Jon Oliver explains what it is and why it is bad.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
When the Bush-Cheney regime went on an orgy of torture, they denied that what they were doing deserved that label and the US media became extremely coy about calling it that, although the practices such as waterboarding had been unambiguously condemned as torture when done by Japanese on American prisoners of war and the perpetrators had been executed. The New York Times was one of the worst culprits during that period, routinely using the phrase ‘enhanced interrogation’ that the Bush administration wanted them to use instead of calling it torture.
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The Daily Show‘s Jordan Klepper talks to a group of idealistic young college newspaper journalists who seem to have no idea of what the future world of digital news holds in store for them.
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In January 2009, Israel took advantage of the period before Barack Obama’s inauguration to unleash a yet another massive assault on Gaza, killing over 1,400 Palestinians, again mostly civilians and children. Operation Cast Lead, as it was called by Israel, created a major worldwide outcry because of the sheer brutality of the Israeli bombardment, similar to what is happening again now, and even led to a UN commission to investigate.
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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.
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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.]
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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.
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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.
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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.
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