All posts by Midnightschildren

Media File Articles

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.

Mind you, it was ever thus; but now, many news organizations are less reverential about the dogma of objectivity. For this we can thank right-wing media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black, and Sun Myung Moon, who took over ailing U.S. publications (New York Post, Chicago Sun-Times, and Washington Times) and transformed them into vehicles of ideological cant. This new posture was on grand display during the controversial 2000 presidential election. The mainstream media (with the notable exception of the New York Times and the Washington Post) resolutely ignored charges of vote suppression that were flying fast and furious from Florida’s black community. Continue reading MEDIA RACISM. By Salim Muwakkil. →

Media File Articles

METHODS OF MEDIA MANIPULATION, by Michael Parenti

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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.

I would argue that the media’s misrepresentations are not all the result of innocent error and everyday production problems, though such problems certainly exist. True, the press has to be selective–but what principle of selectivity is involved? Media bias does not occur in a random fashion; rather it moves in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporations over corporate critics, affluent Whites over low-income minorities, officialdom over protesters, the two-party monopoly over leftist third parties, privatization and free market “reforms” over public-sector development, U.S. corporate dominance of the Third World over revolutionary social change, and conservative commentators and columnists like Rush Limbaugh and George Will over progressive or populist ones like Jim Hightower and Ralph Nader (not to mention more radical ones). Continue reading METHODS OF MEDIA MANIPULATION, by Michael Parenti →

Media File Articles

MEDIA SERVE GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOOD INDUSTRY. by Jane Akre and Steve Wilson.

 

Sitting in his Baltimore office the other day, Charles Margulis, Greenpeace’s quiet and thoughtful anti-genetic engineering warrior, seemed chagrined. Margulis is the one who virtually single handedly prompted Gerber’s recent decision to remove all genetically engineered (GE) ingredients from its baby food. He is also the one who shamed Kellogg into admitting that they exclude GE ingredients from their European cereals but do nothing to keep them out of American breakfast bowls. Continue reading MEDIA SERVE GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOOD INDUSTRY. by Jane Akre and Steve Wilson. →

Media File Articles

MEDIA ALLIANCE STAYS TRUE TO ITS ROOTS. by Makani Themba.

 

It was 1976. Democracy was holding on for dear life in the aftermath of Watergate. And at the center of the drama were reporters; real reporters, damn it, like the ones I wanted to be when I grew up; the ones that would take on the big guns armed with little more than an old typewriter, a pad and pencil, and bad, plain label coffee.

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. Continue reading MEDIA ALLIANCE STAYS TRUE TO ITS ROOTS. by Makani Themba. →

Media File Articles

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? The average American neither knows nor cares about the vast world beyond the nation’s border. The average American student knows little math, no history, and very little geography and nor does he or she want to know. Americans have computer in school, dozens of TV stations, and the most aggressive news media on earth, does that mean they’re better informed?

Hardly. Continue reading MEDIA IS THE MIRAGE, by Mumia Abu-Jamal →

Media File Articles

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). Continue reading ANTI-IMMIGRANT RACISM AND THE MEDIA. by Arnoldo Garcia. →

Media File Articles

JUSTICE JOURNALISM: JOURNALIST AS AGENT OF SOCIAL CHANGE. by Terry Messman.

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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. These and other crusading journalists have left us an inspiring historic legacy of morally charged, politically engaged reporting. They were all socially conscious writers who, in varying ways, practiced “justice journalism.” Continue reading JUSTICE JOURNALISM: JOURNALIST AS AGENT OF SOCIAL CHANGE. by Terry Messman. →

Media File Articles

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. The actions in San Francisco last September against the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) were a hopeful prelude to a global movement for authentic public media. Continue reading MANY VOICES, ONE WORLD. by Dee Dee Halleck. →