Search Results for: Neil deMause

Mar
01
2013

'Sparing' the 98 Percent--by Taxing Them

Media fumble impact of 'fiscal cliff' deal

Source: Citizens for Tax Justice

When congressional Republicans and the White House agreed to their long- awaited “fiscal cliff” tax deal early on January 1, the news media celebrated it as a compromise that raised taxes on the rich while protecting everyone else. As NBC News’ Kelly O’Donnell (12/31/12) put it, negotiators had crafted “a genuine compromise on taxes [where] rates would go up for couples earning above $450,000 a year and stay the same for everyone else.” Echoed Nightline’s Terry Moran (ABC, 1/1/13): “This late compromise, it will prevent many of the dreaded effects of the cliff. Only the top 2 percent of Americans [...]

Jan
01
2013

Sandy and Climate

Media asked wrong questions, got wrong answer

Photo cred.: Andrew Mills (The Star-Ledger)

Hurricane Sandy may be remembered not only as the most powerful storm ever to strike the Eastern seaboard, but also as the moment when a large segment of the U.S. media first allowed itself to say the words “climate change” in relation to a severe weather event. And while sometimes the question was dismissed as soon as it was asked—as on NBC’s Meet the Press (11/4/12), where host David Gregory opened the show by asking, “Should more attention be paid to a changing climate’s impact on the severity of these storms?” then implicitly answered his own question by never addressing [...]

Oct
01
2012

Economy Is the Issue That Isn't

Misidentifying problems, marginalizing solutions

If there's one thing the media seem certain about this election season, it's that the choice between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will come down to one thing: the economy.The "rhetorical debate question" from Ronald Reagan's debate with Jimmy Carter, USA Today (8/21/12) reported on its front page , "has become an iconic one for voters. Are you better off than you were four years ago?" The paper cited polls showing that 55 percent of Americans say they are not. Considering that, you'd expect that the summer would have seen a barrage of stories on the state of the economy, on the trials [...]

Jul
01
2012

"Hope It's in Your Backyard!"

Gushing over fracking ignores climate crisis

Fracking Operation--Photo Credit: Mother Jones/zhuda/Shutterstock

One of the difficulties of reporting on climate change is its incremental nature: It’s hard to expect every media mention of someone driving a car or running an air conditioner to include a note about its effects on the environment. Yet even when the climate impacts of an action are unambiguous and central to a story, reporters all too often avoid the subject. Take the natural-gas extraction technique of hydraulic fracturing (Extra!, 2/12). Better known as “fracking,” the process involves cracking open underground rock layers containing oil and gas deposits by blasting them with a high-pressure chemical slurry. Of the [...]

Jan
01
2012

Jobs Are at Stake When Profits Are at Stake

Lobbyists help media pay attention to employment

When debate heated up in November over the Keystone XL pipeline—a 1,700-mile-long structure that would carry oil from Canada’s tar sands deposits to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast—reporters soon found themselves chasing the answer to a question: How many jobs would be lost if the pipeline didn’t happen? Wall Street Journal senior editor Mary Anastasia O’Grady suggested on Fox News (10/28/11) that the pipeline would create “118,000 indirect jobs” from “feeding and housing all of these people who are going to work on the pipeline,” a number that her Journal editorial board colleague Collin Levy repeated in a Web [...]

Sep
23
2011

Neil deMause on poverty, Phyllis Bennis on Palestinian statehood

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Census Bureau data showing one in six Americans live in poverty was received soberly by the press corps, but should it have surprised them? And what about next week, when the government doesn't release a report and people are still poor? We'll talk with journalist Neil deMause about media’s treatment of poverty and the poor. Also on the show: Mainstream reporting on the Palestinian bid for UN recognition regularly employs loaded language in portraying the initiative as and underhanded gambit which is threatening to the U.S. and Israel. But exactly how does the Palestinian [...]

Aug
01
2011

Letters to the Editor

August 2011

State Budget Shortfalls In his piece "Misrepresenting State Budget Crises" (Extra!, 6/11), Neil deMause lays blame for states' budget shortfalls to the recession and tax cuts. However, he neglects to mention another big cause, the loss of federal revenue-sharing. Reagan ended that program, and with huge federal deficits, it's probably never coming back. But deMause also misses the point that if 50 percent of our federal tax payments weren't eaten up by defense-related costs, including all these wars of choice, we could balance the federal and state budgets without cutting vital services. If we cut these unnecessary defense costs, there [...]

Aug
01
2011

The Fires This Time

In coverage of extreme weather, media downplay climate change

On April 14, a massive storm swept down out of the Rocky Mountains into the Midwest and South, spawning more than 150 tornadoes that killed 43 people across 16 states (Capital Weather Gang, 4/18/11). It was one of the largest weather catastrophes in United States history—but was soon upstaged by an even larger storm, the 2011 Super Outbreak that spread more than 300 tornadoes across 14 states from April 25 to 28 (including an all-time one-day record of 188 twisters on April 27), killing 339 people, including 41 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama (CNN, 5/1/11). Ensuing weeks saw Texas wildfires that had [...]

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