Media
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Media: Why Are Media Outlets Still Citing Discredited ‘Fake News’ Blacklist?
The Washington Post (11/24/16) last week published a front-page blockbuster that quickly went viral: Russia-promoted “fake news” had infiltrated the newsfeeds of 213 million Americans during the election, muddying the waters in a disinformation scheme to benefit Donald Trump. Craig Timberg’s story was based on a “report” from an anonymous group (or simply a person,… Continue reading
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Media: Corporate Welfare Will Bring Back Jobs vs. Jobs Will Never Come Back
The Carrier company’s announcement that, after exhortations from Donald Trump, it was going to move a thousand jobs overseas—rather than the 2,000 that it had previously planned to move—led New York Times reporter Nelson Schwartz (11/29/16) to declare that “Mr. Trump is a different kind of Republican, willing to take on big business, at least… Continue reading
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If We Care About the Constitution, Trump Has to Sell His Empire
Donald Trump is about to become president and immediately begin violating the Constitution. The Constitution explicitly prohibits the president from taking payments and gifts from foreign governments. (Can we stop using the term “emolument“? No one has used it for a hundred years. We want to be clear on what the Constitution means.) Continue reading
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‘People Can Protect the Rights of Everyone in Their Community’
Janine Jackson: Watching social media, interest and energy around issues seems to swell and dissipate. But moving toward a functioning, inclusive democracy requires sustained work: building institutions, organizing, so that in times of acute crisis we have structures, or at least models of ways to respond. Continue reading
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Media: Lashing Out at ‘Identity Politics,’ Pundits Blame Trump on Those Most Vulnerable to Trump
21 November 2016 — FAIR Over the past two weeks, pundits from all ends of the spectrum have been scrambling to explain Clinton’s unexpected loss, with reasons spanning from the plausible to the highly dubious; WikiLeaks, Bernie Sanders, fake news, Jill Stein, Russia, bad algorithms and the FBI have all been accused of having sole Continue reading
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TV Pundits Eager to Make Trump the New ‘Normal’
After wrongly predicting the election, political pundits are returning to TV talkshows to explain what will happen under a Trump presidency. But these predictions aren’t like TV anchors predicting the weather; these forecasts have a profound impact on the public reception to the Trump administration and the future course of US politics. Continue reading
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Polls Showed Sanders Had a Better Shot of Beating Trump–but Pundits Told You to Ignore Them
There was a debate last spring, when the Sanders/Clinton race was at its most heated, as to whether Bernie Sanders’ consistently out-polling Hillary Clinton was to be taken as a serious consideration in favor of his nomination. Before, during and after the race was competitive, this was the Vermont senator’s strongest argument: He was out-polling… Continue reading
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The Comey Non-Story and the Problem of Meta-Scandals
On October 28, FBI Director James Comey dropped a “bombshell” on Clinton, informing congressional committee chairs that his agency had found more emails “pertinent to the investigation” of her private email server, and was looking into the matter. Just like that, chaos broke out, and the entire presidential election hung in the balance. Continue reading
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‘Our Identity Is Often What’s Triggering Surveillance’
Janine Jackson: The civil rights director of the Oregon state Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against his employer. It seems the department got a new computer program that lets them search social media, and to test it out, they looked for hash tags related to Black Lives Matter and activism against police violence,… Continue reading
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NYT’s Kristof Blames Poverty on Too Many TVs, Not Too Little Money
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for giving “voice to the voiceless” on international social justice issues, wrote an op-ed in yesterday’s Times (10/30/16) arguing for increased government action on poverty. His calls for heightened attention to economic deprivation, though, were buried in a larger message that… Continue reading
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At DAPL, Confiscating Cameras as Evidence of Journalism
While elite media wait for the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline to go away so they can return to presenting their own chin-stroking as what it means to take climate change seriously, independent media continue to fill the void with actual coverage. Continue reading
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Media Roll Out Welcome Mat for ‘Humanitarian’ War in Syria
Beyond the opinion pages, media figures are pushing the “humanitarian” approach with varying degrees of subtlety. Meet the Press host Chuck Todd (10/16/16) recently pressed Vice President Joe Biden on the lack of a no-fly zone over Aleppo, suggesting that the Obama administration will “look back and wonder what if? What if? What if? What… Continue reading
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‘Drug Dependence Hasn’t Been Stopped by 45 Years of the War on Drugs’
Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States, a study from Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, is a multi-level, cradle-to-grave if you will, look at the myriad impacts of the criminalization—selective criminalization—of drug possession on the people caught up in the system. Continue reading
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'Nothing to See Here' Is Pundit Takeaway on DNC Leaks
Leaks from Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails have been trickling in for the past week. The leaks—along with previous DNC emails—provide intimate details about the inner workings of the campaign that may well soon elect the most powerful person on Earth. The response from some journalists has been to analyse, dissect and find the most newsworthy… Continue reading
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Charges Dropped Against Amy Goodman–No Thanks to Corporate Media
After Goodman reported on the use of pepper spray and attack dogs against Native American demonstrators opposing the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (Democracy Now!, 9/4/16), North Dakota State’s Attorney Ladd Erickson charged her with criminal trespassing. Realizing that he couldn’t make that charge stick, he sought to charge her instead with participation in… Continue reading
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Hiding US Role in Yemen Slaughter So Bombing Can Be Sold as ‘Self-Defense’
US destroyers in the Gulf of Aden launched airstrikes against Houthi rebels, a Shia insurgent group currently withstanding a massive bombing campaign from a Saudi-led coalition in a year-and-half conflict between largely Shia rebels and the Saudi-backed Sunni government in Yemen. The Pentagon insisted that cruise missiles had been fired onto the USS Mason on… Continue reading
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NYT Declares Snowden a Thief–and Journalism a Crime
The problem with all this talk about the “theft” and “stealing” of secrets is that while Snowden, one of the most prominent whistleblowers of the modern era, has indeed been charged by the federal government with theft—along with two violations of the Espionage Act—he’s been convicted of no crime. Continue reading
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Big Papers Want Foreign Companies, Not War Crime Victims, to Sue US
The New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today are saying that exposing American military and intelligence personnel to foreign liability is per se bad—a nativism so casual and matter-of-fact one might hardly notice it until circumstances force them to explicitly state it. No account is taken of the 7 billion non-Americans or their rights.… Continue reading
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A Cop Killed a Black Man–Then Things Got ‘Ugly’
23 September 2016 — FAIR From the New York Times (9/20/16): About 16 police officers in Charlotte, N.C., were injured when a standoff between law enforcement and demonstrators turned ugly overnight after an officer fatally shot a black man on Tuesday afternoon. Funny—some might say that the turn toward ugliness occurred in the afternoon, when Continue reading
The New Dark Age 