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'
Everyone wants to talk about the role of social media in last year’s uprisings, but the big Arab television news channels played just as significant a part in the Arab Spring. There is a limit to the extent to which mobile phones can replace professional cameras: their ...
On April 23, 2012, the editorial board of the Washington Post ...
One commentator observed that he seemed like a potentate disputing an arrangement of borders and obligations. Others noted that he was back to his calculating best, having abandoned his previously doddering manner after the closure of The News of the World. ...
Whore: (verb) To debase oneself by doing something for unworthy motives, typically to make money.
...
March Madness comes once a year. Media Madness is year-round. What the mass media choose to cover and feature try to turn the priorities of any sane society upside down.
People of vice, war, money, spectator sports and business receive media attention – oftentime...
I worked on 60 Minutes for more than 26 years, most of the time as a producer with Mike Wallace. Each report on the show has “produced by” written on the art work introducing it, but most viewers have no clue what “produced by” really entails.
Indeed, the g...
This essay is excerpted from the foreword of Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by P...
I don’t know Temple University photojournalism major Ian Van Kuyk, despite his enrollment in Temple’s Journalism Department, where I teach.
...
Last week, you would have been lucky to find even a small blurb in a few newspapers about but another journalist killed in post-coup Honduras — the 19th in the last two years, making Honduras by far the most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist. Ind...
Fifteen years ago, in 1997, my Haitian friends helped to arrange my visit to Cite Soleil, then the largest and the most brutal slum (or ‘commune’) in the Western hemisphere, at the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. The arrangement was simple: my F-4 camera and I w...
As in the case of Libya, from NY Times to Fox News, from Guardian to National Post and from Le Monde to Le Figaro, the Western mainstream media’s coverage of the Syrian conflict has been mostly simplistic and black & white with a Hollywoodian good (oppos...
The sorry state of American journalism is on full display in the coverage by the corporate media of the ongoing crisis surrounding Iran’s nuclear fuel program.
The leaders of both Israel and the U.S. have publicly threatened to attack Iran — Israel saying i...
NPR
National Public Radio.
National Pay or Play Radio.
Spring Pledge Drive, 2012.
Hosts beg and cajole on air hour after hour, day after day for money.
They creatively and with cool music in the background alternately shame and praise li...
“Daddy,” the little boy on the bus asks, “what park is that?”
“I don’t know.”
Two blocks later. “Who’s the man in that statue?”
“Beats me.”
“What’s that big building with the point on top?”
“I haven’t a ...
“Israel Vs Iran” reads Sunday’s cover of the New York Times Magazine– the words written ominously in ashes from which smoke and flame still rise. Inside the magazine, Ronen Bergman a military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahrono...
The Iraq war may be over, at least for US troops, but the cover-up of the atrocities committed there by American forces goes on, even in retrospectives about the war. A prime example is reporting on the destroyed city of Fallujah, where some of the heaviest fighting of th...
Watching Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift confront the question “Are most political reporters simply insiders?” is a discomfiting experience. Her struggle to defend the indefensible unavoidably inspires compassion for her uneasy predicament. But the cas...
“Rumor” used to have a bad reputation. In Shakespeare’s plays it is assumed that “rumors” mean artful lies and the spreading of detailed but false accounts of victory and defeat. No journalist could credibly tell of massacre, torture and mass...
On Thursday, January 5, I was waiting for the elevator in the lobby of my building when I was joined by a woman who lives up the hall from me. She was carrying a grocery bag with The New York Times poking out the top. “Why did you buy it?” I asked. “They just raised...
“Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap”!
–General “Buck” Turgidson – Dr Strangelove
“China is a vast country—‘When i...
On December 1, 2011 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) held a hearing in Atlanta inquiring about the “Information Needs of Atlanta”. It was hosted by Atlanta Congressman John Lewis, and FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Mignon Cluburn. The event took pl...
There were two types of media my high school friends and I truly looked forward to on our colonial outpost in what was then West Germany. The first was the appearance in the post exchange of the latest album from our favorite band. The other was when one of us received th...
There is nothing the media love more than a good celebrity sex scandal.
Since the story of Scarlett Johansson’s purloined nude pictures had run its course, and the media squeezed every drop of ink it could from the Kim Kardashian/Kris Humphries engagement/wedding...
Over the last five years, we’ve spent money on the military – in real, inflation adjusted dollars – at a higher rate than at any other time since World War II. That includes the late 1960s, when the United States simultaneously faced a competitor with 10,000 nuclear...
I’m not crazy about Global Times (the house organ of Chinese hypernationalism) but I like the sniggering condescension of Foreign Policy magazine (the house organ of neo-lioberalism) even less.
Actually, Christine Larson’s recent profile of ...