Monday, February 13, 2012

Discrimination

Courtesy of the Russian Times, I found this interesting article:


On Tuesday twelve members of the Buffalo's firefighter squad were rewarded $2.7 million for emotional distress after a judge ruled that the city of Buffalo racially discriminated white men.
According to the lawsuit filed back in 2007, the city overlooked the twelve individuals and promoted black firefighters instead.  "This never should have happened,” said the plaintiffs’ attorney Andrew P. Fleming to BuffaloNews.com.

I'm shocked this made it to court and that they found in favor of the firefighters.  I'm sure they could have taken a payout without much fuss along the way.  Bravo for pushing it to be called discrimination; four years is a long time to fight for vindication.  I don't quite get the 'emotional distress' part of the case, but I'm not a lawyer.

Sad that I couldn't find the story on Fox News, etc.  I find myself using www.rt.com to get a more balanced view of the news.  Seems slightly counter-intuitive to use a foreign news source to find out what's going on in your own country. O_o

4 comments:

Old NFO said...

CF, another good one is the BBC... strange as that may sound, THEY present a pretty good unbiased view.

Bubblehead Les. said...

Well, what's sad is in our neck of the woods, Cleveland .com (the Cleveland Plain Dealer app) is about as useful as a broken water jug. But as buggy as it is, the AP app does get me enough News so that I can blend it with the BBC and Fox. When I used the Reuter app, every time I touched on a story, an Obama Reelection Ad would slide down before I could read the story, so that's out.

But Fox's problem now is that they're part of Rupert Murdoch's Media Empire, and after all the Phone Hacking Scandals over in England with his
Newspapers, Fox seems to be playing it safe and sound and meek. Rumor has it that the American Branch of NewsCorp may come under investigation of the DOJ, which should make Obama very,very happy. Stay Tuned.

RobertSlaughter said...

You said "Sad that I couldn't find the story on Fox News, etc."

Funny, when I Googled "buffalo firefighter discrimination award" I found plenty of places that covered it a week ago (no Fox News, though).

Russian Times has some interesting bits, but they do have an agenda, and I've also seen them recycle old articles (as in change dates, but text otherwise stays the same) about "US Government planning domestic coup" and other articles right out of the political version of Weekly World News.

Chasing Freedom said...

Hey Robert, I didn't mean to imply that RT was the be-all end-all in news sources. I find them to have pertinent stories on their front page that are *relatively* impartial. Every news source has an agenda; I wouldn't take RT for the Gospel any more than I'd take Fox or CNN. Yes, I'm certain that doing Google search for an article would bring it up from different news sources. However, I normally peruse the front pages / news pages of a couple sites & call it good. So, I should have said "Couldn't find it on the main pages of Fox, etc". My apologies.