#OnThisDay in 1989, the People's Liberation Army violently cracked down on a student protest calling for freedom of speech, less censorship, and an end to government corruption in what is known as the #TiananmenSquare massacre. Although the exact death toll is unknown, estimates range from several hundred to 10,000, with many more wounded.
Stateside, Chinese students protested and called for an extension of their student visas.
Today, we mourn the loss of a journalism legend. #RobertMacNeil passed away at the age of 93. His contributions to the field were immeasurable, and his legacy will continue to inspire generations to come.
His impact lives on in the archive where nearly 15,000 episodes of the #PBS#NewsHour and its predecessor programs, including The Robert MacNeil Report, The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, and The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, are preserved: https://americanarchive.org/special_collections/newshour
"In 2023, weekday editions of #PBS’s nightly news program #NewsHour aired nearly as many segments on the #climate crisis as the nightly news shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC combined. Even though 2023 was the hottest year in recorded history, those networks scaled back their climate coverage.
PBS more consistently connected climate change to fossil fuels.
PBS corrected conservative climate #misinformation."
"On Nov. 2, the #PBS#NewsHour’s foreign affairs correspondent Nick Schifrin reported on what he called '#Hamas propaganda videos.' Fair enough. Except that it would be virtually impossible for mainstream US news media to also matter-of-factly refer to public output from the #Israeli government as '#propaganda.'”
California is suing Big Oil for its decades-long coordinated campaign to trick the public into thinking climate change wasn’t real in order to increase/maintain sales. Here the California Attorney General talks about the case and the evidence the state will present https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ewVn15Fg1U
Ugh, PBS, this is awful. "Cars are super expensive. Can anything be done?" "Naw." "Are people switching to other modes of transportation?". "Not my daughter for sure!"
Florida was Ground Zero for anti-queer activism in the late 1970s, much as it is now.
Today in 1977, the top story on most American national TV newscasts: A Miami referendum on whether to reallow discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in jobs, housing and public accommodations. The main crusader for this change was singer Anita Bryant, who ultimately destroyed her own career with a years-long national campaign to fire queer schoolteachers and any teachers who supported queer people's rights, even if they did so on their own time.