[Looking primarily at efforts from powerful interests to control what people perceive (controlling the narrative). Including disinformation/misinformation campaigns and attempts to analyze/expose them. Organized attempts at thought control or cultural manipulation. The concepts of truth/authenticity/objectivity/bias are also necessary to explore in researching and understanding these concepts. Also bad science and anti-science. Mythos that have developed over time and construct a false understanding of our world. Essential introductions by The Consilience Project: "We Don' Make Propaganda! They Do!" and Harvard Kennedy School of Misinformation Review: "Critical Disinformation Studies: History, Power, and Politics."
Amer, Karim, Emma Briant and Brittany Kaiser. "The Weaponization of Data: Cambridge Analytica, Information Warfare & the 2016 Election of Trump." Democracy Now (January 10, 2020) ["We continue our conversation with the directors of “The Great Hack,” Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, as well as former Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser and propaganda researcher Emma Briant, about Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL Group’s history as a defense contractor. “We’re in a state of global information warfare now,” Briant says. “How do we know if our militaries develop technologies and the data that it has gathered on people, for instance, across the Middle East … how do we know when that is turning up in Yemen or when that is being utilized by an authoritarian regime against the human rights of its people or against us? How do we know that it’s not being manipulated by Russia, by Iran, by anybody who’s an enemy, by Saudi Arabia, for example, who SCL were also working with? We have no way of knowing, unless we open up this industry and hold these people properly accountable for what they’re doing.”"]
Applebaum, Anne, et al. "A Kind of Permanent Battle." On the Media (August 7, 2020) ["As we approach November’s contentious presidential election, what lessons can we learn from divided societies abroad? This week, On the Media travels to Poland, where conspiracy, xenophobia and the rise of illiberalism have the country in an existential fight for its future. On the Media producer Leah Feder reports in this 3 part episode: 1) Anne Applebaum on the conspiracy theories around a 2010 plane crash that redrew lines in Polish politics. 2) Pawel Machcewicz on the Law & Justice party's takeover of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk. Also featuring Anne Applebaum, Janine Holc, and Angieszka Syroka. 3) An exploration of left and right strategies in contemporary Poland, with Igor Stokfiszewski, Anne Applebaum, and Jaroslaw Kuisz."]
Armstrong, Karen. "The Lost Art of Scripture." Radio West (December 31, 2020) ["Sacred text – with their often ambiguous wording and metaphorical meanings – are ready-made for differing interpretations from various groups. In her book, The Lost Art of Scripture, Karen looks into the history of these texts, showing how religious practitioners' relationships with them have changed, and how many of us have lost sight of what they were originally written for."]
Arnoff, Kate. "Trump Curbs the Circulation of Science." On the Media (May 31, 2019) ["Last weekend, The New York Times reported on a host of aggressive new obstacles placed by Trump administration to stymie the dissemination of federal climate research. One new rule prevents certain agencies from publishing findings after 2040. A second will omit the National Climate Assessment's "worst case scenario" projection. And finally, a panel of climate deniers will oversee and regulate the release of all federally funded climate research. In this interview, Bob speaks with Kate Aronoff, who recently wrote about these regulations for The Guardian. She explains how these alarming new restrictions fit into the Trump administration's larger pattern of limiting public access to the truth about the climate."]
"Astroturf." Sourcewatch (May 26, 2012)"Astroturf Blogging." Sourcewatch (December 11, 2011)
"Category: Astroturf." Sourcewatch (No Date: Ongoing Archive of Links To Reports)
Barstow, David. "NYT Exposé: “Self-Made Billionaire” Donald Trump Built Empire on Father’s Money, Tax Dodging & Fraud." Democracy Now (October 4, 2018) ["President Donald Trump built his personal brand and presidential candidacy on the claim that he was a self-made billionaire whose only head start was a “small loan of a million dollars” from his father. But a New York Times exposé has revealed that Trump inherited much of his family’s wealth through tax dodging and outright fraud, receiving at least $413 million in inflation-adjusted dollars from his father’s real estate empire. We speak with David Barstow, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times and the lead author on the new investigation, “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches from His Father.” Barstow shares a byline with Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner."]
---. "Trump Faces Probe into Tax Fraud After NYT Exposes How He Helped Parents Scam Millions from Gov’t." Democracy Now (October 4, 2018) ["The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance has opened an investigation into President Trump for fraud and tax evasion following a major exposé by The New York Times revealing that Trump inherited nearly half a billion dollars of his family’s wealth through tax dodges and outright fraud. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has also called for a city probe, and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden has urged the IRSto investigate the president. The Times’ 13,000-word investigative report found the late Fred and Mary Trump transferred more than $1 billion in wealth to their children, paying less than 5 percent of the $550 million in taxes they should have paid under inheritance tax rates. Donald Trump also helped his parents undervalue real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on IRS tax returns in order to reduce taxes."]
Bastek, Stephanie. "The Antebellum Feminine Mystique."The American Scholar (June 12, 2020) ["Contrary to fables, white female slave owners in the South were just as deeply invested in the institution as their male counterparts."]
Bazerman, Charles. "Talk of Anti-Semitism is Filled with Doublespeak and Doublethink." The Daily Doublespeak (February 14, 2019)
BBC News. "George Orwell's 1984: Why It Still Matters." (Posted on Youtube: June 10, 2019)
Beckett, Lois. " Nearly all Black Lives Matter protests are peaceful despite Trump narrative, report finds." The Guardian (September 5, 2020)
Beloff, Zoe, J. Hoberman and Nicolas Rapold. "Art and Fascism." Film Comment Podcast (February 27, 2019) ["This week, the Film Comment Podcast digs into Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and the ways in which the reputation of the notorious film—and that of its maker—have shifted over the years. In a feature article on the legendary Nazi-propaganda project in the latest issue of Film Comment, contributing editor J. Hoberman writes that, “Triumph of the Will is an organic product of cinema history, a synthesis of Metropolis’s monumental mass ornament, Potemkin’s pow, and Hollywood extravagance.” Once denounced as fascist propaganda, the film came to be celebrated as a masterpiece of formal daring in the 1960s and 1970s, a rehabilitation that culminated with Riefenstahl receiving a controversial tribute at the 1974 Telluride Film Festival. Film CommentEditor in Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Hoberman and filmmaker and professor Zoe Beloff for a discussion of the film’s relevance to the current historical moment (Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes are purportedly big fans) and the larger question of artistry in the service of evil."]
Bengani, Priyanjana. "Hundreds of ‘pink slime’ local news outlets are distributing algorithmic stories and conservative talking points." Columbia Journalism Review (December 18, 2019)
Benton, Michael Dean. "Astroturf and Front Group Research: The Center for Union Facts." Dialogic Cinephilia (January 20, 2014)
---. "The Many-Headed Hydra." Politics and Culture (August 10, 2010)
---. "Monsanto (Multinational Agricultural Biotechnology Corporation): Peace and Conflict Studies Archive." Dialogic Cinephilia (November 20, 2014: Ongoing Archive)
---. "The Work of Propaganda." North of Center (January 15, 2020)
Bernays, Edward L. "Manipulating Public Opinion." American Journal of Sociology 33.6 (May 1928): 958-971.
---. Propaganda. NY: Horace Liveright, 1928.
Biagetti, Samuel. "Myth of the Month 1: The Enlightenment." Historiansplaining (April 2018) ["There was no Enlightenment. Steven Pinker’s new book, “Enlightenment Now,” is a classic re-statement of the myth of the Enlightenment which holds that in the 1600s and 1700s, Europeans threw off the tired dogmas of the Middle Ages and embraced a new philosophy of Reason, Progress, Science, and Humanism. In fact, the 1700s were a period of confusion, with no clear unifying ideas or trends: occultism, mysticism, and absolute monarchy flourished alongside experiments in democracy and chemistry. “The Enlightenment” forms one of the central pillars of Whig history, serving to re-affirm the notion that our present-day beliefs and values are rational and coherent."]
---. The Myths We Make: Using the Past as an Ideological Tool." Historiansplaining (2018) ["All of history is, to one degree or another, mythology -- the weaving of a coherent, usable narrative out of the chaos of people's lives. We consider how societies all over the world, since before the beginning of civilization, have developed myths to explain the world that they experience. We also trace some of the major schools of academic history, which have tried to fashion overarching storylines to give meaning to human struggles -- from Biblical providential history to Marxism to postmodernism. We begin by examining the most central myth of the origins of American society: the "first Thanksgiving.""]
Boehlert, Eric. "Why Do Journalists Keep Falling for Police Fast Food Hoaxes?" On the Media (June 26, 2020) ["TV stations across the country were abuzz last week over an alleged plot to poison three New York Police Department officers by pouring bleach into their Shake Shack milkshakes. That story, sent to the press by the local Police Benevolent Association, was false, but fit into a right-wing caricature of rabid anti-cop vigilantes targeting officers. After the story had gone viral, an NYPD investigation cleared the fast food workers of any criminal wrongdoing. A recent report from The New York Post also revealed that the officers had tasted something funky in their drinks — which turned out to be a hint of milkshake machine cleaning solution — but hadn't exhibited any poisoning symptoms, and were even given fresh milkshakes as a courtesy. This extraordinary lie is just the latest in a string of false cop-poisoning stories levied against fast food workers, alleging widespread anti-cop harassment, and amplified by credulous reporters. Brooke spoke with media critic Eric Boehlert, creator of the pressrun.media newsletter, about what these episodes tell us about the press's troubling relationship with police sources."]
Bruck, Connie. How Hollywood Remembers Steve Bannon." The New Yorker (May 1, 2017) ["He says that, before he became a senior adviser to the President, he was a successful player in the film industry. But what did he actually do?"]
Buchheit, Paul. "Yes, Half of Americans Are In or Near Poverty: Here's More Evidence." Common Dream (October 16, 2017)
"Busted: America's Poverty Myths." On the Media (September 28 - October 28, 2016) ["On the Media’s series on poverty is grounded in the Talmudic notion that “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.” Brooke Gladstone traveled to Ohio to learn from people living the varied reality of poverty today, and to unpack the myths that shape our private presumptions as well as our policy decisions. In each episode, we feature the voices and complex stories of individuals, as well essential context from scholars, to lay open the tales we tell ourselves."]
Confessore, Nicholas, et al. "The Follower Factory." The New York Times (January 27, 2018) ["Everyone wants to be popular online.Some even pay for it. Inside social media’s black market."]
Chang, Alvin. "Sinclair’s pro-Trump news is taking over local TV. See if they own your station." Vox (April 4, 2018) [MB: The problem is not that Sinclair is pro-Trump, I don't want any corporation, no matter what their politics/perspective, to have this much influence over the news/media/information. Currently Sinclair is trying to buy Tribune Media which will increase their share of local TV news stations nationwide from 40% to 70+% (including majorities in NYC, Chicago and L.A. - markets they have been unable to penetrate so far).]
Chomsky, Noam. Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. Seven Stories Press, 1997.
Chomsky, Noam and Edward Herman. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. NY: Pantheon Books, 2002.
Christina, Greta. "Wealthy, Handsome, Strong, Packing Endless Hard-Ons: The Impossible Ideals Men Are Expected to Meet." AlterNet (June 20, 2011: Reposted on Role Reboot )
Churchwell, Sarah. "The Lehman Trilogy and Wall Street's Debt to Slavery." NYR Daily (June 11, 2019) [MB - Excellent critique of a popular play's historical misrepresentation of the Lehman family saga (also makes the connection to that other theatrical sensation Hamilton) and monopoly-finance capital's dependence on slavery (throughout the system - not just the South) to build immense wealth.]
Cohen, Adam. "Clarence Thomas Said What?" Amicus (June 8, 2019) ["When Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a 20-page concurrence to the Indiana abortion law case last week, Adam Cohen’s phone started blowing up. In making an argument linking abortion rights to eugenics, Thomas repeatedly cited Cohen’s book, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck. Cohen joins Dahlia Lithwick to explore the history of eugenics in the U.S. and to examine Thomas’ motives and logic for bringing the argument into the abortion debate."]
Cohen, Michael A. and Micah Zenko. "Threat-Mongering in America." Yale University Press Blog #72 (March 28, 2019) ["The greatest threats to America are often overblown, and the world is a much safer place than we’re led to believe. How does this happen and what can we do about it?"]
Collison, David J. "Corporate Propaganda: Its Implications for Accounting and Accountability." (Department of Accountancy and Business Finance University of Dundee, Scotland, U.K.: ND)
Connelly, Matthew. "Erasing History: The National Archives Is Destroying Records About Victims of Trump’s ICE Policies." Democracy Now (February 6, 2020) ["Last month, the National Archives and Records Administration apologized for doctoring a photo of the 2017 Women’s March to remove criticisms of President Trump. The shocking revelation that the agency had altered the image was first reported in The Washington Post. In an exhibit called “Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote,” the National Archives had displayed a large image of the first Women’s March. But signs referencing Trump had been blurred to remove his name — including a poster reading “God Hates Trump” and another reading “Trump & GOP — Hands Off Women.” Other signs in the photo referencing female anatomy were also blurred. The National Archives initially stood by its decision to edit the photo, telling The Washington Post that the changes were made “so as not to engage in current political controversy.” For more, we turn to a historian who says this was only the latest example of “a great and growing threat to our nation’s capacity to protect and learn from history.” The National Archives reportedly is allowing millions of documents, including many related to immigrants’ rights, to be expunged. We speak with Matthew Connelly, professor of history at Columbia University and principal investigator at History Lab. His recent piece for The New York Times is headlined “Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE.”"]
"The End of Propaganda." The Consilience Project (October 17, 2021) ["Attempts at engineering national consensus using propaganda are starting to backfire. Yet many still believe it is necessary for governance. Education is a better way. The COVID-19 pandemic created conditions that have been frequently compared to wartime. With wars come propaganda, and for good reason. When it comes to national security, modern governments have long-standing practices for complex information campaigns that integrate academia, media, and government agencies. When widespread acceptance of certain ideas literally means the difference between life and death, it is hard to argue against the use of propaganda. But public health campaigns in the U.S. and elsewhere are creating unintended negative side effects. In the U.S., polarization and national disunity have increased, even when facing a common “enemy.”"]
Cook, John, Ullrich Ecker and Stephan Lewandosky. "Misinformation and How to Correct It." Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. ed. Robert Scott and Stephan Kosslyn. John Wiley and Sons, 2015: 1-17.
Cook, John, Ullrich Ecker and Stephan Lewandosky. "Misinformation and How to Correct It." Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. ed. Robert Scott and Stephan Kosslyn. John Wiley and Sons, 2015: 1-17.
Cook, Jonathan. "How the Corporate Media Enslave Us to a World of Illusions." Counterpunch (June 15, 2018)
Coppins, McKay. "The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President." The Atlantic (March 2020) ["How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election"]
---. "Pandemic Propaganda." On the Media (March 13, 2020) ["After weeks of downplaying the COVID-19 outbreak and overstating his administration's response, President Trump shifted to a more serious tone in Wednesday's national address. Over the past week, the president claimed that health officials were prepared to deploy millions of tests, and that his White House wasted no time in slowing the spread of the virus. If only. South Korea, which discovered its first COVID-19 patient around the same time as the US, is testing 10,000 people a day, roughly the same number of people tested in the US total since mid-January. Meanwhile, there are widespread reports of tests delayed and denied because of shortages of kits and personnel. And, accounts by unnamed sources close to the President say he resisted offers by domestic labs to produce virus tests — because he didn’t like the “optics” of "national emergency" that steeply rising numbers would imply. These discrepancies and contradictions between what the president, his media allies, critical journalists, and other high-ranking officials say is a tiresome pattern that has defined Trump's time in office. According to McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic, our current state of information overload is called "censorship through noise": a propaganda strategy that has largely protected the president from accountability, but one that leaves us deeply vulnerable during our current public health crisis. Coppins and Brooke discuss the partisan distrust in COVID-19 news and the empty rhetoric from the White House."]
Crawford-Roberts, Ann, et al. "George Floyd's Autopsy and the Structural Gaslighting of America." Scientific American (June 6, 2020) ["The weaponization of medical language emboldened white supremacy with the authority of the white coat. How will we stop it from happening again?"]
Cromwell, David and David Edwards. "Assange Arrest - Part 1: 'So Now He's Our Property.'" Media Lens (April 16, 2019)
---. "Assange Arrest – Part 2: ‘A Definite Creep, A Probable Rapist.'" Media Lens (April 18, 2019)
---. "‘A Suffocating Groupthink’: Sampling The Corporate Media On Israel, Iran, Syria And Russia." Media Lens (May 16, 2018)
Currie, Morgan. "Buried, Altered, Silenced: 4 Ways Government Climate Information Has Changed Since Trump Took Office." Desmog (March 27, 2018)
"Developing A Media Education Language: From Persuasive Techniques to Analytical Tools." ACME (ND)
Digital Disconnect (USA: Jeremy Earp and Robert McChesney, 2018: 63 mins) ["Tracing the Internet’s history as a publicly-funded government project in the 1960s, to its full-scale commercialisation today, Digital Disconnect shows how the Internet’s so-called “democratising potential” has been radically compromised by the logic of capitalism, and the unaccountable power of a handful of telecom and tech monopolies. Based on the acclaimed book by media scholar Robert McChesney, the film examines the ongoing attack on the concept of net neutrality by telecom monopolies such as Comcast and Verizon, explores how internet giants like Facebook and Google have amassed huge profits by surreptitiously collecting our personal data and selling it to advertisers, and shows how these monopolies have routinely colluded with the national security state to advance covert mass surveillance programs. We also see how the rise of social media as a leading information source is working to isolate people into ideological information bubbles and elevate propaganda at the expense of real journalism. But while most debates about the Internet focus on issues like the personal impact of Internet-addiction or the rampant data-mining practices of companies like Facebook, Digital Disconnectdigs deeper to show how capitalism itself turns the Internet against democracy. The result is an indispensable resource for helping viewers make sense of a technological revolution that has radically transformed virtually aspect of human communication."]
Diresta, Renee. "Online Conspiracy Groups Are a Lot Like Cults." Wired (November 13, 2018)
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. "Sanitizing Our Settler-Colonial Past With ‘Nation of Immigrants’ Narratives." Citations Needed #62 (January 16, 2019) ["“The United States is a nation of immigrants.” It’s a phrase we hear constantly – often said with the best of intentions and, in today’s increasingly cruel environment, meant as a strong rebuke of Donald Trump and his white nationalist administration. The metaphor of the “melting pot” serves a similar purpose: the United States is strong and noble because we are a place that takes people in from across the globe, an inclusive, welcoming, compassionate in-gathering of humanity - e pluribus unum - "out of many, one." It’s a romantic idea – and often evoked as a counter to xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric. But how historically accurate are these phrases and the national narratives they entrench? And what if, instead of combating white nationalism, they subtly promote it? On this episode, we dissect the notion that the United States is simply a rainbow collection of disparate groups coming together and breakdown how, in many ways, this absolves us of our past and present as a violent, white-settler colony."]
Dunham, Robert and Kyle Pope. "The death penalty—myth, propaganda, and truth." The Kicker (November 15, 2019) ["On this week’s Kicker, Robert Dunham, executive director at the Death Penalty Information Center, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review, discuss the mistakes national and local reporters make in their coverage of the death penalty. Dunham explains the culture of fear that sustained American execution at its peak, and the importance of reporting policy over politics."]
---. "Filtering the Election." Media Lens (November 18, 2016)
Edwards, David and David Cromwell. "Anatomy of a Propaganda Blitz." Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality. Pluto Press, 2018: 1-19.Elias, Robert. "National Pastimes: Mindless Militarism in American Sports." No Citations Needed #59 (December 5, 2018) ["F-22 flyovers, 160-foot flags draped across the playing field, full color guards, camouflage uniforms, The Star-Spangled Banner, God Bless America, Support The Troops Nights, special perks for vets. What is the origin of the runaway military worship so ingrained in our sports? How did our professional baseball and football leagues become so infused to our military state and what can fans of these sports do to deconstruct and pushback against the forces of jingoism and military fetishizing?"]
Ellerby, Kara and Sumita Mukherjee. "How Empire Uses ‘Feminist’ Branding to Sell War and Occupation." Citations Needed #65 (February 6, 2019) ["Since the dawn of the American Empire, thin moral pretexts in our politics and press have been used to justify our wars and conquest. The invasion of Cuba and Philippines in 1898 was declared to be a fight for freedom from Spanish oppression. Vietnam was about stopping Communist tyranny. The pioneer myth of Manifest Destiny and “westward expansion” was built about “taming” and “civilizing’ the land from violent savages. But one current that flows through all of these imperial incursions has been the idea that the United States – as well as its allies the Great Britain and Israel – are out to protect women. Today's endless occupations in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are, in large part, justified in perpetuity because the United States is a self-declared, unique protector of modernity and women’s rights. All the same, the Pentagon is increasingly promoted, in press releases and media puffy pieces, as a place where women can exercise their agency: the ultimate apex of meritocracy and a vanguard of equality. But what if this approach misses the point of equality altogether? What if this is simply a craven branding exercise, putting a liberal face on what is a fundamentally oppressive system of violence? On this episode, we explore various ways women’s rights and empowerment has been used to sell colonial objectives and how one can differentiate between actual progress and the superficial language of inclusion used cynically in service of mechanized violence."]
Fang, Lee. "Koch Data Mining Company Helped Inundate Voters with Anti-Immigrant Messages." The Intercept (September 9, 2019)
Fields, Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America. Verso, 2012. ["Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed. That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions."]
Francis, Marc. "Smoke and Mirrors: The Bio-Con Documentary in the Age of Trump." Film Quarterly (September 23, 2020)
Frank, Joshua and Jeffrey St. Clair. "Ghosts in the Propaganda Machine." Counterpunch (January 5, 2018)Gillam, Carey. "How Monsanto Plants Stories, Suppresses Science & Silences Dissent to Sell a Cancer-Linked Chemical." Democracy Now (August 14, 2018) ["As Monsanto comes under scrutiny for allegedly hiding the dangers of its weed killer Roundup, we talk to a reporter who says the company attempted to censor and discredit her when she published stories on their product that contradicted their business interests. Carey Gillam is a veteran investigative journalist and author of “Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science.”"]
Giridharadas, Anand. "Purple Episode 3: Let's Not Discount Reality." On the Media (November 25, 2019) ["One of the reasons so many Americans have lost trust and faith is democratic institutions is simple misunderstanding about how the system is designed to work. Another, however, is familiarity with how the system does work— which isn’t exactly of, by and for the People. Anand Giridharadas is author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. He says the founders also didn’t plan on politicians constantly trash-talking government itself and that a decline in trust in government is the result of a concerted, private sector propaganda war waged over the last four decades."]
Good, Dierdre and Karen King. "Mary Magdalene." Radio West (June 13, 2019) ["The Gospel of Mary, written in the name of Mary Magdalene, didn’t make it into the Biblical canon. The image of a powerful woman who was a spiritual leader among Christ’s disciples may have seemed risky to early members of the faith. But what the gospel taught was even more threatening. It challenged the basis of authority, the nature of sin, and it spoke of an inner journey to spirituality. The scholars Dierdre Good and Karen King join us talk about the facts and myths surrounding Mary Magdalene."]
Grandin, Greg. "On American Expansion, Part One: The Myth of the Frontier." On the Media (March 29, 2019) ["What are the stories that America has told about itself? In the first of a three-part series on the notion of American Exceptionalism, Brooke speaks with historian Greg Grandin about America's founding narrative: the country's expansion westward. In his new book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, Grandin traces how the idea of endless, unstoppable growth has influenced US policy and psychology — and how President Trump’s call for a barrier at the southern border upends the idea of America as a country of boundless possibility."]
Greenberg, Jonathan. "Trump's Financial House of Cards." On the Media (May 10, 2019) ["As we all learned this week, President Trump "lost more money than nearly other individual American taxpayer” between 1985 and 1994. It was during that decade of losses that Trump published The Art of the Deal and became a fixture on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans. But if his business failures and his debts were so immense, how did he get on the list to begin with? Jonathan Greenberg, now an investigative journalist, was then the Forbesreporter whose unenviable task it was to evaluate Trump’s fabulous claims. Bob spoke with him this week about the origin myth upon which a 37-year-long con was built."]
---. "The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened." The Intercept (December 9, 2017) ["How did ”multiple sources” all innocently feed the same false information to multiple media outlets? The refusal of CNN and MSNBC to say only compounds the damage they have caused."]
---. "White House Spread False Story About Venezuela Burning Aid Trucks to Win Support for War." Democracy Now (March 11, 2019) ["An investigation by The New York Times has found that several trucks carrying so-called humanitarian aid that were set ablaze during a showdown at the Colombia-Venezuela border last month were not caused by President Nicolás Maduro’s forces, as was widely reported at the time by the media and Trump administration officials. We speak with Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of the founding editors of The Intercept. His latest piece is “NYT’s Exposé on the Lies About Burning Aid Trucks in Venezuela Shows How U.S. Government and Media Spread Pro-War Propaganda.”"]
Greenwald, Glenn and Tom Engelhardt. "A Conversation." Lannan Lectures (September 27, 2017)["Glenn Greenwald is an investigative journalist and author. A former constitutional lawyer, he founded the online global media outlet The Intercept with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill in 2014. He is the author of several best sellers, among them, How Would a Patriot Act?; With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful and the recent No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State. Greenwald has received numerous awards for his investigative journalism. In 2009 he was awarded the Izzy Award by the Park Center for Independent Media for his “path breaking journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom, official deception, and controversial issues.” In 2010 he received an Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the arrest and detention of Chelsea Manning. In 2013 he led The Guardian’s reporting team that covered Edward Snowden and the NSA, which earned the newspaper the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013."]
Hayden, Michael Edison. "Prolific Alt-Right Propagandist's Identity Confirmed." Hatewatch (May 1, 2019)
Hedges, Chris. "The Permanent Lie, Our Biggest Threat." Truthdig (December 17, 2017) ["The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice."]
Hickel, Jason. "The Neoliberal Optimism Industry." Citations Needed #58 (November 28, 2018) ["We're told the world is getting better all the time. In January, The New York Times' Nick Kristof explained "Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History." The same month, Harvard professor and Bill Gates' favorite optimist Steven Pinker lamented (in a special edition of Time magazine guest edited by - who else? - Bill Gates) the “bad habits of media... bring out the worst in human cognition”. By focusing so much on negative things, the theory goes, we are tricked into thinking things are getting worse when, in reality, it's actually the opposite. For the TEDtalk set, that the world is awesome and still improving is self-evidently true - just look at the data. But how true is this popular axiom? How accurate is the portrayal that the world is improving we so often seen in sexy, hockey stick graphs of upward growth and rapidly declining poverty? And how, exactly, are the powers that be "measuring" improvements in society? On this episode, we take a look at the ideological project of telling us everything's going swimmingly, how those in power cook the books and spin data to make their case for maintaining the status quo, and how The Neoliberal Optimism Industry is, at its core, an anti-intellectual enterprise designed to lull us into complacency and political impotence."]
Hirthler, Jason. "Colonizing the Western Mind." Counterpunch (March 2, 2018)
Hogan, Liam. "Debunking the Imagery of the 'Irish Slaves' Meme." Medium (September 14, 2015) ["Those that promote the myth of Irish perpetual hereditary chattel slavery in Colonial America and the Anglo-Caribbean use a variety of images entirely unrelated to indentured servitude to accompany their anti-history. I examined a selection of them."]
Johnson, Adam and Nima Shirazi. "Hollywood & Anti-Muslim Racism (Part 1) - Action and Adventure Schlock." Citations Needed #113 (July 8, 2020) ["The United States and its close allies Saudi Arabia and Israel have been bombing and occupying large sections of the so-called “Muslim world” for decades – drastically ramping up after the 9/11 attacks and seemingly with no end in sight. The U.S., like all empires, cannot operate a large, complex system premised on violence, meddling and subjugation without a moral pretext. This moral pretext, even before 9/11, was primarily about fighting a war on so-called “Terrorism” or “Islamic extremism” while allegedly promoting “stability,” “freedom” and “democracy.” Along with American news media’s constant fear-mongering over scary Muslims lurking in the shadows, a major pillar propping up this moral pretext is pop culture – namely the cultural products coming out of Hollywood. Our decades-long "War on Terror" would no doubt be much more difficult to sustain without a constant reminder from TV and film that, despite the fact that the average American is more likely to be killed by a vending machine than a terrorist attack, the threat of Islamic terrorism remains ever-present and existential, marked by an inevitable “clash of civilizations” devoid of context or any notion that the U.S. is a primary driver of violence across the globe. Over the course of three episodes, we'll be taking a look at how Hollywood’s television and studio film output helps prop up America’s military aggression in the Middle East, engages in both casual and explicit racism, strips conflicts of any historical or imperial context pushes the idea the only Good Muslim is a snitch or CIA agent, and generally leaves its audience angry and ill-informed. In this episode, we review Hollywood’s long history of anti-Muslim racism in both classic and campy action/adventure films and TV and how it both primed us for – and sustains – the never-ending and self-perpetuating "War on Terror.""]
---. "The Root of All Evil." Citations Needed #4 (July 26, 2017) ["... we talk about a recent New York Times article — and the broader media habit of painting the US as benevolent democracy-seeker and Iran and other Official Enemies as cynical imperialists. In this episode we dissect the true history of what caused chaos in Iraq, who’s to blame and what the real motives were behind the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations designs for the country. All this in the context of a battle for control over remaining ISIS territory in Syria and Washington, Riyadh, and Tel Aviv’s desire to stop the dreaded “Shia crescent”."]
---. "White House Spread False Story About Venezuela Burning Aid Trucks to Win Support for War." Democracy Now (March 11, 2019) ["An investigation by The New York Times has found that several trucks carrying so-called humanitarian aid that were set ablaze during a showdown at the Colombia-Venezuela border last month were not caused by President Nicolás Maduro’s forces, as was widely reported at the time by the media and Trump administration officials. We speak with Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of the founding editors of The Intercept. His latest piece is “NYT’s Exposé on the Lies About Burning Aid Trucks in Venezuela Shows How U.S. Government and Media Spread Pro-War Propaganda.”"]
Hayden, Michael Edison. "Prolific Alt-Right Propagandist's Identity Confirmed." Hatewatch (May 1, 2019)
Hickel, Jason. "The Neoliberal Optimism Industry." Citations Needed #58 (November 28, 2018) ["We're told the world is getting better all the time. In January, The New York Times' Nick Kristof explained "Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History." The same month, Harvard professor and Bill Gates' favorite optimist Steven Pinker lamented (in a special edition of Time magazine guest edited by - who else? - Bill Gates) the “bad habits of media... bring out the worst in human cognition”. By focusing so much on negative things, the theory goes, we are tricked into thinking things are getting worse when, in reality, it's actually the opposite. For the TEDtalk set, that the world is awesome and still improving is self-evidently true - just look at the data. But how true is this popular axiom? How accurate is the portrayal that the world is improving we so often seen in sexy, hockey stick graphs of upward growth and rapidly declining poverty? And how, exactly, are the powers that be "measuring" improvements in society? On this episode, we take a look at the ideological project of telling us everything's going swimmingly, how those in power cook the books and spin data to make their case for maintaining the status quo, and how The Neoliberal Optimism Industry is, at its core, an anti-intellectual enterprise designed to lull us into complacency and political impotence."]
Hogan, Liam. "Debunking the Imagery of the 'Irish Slaves' Meme." Medium (September 14, 2015) ["Those that promote the myth of Irish perpetual hereditary chattel slavery in Colonial America and the Anglo-Caribbean use a variety of images entirely unrelated to indentured servitude to accompany their anti-history. I examined a selection of them."]
Holland, Tom and Dominic Sandbrook. "The Nazis in Power: The Nuremberg Rallies." The Rest is History (January 3, 2024) ["“We did not lose the war because our artillery gave out, but because the weapons of our mind didn’t fire” In September 1934, the Nazis held their sixth annual party conference in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg. The location held a symbolic resonance for the party, being not only the embodiment of an uncorrupted medieval Germany, and the centre of the First Reich, but also a bedrock of anti-Semitism. It was therefore here that Hitler would lay out his terrifying vision for the mighty new empire’s future, promulging the superiority and purity of the Aryan bloodline. The rally was a pageant of ritualised fanaticism, recalling the majesty of Germany’s mythic past and all the heroism of classical antiquity. It was the first of many such extravagant displays, replete with parades of marching workers, bonfires, and swastikas, as the Nazi propaganda machine, under the leadership of the grotesque Joseph Goebbels, tightened its stranglehold over Germany. Through the popularisation of the radio, Nazi youth organisations, cinema, and even the Olympic Games, German minds were being steadily remoulded… Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the Nazis' gradual indoctrination of the German people in the build up to the Second World War, and the beginnings of Hitler’s plans for not only the Third Reich, but the entire world."]
Holloway, Kali. "7 things the United Daughters of the Confederacy might not want you to know about them." Salon (October 6, 2018) ["The organization keeps Confederate statues standing and spreads lies about America’s history of slavery."]
Honey, Michael, et al. "The Real Martin Luther King." The Back Story (January 17, 2020) ["Had he lived, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have celebrated his 91st birthday this week. King is celebrated as an American hero and championed in children’s books and inspirational posters, but have Americans lost sight of the real MLK?"]
Hope, Mat. "Web of Power: Cambridge Analytica and the Climate Science Denial Network Lobbying for Brexit and Trump." Desmog (March 21, 2018)
Hypernormalisation (BBC: Adam Curtis, 2016: 166 mins) ["HyperNormalisation wades through the culmination of forces that have driven this culture into mass uncertainty, confusion, spectacle and simulation. Where events keep happening that seem crazy, inexplicable and out of control—from Donald Trump to Brexit, to the War in Syria, mass immigration, extreme disparity in wealth, and increasing bomb attacks in the West—this film shows a basis to not only why these chaotic events are happening, but also why we, as well as those in power, may not understand them. We have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. And because it is reflected all around us, ubiquitous, we accept it as normal. This epic narrative of how we got here spans over 40 years, with an extraordinary cast of characters—the Assad dynasty, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, Patti Smith, early performance artists in New York, President Putin, Japanese gangsters, suicide bombers, Colonel Gaddafi and the Internet. HyperNormalisation weaves these historical narratives back together to show how today’s fake and hollow world was created and is sustained. This shows that a new kind of resistance must be imagined and actioned, as well as an unprecedented reawakening in a time where it matters like never before."]
"Identity Unmasked." Intelligence Report #167 (Summer 2019) ["Using fake names and fictional avatars, wannabe killers and hatemongers exude courage and commitment to their hateful causes. Until the world learns their real names. Until someone exposes their plans. In the anonymity provided by chat rooms, angry, prejudiced hate-filled people express lethal intentions and develop plots to harm or marginalize people because of their faith, ethnicity or sexual orientation. In this issue of the Intelligence Report, we unmask people who are brave in the dark and expose the impact of fighting hate with light."]
Immerwahr, Daniel. "'United States' to Imperial America." Empire Files (August 19, 2019) ["The global expanse of US military bases is well-known; but it's actual territorial empire is largely hidden. The true map of America is not taught in our schools. Abby Martin interviews history Professor Daniel Immerwahr about his new book, 'How To Hide An Empire,' where he documents the story of our "Greater United States.""]
Holloway, Kali. "7 things the United Daughters of the Confederacy might not want you to know about them." Salon (October 6, 2018) ["The organization keeps Confederate statues standing and spreads lies about America’s history of slavery."]
Honey, Michael, et al. "The Real Martin Luther King." The Back Story (January 17, 2020) ["Had he lived, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have celebrated his 91st birthday this week. King is celebrated as an American hero and championed in children’s books and inspirational posters, but have Americans lost sight of the real MLK?"]
Hope, Mat. "Web of Power: Cambridge Analytica and the Climate Science Denial Network Lobbying for Brexit and Trump." Desmog (March 21, 2018)
Hypernormalisation (BBC: Adam Curtis, 2016: 166 mins) ["HyperNormalisation wades through the culmination of forces that have driven this culture into mass uncertainty, confusion, spectacle and simulation. Where events keep happening that seem crazy, inexplicable and out of control—from Donald Trump to Brexit, to the War in Syria, mass immigration, extreme disparity in wealth, and increasing bomb attacks in the West—this film shows a basis to not only why these chaotic events are happening, but also why we, as well as those in power, may not understand them. We have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. And because it is reflected all around us, ubiquitous, we accept it as normal. This epic narrative of how we got here spans over 40 years, with an extraordinary cast of characters—the Assad dynasty, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, Patti Smith, early performance artists in New York, President Putin, Japanese gangsters, suicide bombers, Colonel Gaddafi and the Internet. HyperNormalisation weaves these historical narratives back together to show how today’s fake and hollow world was created and is sustained. This shows that a new kind of resistance must be imagined and actioned, as well as an unprecedented reawakening in a time where it matters like never before."]
"Identity Unmasked." Intelligence Report #167 (Summer 2019) ["Using fake names and fictional avatars, wannabe killers and hatemongers exude courage and commitment to their hateful causes. Until the world learns their real names. Until someone exposes their plans. In the anonymity provided by chat rooms, angry, prejudiced hate-filled people express lethal intentions and develop plots to harm or marginalize people because of their faith, ethnicity or sexual orientation. In this issue of the Intelligence Report, we unmask people who are brave in the dark and expose the impact of fighting hate with light."]
Immerwahr, Daniel. "'United States' to Imperial America." Empire Files (August 19, 2019) ["The global expanse of US military bases is well-known; but it's actual territorial empire is largely hidden. The true map of America is not taught in our schools. Abby Martin interviews history Professor Daniel Immerwahr about his new book, 'How To Hide An Empire,' where he documents the story of our "Greater United States.""]
---. "The Root of All Evil." Citations Needed #4 (July 26, 2017) ["... we talk about a recent New York Times article — and the broader media habit of painting the US as benevolent democracy-seeker and Iran and other Official Enemies as cynical imperialists. In this episode we dissect the true history of what caused chaos in Iraq, who’s to blame and what the real motives were behind the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations designs for the country. All this in the context of a battle for control over remaining ISIS territory in Syria and Washington, Riyadh, and Tel Aviv’s desire to stop the dreaded “Shia crescent”."]
Jones, Josh. "Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism." Open Culture (February 24, 2022) ["Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity. “The great analysts of truth and language in politics”—writes McGill University political philosophy professor Jacob T. Levy—including “George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is.… Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.”]
Kaiser, Brittany. "Meet Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Releasing Troves of New Files from Data Firm." Democracy Now (January 7, 2020) ["New details are emerging about how the shadowy data firm Cambridge Analytica worked to manipulate voters across the globe, from the 2016 election in the United States to the Brexit campaign in Britain and elections in over 60 other countries, including Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil. A new trove of internal Cambridge Analytica documents and emails are being posted on Twitter detailing the company’s operations, including its work with President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. The documents come from Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser, who worked at the firm for three-and-a-half years before leaving in 2018. We speak with Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, co-directors of the Oscar shortlisted documentary “The Great Hack”; Brittany Kaiser, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower featured in “The Great Hack” and author of “Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again”; and Emma Briant, a visiting research associate in human rights at Bard College whose upcoming book is titled “Propaganda Machine: Inside Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry.”" Part Two: "The Great Hack: Big Data Firms Helped Sway the 2016 Election. Could It Happen Again in 2020?" Part Three: "Propaganda Machine: The Military Roots of Cambridge Analytica’s Psychological Manipulation of Voters."]
Kelly, Kim. "The Politics of Criticism." Columbia Journalism Review (August 8, 2019) ["My life with heavy metal, Tucker Carlson, NPR, and strong opinions.]
Kelly, Sharon. "Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 Risks." Desmog (March 16, 2020)
Kitty, Alexandra. "Objectivity in Journalism: Should We Be Skeptical?" Skeptic (ND)
Krekó, Péter and Patrik Szicherle. "Gone Viral: Covid-19 in the disinformation ecosystem." Eurozine (March 17, 2020)
Kroll, Andy. "Media Giant Sinclair, Under Fire for Forcing Anchors to Read Trumpian Screed, Is Rapidly Expanding." Democracy Now (April 3, 2018) ["While Sinclair Broadcast Group is not a household name, it is one of the most powerful TV companies in the nation. It owns 173 local TV stations across the country, including affiliates of all the major networks. And it’s attempting to grow even larger by purchasing Tribune Media—a $3.9 billion deal currently under regulatory review. Sinclair has been widely criticized for its close ties to the White House. But Sinclair is facing new scrutiny after it ordered news anchors at scores of its affiliate stations to recite nearly identical “must-read” commentaries warning of the dangers of “fake news” in language that echoes President Trump’s rhetoric. The commentaries reached millions of viewers last month and drew widespread attention after the website Deadspin published a video over the weekend showing side-by-side comparisons of the broadcasts from 45 Sinclair-owned stations."]
Lerner, Sharon. "How the Media Launders Fossil Fuel Industry Propaganda Through Branded Content." The Intercept (April 3, 2019)
Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. NY: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922.
Loewen, James. "Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History (Teachers College Press, 2018)." New Books in History (January 3, 2019) ["In an atmosphere filled with social media and fake news, history is more important than ever. But, what do you really know about history? In the second edition of his book, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History (Teachers College Press, 2018). Dr. James W. Loewen interrogates what we think we know about our past. Loewen, a sociologist and professor at the University of Vermont, shows readers that history must be reconsidered in order to avoid previously accepted misconceptions. As Loewen demonstrates throughout this valuable text, teachers must look beyond the textbook to discover what really happened and to teach their students how to "do" history. Teaching What Really Happened is an eye-opening book that reinvigorates history and empowers its readers."]
Lombardi, Amy J. "On the Origins of the term 'Doublespeak.'" The Daily Doublespeak (September 4, 2008)
Lutz, Catherine. "Troop Veneration and American Empire." The Dig (January 3, 2018) ["The protest movement against the onset of the Iraq War was countered by a call to “support our troops” from militarists on the Right. But venerating American soldiers is not about supporting actual American soldiers; it's a rhetorical device to preclude questioning or criticism of the wars they are sent to fight. In a face-to-face interview at Brown University’s Watson Institute, anthropologist Catherine Lutz discusses John Kelly’s recent diatribe, Khizr Khan, Trump’s attack on protesting NFL players, and the roots of it all in the Nixon administration’s response to GI rebellion against the Vietnam War. "]
Lyman, Stuart. "Consequences: In a Post-Truth World, Scientific Progress Goes Boink." Lymann BioPharma Consulting LLC (January 17, 2017)
Maguire, Mairead. "Demonization of Russia in a New Cold War Era." Counterpunch (September 17, 2018)
Mayer, Jane. "FOX News White House." The New Yorker (March 11, 2019) ["As Murdoch’s relations with the White House have warmed, so has Fox’s coverage of Trump. During the Obama years, Fox’s attacks on the President could be seen as reflecting the adversarial role traditionally played by the press. With Trump’s election, the network’s hosts went from questioning power to defending it. Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor who co-directs the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, says, “Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.” The network has provided a non-stop counternarrative in which the only collusion is between Hillary Clinton and Russia; Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is perpetrating a “coup” by the “deep state”; Trump and his associates aren’t corrupt, but America’s law-enforcement officials and courts are; illegal immigration isn’t at a fifteen-year low, it’s “an invasion”; and news organizations that offer different perspectives are “enemies of the American people.” Benkler’s assessment is based on an analysis of millions of American news stories that he and two co-authors, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, undertook for their 2018 book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics.” Benkler told me that he and his co-authors had expected to find “symmetric polarization” in the left-leaning and the right-leaning media outlets. Instead, they discovered that the two poles of America’s media ecosystem function very differently. “It’s not the right versus the left,” Benkler says. “It’s the right versus the rest.”"]
McAlevey, Jane. "It's Time to Retire the Term 'Middle-Class.'" Citations Needed #91 (October 23, 2019) ["The term “middle class” is used so much by pundits and politicians, it could easily be the Free Space in any political rhetoric Bingo card. After all, who’s opposed to strengthening, widening, and protecting the “middle class”? Like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights”, “middle class” is an unimpeachable, unassailable label that evokes warm feelings and a sense of collective morality.
But the term itself, always slippery and changing based on context, has evolved from a vague aspiration marked by safety, a nice home, and a white picket fence into something more sinister, racially-coded, and deliberately obscuring. The middle class isn’t about concrete, material positive rights of good housing and economic security––it’s a capitalist carrot hovering over our heads telling us such things are possible if we Only Work Harder. More than anything, it's a way for politicians to gesture towards populism without the messiness of mentioning––much less centering––the poor and poverty. This week we are joined by Jane McAlevey, a union organizer, scholar and Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center."]
McChesney, Robert W. and John Nichols. "The Bull Market: Political Advertising." Monthly Review (April 1, 2012) ["The two logical questions then are where does all this money get spent and what are the effects of this spending on elections and the political system? The short answer to the first question is known by all participants in and observers of American elections: the majority of the money goes to political advertising, and within political advertising the vast majority goes to television ads. The percentage of campaign spending that goes to TV ads has increased sharply over the past forty years. If there is a rule it is that the closer a race, the more money will be spent on the campaigns, and the higher the proportion that will go to paid TV political advertisements. “We spent the vast majority of our money last time on broadcast television,” Obama campaign advisor David Axelrod told attendees at a 2011 cable convention. “It’s still the nuclear weapon.”1 This year, according to a fresh report to investors from Needham and Company’s industry analysts, television stations will reap as much as $5 billion—up from $2.8 billion in 2008."]
McNeil, Leila. "Surely You're a Creep, Mr. Feynman: On Toxic Moral License and the Mythos of Male Scientific Genius." The Baffler #43 (February 2019)
McNeil, Leila, et al. "Pilot!" Lady Science #1 (2017) ["In our pilot episode, learn about Lady Science Magazine, meet its editors, and join our discussion about the history of nursing. We discuss the mythic representation of Florence Nightingale, and historian of science Jenna Tonn joins us to talk about the historical roots of the "naughty nurse" trope."]
Merchants of Doubt (USA: Kim Roberts and Robert Kenner, 2014: 93 mins) ["Merchants of Doubt looks at the well established Public Relations tactic of saturating the media with shills who present themselves as independent scientific authorities on issues in order to cast doubt in the public mind. The film looks at how this tactic, that was originally developed by the tobacco industry to obfuscate the health risks of smoking, has since come to cloud other issues such as the pervasiveness of toxic chemicals, flame retardants, asbestos, certain pharmaceutical drugs and now, climate change. Using the icon of a magician, Merchants of Doubt explores the analogy between these tactics and the methods used by magicians to distract their audiences from observing how illusions are performed. For example, with the tobacco industry, the shills successfully delayed government regulation until long after the health risks from smoking was unequivocally proven. Likewise with manufacturers of flame retardants, who worked to protect their sales after the toxic effects and pervasiveness of the chemicals were discovered. This is all made analogous to the ongoing use of these very same tactics to forestall governmental action in regards to global climate change today."]
Miller, Mark Crispin. "Propaganda 101: How Do You Manufacture Consent?" History Counts (July 4, 2010)
Mitchell, W.J.T. "The Trolls of Academe: Making Safe Spaces into Brave Spaces." Los Angeles Review of Books (January 5, 2018) [ Response by Horowitz with a rejoinder by Mitchell ]
Morozov, Evgeny. "Tech-Master Disaster: Part One." Open Source (September 12, 2019) ["Techno-capitalism's moral and intellectual calamities. ... There’s trouble in the magic Kingdom of Advanced Computation, and the late Jeffrey Epstein leads us to it. This hour is one man’s critical overview of the kingdom and its landscape. Silicon is its valley, its production center out west. The Media Lab at MIT has been high ground of ideas on the east coast. WIRED is the magazine of the realm; TED talks are its showcase. It’s a kingdom of masterful men—names like Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, and Kurzweil. And it has its own code of intelligence, called AI, A for Artificial. It has its high priests like Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Lab in 1985 and of WIRED magazine in 1993. Linkages are tight and loyalty is firm to some central ideas, above all that technology is good for everybody. If it can’t fix a problem, it can transform it—even ultimate challenges of life and death. This kingdom of computation has had it rogue financiers, like the late Jeffrey Epstein. And it has its dissenters, too. Our guest this hour is eminent among those critical insiders: the writer-historian Evgeny Morozov."]
Moser, Bob. "Interference 2020: The Disinformation is Coming from Inside the Country." Columbia Review of Journalism (Fall 2019)
Moss, Candida. "Trump and the Christian Persecution Complex." On the Media (June 3, 2020) ["On Monday, President Trump stood outside St. John's Episcopal Church, which had caught fire the day prior in protests for racial justice. When he brandished a Bible before photographers, Trump knew exactly what message he was sending: Christianity is under siege and the president is the defender of the faith. Never mind the fact that peaceful protesters, clergy among them, were driven from the area minutes before with tear gas to make way for the photoshoot. The narrative of Christianity under attack is a familiar one. Just a few weeks ago, Trump declared that houses of worship should open amid the pandemic on the grounds of religious liberty — despite the public health risk. But it turns out, the myth of Christian persecution can be traced far further back than the Culture Wars. In fact, according to Candida Moss, Christian historians coined the idea that to be persecuted was to be righteous in the 4th Century and they exaggerated claims that Christians were persecuted in the first place. Moss is a professor of theology and religion at Birmingham University in the U.K., and author of The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom. Moss spoke to Bob just after Trump has announced his call for churches to open. In this week's Pod Extra she explains how Christian history has been revised for political means, from the early church to present day."]
Mullen, Stephen. "The Myth of Scottish Slaves." Skeptical Scot (March 4, 2016)
Nyhan, Brendan. "Purple Episode 2: Low Information, High Misinformation Voters." On the Media (November 24, 2019) ["The Pizzagate pedophile conspiracy, crisis actors at Sandy Hook, the flat Earthers...and on and on. Absolute nonsense peddled by the cynical and the naive, and eagerly lapped up by the gullible. Misinformation is a problem that Brendan Nyhan, professor of government at Dartmouth College, has studied for years. In this interview, Brendan and Bob discuss new research on how Americans form their political beliefs and how civic institutions may begin to win back their trust."]
Olenick, Michael. "Debunking Another Misleading Gun Study." Naked Capitalism (September 12, 2018)
Oliver, John, et al. "Confronting the Legacy of the Confederacy." Best of the Left #1186 (May 29, 2018) ["Today we take a look at the legacy of the Confederacy, the monuments and white supremacy it left behind and the racial terror institutionalized in America based on upholding its values."]
Palmquist, Ben. "The 80 Year PR Campaign That Killed Universal Healthcare." Citations Needed #134 (April 21, 2021) ["Almost every wealthy country in the world has some type of universal healthcare system--except for the United States. With over 170 million of its citizens left to fend for themselves in a sprawling and complex maze of Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, tax credits, child care subsidies, co-pays, deductibles and cost-sharing, the U.S. has not only the largest uninsured population, but also the most expensive system on Earth per capita. Why America doesn’t have a universal healthcare system has historically been explained away with a reductionist mix of pathologizing and circular reasoning. "America hates big government," "we love choice," "Americans distrust anything that reeks of socialism." And while this is true in some limited sense, it avoids the bigger question of why has American so-called "democracy" rejected the numerous proposals to enact a single payer or other forms of universal healthcare? While there may be some innate Protestant work ethic or rugged individual mentality at work here, there’s also been a decades-long multimillion dollar campaign funded by big business, doctor, pharmaceutical and hospital industry interests, and the insurance industry to convince the public to reject universal public healthcare. Indeed, if Americans were somehow intractably opposed to the notion––if they were hardwired to reject socialized medicine––these forces would never have had to spend so much money in the first place. On this episode, we explore the 80-year long campaign by capital to convince you to not support universal health programs, how these campaigns have historically fear-mongered against Communists, immigrants and African Americans, who benefits from a precarious, employer-controlled healthcare insurance system, and how this propaganda war on the American mind is anything but over. Our guest is Ben Palmquist, Director of the Health Care and Economic Democracy Program at Partners for Dignity and Rights."]
Phillips, Whitney. "The Toxins We Carry." Columbia Journalism Review (Fall 2019) ["Disinformation is polluting our media environment. Facts won’t save us."]
Pilger, John. "Power, Illusion, and America's Last Taboo." Dandelion Salad (September 2, 2009) ["It was Bernays who, in the 1920s, invented “public relations” as a euphemism for propaganda. Deploying the ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation; he called cigarettes “torches of freedom.” The invisible government that Bernays had in mind brought together the power of all media — PR, the press, broadcasting, advertising. It was the power of form: of branding and image-making over substance and truth — and I would like to talk today about this invisible government’s most recent achievement: the rise of Barack Obama and the silencing of the left."]
Pinsker, Joe and Kelly Weill. "What to Say When a Loved One Spreads Disinfo." On the Media (May 15, 2020) ["Last month, law enforcement across Western Europe reported a slew of arson attacks on 5G towers. The vandalization spree is likely tied to a bizarre conspiracy theory that claims the enormous uptick in deaths has been caused by nascent 5G technology, not the Covid-19 virus. Meanwhile, Americans have been exposed to a flurry of pandemic disinformation. According to a recent Pew study, nearly one third of Americans believe an unsubstantiated theory that the virus was concocted in a lab, a claim repeated by President Trump himself. Earlier this month, a highly-produced anti-vax video called "Plandemic" found an unusually high degree of traction on the internet. According to Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill, this video and other forms of Covid-19 disinformation may be leading some Americans to other dangerous conspiracy theories like QAnon. She and Bob discuss what makes such outlandish fake media so effective. Then, Bob speaks with Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker, who crafted a set of guidelines for cautiously confronting friends and family who may be in the early stages of a conspiracy theory kick."]
Pomerantsev, Peter. "The Info War of All Against All." The New York Review of Books (August 23, 2019)
Prashad, Vijay. "Afghanistan Papers an eerie reminder of Vietnam." Asia Times (December 11, 2019)
Propaganda Thought Maybe (Ongoing Archive of Documentaries)
Propaganda Critic ["Created almost 25 years ago, when the web was in its infancy, Propaganda Critic is dedicated to promoting techniques of propaganda analysis among critically minded citizens. In 2018, realizing that traditional approaches to propaganda analysis were not well-suited for making sense out of our contemporary political crisis, we completely overhauled Propaganda Critic to take into account the rise of ‘computational propaganda.’ In addition to updating all of the original content, we added nearly two dozen new articles exploring the rise of computational propaganda, explaining recent research on cognitive biases that influence how we interpret and retain information, and presenting recent case studies of how propaganda techniques have been used to disrupt democracy around the world. The name “propaganda critic” should not be interpreted as suggesting that there is only room for one propaganda critic. In a functioning democracy, all thinking citizens are entitled to consider themselves critics of propaganda."]
PR Watch [“Every day, companies and their front groups are spending millions of dollars to benefit narrow corporate interests in ways that hurt the lives and livelihoods of people in every state – and they are trying to do this from the shadows. Our investigative work is focused on giving regular people a clear view into the deep-pocketed billionaires, pay-to-play groups and corporations that that are damaging our democratic institutions.” – Lisa Graves, Executive Director of CMD.]
Quinby, Brian. "Mike Rowe’s Koch-Backed Working Man Affectation." Citations Needed #64 (January 30, 2019) ["In recent years, television personality Mike Rowe has amassed a wildly popular following due to alleged working-class straight talk about topics ranging from the affordability of college to reasserting a culture of pride in craftsmanship and labor. From his 5.2 million Facebook followers to his cable programs, his everyman schtick, on its surface, can be very appealing: after all, who doesn’t love a hard day’s work and loathe detached, ivory tower eggheads? But hiding under his superficially appealing blue-collar façade is dangerous ideology, one funded by the Koch Brothers and other far-right, anti-labor corporate interests and specifically tailored to pick off a certain constituency of Home Depot Democrats while pushing political impotence, anti-union narratives and anti-intellectualism. Through a clever combination of working class affectation and folksy charm – often exploiting real fears about a decline in industrialization – Rowe has cultivated an image that claims to be pro-worker, but primarily exists to line the pockets of their boss."]
Radsch, Courtney and Sarah Leah Whitson. "Netflix Censors Hasan Minhaj in Saudi Arabia, Sparking Backlash over Khashoggi Killing, War in Yemen." Democracy Now (January 3, 2019) ["Netflix is under fire for pulling an episode of U.S. comedian Hasan Minhaj’s show “Patriot Act” from Saudi Arabia, after officials from the kingdom complained to the streaming company that it violated Saudi cybercrime laws. The episode was posted in late October, a few weeks after Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Hasan Minhaj sharply criticized the Saudi royal family and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The censored episode has been viewed more than 1.6 million times on YouTube, where it remains available to viewers in Saudi Arabia. On Wednesday, Minhaj tweeted, “Clearly, the best way to stop people from watching something is to ban it, make it trend online, and then leave it up on YouTube. Let’s not forget that the world’s largest humanitarian crisis is happening in Yemen right now. Please donate: help.rescue.org/donate/yemen.” We speak with Courtney Radsch, advocacy director at the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division."]
Rampton, Sheldon. "Books on Propaganda." PR Watch (July 7, 2009)
Kaiser, Brittany. "Meet Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Releasing Troves of New Files from Data Firm." Democracy Now (January 7, 2020) ["New details are emerging about how the shadowy data firm Cambridge Analytica worked to manipulate voters across the globe, from the 2016 election in the United States to the Brexit campaign in Britain and elections in over 60 other countries, including Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil. A new trove of internal Cambridge Analytica documents and emails are being posted on Twitter detailing the company’s operations, including its work with President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. The documents come from Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser, who worked at the firm for three-and-a-half years before leaving in 2018. We speak with Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, co-directors of the Oscar shortlisted documentary “The Great Hack”; Brittany Kaiser, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower featured in “The Great Hack” and author of “Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again”; and Emma Briant, a visiting research associate in human rights at Bard College whose upcoming book is titled “Propaganda Machine: Inside Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry.”" Part Two: "The Great Hack: Big Data Firms Helped Sway the 2016 Election. Could It Happen Again in 2020?" Part Three: "Propaganda Machine: The Military Roots of Cambridge Analytica’s Psychological Manipulation of Voters."]
Kaufman, Amy S. and Paul B. Sturtevant. "Devil's Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (University of Toronto Press, 2020)." New Books in History (July 23, 2021) ["In The Devil's Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant examine the many ways in which the medieval past has been manipulated to promote discrimination, oppression, and murder. Tracing the fetish for “medieval times” behind toxic ideologies like nationalism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and white supremacy, Kaufman and Sturtevant show us how the Middle Ages have been twisted for political purposes in every century that followed. The Devil’s Historians casts aside the myth of an oppressive, patriarchal medieval monoculture and reveals a medieval world not often shown in popular culture: one that is diverse, thriving, courageous, compelling, and complex."]
Kelly, Sharon. "Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 Risks." Desmog (March 16, 2020)
Krekó, Péter and Patrik Szicherle. "Gone Viral: Covid-19 in the disinformation ecosystem." Eurozine (March 17, 2020)
Kroll, Andy. "Media Giant Sinclair, Under Fire for Forcing Anchors to Read Trumpian Screed, Is Rapidly Expanding." Democracy Now (April 3, 2018) ["While Sinclair Broadcast Group is not a household name, it is one of the most powerful TV companies in the nation. It owns 173 local TV stations across the country, including affiliates of all the major networks. And it’s attempting to grow even larger by purchasing Tribune Media—a $3.9 billion deal currently under regulatory review. Sinclair has been widely criticized for its close ties to the White House. But Sinclair is facing new scrutiny after it ordered news anchors at scores of its affiliate stations to recite nearly identical “must-read” commentaries warning of the dangers of “fake news” in language that echoes President Trump’s rhetoric. The commentaries reached millions of viewers last month and drew widespread attention after the website Deadspin published a video over the weekend showing side-by-side comparisons of the broadcasts from 45 Sinclair-owned stations."]
Kuo, Rachel and Alice Marwick. "Critical disinformation studies: History, power, and politics." Mis/Information Review (August 12, 2021)
Leary, John Patrick. "'Meritocracy' Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means." On the Media (March 15, 2019) ["This week, fifty people were charged by federal prosecutors in a college admissions scandal. As the public dug into the details of how wealthy parents made payments to help their students get into elite (and not so elite) universities around the country, some of the discussion centered around "the myth of meritocracy" in the United States. The trouble is, the myth of "meritocracy" goes much deeper than this story. The word was actually coined as satire in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young, who was criticizing the role that the UK's elite education system had in shaping the hierarchy of British society. This week, Bob speaks with John Patrick Leary about the satirical origins of the word and what it has come to mean in the US. He says there are actually two myths: "the myth that there is such a thing, and the myth that the United States is committed to that imaginary thing." Leary is a professor of English at Wayne State University and author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism."]
Lee, Kelly, Martin McKee and Mark P. Pettigrew. "Type A Behavior Pattern and Coronary Heart Disease: Philip Morris’s 'Crown Jewel.'" American Journal of Public Health 102.11 (November 2012): 2018 -2025. Leary, John Patrick. "'Meritocracy' Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means." On the Media (March 15, 2019) ["This week, fifty people were charged by federal prosecutors in a college admissions scandal. As the public dug into the details of how wealthy parents made payments to help their students get into elite (and not so elite) universities around the country, some of the discussion centered around "the myth of meritocracy" in the United States. The trouble is, the myth of "meritocracy" goes much deeper than this story. The word was actually coined as satire in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young, who was criticizing the role that the UK's elite education system had in shaping the hierarchy of British society. This week, Bob speaks with John Patrick Leary about the satirical origins of the word and what it has come to mean in the US. He says there are actually two myths: "the myth that there is such a thing, and the myth that the United States is committed to that imaginary thing." Leary is a professor of English at Wayne State University and author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism."]
Lerner, Sharon. "How the Media Launders Fossil Fuel Industry Propaganda Through Branded Content." The Intercept (April 3, 2019)
Lifton, Robert Jay. "The Assault on Reality." Dissent (April 10, 2018) ["Essential to understanding Trump is his attempt to subject the public to his own solipsistic reality—and thereby destroy our shared basis for democracy."]
Loewen, James. "Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History (Teachers College Press, 2018)." New Books in History (January 3, 2019) ["In an atmosphere filled with social media and fake news, history is more important than ever. But, what do you really know about history? In the second edition of his book, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History (Teachers College Press, 2018). Dr. James W. Loewen interrogates what we think we know about our past. Loewen, a sociologist and professor at the University of Vermont, shows readers that history must be reconsidered in order to avoid previously accepted misconceptions. As Loewen demonstrates throughout this valuable text, teachers must look beyond the textbook to discover what really happened and to teach their students how to "do" history. Teaching What Really Happened is an eye-opening book that reinvigorates history and empowers its readers."]
Lombardi, Amy J. "On the Origins of the term 'Doublespeak.'" The Daily Doublespeak (September 4, 2008)
Macleod, Alan. "Support the Tropes: How media language encourages the left to support wars, coups and intervention." FAIR (April 9, 2021)
Maguire, Mairead. "Demonization of Russia in a New Cold War Era." Counterpunch (September 17, 2018)
Mayer, Jane. "FOX News White House." The New Yorker (March 11, 2019) ["As Murdoch’s relations with the White House have warmed, so has Fox’s coverage of Trump. During the Obama years, Fox’s attacks on the President could be seen as reflecting the adversarial role traditionally played by the press. With Trump’s election, the network’s hosts went from questioning power to defending it. Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor who co-directs the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, says, “Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.” The network has provided a non-stop counternarrative in which the only collusion is between Hillary Clinton and Russia; Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is perpetrating a “coup” by the “deep state”; Trump and his associates aren’t corrupt, but America’s law-enforcement officials and courts are; illegal immigration isn’t at a fifteen-year low, it’s “an invasion”; and news organizations that offer different perspectives are “enemies of the American people.” Benkler’s assessment is based on an analysis of millions of American news stories that he and two co-authors, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, undertook for their 2018 book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics.” Benkler told me that he and his co-authors had expected to find “symmetric polarization” in the left-leaning and the right-leaning media outlets. Instead, they discovered that the two poles of America’s media ecosystem function very differently. “It’s not the right versus the left,” Benkler says. “It’s the right versus the rest.”"]
McAlevey, Jane. "It's Time to Retire the Term 'Middle-Class.'" Citations Needed #91 (October 23, 2019) ["The term “middle class” is used so much by pundits and politicians, it could easily be the Free Space in any political rhetoric Bingo card. After all, who’s opposed to strengthening, widening, and protecting the “middle class”? Like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights”, “middle class” is an unimpeachable, unassailable label that evokes warm feelings and a sense of collective morality.
But the term itself, always slippery and changing based on context, has evolved from a vague aspiration marked by safety, a nice home, and a white picket fence into something more sinister, racially-coded, and deliberately obscuring. The middle class isn’t about concrete, material positive rights of good housing and economic security––it’s a capitalist carrot hovering over our heads telling us such things are possible if we Only Work Harder. More than anything, it's a way for politicians to gesture towards populism without the messiness of mentioning––much less centering––the poor and poverty. This week we are joined by Jane McAlevey, a union organizer, scholar and Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center."]
McNeil, Leila. "Surely You're a Creep, Mr. Feynman: On Toxic Moral License and the Mythos of Male Scientific Genius." The Baffler #43 (February 2019)
McNeil, Leila, et al. "Pilot!" Lady Science #1 (2017) ["In our pilot episode, learn about Lady Science Magazine, meet its editors, and join our discussion about the history of nursing. We discuss the mythic representation of Florence Nightingale, and historian of science Jenna Tonn joins us to talk about the historical roots of the "naughty nurse" trope."]
Merchants of Doubt (USA: Kim Roberts and Robert Kenner, 2014: 93 mins) ["Merchants of Doubt looks at the well established Public Relations tactic of saturating the media with shills who present themselves as independent scientific authorities on issues in order to cast doubt in the public mind. The film looks at how this tactic, that was originally developed by the tobacco industry to obfuscate the health risks of smoking, has since come to cloud other issues such as the pervasiveness of toxic chemicals, flame retardants, asbestos, certain pharmaceutical drugs and now, climate change. Using the icon of a magician, Merchants of Doubt explores the analogy between these tactics and the methods used by magicians to distract their audiences from observing how illusions are performed. For example, with the tobacco industry, the shills successfully delayed government regulation until long after the health risks from smoking was unequivocally proven. Likewise with manufacturers of flame retardants, who worked to protect their sales after the toxic effects and pervasiveness of the chemicals were discovered. This is all made analogous to the ongoing use of these very same tactics to forestall governmental action in regards to global climate change today."]
Mitchell, W.J.T. "The Trolls of Academe: Making Safe Spaces into Brave Spaces." Los Angeles Review of Books (January 5, 2018) [ Response by Horowitz with a rejoinder by Mitchell ]
Moser, Bob. "Interference 2020: The Disinformation is Coming from Inside the Country." Columbia Review of Journalism (Fall 2019)
Moss, Candida. "Trump and the Christian Persecution Complex." On the Media (June 3, 2020) ["On Monday, President Trump stood outside St. John's Episcopal Church, which had caught fire the day prior in protests for racial justice. When he brandished a Bible before photographers, Trump knew exactly what message he was sending: Christianity is under siege and the president is the defender of the faith. Never mind the fact that peaceful protesters, clergy among them, were driven from the area minutes before with tear gas to make way for the photoshoot. The narrative of Christianity under attack is a familiar one. Just a few weeks ago, Trump declared that houses of worship should open amid the pandemic on the grounds of religious liberty — despite the public health risk. But it turns out, the myth of Christian persecution can be traced far further back than the Culture Wars. In fact, according to Candida Moss, Christian historians coined the idea that to be persecuted was to be righteous in the 4th Century and they exaggerated claims that Christians were persecuted in the first place. Moss is a professor of theology and religion at Birmingham University in the U.K., and author of The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom. Moss spoke to Bob just after Trump has announced his call for churches to open. In this week's Pod Extra she explains how Christian history has been revised for political means, from the early church to present day."]
Nyhan, Brendan. "Purple Episode 2: Low Information, High Misinformation Voters." On the Media (November 24, 2019) ["The Pizzagate pedophile conspiracy, crisis actors at Sandy Hook, the flat Earthers...and on and on. Absolute nonsense peddled by the cynical and the naive, and eagerly lapped up by the gullible. Misinformation is a problem that Brendan Nyhan, professor of government at Dartmouth College, has studied for years. In this interview, Brendan and Bob discuss new research on how Americans form their political beliefs and how civic institutions may begin to win back their trust."]
Olenick, Michael. "Debunking Another Misleading Gun Study." Naked Capitalism (September 12, 2018)
Oliver, John, et al. "Confronting the Legacy of the Confederacy." Best of the Left #1186 (May 29, 2018) ["Today we take a look at the legacy of the Confederacy, the monuments and white supremacy it left behind and the racial terror institutionalized in America based on upholding its values."]
Palmquist, Ben. "The 80 Year PR Campaign That Killed Universal Healthcare." Citations Needed #134 (April 21, 2021) ["Almost every wealthy country in the world has some type of universal healthcare system--except for the United States. With over 170 million of its citizens left to fend for themselves in a sprawling and complex maze of Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, tax credits, child care subsidies, co-pays, deductibles and cost-sharing, the U.S. has not only the largest uninsured population, but also the most expensive system on Earth per capita. Why America doesn’t have a universal healthcare system has historically been explained away with a reductionist mix of pathologizing and circular reasoning. "America hates big government," "we love choice," "Americans distrust anything that reeks of socialism." And while this is true in some limited sense, it avoids the bigger question of why has American so-called "democracy" rejected the numerous proposals to enact a single payer or other forms of universal healthcare? While there may be some innate Protestant work ethic or rugged individual mentality at work here, there’s also been a decades-long multimillion dollar campaign funded by big business, doctor, pharmaceutical and hospital industry interests, and the insurance industry to convince the public to reject universal public healthcare. Indeed, if Americans were somehow intractably opposed to the notion––if they were hardwired to reject socialized medicine––these forces would never have had to spend so much money in the first place. On this episode, we explore the 80-year long campaign by capital to convince you to not support universal health programs, how these campaigns have historically fear-mongered against Communists, immigrants and African Americans, who benefits from a precarious, employer-controlled healthcare insurance system, and how this propaganda war on the American mind is anything but over. Our guest is Ben Palmquist, Director of the Health Care and Economic Democracy Program at Partners for Dignity and Rights."]
Perez, Caroline Criado. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Abrams, 2019. ["Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development to health care to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this insidious bias, in time, in money, and often with their lives. Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates this shocking root cause of gender inequality in the award-winning, #1 international bestseller Invisible Women. Examining the home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor's office, and more, Criado Perez unearths a dangerous pattern in data and its consequences on women's lives. Product designers use a "one-size-fits-all" approach to everything from pianos to cell phones to voice recognition software, when in fact this approach is designed to fit men. Cities prioritize men's needs when designing public transportation, roads, and even snow removal, neglecting to consider women's safety or unique responsibilities and travel patterns. And in medical research, women have largely been excluded from studies and textbooks, leaving them chronically misunderstood, mistreated, and misdiagnosed. Built on hundreds of studies in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and around the world, and written with energy, wit, and sparkling intelligence, this is a groundbreaking, highly readable exposé that will change the way you look at the world."]
Phillips, Whitney. "The Toxins We Carry." Columbia Journalism Review (Fall 2019) ["Disinformation is polluting our media environment. Facts won’t save us."]
Pinsker, Joe and Kelly Weill. "What to Say When a Loved One Spreads Disinfo." On the Media (May 15, 2020) ["Last month, law enforcement across Western Europe reported a slew of arson attacks on 5G towers. The vandalization spree is likely tied to a bizarre conspiracy theory that claims the enormous uptick in deaths has been caused by nascent 5G technology, not the Covid-19 virus. Meanwhile, Americans have been exposed to a flurry of pandemic disinformation. According to a recent Pew study, nearly one third of Americans believe an unsubstantiated theory that the virus was concocted in a lab, a claim repeated by President Trump himself. Earlier this month, a highly-produced anti-vax video called "Plandemic" found an unusually high degree of traction on the internet. According to Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill, this video and other forms of Covid-19 disinformation may be leading some Americans to other dangerous conspiracy theories like QAnon. She and Bob discuss what makes such outlandish fake media so effective. Then, Bob speaks with Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker, who crafted a set of guidelines for cautiously confronting friends and family who may be in the early stages of a conspiracy theory kick."]
Pomerantsev, Peter. "The Info War of All Against All." The New York Review of Books (August 23, 2019)
Prashad, Vijay. "Afghanistan Papers an eerie reminder of Vietnam." Asia Times (December 11, 2019)
Propaganda Thought Maybe (Ongoing Archive of Documentaries)
Propaganda Critic ["Created almost 25 years ago, when the web was in its infancy, Propaganda Critic is dedicated to promoting techniques of propaganda analysis among critically minded citizens. In 2018, realizing that traditional approaches to propaganda analysis were not well-suited for making sense out of our contemporary political crisis, we completely overhauled Propaganda Critic to take into account the rise of ‘computational propaganda.’ In addition to updating all of the original content, we added nearly two dozen new articles exploring the rise of computational propaganda, explaining recent research on cognitive biases that influence how we interpret and retain information, and presenting recent case studies of how propaganda techniques have been used to disrupt democracy around the world. The name “propaganda critic” should not be interpreted as suggesting that there is only room for one propaganda critic. In a functioning democracy, all thinking citizens are entitled to consider themselves critics of propaganda."]
PR Watch [“Every day, companies and their front groups are spending millions of dollars to benefit narrow corporate interests in ways that hurt the lives and livelihoods of people in every state – and they are trying to do this from the shadows. Our investigative work is focused on giving regular people a clear view into the deep-pocketed billionaires, pay-to-play groups and corporations that that are damaging our democratic institutions.” – Lisa Graves, Executive Director of CMD.]
Quinby, Brian. "Mike Rowe’s Koch-Backed Working Man Affectation." Citations Needed #64 (January 30, 2019) ["In recent years, television personality Mike Rowe has amassed a wildly popular following due to alleged working-class straight talk about topics ranging from the affordability of college to reasserting a culture of pride in craftsmanship and labor. From his 5.2 million Facebook followers to his cable programs, his everyman schtick, on its surface, can be very appealing: after all, who doesn’t love a hard day’s work and loathe detached, ivory tower eggheads? But hiding under his superficially appealing blue-collar façade is dangerous ideology, one funded by the Koch Brothers and other far-right, anti-labor corporate interests and specifically tailored to pick off a certain constituency of Home Depot Democrats while pushing political impotence, anti-union narratives and anti-intellectualism. Through a clever combination of working class affectation and folksy charm – often exploiting real fears about a decline in industrialization – Rowe has cultivated an image that claims to be pro-worker, but primarily exists to line the pockets of their boss."]
Radsch, Courtney and Sarah Leah Whitson. "Netflix Censors Hasan Minhaj in Saudi Arabia, Sparking Backlash over Khashoggi Killing, War in Yemen." Democracy Now (January 3, 2019) ["Netflix is under fire for pulling an episode of U.S. comedian Hasan Minhaj’s show “Patriot Act” from Saudi Arabia, after officials from the kingdom complained to the streaming company that it violated Saudi cybercrime laws. The episode was posted in late October, a few weeks after Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Hasan Minhaj sharply criticized the Saudi royal family and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The censored episode has been viewed more than 1.6 million times on YouTube, where it remains available to viewers in Saudi Arabia. On Wednesday, Minhaj tweeted, “Clearly, the best way to stop people from watching something is to ban it, make it trend online, and then leave it up on YouTube. Let’s not forget that the world’s largest humanitarian crisis is happening in Yemen right now. Please donate: help.rescue.org/donate/yemen.” We speak with Courtney Radsch, advocacy director at the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division."]
Ray, Tarence. "United in Rage." The Baffler (July 2021) ["Half-truths and myths propelled Kentucky’s war on opioids."]
Rich, Nathaniel. "Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change." The New York Times Magazine (August 1, 2018) ["This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it."]
Rippon, Gina. "Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (Vintage 2020)." New Books in Gender Studies (October 27, 2020) ["For decades if not centuries, science has backed up society’s simple dictum that men and women are hardwired differently, that the world is divided by two different kinds of brains—male and female. However, new research in neuroimaging suggests that this is little more than “neurotrash.” In Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (Vintage, 2020), acclaimed professor of neuroimaging, Gina Rippon, finally challenges this damaging myth by showing how the science community has engendered bias and stereotype by rewarding studies that show difference rather than sameness. Drawing on cutting edge research in neuroscience and psychology, Rippon presents the latest evidence which finally proves that brains are like mosaics comprised of both male and female components, and that they remain plastic, adapting throughout the course of a person’s life. Discernable gender identities, she asserts, are shaped by society where scientific misconceptions continue to be wielded and perpetuated to the detriment of our children, our own lives, and our culture. Gina Rippon is a British neuroscientist and feminist. She is a an honorary professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University in Birmingham, England. In 2015 she was made honorary fellow of the British Science Association. Rippon has also sat on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychophysiology, and is a member of the European Union Gender Equality Network, belongs to WISE and ScienceGrrl, and the Inspiring the Future intiative."]
Roose, Kevin. "QAnon Followers Are Hijacking the #SaveTheChildren Movement." The New York Times (August 12, 2020) ["Fans of the pro-Trump conspiracy theory are clogging anti-trafficking hotlines, infiltrating Facebook groups and raising false fears about child exploitation."]
Rosenwald, Michael. "Top Secret." Columbia Review of Journalism (Fall 2019) [British and American origins of the contemporary information war "As the US press has covered Russia’s meddling in American politics, a counternarrative, about information warfare waged by our own government, has gone largely ignored. In fact, American reporters, if they wanted, could build a credible case that Putin’s disinformation efforts, which often use the media as an unknowing accomplice, simply carry on a tradition honed in this country, going back decades."]
Rushkoff, Douglas. "Introduction: They Say." Coercion: Why We Listen To What 'They' Say. Penguin Putnam, 1999 (Excerpt)
Saini, Angela. "Junk Science: How belief in biological racial difference pollutes the world of science, from eugenics to genetics." American Scholar (August 9, 2019) ["For our 100th episode, we welcome back science journalist Angela Saini, whose work deflates the myths we tell ourselves about science existing in an apolitical vacuum. With far-right nationalism and white supremacy on the rise around the world, pseudoscientific and pseudointellectual justifications for racism are on the rise—and troublingly mainstream. Race is a relatively recent concept, but dress it up in a white lab coat and it becomes an incredibly toxic justification for a whole range of policies, from health to immigration. It is tempting to dismiss white-supremacist cranks who chug milk to show their superior lactose tolerance, but it’s harder to do so when those in positions of power—like senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller or pseudointellectual Jordan Peterson—spout the same rhetoric. The consequences can be more insidious, too: consider how we discuss the health outcomes for different groups of people as biological inevitabilities, not the results of social inequality. Drawing on archives and interviews with dozens of prominent scientists, Saini shows how race science never really left us—and that in 2019, scientists are as obsessed as ever with the vanishingly small biological differences between us."]
Schaeffer, Jan. "Purple Episode 4: Media to the Rescue?" On the Media (November 26, 2019) ["A 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, showed only 23 percent of eighth graders in the United States attained “proficient” status in civics. A 2011 Newsweek survey found that 70 percent of Americans didn’t even know that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. And only 26% of those surveyed in 2017 by the University of Pennsylvania could name all three branches of government. And no wonder: with STEM curriculum and standardized testing squeezing the school day, civics has become the snow leopard of the social studies curriculum. So if the knowledge vacuum is otherwise filled by misinformation and disinformation, and the result is a loss of faith and trust in democracy itself, who is left to intervene? Jan Schaffer — ombudsman for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, Pulitzer Prize–winning former journalist and founder of The Institute for Interactive Journalism — talks to Bob about what responsibility the media have to become educators, and maybe even re-assurers, of last resort."]
Schwartz, Leo. "Disinformation Meets the Coronavirus." Columbia Journalism Review (March 19, 2020)
Smith, Jordan. "The Authors of The Cadaver King and The Country Dentist on the Legacy of Junk Forensics in Mississippi and Beyond." The Intercept (April 22, 2018)
SourceWatch ["The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) publishes SourceWatch, this collaborative, specialized encyclopedia of the people, organizations, and issues shaping the public agenda.SourceWatch profiles the activities of front groups, PR spinners, industry-friendly experts, industry-funded organizations, and think tanks trying to manipulate public opinion on behalf of corporations or government. We also highlight key public policies they are trying to affect and provide ways to get involved. In addition, SourceWatch contains information about others who help document information about PR spin, such as reporters, academics, and watchdog groups."]
Spiegel, Alex. "The Secret History Behind the Science of Stress." All Things Considered (July 7, 2014)
Springer, Claudia. "Shadow Films: Picturing the Environmental Crisis." Jump Cut #58 (Spring 2018) ["For the powerful forces invested in preserving the status quo, even limited environmental protections that threaten traditional modes of corporate profit-making provoke fierce opposition. Corporate stakeholders wield political power through lobbying and donations, and, increasingly, they hold government positions. A 2016 study by the Center for American Progress Action Fund found that 34% of American Congress members denied climate change and had been paid over $73 million in contributions by oil, gas, and coal companies. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who famously claimed that climate change is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," has reportedly accepted more than $2 million from the fossil fuel industry (Herzog). The fallout from political inaction means that people have lost their lives in the U.S., China, Nigeria, Ecuador, and Peru, among other countries, because of the oil, gas, and mining industries' toxic practices and attacks on opponents. The propaganda battles fought with images inflame a war with catastrophic consequences."]
Springston, Rex. "Happy slaves? The peculiar story of three Virginia school textbooks." Richmond Times-Dispatch (April 15, 2018)
Staal, Jonas. Propaganda Art: From the 20th to the 21st Century. (Dissertation: University of Amsterdam, 2018)
---. "Propaganda (Art) Struggle." October #94 (October 2018) ["To oppose the various propagandas discussed above, we will need infrastructures and narratives that mobilize the imagination to construct a different world. To achieve this, we will need an emancipatory propaganda and an emancipatory propaganda art. There is no prior reality to which we should strive to return; there will only be the realities that we will author collectively ourselves."]
Stanley, Jason. "Introduction: The Problem of Propaganda." How Propaganda Works. Princeton University Press, 2015: 1 - 26. ["Our democracy today is fraught with political campaigns, lobbyists, liberal media, and Fox News commentators, all using language to influence the way we think and reason about public issues. Even so, many of us believe that propaganda and manipulation aren't problems for us―not in the way they were for the totalitarian societies of the mid-twentieth century. In How Propaganda Works, Jason Stanley demonstrates that more attention needs to be paid. He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy―particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality―and how it has damaged democracies of the past. Focusing on the shortcomings of liberal democratic states, Stanley provides a historically grounded introduction to democratic political theory as a window into the misuse of democratic vocabulary for propaganda's selfish purposes. He lays out historical examples, such as the restructuring of the US public school system at the turn of the twentieth century, to explore how the language of democracy is sometimes used to mask an undemocratic reality. Drawing from a range of sources, including feminist theory, critical race theory, epistemology, formal semantics, educational theory, and social and cognitive psychology, he explains how the manipulative and hypocritical declaration of flawed beliefs and ideologies arises from and perpetuates inequalities in society, such as the racial injustices that commonly occur in the United States. How Propaganda Works shows that an understanding of propaganda and its mechanisms is essential for the preservation and protection of liberal democracies everywhere."]
Waldman, Paul. "The Bias Against Change and Medicare for All." On the Media (March 15, 2019) ["A year out from the 2020 Democratic primary, "Medicare for All" has emerged as a potent rallying cry and vision for a new American healthcare system. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Beto O'Rourke have all expressed support for some form of universal healthcare. Yet, Republicans and right-wing media have already begun discrediting the idea, similar to how they went after Obamacare beginning a decade ago. It is not surprising that the hefty price tag associated with some of the proposals has been wagged at by Fox News hosts and the like. After all, socialized medicine has been a conservative bugaboo for a century. But according to Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman, the allegation of basic unaffordability has seeped, mainly unchallenged, into media coverage. In this segment, he and Bob parse through the messaging for and against Medicare-for-All, and discuss the biases that stymie the discussion."]
Wallis, Victor. "13th and the Culture of Surplus Punishment." Jump Cut #58 (Spring 2018)
Watters, Audrey. "Fables of School Reform: Ed-Tech Investors Keep Chasing Their Own Tales." The Baffler #43 (February 2019)
Wilkerson, Lawrence. "I Helped Sell the False Choice of War with Iraq; It’s Happening Again with Iran." Democracy Now (February 9, 2018) ["Fifteen years ago this week, Secretary of State General Colin Powell gave a speech to the United Nations arguing for war with Iraq, saying the evidence was clear: Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It was a speech Powell would later call a blot on his career. Is President Trump doing the same thing now with Iran? We speak to Powell’s former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. He recently wrote a piece titled 'I Helped Sell the False Choice of War Once. It’s Happening Again.'"]
Wilson, Bee (read by Ruth Barnes). "Yes, Bacon Really is Killing Us." Audio Long Reads (December 25, 2018) ["Decades’ worth of research proves that chemicals used to make bacon do cause cancer. So how did the meat industry convince us it was safe?"]
Zadrozny, Brandy. "With #SaveTheChildren Rallies, QAnon Sneaks Into The Offline World." On the Media (August 26, 2020) ["On Saturday, more than 200 cities from Spokane to Scranton saw modest rallies for a cause so pure, so unifying, that who in their right mind wouldn’t want to join in? "Save the children" was the chant and child trafficking the scourge. But lately it is a movement being hijacked from within, which is just the latest instance of the QAnon conspiracy theory spilling out of its online domain. This we know from reporting by NBC News investigative reporter Brandy Zadrozny, along with reporter Ben Collins. In this podcast extra, Zadrozny explains how these rallies function as "information laundering," and how local journalists have inadvertantly taken part in QAnon's recruitment strategy."]
Zakaria, Rafia. "Sucking Up To the Saudis." The Baffler (November 30, 2017) ["The Arab Spring in Tom Friedman's Head."]
Renfro, Paul. "Child Safety Sex Panics with Paul Renfro." The Dig (September 19, 2020) ["Dan interviews historian Paul Renfro on his book Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State."]
Rhoads, Kelton. "Propaganda Tactics and Fahrenheit 9/11." Film and History (September 11, 2004)
Rich, Nathaniel. "Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change." The New York Times Magazine (August 1, 2018) ["This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it."]
Rippon, Gina. "Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (Vintage 2020)." New Books in Gender Studies (October 27, 2020) ["For decades if not centuries, science has backed up society’s simple dictum that men and women are hardwired differently, that the world is divided by two different kinds of brains—male and female. However, new research in neuroimaging suggests that this is little more than “neurotrash.” In Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (Vintage, 2020), acclaimed professor of neuroimaging, Gina Rippon, finally challenges this damaging myth by showing how the science community has engendered bias and stereotype by rewarding studies that show difference rather than sameness. Drawing on cutting edge research in neuroscience and psychology, Rippon presents the latest evidence which finally proves that brains are like mosaics comprised of both male and female components, and that they remain plastic, adapting throughout the course of a person’s life. Discernable gender identities, she asserts, are shaped by society where scientific misconceptions continue to be wielded and perpetuated to the detriment of our children, our own lives, and our culture. Gina Rippon is a British neuroscientist and feminist. She is a an honorary professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University in Birmingham, England. In 2015 she was made honorary fellow of the British Science Association. Rippon has also sat on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychophysiology, and is a member of the European Union Gender Equality Network, belongs to WISE and ScienceGrrl, and the Inspiring the Future intiative."]
Roberts-Miller, Patricia. "What’s wrong with the 'women should be afraid that their sons will be accused of rape' meme." (Academic/Personal website: September 24, 2018)
Roose, Kevin. "QAnon Followers Are Hijacking the #SaveTheChildren Movement." The New York Times (August 12, 2020) ["Fans of the pro-Trump conspiracy theory are clogging anti-trafficking hotlines, infiltrating Facebook groups and raising false fears about child exploitation."]
Rosenwald, Michael. "Top Secret." Columbia Review of Journalism (Fall 2019) [British and American origins of the contemporary information war "As the US press has covered Russia’s meddling in American politics, a counternarrative, about information warfare waged by our own government, has gone largely ignored. In fact, American reporters, if they wanted, could build a credible case that Putin’s disinformation efforts, which often use the media as an unknowing accomplice, simply carry on a tradition honed in this country, going back decades."]
Saini, Angela. "Junk Science: How belief in biological racial difference pollutes the world of science, from eugenics to genetics." American Scholar (August 9, 2019) ["For our 100th episode, we welcome back science journalist Angela Saini, whose work deflates the myths we tell ourselves about science existing in an apolitical vacuum. With far-right nationalism and white supremacy on the rise around the world, pseudoscientific and pseudointellectual justifications for racism are on the rise—and troublingly mainstream. Race is a relatively recent concept, but dress it up in a white lab coat and it becomes an incredibly toxic justification for a whole range of policies, from health to immigration. It is tempting to dismiss white-supremacist cranks who chug milk to show their superior lactose tolerance, but it’s harder to do so when those in positions of power—like senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller or pseudointellectual Jordan Peterson—spout the same rhetoric. The consequences can be more insidious, too: consider how we discuss the health outcomes for different groups of people as biological inevitabilities, not the results of social inequality. Drawing on archives and interviews with dozens of prominent scientists, Saini shows how race science never really left us—and that in 2019, scientists are as obsessed as ever with the vanishingly small biological differences between us."]
Schaeffer, Jan. "Purple Episode 4: Media to the Rescue?" On the Media (November 26, 2019) ["A 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, showed only 23 percent of eighth graders in the United States attained “proficient” status in civics. A 2011 Newsweek survey found that 70 percent of Americans didn’t even know that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. And only 26% of those surveyed in 2017 by the University of Pennsylvania could name all three branches of government. And no wonder: with STEM curriculum and standardized testing squeezing the school day, civics has become the snow leopard of the social studies curriculum. So if the knowledge vacuum is otherwise filled by misinformation and disinformation, and the result is a loss of faith and trust in democracy itself, who is left to intervene? Jan Schaffer — ombudsman for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, Pulitzer Prize–winning former journalist and founder of The Institute for Interactive Journalism — talks to Bob about what responsibility the media have to become educators, and maybe even re-assurers, of last resort."]
Schwartz, Leo. "Disinformation Meets the Coronavirus." Columbia Journalism Review (March 19, 2020)
Smith, Jordan. "The Authors of The Cadaver King and The Country Dentist on the Legacy of Junk Forensics in Mississippi and Beyond." The Intercept (April 22, 2018)
Spiegel, Alex. "The Secret History Behind the Science of Stress." All Things Considered (July 7, 2014)
Springer, Claudia. "Shadow Films: Picturing the Environmental Crisis." Jump Cut #58 (Spring 2018) ["For the powerful forces invested in preserving the status quo, even limited environmental protections that threaten traditional modes of corporate profit-making provoke fierce opposition. Corporate stakeholders wield political power through lobbying and donations, and, increasingly, they hold government positions. A 2016 study by the Center for American Progress Action Fund found that 34% of American Congress members denied climate change and had been paid over $73 million in contributions by oil, gas, and coal companies. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who famously claimed that climate change is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," has reportedly accepted more than $2 million from the fossil fuel industry (Herzog). The fallout from political inaction means that people have lost their lives in the U.S., China, Nigeria, Ecuador, and Peru, among other countries, because of the oil, gas, and mining industries' toxic practices and attacks on opponents. The propaganda battles fought with images inflame a war with catastrophic consequences."]
Staal, Jonas. Propaganda Art: From the 20th to the 21st Century. (Dissertation: University of Amsterdam, 2018)
---. "Propaganda (Art) Struggle." October #94 (October 2018) ["To oppose the various propagandas discussed above, we will need infrastructures and narratives that mobilize the imagination to construct a different world. To achieve this, we will need an emancipatory propaganda and an emancipatory propaganda art. There is no prior reality to which we should strive to return; there will only be the realities that we will author collectively ourselves."]
Stein, Zak. "On Propaganda and the Information War." Jim Rutt War (October 7, 2021) ["Zak Stein & Jim have a wide-ranging talk inspired by two recent Consilience Project essays on the information war & propaganda. They discuss the culture wars as a case of mutually assured destruction, distinguishing education from propaganda, developing widespread resistance to propaganda, epistemic nihilism, key indicators of propaganda, the function of thought-terminating clichés, a typology of propaganda, leaders’ failure to educate rather than propagandize regarding Covid vaccines, modulating noise & chaos in the information ecosystem, redirecting technological innovation toward new goals of educational development, and much more." Zak Stein's latest book is Education in a Time Between Two Worlds: "Our world is currently undergoing major transformations, from climate change and politics to agriculture and economics. The world we have known is disappearing and a new world is being born. The subjects taught in schools and universities today are becoming irrelevant at faster and faster rates. Not only are we facing complex challenges of unprecedented size and scope, we’re also facing a learning and capacity deficit that threatens the future of civilization. Education in a Time Between Worlds seeks to reframe this historical moment as an opportunity to create a global society of educational abundance. Educational systems must be transformed beyond recognition if humanity is to survive the planetary crises currently underway. Human development and learning must be understood as the Earth's most valuable resources, with human potential serving as the open frontier into which energy and hope can begin to flow. The expansive essays within this book cover a diverse array of topics, including social justice, the neuroscience of learning, deschooling, educational technology, standardized testing, the future of spirituality, basic income guarantees, and integral meta-theory. As an invitation to re-vision the future of schools, technology, and society, Education in a Time Between Worlds replaces apathy and despair with agency, transformation, and hope."]
Taibbi, Matt. "Russia Isn't Dividing Us - Our Leaders Are." Rolling Stone (February 24, 2020)
"The Annual Top 25 Archive of Censored News Stories." (An ongoing project of the Project Censored's international collective of students, professors, journalists, and citizens, to document the annual top 25 censored news stories. The annual series goes from 1976 to now.)
Trotter, Wilfred. Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. 2nd Edition. London: T.F. Unwin Ltd., 1922."The Annual Top 25 Archive of Censored News Stories." (An ongoing project of the Project Censored's international collective of students, professors, journalists, and citizens, to document the annual top 25 censored news stories. The annual series goes from 1976 to now.)
Waldman, Paul. "The Bias Against Change and Medicare for All." On the Media (March 15, 2019) ["A year out from the 2020 Democratic primary, "Medicare for All" has emerged as a potent rallying cry and vision for a new American healthcare system. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Beto O'Rourke have all expressed support for some form of universal healthcare. Yet, Republicans and right-wing media have already begun discrediting the idea, similar to how they went after Obamacare beginning a decade ago. It is not surprising that the hefty price tag associated with some of the proposals has been wagged at by Fox News hosts and the like. After all, socialized medicine has been a conservative bugaboo for a century. But according to Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman, the allegation of basic unaffordability has seeped, mainly unchallenged, into media coverage. In this segment, he and Bob parse through the messaging for and against Medicare-for-All, and discuss the biases that stymie the discussion."]
Wallis, Victor. "13th and the Culture of Surplus Punishment." Jump Cut #58 (Spring 2018)
Watters, Audrey. "Fables of School Reform: Ed-Tech Investors Keep Chasing Their Own Tales." The Baffler #43 (February 2019)
West, Stephen. "On Media: Manufacturing Consent, Pt. 1." Philosophize This (December 17, 2020) [On Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's landmark book Media Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.]
---. "On Media Pt. 2: Marshall McLuhan." Philosophize This! #149 (January 5, 2021)
Whitlock, Craig. "The 'Pentagon Papers' Of Our Time." On the Media (December 11, 2019) ["On Monday, the Washington Post released the fruits of a three-year investigative effort: the "Afghanistan Papers," a once-secret internal government history of a deadly, costly, and ultimately futile entanglement. The hundreds of frank, explosive interviews — along with a new tranche of memos written by the former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — revealed the extent to which American leaders misled the public on their efforts to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, rout the Taliban, expel Al Qaeda, install democracy, and undo corruption. In this podcast extra, investigative reporter Craig Whitlock tells Bob about the monumental story that the Post uncovered — and the extraordinary effort it took to report it out. "]
Wilson, Bee (read by Ruth Barnes). "Yes, Bacon Really is Killing Us." Audio Long Reads (December 25, 2018) ["Decades’ worth of research proves that chemicals used to make bacon do cause cancer. So how did the meat industry convince us it was safe?"]
Zadrozny, Brandy. "With #SaveTheChildren Rallies, QAnon Sneaks Into The Offline World." On the Media (August 26, 2020) ["On Saturday, more than 200 cities from Spokane to Scranton saw modest rallies for a cause so pure, so unifying, that who in their right mind wouldn’t want to join in? "Save the children" was the chant and child trafficking the scourge. But lately it is a movement being hijacked from within, which is just the latest instance of the QAnon conspiracy theory spilling out of its online domain. This we know from reporting by NBC News investigative reporter Brandy Zadrozny, along with reporter Ben Collins. In this podcast extra, Zadrozny explains how these rallies function as "information laundering," and how local journalists have inadvertantly taken part in QAnon's recruitment strategy."]
Zoellner, Tom. "The Rwanda Myth." Los Angeles Review of Books (April 3, 2021) [On Michela Wrong's book Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad."
Zollman, Florian. "Fake News by Design." Monthly Review (March 7, 2018) ["Mainstream news media reporting and the manufacture of bloodbaths in Libya and Syria"]
Jonas Staal, ‘PROPAGANDA ART FROM THE 20TH TO THE 21ST CENTURY’, PhDArts 2018 from Lectorate KTP & PhDArts on Vimeo.
MB here -- Cinemark theater screened this Disney World advertisement (opportunistic selling of images of disturbed veterans as a means of promoting/selling a corporate image) right before Thor: Ragnarok last night (after a long series of other militarized ads/promotions). It is not only corporate propaganda, but it also perpetuating a repeatedly disabused cultural lie (across many cultures) - the myth of people spitting on returning veterans. Furthermore, the advertisement is riddled with other obvious falsities/distortions. The represented veteran claims in the advertisement for Disney World that no one welcomed him home (the unspoken claim is that Disney World is the only entity that welcomes returning veterans like him). Can you really believe "no one" welcomed him home in a hyper-militaristic country (even in the aftermath of our invasion and occupation of Vietnam)? I wonder how his family feels about this advertisement for Disney World (if no one welcomed him they would be included in that claim)?
"Access to healthcare is a spiritual issue, deeply rooted in a compassionate world view. Currently, in America, more than 40 million people are uninsured and millions more have insurance with such a high deductible that they cannot afford to use it. It is estimated that 22,000 Americans die prematurely every year because of a lack of access to healthcare. Why can't we cover everyone? Why do we spend twice as much as every other western democracy while getting less than France, Belgium, England, etc.? Why are politicians on both sides of the political spectrum seemingly in the pocket of healthcare insurance and pharmaceutical companies . . . and why are most churches silent about this travesty?"
Zollman, Florian. "Fake News by Design." Monthly Review (March 7, 2018) ["Mainstream news media reporting and the manufacture of bloodbaths in Libya and Syria"]
----------------------------------------------------
Last Sunday our [now former] president, Donald Trump, in a tweet threatened the chief scientist, Dr. Fauci, involved in the national sort-of-effort to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. In the tweet he gives thanks to relatively obscure One America News Network (OAN). You should familiarize yourself with this propaganda channel - here is Mr. Oliver, properly physical distancing, providing a look at the president's new, favorite fluffer, non-news network.
Jonas Staal, ‘PROPAGANDA ART FROM THE 20TH TO THE 21ST CENTURY’, PhDArts 2018 from Lectorate KTP & PhDArts on Vimeo.
MB here -- Cinemark theater screened this Disney World advertisement (opportunistic selling of images of disturbed veterans as a means of promoting/selling a corporate image) right before Thor: Ragnarok last night (after a long series of other militarized ads/promotions). It is not only corporate propaganda, but it also perpetuating a repeatedly disabused cultural lie (across many cultures) - the myth of people spitting on returning veterans. Furthermore, the advertisement is riddled with other obvious falsities/distortions. The represented veteran claims in the advertisement for Disney World that no one welcomed him home (the unspoken claim is that Disney World is the only entity that welcomes returning veterans like him). Can you really believe "no one" welcomed him home in a hyper-militaristic country (even in the aftermath of our invasion and occupation of Vietnam)? I wonder how his family feels about this advertisement for Disney World (if no one welcomed him they would be included in that claim)?
"Access to healthcare is a spiritual issue, deeply rooted in a compassionate world view. Currently, in America, more than 40 million people are uninsured and millions more have insurance with such a high deductible that they cannot afford to use it. It is estimated that 22,000 Americans die prematurely every year because of a lack of access to healthcare. Why can't we cover everyone? Why do we spend twice as much as every other western democracy while getting less than France, Belgium, England, etc.? Why are politicians on both sides of the political spectrum seemingly in the pocket of healthcare insurance and pharmaceutical companies . . . and why are most churches silent about this travesty?"
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