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 | MEDIA RACISM. By Salim Muwakkil.
We seem to be in the midst of some kind of paradigm shift in the way that news is produced, packaged, and consumed. Increasing numbers of news shops are beginning to display their ideologies in their windows. They continue to give lip service to those cherished journalistic ideals of objectivity and impartiality, but the actual news product is shot through with bias. |
| METHODS OF MEDIA MANIPULATION, by Michael Parenti
We are told by media people that some news bias is unavoidable. Distortions are caused by deadline pressures, human misjudgment, budgetary restraints, and the difficulty of reducing a complex story into a concise report. Furthermore, the argument goes, no communication system can hope to report everything. Selectivity is needed. |
 | MEDIA ALLIANCE STAYS TRUE TO ITS ROOTS. by Makani Themba.
These journalists and these times gave birth to Media Alliance more than a quarter century ago as an institution that would hold the profession, and democracy, accountable to the highest standards of quality and transparency. MA took on union busting, protection of reporters and sources, and the perpetual corporate cover up; and it moved beyond those issues to become the area's most important training resource for those seeking a career in media and those seeking to influence the media for progressive change. |
| MEDIA IS THE MIRAGE, by Mumia Abu-Jamal
American mass media is a marvel of technology. It is whiz bang, sparkle glitter, and satellite wizardry. It is a master plan of methods to communicate, and a pauper's worth of substance. With such technology, how are people so woefully misinformed? |
| ANTI-IMMIGRANT RACISM AND THE MEDIA. by Arnoldo Garcia.
September 11. After an 18-hour flight from Johannesburg, where I had attended the World Conference Against Racism, I was seated in a San Francisco-bound United Airlines jet plane at JFK International Airport in New York, when the captain announced that a hijacked plane had been crashed into the World Trade Center (WTC). |
| JUSTICE JOURNALISM: JOURNALIST AS AGENT OF SOCIAL CHANGE. by Terry Messman.
Many forms of politically engaged journalism have arisen to fight social injustices in the course of U.S. history: the radical pamphlets by Thomas Paine that helped incite a revolutionary uprising against British rule; the muckraking reporting of Upton Sinclair that exposed inhumane conditions in the Chicago stockyards; the investigation of the Standard Oil Company by Ida Tarbell; Dorothy Day's prophetic reporting on the injustice of poverty in her groundbreaking Catholic Worker newspaper; the attacks on municipal corruption by Lincoln Steffens; the exposé of the profiteering funeral industry by Jessica Mitford; the no-holds-barred struggle with the war machine waged by the underground press of the 1960s. |
 | MANY VOICES, ONE WORLD. by Dee Dee Halleck.
The recent activism against globalization has encouraged people the world over to reassess the role of transnational corporations and their governmental counterparts in the widening of the gap between rich and poor and the headlong rush toward global warming and ecological devastation. Media corporations are key targets in the ongoing struggle. |
| MEDIA, OIL, AND POLITICS: ANATOMY OF THE VENEZUELAN COUP. by Eric Quezada.
The April 2002 attempted coup against president Hugo Chavez in Venezuela was widely applauded in U.S. corporate media editorials the day after the coup. In Venezuela itself, the mainstream media helped mobilize the anti-Chavez demonstrations which were used as the coup pretext. But a people's movement, with information and support from online and alternative news sources, ended up reversing the coup. In the months since, evidence is mounting of direct U.S. participation. |
| WHAT'S CENSORED? Project Censored Fights for Media Freedom, by Peter Phillips
In medicine, it's called Managed Care. In media, it's Managed News. Corporate media today is in the entertainment business. Market shares, advertising dollars, and political self interest drive the news. Stories about the decisions and manipulations of the powerful and news about challenges to power by the powerless are continually ignored or under-reported in mainstream media. |
 | FREE SPEECH TELEVISION. By Eric Galatas.
n your article on the state of our national progressive media (MediaFile, Jan/Feb 2001), Don Hazen is quoted as saying that there is currently no progressive television network operating in the United States. Happily, Mr. Hazen is wrong. |
| GREENS SHUT OUT BY NATIONAL MEDIA. by Peter Hart.
The pain the establishment media felt over Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader's challenge to the two-party system was evident in CBS's election night coverage. When reporter Ed Bradley commented that Ralph Nader might approach the five percent threshold for receiving federal matching funds, Dan Rather interrupted: "About $12 million, $13 million of your money and mine." As Bradley pointed out that Nader was "hurting" Al Gore in several states, Rather added: "And every taxpayer." |
| DISTORTED MEDIA COVERAGE FUELS ANTI–YOUTH PROP. 21, by A. Clay Thompson
When searching for the perpetrators behind this nation's current cops-and-incarceration boom, media workers need only look in the mirror. While reporters and writers may occasionally finger demagogic pols for shamelessly campaigning on soft-headed, tough-on-crime promises, our industry typically primes the public to salivate in anticipation of each new slab of lock-'em-up legislation. This is nowhere more obvious than with youth crime. |
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