This morning brought jarring news to Jackson and Hinds County about our incoming district attorney who many believe can reform a badly broken criminal-justice system that has left accused people sitting in jail without trial for years on end.

Multiple women are accusing Jody Owens, who won the Democratic primary and faces no challenger in November, of inappropriate and sexual behavior and comments from his time as the managing attorney of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Jackson office. Kira Lerner broke the story in The Appeal, a national news outlet focused on criminal-justice issues, after months of conversations with former employees and after seeing a complaint filed with the EEOC this summer.

"Their allegations include claims that Owens, who was the office's managing attorney until June, commented on some women's appearances, discussed their dating lives, made unwanted advances, or touched them inappropriately," Lerner wrote.

The Appeal did not name most of the accusers, but detailed what the woman filing the EEOC alleged, including inappropriate touching under a dinner table and calling her to talk about dating, instead of work.

Owens denied the allegations in an email to The Appeal: "I have never condoned nor participated in any unwanted behavior or touching of any kind with an employee."

The employee filing the complaint also alerted Lisa Graybill, the SPLC's deputy legal director of criminal justice reform, as well as Twyla Williams, the office's director of human resources, Lerner reported. The women did not respond to The Appeal for comment, and the SPLC said it could not comment on confidential personnel matters.

Less than a year ago, SPLC co-founder Morris Dees stepped down from his position in the Montgomery headquarters due to similar charges.

Owens ran for district attorney on a "decarceral" platform, pledging to tackle the pre-trial detention problem and making the system more efficient and humane as a whole, while still prosecuting those who commit serious crimes. He would replace former District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith who served for 12 years and faced multiple trials himself, including for domestic violence and stalking his former girlfriend, but was ultimately acquitted.

Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba is a supporter of Owens, as well as Smith, even showing up to sit up on the front row during closing statements in the State of Mississippi's trial against the current DA for his efforts to delay prosecution of Jackson man Christopher Butler. Smith was acquitted in that trial as well.

Appeals Court Keeps Christopher Butler Behind Bars

Speaking of Christopher Butler, the Mississippi Court of Appeals turned back his attempt to cut short a 30-year drug-related prison sentence, avoid paying $500,000 in fines, in a Sep. 17 decision. This ruling was just the latest development in a winding and rather confusing saga that was at the heart of Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood's efforts to prosecute Smith for what his office argued was favoritism toward certain defendants such as Butler and Darnell Turner for whom the DA went to great and sometimes confusing lengths to keep out of prison, frustrating judges, police officers, the Mississippi Bar Association and other law enforcement in the process. The attorney general dropped Turner from its case against DA Smith early in the process.

In filings and in the courtroom, the attorney general's office indicated that Smith's efforts to keep Butler, and earlier Turner (a long-time associate of Smith who had done work for his early campaigns), from going to trial or prison showed favoritism toward certain defendants and, at points, insinuating in the courtroom that corruption might be involved. For his part, Smith argued that he was a criminal-justice reformer trying to stop unfair prosecutions, although it was not clear why he had picked the cases of Butler and Turner as his cause célèbres.

Being willing to help certain defendants wasn't a new accusation directed toward Smith. Journalist Curtis Wilkie's book on the Dickie Scruggs scandal, "Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Famous Trial Lawyer," quoted former long-time DA Ed Peters (who had backed Smith against former DA Faye Peterson) on a FBI recording indicating to corrupt attorney Tim Balducci that then-new DA Smith would help indict two attorneys who "screwed (Balducci) over ... on a deal."

Wilkie writes that Peters told Balducci that the new Hinds district attorney was already prepared to indict others who had "'tried to screw him out of a percentage of fees and things.'" Peters told Balducci he would "'have Robert with us'" at a meeting soon in Jackson. "'You need to meet Robert anyway,'" Peters said on the FBI recording. "'It'll be good for you.'"

Smith, the grandon of civil-rights hero Rev. R.L.T. Smith, has long denied any corruption on his part, including through his connections with Peters—who, in truth, could've been making it up about Smith. The federal investigation of Scruggs, Balducci, former state auditor Steve Patterson and others revealed that Peters had offered his own former assistant district attorney—then-Hinds County Circuit Judge Bobby Delaughter—a million-dollar bribe. Peters cut a deal with the feds, and Delaughter went to prison, tarnishing his heroic narrative as the prosecutor who finally sent Medgar Evers' killer Byron de la Beckwith to prison. (Lesser known was that, around the same time as the Beckwith trial, he and Peters were also behind the faulty prosecution of Cedric Willis, sending him to prison for 12 years for a murder-rape he did not commit.) 


Hood's main prosecutor in Smith's Butler-related trial was Stanley Alexander, a long-time 
prosecutor who had served as DA Peterson's top assistant district attorney—who had run unsuccessfully for DA against Smith and then again this fall against Jody Owens. The first Smith trial ended in a mistrial; then he was acquitted in a second trial (the one where Mayor Lumumba sat on his front row for closing arguments). And just to add to your confusion by now, Smith ran unsuccessfully for governor against Hood in the Democratic primary this year for governor, drawing minimal votes. Hood is now the nominee heading into November, and Peterson is a Hinds County judge that the district attorney prosecutes case before.

Neither Butler nor Turner, also known as Darnell Dixon, has fared as well as any of the above, however. After the State of Mississippi took over Turner's prosecution from the county, Hinds County Circuit Judge Jeff Weill sentenced him in late 2017 for 45 years in three separate counts related to a 2014 domestic incident—aggravated assault with a firearm, aggravated domestic violence and shooting into an occupied vehicle. Despite Smith's alleged early attempts to help Turner, the State had indicted and arrested Turner in 2016 for beating the 22-year-old mother of one of his eight children and shooting into the car she was in. The jury found that he had dragged her out of her car, took her to a bridge in the Washington Addition vicinity, tried to strangle her there and suspended her over the railing of a bridge, prosecutors said. Then he left, and someone came to her aid. Turner came back and beat that person, picked the victim up, put her in his car and kept beating her there as he drove her home, the State said.

A Hinds County Circuit Court jury convicted Christopher Butler of possession of about four pounds of marijuana on July 27, 2017, also in Weill's courtroom. Weill sentenced Butler to prison for 30 years without parole under the State's habitual offender law. In his appeal denied last month, Butler argued among other things that Judge Weill should have recused from his case, as Butler had requested in December 2016, due to "contentions" between the judge and District Attorney Smith. Weill noted then, however, that Smith had eventually recused himself months before the trial and was no longer associated with the case.

The appeals court denied that point, along with the others. "Butler offers nothing more than mere speculation to support his claim of judicial partiality," the court found. "... Butler points to no specific rulings or record evidence that would indicate the circuit judge was biased against him or unqualified to hear his case."

'They Behaved More Like Members of Weinstein's PR Team'

Mississippi doesn't have a monopoly on complicated webs of accusations, although tentacles of national scandals, or those involved in them, have a way of ending up here. This came into full relief earlier this week when excerpts of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow's book, 'Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,' started leaking out to media outlets like Variety. The specifics we know so far are shocking—like a young woman accusing Matt Lauer of vicious anal rape at the Sochi Olympics—but the systemic through-line isn't a surprise.

Anyone paying attention to national media in the wake of #MeToo knew that Farrow was going to bring the receipts on network executives Andrew Lack and Noah Oppenheim for shutting down support for his long-running investigation of Harvey Weinstein. That work, alongside reporting by women journalists at The New York Times, exploded the already-existing #MeToo movement against systemic misogynistic cultures, rife with sexual harassment and assault, including in many national media offices.

But we didn't know to what extent Farrow would report that NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack, President Noah Oppenheim and others may have pandered directly to Weinstein's requests for them to shut down Farrow's work. 
"[A]s I witnessed firsthand during the year I spent at NBC News after Ronan published our reporting in the New Yorker—and as Ronan has further documented in his forthcoming book, 'Catch and Kill'—Lack and Oppenheim were the ones who were lying," his NBC producer Rich McHugh claimed in Vanity Fair today. "They not only personally intervened to shut down our investigation of Weinstein, they even refused to allow me to follow up on our work after Weinstein's history of sexual assault became front-page news. As the record shows, they behaved more like members of Weinstein's PR team than the journalists they claim to be."

NBC executives are denying that they helped Weinstein kill the story.

One of the main things I appreciate about Farrow's work in this arena is that his goal is clearly not to just to out bad actors, but to change a sick system that creates seemingly invincible forts around those who seem to spend good parts of their day trying to figure out how to be the biggest player in the room, using their power to control and sexualize women, and sometimes men, around them like they're on some big-game hunt. Men like this not only prey on victims they consider too weak to stop them, but demonize and distance women strong enough to do something to stop it or be close enough to find out about it. A primary goal is clearly to keep women, or other men, who might blow up the scam at a distance or too marginalized for anyone to take seriously. And women who try to ring the bell are ignored or smeared.

This is a major reason why many board rooms, newsrooms and corner offices have so few strong women running them. Too many men in charge don't want women who will challenge them and their habits or a culture they believe benefits them.

NBC: Many Afraid to Speak Out

NBC is a textbook example. We knew even before Farrow's new bombshell book that it has long been a culture where everyone was afraid to speak out about, say, Matt Lauer trapping women in his office with a door-lock button on his desk, or about their own boss Lack's reported propensity for affairs with NBC women, followed by payoffs and non-disclosure agreements. Farrow's new book has interviews with women willing to speak out about this decades-old cycle.

The executives, and Lauer, are saying in statements that the new allegations aren't true, at least parts of them. Lauer claims the anal sex was consensual (lubricant or not), and while Lack isn't denying his own affairs, he is denying that he and other executives intentionally withheld information about the rape from staffers when the company announced it was firing Lauer in late 2017, soon after allegations went public. Oppenheim told staffers that the executive repeated how the attorney of Lauer's victim was characterizing the rape.

Lack wrote to the NBC staff upon the firing, indicating that it the first he and other executives had heard about Lauer's "inappropriate behavior":

"On Monday night, we received a detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace by Matt Lauer," Lack wrote. "It represented, after serious review, a clear violation of our company's standards. As a result, we've decided to terminate his employment. While it is the first complaint about his behavior in the over twenty years he's been at NBC News, we were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident."

NBC executives apparently indicated then that Lauer had committed no "crime," but staffers are now pushing back on that, considering that they were unaware of the alleged rape. In a call to staff yesterday (that Lack was not on), staffers pressed NBC President Noah Oppenheim on exactly what the executives knew about the Lauer accusations in 2017, and whether they involved rape.

On Wednesday, Today Show host Hoda Kotb was clear that staffers did not understand that Lauer was accused of rape in 2017. "[T]hese are not allegations of an affair, there are allegations of a crime, and I think that’s shocking to all of us here who have sat with Matt for many many years," she told viewers.

NBC executives had assured staff then they had no knowledge of earlier Lauer transgressions, which Farrow now says he can prove was false, even telling George Stephanopolous on "Good Morning America" today both that NBC execs knew about previous Lauer problems and even had earlier secret NDAs with Lauer victims, among others.

Farrow said in the same interview that NBC had ordered a “hard stop to reporting."

“They told me and a producer working on this that we should lot take a single call. They told us to cancel interviews," Farrow said this morning. "The question for years has been, ‘Why?’ because every journalist at that institution didn’t understand why. And I think the book answers that question. This was a company with a lot of secrets.”

We'll see more when the book drops next week.

'Lack was sounding like 'Father Knows Best''

But here's what we know already: Bossman Andy Lack—the founder of the Mississippi Today website during the 2016 presidential campaign—has been monstrously clueless on gender issues and what equality looks like for decades now. Just read the response to an infamous media call he hosted back in 1997 about their "The Sex War: The Tension Between Men and Women" week-long package when he was president of NBC News. There was a rather obvious problem.

"What Lack was unable to explain, ironically, was why the top NBC News executives gathered to discuss 'The Sex War: The Tension Between Men and Women' were of one sex. Male," Howard Rosenberg, who listened in, wrote afterward in the Los Angeles Times.

When a "TV Guide man," as Rosenberg called him, pointed out all the testosterone on the call, Lack responded that “a lot of women” from NBC News had actually helped create “The Sex War." He then said, “If you think we [he and the male executive producers] produce the shows instead of the women mentioned on this show, you don’t understand our business very well.”

Ah, so the male executive producers were getting the top-level credit—and the women doing the work? A New York Post man pressed Lack—so did he mean that women didn't prefer to be top executive producers? The pushback irritated Lack, Rosenberg wrote.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand the thrust of your question,” Lack replied. And then: “I think it’s one of the most thankless jobs in this business,” he said about being an executive producer. “I think these titles are kind of silly.”

Lack asked if Mr. New York Post was married. No. “Then,” Lack retorted, “I think you probably don’t understand that they [women] are in charge.” Oh: the old pivot-to-the-happy-wife trick when someone brings up sexism. Seen it a million times.

This is how Rosenberg later characterized Lack, then 50, in his column: "Was this the ‘50s? Lack was sounding like 'Father Knows Best,' seeming to redefine relationships in terms of that old saw about men having the trappings of power, but women—knowing how to wind those big lugs around their fingers—really controlling things."

Hal Boedeker, the TV critic for the Orlando Sentinel, was even more brutal in his column, "Executives at NBC–Men Behaving Cluelessly" (a headline that seems still sadly true today). As for the exec's sexist responses to the male journalists: "Lack's misreading of the TV news business was only surpassed for idiocy by his take on the sexes." He added in a stunningly prescient statement: "So the next time you wonder why NBC seems to be making asinine decisions, consider the executives. They offer the real-life version of Men Behaving Badly." The New York Times got in on the critique, too, extending it to the silly "Sex War" series Lack was so proud of, which of course included a segment on sexual harassment at work.

I now use these pieces about the "Sex War" call in a guest workshop I do for a Mississippi State University journalism class on gender and media. The students of all genders quickly see how such attitudes can create a climate for bad behavior and cover-ups—in no small part because people at the top, like Lack then, could not articulate why women might want better access to executive producer spots, or how they—we—can improve the coverage, the business and the culture rather than just quietly do the grunt work.

What the 'Sex War' Means for Mississippi Media

Lack's gender blind spots, or whatever you want to call them, are important in Mississippi because he came down here and started a supposedly "world class" website that hires a lot of young women, a good number of men of a certain age and experience, but with no experienced or older women editors or reporters in the mix. He has only hired men over 40 (an educated guess; it's probably closer to 50) as the five top editors who have run the newsroom since 2016. It's not a slap on all those men to state the obvious: Even if the age disparity between genders at Lack's Mississippi website is somehow accidental, there is no excuse for this look in a state that desperately needs better representation of strong women leaders in media, newsrooms and beyond.

There is a basic disconnect here, and it's not hard to see how it could come directly from the man credited on the website as the "founder" who envisioned the website as his "brainchild," as fundraising materials put it. Likewise, Lack's appearances in the state (often with other NBC stars including also-accused Tom Brokaw) on male-dominated stages do not allay those concerns. Nor did his network's wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump, which drew Lack major criticism nationally. He even <a href="http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2019/sep/04/editors-note-media-horse-race-election-reporting-s/ ] and, of course, wasted $69 million of NBC money criticizing Hillary Clinton on a stage at Ole Miss for being unlikeable on the debacle that was Megyn Kelly—even after her long history of racist remarks at FOX News.

This problem isn't just about Andy Lack, but he clearly represents a systemic and viral male-dominated culture that believes from within that it has the right to continue, but it must change. He also is the national-media tentacle that hits closest to home in Mississippi, which already has a tremendous misogyny-in-media problem without a network celebrity wandering down here now and then and providing cover for more of it, intentionally or not.

Email story tips to Editor-in-chief Donna Ladd at donna@jacksonfreepress.com and follow her on Twitter at @donnerkay. Her Dossier now appears every Friday. They will all be collected soon at jacksonfreepress.com/dossier.

When former Republican stalwarts from Mississippi want to get a talking point onto the ground back here in their home state, all they have to do is get on the phone with a news outlet not likely to challenge or contextualize their statements, or even include the high-powered lobbying job they do now in the resulting piece.

Put another way, regardless of controversies they have found themselves embroiled in nationally, or even right here in Mississippi, power brokers like former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott can always find a sympathetic, or least non-questioning, ear back in the Magnolia State. Here, too often collegiate choice (especially Ole Miss), fraternity (especially SAE and Sigma Nu) and proximity to piles of green (even if it came from Moscow) mean it’s easy to talk down to Mississippians through the medium of the state’s press.

You could call it the heart and privilege of being a good ole Mississippi boy. You open your mouth, and everyone forgets you’re a lobbyist for foreign nations and corporations. Or you sign a horrifically discriminatory law that allows discrimination against LGBT people (and opens the door to anti-miscegenation views all over again), and you still get invited to the Christmas or launch parties. You might even get to hug up to a national network news poobah about a month after signing such a law, if you’re lucky.

This pandering to our less-than-best leaders isn’t a new problem for Mississippi, but it came to a dramatic head on Sept. 24 within hours of Nancy Pelosi announcing an impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump for trying to get a foreign leader begging for U.S.-made missiles to go ahead on and investigate one of his political opponents.

New JFP investigative fellow Nick Judin and I wrote a big explainer on the impeachment mess (and Mississippi connections) that dropped Wednesday. In that story, among many other revelations, we talk about what happened the evening of Sept. 24 in Mississippi when former Majority Leader Lott told a Ridgeland-based news website that impeachment could "backfire" for Democrats.

Now, it’s not exactly news that Lott, as a blood-red Republican, would oppose impeachment. But the journalistic omission was jarring—the piece never mentions that Lott has been an extremely well-paid lobbyist for years, including his firm's work for the Kremlin, and it only quotes other Trump-loving Republicans from the state.

Republicans don't want Trump impeached and especially, I'd posit, not over activities in the Russia-Ukraine morass. Stop the presses! Ding, ding!

The site’s only other story on the impeachment to date is about how impeachment could hurt Democrats, leading with Phil Bryant addressing the importance of a Trump endorsement for the Mississippi GOP candidate for governor (which was then the lead story for at least a day on the site when the inevitable happened). Maybe I've missed it, but a Mississippi Democrat supporting impeachment, like U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, isn't quoted at all, although he released this statement the day Pelosi announced impeachment. That's just weird, no?

Here’s the thing: These men should not control or dominate the narrative about impeachment or anything else in Mississippi, even if they long have. This state's residents deserve to know that men we have elected to high-level posts in the past lobby for Russia, Ukraine or the Saudi Royal Family, or the makers of the missiles Ukraine wants, for that matter—or if their associates do or if any of them have in recent decades, years and months. We deserve context. We deserve facts. Different viewpoints deserve a voice. We deserve to know about the various faces of men and women who have benefitted from our voters’ pocketbooks over the years—not just the public face that serves their own spin.

This applies regardless of party. (See our story for more on the Biden family in Mississippi, too.) While you're there, study up on the history of the lobbying and political histories of Lott, Barbour and associates. Be sure to click on the links.

Is ‘Lobbyist’ a Banned Word in Mississippi Media?

When that website’s political reporter had Lott on the phone, Lott-the-lobbyist seized the opportunity to endorse the former politician he hoped would become the next chancellor at Ole Miss—former U.S. Rep. Chip Pickering, who left Congress amid a scandal involving an affair, a detailed journal and a bizarre conservative “family” in Washington, D.C., none of which was mentioned either. The story lists all the candidates who remained then and included Lott’s endorsement of Pickering, although oddly did not quote other people endorsing other chancellor candidates.

"We need a very strong leader who can promote a positive image of the state, one that will be able to work with the alumni and can be respected and work with the students and faculty," Lott told the site, apparently about Pickering.

That piece did not mention Lott’s lobbying job or include that Pickering himself was a partner in Capitol Resources from 2009 to 2013, which employs lobbyists in nine southern states, as well as its Washington, D.C., office, its website shows. At the firm started by younger Barbours, Pickering lobbied for the telecommunications industry, in which he also specialized in Congress. Currently, LinkedIn shows that Pickering is the CEO of Comptel in Washington, a trade association of the telecommunications industry.

Incidentally, Pickering’s father Charles, a controversial judge with a complicated past on race issues who sat on the board of Alliance Defending Freedom (designated a “hate group” due to its anti-LGBT positions including criminalizing homosexuality), is on the advisory board of the Ridgeland website. ADF attorneys also helped Gov. Bryant defend HB 1523 in the courts.

To the site’s credit, it did mention that another University of Mississippi chancellor candidate, Jim Barksdale, was one of its founding donors and on its board. The piece said his application for the chancellor position at his alma mater came in too late for IHL consideration.

'He Wasn’t a Barbour or Bryant Man'

Meantime, today, protests erupted in Oxford, Miss., over the Institutions of Higher Learning’s quick choice of Glenn Boyce last night as chancellor, with an apparent press announcement cancelled as a result of protests this morning, followed by an email officially announcing Boyce's appointment. The Daily Mississippian, the student newspaper, wrote a scathing editorial this morning with a one-word headline: "Bullshit."

"Today’s news that Glenn Boyce will be the next chancellor is a thinly veiled attempt to exclude students, staff and faculty from a pivotal decision, but under further review, is exactly what it looks like: a sham," the editorial stated. "The board supposedly represents democratic values. That is a farce. When a small group of individuals—appointed by a single governor—chooses for a large community of people, it is nothing other than undemocratic. This is especially true when the choice for a new chancellor was directly involved in the quasi-search process."

I ran across fascinating perspective on the politics of the UM chancellor position today, by former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, who was the last Democrat who has held that position since Haley Barbour of the BGR Group came back to Mississippi and defeated him in 2003.

Musgrove's defeat came despite a re-election campaign embrace of Barbour's signature tort-reform issue, although Gov. Barbour's version would go much further, thanks in no small part to juicy Clarion-Ledger headlines about "jackpot justice" in poor black Delta towns, while ignoring reporting elsewhere about the need to balance lawsuit limits with insurance reforms, which the tort lobby and their clients decidedly did not want. The ultimate effect of the bad reporting and subsequent legislation? Less campaign money for Democrats and more for Republicans, helping both solidify a conservative judiciary here (supported by the U.S. Chamber) and, now, a Republican supermajority in the Legislature that just reaches out and takes over the majority-black capital city's airport, ripe with economic potential for the takers, and just sneaks in money for school vouchers at the last minute. Who's going to stop them in the era that Haley Barbour's strategy created?

The same goes for handpicking university chancellors, it seems. Musgrove wrote the piece for Huffington Post back in 2015 about the controversy then over ousted Chancellor Dan Jones, considered more of a progressive on race issues. Such a slap at Ole Miss tradition did not please all alumni, of course, many of whom still have an exiled Colonel Reb dance at their wedding receptions and the like. (Seriously, I've seen it. Eek.)

"Without missing a beat, he returned to his pre-gubernatorial position as head of Washington, DC lobbying firm, the BGR Group," Musgrove wrote of Barbour.

"(Barbour) also took an equity position at the law firm, Butler Snow, in Ridgeland, MS—a suburb of the state’s capitol (sic) of Jackson," Musgrove continued. "When Barbour left office, Butler Snow was the third largest law firm in town. Since then, Butler Snow has taken hundreds of millions of dollars in state contracts. Now they are one of the largest firms in the nation. Their offices are a who’s-who of former and future gubernatorial appointments. Their roster of attorneys includes Barbour’s former Chief of Staff, Governor Bryant’s daughter, US Senator’s Wicker’s daughter and her husband - who also happens to be Governor Bryant’s former Chief of Staff and campaign manager for Senate Appropriations chair Sen. Thad Cochran."

Musgrove added: "Butler Snow got the contract to redraw the state legislative map during redistricting. And to the shock of no one, Butler Snow’s favored candidates came out on top. Butler Snow could be considered the ‘for-profit’ arm of our state government."

That meant, Musgrove wrote, that Jones was a political outsider when it comes to the traditional power base in Mississippi. And Ole Miss is among state universities that are "major revenue generators," as he put it.

"Hundreds of millions—if not billions—flow through their hallowed halls in legal fees for health care contracts, research grants, bond issuances, buildings contracting, the list is too long to count," Musgrove said. "Even in a poor state that chronically underfunds education, we’re talking a mountain of untapped billable hours for a firm like Butler Snow."

"Dan Jones was standing at the gates of a gold mine, but he wasn’t a Butler Snow man. He wasn’t a Barbour or Bryant man."

Meek’s Revenge on Ole Miss

Speaking of Ole Miss and controversy, I ran into Ed Meek whose name used to grace the University of Mississippi journalism school until he disparaged young black women in Oxford on Facebook. He was in the audience for the screening at Judy Meredith’s documentary, “Who Is James Meredith”?, at Two Museums in Jackson on Wednesday. He stood up and remarked that he was thrilled that the Merediths’ granddaughters were attending Ole Miss.

On Sept. 20, the news website Meek founded and ran in Oxford, Hoddytoddy.com, reported that he was moving his $5.3 million endowment (which is why the j-school had been named after him) away from the University of Mississippi to the CREATE Foundation in Tupelo, which has run nonprofit media as far back as the early 1970s before it became a trend in recent years. It has long owned the print newspaper, the Daily Journal, and even the printing press that now prints the Jackson Free Press.

Oddly, the HottyToddy.com reporter didn't mention Meek's history with that website.

Apparently, Meek was in on early plans for Mississippi Today, even suggesting the name, I'm told—which is apparently a nod to USA Today in the site’s long-stated goals of remaining neutral and nonpartisan. That is ironic, considering that the Gannett Corp., which owned The Clarion-Ledger until Gatehouse Media took over the parent corporation recently (retaining the name), owns USA Today. Confused, yet?

We, by the way, named the Jackson Free Press for the Mississippi Free Press, a Civil Rights Movement newspaper started by hero Medgar Evers, Rev. R.L.T. Smith and friends, and printed by white newspaper editor and owner Hazel Brannon Smith. Along the way of shedding her segregationist upbringing, let’s just say Smith pissed off a lot of racists—a tradition we have long been happy to continue.

‘It’s Not Like They’re Dog Kennels’

Seriously, Rep. Steve Palazzo? The dehumanization in your words about immigrants last week, reported by Ashton Pittman, were nothing short of horrifying. Why not stop vying to be the worst of Mississippi?

(P.S. Palazzo is against Trump's impeachment, too. Alert the media.)

First, Do No Harm: How Not to Cover Crime and Public Schools

I attended a gathering of media leaders Thursday morning in the Jackson Public Schools board room hosted by its newish high-energy superintendent, Dr. Errick Greene. He summarized the district’s new strategic plan, which I’d seen because I had attended the unveiling at Kirksey Middle School and sat in on a brainstorm session there. (Look at the strategic plan here.)

Dr. Greene gave examples of positive media coverage, including my recent Let’s Talk Jackson podcast with him—even though he added with a smile that I “pressed him” in it. (Hey, that’s what I do.) But he seemed to like the chance to get beyond easy sound bites and sensationalism, and he didn’t pull punches about problems and needs in the district.

At the gathering, I asked Dr. Greene how Jackson media’s typical style of crime coverage affects the schools. (Most of you know how I feel about it already.)

What was sad to me is that Dr. Greene had to tell newsroom leaders that they don’t have to mention a JPS school just because a crime happens in its general vicinity. This cements in people’s minds that our schools are bad and dangerous, which in turn hurts the school, the district, the kids and families, and even the city’s economy when people decide to move to the suburbs and take their piece of the tax base with them.

What makes me sad, and a bit angry, is how often I’ve heard that same request over the last 17 years of running this newspaper at forum after forum—to please stop mentioning a school that had nothing to do with a crime. Will it be any different this time, especially on networks that love to lead newscasts with the latest mayhem report? Who knows?

Meantime, dip into our Preventing Violence archive to see how the Jackson Free Press covers crime differently and from a causes-solutions frame.

Hinds Documents Still Intact

Back in Jackson proper, the Jackson Free Press got good news this week when Hinds County Board of Supervisors President Peggy Calhoun assured me that the board would not destroy a list of documents we raised concerns about after a recent vote. She also assured me that all of the records are copies of documents available in the Hinds County Chancery Court’s office, the first time we had heard that necessary bit of information.

I was happy to hear that and also appreciate that President Calhoun understood that we want to go through the documents and ensure that they are indeed on file, especially considering that they are not being digitized.

I’ve talked about this in the last couple of Dossiers. Reporter Seyma Bayram is trying to make an appointment for us to view the documents on the list now. We’ll keep you posted.

Meantime, visit our very deep JFP Documents Morgue at jfp.ms/documents and poke around. Your hands won't even get dusty.

Dossier Tip of the Week: Seyma and I both have run into public officials in the last couple of weeks who do not understand that they are on the record during a phone call with a journalist about a story she's working unless they say it's off the record in advance. We can't spend an hour on the phone with you, and then you try to say it was all off the record and, thus, useless to us. Public officials need to understand this as a vital part of public transparency and accountability.

Email editor-in-chief Donna Ladd at donna@jacksonfreepress.com and follow her on Twitter at @donnerkay.

Last week, I picked up a two-minute voicemail from a man named "Robert" who wasn't pleased that our 36-page print edition of the Jackson Free Press talked about the recent ICE raids in Mississippi on three pages. The cover package was our annual 2019 college-football preview, which covered six pages including advertising related to football.

How dare we include reporting on the ICE raids, and immigrant children crying, in the same issue as football, he contended.

"Y'all g0t all this crap in there about this damn illegal raid on these illegal aliens that stole jobs from American citizens," he lectured. "I think that really sucks because I wanted to read about football. I don't want to read about all this crap in here with these illegals because all they're doing is stealing our jobs away from our people."

In fact, he said, we should just leave politics out of the issue altogether. (The same issue had a four-page spread on the primary run-offs including a voter's guide.)

"It would really be nice if you'd cover the football and leave the politics out of it," he said as if he was talking to a child used to being scolded. "If you want to talk about politics, tell both sides of the story. Don't just tell the part about the illegals and how sad it is to see the children crying. Nobody wants to see the children crying, but they're stealing people's identities, stealing people's jobs, and it's just not right."

By the end of the message, however, it turned out that "Robert" is not, in fact, against politics in media—just the kind he doesn't agree with.

"So, y'all need to quit this damn liberal crap and start doing fair news," he explained. "Just like Donald Trump said, y'all ain't nothin' but a bunch of fake news. And don't feel bad because Channel 16, 3, 12, they all do the same thing. I watch Fox News, and I hear the truth, and then I watch my local news, and I hear all these lies."

Apparently, not mixing football with reporting on ICE raids is the only way to keep "Robert," whom I'm guessing isn't exactly a regular reader of my award-winning newspaper, as a reader.

"I just wanted to let you know that. If you want me to read your paper in the future, uh, you need to leave the politics out of it," he declared. "Stay with the football preview. Now if you want to cover politics in another issue, that's fine. But when I pick up an issue to read about football, that's what I expect to read about."

"Robert" ended his message by offering to further explain his desires to me and gave me his phone number. "You people are ruining everything for everybody. I just wanted to let you know how I felt about it. If you'd like to call me back, I'd be more than happy to talk to you," he offered.

I didn't call him back.

Want to hear more callers to the Jackson Free Press? Hear one from a gentleman caller complaining that we cover black Mississippians too often. And in this one, a woman offers to buy a black columnist, then a teenager, a "plane ticket back to Africa."

What a couple of weeks: I lost a good friend and colleague in Cedric Willis; I had check and credit-card fraud hit inside my office and staff; and I've just spent recent days feeling punched in the gut as news crept out first about Jeffrey Epstein finally being arrested properly for trafficking children and then his safe full of sick, naked souvenirs. As someone who was raped as a teenager, this news is devastating.

It's not an easy time in journalism by any measure. My 2018 team may have just won 20 southeastern U.S. awards for deep and impactful work we did last year, but the reality in our industry overall is that we have to scrap and claw to keep staff and ourselves paid and doing the top-notch work our community needs and expects from us coming out. It's the same for most outlets in the U.S., especially those of us who don't pander or violate journalistic ethics by trading a story for ad dollars or avoiding vital stories that their funders don't want. Journalism is under attack, both politically and from Internet giants like Facebook.

I've experienced several journalism low-blows in recent months. I had to let someone go for multiple instances of plagiarism I caught before print. I've had work product stolen. Oh, and the Dem men attacks about me both being "miserable"—they don't know my Zen self—and on the payroll of the Mississippi GOP (why they block me on Twitter?) after I criticized a Democratic pol for voting for the Heartbeat bill. It seems that I also think Ronald Reagan fixed the economy—an easily factchecked lie.

Joke's on them—journalism is often a thankless profession, and a progressive woman newspaper editor in the middle of Mississippi knows that better than anybody, I'd wager. My response to efforts to derail me and my paper is always the same: "Excellent work is the best response. Back to it." And forward this news train chugs.

The good news among all the real loss of late is a boost to my faith in truly good journalism to survive all attackers. I'm reminded of the phrase my partner Todd Stauffer embraced in the early months of the JFP back when we unpacked Trent Lott's (and the Mississippi GOP's) racist political strategies in 2002 and then came out against the Iraq War the week it started when it could have been business suicide.

"Do the right thing and wait" became his mantra to help him sleep at night.

This recent boost came, first, from thinking so much about Brian Johnson's 2006 story about Cedric that the new exoneree used to lobby the Legislature for better restitution laws. (He picked up our extra copies to hand out.) And I didn't know until his funeral that he had the issue's cover reproduced on a T-shirt that he then wore to vote for Barack Obama in 2008. 
 I do know just how many young journalists and soon-to-be voters were inspired by his story and his visits. I also know Brian was the only journalist who told the full story about Hinds DA Ed Peters' office and the State of Mississippi basically covering up Cedric's innocence while they were making a big deal out of finally putting Medgar Evers' killer in prison—a case that led to prosecutor Bobby DeLaughter and a reporter being canonized in a white-hero movie about the overdue prosecution, even as Cedric Willis was being brutalized in Parchman with no media giving a damn until attorney Emily Maw and the Innocence Project New Orleans came along years later.

That, in turn, got me to thinking about the journalism Brian, Adam Lynch and I did about Frank Melton's mayoral campaign and term as mayor. Melton was a destructive character boosted by a press corps that mostly loved him. (I'm told some feared him). That work really put us on the local and national map—and had deep community impact. Our investigations led to fraught state and federal trials for him that ended in acquittals or mistrials, but importantly kept the spotlight (other media joined belatedly) on him and his gun-toting, alcohol-fueled cries for attention.

My Melton era resulted in what I consider the most vital result of my own journalism—then-DA Faye Peterson ordered the boys, whom he had also used to try to discredit her, out of his home. There, I had seen the mayor staggering drunk and strapped with guns, putting teens on show like they were his trophies. It was sick and creepy. While I couldn't definitely prove the worst rumors about him true or not—his young accusers had been murdered—knowing his "foster-parent" con was up helped me sleep at night.

The Melton experience would motivate me to study evidence-based violence prevention (it's not boys with sledgehammers). That later led me to profile former gangster Benny Ivey for The Guardian and then the Jackson Free Press, which ended up with him as one of Mississippi's first two credible messengers. Now that's a journalism trail.

I've thought about Melton a lot since the Epstein arrest resulting from the stellar journalism of Julie K. Brown at the Miami Herald, who wouldn't let go of an aging injustice. I've experienced what she must have gone through doing this work—fear, public disparagement, late and sleepless nights, calls at all hours, worry about protecting victims, getting the facts right. And in my case, if Melton or others would succeed in running me out of business as promised, thus lowering the journalism bar back to 2002 levels when star reporters couldn't figure out how to report both sides of "tort reform."

When you get into this crazy business for the express purpose of having positive impact, you make it happen no matter what and find people who share the same drive to help you. Awards and accolades are secondary, although they feel great after the hell you go through. Insults and absurd lies end up not mattering a hill of beans. The progress you and your teammates all ignite together with stellar reporting, while cheering each other on, is what is exciting and necessary about long days, multiple drafts, factchecking, the threats and lies.

Journalism can and will beat the hell out of you, these days more than ever. But then you go to a friend's funeral overwhelmed with grief and see his picture on the big screen wearing your newspaper's cover on his T-shirt when he voted for the first time, and only one thought remains.

The journalism must go on.

Attend a crime town hall in honor of Cedric at Walton Elementary School on Aug. 1 from 6 to 8 p.m. See http://jxnpulse.com/2019/07/ymps-youth-crime-violence-town-hall-dialogues/. Please support the JFP's deep, impactful journalism by joining the JFP VIP Club at whatever level you can afford.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court sided with businesses and the U.S. government Monday in a ruling about the public's access to information, telling a South Dakota newspaper it can't get the data it was seeking.

Open government and reporters groups described the ruling against the Argus Leader newspaper as a setback, but it was not clear how big its impact will ultimately be.

The paper was seeking to learn how much money goes annually to every store nationwide that participates in the government's $65 billion-a-year food assistance program, previously known as food stamps.

Reporters at the paper, which is owned by USA Today publisher Gannett, asked the federal government in 2011 to provide information about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Officials initially declined to provide all the information reporters were seeking. In response, the paper sued, arguing that the store-level data the government declined to provide is public and shows citizens how the government is spending their tax money.

The government lost in a lower court and decided not to appeal. But a supermarket trade association, the Virginia-based Food Marketing Institute, stepped in to continue the fight with the backing of the Trump administration, arguing that the information is confidential and should not be disclosed.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for a six-member majority of the court that at "least where commercial or financial information is both customarily and actually treated as private by its owner and provided to the government under an assurance of privacy," the information should not be disclosed. He said the SNAP data qualified.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a dissent joined by justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor that he feared "the majority's reading will deprive the public of information for reasons no better than convenience, skittishness, or bureaucratic inertia."

The Food Marketing Institute said in a statement that it believes the ruling will "protect private financial information today and in the future."

Maribel Wadsworth, president of the USA Today Network, said in a statement that the decision "effectively gives businesses relying on taxpayer dollars the ability to decide for themselves what data the public will see about how that money is spent." She called it a "step backward for openness."

The case has to do with the Freedom of Information Act. The act gives citizens, including reporters, access to federal agencies' records with certain exceptions. A section of the law tells officials to withhold "confidential" ''commercial or financial information" that is obtained from third parties and in the government's possession. The question for the court was when information provided to a federal agency qualifies as confidential.

Previously, lower courts had said that information couldn't be found to be confidential unless disclosing it was likely to cause "substantial" competitive harm. The Supreme Court rejected that reading.

The Associated Press was among dozens of media organizations that signed a legal brief supporting the Argus Leader.

The case is Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media, 18-481.

Due to questions from non-journalists on how the journalism awards process works each year, here's a primer. Every year, Jackson Free Press editor-in-chief Donna Ladd chooses a wide selection of the newspaper's best work to submit for awards in a variety of contests. Each individual entry requires a fee, ranging from $10 to $75 depending on the contest, and we work within a budget set by Publisher Todd Stauffer each year that must cover all contests. (It's a tedious process.) Because of the typical high quality of JFP work, we cannot afford to put up all of our journalism for awards, and we only put up work we feel confident can and should win a category. Ladd selects work by multiple writers based on her own experience with contests and understanding of the kinds of work appropriate for various categories and with input from current and past writers who reach out with suggestions/lists of work they and other members of the team did for various categories. Although we win a lot of awards typically, not all the work we believe should win, or that is put up, ends up winning, so cheers to the winners from the JFP and other outlets that won awards.

Due to the limited budget and to honor our team approach to beats and journalism, Ladd prioritizes collaborative work by teams, which often win special awards, such as the team work this year on police shootings and the gang law. Individual awards are the second priority, and she favors the best-written and -reported work of current and past writers (including interns and freelance) based on the followed criteria: (1) greatest community impact, (2) most enterprising reporting and solutions-driven content, and for drafts turned in (3) on deadline and (4) that did not require significant editing or rewrite by anyone other than the writer before final draft (an ethical consideration as well).

Community-service prizes, of which the JFP has won many over the years, typically honor collaborations of breaking news reports, cover stories, investigative work, editorials and columns (often by freelancers as well, such as when a large team won for our work on the failed Personhood amendment), and they typically include work outside the calendar year.

Work by individual staffers who left without notice, did not return the Jackson Free Press' work product (notes, recordings, files, etc.) for their staff work and did not respond to messages during the contest period is the lowest priority for award submission, although those writers are certainly included in collaborative entries.

Several of the contests are open to freelance writers who wish to submit and pay fees for their own additional work to be considered, which is a common practice at news outlets for entries a publication cannot afford to submit. This newspaper does, and is happy to, coordinate with freelance or former writers to avoid overlap in content entries if they reach out or keep up communications, including returning messages during the contest period.

See our list of 20 awards for 2018 work.

Ed Meek, the man whose $5.3-million donation in 2009 cemented him as the namesake of the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi, requested over the weekend that his name be removed from the school. His Sept. 22 announcement came just 24 hours after UM’s faculty at the journalism school released a statement giving him three days to request his name be removed. They also invited Meek "to be part of a conversation about charting a path forward that speaks to our core values and should guide our future relationships with all constituents."

This decision follows controversy around Meek’s now-deleted Sept. 19 Facebook post of two black women attached to a post criticizing Oxford’s plummeting property values and rising crime.

"I have asked the University of Mississippi to remove my name from the School of Journalism and New Media,” Meek wrote on Facebook. "This past week I made a post on Facebook that reflected poorly on myself, the School and our University. It was never my intention to cast the problems our community faces as a racial issue. I do not believe that to be the case. I heartily apologize to all I have offended. I particularly apologize to those depicted in the photographs I posted. I was wrong to post them and regret that I did so.”

He added: "I have spent my life in service to the Oxford-University community and have prided myself that I was a proponent of integration and diversity at all times. I helped to transform the Department of Journalism into a School because of my passion for a free press, free speech, and an independent student media. My desire then and now is for the School of Journalism to be a global leader in Journalism education. I recognize that the attachment of my name to the School of Journalism is no longer in the best interest of that vision. I love Ole Miss too much to be one who inhibits the University and the School from reaching the highest potential and it is with that in mind that I make this request.”

UM Chancellor Jeffrey S. Vitter issued a statement the evening of Sept. 22, following Meek’s announcement, thanking the Meek family for their ongoing and permanent contributions to the university.

"While his request tonight to remove his name from the Meek School of Journalism and New Media was made selflessly to permit the university to move forward, it is nonetheless regrettable and poignant,” Vitter wrote. "A primary hallmark of leadership is the willingness to sacrifice personal gain for the betterment of the whole. We commend the Meek family for their heartfelt response to the concerns of the UM community.”

The name-change process was set in motion following outrage from past and present UM students, including the women captured in Meek’s Facebook post. Mahoghany Jordan, a UM senior, responded to Meek in an editorial at the Daily Mississippian.

"In closing, I relinquish being over-sexualized, scapegoated and invalidated by anyone. I deserve to feel secure in my skin on this campus and in this town just as my counterparts do and I will continue to carry on as such,” she wrote.

With more than 2,800 signatures, the Change.org petition requesting Meek’s name to be removed from the school is now closed, claiming victory.

Vitter’s open letter from Sept. 21 said the name change will be the first of a two-pronged process to address students’ concerns. The chancellor outlined the lengthy process in his letter.

The faculty committee of the academic unit must approve a recommendation to make a name change. Pending that approval, the undergraduate and graduate councils, comprised of faculty across the university and one voting student on each council, will also have to consider the name change. That decision would go to the Council of Academic Administrators before ultimately going to Vitter, “who would decide whether to make a request to the IHL Board for consideration and a final vote.”

Vitter’s letter also addresses a sometimes unwelcoming environment he said students pointed out at a Sept. 20 listening session following Meek’s Facebook post. In response, the second, “longer-term” prong involves the vice chancellor for diversity and community engagement, Kristina Caldwell, leading an "expedited acquisition of additional feedback and consideration of new actions and strategies to address concerns around university and community climate.”

At last week’s listening session, The Daily Mississippian reported that both Jordan and Ki’yona Crawford, the other woman in Meek’s post, aired their grievances.

"Meek has put a crack in my foundation," Jordan said at the forum. "Am I really accepted? Am I protected? I can't give you a wholehearted 'yes' anymore. I really can't, and that's sad to say."

"When I first saw the post, I was confused as to why our pictures were being shown—and only our two pictures," Crawford said. "And then I critiqued his statement. He said something about the drop in enrollment rate, and he said something about the property values decreasing. And I'm sitting here like ... is he trying to imply that we're prostitutes? Like what is he trying to imply?"

Vitter closed his letter thanking the students from the listening sessions for sharing emotional comments and perspectives that will help move the university forward.

“I want to close by reiterating my thanks to the students who shared many emotional comments and perspectives at last night’s listening sessions,” Vitter wrote. “Your willingness to step forward and discuss how this week’s events affected you in a frank and civil manner reflected the best of what we want for our university. It is the constructive way for families to deal with the tough stuff in life, and it’s how our university family will address these issues going forward.”

Meek was also the founder and publisher of HottyToddy.com, a local website in Oxford that pledged to give all proceeds to the journalism school. The Clarion-Ledger reported that the board of HottyToddy.com, which includes representatives from the journalism school, gave the website to the university within the last two weeks.

Email city reporter Ko Bragg at ko@jacksonfreepress.com.

It all started on Facebook Wednesday night, Sept. 19, when Ed Meek, the eponym of the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi, posted a photo of two black university students paired with a caption blaming the young women for crime and plummeting property values.

"I hesitated until now to publish these pictures but I think it important that our community see what the camera is seeing at 2 a.m. after a ball game," he wrote, adding that he saw no police presence despite hearing about fights. "Enough, Oxford and Ole Miss leaders, get on top of this before it is too late. A 3 percent decline in enrollment is nothing compared to what we will see if this continues...and real estate values will plummet as will tax revenue. We all share in the responsibility to protect the values we hold dear that have made Oxford and Ole Miss known nationally."

Following thousands of comments and public outcry, Meek issued a quasi-apology via Facebook. "I apologize to those offended by my post," he wrote. "My intent was to point out we have a problem in The Grove and on the Oxford Square."

Meek did not respond to requests for comment at press time.

Mahoghany Fires Back

Since then, people have shared photos of Mahoghany Jordan and Ki'yona Crawford thousands of times, not always with their faces blurred out, launching them front and center into a controversy they did not stir up.

Jordan penned a column in the Daily Mississippian lambasting Meek for a post she said reeked of "racist ideology as well as misogyny."

"Ed Meek's post was not meant for me nor my good friend (Ki'yona) Crawford. We weren't the ones fighting Alabama fans at a tent in the Grove, we weren't harassing our LGBTQIA+ counterparts, nor were we the ones fighting in front of bars around the Square. However, somehow for Meek, the blame for the university's enrollment decline and city's decline in property value was easier to associate with two women of color as opposed to the particular demographic that has been at the forefront of the school's most controversial moments by far."

Jordan said that she has worked hard to embrace her "voluptuousness" as well as her skin tone, and that she does not need an apology from Meek or his "reciprocal guilt."

"In closing, I relinquish being over-sexualized, scapegoated and invalidated by anyone. I deserve to feel secure in my skin on this campus and in this town just as my counterparts do and I will continue to carry on as such," she said.

Today, Sept. 21, The Daily Mississippian editorial board called for the Meek School of Journalism and New Media to cut ties with the school's namesake in an effort to stand against hate—something they point out has not always been the case within the paper's history, nor UM has a whole.

"The Daily Mississippian of today rejects our university's history of complicity and, instead, chooses to stand against hate," the editorial says. "(Meek's) name and the division it has come to represent do not align with our values. This change is absolutely necessary to uphold everything we stand for—as journalists, as students, as individuals. Students should not have to attend a school whose name makes them feel discriminated against."

In 2009, Meek and his wife donated $5.3 million to the journalism school, and the department became his namesake.

Other student groups are acting in solidarity. UM's Black Student Union issued a statement via Facebook on Thursday demanding that UM Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter release a public statement to the student body condemning "racist comments made by Ed Meek," and for the school's journalism school to do the same.

The university met those demands.

"We have heard the calls for the Meek name to be removed from our building," Will Norton, dean of UM's journalism school said Thursday in a video statement. "We have heard the comments that suggest that that response would be too harsh. We are continuing to listen and continue to respond. We expect to make a recommendation to Chancellor Vitter in the very near future."

Jordan: 'Am I Protected'?

Vitter responded to Meek in a Facebook comment echoing the call for a safe campus, but condemning the post for suggesting "an unjustified racial overtone that is highly offensive." He also encouraged Meek to withdraw his comment and apologize.

The chancellor then issued an official statement iterating the university's outrage and willingness to support the two students in the photos.

"This social media post was deeply hurtful because of the sentiment conveyed about the presence of African Americans in Oxford and at Ole Miss," Vitter wrote on Sept. 20. "We are outraged that photographs of two of our female African American students were used to make this point. University leaders have been in contact with the students to give them support and assistance."

Vitter also announced a listening session, which was held last night, Sept. 20, on the Oxford, Miss. campus.

The Daily Mississippian reports that hundreds of students came together at the forum, including Jordan and Crawford.

"Meek has put a crack in my foundation," Jordan said at the forum. "Am I really accepted? Am I protected? I can't give you a wholehearted 'yes' anymore. I really can't, and that's sad to say." Crawford also spoke, The Daily Mississippian reports. "When I first saw the post, I was confused as to why our pictures were being shown—and only our two pictures," Crawford said. "And then I critiqued his statement. He said something about the drop in enrollment rate, and he said something about the property values decreasing. And I'm sitting here like ... is he trying to imply that we're prostitutes? Like what is he trying to imply?"

UM alumnus have also flooded social media with statements of solidarity with those on campus, including former editors at the Daily Mississippian.

There is also a Change.org petition for Meek's name to be removed from the journalism school. It had nearly 2,500 signatures at press time.

Meek's Other Enterprises, Media Efforts

Meek is a former assistant vice chancellor for public relations and marketing at the university and the CEO of Oxford Publishing, a national publishing and trade show group, who has recently received the Mississippi Governor's Distinguished Citizen Award. He is the founder of HottyToddy.com, which stills lists him as the publisher and currently indicates an all-white staff on its website. However, The Clarion-Ledger reported this week that Meek is no longer publisher and that the University of Mississippi just acquired the site within the last week or so.

The HottyToddy.com site indicates that HottyToddy.com LLC is a division of New Media Lab LLC, which it says provides all profits to support the Meek School of Journalism and New Media. It was not officially affiliated with the University of Mississippi, although journalism-school Dean Will Norton and Associate Dean Charlie Mitchell are shown as members of HottyToddy.com's 11-member board, as well as on New Media Lab's mostly white board, with one woman. Nine members of the HottyToddy.com board appear to be white men, with one white woman and one black man rounding out the roster.

Meek previously told the Jackson Free Press that he was involved in the initial planning for Mississippi Today, a nonprofit news website in Ridgeland, Miss., founded by NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack with close ties to University of Mississippi staff and alumni. Dean Norton also sits on that website's eight-member board, of mostly white men, which contains two women and two members of color, including one of the women.

Dean Norton and other assistant deans posted on Facebook that Meek's commentary is not a reflection of the journalism school. "This post is in no way associated with or represents our school, our students or our faculty. We are embarrassed by his actions," the post stated.

In her Daily Mississippian column, Mahoghany Jordan also referred to a book Meek wrote about witnessing the 1962 race riots at Ole Miss.

"As for Ed Meek: one should never use the physical appearance of a person as a measurement of their morality. As you documented in your civil rights book, 'Riot: Witness to Anger and Change,' suits were worn by both the affirming and opposing side during the university's integration process."

Email city reporter Ko Bragg at ko@jacksonfreepress.com. Donna Ladd contributed to this story.

The Jackson Free Press, and its editors and journalists, have come under fire many times since we launched 16 years ago in Mississippi's capital city. This newspaper was months old when we published facts about the myths behind the Iraq War as a cover story just after it started, amid patriotic fervor and a near-clampdown on any criticism of George W. Bush's rationale.

Popular former Mayor Frank Melton yelled across a restaurant 12 years ago that he would run us out of business in six months because we reported myriad facts about him that other media had ignored until we came along, eventually leading to him facing two trials and losing a re-election bid. We were the only outlet to report that he was lying under oath during his campaign, even as other media knew.

Local developers and businessmen were furious when we reported that they owned potential waterfront property along the "Two Lakes" footprint, and that many of them had put money into an undisclosed political action committee to elect a pro-Lake mayor—names we had to fight to uncover and reveal. For years, some of them disparaged and blacklisted this newspaper, even sending the editor drunken emails in the evening about how terrible we are. (To be fair, that person eventually apologized.)

When the editor of the Jackson Free Press interviewed former Sheriff Malcolm McMillin in response to allegations that he had covered up details of a local drunk-driving tragedy, a local blogger, who uses a fake name in his posts, called her a "journalistic slut." The blogger was pushing the conspiracy and had not tried to interview the sheriff.

In the early years, a conservative blog called for boycotts of the Jackson Free Press because we dared talk about the racism behind crime rhetoric that a white district attorney candidate used to disparage his black opponent. One commenter even started a "parody" blog linking the picture of the young daughter of a backer of this newspaper to a picture of genital warts.

A man from Brooklyn, N.Y., who supports the Confederate flag threatened the newspaper's male publisher physically and by phone and email for weeks because we support changing the Mississippi flag.

In a heated U.S. Senate race between the right-wing State Sen. Chris McDaniel and incumbent Thad Cochran, this newspaper exposed how the Republican Party was directing money into PACs for black leaders, so they could gin up support for Cochran, who had a less-than-stellar voting record on many issues affecting black Mississippians, including opposing a congressional apology for doing too little about lynching.

And now, as national progressive media publish glowing reports of Jackson's current mayor's promises on criminal-justice reform, the JFP publishes critiques of his decisions to allow the police department to participate in Jeff Sessions' controversial "Project Eject," to continue withholding names of police officers who shoot and kill citizens and to promote mugshots of accused juveniles tried as adults, as well as agreeing to "perp walk" juveniles for media. We endorsed the mayor, but it is still our job to hold him accountable. (To date, our coverage led to the mayor revoking the mugshot and perp-walk policies.)

When we broke the story that Gov. Phil Bryant had (again) declared Confederate Heritage Month, his press person (again) would not return our calls to confirm or deny, later giving a statement to the Associated Press after our story went viral nationally.

To add journalistic insult to injury, some newsroom leaders in the state ask not to appear alongside our journalists and editors in discussions because they apparently fear we might bring up some of the under-covered stories in the state. And we might—respectfully, of course.

This is a small list of the responses this newspaper has faced for doing our damn job and challenging the entrenched status quo in Mississippi. But we continue doing our job to afflict the comfortable with accurate journalism and, in so doing, comfort and help those afflicted by it, to borrow from an 1893 phrase about the role of a free press.

If you are smart, you do not go into journalism, or start a newspaper, to have citizens, elected officials or a political party universally love you. If you are serious about doing serious journalism, you get into this industry ready to be pummeled near daily, personally and as an organization, for reporting facts that one or more people would rather you ignore. Journalism requires a tough skin and hard work, and we have the First Amendment to protect our role for a reason. We are the watchdogs of democracy and truth when we do our jobs well. It is not about soft-pedaling to maintain access; it is about reporting facts.

Good journalism is not designed to make people comfortable, especially public servants whom the public elects and pays to represent us and, ostensibly, to make good decisions. Donald Trump, of course, is pushing the same marginalization of good journalism that we have long faced in Mississippi, so it's not unfamiliar to us. But it is very dangerous to our democracy when the nation's top official works constantly to comfort the very comfortable and afflict the afflicted by creating distrust in those of us willing to report truths he would rather us not.

Newspapers around the nation are publishing editorials today warning about the risk of elected officials weaponizing lies about the media in order to cover up their own corruption and malfeasance. We are not here to reinforce what any public servant of any party tells us we need to support. We are not here to dote on the governor at cocktail parties so we get invited to the next signing of a discriminatory bill. We are not here to reinforce the views of any elected official or political party, even if we endorsed that candidate.

In a time when journalism is very difficult to sustain, those who remain in this industry must dig deep into issues that the public does not have the time nor the expertise to investigate for themselves. We are here to give the public information they need. We are here to warn the public about lies, deceit and false information.

We are here to serve American democracy despite any elected official's open disdain for it. We are not the "enemy of the people"—we are the enemy of lies and corruption.

Shortly before 9 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 11, in the Presidential Hills subdivision in northwest Jackson, a 14-year-old girl named Alexandria Love was shot in the head. Just an hour later, doctors at the University of Mississippi Medical Center listed Love in very critical condition.

As doctors cared for Love and her teenage classmates sent Facebook prayers laden with emoji, the Jackson Police Department tweeted that it was looking for the alleged suspect: "a 15-year old unidentified BM," using a shorthand abbreviation for black male. "If identified as a suspect, adult charges are possible, and identity will be released," JPD added.

The Jackson Police Department then kept reporters informed via email during every step of their pursuit of the teenage boy, who remained nameless for a time.

On Nov. 13 at 4:10 p.m. JPD tweeted, alongside an earlier mugshot, that they wanted Sheroderick Elmore for aggravated assault in connection with Love's shooting. Less than two hours later at 5:42 p.m., they announced his capture via Twitter. Around dinnertime on Nov. 14, JPD tweeted that Love had died—Jackson's 53rd homicide to that point. There are now 59 homicides on the books in 2017. That tweet also disclosed that Elmore's charges had been upgraded from aggravated-assault to murder. A few hours later, JPD sent reporters his updated booking photo via email.

Jackson Police Department spokesman Sgt. Roderick Holmes said JPD believes some sort of "argument or altercation" took place prior to the shooting between Love and Elmore, but there are no further details about it to date. What they do know is that Elmore and Love were not alone in the residence where the shooting took place, although the two teens may have been alone in a room together when the gun went off. Holmes added that the "detectives believe they have the individual that shot (Love), but what actually led to that shooting is what's in question."

With a heavy allegation and charge against him that strip him of youthful qualities, it becomes easy to forget that Elmore is still not old enough to vote, buy cigarillos or enlist in any military branch. He is also innocent until proven guilty, despite local-turned-national media attention that can seem more like a frenzy.

But, this story is not uniquely Elmore's. Many youth are caught up in a criminal-justice system with a long-running history of flip-flopping between punitive and rehabilitative models and inconsistency of who gets charged as an adult and who does not. 
 Minority youth can be victimized twofold: first by a system that tends to see them as adults more often than it does their white counterparts, and then again by media attention that preys on the same damaging racial stereotypes that got them there in the first place.

Of Chains and a Perp Walk

Sheroderick Elmore walked into his initial court appearance facing adult charges on Nov. 14, the day before his 16th birthday. There, the judge revoked his bond. Then, two police officers walked on either side of Elmore's slender frame, the shackles around his ankles and wrists and the chain around his waistline jangling with each step. Television reporters and other journalists with cellphones were in place and ready to record this staged perp walk as he slinked toward a white police van.

"Do you have anything to say?" a reporter asked the teenager. No audible response followed. Instead, Elmore climbed into the vehicle, his head lowered first to clear the car door, but then it remained that way as cameras encroached to continue filming the teenager before the doors shut a final time.

Holmes told the Jackson Free Press that the police department's protocol for sending out mugshots to media depends on several factors, including public and media demands. But, it can also hinge on "what's going on at the time," he said.

JPD typically releases mugshots of juveniles charged with violent crimes to the media—but not always. It is the police department's discretion to send out a mugshot after an arrest. In Elmore's case, the Jackson Free Press received six emails over the course of four days about developments. Sometime after JPD released his booking photo, other media outlets called JPD to arrange for the perp walk to take place after the teenager's initial bond hearing.

"Generally, they'll contact either me or whoever is available that day and just ask if they can get what they call a 'perp walk,'" Holmes said in an interview. "That's the term that's used, and if we can accommodate them, then we'll do it, but not all the time we're actually able to do it."

Holmes added that JPD never initiates a perp walk; they are always in response to media requests. He said the department received more than one request for the opportunity to photograph Elmore, which was another factor that allowed the perp walk to take place. Police also have to schedule the photo op with the court and the jail. Normally, JPD will not do perp walks for a single media outlet, Holmes said. If only one outlet requests a perp walk and they decide to do it, they may try to let other media outlets know it is taking place.

Reporters then prepare television broadcasts and publish video footage and mugshots online. These images often remain linked through Google searches even if the arrestee is later proven innocent or if a judge moves the case back to youth court, where juveniles have more protections.

Patrick Webb is an associate professor of criminal justice at St. Augustine's University, a historically black college in Raleigh, N.C., who has done research on the relationship between media coverage and juvenile proceedings. He says research points to a "simple correlation" between the police and the media, meaning "when you see one, you see the other," and these entities working in tandem can have a severe impact on how young people see themselves.

Webb says that in depicting a "young person that's not culpable" as a criminal in the media, juveniles can come to see themselves as criminals, and in turn will exhibit that type of behavior in a "self-fulfilling prophecy."

In a 2008 study, Webb presented a theory that suggested public embarrassment from the media and other tactics could teach children to abstain from criminal behavior to avoid public embarrassment to themselves and their families and to keep from jeopardizing their futures. But, Webb says, these fear-backed, short-term measures like "Scared Straight" tough talks and media "dog-and-pony" shows only create temporary behavior changes. He says the best way to discourage anti-social behavior is not to intimidate or shame the person.

"Exposing children to 'hey, look this is what can happen to you, look at this perp walk, look at this kid behind these bars,' it may frighten him and it may expose him, but it's not going to change his thinking," Webb said. "It will only frighten him and shock him and entertain him and leave an impression, but that impression will not be permanent, and it will not lead to a change of behavior."

'Irremediably Delinquent'

Kids in the Jackson Public School system wear a uniform up until high school. Entering ninth grade, ditching the school uniform becomes one of the defining transitional moments into adolescence. But, when juveniles are charged with a crime and held in jails or detention centers, they are stripped of many freedoms, including what they can wear. They trade in graphic T-shirts for a uniform mandated by a state ironically lacking homogeneity in its juvenile-justice system.

Earlier this summer, headlines ripped through the country about the tragic murder of Kingston Frazier, a 6-year-old boy who was asleep in the back of his mother's car that was stolen from the Jackson Kroger parking lot when she ran inside to grab some items late at night. Frazier was later found dead, and three teenagers were charged with capital murder.

Dwan Wakefield Jr. of Ridgeland was granted a $275,000 bond in November. Wakefield and another suspect, DeAllen Washington, were both 17 at the time of the shooting. Previous statements have painted Byron McBride, 19, as the shooter in this crime, although it is not yet proved.

Capital murder is a crime punishable by death and one for which juveniles can be charged as adults. However, while Elmore faces lesser charges for allegedly murdering Alexandria Love, he is being held without bond, although Wakefield went home.

As early as 1984, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall knew that pre-adjudicatory detainment was not going to be applied fairly. Schall v. Martin, a landmark Supreme Court case upheld that juveniles who present a "serious risk" can be held in preventive detention so they do not commit another crime before trial.

The ruling left it to judges to decide, based on their own predictions, who presented a "serious risk" and who did not.

Marshall dissented, citing that the decision left too much room for subjectivity in how judges will decide which juveniles are detained before their cases go to trial and those who can go home.

On the other hand, the majority of justices believed that detention before trial is justified because "juveniles, unlike adults, are always in some form of custody." Marshall and two other justices disagreed.

"The majority's arguments do not survive scrutiny. Its characterization of preventive detention as merely a transfer of custody from a parent or guardian to the State is difficult to take seriously," Marshall wrote in the dissent. "Surely there is a qualitative difference between imprisonment and the condition of being subject to the supervision and control of an adult who has one's best interests at heart."

Marshall added that because juveniles are impressionable, incarceration can be "more injurious to them than to adults," and that those juveniles subjected to preventive detention come to see society as "hostile and oppressive."

In turn, they would regard themselves as "irremediably delinquent," he warned.

"Such serious injuries to presumptively innocent persons—encompassing the curtailment of their constitutional rights to liberty—can be justified only by a weighty public interest that is substantially advanced by the statute," Marshall wrote.

By Geography and Race

Today, geography seems to be one of those subjective variables in the juvenile process in Mississippi.

Jody Owens II, managing attorney of the Mississippi office of the Southern Poverty Law Center, offered an explanatory anecdote. Say a kid grabs someone's cellphone out of a car and he happened to have a knife on him. Owens said some people could look at that as aggravated assault, or armed robbery, even if the knife was never exposed. Others would see it as petty theft.

"There's a wide range of latitudinal control that (law enforcement) has when it comes to charging individuals," Owens told the Jackson Free Press. "And largely the system of checks and balances would be from the county attorney and prosecutor."

State law automatically launches certain juveniles into the adult court system due to the nature of their crimes. Because Elmore allegedly committed an act using a deadly weapon, statutory authority treats him, and any youth as young as 13, as an adult in the jurisdiction of the circuit court. 
However, he can be waived into the juvenile system later at the discretion of his lawyers or a public defender through a motion that may or may not be granted—even after his mugshot and perp-walk video have made the rounds, and he has faced cameras.

Owens said that, in his experience, when youth actually face sentencing, juveniles convicted of the same crime get time varying from two years to 10 years to 20 years depending on where they committed the crime.

"We like to highlight in Mississippi (that) it's just by geography," Owens said. "And what that means is that where you are determines how much time you will spend in prison and what you will be charged with. We see it time and time again. It's particularly sad and painful for many of us who do this work."

As of July 2017, the Mississippi Department of Corrections detained 694 youthful offenders under 22 years old in correctional facilities throughout the state. Nationally, The Sentencing Project found that as of 2015, black youth were more than five times as likely to be detained or committed compared to white youth.

Sentencing Project data from 2013 indicates that these disparities in arrest rates exist even when black and white youth commit the same type of crime and have residual effects at every point in the justice system thereafter.

"The arrest disparity is the entrance to a maze with fewer exits for African American youth than their white peers," a Sentencing Project study reads.

In 2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that transferring youth from the juvenile court system to the adult criminal system "typically results in greater subsequent crime, including violent crime." One of the CDC studies conducted in Florida found that youth transferred to the adult system had 34 percent more felony re-arrests than youth retained in the juvenile system.

A 2008 Campaign for Youth Justice study shows that African American youth are 62 percent of the youth prosecuted in the adult criminal system and are nine times more likely than white youth to receive an adult prison sentence for similar or even lesser crimes.

Other research points to biases in how the public perceives black youth as more deserving of harsh treatments than white youth. In 2012, a Stanford University study highlighted "the fragility of protections for juveniles when race is in place."

Researchers asked a sample of 735 white Americans to read about a 14-year-old-male with 17 prior juvenile convictions who brutally raped an elderly woman. Half the respondents were told the offender was black, the other half that he was white.

The study found that participants who were told to envision a black offender more strongly endorsed a policy of sentencing juveniles convicted of violent crimes to life in prison without parole compared to respondents who had a white offender in mind. Those told to envision a black teen also considered juvenile offenders to be more similar to adults in terms of culpability versus respondents who were told the offender was white.

The Stanford researchers purposefully chose a sample group of white Americans because "whites are statistically overrepresented on juries, in the legal field and in the judiciary." Notably, this study was conducted when the U.S. Supreme Court was considering if they will ban life without parole for juveniles in the system.

In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld life without parole for juveniles as unconstitutional, and last year the court ruled that juvenile lifers would have that statute applied retroactively and be handed new sentences. As of July, Mississippi had 87 people who would need their sentences reviewed, as they had been sentenced as juveniles to life without parole, the Associated Press reported.

Still Children, Developmentally

The wall clock in Johnnie McDaniels' office at Henley-Young Juvenile Justice Center is out of sight, but it keeps track of time so loudly you could almost feel every vibrating stroke of the second hand. McDaniels' office is just off the waiting room in the youth-detention center in Jackson where Elmore is likely being held, as a jailer at the Raymond facility told the Jackson Free Press.

McDaniels would neither confirm or deny if Elmore was there, hoping to preserve some of his confidentiality in light of the fact that every detail from his name, birthday, and even home address has been exposed on the Internet through both media and websites that host mugshots and even addresses of people who have been arrested. To get that mugshot down, even if charges are later dropped, the arrestee has the responsibility of contacting the mugshot database and potentially several others like it and paying a fee.

It costs as high as $50 to remove a single mugshot exposed to the public and revealed in simple Google searches.

Just a few weeks ago, you could have found Elmore in the Presidential Hills neighborhood. On a Monday afternoon, the sun low in the sky as the season would have it, young black boys seemingly the same age as Elmore played basketball in a nearby park—a rare maintained green space in Jackson. Presidential Hills is a quaint neighborhood with houses all built seemingly uniformly in size and structure, but varying in color and outer material.

Disinterested in talking to media, and seemingly confused about what is happening to their boy, the Elmores have a home in this neighborhood just a walkable distance from where Alexandria Love was shot.

Just weeks ago, Elmore and Love both attended Provine High School. Now, the Loves are forced to reckon with their first holiday season without their daughter, as they plan a funeral, and Elmore's family as he is kept locked up.

Time and permanency are concepts you come to understand better as an adult. Kids have a harder time dealing with the future and how present actions come into play—little girls don't understand that cutting off a Barbie doll's hair means she will never have those long fluid locks again.

For that reason, researchers debate juveniles' brain development as an indicator of how they should be treated in the eyes of the law. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that the adolescent brain does not begin to resemble adult brains until a youth person reaches the early 20s.

In a 2011 study on adolescent decision-making and legal culpability published in the Journal of Health Care Law and Policy, researcher Samantha Schad points out the inconsistency in the way researchers view adolescents' maturity.

Some experts believe juveniles have mature enough cognitive skills to make important decisions under controlled circumstances, while others believe that adolescents are psychosocially immature, which hinders their ability to "perceive future consequences and increasing their susceptibility to risk-taking and impulsivity."

When it comes to quick decisions, Schad adds, adolescents' immaturity can lead to bad decisions, especially in the criminal context "when most decisions to commit crime happen quickly." This perception of juveniles then affects how they're punished in the juvenile-justice system; more perceived maturity means more adult-like punishments.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court accepted adolescent brain science in its 2005 ruling to do away with the death penalty for juveniles. The majority wrote that there are three major differences between juveniles and adults that indicate they "cannot with reliability be classified among the worst offenders." First is the recognition of juveniles' comparative immaturity and irresponsibility; second is their susceptibility to peer pressure; and "the third broad difference is that the character of a juvenile is not as well formed as that of an adult."

However, racial bias influences who people believe are culpable and who should take the blame for their actions. A 2013 Cornell study by Kristin Henning titled "Criminalizing Normal Adolescent Behavior in Communities of Color" points out just how disparities take place along the color line in juvenile court.

"When courts transfer youth to the adult system, it is equally well documented that black youth receive significantly more punitive sentences than white youth," Henning wrote. "Thus, while courts may forgive or excuse white youth for engaging in reckless adolescent behavior, courts often perceive youth of color as wild, uncontrollable, and morally corrupt and hold them fully culpable for their conduct."

McDaniels says these same principles of youth brain science apply even when something really tragic happens

"Juveniles, no matter how serious the offense they're charged with, do not necessarily understand that this could be something that complicates your life for the rest of your life," McDaniels said in his office in south Jackson. "They tend to rationalize things in a way that makes you understand that even though they committed an adult act, they don't process it the same way."

McDaniels, also an attorney, added that subsequent media scrutiny only hinders young people's capacity to function even further.

"When they are sensationalized, when they are put in the media, they are stigmatized, you do some serious—," he pauses and continues, "—that produces some serious mental health challenges for juveniles who are charged as adults."

Webb, the St. Augustine's professor, said that when examining treatment of juveniles in the media, he sees a difference in the precautions taken at every level of the system—including whether or not the child's identity will be released to media.

"What's funny is this," Webb told the Jackson Free Press. "If it's a white youth that's being accused of a heinous crime, then all of a sudden the authorities will take every precautionary measure to secure and not disclose that child's identity because again there's a lack of culpability—he's not an adult, you follow me?

"But when it's a black person, all of a sudden culpability is not even discussed. This person is just completely dangerous—it's because of his environment, he has no morals, it's because of poverty, a lack of father, and so on. So, you see this double standard."

Carousel of Injustice

"Super-predator" rhetoric emerged in the 1980s based on faulty "science" that indicated that many young men, particularly young men of color, were genetically inclined to be criminals and, thus, could not be rehabilitated. Media and politicians of both major parties latched onto the concept, using it as an excuse to pass tougher sentencing and discipline policies that many experts say led to mass incarceration of people of color, even as the crack epidemic was subsiding and youth crime was dropping in the nation.

During the same span, in 1989, the world was outraged when five teenagers pled guilty for allegedly brutalizing a white female jogger in Manhattan's Central Park. Then-business mogul Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in The New York Times advocating for the death sentence for the young men. After the Central Park Five served several years in prison, however, they were exonerated and released when the real murderer came forward, and it was determined that police had coerced the youth into taking the blame. This case serves as a harsh reminder that accused teenagers can actually be innocent long after their mugshots flash through Twitter.

As early as the President Richard Nixon administration of the 1970s, it became clear that racial biases and policies would continue to plague the criminal-justice system. Nixon began the "War on Drugs" that contributed to nationalized fear and prejudice through his rhetoric bashing drug users and toughening sentences.

Harper's Magazine in April 2016 resurfaced a quote from a 1994 interview with former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman that revealed the administration had a targeted goal to lock up African Americans.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying?" Ehrlichman told reporter Dan Baum. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

In the 1980s, politicians continued to associate blacks with crime as a way to secure voters—pandering to their heightened fear of black men. During the 1988 U.S. presidential election, a notorious ad juxtaposed former President George H.W. Bush's stance on crime with that of challenger Michael Dukakis.

The ad touted Bush as being tough on crime and supporting the death penalty, and shamed Dukakis for giving an African American man, Willie Horton, a weekend visitation pass from prison during which time he escaped and raped a woman. The ad displayed Horton's mugshot and details his criminal history in efforts to make Dukakis look soft on crime, but also to equate danger with black men.

Bush's drug czar and other conservatives quickly branded young men of color as "super-predators" who would multiply and who "posed a grave threat to society—a threat that advocates predicted would worsen unless drastic measures were taken," the National Academies of Sciences reported. Policies in the juvenile system went from rehabilitative to punitive in many states as a response to fear that was racially charged—even as early believers in the super-predator myth later renounced it.

From the late 1980s into the early 1990s, violent juvenile crime, particularly homicide, had spiked during the crack era. As research from 2013 on reforming juvenile justice by the National Academies of Sciences pointed out, this increase became the "catalyst for (juvenile justice) reform during this period"—making it tougher.

The fear of black youth came to a head when President Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, ushering in tougher sentences on crack versus cocaine, three-strikes laws and zero-tolerance discipline, as well as the development of more private prisons.

This pivotal era in history ultimately gave way to something Webb calls the "merry-go-round," that media propelled and is kept spinning by money.

"So now you have this merry-go-round here," Webb said. "You keep shaping the image through the media," Webb said, "which justifies severe policies and programs in law, which in term feeds into the prison-industrial-complex. And when the stockholders get paid, and they will, then of course they're going to go back to those policy makers through their lobbyists and support their campaigns."

Solutions in 'The Sip'

Back at the Henley-Young detention center, McDaniels knows that the only thing he can control is the type of care and services juveniles receive in his center. But he is still concerned about what happens to juveniles charged as adults and sensationalized in the media sphere.

"The facts may not turn out to be what they are," McDaniels said. "But what you have is a kid that would have a pretty tough time trying to re-adjust trying to go back to school. He's been on the news for, you know, this sensational horrific act.

"There are a bunch of juveniles who come through this facility charged with all types of things, and in the end they were not guilty of them," he added.

This is why McDaniels thinks these adult charges should be evaluated on the back end, out of the public eye and through a youth court-driven system. He added that he is not viscerally against juveniles being charged as adults for violent crimes, but he does believe the system is unnecessarily complicated and that youth-court involvement upfront could help.

"I think there should be hearings and court proceedings by the youth-court judge, and there should be more court involvement in the process," he said.

This would also keep juveniles, no matter how they're charged, out of the public eye—anonymity is a privilege only afforded to the juveniles that do not get charged as adults.

"You should not have a juvenile charged as an adult, put into the adult system, take two to three years for that child to be indicted and charged, and they lost those two years in the system," he said.

McDaniels has run Henley-Young for the last two-and-a-half years. He brings a decade-long experience of prosecutorial work to his role as the chief caretaker of some of the most vulnerable and at-risk youth in the region. Those years showed him just how fast the revolving door spins kids in and out of the juvenile system and later into the adult system was in something he calls the "school-to-Henley-Young-to-Raymond-to-Parchman pipeline."

In the detention center, McDaniels has seen reading levels increase. He works to ensure that kids receive the mental care they may not have ever gotten otherwise. He estimates that in the last 10 years, the recidivism rate was probably about 50 percent, and within the last two since changing to a rehabilitative model, only about three of every 10 kids come back, usually for drug or alcohol issues, he said.

Henley-Young and the juvenile-justice system in Hinds County and the surrounding areas have gone through several changes in recent years mandated through a consent decree reached in 2012 after the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACLU and Jackson-based civil-rights attorney Robert McDuff sued the Mississippi Department of Corrections in November 2010, alleging a culture of violence and corruption that endangered youths.

The lawsuit came about to fix Walnut Grove Correctional Facility in Leake County, a private prison that housed juvenile offenders charged with an adult crime until they were old enough to go to adult prison. The facility closed in the fall of 2016, with the former Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Marshall Fisher citing "budget constraints and the prison population." There was also significant controversy that preceded the closure.

The consent decree required MDOC to establish a "Youthful Offender Unit" that exists as a separate facility at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Rankin County. In June 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice settled with the Hinds County jail system, requiring a systemic turnaround of bad practices. Part of the DOJ's requirements were for better treatment of youthful offenders held in their facilities.

Jody Owens of Southern Poverty Law Center said that the Hinds County Board of Supervisors, who are responsible for the jail and its budget, determined they do not have enough resources to put juveniles charged as adults in their own proper facility. So they decided to put those juveniles in Henley-Young instead of holding them in the county jail. McDaniels said as of September, juveniles charged as adults could be phased into Henley-Young in conjunction with the sheriff's department—providing a less-harmful environment than they previously would have faced.

It's a start, the experts say. "That's really exciting and groundbreaking for Mississippi to be doing this in Henley-Young of all places," Owens said. "Because of the myth of the 'super-predator' and the myth that these kids are different."

Read and comment on the JFP's ongoing coverage of youth-crime causes and solutions at jfp.ms/preventingviolence. Email city reporter Ko Bragg at ko@jacksonfreepress.com.

It has never occurred to me to call up the police and ask them to stage a special "perp walk" so I can send someone to photograph someone accused of a crime. And I would certainly never request the depraved privilege of capturing images of a juvenile accused of killing another child.

Why would I salivate for images of a troubled kid who has been caught already? Why would other media finagle a staged event to broadcast an image of a child who, like adults, is innocent until proved guilty? How does broadcasting the accused child's mugshot, much less a set-up video, help anyone? He's in custody, after all, not on the run. Not to mention the journalism ethic that we never actually set up news shots.

We know now that this exact scenario happened in recent weeks in Jackson, as Ko Bragg reports in this week's cover story. I'm astounded. It's not like I had high expectations for most local broadcast and print media when it comes to reporting on crime, especially involving kids. It's the worst I've seen in any city, except maybe New Orleans. But it honestly never occurred to me that the media essentially set the perp walks up themselves in order to get juicy footage. That reminds me of a Canadian documentary maker who tried to get my photographer to wear a hidden camera once to "doorstep" an old Klansman refusing an interview. Hell no, we said. Not ethical.

Neither is cherry-picking the most sensational (and still alleged) juvenile crimes to turn into ratings, clicks and page views. Meantime, JPD has only provided us vague details of how the young man is believed to have murdered the teenage girl, and won't give us a police report or summary.

Or, how about a trace report on where the weapon came from? That might actually prove useful to future crime prevention.

The fact that this perp-walk scam is apparently common in Jackson speaks to the larger problem we have with formulating a real plan to reduce violent crime in a city where the response is usually reactive, from the police to media to residents. The line is that the more these young hoodlums are locked up, the less crime there will be. They can't hurt us when they're behind bars, after all. The truth, though, is that (if convicted) many of them won't be behind bars forever and, while they're there, they are likely to join a tough gang because incarceration incubates gangs and violence.

And as Ko reports, this teenager may be proved innocent as many have been over the years here and elsewhere. Or, even after he has been paraded around like a captured animal, a judge may decide to send him back to youth court and out of the public eye again. But guess what? The damage may already be done on a child whose brain is not fully developed yet with each of those camera flashes pushing him further beyond hope and rehabilitation. Hell, that treatment would scar my 56-year-old self.

The loss of the 14-year-old girl was tragic and heartbreaking. But this treatment of this teen boy is not going to bring her back. It is reactive and vengeful, and it is not smart. At this point, it's absurd to ignore widely disseminated evidence—that's even in recent BOTEC reports about Jackson crime—that shows that harsh treatment by the criminal-justice system can turn a juvenile into a hardened criminal who later commits worse offenses and makes our society more dangerous. It's chilling to think that the way the police and most media have handled—or mishandled—this boy to date could lead to more deaths down the road, but it is a real concern. Parading your catch around for cheap camera shots has no positive value other than to make people leer at the accused, and it carries high risks for the future safety of the community.

What we need are proactive approaches, not reactive ones. Also in this issue, you'll read a similar argument by the head of Mississippi's FBI. Neither he nor I argue that arrests are never needed, and we likely don't agree on all policing practices, but Christopher Freeze's argument that the community must step up to do more to keep a young person from committing crime, long before the moment of pulling the trigger, is solid.

We must replace the kneejerk, nonsensical responses to crime that are not grounded in evidence—like that it's up to cops to arrest all the bad guys so crime will stop—with proactive, smart approaches to redirecting and educating young people before they commit crime. Or, as Freeze points out, feeding them if they're hungry and, even better, teaching them the skills to (legally) avoid hunger themselves. That is, whatever it takes to keep that 14-year-old girl alive and a 16-year-old out of prison.

To that end, media should be asking (a) exactly what happened that tragic night, (b) is the evidence against the accused strong and, if so, (c) how did the young man get to that point? There are many, many, many causes of crime. Which ones applied in his instance, and what can we learn from this crime in order to take action to prevent it from happening again? What are the potential solutions further back up the line?

Yes, this causes-to-solutions reporting takes more effort than feeding the thirst for blame and revenge, but journalists are supposed to do the difficult work others don't have time to do, not just race for easy clicks. Besides, I've learned that families involved on all sides of these tragedies, especially when children are involved, are not as bloodthirsty as the larger public. I think of the family of James Craig Anderson, who asked that his young white murderers not face the death penalty even though they came to Jackson looking for a black man to kill. I've witnessed that grace many times.

Even if you don't care at all about young accused Jacksonians, replacing bad policing and media habits with smarter preventative approaches is better for the whole community. We need to interrupt the cycles of crime at every point possible, not lustfully continue bad practices that will ultimately fail and lead to more victims. It's way past time to choose real solutions over ratings and page views. Let's demand it.

See the JFP's award-winning "Preventing Violence" project and a video conversation with Freeze at jfp.ms/preventingviolence.

"Is youth crime the fault of the child or the parent?" A teacher gave that free-write prompt to young people I worked with in the Mississippi Youth Media Project last spring. Most of them had either witnessed or been a victim of violent crime and had just read a story I had written about violence. Even though my story had delved into myriad causes and potential solutions, the teacher wanted them to pick which of two parties was at fault.

In so doing, she unwittingly encapsulated just about everything that is wrong with journalism in one sentence. The worst reporting just looks for two sides to blame each other. In this case, either the child or the parent must be to blame. The implication is the two parties cannot share the responsibility with little thought that many parties may be complicit to varying levels.

The sentence thus violates a cardinal rule of good reporting—avoid yes-or-no or leading questions. Take TV. Many will-be broadcasters are taught to just go get a good sound bite, or ask someone "how it feels" when they lose a loved one rather than "how can we prevent crime?"—which admittedly is the harder question.

Little results from such journalism, other than ratings or clicks. Maybe the audience gets a warm-and-fuzzy feeling if it's a "positive" story, or feels anger or hopelessness if it's a "tragic" story. Put simply, such blame-seeking, binary questions do not reveal complicated causes, inspire action and certainly do not present possible solutions.

I chose to be a journalist to find solutions for issues such as youth crime. And that means seeking the various causes first to get there.

That is why the journalism in the Jackson Free Press is different. We reject the "both-sides-ism" we're hearing a lot about after the practice helped Donald Trump slip into the White House. In "horse race" political coverage, media outlets tend to take the easiest route: report the dumpster fires and nasty opposition research as they pop up. And divide the story down a fake middle with an equal number of Republicans and Dems staring each other down. That is not the same thing as actually reporting the various positions on an issue and being fair to those criticized, allowing them a chance to respond, which is vital.

Some outlets even count the number of partisans on each side, to the confusion of those of us who reject partisan shtick. If you haven't figured it out, yet, that dog don't hunt—or educate kids or stop Russia from controlling the White House. It's a false paradigm pushed by those obsessed with party politics and politicians. Those who feign "neutrality" and fake "objectivity" sure don't (a) seek and report true causes, (b) know what to do with complicated nuance or those who eschew party devotion or (c) focus pretty much at all on solutions. Why? Because "horse race" journalism is designed to stoke what linguist Deborah Tannen calls the "argument culture." It follows an either-or frame, and it's usually damn useless, except for page views and dividing people into two neat, useless groups that growl at each other.

It's why I'm obsessed with a growing type of reporting called "solutions journalism." I just spent three days at the Solutions Journalism Summit at Robert Redford's beautiful Sundance Resort in Utah ("Think you used enough dynamic there, Butch!?") with about 100 inspiring, passionate journalists from across the U.S. and a few from Europe. I was the only representative from Mississippi, and it was exhilarating to plan collaborations with solutions-focused journalists. 
 The network's website opens with hints about how this type of journalism is different from the problem-focused reporting we too often see. Per the network, "solutions journalism" is "rigorous reporting on responses to social problems," "a way to spark constructive discourse," "a way to build trust with your audience," "a universe of stories not being told," "part of a higher-quality news product" and "just better journalism."

It is not hero worship of a cool-sounding "solution." In fact, when I revealed a failed local crime initiative ("MACE") where law enforcement diverted a grant that was supposed to include services for at-risk teens to just do police sweeps, I was following a "sojo" best practice to vet alleged solutions. Other local media did breathless reporting when MACE went public—decidedly not rigorous solutions journalism.

Some journalists are a harder sell than I was when it comes to solutions journalism. Throughout the now-30-plus years of my career, I have rejected the he-said-she-said, USA Today-style tradition of splitting stories down a fake middle to keep "both sides" from complaining. I always wanted to go deeper and report, and try to inspire, viable solutions. Truth is too messy and problems too complex to fit neatly into two identical containers, and often what passes as a "side" is just political propaganda.

What I do believe in, and teach and practice here at my newspaper, is digging deep into an issue and reporting what we find regardless of where it happens to bounce on the partisan roulette table. That's how I ended up a guest on a pro-NRA radio show after reporting on a black preacher who armed himself to take on the Klan in the 1960s. It's also why we pursued reporting few others would touch that landed a rather-crazy, gun-toting, alcoholic mayor—who happened to be a black Democrat—in a state and later a federal trial.

That pursuit of truth, regardless of party, led to authorities removing the young men living in his house with him. Thinking back, I might've dug deeper into solutions to keep powerful men from declaring themselves "foster parents" in the first place. Or I could have investigated better ways to interrupt the crime cycle than the snake oil Frank Melton was doling out. (I am now.)


Problem-focused sensationalism is so common that I forgave the teacher's binary crime topic. I decided to build on it, though. I asked the students to do a new free write: "Young people commit crime because ...." They wrote emotional, informed pieces and then read them aloud. I then asked them to write each cause on a sheet of paper for a systems analysis of the dozens of reasons for youth crime on the floor, which they later moved to a wall.

The YMP crime wall then inspired later students to create a powerful long-form story and a 10-minute documentary about the causes, and potential solutions, of youth crime, which appears with the rest of their journalism at jxnpulse.com. They interviewed the mayor, the state FBI leader and former criminals, as well as people engaged in preventing youth crime. The students ignored politics as they told powerful stories with embedded causes and possible solutions.

It was real, rigorous and so much better than two "sides" sniping at each other from one paragraph to another.

Follow Donna Ladd on Twitter @donnerkay. Read the full "Preventing Violence"
archive at jfp.ms/preventingviolence.

JFP Editor-in-chief and CEO Donna Ladd ended the Jackson Women's March at the Mississippi Capitol on Jan. 21, 2017, with this speech about the importance of independent media. Here is a transcript of her speech; you can listen to it here.

Hey y’all, how you doing? You know, I love a protest, I just want to tell you. There’s like nothing, nothing to me more American than this right here, and I don’t know abot you guys; I’ve been feeling so patriotic, and sometimes angrily so, over these last few months, in a way that I haven’t in a long time. This is exactly what I need to see today is all you guys out there exercising your First Amendment rights to say what you need to say.

In 1992 I was living in New York City, and I went to a big pro-choice rally in Washington, D.C.; I went there with a group of women from a newspaper I worked for there. We weren’t there to cover it; we were there to join women from around the nation who were standing up for our own basic rights.

The women I went with weren’t overtly political then, and they’re still my best friends up there now. We were young, and I’ll be honest, we were as into staying up all night drinking and stuff as we were into politics.

We called ourselves the “Babes for Choice.” We made hand-lettered signs and put lipstick kisses all over them, and we had the best time ever. The rental car even got broken into on our way there because I stupidly left my motorcycle jacket on the backseat. We just duct-taped that thing up and headed on to Washington.

From there, I became a more serious journalist over the years, and I covered a lot of protests and political gathers. I covered Clinton’s first convention in New York City including the protests that surrounded the building outside. I covered Bush II's inauguration in Philadelphia, the Republican Convention in Philadelphia (Pa), the Bush-Gore recount in South Florida for the Village Voice, protest after protest. For a while there that’s what I did, cover protests.

I covered the Iraq War demonstrations in New York City and those on behalf of the homeless and against police violence, and countless marches here in Mississippi’s capital city.

I believe in the power of protest. It is at the core of what makes America great—our First Amendment. If we do not have a free press, we cannot be free. It’s impossible. Right now in Russia, the citizens get most of their information from Russia Today and other state-owned outlets. We can’t go down that road.

When politicians refuse to sit down and answer questions from the press, as most Republican leaders right here in Mississippi do if they fear those questions will challenge them, we are not a free nation or a free state.

Under Trump there is already pushback against legitimate news organizations and any kind of challenging questions from the press, not to mention being made fun of by SNL.

The fact that Trump calls anything negative, or critical, “fake news,” even as his own cabinet members pushed actual fake news is a very ominous sign of things to come. And it doesn’t matter what party you associate with. I’m not a member of a political party; I’m a journalist.

I’ve been saying lately that the strategies used against serious, critical press in Mississippi, and have been since we started this paper 15 years ago, are now moving into the White House, and that really scares me.

Media matters, ladies and gentlemen. It matters who runs it, and it matters the decisions they make. I can probably count on one hand the number of women in newsroom management in the State of Mississippi.

Outside of my paper, we see very few serious female columnists voicing their views. In one prominent paper, I often count the female columnists in the Sunday opinion section: maybe one or two out of nine or 10 are women; and more often than not the female is Ann Coulter.

Your voices matter to this state and this nation. It is easy for the world to assume that all Mississippians never question Donald Trump, never question Phil Bryant or his new buddy Nigel Farage of the United Kingdom.

Most of us must—the assumption goes—be in favor of limiting women’s rights and options, violating LGBT rights through HB1523 and other attempts, and limiting voter access for people of color however possible.

Too many people believe that the so-called “values” of the men at the top—Bryant, Trump, etcetera—speak for us all. All of us Mississippians.

I am here today to tell you that they are wrong. There are so many good, caring, faithful people in Mississippi who truly love their neighbors and celebrate differences—and in the 21st century we are willing to speak up about it, and we might live if we do.

But, y’all, this is on you really. Media, we can do what we do, and we will. We don’t practice access journalism.

This is going to require each of you to seize your platform and do your part, writing or talking to change your world. You have the power.

You must demand and support a better media that is not afraid to report facts, even if it makes one side or another look worse in a particular story. I pride myself on the fact that we piss off Republicans and Democrats regularly. It’s about facts.

Most real stories cannot be split down the middle. False equivalency in journalism is a very serious threat to our democracy. So is the desire not to offend a powerful leader so that a journalist can keep getting some access.

When we pretend to be “objective” by splitting stories down the middle with two Republicans on one side and two Democrats on the other and no real people in the story—and then we head out to happy hour—we are not practicing the kind of journalism that will protect and strength our democracy and freedoms for all.

In too many cases, we are giving liars equal coverage.

I am here to tell you that it is possible to do serious coverage without resorting to “access journalism” and without pulling the punches that need to be thrown.

Here’s the thing, ladies. You will get called names for speaking out, especially in our state. Your butt will be disparaged on blogs and on Twitter. Bloggers will lie about you incessantly. Some might even grab you and kiss you in public without permission and then send you half-naked photos of himself in email. (I’m speaking from experience here if you haven’t figured it out.)

Progressive men will quietly take you aside and say “you know, you’re being too loud” and “you shouldn’t challenge men in public quite that way.”

Men in public office will say you’re “hatin’” and over and over you’ll hear that you will only “be in business for six months because I’m gonna run you out of business.” I’ve been hearing that for 15 years.

They will spread rumors about you. They will link pictures of you and your friends to genital warts. They will get drunk and send you vicious emails because they didn’t like your reporting on a development project. They will do everything possible to turn people against you.

You need a tough skin to speak out if you’re a woman, or a man in this state who bucks the status quo. We must draw on the strength of loud women who have paved the way: Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells, Hazel Brannon Smith, Coretta Scott King, Myrlie Evers, Gloria Steinem and, yes, Hillary Clinton. You don’t have to agree with every word these women said to understand that it took courage to say it.

The amazing news is that we are surrounded now with women ready and willing to speak out and men who will support you for doing to.

My office overflows with powerful women who use those voices—from associate publisher Kimberly Griffin to managing editor Amber Helsel to reporter Arielle Dreher who digs deep to tell you the whole story about HB 1523 or the Legislature’s frivolous attack on Planned Parenthood, which only does women’s health services and no abortions in our state, but is still under attack from the same conservative men who complain about frivolous legislation. That’s not right.

And then there are our young women like 15-year-old Maisie Brown who has given speeches from here to Washington, D.C., on the need to change the Mississippi flag and who now helps me run the Mississippi Youth Media Project to help even younger people find and use their voices.

To me, ladies, this is not partisan any more than the successful vote against Personhood was partisan in the state of Mississippi. You did that then; imagine what you can do going forward. This is about the need to help each other use and lift up our voices in a way that will change our world for the better and to let freedom continue to ring for every American.

You go, girls, and the men who support us grrls, G-R-R-L-S. Speak up loud and proud.

Listen to Donna's full speech here.

Read her column responding to Sen. Chris McDaniel's disparagement of Women's March participants here.

The movement includes federal lawmakers who are questioning whether to tax colleges on investment profits that can amount to billions of dollars a year. Many students and alumni are making inquiries too, demanding to know whether schools invest in certain industries.

Those moves challenge the privacy that has long been granted to university endowments, which are large pools of investments meant to provide financial aid to current students and to sustain the schools for future generations.

Endowments face little federal regulation compared with other fundraising institutions. Private foundations, for example, are required to spend at least 5 percent of their assets each year and pay a 2 percent excise tax on investment earnings. Colleges face no spending rules and, because of their educational purpose, are not taxed on their earnings.

Despite the calls for transparency, record requests made by The Associated Press to dozens of the nation's wealthiest colleges show a continued push to keep investments secret.

Out of 50 public and private universities asked to disclose their investments, 39 schools with combined endowments of $255 billion refused to provide a single record. Four never responded to the requests sent in September. None of the private universities, which are not subject to open-records laws, released any information.

Most public universities, which operate with taxpayer money, kept their investments secret. The universities that did provide records in most cases revealed only a small fraction of their portfolios.

Colleges drew on a variety of reasons to withhold records. The University of Virginia and four other public universities said they house their endowments in outside foundations that are not subject to open-records laws. Michigan State University, also public, cited a state law that explicitly keeps college investments confidential. Private Vanderbilt University said it made agreements with financial managers not to share investment details.

"I think that they go to great lengths to try to isolate themselves," said Neal Stoughton, a professor and director of the Endowment Research Center at Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria.

"They don't want the endowments to be subjected to a lot of political influence, because that's not the way to invest for the long term," he added. "That's not the way to get a higher rate of return."

Transparency can also lead to unwanted scrutiny. For instance, Harvard University's investments in the timber industry inspired student protests in 2014, and environmental groups blasted the school for buying land in Africa to be used for commercial farming. Harvard insists that it invests responsibly.

The University of California system told one of its student newspapers that it cut investments in the owner of Bushmaster, the maker of the rifle used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. The New York Times uncovered the financial tie in 2013.

Many colleges contend that disclosing their investment portfolios would risk losing a competitive edge. Instead, most schools issue annual reports with broad information but few details about specific investments.

Exceptions include the investment arm of the University of Texas system, which is required under state law to publish its holdings every year.

"It's a trade-off between negatively affecting the performance and wanting to fully inform," said Richard Smith, a finance professor at the University of California Riverside who has researched endowments. "Sometimes there's a value in keeping your investment choices secret."

Two congressional committees sent letters to the richest private colleges last month asking for a wide range of information about their endowments, including how the schools use endowment assets "to fulfill their charitable and educational purposes." The inquiry was partly meant to determine whether schools deserve the federal tax breaks they receive.

Separately, Rep. Tom Reed, a Republican from New York, is drafting a proposal that would require all endowments of more than $1 billion to spend at least 25 percent of their profits every year on financial aid. Reed's goal is to help lower tuition costs for students from working-class families. But as part of his plan, he also hopes to propose stronger reporting requirements to shed light on college investments.

"People are concerned. We just don't know where the money's coming from and where it's going," Reed said in an interview. "I think that transparency will go a long way to clean up some abuses in this arena."

On campuses, too, students have been pushing for greater transparency. Student groups that oppose the fossil fuel, firearm and other industries say they should have a role in the investment process. At Northwestern University in Illinois, students in the group Fossil Free Northwestern have ramped up protests this year, pressing the private school to disclose its investments and stop supporting coal and oil companies.

"There's a really big movement to know exactly what is funding our education and to have some sort of say over that," said Christina Cilento, a group member and junior at Northwestern.

Some schools have heeded calls from students and dropped certain investments. Becker College, a small private school in Massachusetts, announced on March 10 that all its investments would "generate a positive impact on society."

But often, even the institutions themselves don't know where their money goes, in part because they hire outside managers who constantly buy and sell investments. Additionally, many schools put their money into mutual or hedge funds, which in turn make other investments that can be kept confidential.

The issue has flared up at Hampshire College, where a group of students urged the school to ensure that its investments, including in hedge funds, don't support prisons. The private college in Massachusetts passed a policy against prison investments last year but added that there's no way to pinpoint where all of its money lands.

In the past, calls for greater transparency have had little success. Last year, state lawmakers rejected a proposal that would have made the public University of Connecticut's endowment subject to open-records laws. In September, private Duke University denied a request from students to release its endowment portfolio, saying there are "genuine concerns such disclosure would reduce competitive advantages."

But Reed said he's unfazed by "negative pushback" he has fielded from some universities.

"If we're going to have a tax preference given to these colleges," he said, "then we need to make sure we know where those dollars are going."

The sheriff's office initially told Jason Parsley that his request would cost $399,000, take four years and require the hiring of a dedicated staffer. The response set off a public-records marathon that lasted nearly a year. The Associated Press featured Parsley's effort last year during Sunshine Week, a national government-transparency initiative that takes place each March, and then decided to join forces with his newspaper, the South Florida Gay News.

The goal was to determine whether such police emails were indeed public and, if so, how the public and media could obtain them in a timely and cost-efficient way.

After making multiple records request to four Florida law enforcement agencies, the two news organizations have at least a partial answer, which could provide a blueprint for other news organizations reporting on police accountability.

As law enforcement agencies have come under increased scrutiny in recent years, media organizations, watchdog groups and others have become more vigilant about filing public-records requests for emails and documents, particularly after police shootings. Police agencies have not always complied, and those that do sometimes put up obstacles, charging fees that many open-government advocates say are excessive and aimed at keeping hidden information that should be public.

"They throw up ridiculous costs, ridiculous delays as a roadblock," said Barbara Petersen, head of Florida's First Amendment Foundation. "If you throw out a humongous number, the person is going to walk away," particularly private citizens who often do not have the money to hire lawyers or the know-how to challenge inflated fees.

In many states, including Florida, government agencies can waive records fees if they deem releasing the information in the public interest. While it is routine for media organizations and others to seek such waivers, it is rare for agencies to grant them.

Other examples of excessive fees abound in Florida and elsewhere.

After the fatal 2014 shooting of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer, the city hired an outside firm to handle the requests for police officers' and city officials' emails, said Adam Marshall, a lawyer with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

The firm charged requesters $500 plus $135 an hour. If done by Ferguson clerks, the cost would have been $13.90 an hour. In one example, he said, a search for emails containing any of seven key words cost $1,375. Two Ferguson police officers resigned after they were found to have sent racist emails.

"Anyone who uses modern email programs knows you can find any email containing a key word in about a half a second," Marshall said. "The practical effect is that it is inhibiting the public's right to know. ... That shouldn't depend on an individual's ability to pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, particularly when it comes to law enforcement, which has the power to shoot and arrest people."

The AP and Parsley decided to press the issue in Florida, rather than let his original request die after he received the estimate for $399,000 in fees.

Last May, the AP asked two other Florida sheriff's offices, in Hillsborough and Orange counties, to search for employee emails containing any words on a list of specific racial and gay slurs. Hillsborough County said the search would cost $2,668, a cost that was prohibitive.

Orange County originally said the search would cost $37, an amount the AP paid. In November, six months after the request, Orange responded and said it was mistaken — the search would cost $1,224. When AP questioned the jump, Orange County responded by saying it again had provided a mistaken figure: The actual cost to search its officers' emails would be $44,360.

After negotiations between the Orange County sheriff and lawyers for the AP, the request was modified to delete a gay slur that contains the word "she," because sheriff's officials said "she" was causing the system to capture too many emails. The cost dropped last month, nine months after the original request, to $349, a cost the AP and South Florida Gay News paid. Officials with the Orange County Sheriff's Office say those emails are now being processed.

Parsley, meanwhile, made fresh requests to both the Broward County sheriff and the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. After discussions with officials at the agencies and information technology experts, both news outlets ultimately asked only for more recent emails that would still be on the law enforcement agencies' servers. Older emails that reside on backup systems are more cumbersome to search, requiring more time and expense.

Parsley has yet to receive the emails he requested from Broward or Fort Lauderdale. But local prosecutors decided to pursue the same information on their own, filing a request for derogatory emails with Fort Lauderdale police. The police department acted relatively swiftly, fulfilling prosecutors' request within months.

Prosecutors wanted to make sure no arresting officers had a bias against minorities or gays that could be exploited by defense attorneys at trial, said Ron Ishoy, spokesman for the Broward County state attorney's office. The office did not have to pay for the information because it was for a law enforcement purpose, he said.

It is common practice to provide information to other law enforcement agencies without charging a fee, according to Detective Keven Dupree.

After being tipped off, Parsley paid $5 to get a copy of the Fort Lauderdale police emails that were shared with prosecutors. They revealed that two department employees used a racial slur and another used a gay slur. Two officers were recommended for short suspensions, while a civilian employee received a one-day suspension.

In an emailed statement to the AP, a Fort Lauderdale police spokesman said the department is waiting to hear back from Parsley after giving him the cost estimate.

Parsley said he has no confidence he will ever get the information from the two agencies.

"In Fort Lauderdale, the price tag for our request came out to be $1,215, significantly less than the $399,000 we got from (Broward). But even that price is a lot of money for a small publication," he said. "I've looked into narrowing my search even more to continue to bring down the cost."

David Herzog, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, said such conflicts could be avoided if law enforcement agencies simply posted relevant emails and documents to their websites when a major case develops.

"That way," he said, "the department doesn't have to go through repeated public records requests."

"I think heroic deeds were all conceived in the open air."

The quote atop this editorial is from Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road—a cheerful 1856 tribute to freedom and the great outdoors.

Hopefully, Mr. Whitman would have approved use of his prose to promote open, well-aired government. It's unlikely the great poet favored government secrecy and closed-door meetings. He also wrote, "Out of the dark confinement, out from behind the screen!"

For today's purposes, Whitman's "screen" represents the executive session—a self-important term for a classic oxymoron: closed public meeting.

Too many elected boards seek every opportunity to meet out of sight of the public they serve. Some schedule executive sessions as a regular agenda item. Some hold up to three executive sessions in a single meeting. Some have executive sessions that last longer than the open portion of their meeting.

In most cases, executive sessions do not violate open meeting laws. The closed-door discussions are often suggested or encouraged by an elected board's legal counsel.

But legality and necessity are two different things.

Consider the following list our Fourth Estate counsel to county commissions, city councils, and school boards everywhere on executive sessions and general government openness. Citizens should hold their elected officials to the standards below. These are Ten Commandments for Open Meetings:

ONE: Do not gather as a quorum outside of regular meetings, and do not hold special meetings without giving at least 24 hours public notice.

TWO: Do not habitually add last-minute items to the agenda, and do not act on anything not listed on the posted agenda.

THREE: Do not abuse the litigation excuse for executive sessions to speculate about possible or imagined lawsuits.

FOUR: Do not stretch the personnel excuse for executive sessions to discuss policy issues. Example: Creating a new position or changing a department's job descriptions are policy decisions and not appropriate topics for a closed meeting.

FIVE: Do not dial up the "negotiations" excuse to suddenly exclude the public from discussion of controversial issues that were previously aired thoroughly in open session.

SIX: Do not allow executive session conversations to stray to other topics.

SEVEN: Do not violate the spirit of the open meeting law with frequent phone, email or text dialogues with other members. Reach consensus at the meeting.

EIGHT: Do not make a habit of whispering or passing notes at meetings. You were elected to speak for us. Tell what you have to say out loud and proud!

NINE: Allow public input at every meeting. Include it on every agenda.

TEN: Be as transparent as possible. Do not hold executive sessions simply because counsel advised it is "legal" to do so. Ask yourself: "Is it absolutely critical we discuss this privately?"

That should be the standard because legality and necessity are two different things.

We appreciate our local commissioners and board members. They serve for minimal compensation. They make tough decisions. They sometimes lose friends and make enemies. Their dedication to community is admirable.

We simply ask elected officials to think twice before kicking the public out of public meetings.

Strive for fewer. Less is more. A closed meeting should be a rare occasion, not a habit.

Brian Hunhoff writes for the Yankton County Observer in Yankton, South Dakota. His editorials about open government won the 2015 Freedom of Information award from the National Newspaper Association.

Many public servants often forget, or ignore, that the public has the right to know just about everything they do. We pay them, and it is up to us to hold them accountable. But, often, the sun simply doesn’t shine on local or state government—and it’s as bad as we’ve ever seen it in the state of Mississippi. Sometimes it’s ineptness, sometimes it’s trickery, sometimes it's nefarious, sometimes it’s ignorance of sunshine laws, including the Mississippi Open Records Law, established to give the public, and thus the media, the right to a prompt response to information requests. We also have the right to be present for the vast majority of public meetings, including work sessions of government groups (which we have been turned away from because they don't want sunshine on the process while it's happening, preferring to present a "done deal" to the public.)

In Jackson and Mississippi, we deal with a wide variety of responses and roadblocks to information. The most common is probably simply ignoring our requests unless we keep badgering them (which is illegal, of course). Another frustrating way to block information access is by charging expensive hourly rates for the time it supposedly takes a staffer to reach into a file and make a copy, or print out a list of readily available information. Or, they try to charge exorbitant per-page rates (unless it’s something they want us to have, of course). Our favorite example of that was Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann’s office telling us it would cost us hundreds of dollars to get copies of then-Gov. Haley Barbour’s executive orders to pardon inmates after we broke that story back in 2008.

The other major problem with records access is the tendency to delay: By definition, “public” information is supposed to be available on demand to the public if at all possible. We understand it takes a few hours or maybe a day or two to answer us about a current document, if it is a good-faith delay, but public servants often take one or more weeks just to tell you “no.” We understand it they are historic records stored in a warehouse somewhere, but current records? Just make them available. The public should know what you’re doing as you do it, so they can have input. It’s also true that when public servants block data, media get a whole lot more curious why.

One of our biggest sunshine frustrations, in fact, came back in 2006 at the hands of another media outlet, The Clarion-Ledger, which hasn't exactly been a sunshine stalwart over the years. That paper, which could afford attorneys back when we couldn't, actually negotiated a longer period of time to respond to requests with the Frank Melton administration, which did not believe it had to follow the law. (The Clarion-Ledger also notoriously withheld information on a lawsuit it was involved in with Melton when he was running for mayor, including the fact that he had lied under oath. The paper endorsed him without revealing that information.)

The JFP has long focused on the serious problem of campaign donation transparency in the state, especially that shielded by political action committees, and more recently the problem with city contractor transparency. PACs often under-report (or don’t bother to at all), use illegible handwriting or wait to report until it’s too late. We’ve even learned that third-party groups are set up to handle money to keep people from knowing exactly who is giving to what candidate.

We have always instructed our news staffers to report campaign donations—because that can be the first step on the corruption trail. Some donors give money and expect lucrative jobs or contracts in return. The public has the right to know about them, even if legal. We’ve used every investigative tool at our disposal to try to expose dark money and post the actual campaign reports themselves (recent years’ reports are in the JFP Documents Morgue at jfp.ms/documents).

The good news is that this isn't a problem every time. In the last mayoral elections, for instance, the Jackson City Clerk's office was wonderful about providing us quick PDFs of campaign-finance reports as they came in (many from that election are posted here.)

Once again, the JFP is turning up the volume on public records, filing more requests to both get information for the public and to test the system. The City of Jackson, for instance, has publicized an apparent “open data” push of late that we will monitor and test for effectiveness.

On the other hand, the City rejected a very basic public-records request recently for a list of firms holding active contracts with the City and the amount of "authorized to each," responding to us that it is not “an identifiable public record.” This is absurd and an insult of taxpayers’ intelligence to tell us that we cannot have a list of companies the city pays. That response letter is posted in the JFP Documents Morgue as the first entry in our new Sunshine Hall of Shame where we plan to track late or negative responses to our requests going forward.

This week, just in time for Sunshine Week, state reporter Arielle Dreher and the JFP news team will start rolling out the results of a state transparency project that will shine a great deal of needed sunshine. Keep an eye out.

Meantime, you can submit your own public-records requests to the City of Jackson here. Write news@jacksonfreepress.com if you have problem accessing information. Remember, every week must be sunshine week when it comes to access to public information and meetings. Never forget: All of them work for us.

Be sure to visit our Sunshine archive for some of our public records work over the years.

AP joined with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to file the lawsuit.

At issue is a 2014 Freedom of Information request seeking documents related to the FBI's decision to send a web link to the fake article to a 15-year-old boy suspected of making bomb threats to a high school near Olympia, Washington. The link enabled the FBI to infect the suspect's computer with software that revealed its location and Internet address.

AP strongly objected to the ruse, which was uncovered last year in documents obtained through a separate FOIA request made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"The FBI both misappropriated the trusted name of The Associated Press and created a situation where our credibility could have been undermined on a large scale," AP General Counsel Karen Kaiser said in a 2014 letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder.

"It is improper and inconsistent with a free press for government personnel to masquerade as The Associated Press or any other news organization," Kaiser wrote. "The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation."

In a November opinion piece in the New York Times, FBI Director James Comey revealed that an undercover FBI agent had also impersonated an AP reporter, asking the suspect if he would be willing to review a draft article about the bomb threats.

Comey described the tactic as "proper and appropriate" under Justice Department guidelines in place at the time. He said such a ruse would likely require higher-level approvals now than it did in 2007, but that it would still be lawful "and, in a rare case, appropriate."

In a meeting with reporters the following month, Comey left open the possibility that an agent might again pose as a journalist, though he said such a tactic ought to be rare and "done carefully with significant supervision, if it's going to be done."

AP's records request also seeks an accounting of how many times since 2000 the FBI has impersonated media organizations to deliver malicious software.

In a response to AP, the FBI indicated it might take nearly two years to find and copy the requested records. AP's lawsuit asks a federal judge to order the FBI to hand over the records.

Brian Tolley, the executive editor of The Clarion-Ledger, announced his departure this afternoon on the newspaper's website. Tolley, who has managed the newsroom since March 2012, will helm news operations for publications in Hilton Head, S.C., the C-L reported.

According to a story on the C-L's website, Tolley's tenure brought the advent of a digital pay meter as well as the addition of national and world sections of USA Today as part of a initiative to fatten up the local paper and bolster declining circulation. The most recent publicly available information shows the C-L's Sunday circulation (the biggest day for dailies) had dipped to around 60,000 as of 2013.

Of the outgoing editor, the paper wrote today: "A champion of digital journalism, Tolley overhauled jobs and workshifts, created new positions for a modern newsroom, emphasized social media and readership metrics, and recruited people with non-traditional newspaper backgrounds to facilitate change.

"Content coverage also shifted noticeably. An investigative and enterprise team was formed to do major projects, and many traditional coverage areas were eschewed while more resources were poured into covering state government, politics and college sports in a more comprehensive way."

Tolley's exit was not entirely unexpected.

In late July, the C-L announced that Jason Taylor, formerly of the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times Free Press, would take over operations at the Jackson daily as well as the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American and Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, succeeding Publisher Leslie Hurst, who retired July 31.

Meanwhile, Gannett is rolling out a plan to revamp its newsrooms by having fewer editors and requiring other newsroom staffer to reapply for their jobs. A source with knowledge of Clarion-Ledger operations tells the Jackson Free Press that this fall employees at the Jackson-based daily will learn how the newsroom has been reconfigured and whether their jobs exist. Employees will then have an opportunity to interview for new positions.

Jim Romenesko reported on his blog that some of the new job titles include community content editor, content coach, engagement editor, news assistant, planning editor, and reporter I, II and III.

Taylor said the paper would begin searching for a new editor right away; Dustin Barnes, who has worked for the C-L for five years and had been covering Jackson city hall, also recently announced his resignation. Barnes has been handling City of Jackson coverage since Brian Eason left for the Indianapolis Star, a Gannett sister publication, this spring.

"All newspapers are faced with covering news with fewer people," Tolley said in the C-L web story. "That's the reality. If we had continued as an institution to try to do everything we did 10 years ago, then we would have ended up not doing anything of substance, and not doing anything very well. Instead, we tried to be great at a few core things, and investigative work and community leadership journalism were always atop that list."

Gannett owns the Clarion-Ledger, USA Today and a number of other titles across the country, and is "beta testing" the strategy in five of its markets: Ashville, N.C.; Greenville, S.C., Asbury Park, N.J.; Pensacola, Fla. and Nashville.

These news organizations are characterizing the shakeup, which will mean fewer newsroom managers and production staff (read: copyeditors, whose functions will be consolidated) as a redeployment of resources, all with the goal of strengthening local journalism.

The Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times called it a "sweeping reconfiguration of the way our news team is set up," resulting from concerned editors' dissatisfaction with the way newsrooms are meeting the challenges of fragmented media markets.

Editor John Awtry writes: "Full disclosure: realigning will come with some pain. In keeping with the realities of a fragmented media landscape, the trade-off is that there will be fewer management positions, fewer production-related roles, and that will make us a little smaller overall. But this is about more than contracting — we're not facing these challenges without a plan. The reinvestment in reporting resources and new tools will position us to continue the digital growth you've helped us achieve, and increased watchdog staffing will give you deeper local stories in the printed paper you can't get anywhere else."

News of the initiative emerges on the heels of the McLean, Va.-based Gannett's announcement that it would split its businesses into two divisions, for broadcasting and publishing. Wall Street—a constant thorn in the side of the news industry because investors value quarter over quarter growth more the quality of a company's product, such as high-impact journalism—rewarded the announcement by giving Gannett's per-share stock price a $.40 boost, to $34.27.

In Asbury Park, which covers central and southern New Jersey, executive editor Hollis Towns said the plan would allow the paper to "flatten" the management structure and hire more reporters who will be free to spend time in the community to provide faster coverage.

"More than ever, our reporters are being asked to connect with you by being out in the community, listening, tweeting and holding conversations with you in local coffee shops and delis," Towns wrote in a message to readers on the newspaper's website.

Nashville Public Radio reported that the reshuffle at The Tennessean would involve slashing 15 percent of newsroom staffers, reducing the number of positions to 76 from 89.

Like many Gannett properties, The Clarion-Ledger has suffered a steady decline in readership in circulation over recent years, bringing its Sunday circulation (the biggest day for dailies) to around 60,000 in 2013. Earlier this year, Gannett attempted to fatten The Clarion-Ledger and other newspapers, which had already shrunk in dimension, by inserting USA Today into the papers, in what it called the Butterfly Initiative.

The Clarion-Ledger is also facing another publisher change, with its 6th publisher since 2004 taking over the business reins soon.

Gannett also announced that it signed a definitive agreement to acquire full ownership of Cars.com. Under the agreement, Gannett will acquire the 73 percent interest it does not already own in Cars.com's parent company, Classified Ventures LLC, for $1.8 billion in cash.

In late July, the C-L announced that Jason Taylor, formerly of the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times Free Press, would oversee operations at the Jackson daily as well as the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American and Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser. He succeeds Leslie Hurst, who retired July 31.