Princess Hee Haw: Trash Talking

Pissed off by what seem like never ending revelations on Hunter-L, a main Hunter College listserv, and department memos echoing the listserv postings about the debauching of the Department of Film and Media Studies, a Colleague posted the following listserv comment, referring to me, the primary protagonist for disclosure and transparency.
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Prof. Stein is correct. I hope when we revise the guidelines for Hunter-L we can discourage or disallow baseless attacks on specific departments as well as individual people. There has to be a way to parse out people’s freedom to speak from the kind of trash that get published about our department on a regular basis.

Kelly Anderson
Associate Professor, Dept. of Film and Media Studies

The department has a bad image in the College, said Colleague Larry Shore at a faculty meeting many moons ago. His comments were unchallenged; only a few expressed surprise (I thought their  reactions were affected). Translation and context of his comments:  D:F/M debauchery is no longer easily concealed behind a facade of academic propriety.

Anderson’s comment was tacked on to an earlier comment of another Colleague, Pulitzer Prize Winner Bernard Stein, who was blowing smoke about the state of undergraduate journalism in the department. Both comments beg for a response, especially Stein’s. But for now, I’m publishing their Hunter-L comments as is, though I cringe at the shimmying of artifice and felonious misrepresentations.  And lies.

Stein’s follows.

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 10:23 AM, Bernard Steinbstein@hunter.cuny.edu wrote:

In a post on Hunter-l, Prof. Gregg Morris asserted that Hunter’s journalism curriculum is not meeting the challenges posed by the migration of news to the Internet.

I write to correct the record.

– Students who choose the journalism concentration are required in the second semester of reporting & writing to cover a New York City neighborhood and publish their stories on-line, accompanied by photographs, videos and interactive features.
– Students in magazine writing publish their work in the e-zine The Bridge.
– Students in on-line journalism use the digital toolbox to blog on a topic of interest to them.
– Students in Neighborhood News, which I teach, report on-line and in print for The Hunts Point Express, which serves a community in the South Bronx.
–Students who study with the Jack Newfield Visiting Professor publish their projects in a variety of formats and venues, including the Village Voice, City Limits, the New York World and the Mott Haven Herald.

Prof. Morris’s students publish their work in The WORD, his on-line publication. And students in journalism classes that have no Website of their own have the opportunity to polish and publish their course work in 6mix, maintained by the Film & Media Department.

No more robust a lineup of classroom-based digital publications can be found anywhere in CUNY. Most of us take pride in our students’ work and in the opportunity they’re afforded to build portfolios they can show to employers and graduate schools.

Bernard L. Stein
Professor of journalism, Dept. of Film & Media

More about this later.

D:F/M Colleagues.

D:F/M Colleagues.

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