'learned' on mainstream TV.

--Except, that you actually get to *SEE* the celebrity journalist -- and you get to *say* that you actually saw her[/him]: "Oh I once saw *Gwen Ifill*!!", if your thing is actually getting to *see/meet* in person some, yet again turned into a celebrity by the mainstream news PR department, celebrity "journalist".

This is really, covertly by the mainstream news ad people, just meant to be a mainstream celebrity journalist -- and PBS -- promotion and easy, smooth (it's the 'smooth jazz' equivalent of "news"), entertainment event, packaged/disguised as a mainstream journalist's speaking event.

If you want alternative news by a Black journalist, go to publisher Glen Ford's BlackAgendaReport.com and, also for the hiphop generation, go to DaveyD.com. And for Black alternative local news go to publishers Willie & Mary Radcliffe's SFBayview.com.

Any progressive/leftist who goes to actually *pay for* and support this event, and sit among any rows full of intellectual *dolts*, ought to be ASHAMED of themselves.

AND KPFA IS *SPONSORING* THIS HOKEY EVENT!??? ...**SAD...**

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