Emigration, segregation, privacy and AI: Northeastern students flag undercovered stories

Every semester I ask my media ethics and diversity students at Northeastern to identify stories in the news that they think haven’t received as much coverage as they should have.

It’s always an enlightening experience — all of these stories have obviously received some coverage, but in my students’ view they weren’t repeated and amplified enough to penetrate the public consciousness. Right now, of course, there’s the Trump factor, as we all ponder what important news is being undercovered because of the way that the White House is dominating the news.

My class comprises nine graduate students and advanced undergrads. Here’s what they came up with.

• O Canada. The Trump administration’s brutal treatment of immigrants is getting plenty of attention, but The Atlantic reports (gift link) that Americans are looking to leave as well: “U.S. citizens now represent the majority of clients looking for an exit, through foreign citizenship, permanent residence, or a visa that allows them to live abroad.” Indeed, three prominent Yale professors, including Timothy Snyder, the author of “On Tyranny,” said this week that they’re decamping for the University of Toronto.

• Tax privacy takes a hit. The IRS may soon reach an agreement with immigration officials to turn over tax data, including the names and addresses of undocumented immigrants, according to The Washington Post, which reports: “The proposed agreement has alarmed career officials at the IRS, … who worry that the arrangement risks abusing a narrow and seldom-used section of privacy law that’s meant to help investigators build criminal cases, not enforce criminal penalties.”

• Journalists killed by Israel. Two more journalists working in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces, Al Jazeera reports. Hossam Shabat, who worked for Al Jazeera, died after his car was targeted. Another, Mohammad Mansour, who worked for Palestine Today, was killed in his house, along with his wife and son, according to reports. “The deliberate and targeted killing of a journalist, of a civilian, is a war crime,” said Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which reports that 173 journalists, mostly Palestinian, have been killed in the Israel-Gaza war. Other reports put the number of killed media workers at more than 230.

• Human trafficking or not? A high-priced brothel that catered to wealthy clients in Cambridge, Watertown and Washington has certainly gotten plenty of coverage, but there’s an important nuance that may have been overlooked. According to Cambridge Day, prosecutors have made “no distinction” between consensual sex work and human trafficking — casting a very different light on the sensational story, which has encompassed issues ranging from victimhood to privacy.

• Exploiting pregnant women. So-called crisis pregnancy centers lure pregnant women who may be considering abortion, and who instead find themselves dealing with anti-abortion activists. “The anti-abortion movement takes advantage of their economic vulnerability,” reports The New York Times (gift link), adding that some clients are required to take parenting or even Bible classes in order to obtain medical care that they need.

• AI and climate change. There’s so much cheerleading going on in the media about artificial intelligence that the environmental cost tends to get overlooked. The reality is that AI uses enormous amounts of energy and water (for cooling), thus contributing to climate change. And though some solutions are coming on line, the Harvard Business Review reports that the “adverse environmental impacts of AI disproportionately burden communities and regions that are particularly vulnerable to the resulting environmental harms.”

• Climate case is quietly dismissed. An under-publicized case came to a quiet end recently as the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal brought by 21 young people who sued the federal government on the grounds that their constitutional rights had been violated through policies that encouraged the use of fossil fuels. According to The New York Times (gift link), the Supreme Court’s action in the case of Juliana v. United States came after 10 years of legal maneuvering.

• Is it safe to fly? Plane crashes tend to be well-covered when they occur. But who is looking into the question of whether they are increasing in frequency, or the fears that passengers have about flying at a moment when it seems that safety can’t be ensured? The New York Times (gift link) pulled some of that information together by recounting three recent crashes, in Washington, Philadelphia and Alaska.

• Segregation in the South. This May will mark the 71st anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed school segregation throughout the U.S. Yet ProPublica reported recently that Alabama continues to be the home of numerous “segregation academies” — private schools set up for white families, while Black students attend increasingly segregated public schools. “ProPublica has found about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating,” according to the report.