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The PBS affiliate owned by the City of New Tork, WNYC-TV, has become the target of protests over its suppression of two national programs–the weekly investigative news show the Kwitny Report, and the documentary Days of Rage.
In a cover story on crack (11/28/88), Newsweek tells us that the residents of America’s “Crack Nation” are both poor and black and white and middle class. Yet when I looked at the pictures, conspicuously missing were the white and middle-class residents that Newsweek assured me also lived there. The blacks were profiled in the […]
For those Americans still clueless that a virile, active president has replaced an aging enfeebled one, the Bush administration has kindly and gently choreographed a remarkable outdoors routine for the nation’s press photographers
Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. —A.J. Leibling When Ben Bagdikian predicted in the first edition of The Media Monopoly (1983) that the future would see a half-dozen corporations controlling most of the media market, he was attacked as alarmist and paranoid. This month, when the Time and Warner communication giants […]
No sooner was it established that Pan Am Flight 103 had been destroyed by a bomb than the U.S. media went into its predictable ritual. Journalists prepared President Reagan and President-elect Bush with all the usual questions: How can we bring terrorists to justice? Will we retaliate against any country harboring those responsible for bombing […]
Reagan left office bolstered by the oft-repeated media myth that he had been far and away the most popular of any president since World War II. But bearing in mind Mark Twain’s observation that a lie gets half-way around the world before truth puts its boots on, the U.S. public deserves to know what the […]
The New York Times is not only the newspaper of record for the Fortune 500, it is also a member in good standing of that elite group of corporate giants. Though a number of press critics have dissected the ideological biases, deadly prose and institutional arrogance of the Times, its business operations are less frequently […]
The average taxpayer, curious to know how and why an estimated $1,000 per household will be handed to the Savings & Loan industry, won’t get much help from the news media. Thus far, coverage of the S&L crisis has offered little analysis of how the multi-billion dollar boondoggle relates to broader economic questions and little […]
ABC News Nightline is widely considered to be the preeminent public affairs program in the United States. It undoubtedly has the biggest audience of such shows; five to seven million households are tuned to Nightline on an average week night. With its combination of near-universal acclaim from critics and a large number of loyal viewers, […]
A deluge of stories commemorated the 25th anniversary of President Kennedy’s death—from Time to the National Enquirer, from Geraldo Rivera to MacNeil/Lehrer—including over 30 hours of primetime programming. The media took a second look at the possibility of a second gunman in reports ranging from the serious (PBS Nova’s probe of the scientific evidence) to […]
“Look Mom, Star Trek.” “Hey, I thought you said you were going to watch public TV.” “This is public TV!” “Then how come I just saw Tony the Tiger on an ad?” Mom’s wrong. First of all, that was no ad, it was “enhanced underwriting,” a plug for a corporate contributor. Second, Junior’s as likely […]
If the presidential campaign often resembled a circus, television was its distorting mirror—turning election realities upside down. The winning candidate carried around four names—George Herbert Walker Bush—degrees from elite schools Andover Academy and Yale, residences in many states. Yet on TV he ran as Joe Sixpack, while his opponent spent most of the campaign denying […]
On September 8, 1988, Washington Jewish Week (with a circulation of 20,000) disclosed that Vice President George Bush had appointed an ethnic coalition for his campaign that included a number of outspoken antisemites with Nazi and fascist affiliations. The article prompted the resignation of six leaders of the GOP’s ethnic outreach division. Although the resignations […]
As the media dominate the presidential campaign, the pattern of 1980 and 1984 seems to be repeating itself. Instead of analyzing and exposing George Bush’s tarnished record, the US press has coated the vice president with the same teflon which protected Ronald Reagan for the past eight years. This is especially true with respect to […]
CNN Crossfire on Gary Hart and the Media (5/12/87): Host Tom Braden: Ben Stein is a media critic in Los Angeles, and I’d like to ask him…does a candidate’s private life have any bearing on what he does as a private official? Ben Stein: Absolutely. If you have a presidential candidate who is having a […]
The daily barrage of army and government disinformation has become a key component of the eight-year civil war in El Salvador.
On May 5, 1988, the US Embassy in El Salvador published a collection of articles and leaflets in its Daily Press Digest under the heading “Leftist Propaganda in the US.” Included in the digest was a piece by freelancer Chris Norton, which described the plight of Salvadoran refugees returning from Honduras, and an article on […]
The media showed little interest when subcommittee chairman Hughes recently disclosed he had new evidence that the entire Sandinista connection was a US intelligence fabrication
The day after a Soviet interceptor plane blew up a Korean passenger jet, a New York Times editorial was unequivocal: “There is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner.” Confronted with the sudden reality of a similar action by the U.S. government, the New York Times inverted every standard invoked with righteous indignation five years earlier.
By the end of the Democratic Convention, media cliches about the campaign had outpaced peaches as Georgia’s leading export. Through dint of repetition, the most dubious claims became truisms. If there was a chorus that resounded in Atlanta’s Omni Coliseum even louder that Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America,” it was the media’s unanimous refrain about […]
