Can America Survive the Rule of a “Stupified Plutocracy”?

Lewis Lapham, who as editor of Harper's magazine made it essential reading, is without doubt our greatest living satirist, sardonic, erudite, righteous in the tradition of Twain, Mencken, Vidal and Hitchens. As the Times put it, "Lapham's portraits of his country are astute and his dry wit as sharp as a knife."

The occasion for this interview is the 30th anniversary reissue of his book of essays, Money and Class in America (with a new introduction by Thomas Frank), as essential a deconstruction of American political culture today as it was the moment it was first published in the decade that sent us spiraling down our current path.

Incidentally, Lapham Quarterly, the project of his "retirement," is out with a Special Issue: A History of Fake News.

Turf War

Former mayor and assembly-speaker Antonio Villaraigosa will likely announce his candidacy for U.S. Senate this coming week. If Tony runs, he'll be taking on the Democratic front runner, California Attorney General Kamala Harris. Harris is coffee-colored and from the Bay Area and Villaraigosa is an Elay homeboy with an Hispanic name, so the media have made the sensible decision to present the competition in a way that's simple and easy-to-understand: black against Latino, SanFran vs SoCal. The alternative would be to waste endless column inches and seconds of airtime evaluating the candidates' records and explaining their policy differences, and no one wants that. The only snag in the epic ethnic showdown scenario is that the candidates don't fit the required templates -- Harris is the offspring of an Indian physician mother and Jamaican economist father and Villaraigosa was still struggling with español as recently as his run for mayor -- and may balk at being cast as ethnic stereotypes.

Oh, well. It's not their choice to make.

It needed to be said: The Rally to Restore Sanity was about nothing

As the absurd Keith Olbermann contretemps underscored, the idea of Left-Right equivalency is a fantasy, a right wing myth deliberately fabricated by the same conservative disinformation machine that has driven our politics increasingly fringeward. As Jon Stewart surely knows, there is no Liberal media conspiracy, no death panels, no $200M-a-day trips to the Taj Mahal, no Socialist in the White House, blah blah & blah. For Stewart to position himself equidistant between the Left and Right is to do a disservice to the very political sanity he was nominally attempting to revive. As Bill Maher put it on his show the other night:

The message of the rally, as I heard it, was that if the media stopped giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all nonpartisan and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side forgetting that Obama tried that and found out...there are no moderates on the other side. When Jon announced his rally, he said the national conversation was dominated by people on the Right who believe Obama's a Socialist and people on the Left who believe 9/11's an inside job, but I can't name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11's an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama's a Socialist? All of them.

Here's the full clip:

The rest of the story: The Left vs. Jon Stewart? by Nick Baumann (Mother Jones 2010-11-08).

2010: A mind-clearing exercise for an election day morning

Ralph Nader discusses what's at stake in the midterm elections in an interview on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.

Democracy Now! election results live tonight at 8pm (eastern): http://ow.ly/337rp
Twitter: follow #FSvote.

Our dysfunctional political dialog is no accident

A lot of billionaire dough underwrites the stupider parts of American discourse. The writer who blogs at Reverend Manny and the Twilight Empire has compiled a list of what the right-wing propagandists at Americans for Prosperity did with their time and money this summer. Just one of many neo-conservative funnels, Americans for Prosperity spent their boodle to make our discourse more stupid, regressive, and protective of corporate power and profits. This year they’ve raised $26 million to influence public opinion. Wait’ll you hear how they plan on spending it.

The rest of the story: How Americans for Prosperity spent its summer (and Koch’s Millions).

See, also: Two Right-Wing Billionaire Brothers Are Remaking America for Their Own Benefit; How billionaires' money took over Washington -- and created the mobs who rant against reform by Jim Hightower (AlterNet 2010-03-19).

Resource: Media Links

Here are some of the websites that FAIR, the national media watch group, recommends to keep up with the news. FAIR publishes Extra!, a magazine of media criticism, and a weekly radio program, CounterSpin, about "the news behind the headlines."

Alternative News

• AlterNet. Syndicated writings from the alternative press.
• The American Prospect. Liberal political magazine; has a good blog.
• Common Dreams. Breaking news and links to highlights from the day's progressive press.
• CounterPunch. A bi-weekly muckraking newsletter edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
• Democracy Now!. The web version of the daily radio show.
• Free Speech TV. Towards more democratic television; site features downloadable independent video.
• Eschaton. Popular blog is perhaps the best round-up of the progressive blogosphere, with much media criticism.
• In These Times. A nonprofit political magazine featuring news and analysis that challenge the corporate media.
• Indymedia.org: Independent media organizations and journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage.
• Left Business Observer. Monthly newsletter on economics and politics edited by Doug Henwood.
• The Nation. America's oldest weekly news magazine, featuring political news and commentary.
• OneWorld Online. Global news with a focus on the developing world.
• The Progressive. Political magazine with commentary and news advocating for peace and social justice.
• Raw Story. Alternative news site that highlights stories that get underplayed by the corporate media. It also features some original reporting.
• Sam Smith's Progressive Review. "Washington's Most Unofficial Source."
• Truthout. Independent progressive website with original reporting, analysis as well as articles from around the web.
• WorkingForChange. Left-oriented phone company Credo has a remarkably good roster of columnists.
• World Socialist Web Site. News from a Marxist perspective; frequent media criticism.
• ZNet. Z Magazine's site for progressive news and organizing.

Mainstream News

• BBC World News.
• The Independent. A U.K.-based newspaper.
• Le Monde Diplomatique in English. A French monthly news magazine focusing on global politics (French edition).
• The Los Angeles Times
• The New York Times. Registration required.
• Reuters. British-based news service.
• Salon Magazine
• Slate Magazine. The Washington Post's online magazine.
  Includes Today's Papers, a review of national newspapers' front pages.
•  The Washington Post.
• World Press Review, a monthly magazine offering analyses and English-language translations of the international press.

Media Criticism and Resources

• Abyz News Links. An enormous database of national and local U.S. news publications.
• Adbusters. Examines and parodies advertising culture.
• Center for Investigative Reporting.
• Crooks and Liars. Liberal blog that features video.
• The Daily Howler. An often insightful web-based column on media inaccuracy and arrogance.
• Freedom Forum. Formerly the Gannett Center.
• Index on Censorship. Promotes free expression around the world.
• Institute for Public Accuracy. Seeks to broaden public discourse by gaining media access for those whose perspectives are commonly drowned out.
• Jim Romenesko's MediaNews. Up-to-date media news and gossip. With links to media writers.
• JournalismNet. Online resources for investigative journalists -- search tools and much more.
• Media Bistro. Journalists' site features a daily round-up of media news.
• Media Channel. A media criticism site critical of corporate ownership, with links to articles on media from around the world.
• Media Matters. An organization dedicated to exposing conservative media misinformation.
• Project Censored. Identifies and promotes the most undercovered stories of the year.
• Center for Media and Democracy's PR Watch. Investigates and counters corporate and government spin.
• This Modern World. The weekly cartoon of social and political satire by Tom Tomorrow.
• TomPaine.com. Aims to encourage debate on issues like media, the environment and campaign finance reform.
• Vanderbilt University's TV News Archive. The best free resource for studying TV news.
• world-newspapers.com Exhaustive links to international newspapers online.
  

FAIR distributes regular Action Alerts to an international network of over 50,000 activists.  What's Wrong with the News? is an overview of FAIR's critique of the mainstream media. See, also: What's FAIR? by FAIR founder Jeff Cohen.

The Media: Don't Get Even. Get Mad!

Here's one of Ben Craw's daily mashups of cable news coverage from HuffPost, this one on the ridiculous calls for an Emobama who can demonstrate that he feels our pain over BP's poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico. Partly a result of the news media's hunger for controversy, partly a reflection of the Right's deep well of cynicism -- had the president gotten emotional Fox would be polling on whether he was too much the girlyman, the controversy has sucked the oxygen out of more substantive discussions about how BP can be made to pay for its crimes, whether future disasters can be prevented by meaningful regulations, and how we can be weaned permanently, if we can, from the oil tit. As always, though, cable news coverage is good for a laugh: watch to the end if you don't believe me.

Lester "Red" Rodney (1911-2009)

"It didn't make SportsCenter, but one of history's most influential sportswriters died this week at the age of 98. His name was Lester Rodney. Lester was one of the first people to write about a young Negro League prospect named Jackie Robinson. He was the last living journalist to cover the famous 1938 fight at Yankee Stadium between 'The Brown Bomber' Joe Louis and Hitler favorite, Max Schmeling. He crusaded against baseball's color line when almost every other journalist pretended it didn't exist. He edited a political sports page that engaged his audience in how to fight for a more just sports world. His writing, which could describe the beauty of a well-turned double play in one sentence and blast injustice in the next, is still bracing and ahead of its time. He should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Instead he was largely erased from the books."

The rest of the story: More Than a Sportswriter: Lester "Red" Rodney: 1911-2009 by Dave Zirin (Huffington Post 2009-12-23)

Reading list: Interview with Lester Rodney (Political Affairs magazine)
Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney, the Communist Who Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports by Irwin Silber (Temple University Press 2003)

The Media: Amy Goodman

by Bill Moyers (truthout 2009-10-27)

Amy Goodman's new book is "Breaking the Sound Barrier." (Photo: Riza Falk/flickr)

This is Bill Moyers's introduction to Amy Goodman's latest book, "Breaking the Sound Barrier," published by Haymarket Books.

You can learn more of the truth about Washington and the world from one week of Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!" than from a month of Sunday morning talk shows.

Make that a year of Sunday morning talk shows.

That's because Amy, as you will discover on every page of her new book, "Breaking the Sound Barrier", knows the critical question for journalists is how close they are to the truth, not how close they are to power. Like I. F. Stone, she values the facts on the ground; unlike the Sunday beltway anchors, she refuses to take the official version of reality as the definition of news, or to engage in Washington's "wink-wink" game, by which both parties to an interview tacitly understand that the questions and answers will be framed to appear adversarial when in fact their purpose is to avoid revealing how power really works. Quick: recall the last time you heard a celebrity journalist on any of the Sunday talk shows grill a politician on what campaign contributors get for their generosity. Try again: name any of those elite interrogators who skewered any politician for saying that "single-payer" wasn't on the table in the debate over health care reform because "there's no support for it." OK, one last chance: recall how often you have heard any of the network stars insist that Newt Gingrich reveal just who is funding his base as the omnipresent expert on everything.

See?

Now read "Breaking the Sound Barrier" for a reality check. And tune in to "Democracy Now!" to hear and see the difference an independent journalist can make in providing citizens what they need to know to make democracy work.

It takes the nerves, stamina and willpower of an Olympic triathlete to do what Amy Goodman does. That's just who she is, this quiet-spoken tornado of muckraking journalism: Edward R. Murrow with a twist of Emma Goldman, a Washington Post reporter once noted - willing to take on the powers that be to get at truth and justice, then spreading the word of those two indispensable gospels to the republic and the world beyond. Amy Goodman goes where angels fear to tread. Beaten by Indonesian troops while she and a colleague - also beaten - were covering East Timor's fight for independence. Hiking dangerous African deltas to get to the bottom of Chevron Oil's collusion with the Nigerian military. Or closer to home, in New Orleans or Appalachia or facing down the police when her colleagues were arrested in Minneapolis during the 2008 Republican National Convention (they threw her in the slammer, too).

Through her reporting, we hear from people who scarcely exist in news covered by the corporate-owned press. We learn about issues of war and peace and social wrong. She is impervious to government subterfuge or spin. "Goodman is the journalist as uninvited guest," that Washington Post reporter wrote. "You might think of the impolitic question; she asks it." And once it's been asked, she refuses to take "no comment" for an answer. She returns to a story time and again, continually digging, refusing to let her audience or investigative target forget how important it is to nail down just who's responsible and what needs to be done.

On top of everything else, she finds time to take her message out to a broad public with speeches and books and a weekly newspaper column, from which her collection of essays, "Breaking the Sound Barrier," has been selected. I'd be envious if it didn't appear unseemly. Let's just say I'm in awe. Read this collection and revel in the truth-telling. Be outraged by what you learn from it and renew your oath as a citizen. "We stand with journalists around the world who deeply believe that the mission of a journalist is to go where the silence is," Amy Goodman said in December 2008 when she accepted the Right Livelihood Award for personal courage and transformation. "The responsibility of a journalist is to give a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, beaten down by the powerful." And, at a time when the future of journalism is in question, this ringing rationale for our embattled but essential craft: "It's the best reason I know for us to carry our pens, our microphones, and our cameras, both into our own communities and out to the wider world."

Right on.

"As an organization, truthout works to broaden and diversify the political discussion by introducing independent voices and focusing on undercovered issues and unconventional thinking."

Clip File: Are Mainstream Media Covering 21st Century Freedom Riders Fighting For Health Care Civil Rights & Ending Wars?

"There are heroes in America -- people who are doing today what the Freedom Riders did in the 1960's -- challenging unjust laws and face arrest for taking a stand. In the 60's they were fighting for racial equality. Today, they fight against inequality in access to health care and against an out of control military adventurism and wars that shouldn't have been started and that should not be continued....

"Imagine how much less effective Martin Luther King jr., Rosa Parks and John Lewis would have been if there was no media coverage of their civil disobedience. Believe me, they planned those acts carefully to maximize media coverage.

"Media coverage amplifies the effectiveness of the protests. Police threats and intimidation make it harder for the media to cover protests and cover the arrests. That sabotages the effectiveness of the demonstrators who are literally putting their freedom on the line, going through the process of getting arrested, handcuffed, put in a police van or bus, fingerprinted, mug-shotted, fined and sometimes charged with crimes -- usually charges that are unsupportable and ultimately dropped.

"Now, with major decisions being made about whether or not to continue the Afghan war and whether or not to give health care to all Americans, it is time of incredible opportunity to employ the non-violent political strategies used so effectively by MLK and Ghandi. And the mainstream media can help or throw away this opportunity."

The rest of the story: Are Mainstream Media Covering 21st Century Freedom Riders Fighting For Health Care Civil Rights & Ending Wars by Rob Kall (OpEdNews 2009-10-08)

Change Watch: White House Proposes Changes in Bill Protecting Reporters’ Confidentiality

Sounding like Bush-Cheney never left the building,

[t]he Obama administration has told lawmakers that it opposes legislation that could protect reporters from being imprisoned if they refuse to disclose confidential sources who leak material about national security, according to several people involved with the negotiations.

The administration this week sent to Congress sweeping revisions to a “media shield” bill that would significantly weaken its protections against forcing reporters to testify.

The bill includes safeguards that would require prosecutors to exhaust other methods for finding the source of the information before subpoenaing a reporter, and would balance investigators’ interests with “the public interest in gathering news and maintaining the free flow of information.”

But under the administration’s proposal, such procedures would not apply to leaks of a matter deemed to cause “significant” harm to national security. Moreover, judges would be instructed to be deferential to executive branch assertions about whether a leak caused or was likely to cause such harm, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The rest of the story: White House Proposes Changes in Bill Protecting Reporters’ Confidentiality by Charlie Savage (New York Times 2009-09-30)

Heath Care: Glenn Beck changes his mind

Once again, it is left to The Daily Show to reveal the moral hackery, partisan flackery, and intellectual quackery that is Fox News.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Glenn Beck's Operation
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

Community: Future of News and Civic Media

The “Future of News and Civic Media” conference in mid-June, sponsored by Center for Future Civic Media and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, showcased some of the work being done as a part of the Knight News Challenge (slogan: "You invent it. We fund it.") on creative ways to provide people with the news and information needed to manage their communities effectively.

Technology: How CBS Evening News can become #1

And now, the news:
Everything sounds better with Auto-Tune.
Auto-Tune the News on YouTube.

Media: Times' Shakeup # 2,143

As reporting goes, this is pretty cheesy (on my part), but what the heck: daily journalism being essential to a viable community life, you need to know that

A source told E&P [Will LAT's Stanton Replace O'Shea? (E&P)] that Russ Stanton is the frontrunner to replace James O'Shea, who was fired over the weekend in a shakeup at the Los Angeles Times. Stanton has been innovation editor at the paper since January 2007, and is in charge of editorial content at latimes.com. Before that he was business editor. Forbes: The honeymoon is over at Tribune, writes Louis Hau. NYT: The ousted editor of the Los Angeles Times on Monday offered a scathing critique of the newspaper industry and specifically his longtime employer, the Tribune Company, arguing that cost cuts, a lack of inve stment and an aversion to serious news was damaging the business. LAT: Tribune Co. chairman Sam Zell on Monday backed Los Angeles Times publisher David D. Hiller's decision to replace the newspaper's editor. LA Observed: O'Shea's remarks to newsroom. E&P: Former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll said the weekend dismissal of editor Jim O'Shea "affects morale." Chicago Tribune: Hiller said in an interview Monday that he would "love to say we can spend more or spend the same every year, and I don't th ink that's realistic" given the economic realities of the news business.

This comes from MediaBistro's Daily Media News Feed, essential reading for anyone in journalism, tv or public relations in any of the municipalities where such crimes occur.

L.A.Times: When we lament the loss of newspapers, we're not usually thinking of the Times

As reporting goes, this is pretty cheesy (on my part), but what the heck: you need to know that

A source told E&P [Will LAT's Stanton Replace O'Shea? (E&P)] that Russ Stanton is the frontrunner to replace James O'Shea, who was fired over the weekend in a shakeup at the Los Angeles Times. Stanton has been innovation editor at the paper since January 2007, and is in charge of editorial content at latimes.com. Before that he was business editor. Forbes: The honeymoon is over at Tribune, writes Louis Hau. NYT: The ousted editor of the Los Angeles Times on Monday offered a scathing critique of the newspaper industry and specifically his longtime employer, the Tribune Company, arguing that cost cuts, a lack of investment and an aversion to serious news was damaging the business. LAT: Tribune Co. chairman Sam Zell on Monday backed Los Angeles Times publisher David D. Hiller's decision to replace the newspaper's editor. LA Observed: O'Shea's remarks to newsroom. E&P: Former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll said the weekend dismissal of editor Jim O'Shea "affects morale." Chicago Tribune: Hiller said in an interview Monday that he would "love to say we can spend more or spend the same every year, and I don't th ink that's realistic" given the economic realities of the news business.

This comes from MediaBistro's Daily Media News Feed, essential reading for anyone in journalism, tv or public relations in any of the municipalities where such crimes occur.

The Press: Can the L.A. Times be saved? (Central Library 2007-06-05)

The Los Angeles Times has struggled to fight declining circulation and to make up for it by capturing readers on line. Times publisher David Hiller, editor Jim O'Shea, innovation editor (egad!) Russ Stanton, and LATimes.com executive editor Meredith Artley mull over the decline of an essential civic institution Tuesday at the L.A. Public Library. Free; 7 p.m.; 630 W. 5th St., L.A.; 213-228-7000. <http://www.lapl.org>