Long time readers of this blog know that I despise the editorial columnists at the New York Times, especially David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, and Thomas Friedman and long ago stopped reading them. Only Paul Krugman has anything useful to say. I thought that my views were not shared by mainstream media people because after all, they are all part of the same system of which these columnists are at the pinnacle. [Read more…]
A friend pointed me to what she said was the best commercial shown during the Super Bowl. I agree that it is a really good one. [Read more…]
Last evening I went to talk given by Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He is a prolific author on the media and politics and he was speaking about the ideas in his new book (co-authored with John Nicholls) titled Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex is Destroying America in which he argues that the idea of ‘one person, one vote’ has now become ‘one dollar, one vote’. [Read more…]
There were two exchanges on TV recently that were interesting to watch. In both, Glenn Greenwald took on alleged liberals who could not hide their disdain for Edward Snowden while at the same time being obliged to concede that the documents he released revealed hitherto secret government activities that we had a right to know about. [Read more…]
In the US, advertising is everywhere. You can’t go anywhere without being urged to buy stuff. You see them when you are driving, they are there at the gas pump when pumping gas, they are there on the ATM screen when you are getting cash, you hear them when you are put on hold. You simply cannot avoid them. [Read more…]
You will have noticed that there are ads on this blog. The people who run the FreethoughtBlogs site have contracts with various agencies to place the ads and when people click on the ads, it generates a small amount of money for the network that is then distributed to the various bloggers. The ads that appear are based on some sort of algorithm that looks at the content of the page as well as the browsing and search engine queries history of the person viewing the page. So two people viewing the same page at the same time may well see different ads. [Read more…]
I have little idea of the business end of this blog, leaving it in the highly capable hands of Ed Brayton, the host of Dispatches From the Culture Wars. All I know is that ads appear at various places based on arrangements with vendors and on algorithms that are based on the content that I provide and the browsing habits of the readers, so two readers reading the same page at the same time may see some ads that are the same and others that are different. [Read more…]
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…]