Bob CollinsIt was proven beyond all doubt today that you can tweet and talk at the same time on the Daily Circuit’s Friday Roundtable.
I was on it today along with Lars Leafblad, principal with Keystone Search, an executive search firm; and Kyle Tran Myhre, also known as “Guante,” a hip-hop performer and two-time national poetry slam champion.
The main topics were the killing of Trayvon Martin, and employers who demand the Facebook passwords of job applicants. We never got around to the question before the Supreme Court this week about whether mandatory life sentences should be imposed on juveniles who commit murders. But scroll back through the week and you can read plenty about that particular issue.
Update 4:52 p.m. David Kearsley sent in this comment about the program and gave us permission to reprint his message:
Perhaps if the MPR News staff was not almost completely bereft of non-Caucasian “on-air” and production team talent, you wouldn’t have to trot out people like “hip hop artst” Kyle Tran Myhre (or gospel/blues singer Jearlyn Steele) in order to have an African-American voice available, as you endeavor to cover stories such as the Trayvon Martin case, among others.
Talented and insightful as he might be, Mr. Myhre is not a journalist, and I for one am pretty sick and tired of the “Minnesota nice” apartheid system in place at MPR News. I’ve been in the MPR building multiple times, and I’ve been examining the list of “MPR People” on this website, in order to get a feeling for how many African-Americans work on the MPR News production staff. So far I’ve come up empty. We won’t even talk about the “on-air” news situation.
