Search Results for: George Seldes

Sep
01
2008

CounterSpin Interview: The Media Ignore Their Core Duty

Arianna Huffington & Glenn Greenwald on media accountability

Arianna Huffington--Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/jdlas

From Iraq to Enron, from Hurricane Katrina to No Child Left Behind, from torture to civil liberties to healthcare and much more, it would be hard to overstate the role the U.S. media played in enabling many of the policy debacles of the Bush years. And yet media accountability rarely goes beyond the half-hearted internal investigation, followed by, if we’re lucky, the half-hearted mea culpa. That the media are not prone to self-criticism isn’t a new thing. As crusading journalist George Seldes said decades ago, “The most sacred cow of the press is the press itself.”   CounterSpin talked to [...]

Feb
01
2006

The Secret Origins of FAIR

How police spies and media moles helped launch a movement

In 1997, the Soviet Union detonated thermonuclear weapons in the sky over the United States, shutting down the Pentagon’s computer systems and leaving the nation vulnerable to invasion and occupation. The U.N., dominated by East Bloc Communists, became the U.S.’s de facto government, forcing schoolchildren to pledge allegiance to the U.N. flag. The year 1997 never fit this profile in reality, but it did in Amerika, the 12-episode miniseries broadcast by ABC in 1987. To this day, Jeff Cohen won’t reveal the identity of the person who sent him an advance script of Amerika. But that anonymous person made Cohen [...]

Feb
01
2006

Media Reform for What?

The success so far, the challenge ahead

Most people have heard the famous quote by press critic A.J. Liebling, “Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.” Recently I keep recalling another, less popular quote in which Liebling referred to the press as the “weak slat under the bed of democracy.” He continued: It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum, while armament, a secondary instrument of liberty, is a government concern. A man is not free if he [...]

Feb
01
2006

On the Shoulders of Giants

The unbroken tradition of press criticism

On the occasion of FAIR’s 20th anniversary, it is appropriate to recall some of the early press critics who helped blaze the trail that FAIR has so honorably followed. George Seldes Like FAIR, George Seldes was dogged in his quest for journalistic accuracy. Seldes had been a journalist for five years in 1914, when the first shots were fired across the trenches of the Western Front. After covering the Great War, which killed 8 million people, he would say (Freedom of the Press): I now realize that we were told nothing but buncombe, that we were shown nothing of the [...]

Jul
20
2005

SoundBites

James Weinstein, 1926-2005 "Jim Weinstein was a shining example of a truly independent journalist.... In his own way, he was in the tradition of George Seldes and I.F. Stone and Lincoln Steffens--muckraking journalists who challenged the received wisdom. He always asked 'Why?' and 'Who is behind what?' and 'Where are the bodies buried?' More than ever, we need journalists such as Jim, who insisted that we must think things through, that we must remember the past in order to understand the present and prepare for the future." --Studs Terkel on In These Times founder James Weinstein (AlterNet, 6/19/05) A Shining [...]

Feb
22
2005

Great Media Critics

Intrepid for Journalism and Labor Rights

When I think of newspaper journalists who became authors and had enormous impacts on media criticism in the United States, two names come to mind. One is George Seldes. As a young man, he covered the First World War and then reported on historic events in Europe for the Chicago Tribune from 1919 until 1928. Seldes quit the paper and went on to blaze a trail as an independent journalist -- ready, able and eager to challenge media business-as-usual. Naturally, he earned hostility from the kind of media magnates he skewered in “Lords of the Press.” The renowned historian Charles [...]

Mar
01
2002

Fear & Favor 2001 -- The Second Annual Report

How Power Shapes the News

Fear & Favor is FAIR’s annual review of incidents that reflect the range of pressures on reporters to use something other than journalistic judgment in deciding what goes in the news and what gets left out. The year 2001 presented special challenges in this regard. The horrific September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the ensuing declaration by the Bush administration of an open-ended "war on terrorism," meant incredible pressure on the press corps to present U.S. actions and policy in the best light; incidents of outright censorship occurred, and even more self-censorship, as many [...]

Apr
20
2000

When Corporate Media Cover 'Independent Media'

During the recent protests in Washington against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the leading cable news network became fascinated with "independent media." Journalism free of huge economic interests — what a concept! "Modern-day demonstrators say you just can't trust folks like us, the so-called corporate media," a CNN anchor explained, introducing a report that aired repeatedly over a two-day period. Correspondent Brooks Jackson took it from there. "They call themselves the independent media," he said, and that means working without ties to the large corporations of the media world. "Global corporate media? Gee, that would be us," Jackson [...]

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