Oscar Rights Some Historical Wrongs, Creates Some New Ones
Many have exposed the fictions of Argo; Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir described the film as “a propaganda fable.” But when the Academy chose Argo and almost ignored Zero Dark Thirty, I cheered.
Robin Andersen
Fiction More Real Than What’s ‘Fit to Print’
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 […]
Tom Ricks’ Gamble
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 […]
Hollywood’s Media—and Washington’s
“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 […]
Invading Grenada
Urgent Fury, carried out 20 years before Operation Iraqi Freedom, has faded from public and political memory. Yet there is much to be remembered, as there are many cogent parallels between Grenada and Iraq.
Memory Unerased
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 […]
George Gerbner, 1919-2005
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 […]
On the Shoulders of Giants
On the occasion of FAIR’s 20th anniversary, it is appropriate to recall some of the early press critics who helped blaze the trail that FAIR has so honorably followed. George Seldes Like FAIR, George Seldes was dogged in his quest for journalistic accuracy. Seldes had been a journalist for five years in 1914, when the […]
That’s Militainment!
The media build-up to war presented a military attack on Iraq as an overwhelming natural force whose momentum could not be stopped. “The clock is ticking,” NPR reported in early March (3/8/03), with soldiers in Kuwait complaining that there was “too much waiting around.” Military preparations were like a “huge gun and every day you […]
Road to Ruin
The Toyota 4 runner sits off-road in the middle of a fern-laden forest. The ad copy proclaims: THE ANSWERING MACHINE FOR THE CALL OF THE WILD From a rugged mountain vista to deep in the plush forest, nature calls out for us. And the 1997 Toyota 4-wheel drive is one of the only machines capable […]
Iraqi Dupes or Pentagon Promoters?
Whatever the Gulf War will do to the political geography of the Middle East and the world, the war changed the landscape of the American and international news media forever. The clear winner is Cable News Network, in ratings, name recognition, praise, even envy. CNN has become the international channel of choice. When Iraqi foreign […]
