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April 27, 2002
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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April 27, 2002
Inside the J-School
Pyramid
Can I Have My Diploma, Now?
By Jordy Cummings
Ah, to be a J-school grad. Indeed, 'tis a world
of wonderment, of knowing how to write an inverted pyramid without
inverting the pyramid, of knowing how to write a hedder while
the world heads right. Now don't get me wrong, my degree will
look good in between the Klee print and the Steal-your-face.
What worries me, however, is what my j-school experience says
about the state of journalism in the era of corporate media,
the era of the bloody murder of Daniel Pearl, the era of Greta
Van Sustren having to get plastic surgery to keep her career.
Many journalists tend to over-state the
power of corporate consolidation, as if it were a cause and not
a symptom. As easy as it is to complain about media-ownership
being in fewer and fewer hands, conglomerates have controlled
much of the mass media for nearly half a century. The current
situation can be attributed to labor's aquiescence with management--in
other words, journalists have failed to organize in a sophisticated
enough manner to defeat these forces.
To the current corporatist media mogul,
the bottom-line is no different from the bottom line in a coal-mine.
Coal workers, however, have more power to threaten that bottom-line,
therefore creating an equilibrium in that industry. Thus the
coal consumer is served well, while the consumer of cultural
industry is treated with kid-gloves, to be protected against
information that may threaten advertisers. Indeed, this has far
more to do with the somewhat reactionary middle-class culture
from which the mass-media picks its journalists than it does
with horizontal integration.
Journalism schools at most elite universities
have a self-contained process of selection, both in which students
are accepted and cultivated and which professors are hired. Entry
is not predicated on experience, rather it is predicated upon
"good grades," thus narrowing the circle to "mainstream"
people, intelligent but without a broad perspective. The Mike
Gashers and Norman Solomons of this world are rare, while mid-level
hacks concern themselves with the thankless low-paid task of
molding young naive minds into stenographers, in hope that a
few will transcend this myopia.
This structure creates, however, a reactionary
movement of students completely cut off from all political and
social struggles, not to mention the slightest hint of countercultural
adherence. What is left are genuinely talented and hungry young
journalists who are forced to sacrifice their principles, or
more often, a smug and cynical, thoroughly bourgeois polity.
Thus, the censorship of any form of dissent - intellectual or
political - is internalized among the new vanguard of the corporate
media.. No legislation is needed when the propagandists are propagandized,
so to speak. An illuminating example is my own experience attempting
to experiment in what is supposed to be the avant-garde vanguard
- the student press.
I traveled down to working-class Swanton,
Vermont on the night of November 7, 2000, on which day there
was a coup d'etat by the cowboy-faction of the American establishment.
With a photographer in tow, I had a unique, gonzo experience
getting chased out of American Legion halls for daring to question
the authority of the Bush family. I was tarred with racist language
while my obviously queer photographer was gay-bashed. Our experience
was a microcosm for what was to happen to America - and indeed,
has happened to America.
After writing what I dare say was one
of the best things I have ever written and submitting it free
of charge to the "progressive" student press, I was
told by the editor of this apparently "progressive"
student newspaper that my writing was "too experimental."
Too experimental for the student press? This in and of itself
is an indictment of journalism in 2002, in which professionalism
is a more important virtue than experimentation.
Frustrated with the structures of mainstream
journalism, I turned to web-journalism, the left and the counterculture
to publish my work and it has worked out fine and dandy, thank
you very much. What worries me, however, is the impression created
in the minds of the young and hungry j-school students that they
have to sell out or shut up, and that the psychological profile
of their readership is of more importance than writing something
that has never been written before.
As it is, we'ree stuck inverting pyramids
without inverting the real pyramid. What a shame.
Jordy Cummings
lives in Montreal. He can be reached at: yorgos33ca@yahoo.ca
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