One photograph I will always treasure is a lovely family portrait showing 9-year-old Nguyen Thi Ly and her mother and grandmother in their home in Vietnam.
Taken in 2010 by the renowned photographer Catherine Karnow, the tender image captures the warmth of family while proffering haunting evidence of an American tragedy—Agent Orange.
Look closely, and you will notice that the faces of Ly and her mother are unusually flat and that their eyes are widely spaced. Both suffer from serious medical maladies and congenital defects. As Karnow learned during a 2010 reporting trip supported by Renaissance Journalism, their health problems can be attributed to the grandmother’s exposure to Agent Orange, the highly toxic defoliant that the U.S. military used without abandon during the Vietnam.
Triggered by the Black Lives Matter Movement, journalists across the United States are questioning the news media’s complicity in sustaining systemic racism and the inequities that permeate society. Recently, for example, the Los Angeles Times published an unflinching editorial apologizing for its “history of racism” and vowed to “redouble and refocus its efforts to become an inclusive and inspiring voice of California.”
Today, this drive for a reckoning in America is also rippling through philanthropy, which has become an increasingly influential player in media as nonprofit journalism has spread in the United States.
Renaissance Journalism is pleased to announce it has awarded $80,000 in reporting grants to four Bay Area news organizations as part of its Equity and Health Reporting Initiative.
Each organization will receive a $20,000 grant for an in-depth, ambitious reporting project that explores the disproportionate impact of systemic inequities—as exposed in bold relief by the pandemic and Black Lives Matter uprisings—on the health and well-being of our region’s most vulnerable communities. Projects will be completed by May 2021.
