Helen Thomas. Photo: rachaelvoorhees (CC)
Our Media Experienced A Few Highs and Many Lows in 2010;
None As Disgraceful As The Vitriol Against Helen Thomas
In 1960, I co-founded a student magazine at Cornell University called Dialogue. I was a wannabe journalist, fixated on emulating the courageous media personalities of the times, from Edward R. Murrow to a distinctive figure I came to admire at presidential press conferences, a wire service reporter named Helen Thomas.
In recent years, my faith in the power of dialogue in politics has been severely tested—as, no doubt has hers—in an age where diatribes and calculated demonization chills debate and exchanges of opposing views.
Once you are labeled and stereotyped, especially if you are denounced as an anti-Semite, you are relegated to the fringes, pronounced a hater beyond redemption, even beyond explanation.
You have been assigned a scarlet letter as visible as the Star of David the Nazis made Jews wear.… Read the rest
It’s election season in Britain and it’s shaping up to be one of the most interesting in decades. Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg is seriously shaking up the status quo in a way that could turn the traditional two choices of political party into a tripartite race, with the usual ragbag of independents to spice things up. In the past that has meant candidates from the Official Monster Raving Loony Party and others, but this year we have an independent candidate whose election platform combines lines from notorious antisemitic document the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with Europhobia, anti-environmentalism and attack on the “needless spoiling of the firework trade,” as reported in the 