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Impeachment and what follows? Let our experts help if you are covering!
For President Donald Trump…he’s living in interesting times. There’s an irony to that statement, as the so-called Chinese proverb ‘May you live in interesting times’ which has been purported as a centuries old curse on the English has no actual source or history. It too is fake news. But painfully accurate in these times of political turmoil in Washington. What’s not fake is the talks of impeachment. The issue has traction and it looks as if the first steps of the process will soon move forward. The President and his supporters are digging in and pushing back. This will be an issue that dominates the headlines for months, if not longer. It may even stretch into the election cycle for 2020. There will be results, consequences and reactions each step along the way. The President has even indicated the division will be akin to civil war. While not likely, the splitting of the American voter will deepen and it will be interesting to see, once all the dust has settled, who benefits at the ballot box in 2020. If you are a reporter covering this topic – that’s where our experts can help. Mark Caleb Smith is the Director of the Center for Political Studies at Cedarville University. Mark is available to speak with media regarding Trump, impeachment and the upcoming election. Simply click on his icon to arrange an interview.
Covering Climate Change? Let Our Experts Help with Your Coverage
It took a long time, but climate change is part of everyday life. It is now part of the constant news cycle, it is used in shaping public policy, incorporated into marketing plans and owns a part of (most) political party platforms. Climate activism is growing as well. One year ago, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg skipped school to sit in front of Swedish Parliament to protest our climate. Today, those same one-day strikes inspired by her take place in over 800 cities across the planet. Climate change is real and with any growing topic or cause, there’s also a lot of misinformation shared, and some facts just aren’t being interpreted correctly. If you’re a journalist covering climate change – that’s where our experts can help with your questions, stories and ongoing coverage. Dr. Pamela Grothe is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences as the University of Mary Washington. She recently completed a Ph.D. in the Paleoclimatology Lab at the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department at Georgia Institute of Technology. She’s an #expert in climate change and is available to speak with media – simply click on her icon to arrange an interview.
Until now, it seemed no scandal could stick to President Donald Trump. But after a whistleblower came forward after an awkward conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy – it seems Trump may have finally crossed the line. His request for an investigation by a foreign power into a political, opponent may have been illegal. Trump repeatedly Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to work with Attorney General William Barr and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer. At one point in the conversation, Trump said, “I would like for you to do us a favor.” The president’s words set the parameters for the debate to come — just the fourth impeachment investigation of an American president in the nation’s history. The initial response highlighted the deep divide between the two parties: Democrats said the call amounted to a “shakedown” of a foreign leader, while Trump — backed by the vast majority of Republicans — dismissed it as a “nothing call.”… Pelosi announced the impeachment probe on Tuesday after months of resistance to a process she has warned would be divisive for the country and risky for her party. But after viewing the transcript on Wednesday, Pelosi declared: Congress must act.” September 25 – Associated Press This will only be the fourth time in history an impeachment investigation has taken place - and odds are it will dominate the Washington scene for months. But there are a lot of questions to be asked: How long will this take? What does it take to actually succeed? If Trump is impeached by Congress – will the Senate follow? Could he actually be removed from office? And, is this a risk for Democrats who could feed into the Trump narrative of another failed attempt at a witch hunt? There are a lot of questions and that’s where our experts can help. Dr. Stephen Farnsworth is professor of political science and international affairs at the University of Mary Washington. A published author and a media ‘go-to’ on U.S. politics, he is available to speak with media regarding this topic. Simply click on his icon to arrange an interview.
Was it Dora that finally discovered the key to diversity at the box office?
If you have young kids – or have at least been around them over the past 20 years – you’ll know Dora the Explorer, the always polite adventurer who takes excited young viewers on a trek through South America while educating them at the same time. The star of Nickelodeon has her own theme song, branded toys and clothes, along with a cast of characters who have also become household names. The show has been a success on the small screen, but the cross-over to live action proved to be gold at theaters, too, and the movie has already grossed more than $80 million at the worldwide box office. Dora and the Lost City of Gold is a smashing success, and for more reasons than just name recognition. Dora, played by Isabela Moner, is the strong female lead of a cast that is almost entirely made up of actors from Latin backgrounds. The film continues to show the success of gender and racial diversity in Hollywood. The move toward increased diversity also includes the LGBTQ community and people with disabilities. “There is a major push for representation in both of these communities and we're still reaching new milestones there every day,” said A.B. Osborne, assistant professor of animation at Augusta University. "Steven Universe and the recent She-Ra reboot have been major breakthroughs for authentic and positive LGBTQ representation. Steven Universe, for example, had the first same-sex marriage proposal and wedding for a kid's animated series. Rebecca Sugar, the creator, had to work very hard to get Cartoon Network to agree to that moment." Osborne adds, “Another milestone that means a lot to a good friend of mine who has Asperger's syndrome is the creation of Symmetra from Overwatch. She was the first autistic playable videogame character. It’s not all positive, however. Disney recently announced that Halle Bailey would be playing Ariel in its remake of The Little Mermaid. The backlash was loud, but Disney has not wavered, stating the young African American actress is perfect for the role. Diversity and inclusion in film and society is always an important albeit sensitive topic – and if you are covering stories about diversity, let our experts help. Osborne is an expert in the field of animation, working in everything from classic cartoons to technical and medical animation. He is available to speak with media regarding this topic – simply click on his icon to arrange an interview.
18 Years since 9/11 – Let an expert from Cedarville help with your coverage
It’s been 18 years since the attacks of 9/11 and that moment still occupies how this country approaches security, the military and foreign affairs. Terrorism and attacks both home and abroad are still top of mind and Secretaries of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, Janet Napolitano, and Jeh Johnson were recently called to testify in Washington about the state of America’s readiness against terror attacks in the near two decades since September 11, 2001. The changes to policy, legislation and how America approaches security have drastically altered how society functions either in plain sight (at airports) or behind the scenes (phone monitoring and cellular digital gathering). The ripple effects of 9/11 are still being felt and being debated by lawmakers at every level in Washington. “Americans are still dealing with the aftermath of the post-9/11 world in other ways. The Trump administration is currently negotiating with the Taliban to end the 18-year war in Afghanistan, or at least to end the U.S. and NATO military presence there. A growing number of Democrats have called for the dismantling of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, just one of many agencies housed within the colossal and dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security, which was created in 2003. Congress is also set to decide whether to permanently reauthorize the National Security Agency’s moribund call-records program that began shortly after the September 11 attacks.” September 06 – New Republic Are you a journalist covering domestic and international terrorism? Do you have questions about how ready, vulnerable or susceptible America is to another attack? What laws are needed and which policies need to be sun-setted now that so much time has passed. Then that’s where our experts can help. Dr. Glen Duerr's research interests include nationalism and secessionism, comparative politics, and international relations theory. Glen is available to speak to media regarding the state of America’s homeland security – simply click on his icon to arrange an interview.
Georgia Southern University is making it easier for active-duty military or veterans to find out what courses they can receive credit for based on their previous military experience. The university’s new widget, available at GeorgiaSouthern.edu/military-veterans, asks for information like the branch of military served in, highest level of experience and job title to determine what Georgia Southern courses match their experience. The tool is available to prospective or current students, and it provides an immediate response with courses for which someone may receive credit. Military Education and Outreach Coordinator retired Sgt. Maj. Bill Gammon works with current and prospective students to create a plan based on their choice of major and determine which courses work best for their path. Credit will be awarded after an individual evaluation is completed. “The biggest benefit is that it doesn’t require them to take classes in things that they’re already well-experienced in,” Gammon said. “It helps them expedite their way through their college experience here to their final goal.” Georgia Southern works with the American Council on Education to determine which military training or job equals a college course. Gammon noted experience and credits from the Air Force are slightly different because airmen take college courses through the Community College of the Air Force (CCAF), but with the university’s GEM Program, they can complete their CCAF degrees. Are you a reporter interested in covering how schools like Georgia Southern University are working with the military? Then let our experts help. Sgt. Maj. Bill Gammon is available to speak to the media regarding this program – simply contact Melanie Simón at 912.344.2904 to arrange an interview.
It was 400 years ago this August that the first enslaved people arrived on the shores of North America, changing forever the direction of history. “These men and women had been stolen from their homes in Africa, forced to board a ship, and sailed for months into the unknown. The first Africans in an English colony, their arrival is considered by many historians to be the beginning of a 400-year story filled with tragedy, endurance, survival, and a legacy of resilience, inequality, and oppression.” National Geographic, Aug. 13 The history of slavery and the journey from chains to freedom to equality has been a long one and there is still so much to learn and tell. Even today, how are African American communities negatively affected by this event? Is the topic taught and covered in U.S. children’s education? What role did the enslaved play in the building of our country and is that role recognized? What would America look like today without the slave trade? Do reparations work and how would they be decided? This is an important and sensitive topic – and if you are a journalist covering the history of slavery, that’s where our experts can help. Professor Seretha Williams is an expert in Africa and African diaspora, digital humanities, and digital publication. Williams is also the co-editor of Afterimages of Slavery, Essays on Appearances in Recent American Films, Literature, Television, and Other Media. She is available to speak with media regarding this historic moment – simply click on her icon to arrange an interview.
Inverted yields and a potential recession – are rocky times ahead?
Everything seemed to be going swell. Unemployment was low, the number of jobs was high and the economy seemed to be roaring. Until last week. Yields on two-year and 10-year Treasury notes inverted early Wednesday, a market phenomenon that shows investors want more in return for short-term government bonds than they are for long-term bonds. It's the first time that has happened since the Great Recession and it can be an indication that investors have lost faith in the soundness of the U.S. economy. - USA Today, Aug. 14, 2019 Inversions are usually the canary in the coal mine when it comes to recessions. In fact, this very same incident has occurred in the previous nine recessions since the mid-1950s. How bad will this recession be? Is there any way to reverse course? Is this simply an American issue or will it spread globally? Compared to 2008 – how bad of a situation are we in? There is a lot of speculation and questions being asked. If you are a reporter covering the economy and need an expert to help guide you through the situation and provide accurate information on the state of America’s economy – that’s where we can help. Dr. Simon Medcalfe is a highly regarded finance expert and the Cree Walker Chair in the Hull College of Business at Augusta University. Medcalfe is available to speak with media regarding the economy and its outlook – simply click on his icon to arrange an interview.
Key Environmental Quality Research Questions Identified for North America by Multidisciplinary Team
As density in cities increase along with other global megatrends, researchers are working to address environment and health challenges in collaborative ways. Using a recently pioneered process, a multidisciplinary team of North American researchers, government agencies and businesses leaders identified priority research questions for the United States, Canada and Mexico in an effort to tackle pressing environmental quality issues. In an article published in the journal of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Bryan W. Brooks, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Environmental Science and Biomedical Studies and director of the environmental health science program at Baylor University, led the Global Horizon Scanning Project (GHSP), which focuses on identifying environmental and health issues internationally. Brooks also facilitated GHSP workshops in Africa, Australia, Central and Southeastern Asia, Europe and Latin America. “We face palpable global environment and health challenges, which require innovative understanding, tools, products and systems to prevent, diagnose and manage adverse outcomes to public health and the environment,” Brooks said. “The GHSP was initiated as part of a larger effort to identify important international research needs. It is essentially a research roadmap towards achieving more sustainable environmental quality, which is necessary to protect human health, biodiversity and ecosystem services.” As part of the study, members of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry’s (SETAC) and the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Environmental Chemistry and Agrochemcials Divisions submitted questions that were then synthesized during a workshop by scientists and engineers from the academic, government and business sectors. “This project is intentionally inclusive, bottom-up, multidisciplinary, multisector and transparent,” Brooks said. “Answering these priority research questions will not be easy, but strategically doing so promises to accelerate progress to address grand challenges that matter to everyone.” “This report provides a comprehensive global perspective covering some of the world’s most critical environmental challenges that will impact society for decades to come,” said Sherine Obare, Ph.D., dean and professor of the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering at UNC Greensboro and chair elect of the American Chemical Society’s Environmental Chemistry Division. “SETAC’s ability to engage scientists from around the globe has led to forums that identify urgent challenges including, next generation 21st century analytical chemistry methods, strategies to predict chemical exposure, understanding multiple stressors and new approaches in chemical risk assessment. This project will define the scientific directions needed to transform environmental science and engineering, globally.” “The GHSP reflected in this paper has harnessed the insights of scientists not only across North America but around the world,” said Charles Menzie, Ph.D., Global Executive Director of SETAC. “Each brings tremendous experience and a strong sense of what is needed for future research. However, the distillation of these many into a set of consensus questions provides a much needed foundation for charting our direction for research to inform environmental policy. SETAC is proud to have supported this through our global meetings and now through our journal.” A related GHSP manuscript identifying priority environmental quality questions for the Australasiaregion of Oceania was also recently published in Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management. GHSP efforts from Africa and Asia are ongoing with plans to report priority research questions from these global regions in the next year. ABOUT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY Baylor University is a private Christian University and a nationally ranked research institution. The University provides a vibrant campus community for more than 17,000 students by blending interdisciplinary research with an international reputation for educational excellence and a faculty commitment to teaching and scholarship. Chartered in 1845 by the Republic of Texas through the efforts of Baptist pioneers, Baylor is the oldest continually operating University in Texas. Located in Waco, Baylor welcomes students from all 50 states and more than 80 countries to study a broad range of degrees among its 12 nationally recognized academic divisions. ABOUT BAYLOR COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES The College of Arts & Sciences is Baylor University’s oldest and largest academic division, consisting of 25 academic departments and seven academic centers and institutes. The more than 5,000 courses taught in the College span topics from art and theatre to religion, philosophy, sociology and the natural sciences. Faculty conduct research around the world, and research on the undergraduate and graduate level is prevalent throughout all disciplines.
Preacher Archives Add New Element to Baylor University’s Black Gospel Music Restoration Project
The Black Gospel Music Restoration Project at Baylor University is preserving more than just gospel music. In the past few years, Baylor journalism professor and former Billboard gospel music editor Robert Dardenand a team from the Baylor Libraries have undertaken the project of restoring and preserving recorded sermons from black preachers in addition to the gospel music. While both are equally important to preserve, finding sermons to preserve comes with a unique set of challenges. Darden said the idea for preserving sermons started about four years ago, when the BGMRP team was in contact with the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Marvin Griffin, former pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Waco. Griffin was a renowned Civil Rights leader in Central Texas and boasts a list of significant firsts, including first black man to earn a degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and first African-American president of the Austin Independent School District board of directors. Darden said somebody mentioned in passing that they kept Griffin’s sermons and said he ought to hear them because they are full of music. “All black preachers sing, and all black singers preach,” Darden said. “That got me thinking – nobody has been collecting the black preaching from the Civil Rights movement, other than Dr. King. All these incredible heroes who were preaching around the rest of the country, there’s not a collection of their work. So, I met with the other folks in the Black Gospel project, and we agreed that in addition to the music, we ought to be trying to collect preaching.” Many of these sermons had been recorded on vinyl, and Darden said some have even speculated that it was black preaching that started black gospel music in the 1930s. He said some records that were just a black preacher preaching for two and a half minutes on each side sold half a million copies – even during the Great Depression. Digitizing sermons from different formats When the BGMRP was founded in the Baylor Libraries in 2005, the bulk of incoming materials focused on recorded gospel music. Over the ensuing decade, the BGMRP team realized they already had hundreds of vinyl LPs from famous preachers in their collection. Shortly after, they started receiving sermons in many different formats. Darryl Stuhr, associate director of the Libraries’ digital preservation services, consulted with Darden and together they decided they needed a collection to show to preachers and their families who were not familiar with the projects, in hopes of convincing them to trust the project with their sermons long enough to digitize them. Darden worked with two in particular – the Rev. E.E. Jones in Shreveport, Louisiana, and the Rev. Clay Evans in Chicago, who is still preaching at 93-years-old. “Evans) was one of only two preachers who helped Dr. King in Chicago during those really rough times, and they had collected video cassettes of him back into the ‘70s,” Darden said. “That’s the good news. The bad news is they kept them in unairconditioned or unheated warehouses.” Darden said the BGMRP spent lots of money getting these cassettes stabilized enough to play them even just one time so they could be digitized. Using technology at the Libraries’ Riley Digitization Center, audiovisual digitization staffers Stephen Bolech, Travis Taylor and Hannah Engstrom are able to rescue the recorded sermons from other formats as well, including videocassette, film and digital audio tape. The wide range of formats the BGMRP team can work with means a greater number of sermons can be saved, Stuhr said. “They’re not all in the best condition, but they’re just thrilling because (Evans’ church) is one of the largest historic African-American churches in just full 1970s regalia. We got (Jones and Evans) and we’ve been using those to approach other preachers and their families now. This is already the largest collection in the country, and we just started,” Darden said. Recently, Darden got a call from PBS. Dr. Henry Louis Gates of the TV series “Finding Your Roots,” whom Darden quotes in his books, will have a new six-part series on the history of African-American churches in America debuting in 2020. Darden said they contacted him about providing materials for the show and contacts of people. The BGMRP already has made hundreds of copies for PBS and is communicating about how they can help. “I’m hoping they’re going to come down and do some filming here as well, because a lot of the stuff we have is old bulletins and the sheet music – we just have everything. Sure, we can digitize it, but if they came down, they could array it in such a way from an artistic standpoint,” Darden said. Search continues Darden got together with some of the “preaching folks” at Baylor and put together a top 10 wish list of influential black preachers of the past 50 years whose sermons they would like to digitize. “I just think God put me in a place where I could facilitate, rather than me initiate, and it was God’s idea apparently, because it wouldn’t have worked this well otherwise,” Darden said. Darden said new vinyls continue to come in every few days, and it is like Christmas for him to go see what is new. “I don’t mind not knowing every artist or every preacher – there’s hundreds and thousands of them,” he said. “But what scares me is when I pull a piece of vinyl out and it’s a label that I don’t know, which means there’s another whole line of that label that we’ve never heard of. So here we’re sitting 15 or so years into this project, and I don’t know if we have 1 percent of what’s out there – 10 percent? There’s no database. Nobody knows.” “It’s unlike every other kind of music. Nobody ever made a discography of gospel music,” Darden said. “So, whether we mean to or not, we’re actually putting that together as well. Trying to figure out how many Andraé Crouch albums, how many James Cleveland, how many Rosetta Tharpe, and now with preaching, it could go on forever. It’ll be going, hopefully, long after I’m gone.” For more information or to learn how to donate materials, visit the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project at www.baylor.edu/library/gospel or email digitalcollectionsinfo@baylor.edu.