Search Results for: Michelle Chen

Mar
01
2012

With Fox News Liberals, Who Needs Conservatives?

They play the left on Rupert Murdoch’s TV

Bob Beckel--Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Fox News co-host and contributor Bob Beckel has called for the assassination of WikiLeaks spokesperson Julian Assange (“A dead man can’t leak stuff”—Follow the Money, 12/6/10), for furnishing guns to school children (“If you give your kid a gun, no bullying”—Five, 1/5/12) and for militant opposition to the “War on Christmas,” which is “completely out of hand” (Five, 12/9/11). These views are anything but out of place on Fox News, where hosts and commentators are known for fantasizing about murdering progressives (FAIR Blog, 11/10/10), deifying gun ownership (Beck, 6/29/11) and courageously confronting those who would wish them happy holidays (O’Reilly [...]

Oct
01
2011

Closer to Home, 'Digital Democracy' Loses Appeal

From Egypt to San Francisco, officials dislike protesters’ use of social media

Photo Credit: BART

When Bay Area Rapid Transit authorities shut off cell phone service to deter protests against police violence, the backlash went viral. And despite the stifling of social media in San Francisco-area stations and trains, dissenters may have gotten the last word with old-fashioned ink scrawled on a handmade sign: “Mu-BART-Ak?” The quip highlighted the double-speak behind the political establishment’s attitude toward subversive applications of social media. A few months earlier, the “Twitter Revolution” was all the rage in Washington; establishment figures like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (BusinessWeek, 1/27/11) and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (6/5/11) praised the uprising [...]

Dec
18
2009

Michelle Chen on Copenhagen, Joe Conason on ACORN videos

By

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Walkouts and protests at the Copenhagen summit have highlighted the political friction in responding to climate change. But is the press corps that brings us headlines like the New York Times' "Poor and Emerging States Stall Climate Negotiations" the right place to look for an understanding of concerns about the inequality of climate change's human impacts? We'll get a different perspective from writer Michelle Chen, who’s been following the story. Also on the show: An independent report on ACORN, commissioned by the group and authored by the former attorney general of Massachusetts, has some [...]

Jul
01
2009

Local Heroes

A new media model may be right around the corner—literally

First came the waves of consolidation that swallowed up independent newspapers across the country. Now, as more newsrooms shrink and shutter in the Internet age, the local daily paper may be verging on extinction. But in many communities, a new tide of experimental Web-based ventures is moving to fill in the holes left by declining corporate media. These emerging “hyperlocal” models—ranging from slick news aggregators to more traditional pavement-pounding reporting—focus on a certain geographic area and draw from an array of local sources, like reader announcements, government records and Twitter. Though individual sites aim to capture the peculiarities of the [...]

Jun
01
2008

Misogyny's Greatest Hits

Sexism in Hillary Clinton coverage

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/rachel_bunting

It may have been the first time an audience heckler yelled “Iron my shirt!” at a United States senator (AP, 1/7/08), as well as the first time a presidential candidate has had a pair of nutcrackers fashioned in her likeness (New York Post, 9/7/07). Sen. Hillary Clinton’s run for the Democratic nomination has been fraught with sexism, exposing an ugly streak within the American press. There were several repeat offenders—MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, the New York Times’ Bill Kristol—but degrading, misogynist and ageist attacks on Clinton spanned from print to radio, from the Web to television. The level to which media [...]

Aug
01
2006

Katrina's Vanishing Victims

Media forget the 'rediscovered' poor

It happened on the afternoon of September 1, three days after Hurricane Katrina pushed a wall of water onto the city of New Orleans. CNN had been airing just-received videos of tens of thousands of people trapped at the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center, without food or supplies-scenes of elderly residents left to die by the roadside, of children chanting, "We want help!" Anchor Wolf Blitzer turned to CNN commentator Jack Cafferty to ask how it could be that, with all the advance warnings of disaster bearing down on the city, so many people had still been left [...]

Sep
01
2005

Strings Attached

Telecom industry’s spin machine casts net over community broadband

Over the past few years, the war over the Digital Divide has spread to a new technological turf: “broadband” Internet access. Broadband allows for much faster and more efficient data transmission than traditional dial-up modems. The catch: The telecommunications companies that offer broadband don’t necessarily offer it to all customers, and for those who can order broadband, it comes with a substantial price increase over dial-up. In response, public and non-profit entities are challenging the telecom industry with homegrown broadband-access schemes offering free or low-cost connections to homes, businesses and institutions. As the United States continues to fall behind other [...]


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