I sometimes think I am the only one left reading them:
"Teen Vogue editor resigns after fury over racist tweets" by Katie Robertson New York Times, March 18, 2021
Alexi McCammond, who made her name as a politics reporter at the Washington news site Axios, had planned to start as the editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue next Wednesday. Now, after Teen Vogue staff members publicly condemned racist and homophobic tweets McCammond had posted a decade ago, she has resigned from the job.
Condé Nast, Teen Vogue’s publisher, announced the abrupt turn on Thursday in an internal e-mail that was sent amid pressure from the publication’s staff, readers, and at least two advertisers, just two weeks after the company had appointed her to the position.
“After speaking with Alexi this morning, we agreed that it was best to part ways, so as to not overshadow the important work happening at Teen Vogue,” Stan Duncan, the chief people officer at Condé Nast, said in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times.
In a statement included in the e-mail, McCammond said her “past tweets have overshadowed the work I’ve done to highlight the people and issues that I care about.”
“I wish the talented team at Teen Vogue the absolute best moving forward,” she said.
McCammond, 27, established herself as a prominent political reporter last year. She covered President Biden’s campaign for Axios and was a contributor to MSNBC and NBC. In 2019, she was named the emerging journalist of the year by the National Association of Black Journalists. She would have been the third Black woman to serve as Teen Vogue’s top editor, after Lindsay Peoples Wagner and Elaine Welteroth.
How did she cover the campaign, wait outside his house every day?
Her job status became shaky days after Condé Nast named her to the position, when the offensive tweets she had posted as a teenager in 2011 resurfaced. They included comments on the appearance of Asian features, derogatory stereotypes about Asians, and slurs for gay people. McCammond had apologized for the tweets in 2019 and deleted them. Screenshots of the tweets were recirculated on social media after her hiring at Teen Vogue was announced on March 5.
That makes it all right, and I stand behind everything I have typed.
The truth is the truth.
Within days, more than 20 staff members at Teen Vogue posted a note on social media saying they had made a complaint to company leaders about the tweets, and McCammond apologized for them again both publicly and in meetings with Condé Nast staff. “I’ve apologized for my past racist and homophobic tweets and will reiterate that there’s no excuse for perpetuating those awful stereotypes in any way,” she wrote in a March 10 letter posted on her Twitter account. “I am so sorry to have used such hurtful and inexcusable language.”
As the criticism of her hiring mounted, Ulta Beauty and Burt’s Bees, major advertisers with Teen Vogue, suspended their campaigns with the publication.
I wouldn't worry.
The money machine will re$tart $oon.
The scrutiny of her tweets has come at a time of heightened concern about violence and harassment directed against Asian Americans. On Wednesday, after eight people were killed in shootings in Atlanta, including six women of Asian descent, Condé Nast’s chief executive, Roger Lynch, sent a memo to the company’s staff that said 1 in 10 of its employees identified as Asian. “Our teams, our families and our friends have all been affected by the rise in hate crimes toward Asian people and it’s unacceptable,” Lynch wrote in the memo, which was reviewed by The Times.
McCammond had been vetted before Condé Nast hired her, and top executives including Lynch and Anna Wintour, the chief content officer and the global editorial director of Vogue, were aware of the decade-old racist tweets, Duncan said in his note on Thursday, and McCammond acknowledged them in interviews with the company.
Wintour discussed the tweets with leaders of color at Condé Nast before the job was offered, according to a company executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel issue. McCammond struck Condé Nast leaders as an impressive candidate, the executive said, and they felt her 2019 apology showed that she had learned from her mistakes.
Although the company was aware of the racist tweets, it did not know about the homophobic tweets or a photo, also from 2011, that was recently published by a right-wing website showing her in Native American costume at a Halloween party, the executive said. The vetting process did not turn up the additional material because it had been deleted, the executive added.
Condé Nast has reckoned with complaints of racism in its workplace and content over the past year. In June, amid the Black Lives Matter protests, Wintour sent a note to the Vogue staff, writing that, under her leadership, the magazine had not given enough space to “Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators” and acknowledging that it had published “images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant.”
Or Nasty?
Have you cancelled your $ub$cription yet?
"Students who got partial loan relief to see full discharge" by Carole Feldman Associated Press, March 18, 2021
WASHINGTON (AP) — Students who were defrauded by their colleges and received only partial relief from their federal loans could now see them fully canceled, the Biden administration announced Thursday, reversing a Trump administration policy.
The change could lead to $1 billion in loans being canceled for 72,000 borrowers, all of whom attended for-profit schools, the Education Department said.
“Borrowers deserve a simplified and fair path to relief when they have been harmed by their institution’s misconduct,” said Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “A close review of these claims and the associated evidence showed these borrowers have been harmed, and we will grant them a fresh start from their debt.”
The department said it was rescinding the formula used by the Trump administration to determine partial relief and putting in place “a streamlined path to receiving full loan discharges.”
The decision applies to students who already had their claims approved and received only partial relief, the department said.
A senior department official briefing reporters said the agency was continuing to review both the backlog of claims yet to be decided and those that have been denied.
The department described Thursday’s action as “a first step” and said it would be looking at rewriting the regulations down the road.
In addition to having their loans fully canceled, students will be reimbursed for any payments made on the loans and have their eligibility for federal student aid reinstated. The department said it also would ask credit bureaus to remove any negative ratings tied to the loans.
“Abandoning partial relief is a strong start for a narrow subset of borrowers, but what we need from the Education Department is an overhaul of the current borrower defense process,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, which represents former students at for-profit colleges.
“The previous administration turned borrower defense into a total sham that was rigged to deny claims without any true consideration,” Merrill said. “The Biden-Harris administration must now address these failings or else perpetuate a system that is stacked against the very students they are supposed to protect.”
Career Education Colleges and Universities, an industry lobbying group, said it had no comment on the Biden administration’s actions.
The borrower defense to repayment program allows students to have their federal loans canceled if they were defrauded by their colleges. The Obama administration had expanded the program aimed at helping students who attended for-profit colleges, but then-president Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, pulled it back, saying it had become too easy for students to have their loans erased, and revised the program to make it harder for them to get relief, including providing only partial cancellation of the loans.
Congress voted to overturn DeVos’ changes last March, but it was vetoed by Trump.
Nearly two dozen state attorneys general had sued the Trump administration over its implementation of the borrower defense to repayment program, which allows borrowers to have their loans canceled if their colleges made false claims to get them to enroll. One of the plaintiffs in that suit was California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who was confirmed Thursday as President Biden’s health secretary.
The lawsuit, which was filed last July, argued that DeVos had changed the policy without justification, failed to provide a meaningful process for students to get their loans forgiven and created “arbitrary impediments” for them, including forcing them to prove that their schools knowingly misled them.
Representative Bobby Scott, chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, said that DeVos had used a “nonsensical formula” to compute relief and that Thursday’s action would be “life changing for tens of thousands of people across the country.”
Related:
That's not nearly enough, and it should be targeted to those who need it.
