The Los Angeles Times has a list of the deaths of well-known people in 2013. Some of them I had heard about and some were of people I did not know at all. But some were of people whose reports of their passing somehow slipped by me and whose deaths I would have noted if I had been aware.
I have written harshly in the past about NPR’s national security correspondents Tom Gjelten and Dina Temple-Raston, describing them as serving pretty much as mouthpieces for the national security state. I came across this clip from a conference at New York University in 2010 in which from the audience she posed a question regarding Anwar al-Awlaki to Glenn Greenwald who was on the panel that showed how much she is locked into the mindset of believing what the government tells her. The exchange between her and Greenwald is very revealing. [Read more…]
It is a measure of how out of touch I am with popular culture that I often learn about a media phenomenon only long after it has been around or if it goes down in flames. Sometimes the names associated with the phenomenon (Honey Boo Boo, Miley Cyrus, the Kardashians) lurk in the fringes of my consciousness because the news headlines feature them but I know next to nothing about them. [Read more…]
… as measured by its repetition on local news channels. Conan O’Brien has the scoop. [Read more…]
It turns out that it is not just journalists like David Miranda and Laura Poitras who are detained and questioned at length when they arrive at airports in the US and the UK. Now comes a report that even reporters from establishment media like the New York Times have suffered the same fate. [Read more…]
So Time magazine has chosen Pope Francis as its Person of the Year. I can’t say that I am surprised. It is just the kind of choice they like, that will generate interest and perhaps hits and sells magazines, but not arouse any great controversy. [Read more…]
Bloomberg news has been having a conflict with the Chinese government after it ran a series of stories about the wealth of senior Chinese government officials. In seeming retaliation for this, a British reporter for Bloomberg was not allowed to attend a press conference with British prime minister David Cameron and his Chinese counterpart in Beijing yesterday. [Read more…]
British comedians John Bird and John Fortune discuss the new media landscape that seems to be passing them by and wonder what they should do about it. And in the process, deliver their usual insightful critiques about the nature of current society. [Read more…]
Back in 2008, I wrote a 12-part series titled The Propaganda Machine in which I laid out how the right-wing propaganda machine works in the US. Much of that machine became created because of what is now known as the Powell Memo. [Read more…]
It should come as no surprise that TV news shows are increasingly populated by attractive women as reporters, anchors, panelists, and hosts. They seem to be following the rule that People magazine uses for its covers based on what they think increases newsstand sales: young is better than old, rich is better than poor, pretty is better than ugly, and so on. [Read more…]