by Pascal Robert, Black Agenda Report
Don’t worry about Barack Obama. He’s far too useful to the rulers of America to be derailed by scandal, or even a combination of scandals. “Obama’s neoliberal government giveaways to private corporations and mercenary foreign policy already make him too valuable to the guardians of American empire to have his presidency threatened.” Continue reading »
From our archives: articles you should have read when they first appeared but missed.
The mainstream media’s long-time kid-glove treatment of Andrew Breitbart led directly to the unjustified ouster of Shirley Sherrod.
[Originally: July 26, 2010 ]
This piece was first published by the Hillman Foundation.
Let me make this utterly clear: What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites, is the utter and complete perversion of journalism, and it can have no place in a civilized society. It is words crashed together, never to inform, only to inflame. It is a political guillotine. It is the manipulation of reality to make the racist seem benevolent, and to convict the benevolent as racist—even if her words must be edited, filleted, stripped of all context, rearranged, fabricated, and falsified, to do so. Continue reading »
Chuck Todd and David Gregory, two overpaid clowns representing the awful mediocrity of corporate television. Exchanging inanities on a similarly useless program, Meet the Press.
Editor’s Note: The Western left, and the American left in particular, have been scandalously myopic and inadequate in organizing against the corporate media. The goal from the start should have been to neutralize the effects of the corporate media, since without that the great battles to win over the American majorities would be impossible. This of course required the patient building of a parallel and powerful structure entirely controlled by progressive organizations. What passes for leadership on the American left thought otherwise. Without heeding the obvious truth that you should not seek battle unarmed, it has wasted its time in scores of campaigns whose triumph ultimately depended on the grudging sympathy of the corporate media. Those who blackballed the notion of building our own media should have realized that media power is today inherent in the dialectics of class struggle. Without media power any type of mass organizing becomes ten, a hundred times more difficult, and later, any kind of popular action—be it a strike or huge demonstrations— can be disfigured and slandered by the corporate propagandists at their pleasure, to the point of almost complete criminalization. Friendly media power is in effect a key aid in the birthing of radical movements and a protector of their development. More so in the age of expertly manipulated societies. Continue reading »
The Problem With Journalism? Scott Pelley Blames the Internet
Pelley
For nearly a quarter century, Howard Kurtz has served as hall monitor for Washington’s conventional wisdom, handing out demerits to independent-minded journalists who don’t abide by the mainstream rules. So, there is some understandable pleasure seeing Kurtz face some accountability in his ouster as bureau chief for Newsweek and The Daily Beast.
Bill Van Auken, wsws.org
Syria’s Assad: If the corporate media jackals have their way he may end as badly as Gaddafi. By assassinating the character of targeted victims, media figures doing the bidding for the empire have become as abject as common mafia enforcers.
In preparation for a US war against Syria, Washington’s political establishment and the corporate media are steadily escalating a campaign of lies and propaganda about the alleged use of chemical weapons.