Media Hits & Misses

  Fraudulence of American media. Democracy Now! (8/27/18) We host a roundtable discussion on the life and legacy of John McCain, the Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war, six-term senator and two-time presidential candidate, who died Saturday at the age of 81 of brain cancer. We speak with Mehdi Hasan, columnist for The Intercept and host of their “Deconstructed” podcast. He’s also host of “UpFront” at Al Jazeera English. He’s been tweeting in response to McCain’s death and wrote a piece last year headlined “Despite What the Press Says, ‘Maverick’ McCain Has a Long and Distinguished Record of Horribleness.”…

  By James Risen The Intercept (8/16/18) When Adolf Hitler came to power, after the Nazis had shut down all of Germany’s independent newspapers and magazines and ended press freedom in the country, Hermann Ullstein, a member of a highly regarded German publishing family, fled to New York and wrote a penetrating memoir of the rise and fall of his family’s media empire. His father, Leopold Ullstein, a Jewish newspaper dealer, had founded Ullstein Verlag, the family publishing house, which at its pre-Nazi peak owned some of Germany’s most important publications, including the Vossische Zeitung newspaper. But when Hitler stole their press…

“If you ignore him, then you starve him of the thing he loves the most ― and that is controversy and attention.” By Nick Visser The HuffPo (8/15/18) Omarosa Manigault Newman says there’s a lone way to combat President Donald Trump’s fiery rhetoric and constant attacks on Twitter: Don’t give him the attention. “There’s one way to shut Donald Trump down and that is to just don’t give him the oxygen,” Manigault Newman, who served as an aide to the president until her dismissal in December, said on The Daily Show Tuesday night. “And the oxygen comes from the clicks,…

  “Sometimes things are exactly as they appear.” By Mike Lofgren Common Dreams (8/2/18) According to an Annenberg survey, only a quarter of Americans can correctly name the three branches of the federal government. Is that sad fact, like the weather, something that just happens, beyond anyone’s control? Or does something make Americans resistant to the most elementary information? Could the manner in which that information is conveyed to them be so needlessly complex and hedged that people just give up and prefer blissful ignorance? We have seen this phenomenon on display in the way in which the mainstream media hem…

  The issues transcend whether you like Assange or not. [Editor’s Note: Julian Assange is a prickly, controversial and not all that nice of a guy. Putting aside one’s personal feelings about him, the Assange case raises huge issues for the future of a free press. This is a much-needed discussion of the issues involved. — Mark L. Taylor] By Peter B. Collins Who.What.Why (6/24/18) As Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno, visits London, reports indicate he is about to withdraw asylum for Julian Assange, exposing the WikiLeaks founder to eventual extradition to the United States to face charges under the Espionage…

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied…

  By Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone (5/1/18) Late in his new memoir, Reporter, muckraking legend Seymour Hersh recounts an episode from a story he wrote for the New Yorker in 1999, about the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. Bill Clinton was believed to be preparing a pardon for Pollard. This infuriated the rank and file of the intelligence community, who now wanted the press to know just what Pollard had stolen and why letting him free would be, in their eyes, an outrage. “Soon after I began asking questions,” Hersh writes, “I was invited by a senior intelligence official to come have a chat at…

  “I think what we have seen over the decades since the mid-’70s, and I’m going to make a provocative comparison here, is something analogous to what the Nazis called gleichschaltung, which means streamlining.” By Emily Wells Truth Dig (4/27/18) In a recent episode of “On Contact,” his video series on the RT network, Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges speaks with Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University, about the destruction of the independent press in the United States. Hedges calls attention to the algorithms of Facebook, Google and Twitter, and how they steer traffic away from anti-war and…

Illustration by Seth L. Taylor, 2018.   By Charlie May Salon (4/23/18) Fox News host Sean Hannity is responding to the “latest fake news attack” against him, playing the victim to claim that he is being vilified for “investing my personal money in communities that badly need such investment.” Despite his frequent rants against liberal or media “elites,” an extensive report from The Guardian on Monday revealed that Hannity is linked to numerous shell companies that have spent at least $90 million on nearly 900 properties across the country. Furthermore, belying his supposed conservative principles, Hannity’s empire was purchased at a deep…

  “The fix was in.” (Editor’s Note: One of the greatest republican myths is the one about the “liberal media”. Mainstream corporate media is occupied territory and generally not open to progressive candidates or opinion. While there are individual stories and occasional glimmers of fairness, ultimately, when it comes to mainstream media there is only one interest: MONEY. — Mark L. Taylor) The Young Turks (4/19/18) Former MSNBC host Ed Schultz opened up in a recent interview about why he believes he was fired in 2015. Schultz, who’s now anchor of a show on RT, told National Review‘s Jamie Weinsteinthat…

  By Laura Yuen & Euan Kerr MPR (4/18/18) On Nov. 2, Jon McTaggart, the CEO of Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media Group, posted an all-staff memo expressing his disgust and outrage over reports of an NPR news executive who sexually harassed women. The news of how NPR handled the allegations in Washington — a process that NPR’s top official admitted was slower and less forceful than it should have been — had rattled some of McTaggart’s employees in St. Paul. “I can tell you how the APM Group would address this kind of situation,” McTaggart wrote in the memo. “I…

  The Empire Files (11/13/15) Abby Martin interviews journalist and author Max Blumenthal on the current situation in Palestine and the Israeli occupation. This episode covers what is behind today’s rebellion, the rising dominance of far-right, ultra-racist ideology in Israel, eye-witness accounts of the aftermath of the Gaza war, and the Israeli government’s fear of Palestinian resistance. Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and author of the New York Times Best Seller “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel”, and the recently-published “The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza.” Link to 28-Minute Video

‘We are here to deliver your message. Period.’ By John Swaine The Guardian (4/10/18) The chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group met Donald Trump at the White House during a visit to pitch a potentially lucrative new product to administration officials, the Guardian has learned. David D Smith, whose company has been criticised for making its anchors read a script echoing Trump’s attacks on the media, said he briefed officials last year on a system that would enable authorities to broadcast direct to any American’s phone. “I just wanted them to be aware of the technology,” Smith said in an interview. He also recalled an…

“Right now there are no shared facts in America.” VICE News on HBO (3/30/18) In Trump’s America, half the population lives in a world where the “crooked media” tells “fake news” made up of “alternative facts,” while the other half fights to maintain public trust in traditional media. Much of this stems from the parallel online universe that led up to the 2016 election. Clinton and Trump supporters really don’t listen to each other on Twitter, according to an analysis from the Electome project at the MIT Media Lab provided exclusively to VICE News. “At least on Twitter, we see…

  By Jeff Cohen Common Dreams (3/26/18) When the “War on Terror” was launched in 2001, mainstream media—especially cable TV news—started a parade. It was a narrow parade of hawkish retired military and intelligence brass promoting war as the response to the crime of 9/11, predicting success and identifying foreign enemies to attack. We can look back at this parade and laugh at the total nonsense dispensed. But the more human response is to cry—over the toll, still mounting, of hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond, and violent instability across the region, including countries…

  On The Media/ WNYC 93/23/18) Cambridge Analytica claims that, with the help of 50 million Facebook users’ data, it was able to target ads so specifically and so effectively that it helped swing the election for Donald Trump. The media have been more than happy to boost the claim, but many experts are skeptical. This week, a look at what exactly went on with Cambridge Analytica and whether we shouldn’t be focusing more on Facebook. Plus, how social media works to undermine free will and what the future might hold for Facebook. 1. Antonio García Martínez, columnist at WIRED and former tech entrepreneur,…

The psychosis of our permanent war state. How the press goes limp before the military. The choice is between socialism and barbarism.   Link to 31-Minute Video

Intercepted (2/21/18) JAMES RISEN AND GLENN GREENWALD have both won Pulitzer Prizes. They both have found themselves in the crosshairs of the U.S. government for their journalism. And they both write for The Intercept. But Jim and Glenn have taken very different approaches to covering the Trump/Russia story. In this one-hour special video edition of Intercepted, they go head-to-head in a debate. Glenn is one of the most high-profile critics of the official story bolstered by the U.S. intelligence community, the Democrats, and many media outlets, including some of this country’s most powerful papers and news channels. Jim battled both the Bush and…

  By Olivia Solon The Guardian (10/9/17) Facebook’s founders knew they were creating something addictive that exploited “a vulnerability in human psychology” from the outset, according to the company’s founding president Sean Parker. Parker, whose stake in Facebook made him a billionaire, criticized the social networking giant at an Axios event in Philadelphia this week. Now the founder and chair of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Parker was there to speak about advances in cancer therapies. However, he took the time to provide some insight into the early thinking at Facebook at a time when social media companies face intense scrutiny from…

By Monika Bauerlein Mother Jones (2/3/18) It’s a weird feeling when your organization’s reporting ends up at the center of a scandal bordering on constitutional crisis. But things have been weird, and here we are: MoJo‘s October 2016 story about the Steele dossier is a key data point in the Nunes memo (though they couldn’t even get the date right—more on that later). That inclusion, and how it came to pass, tells us a lot about journalism, propaganda, and what democracy is up against. Let’s unpack that a bit. First, propaganda: Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Nunes episode is how effectively…

  By Julia Conley Common Dreams (1/11/18) Weeks after leaving a Dutch reporter stunned by denying that he’d made televised remarks about terrorism, several of the Netherlands’ political journalists refused to allow a Trump appointee to ignore their questions about the incident, demonstrating effective political journalism while many American news outlets are criticized for allowing elected officials to get away with blatant and repeated lies. Reporters at a press conference repeatedly asked Pete Hoekstra, the new U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, to comment on his remarks at a hearing in 2015. Hoekstra urged the press to move on from the issue, but to no…