Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives by Tag 'media'
We are supposed to take seriously the outrage coming from members of the corporate press in response to the revelation that the Obama administration’s ever expanding use of executive powers to intimidate and crush dissent had turned its focus on the U.S. press.
B...
There must be reasons why people are weary of the flood of excellent documentary films, books and articles showing us what the corporate state – that is, the fusion of big business and government to constantly serve the former against the peoples’ interest – is doin...
On Tuesday The New York Times revealed that the Justice Department had seized without notice caches of Associated Press phone records. Not simply work phone logs, but home and mobile phone records of A.P. journalists as well, from the agency’s bureaus in New York...
“Paranoia,” said Woody Allen, “is knowing all the facts.” By that measure, we’re becoming more and more “paranoid” every day.
This week, we learned that the Obama Justice Department ...
POTUS has been caught with his pants down, even if just this once and confined to government spying on the Associated Press. Only when its own ox is gored does the press, here the New York Times in a blistering editorial (May 14), fight back, yet still without to...
The other day, I stood outside the strangely silent building where I began life as a journalist. It is no longer the human warren that was Consolidated Press in Sydney, though ghosts still drink at the King’s Head pub nearby. As a cadet reporter, I might have walked on ...
Cable news networks thrive on tragedy.
That’s nothing new.
What is new is the incredible, monomaniacal programming mantra that has taken over CNN—the ever-more inane and dementia-addled granddaddy of the 24-hour news business.
Their unwil...
In mid-March, the Wall Street Journal carried a long discussion of the origins of th...
In the ruckus of commentary that has fogged the media since the Boston bombings, a few good words have been said, a few good insights, a few good ...
London.
No sooner had the news broken of Margaret Thatcher’s death than the glorious tributes came flooding in, a veritable deluge of unreserved praise for the Britain’s first female Prime Minister. ...
Realpolitik, its claims to the contrary, has usually been a fraud, dealing neither with practical politics, in contradistinction to an ideological posture, worldview, or weltanschauung, nor with a pragmatic grasp of reality, in contradistinction to a ...
The Sunday New York Times (NYT) publication of the opinion piece entitled “For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun” by Roberto Zurbano has turned into a debate on whether a segment of the Cuban population has done well or not after 1959. The auth...
There’s some extra space in the AP Stylebook now that it’s editors have eliminated the term “illegal immigrant.”
I propose that AP replace it with “corporate crime.”
There’s little question that corporate crime — pollution, corruption, fraud,...
I spent years as a political pundit on mainstream TV – at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. I was outnumbered, outshouted, red-baited and finally terminated. Inside mainstream media, I saw that major issues were not only dodged, but sometimes not even acknowledged to exist.
...
Always the target of media scorn, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s death was occasion for a double dose. “Venezuela Bully Chávez is Dead,” read the New York Post headline (6 March); “Death of a Demagogue” was how Time framed the news (5 M...
The Grassroots activist group, RootsAction.org, has drafted a petition, addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee and posted on l...
Quito.
Zombies dominate our nation’s airwaves. They have already devoured much of our rational public discourse and now threaten our social sanity. Zombies are hot commodities. They sell. That’s why they cannot be stopped or killed. Some editors and pr...
Thanks to the courageous action of Private Bradley Manning, the young soldier who has been held for over two years by the US military on trumped-up charges including espionage and aiding the enemy, we now have solid evidence that the country’s two leading news organizat...
A cursory glance at The New York Times is enough to unsettle an otherwise tepid Tuesday. One recalls the story of Noam Chomsky’s doctor telling him he ground his teeth, which Chomsky ...
USA Today cautioned recently that “War with Iran won’t be a quick affair.” A Pittsburgh newspaper plaintively wonders whether “War with Iran” is a “Necessity or Folly.” Talk of war is in the air. What many in this country don’t realize is that ...
Despite the well-intentioned efforts of organizations such as Prometheus Radio Project and Free Press to reform the media landscape, these efforts have only played into the hands of the government and the corporations who control it. This is the nature of reform, no...
The story is very simple: the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of China was just about to open, and one of the editors of the China Daily sent me an email from Beijing, to Nairobi, asking me to study the Chinese Constitution and to shoot a commentary on the...
Is the BBC in such a petrified or paralysed state, so badly decayed, that it is beyond repair? Are all hopes of inner movement or structural reform misplaced?
To read the national press this would appear to be the case. I’m not so sure. Hysteria has now reach...
The style in which journalists lie at say, the BBC or NBC needed the might of an Edward S. Herman or Noam Chomsky to decode. Their “Manufacturing Consent” exposed the complexity of how systematic and deliberate misinformation is carried on the airwaves. That changed i...
There is a hierarchy of attractiveness and what constitutes as beauty here at the edge of the empire. What I am speaking of is not indicative of how people actually feel (nor their needs or desires) but what is portrayed by Momma White Bread nightly on the electric soma a...