In mainstream US media coverage of the Israeli assault on Gaza, the attacks by Hamas are labeled ‘terrorism’ while those by Israel are labeled ‘self defense’. But as Glenn Greenwald says, the sheer statistics of the current assault on Gaza reveals how the US media uses those labels in a purely propagandist manner.
[Read more…]
The Cleveland public radio affiliate station WCPN 90.3 FM will be having Joe Puckett and me on their morning call-in talk show The Sound of Ideas that runs from 9:00-10:00 am tomorrow (Tuesday), with a break for national news from 9:01-9:06. We will be joined by Tim Beal, a professor of religious studies at my university, whom I have known for a long time and is a very thoughtful scholar, and a rabbi whom I do not know. The show was triggered by the debate I had with Joe Puckett but will not be devoted exclusively to the question of god’s existence but will be broader and look at the rapidly changing landscape of religious beliefs.
[Update: I have just been informed by WCPN that Tim Beal will not be on the show but Peter Haas, another thoughtful scholar of Judaic Studies from our department of religious studies, and Craig Bauman, President of the University of Akron’s Secular Student Alliance, who will be calling in.]
[Read more…]
The Daily Show continues to chronicle the end of TV news as we have come to know it, as evidenced by the way the cable news networks covered the book tour of Hillary Clinton.
[Read more…]
In an interview with NPR, new editor of the New York Times Dean Baquet regrets that the paper has previously sat on stories at the behest of the government. He acknowledges that this is what cost them the Snowden scoops that he says that he would have loved to have got.
[Read more…]
The Daily Show has analyzed the trajectory of media coverage in the wake of mass shootings like the recent one in California and since such events have become so routine, has created a template that the media can use to quickly cover them.
[Read more…]
Today is the anniversary of the first news report based on the Edward Snowden documents and it is interesting to look back at how perceptions have changed over that time about Snowden and the journalists he used as a conduit for that information. A fascinating aspect has been the reactions of the so-called ‘liberal’ media because they got squeezed between the principle that transparency about how government works is always to be preferred and their desire to protect president Obama and his administration who have been revealed to be liars and law-breakers when is comes to spying on people.
[Read more…]
Some people in the media, especially activists and pundits, feel a compulsion to stay visible in the public eye either because of ego or because that is how they make their living by giving talks and selling books and the like. The way they do that whenever they sense that they are being forgotten is to troll for attention. In an earlier post, I said that it was easy to be a conservative troll. All you had to do was say something outrageous or extreme that would anger or at least annoy and exasperate liberals who would then rise up and condemn you.
[Read more…]
I finished the book (its full title is No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State) in two sittings. It is not too long (about 250 pages) and Greenwald has a direct style where he says what he means without weasel words that makes it easy to follow. It describes how Edward Snowden came to gain access to all the materials he chose to reveal, what made him decide to reveal it, the main contents of the revelations, why it is important, and the reactions to his disclosures. (Notes on each chapter, the index to the contents, and many of the source documents from the NSA that are not in the book or are hard to read because of the size of the font can be found here.)
[Read more…]