A timeline of the horrific events that unfolded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina hangs on the wall of the conference room in the Treme production offices in New Orleans. The skeletal framework is fleshed out by a team of writers, many of them locals, determined to bring to life the story of people who doggedly reinhabit New Orleans as a place, a state of mind and a culture that refuses to die. Though Treme is scripted entertainment by David Simon and Eric Overmyer, producers of HBO’s The Wire, the events and characters—especially the musicians—are drawn from the cultural traditions, [...]
Search Results for: Robin Andersen
Apr
20
2009
Index: A
—————— Aarons, Leroy Beyond balance: thorough coverage of gay controversies is still the exception (Ott), 1-2/02;27 Abbas, Mahmoud Nixed signals [when Hamas hinted at peace, U.S. media didn't take the message] (Ackerman), 9-10/06;10 ABC. see also Nightline ABC does "something useful" [programs on poor children], 11-12/91;19 ABC erased protesters [at the Oscars], 6/99up;3 ABC News goes for the gold, 9/92;16 ABC's 1984 cover-up for the gipper, 3-4/90;15 ABC's antiwar "reality check": world news tonight minimizes support for withdrawal (Hart and Naureckas), 10/05up;4 ABC's military analyst calls for "excessive force": CSIS's cordesman advocates brutality against Palestinians (Ackerman), 1-2/01;23 ABC's one-color TV, [...]
Mar
01
2009
Tom Ricks' Gamble
Justifying a kinder, gentler Iraq occupation
Reporter Thomas Ricks’ new book The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, documents the military changes that took place in Iraq after the controversial troop “surge,” which is commonly credited with having greatly reduced violence in the country (Extra!, 11-12/07, 9-10/08). A Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, Ricks is also a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and writes the Best Defense blog at Foreign Policy.com. Ricks has been deeply embedded with the leadership of the “surge” and, as the book boasts, had “extraordinary privileged access” to Petraeus and [...]
Jan
01
2008
Hollywood's Media--and Washington's
Rendition highlights the limits of torture discussion
“Guantánamo, a prison in no way ready to close, is at the heart of a conversation that almost no one seems willing to open.” Since September 27, 2007, when Karen Greenberg closed an article on TomDispatch.com with that observation, a media conversation about torture has unexpectedly taken off. The New York Times (10/4/07) published a lengthy exposé about the long turmoil at the Department of Justice caused by the Bush White House’s insistence that “enhanced interrogation” was key to fighting its “war on terror.” PBS’s Frontline (10/16/07) explored how Dick Cheney's office secretly pushed the idea that the president could [...]
Jan
01
2007
BOOK EXCERPT: Invading Grenada
Selling the modern era’s first ‘pre-emptive’ war
“It isn’t nutmeg that’s at stake in the Caribbean and Central America; it is the United States’ national security.” —President Ronald Reagan, March 10, 1983 On October 23, 1983, U.S. combat troops began Operation Urgent Fury in the eastern Caribbean, invading the sovereign state of Grenada, an island of 113 square miles with approximately 110,000 inhabitants. It was the first time the U.S. military had committed combat troops since Vietnam. Over the course of a year, the Reagan administration had argued vigorously that Grenada posed a threat to U.S. national security. Unlike the unlimited access journalists had in Vietnam, the [...]
Dec
29
2006
Robin Andersen on media and war
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: A special conversation with media historian and scholar Robin Andersen about the media and war. Andersen's new book A Century of Media, A Century of War traces media gullibility, official deception and propaganda through the years. It's a reminder that the media's role in making the case for the Iraq War is part of a larger story, that of a press corps that regularly cheers on American military action while shielding readers and viewers from its consequences. We'll speak about that history, and how military imagery in the culture at large affects how we [...]
Oct
01
2006
Memory Unerased
Deep Dish documents the unseen Iraq War
In the days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as the U.S. military planned a massive aerial bombing campaign on the densely populated city of Baghdad, the Pentagon phrase “Shock and Awe” was repeated with enthusiasm on television, part of the celebration of the power of modern warfare. At the same time, Deep Dish TV was setting in motion a plan to record, illuminate, document and bear witness to what would be left out of the commercial media war frame. They would title the 13-part series of 28-minute programs Shocking and Awful, and the group of independent artists and media [...]
Apr
01
2006
George Gerbner, 1919-2005
From anti-fascist fighter to cultural environmentalist
George Gerbner was born in Budapest in 1919 and fled to the United States to escape fascism in 1939, but he never lost his Hungarian accent. What he said about U.S. media culture often sounded as foreign as the way he said it. Gerbner spent his life in an adopted country saturated with graphic depictions of violence, a culture where the apex of expression often seemed to be focused through the crosshairs of a weapon. But he did not like media violence. I sat next to him at a dinner party while attending a conference in Istanbul, and the topic [...]
