The Resistance Will Not Be Televised
If you relied on articles and broadcasts from the legacy national news media during early 2025, you wouldn’t know the extent of grassroots action.
Miranda C. Spencer
Establishment Media and the Green New Deal: New Wine in Old Bottles
While the resolution was a radical departure from politics as usual, most corporate media filtered coverage of the “Green New Deal” through the lens of conventional expectations.
USA Today Warns Dems: Don’t Try to Stop Climate Change
The real point of the 925-word story, by Gannett Washington reporter Ledyard King, was conveyed in the print edition’s subhead: “Policies Could Carry Risk for Leaders of New House.”
Don’t Do Anything About Climate Disaster, USA Today Warns Dems
USA Today insists, without offering evidence, that Democrats’ efforts to forge climate policy had an important role in the rise of the Tea Party and Republicans’ victory in the 2010 midterm elections.
Call Them by Their Names
The identities of white people who report people of color to the police for doing innocuous things are far more closely protected than those of people falsely targeted for “suspicious” behavior.
WSJ Fakes a Green Shift Toward Nuclear Power
The Wall Street Journal published an article headlined “Environmental Groups Change Tune on Nuclear Power.” But major assertions in the Wall Street Journal article turn out to be either factually inaccurate, or to omit or spin important details.
Sunday Morning Snow Job
On February 16, 2014, all three Sunday morning programs featured the climate change topic prominently. Unfortunately, quality didn’t match quantity, reflecting the “balance as bias” framework of years past, with scientists debating nonscientists and facts vying with opinions and political platforms—sometimes to the point of incoherence.
Kicking Carbon
Just as the mainstream media are evolving away from the era of false balance (Extra!, 11/04) to accept the reality of what scientists call “anthropogenic global warming,” a different type of denial has taken hold: a refusal to acknowledge the fact that the solution to the climate crisis requires humanity to stop depending on fossil […]
Natural Gas and the News
When it comes to natural gas extraction via “fracking,” TV journalism has some serious competition: energy industry commercials. Like ads for political candidates that run concurrently with broadcast news coverage of the presidential race, ads promoting natural gas (and other fossil fuels) have long been running in concert with news segments about the topic, most […]
The Unrenewed Debate Over Renewable Energy
When the March 11 earthquake and tsunami shut down cooling systems at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, U.S. government and nuclear industry spin control kicked in, asserting that a similar disaster couldn’t happen here, and that atomic power is here to stay. Corporate news outlets typically got caught up in this spin, relaying distorted and/or […]
The Planet Keeps Warming, But U.S. Media Interest Cools
After the anticlimax of the COP-15 climate-policy negotiations in Copenhagen last year (Extra!, 2/10)—in which the more than 190 UN-member nations walked away with a non-binding statement of intent cobbled together in secret by the U.S. and a few other wealthy nations—public and press expectations for this year’s COP-16 meeting (11/29-12/10/10) in Cancún, Mexico, were […]
Environmental Journalism in the Greenhouse Era
The need for informed and nuanced environmental reporting has never been greater: The scientific evidence of global warming demands urgent action, climate change already underway affects every corner of society, and climate issues unavoidably arise in economic and energy debates. That a recent poll showed declining concern about the planet’s state (Pew, 10/22/09) only accentuates […]
Overlooking Evidence
Breast cancer is now epidemic, affecting one in eight women, according to the American Cancer Society and others. The leading cause of death in women in their late 30s to early 50s, it’s estimated to have killed 40,000 people in 2008. Known risk factors for breast cancer—such as age, genetics, reproductive history and alcohol consumption—account […]
America’s Broken Electoral System
Throughout 2004, the “swing state” of Ohio was in the media spotlight. Prior to the election, it was a site of alleged voter fraud and suppression; as Extra! reported (12/04), the news media tended to portray the charges as partisan ploys rather than significant threats to the electoral process. Then, on November 2, Ohio became […]
America’s Broken Electoral System
Throughout 2004, the “swing state” of Ohio was in the media spotlight. Prior to the election, it was a site of alleged voter fraud and suppression; as Extra! reported (12/04), the news media tended to portray the charges as partisan ploys rather than significant threats to the electoral process. Then, on November 2, Ohio became […]
Suppressing the Vote, Suppressing the News
In the run-up to the pivotal 2004 presidential election, reports of an unprecedented flood of new voter registrations (especially in electoral vote-rich swing states like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania) filled papers and newscasts in local media and the national mainstream press. But looming over this exercise in democracy was the shadow of the disputed 2000 […]
‘Making the Invisible Visible’
“We’d like to thank the mainstream media for showing up,” quipped Cheri Honkala, adjusting her baby son on her jeans-clad lap. The executive director of the Philadelphia-based Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a multiracial organization of, by and for poor and homeless people, Honkala was opening a Saturday press conference last October in a claustrophobic classroom […]
Who Won the Election? Who Cares?
On November 7, 2001, a reader of the political website MakeThemAccountable.com made a series of predictions about how the news media would cover a long anticipated review of uncounted Florida ballots from the 2000 presidential election: The data will show that Gore won, but the article will be written to obscure that fact…. The headline […]
Pulp Facts
When people think of the most environmentally devastating industries, the print media may not come immediately to mind. But unfortunately for everyone who gets their news this way, the cost of the morning paper that lands on our stoop—and even the magazine you are now reading—may include “denuded landscapes, toxic rivers, foul air, bulging landfills […]
TV Nation
Michael Moore likes to ask the question: “What if the rest of us had a TV show?” We might want an amiably unkempt, roly-poly everyman in a baseball cap for an anchor. We’d want to fly a kite with suicide-assisting doctor Jack Kevorkian, and run a convicted felon for president under the slogan, “From the […]
