Tag Archives | Journalism

We Need A Media War On All Fronts

By on May 21, 2012 in News 1

Radionette TV SetWhen do you feel like you are over the hill?

When you get letters like this one from Jose Hevia after writing an op-ed featuring an essay from your recent book Blogothon, recounting your experiences as a network TV insider turned independent media outsider. The essay offered a case study of how the nominally non-commercial network, PBS, turned its back on a human rights TV series I co-produced. It is about the challenges progressives face in offering a counter-narrative to parochial mainstream thinking.

My critical correspondent wondered what I was whining about:

Complaining that the old media is getting more and more monopolized is … Who cares about old media? … Nobody is my inner circle under 30 watches old media any more.

Bye.

Take that, old man. Ha, ha, ha.

I am not sure his view is totally true, what with Comedy Central, movie channels galore and unlimited sports coverage.… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 1

Barack Obama Is Our First Gay, Female, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish President (According to the Media)

By on May 16, 2012 in News 9

First Gay PresidentBill Clinton only got to be America’s first “black” president. Interesting take from Eric Randall in the Atlantic Wire:

Newsweek’s cover this week declares that Barack Obama is the “First Gay President,” playing on the reader’s knowledge that Obama isn’t himself gay, but his support for same-sex marriage earns him an honorary rainbow halo. The headline obviously calls back to 1998, when Toni Morrison declared Bill Clinton the first black president in The New Yorker, which at the time was edited by current Newsweek editor Tina Brown. “Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas,” Morrison wrote, laying out the formula for how to declare a President has attained the identity of someone else through actions and behaviors. Newsweek‘s cover has been called “controversial” and “pretty shocking,” but it’s merely the most recent in presidential firsts that weren’t for the country’s actual first black president.

Continue Reading · 9

The Axis of Indifference In The Media World

By on May 15, 2012 in News 0

BlogothonThe following is an excerpt from my new book Blogothon. It was originally given as a speech to a media conference and has been updated slightly.

Foreign correspondents have always been revered within journalism. That’s why covering Iraq or other wars are assignments so many reporters cultivate. Many see them as a ticket up the media pecking order.

Being “under fire” promise excitement, danger and—let’s face it, on TV —precious “face time.” Going overseas is often a route to more visibility and  better jobs at home on the strength of your “bravery.” War reporting can be the macho oxygen of ambition.

Just as covering a turbulent world is attractive in the ranks, up in the suites of media power  “foreign news” is, according to Michael Wolff, a “nostalgist’s beat” said to turn  off American audiences and tune them out. That’s why decision-makers shutter bureaus and redefine news of the world as news of American power in the world.  (They also realize financial savings by doing so, of course.)

In an age of globalization, as global news grows more important, it is covered less.… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 0

Geraldo Rivera: I Was “Manually Raped” By the TSA

By on May 14, 2012 in News 12

Geraldo RiveraPaul Joseph Watson writes on InfoWars:

Fox News host Geraldo Rivera revealed last Friday how he was “manually raped” by a TSA worker while traveling to Afghanistan, explaining how he had been persecuted by the federal agency for falsely appearing on the infamous ‘no fly list’.

Rivera appeared on Fox and Friends to discuss this story about an eighteen-month-old child appearing on the TSA’s no fly list. The parents of the toddler said that after they were “humiliated, embarrassed and picked on” by TSA agents at Ft Lauderdale Airport, they were marched off the plane, and ordered to stand in the terminal for half an hour. However, Rivera devoted most of the segment to his own TSA nightmare story.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 12

The 9/11 Propaganda Archive

By on May 10, 2012 in News 13

Homeland Security Advisory SystemVia Media Roots:

A mysterious pair of internet archivists who call themselves ‘Neuro Linguistic Programming’ started to upload what they claim is ‘Part 1 of 40′ of American mainstream media print publications from the day of 9/11 and the immediate weeks that followed. They plan to put up full issues of Time and Newsweek that are filled to the brim with blatant terrorist fearmongering and propaganda.

Following 9/11, news media accelerated at an amazing rate, and most companies adopted internet versions of their paper or magazines. Before this was commonplace, many interesting pieces of information from that day were most likely never reprinted again– due to false information or just abandonment by the person feeding the propaganda of a particular propagandistic ploy.

‘Part 1′ gives us a look at a ‘Terrorism Survival Guide,’ an actual print magazine which was distributed and sold at grocery stores around the country. We especially like the bio-terror section with the photoshoot of the little girl in a hazmat suit holding a Barbie with a gasmask on.… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 13

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange to Launch TV Show on RT (Russia Today)

By on April 14, 2012 in News 14

Reports Zarifmo Aslamshoyeva on CNN:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange plans to debut a talk show, “The World Tomorrow,” on Russia’s state-funded television network next week. Assange and RT, an English-language international satellite news channel, would not release the guest lineup in advance, but hinted that the first interview would be controversial.

WikiLeaks has asked followers on Twitter if they can guess the show’s first guest. “Any bets on who The World Tomorrow’s first mystery guest(s) are?” it tweeted. “You’ve been waiting and we’ve been teasing,” said RT’s website of the show, which will also be released online. The talk show set for launch Tuesday is creating a stir in global media circles.

Continue Reading · 14

Before the Internet, The VCR Was Terrorizing Your Children (Video)

By on April 13, 2012 in News 8

VCR HorrorsVia Freddy In Space:

It’s the 1980s. Young horror fans are in their glory, while their parents are outraged over the tapes that are easily accessible to them at the local video store. ABC News runs a news piece on their show 20/20, aimed to demonize horror films and the kids who enjoy them with all kinds of wild and salacious accusations. Three decades later, the news piece serves as a 15 minute journey back in time, reminding us horror fans of our early years spent ingesting horror VHS tapes, so voraciously that it’s almost as if we knew they were going out of style.

Continue Reading · 8

Sayonara to Mike Wallace and The News Era He Led

By on April 9, 2012 in News 3
Mike Wallace in 1957.

Mike Wallace in 1957

Mike Wallace lived a long life and became one of America’s best-known non-anchor news stars, whose frequent appearances stirred controversies and broke countless stories.

The picture in the New York Times obit showed his wall of Emmys—I am sure he had a museum-full—all thanks to his relentless drive and unlimited energy.

Later in life, he would acknowledge that he was a manic depressive, but it was that manic part that pushed him to interview a who’s who of who was, and expose endless bad guys often with gimmicky confrontational interviews that showcased his considerable talents on 60 Minutes, for decades. America’s most watched news magazine.

My earliest memory of him was not on CBS where he achieved iconic status but on a network that came and went called Dumont, where he did an interview show for many years before he went national.

The show was called Night Beat, and was shot in black and white in a darkened studio that Mike lit up with his questions and chain smoking, very much in the Edward R, Murrow tradition.… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 3

The Drone War on Journalists

By on March 25, 2012 in News 3
Anwar al-Awlaki (CC)

Anwar al-Awlaki (CC)

Scott Horton wrote in Harper’s Magazine:

… I wrote about how the Obama Administration has insisted that its deal with Yemen’s dictatorship concerning the use of drones there is a secret, and how it has been wielding that specious claim to justify withholding publication of a controversial Justice Department memo that outlines the president’s supposed authority to order the assassination of an American citizen abroad. Jeremy Scahill has published an important study of what the Obama Administration is prepared to do to journalists who expose its hit operations in Yemen:

On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 3

How To Stage War Reporting

By on March 22, 2012 in News 9

Via Russia Today, an interesting look at mainstream media outlets (Al Jazeera, CNN) dramatizing conflict journalism — in this case, in Syria.

The camera is shaken to make the footage seem raw and amateur, a stream of grey smoke in the sky is reported as stemming from a nonexistent “explosion”, and an onscreen personality requests background gunfire for a sound effect for his live shot on Anderson Cooper 360. In short, “The activists who become journalists try to make their shows as ‘hard’ as possible. The more blood and death, the higher the price.”

Continue Reading · 9