Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Barack Obama has announced his pick for Supreme Court justice—former Harvard Law School dean and Solicitor General Elena Kagan. And the media debates have begun: about her record, her credentials and her likely impact on the court. We'll sort through some of what you're hearing and perhaps what you aren't hearing in a conversation with court watchers Glenn Greenwald, of Salon.com and author and law professor Marjorie Cohn. That's coming up but first, as usual, we'll take a look back at the week's press. —With a story like the ongoing environmental disaster in the [...]
May
01
2010
Journalists ♥ Tea Party
At last a citizen movement corporate media can love
In the first year of the Obama administration, the corporate media suddenly overcame their general aversion to citizen movements that criticize government policies, granting the staunchly conservative Tea Party activists enormous coverage—a decision that seems likely to impact politics for the foreseeable future. Citizen movements are hardly ever front-page news, even when they have clearly identifiable political agendas and broad public support. But the Tea Party movement—an amorphous, politically incoherent umbrella designation for various strands of opposition to Obama, much of it beset with racism and backed by less-than-grassroots deep-pocket Beltway lobbying groups—has managed to buck that trend, getting the [...]
Mar
01
2010
'America Was Safer Under Bush'
Journalists accept GOP’s screwy terrorism scorecard
That George W. Bush kept America safer from terrorism than Barack Obama is a conservative article of faith these days—and corporate media seem little inclined to challenge the blatant falsehoods used to advance this childish GOP talking point. The most prominent example came on Good Morning America (ABC, 1/8/10) during a discussion of the failed Christmas Day “underwear bomb” plot, when former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani told anchor George Stephanopoulos: “We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama.” Get that? So-called terrorism expert Giuliani, who can barely finish a sentence without mentioning September 11 [...]
