James Aronson Awards Coordinator Peter Parisi Supports News Censorship of the WORD: Boycott the Aronson Awards

I’m telling my students to boycott the event. I’m telling everyone in the journalism circles I frequent to boycott the event even if they never heard of the Aronsons. I’m telling them to tell their friends and associates.

Peter Parisi [From his facebook page

Regarding Colleague Parisi’s comments at the March 14 faculty meeting supporting censorship of the WORD: How incredibly hypocritical. How incredibly obtuse — as he and Colleagues dumb enough to support him are about to learn.

I was not exaggerating when I recently told Colleagues in the Department of Film and Media Studies, Hunter College, about the contempt in journalism circles for this event and that I had to put someone in place at the Polk Awards last year for intimating that I somehow was involved with this Parisi coordinated farce.

BACKGROUND: I stopped attending long ago because of the artifice and sleight of hand obviously at work as well as that bovine moment when Colleague Peter Parisi, swept in a paroxysm of contempt typical of too many D:F/M Colleagues, indulged his dark side and told an Aronson Award’s crowd in the Lang Auditorium that the WORD was a department project. I didn’t make an issue of it. [Peter Paris, right. From his facebook page].

I also stopped attending the The Aronson Awards years ago because of students’s concern about the selection process for the undergraduate awards and the shoddy treatment of the undergraduate winners. They thought there was a scam at work. I never discouraged students from applying if they so chose, but I eventually stopped encouraging them.

But not now.

Boycott. Boycott. Boycott.

Social Justice Journalism is rarely ever mentioned in any form in this department nor on this campus and is rarely ever mentioned in the oratory at the awards ceremonies. Students don’t learn about it until a few weeks, if not a few days, before the event and only about three or four apply if that many. And their stories have little if anything to do with social justice journalism. And there are other serious matters. I have questions about the makeup of the Aronson Committee. Where’s the transparency?

There is none.

Notice to D:F/M Colleagues from Peter Parisi Announcing the Awards:

Dear F/M Colleagues,

The Aronson Award Ceremony takes place at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 18 in the Lang. We’ve got a vibrant group of winners! Please spread the word and bring your classes.

The winners of the 2011 awards are: John Nichols of The Nation for career achievement as correspondent, blogger, social critic and book author in politics and media criticism; the Center for Public Integrity and iWatchnews.org for its wide-ranging investigation of weak inspection systems that gravely endanger factory workers and surrounding communities; the Sarasota Herald-Tribune for “Unfit for Duty,” a rigorous exposé of systematic failure to discipline for officers arrested or implicated in crimes; Lea Goldman of Marie Claire for exposing widespread fraud in “pink”-themed breast cancer fund-raising, Danny Hakim and Russ Buettner of The New York Times for “Used and Abused,” a deeply researched and poignant series on rampant neglect and mistreatment of the developmentally disabled in New York State institutions.