I know this is from last week (sorry, been watching the World Cup), but it’s yet another Daily Show clip exposing the sorry state of the American mainstream media. Michael Hastings, with his Rolling Stone piece that led to the downfall of General McChrystal, showed these morons how to do real journalism and the best they can do is whine about how Hastings got so much access.

For more on this I recommend Glenn Greenwald’s excellent post on the subject.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, corporate media, McChrystal, Obama

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Jon Stewart on the recent CNN ratings woes:

CNN and fact-checking:

Hilarious hypocrisy:

Pointless journalism, “just saying…”:

CNN gives up:

Wolf Blitzer and the Olympic torch:

Rick Sanchez falls off the SS Verne Troyer:

Anna Nicole Smith and refrigerators:

Technorati Tags: CNN, media, The Daily Show

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Watch the full discussion below:

Technorati Tags: Blogging, corporate media, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, new media

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Technorati Tags: Fox News Channel, media, The Daily Show

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Project Censored has released its latest top 25 stories of 2008-09 that you won’t find in mainstream media.  Project Censored is a media research group affiliated with Sonoma State University’s Sociology of Media and Sociology of Censorship classes and other independent groups.  According to its website:

Project Censored’s principle objective is training of SSU students in media research and First Amendment issues and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States.  Project Censored has trained over 1,500 students in investigative research in the past three decades.
Through a partnership of faculty, students, and the community, Project Censored conducts research on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media. Each year, Project Censored publishes a ranking of the top 25 most censored nationally important news stories in the yearbook, Censored: Media Democracy in Action, which is released in September. Recent Censored books have been published in Spanish, Italian and Arabic.

[....]

In our view, the only valid justification for declining a news story is that in a medium limited by time and space, another news story was simply more important to the people of the community, whether local, national or international. While admittedly a subjective process, it is nonetheless, a process to be undertaken by the news people themselves (the investigative journalists and editors), NOT by the managers and CEOs of their “parent company.” No professional journalist or researcher should ever have to face the destruction of his or her career (or life) simply because they wanted to tell the truth. While no two people will always agree on what story is more important than another, a system where the working reporters and editors run the newsroom would at least provide a fertile environment for debate, dissent and critical thinking.

The growth of independent media and journalism in recent years shows that people throughout the world yearn to hold not only their leaders accountable, but their media sources as well. For that reason, the Project Censored research program continues, in its small way, to support and highlight those who tell the truth about the powerful (no matter the consequences) and are relentless in their quest to hold Big Media accountable for their decisions.

If you care about these issues, then Project Censored is certainly an organization that deserves our support.

Here’s a list of the top 25 stories of 2008-09 not mentioned by the mainstream media:

• 1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
• 2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
• 3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
• 4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
• 5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
• 6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
• 7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
• 8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
• 9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
• 10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
• 11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
• 12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
• 13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
• 14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
• 15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
• 16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
• 17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
• 18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
• 19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
• 20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
• 21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
• 22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
• 23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
• 24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
• 25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

Technorati Tags: censorship, media, Project Censored

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Let’s put the whole issue into perspective.  ACORN, a non-profit, grass-roots organization that represents poor Americans has received a  mere $53 million in federal funds since 1994, while these douchbag contractors from ArmorGroup are the recipients of a $189 million 5-year contract to defend the US embassy in Kabul.  That comes to $3.5 million a year for ACORN as opposed to nearly $38 million per year for ArmorGroup.  Where’s the outrage?  Barely a peep is heard.

One of the more obvious problems stemming from the government’s need for contractors like ArmorGroup — a relatively minor player in the realm of private military contractors — is that, given the US government’s commitment to the military occupation of Afghanistan and  Iraq, the Pentagon must rely on these sorts of  for-profit corporations to fulfil the work and procedures once handled by the US  military.

It’s so bad  that actions like those pictured above must go un-addressed.  There’s little the Pentagon can do, even though they have had multiple problems with ArmorGroup.  The New York Times recently discussed this issue:

The troubles with the ArmorGroup contract, and the State Department’s frustrated dealings with the company over two years and through two administrations, illustrate how the government has become dependent on the private security companies that work in war zones, and has struggled to manage companies that themselves are sometimes loosely run and do not always play by the government’s rules.

With a stretched military, the government relies on the security companies themselves to vet, train, and discipline the guards, all at the lowest cost.

“It’s expensive for the State Department to withdraw a contract from one company, rebid the project and award it to a new one,” said Janet Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who represents one of the ArmorGroup whistleblowers. “So businesses know that once they get a contract, State may ding them around a little bit, but it’s not going to fire them.”

The perils of this reliance were most graphically illustrated in Iraq in 2007, when security guards from another contractor, Blackwater, were involved in shootings that left 17 civilians dead on a Baghdad street. But interviews and documents show that the ArmorGroup affair, in its mundane, unsavory details, offers perhaps a more representative look inside the troubled relationship between contractors and the government in war zones.

Technorati Tags: ACORN, ArmorGroup, media, media reform, military contractors

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Writing at the Huffington Post, media reform campaigner Timothy Karr has a great article on what really scares rightwing TV and radio fearmongers like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Lou Dobbs: greater localism and diversity in media.  Karr exposes their self-serving lies with a healthy dose of reality — which has a well-known liberal bias — pointing out, “The central mandate of the Federal Communications Commission — as enshrined in the Communications Act of 1934 — is to promote localism, diversity and competition in the media. This same principle of localism has been a rallying cry for several generations of true conservatives.”

He continues:

Broadcasters get hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies and the right to use our airwaves in exchange for a basic commitment to be responsive to the interests of local communities.

Moreover, the Supreme Court recognized that “safeguarding the public’s right to receive a diversity of views and information over the airwaves is … an integral component of the FCC’s mission.”

Sadly, the FCC has failed to live up to this standard. And what mainstream media’s fear-merchants are most afraid of is not censorship, but an FCC that actually does its job — creating more opportunities for people like you and me to participate in media.

We don’t have that now. Washington bureaucrats have allowed powerful media corporations to control the public airwaves and dominate local cable networks. We have reached a nadir where the free press that Thomas Jefferson hoped would open “all the avenues to truth” has devolved into a media system that’s a megaphone for the few.  Read on…

Truer, more obvious words couldn’t have been spoken.  The only way to break the current dominance of these paranoid, faux-populist douchebags is to demand the FCC regulate the public (i.e., our) airwaves by honoring its founding principles of diversity and localism.

Technorati Tags: censorship, CNN, Fox News Channel, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, media reform, Rush Limbaugh, Timothy Karr

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The most preventable tragedy was the deterioration of quality. Downsized local publications were all but forced to rely on more national content, but that content didn’t have to become so vapid.

Beltway scribes didn’t have to miss the Iraq war lies or the predictive signs of the Wall Street meltdown. Election correspondents weren’t compelled to devote four times the coverage to the tactical insignifica of campaigns than to candidates’ positions and records, as the Project for Excellence in Journalism found. Business reporters didn’t need to give corporate spokespeople twice the space in articles as they did workers and unions, as a Center for American Progress report documents. National editors weren’t obligated to focus on “elevat(ing) the most banal doings” in the White House to “breaking news,” as the New York Times recently noted.

Technorati Tags: corporate media, media, newspapers

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For a more in depth analysis of the segment see Ryan Chittum’s blog at Columbia Journalism Review.  Chittum admits that the clips used by Stewart are selective, but there is still an important aspect to overall critical assessment of CNBC business reporting:

[W]hat makes this [segment] so interesting is what Stewart does to pierce the CNBC bubble on several different things that make the network so disliked by business journalists generally: Its lack of a line between opinion and reporting (and lack of disclosure about who’s a reporter and who’s not). Its Siamese-twin closeness to Wall Street. Its rah-rah rooting for the stock markets. Its inanity in interviews that too often veers into sycophancy. On the other hand, if there is a discomfort among the business reporters with CNBC, it might be because the network’s bad practices are only extreme manifestations of wider cultural problems in their profession.

Technorati Tags: media, The Daily Show

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Technorati Tags: corporate media, Election 2008

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