Media Crime Hype Helps Roll Back Reforms
Actual data about life and death in jails is not enough to move New York’s governor, but the sensationalism about crime is enough.
After San Bernardino, Some Reporters ‘Poke Around’–While Others Follow the Money
A “bottomless season of nastiness, racist hate-mongering and war fever” has swept through much of the media and political sphere in the wake of the San Bernardino massacre.
Lost in Translation
The menacing threat has been repeated endlessly in U.S. corporate media in recent years: Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” “Iran,” “Israel” and “wipe” in one form or another occur together in more than 17,000 articles in the Nexis news database over the last seven years. It plays […]
Discounting Expertise
From the Scopes trial’s crackdown on Darwinism to William F. Buckley’s famous preference for government by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book over the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty, from columnists George Will (Washington Post, 11/28/10) and Jonah Goldberg (L.A. Times, 8/30/11) lashing out at the “cult of expertise” to Rick […]
Upping the Ante in Iran Propaganda
Claims that Iran has a nuclear weapons program are allegations, not facts (Extra!, 1/12)—but are treated as established background material in the corporate media: “The president, as you know, has been trying to force Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program,” explains CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley (2/6/12). The Washington Post editorializes (1/11/12) […]
GOP Reality TV
After kicking off the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination by devoting serious time to real estate developer Donald Trump’s publicity-stunt non-campaign (FAIR Blog, 4/26/11), corporate media election coverage had nowhere to go but up—right? Never underestimate the power of establishment media to make electoral coverage ever more trivial and undemocratic. Early coverage of […]
Alex Jones and the Informational Vacuum
Alex Jones, radio and Internet talkshow host, documentarian, author and website producer, is the undisputed heavyweight king of conspiracy theory coverage, a niche he has successfully carved out in an enabling corporate media environment.
It’s All Greek To Them
In recent months, the Greek financial system has collapsed, necessitating a nearly $150 billion bailout backed by other European nations. Corporate media in the U.S., led by Fox News and the Washington Post, have taken this as an opportunity to proclaim the demise of the European social model and to castigate working-class protests against austerity […]
Glenn Beck Gets Progressively More Paranoid
Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck had a surprising 2009 (Extra!, 6/09), becoming a high-profile advocate for the right-wing Tea Party movement and attracting millions of viewers to his late afternoon cable talk show. How does one top that? By spinning out elaborate theories about the “progressive” assault on the Constitution and the country, hinting […]
Falling for the ACORN Hoax
When conservative activist James O’Keefe was arrested on January 25 for attempting to interfere with the phone lines of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu from Louisiana (Washington Examiner, 1/26/10), outrage in the media was hard to come by. O’Keefe secretly filmed two accomplices as they impersonated telephone company employees in the senator’s office; he claimed he […]
Playing the Nazi Card
Comparing anyone to Hitler is egregious. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Walter Mondale released a letter that Ronald Reagan had written to Richard Nixon 20 years earlier, in which Reagan compared John F. Kennedy to Hitler and Karl Marx—though Reagan contended he was only speaking of Kennedy’s economic proposals (UPI, 10/23/84). In 2004, the Bush […]
NYT’s ‘Egregious and Absurd’ Editorial Priorities
Brad Jacobson is resurrecting the “NYT Front|Back” feature of his Media Bloodhound blog (7/10/09)–spotlighting the New York Times‘ “penchant for placing a supremely unnewsworthy story on its cover while burying a vital one in its back pages”–only for “the most egregious and absurd examples.” The current example being their July 7 front-page headliner, “In Sex […]
If It Bleeds, It (Sometimes) Leads
Looking beyond “the yellow-tape segments that bleed and lead local TV news” Norman Solomon (Creators Syndicate, 6/13/09) discerns what he dubs “Media’s Love/Hate Affair with Violence”–as exemplified by the kind of violence–rarely occurring in the light of day–that gets scant media attention. With somewhere around 2 million people behind bars in the United States, all […]
Glenn Beck Is No Howard Beale
Fox News’ latest sensation Glenn Beck has invited comparisons of himself to Howard Beale, the barking-mad TV host in 1976’s black comedy Network, who urged viewers to throw open their windows and shout, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Beck recently told the New York Times (3/30/09): “I […]
Bart Laws on swine flu, Kristin Thomson on radio diversity study
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: If you didn’t panic over the swine flu, then maybe you weren’t watching much TV, where scary charts and maps documented the spread of a worldwide pandemic. At least that’s what we were hearing last week. With the media hysteria subsiding, the question isn’t so much did the press […]
National Papers as ‘Paparazzi-Like Birdcage Liner’
David Sirota has a new column (Creators Syndicate, 3/27/09) chronicling the nature of “newspapers’ self-inflicted blows”: First, financially strapped newspapers undermined their comparative advantage by replacing audience-attracting local exclusives with cheaper national content. Then the providers of that national content diverted resources from tough-to-report investigative journalism that builds loyal readership and into paparazzi-like birdcage liner […]
The Online Predator Scare
There is money to be made from fear—and business has been good for those hawking the online child predator threat. Exploiters of the scare range from the Internet-policing groups who ferret out suspects and share information with authorities (and sometimes, for a fee, with journalists) to vendors of software intended to help parents monitor and […]
Media’s ‘Girls Gone Wild’ Fantasies
When Time magazine (6/30/08; online edition, 6/19/08) reported that “nearly half” of 17 pregnant teenagers at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts had made a pact to have children simultaneously, corporate journalists latched onto the story and scurried to express their dismay on newspaper pages, blogs and 24-hour cable news. Time’s article, which reporter Kathleen Kingsbury […]
Robert Dreyfuss on Obama’s foreign policy, Amanda Marcotte on ‘pregnancy pact’ story
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin071108 Robert Dreyfuss and Amanda Marcotte @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin071108.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Barack Obama’s image as a harbinger of change has many hoping his election will bring change in foreign policy. He certainly differs from George Bush on the need for diplomacy. But what about issues such as the projection of American power […]
Justin Levitt on Supreme Court and voter ID, Sara Robinson on Texas Mormons case
This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court and Indiana’s voter ID law, with Justin Levitt of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. Also on the program: Blogger/writer Sara Robinson joins to discuss how media coverage surrounding the recent raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch turned sensationalized + the legal implications of this story.
