Search Results for: David L. Wilson

Jun
01
2011

'Waterboarding Worked'?

After bin Laden’s death, media push pro-torture message

A waterboarding demonstration in Coney Island.--Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Salim Virji

To hear some tell it, the intelligence clues that ultimately led to Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan were generated by the use of torture. But the evidence available so far does not bear this out. Torture advocates on the right are claiming vindication. On Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor (5/2/11), Rep. Peter King (R.-N.Y.) announced that we obtained information several years ago,vital information about the courier for Obama [sic]. We obtained that information through waterboarding. And so for those who say that waterboarding doesn’t work, to say that it should be stopped and never used again—we got vital information [...]

Aug
01
2010

Who Gets to Review and Be Reviewed?

Authors, book critics drawn from narrow pool

When it comes to political books, the New York Times Book Review and the C-SPAN book show After Words share an exceedingly narrow view of whose books deserve review—and who is fit to discuss them. A FAIR study found that these important media venues for discussion of newly published books were overwhelmingly dominated by white and male authors, reviewers and interviewers. FAIR’s study examined every episode of After Words from March 2008 to January 2010, and the reviews of politically themed books in the New York Times Book Review from January 2009 to February 2010. In total, the study counted [...]

Feb
01
2010

SoundBites

Newspeak 2010 “The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.” —Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy (1/21/10), granting corporations the power to spend untold billions to do our thinking for us ‘Back to Basics’ Here’s a cable news discussion of the Massachusetts Senate race (noted by Political Animal, 1/19/10): Ad exec-turned-pundit Donny Deutsch described Scott Brown, the winning Republican, as a “traditional-looking middle-aged white male” and suggested that voters might be “going back to basics” after electing an African-American president and “we’ve had the female candidates and whatnot.” Deutsch said Brown “looks like the traditional view of a candidate,” [...]

Jul
24
2009

David Swanson on healthcare reform, Harold Meyerson on California's budget crisis

By

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: "Obama May Have To Wait for Health Reform" explained one July 22 headline. Leave it to corporate media to take a life-and-death issue for millions of Americans and reduce it to an item on a president's wish list. But if they're going to mainly cover healthcare policy as inside the Beltway politicking, how good a job are they doing even of that? We'll hear from activist and author David Swanson about the current state of play in healthcare reform efforts and what the media may have to do with it. Also on the show: [...]

Sep
15
2008

The Myth of Pro-Obama Media Bias

Little evidence for self-proclaimed ‘lovefest’

If there has been one unquestioned assumption of the 2008 election, it is that the media love Barack Obama. Rush Limbaugh declared that the media were following Obama with “their tongues dragging along the concrete to the floors.” “Lenin, Stalin never got this kind of coverage from their media,” Limbaugh claimed (7/22/08), which he blamed on the “chickification of our culture and the news business” (7/21/08). Joseph McQuaid, publisher of the conservative New Hampshire Union Leader, wrote an editorial headlined “Obama Orgy” (7/21/08) that denounced “the outrageous imbalance in the major media’s coverage of the candidates.” Such proclamations bolstered a [...]

Sep
01
2008

The Illusion of Immigrant Criminality

Getting the numbers wrong

Photo Credit: Democracy Now!

Immigrants aren't a crime problem. "The foreign-born commit considerably fewer crimes than the native-born," as President Herbert Hoover's National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement concluded in 1931 (National Lawyers Guild Quarterly, 10/39; Immigration Policy Center, Spring/07). While noncitizens now make up more than 8 percent of the U.S. population, the available evidence indicates that they account for no more than 6 or 7 percent of the people incarcerated for crimes in the United States, less than 170,000 of the 2.3 million inmates currently in our federal, state and local penal systems--not including some 30,000 immigrants in administrative detention on [...]

Aug
01
2008

The 'Pledge' That Wasn't

Misrepresenting Obama's public financing promise

When Barack Obama decided to reject public financing in the general election, corporate media and Republican partisans made an identical attack, claiming that Obama broke a promise to take public funding. Unfortunately, this claim was demonstrably untrue: Obama hadn't made an unconditional promise to take public financing. The New York Times (6/20/08) referred to Obama's "decision to break an earlier pledge to take public money." NPR (All Things Considered, 6/19/08) reported, "Earlier, Obama had said he would participate in public financing if his Republican rival, Arizona Sen. John McCain, did the same." NPR's Weekend Edition host Scott Simon (6/21/08) went [...]

Jun
19
2008

Remembering Russert

What media eulogies remember--and forget

NBC's Meet the Press anchor and Washington bureau chief Tim Russert died of a heart attack on June 13. The outpouring from media and political elites only underscored Russert's status as one of most important figures in mainstream journalism. But amidst all of the accolades, critical assessments about Russert's record were scarce. It would be difficult to imagine anyone more admired by fellow journalists. "He was the preeminent political journalist in America," declared pundit Al Hunt (6/15/08). "He was an American character right from Mark Twain," offered NBC colleague Chris Matthews (6/15/08). "He had an authority and insight in covering [...]

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