Tuesday, November 8, 2022

Media/Communications/Journalism (Concepts and Theories)

Abumrad, Jad, et al. "Twitch and Shout."On the Media (February 22, 2019) ["Twitch.tv is a video streaming platform where millions of people broadcast their lives and video game action in real-time. It's like unedited, real, reality TV. This week, On the Media digs into why so many people want to share so much on Twitch, and what it tells us about the future of entertainment. First, a look at a couple of the biggest streamers of the platform, Ninja and Dr. Disrespect, who command devoted audiences and giant paychecks. Then, Bob dives into the inaugural season of the Overwatch League, the most expensive and highly produced pro gaming venture to date. Finally, Brooke speaks with Radiolab's Jad Abumrad about the life of a homeless streamer who's life was saved by Twitch."]


"Ad accusing Hamas of 'child sacrifice' lands UK paper in hot water: Despite outcry, The Guardian prints ad claiming Hamas uses children as "human shields"." Al Jazeera (August 11, 2014)

Alcaraz, Lalo. "Rachel Maddow Interviews Lalo Alcaraz On His Satirical Movement: Self-Deportation." Huffington Post (February 2, 2012)

Ali, Wajahat, et al. "Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America." Center for American Progress (August 26, 2011)

Almaaita, Zaynah. "Top 25 Censored News Stories of 2017 - 2018 - #22 Big Pharma’s Biostitutes: Corporate Media Ignore Root Cause of Opioid Crisis." Project Censored (October 2, 2018) ["The beginning of the opioid crisis, Martin reported, goes back to drug manufacturing companies hiring “biostitutes,” a derogatory term for biological scientists hired to misrepresent research or commit fraud in order to protect their employers’ corporate interests. As Martin reported, research by biostitutes was used to make the (misleading) case that opioids could treat pain without the risk of addiction. Purdue Pharma, which manufactures OxyContin, and McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen, which distribute that drug and other opioids, suppressed research that showed how addictive opioids are, and they began to push doctors to write more prescriptions on behalf of the “needs” of consumers.  In particular, Papantonio said, distributors targeted the nation’s poorer communities, including industrial cities with high unemployment rates, such as Detroit, and economically-stressed mining communities, as in West Virginia. Such mercenary practices not only impacted the individuals who became addicted, they also ravaged the finances of the targeted cities and counties. As Papantonio told The Empire Files, the opioid crisis has required local government expenditures for everything from new training for emergency medical responders, to the purchase of Naloxone (sold under the brand name Narcan) for treating opioid overdoses, to the expansion of dependency courts to handle the cases of neglected or abused children, and the retooling of jails as de facto rehabilitation centers—all of which have come out of city and county budgets. In his Empire Files interview, Papantonio estimated that the cost for a “typical community” fell between “ninety and two hundred million dollars—that’s just the beginning number.”]

Alperovitz, Gal. "'Mr. Boston': Meet the Man Who Secretly Helped Daniel Ellsberg Leak Pentagon Papers to the Press." Democracy Now (February 2, 2018) ["Historian Gar Alperovitz has revealed for the first time the key role he and a handful of other activists played in helping whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leak to journalists the Pentagon Papers—a 7,000-page classified history outlining the true extent of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg told The New Yorker the secret role this group played was so crucial in releasing the Pentagon Papers that he gave them a code name: “The Lavender Hill Mob.” Alperovitz went by the alias “Mr. Boston.” Ellsberg told The New Yorker, “Gar took care of all the cloak-and-dagger stuff.” We speak to historian and political economist Gar Alperovitz about why he is going public now."]

Alpert, Jon, Jonathan Novick and Ben Rosloff. "All for One: U.S. and Russian Filmmakers with Disabilities Collaborate in Powerful New Documentary." Democracy Now (August 10, 2018) ["While tensions between the U.S. and Russia continue to heat up, one group of filmmakers has found a way to strengthen ties between the two countries through a common bond: their disabilities. A new film premiering tonight in New York follows the Media Enabled Musketeers, American and Russian filmmakers with disabilities, as they make original films to tell their stories. “All For One” tells the story of 35 Russians and 13 Americans who collaborated to create films about everyday issues to empower themselves, educate the public and provide more opportunities for people with disabilities. These include films about accessibility, finding love, confronting prejudice and following dreams. For more we speak with Jon Alpert, co-founder of Downtown Community Television Center, or DCTV, the country’s oldest community media center. He is the co-director of the Media Enabled Musketeers project. We also speak with Jon Novick and Ben Rosloff, filmmakers with Media Enabled Musketeers." Part two: "Extended Interview with Members of the Media Enabled Musketeers on Disability Rights & Filmmaking."]

Anderson, C. W. "Print Culture 101: A Cheat Sheet and Syllabus." The Atlantic (August 18, 2010)

Anderson, Justin. "Who Will Take on the 21st Century Tech and Media Monopolies?" FAIR (April 10, 2018) ["After decades of regulatory neglect, Big Tech is finally coming under the microscope."]

Andrejevic, Mark. "Estrangement 2.0." World Picture #6 (Winter 2011)

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."]

Armiak, David. "New Study Undercuts Trump FCC Chair's Justification for Rolling Back Net Neutrality." Exposed (July 6, 2017)

Assange, Julian and Michael Ratner. "Julian Assange on Being Placed on NSA "Manhunting" List & Secret Targeting of WikiLeaks Supporters." Democracy Now (February 18, 2014)

Assange, Julian and Slavoj Zizek. "Full Video of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange & Philosopher Slavoj Žižek With Amy Goodman." Democracy Now (July 2, 2011)

"Bahrain: Below the Radar." Listening Post (April 23, 2011)

Baker-White, Emily. "Police Attitudes in Plain View." Criminal Injustice #106 (September 3, 2019) ["Many people make their social media posts public. Everyone can see them, like a signed billboard visible anywhere in the world. So, what should we think when we learn that *some* police officers, in some departments, have been posting racist messages or memes endorsing violence, visible to anyone on the Internet? "]

Baldwin, Alec and Julie Brown. "The Epstein Story Did Not Just Happen Overnight." On the Media (July 10, 2019) ["Julie Brown of the Miami Herald conceived, reported, and wrote one of the most explosive criminal justice stories in recent memory. She revealed the shutting down of an FBI investigation that may have been on the verge of discovering the full extent of a child-sex-trafficking operation run by politically-connected billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. The prosecutor allegedly behind that decision, Alex Acosta, is now President Trump's Secretary of Labor. Acosta offered Epstein a plea deal in which Epstein pleaded guilty to recruiting underage girls for sex and spent about a year in the local lockup, with work release. The deal also proactively protected from prosecution any potential co-conspirators. Brown pored over internal emails to see exactly how Acosta and other powerful law-enforcement officials made these decisions."]

Balzarini, John and Les Bernal. "Gambling and Neoliberal Rot - How Our Most Regressive Tax Flies Under the Radar." Citations Needed #63 (January 23, 2019) ["As more and more states turn to casinos and lotteries to ‘fill the gap” in 'falling' state budgets, the predatory and regressive nature of gambling as an alternative to increasing taxes on the rich avoids nearly any media scrutiny among centrists and liberals. Even the Left has mostly ignored the issue––ceding criticism of our most regressive tax to the Christian Right, who largely oppose gambling for all the wrong reasons. In this episode, we explore how lotteries and casinos have come to represent the last throes of the false neoliberal promise of "jobs” and “growth.” Throughout much of the United States, specifically the Rust Belt and Midwest, casinos and prisons are increasingly the only growth industries, entrenching the shift from an industrial economy to one that exclusively preys on the poor and desperate in a never-ending race to the bottom. Beyond the glitz and easy “tax revenue” lies a massive transfer of wealth from the poor, black and elderly to the super wealthy - achieved, slowly over decades, with zero sustained criticism from the media."]

Bamford, James.  "The NSA's Warrantless Wiretapping Program." Boiling Frogs (July 21, 2009)

Banuelas, Erika. "The Top 25 Censored News Stories of 2017 - 2018: #18 Adoption Agencies a Gateway for Child Exploitation." Project Censored (October 2, 2018)

Barkan, Ross. "The Gray Zone Lady." The Baffler #50 (Match 2020)  [The New York Times, "particularly in its approach to national political stories, has clung to a horse race model of coverage that should have been discredited decades ago. The model, long derided but shockingly durable, operates from a rather simple premise: How do we figure out who’s going to win? It is rarely curious about anything else, and it can be applied to political campaigns and governing policy alike. Horse race coverage treats politics as a glorified sporting event, each side reduced to a combatant of equal moral stature, and tries desperately to divine the future, with all the arrogance of science and none of its corresponding rigor. It regards political reportage as theater criticism, diminishing pivotal and thorny questions about policy. The other question horse race coverage may ask: How does this play? Instead of asking whether a certain candidate will support more drone strikes in the Middle East or will pursue a health care policy that makes coverage cheaper and more humane, the horse race paradigm is most concerned about tactics. Will an embrace of x lead to victory or defeat? What is the underlying strategy? Political coverage becomes inseparable from gossip. Such an approach relishes artificial events constructed specifically to make news, like the press conference, the diner visit, or the rally with surrogates, campaign operatives tasked with massaging the truth, repeatedly, for the benefit of the press, who must decide whether to be “spun” or not."]

Barlett, Donald and James Steele. "On Media, Govt. Failure to Hold Wall St. Accountable for Financial Crimes." Democracy Now (August 1, 2012)

Becker, Elizabeth. "You Don't Belong Here." On the Media (April 30, 2021) ["Before the Vietnam War there was a law that banned women from reporting on the frontlines of any war for the U.S. When President Johnson refused to officially declare a state of war in Vietnam, an opening appeared: no war, no ban. A handful of pioneering women bought one-way tickets into the battlefield. They had no editors, no health insurance and little or no formal training. This week, Brooke spoke about this time to reporter Elizabeth Becker, formerly a Washington Post war correspondent in Cambodia, NPR's foreign editor and then national security correspondent for the New York Times. Becker is the author of a new book: You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War."]

Bell, Emily. "The Fact-Check Industry: Has Our Investment in Debunking Worked?" Columbia Journalism Review (Fall 2019)

Bello, Walden, Kevin Danaher and Njoki Njehu. "Report Back from A16 (The A16 IMF/World Bank Demonstrations in Washington, D.C.)." Unwelcome Guests (April 22, 2000)

Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford University Press, 2018. ["This book examines the shape, composition, and practices of the United States political media landscape. It explores the roots of the current epistemic crisis in political communication with a focus on the remarkable 2016 U.S. president election culminating in the victory of Donald Trump and the first year of his presidency. The authors present a detailed map of the American political media landscape based on the analysis of millions of stories and social media posts, revealing a highly polarized and asymmetric media ecosystem. Detailed case studies track the emergence and propagation of disinformation in the American public sphere that took advantage of structural weaknesses in the media institutions across the political spectrum. This book describes how the conservative faction led by Steve Bannon and funded by Robert Mercer was able to inject opposition research into the mainstream media agenda that left an unsubstantiated but indelible stain of corruption on the Clinton campaign. The authors also document how Fox News deflects negative coverage of President Trump and has promoted a series of exaggerated and fabricated counter narratives to defend the president against the damaging news coming out of the Mueller investigation. Based on an analysis of the actors that sought to influence political public discourse, this book argues that the current problems of media and democracy are not the result of Russian interference, behavioral microtargeting and algorithms on social media, political clickbait, hackers, sockpuppets, or trolls, but of asymmetric media structures decades in the making. The crisis is political, not technological."]

Bender, Stephen. "Propaganda, Public Relations, & the Not-So-New Dark Age." LiP(Winter 2006)

Bengani, Priyanjana. "Hundreds of ‘pink slime’ local news outlets are distributing algorithmic stories and conservative talking points." Columbia Journalism Review (December 18, 2019)

Benkler, Yochai. "A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle Over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate." Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review (Forthcoming: 2011)

Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford University Press, 2018. ["This book examines the shape, composition, and practices of the United States political media landscape. It explores the roots of the current epistemic crisis in political communication with a focus on the remarkable 2016 U.S. president election culminating in the victory of Donald Trump and the first year of his presidency. The authors present a detailed map of the American political media landscape based on the analysis of millions of stories and social media posts, revealing a highly polarized and asymmetric media ecosystem. Detailed case studies track the emergence and propagation of disinformation in the American public sphere that took advantage of structural weaknesses in the media institutions across the political spectrum. This book describes how the conservative faction led by Steve Bannon and funded by Robert Mercer was able to inject opposition research into the mainstream media agenda that left an unsubstantiated but indelible stain of corruption on the Clinton campaign. The authors also document how Fox News deflects negative coverage of President Trump and has promoted a series of exaggerated and fabricated counter narratives to defend the president against the damaging news coming out of the Mueller investigation. Based on an analysis of the actors that sought to influence political public discourse, this book argues that the current problems of media and democracy are not the result of Russian interference, behavioral microtargeting and algorithms on social media, political clickbait, hackers, sockpuppets, or trolls, but of asymmetric media structures decades in the making. The crisis is political, not technological."]


Bennett, W. Lance, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston. When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007: 13-28

Benton, Michael. "The Work of Propaganda." North of Center (January 15, 2020)

Berkshire, Jennifer, Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi. "The Charter School Scam." Citations Needed #1 (July 12, 2017) ["... the media hype surrounding the privatization of education."]

Bernish, Claire. "Government's Own Data Shows That U.S. Interfered in 81 Foreign Elections." Mint Press (March 22, 2017) ["Ask an average American who makes a habit of following government-mouthpiece corporate media about interference in national elections and you’ll likely elicit a nebulous response concerning Russian hackers and a plan to install Donald Trump in the White House — but you probably won’t hear a single syllable pertaining to United States government’s actual attempts to do the same."]

Beyond the Frame: Alternative Perspectives on the War on Terrorism." Media Education Foundation (2004)

Bhagwati, Anuradha, et al. "Many Lines of Fire: Women at War." Making Contact (May 27, 2009)

Bishara, Marwan, et al. "Information wars: How will governments deal with the information revolution?" AlJazeera (February 24, 2011)

---. "Social networks, social revolution: Youtube, Facebook and Twitter have become the new weapons of mass mobilisation." Empire (February 16, 2011)

Bittman, Mark. "That Flawed Stanford Study." Opiniator (October 2, 2012)

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."]

Bombach, Alexandria. "On Her Shoulders: Stunning Film Follows Nobel Peace Winner Nadia Murad’s Fight to End Sexual Violence." Democracy Now (January 3, 2019) ["We look at the remarkable story of Nadia Murad, the Yazidi human rights activist from Iraq who was recently awarded the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize. Murad was kidnapped by the Islamic State in 2014 and repeatedly raped as she was held in captivity. After managing to escape, Murad fled Iraq and has dedicated her life to drawing international attention to the plight of the Yazidi people. The documentary “On Her Shoulders” follows Murad as she shares her story with the world. The documentary has been shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Documentary and recently received the Columbia Journalism duPont Award. We speak with the film’s award-winning director Alexandria Bombach."]

Bordwell, David. "When media become manageable: Streaming, film research, and the Celestial Multiplex." Observations on Film Art (January 22, 2020)

Bors, Matt and Angus Johnston. "Three Time Covers from the Last Five Years." Dialogic (May 12, 2013)

Boykoff, Jules and Kristian Williams. "Police Power and the Suppression of Dissent." Writers Talking (February 24, 2009)

Bragg, Billy. "British Rocker on Norway Attacks, Activism & His Song on Murdoch, “Never Buy The Sun” Democracy Now (August 1, 2011)

Brea, Jennifer. "Unrest." Film School (October 7, 2017) ["Jennifer Brea is a Harvard PhD student soon to be engaged to the love of her life when she’s struck down by a mysterious fever that leaves her bedridden. She becomes progressively more ill, eventually losing the ability even to sit in a wheelchair, but doctors tell her it’s “all in her head.” Unable to convey the seriousness and depth of her symptoms to her doctor, Jennifer begins a video diary on her iPhone that eventually becomes the feature documentary film Unrest. Once Jennifer is diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), commonly called chronic fatigue syndrome, she and her new husband, Omar, are left to grapple with how to live in the face of a lifelong illness. Refusing to accept the limitations of bedbound life, Jennifer goes on an inspiring virtual voyage around the world where she finds a hidden community of millions confined to their homes and bedrooms by ME. These patients use the internet, Skype and Facebook to connect to each other — and to offer support and understanding. Many ME patients have experienced uncertainty, confusion and even disbelief from the medical community and society as a whole. After all, it’s easy to ignore a disease when patients are too sick to leave their homes. In Unrest, Jennifer shares her pain and the most intimate moments of her life in order to offer hope and visibility to those who suffer alone in dark, silent rooms. Though Jennifer and Omar may have to accept that they will never live the life they originally dreamed about, together they find resilience, strength, and meaning in their community and each other. Director, subject and activist Jennifer Brea joins us to talk about her journey, illness and her determination to make things better for people living with ME."]

Bromwich, David. "Diary: The Snowden Case." The London Review of Books 35.13 (July 4, 2013)

Brown, Cecil. "Tarantino's "Django: Unchained": Hollywood’s Nigger Joke." Counterpunch (January 1, 2012)

Brownlee, Kimberlee. "Stop Labelling People Who Commit Crimes 'Criminals.'" Aeon (November 10, 2017)

Buchanan, Pat, et al. "The Beginning of Now." This American Life #615 (April 28, 2017) ["Before Donald Trump started his presidential campaign in 2015, there was a congressional race that redefined what was possible in American politics. Steve Bannon and Breitbart News got involved in that race early, just like they later got deeply involved in Donald Trump's race. On this week’s show: What happened in that campaign, what it made it work, and how we got to now."]

Burton, Tara Isabella. "How Personal Branding Became an American Religion." On the Media (February 3, 2024) ["In January 2020, Equinox launched an ad campaign with the zeitgeist-capturing slogan, “Make Yourself a Gift to the World.” The message wasn’t just for devotees of luxury gyms. In the digital age, branding yourself, or actively defining a unique and “authentic” personal identity, is the new norm. Writer and social critic Tara Isabella Burton explores how we got here in her new book, “Self- Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to Kardashian.” Burton’s background is in history and theology. To her mind, our current obsession with personal identity and self-creation has deeply religious roots."]

"Busted: America's Poverty Myths." On the Media (5 part series: 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."]

"Buying the War: How Did the Mainstream Press Get It So Wrong." Bill Moyers Journal (2007)

Cantú, Aaron Miguel. "The Whitest News You Know: The False Promise of a Press for Everybody." The Baffler #43 (February 2019)

Carpenter, Edmund. Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me. Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1972. [Early, important analysis/theorization of the impact of media upon human consciousness.]

Carpentier, Megan. "Steubenville and the misplaced sympathy for Jane Doe's rapists: Rape is unique in US society as a crime where the blighted future of the perpetrators counts for more than the victim's." Comment is Free (March 18, 2013)

Carpini, Michael X Delli and Bruce A. Williams. "After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment." Media Matters (February 19, 2012)

Chamberlin, Kenneth, Jr., et al. "Killed at Home: White Plains, NY Police Called Out on Medical Alert Shoot Dead Black Veteran, 68." Democracy Now (March 29, 2012)

Chang, Alvin. "Sinclair’s pro-Trump news is taking over local TV. See if they own your station." Vox (April 4, 2018) [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).]

Chayka, Kyle. "About the Filter World." On the Media (January 31, 2024) ["In Micah Loewinger's introduction to this interview, he shared this personal anecdote: "Before I landed a job at this show, I worked for a few years, on and off, at a couple record stores around New York City. And some of my favorite albums to this day, were recommended to me by my coworkers. Men and women who I consider to be archivists –– not just of old formats like vinyl records, CDs, and cassettes –– but of underappreciated artists and niche genres. A knowledge of music history that can only come from a lifetime of obsessive listening, research, and curation. Nowadays, I pay for Spotify. I try to learn about music off the app and then save it for later listening on Spotify, but sometimes I find myself just letting its recommendation algorithm queue up the next track, and the next. And it definitely works. Spotify has helped me discover great music, but it’s never been as revelatory as a personal recommendation from a friend or an expert at a record store or an independent radio station. This feeling … that I’ve traded convenience for something deeper is what made me want to read Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at the New Yorker.""]

Cho, Joshua. "Corporate Looting as ‘Rescue Plan,’ Robber Barons as ‘Saviors.'" FAIR (May 1, 2020)

Chomsky, Noam. Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. Seven Stories Press, 1997.

---. "What the American Media Won't Tell You About Israel." AlterNet (December 3, 2012)

Chomsky, Noam, et al. "Occupy 2.0 (Peer Produced Politics)." Unwelcome Guest (March 10, 2012)
   
---. "On WikiLeaks, Obama’s Targeted Assassinations and Latin America’s Break from the U.S." Democracy Now (May 14, 2012)

Chossudovsky, Michael. "The Globalization of War." Needs no Introduction (June 8, 2018) ["The lecture is based on Professor Chossudovsky's book, The Globalization of War: America's Long War on Humanity. In this speech, he postulates that the U.S. and its Western allies have embarked on a hegemonic war of conquest, using the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as a pre-text. Further exacerbating this agenda is the complicity of media and co-opted movements which refuse to challenge the pre-text of a war on terrorism."]

Christina, Greta. "Wealthy, Handsome, Strong, Packing Endless Hard-Ons: The Impossible Ideals Men Are Expected to Meet." AlterNet (June 20, 2011)

Ciccariello-Maher, George and Mike King. "American Blowback: Cop-on-Cop Crime in LA." Counterpunch (February 8, 2013)

Cioffi, Sandy and Riki Ott. "Sandy Cioffi on Nigerian Oil, Riki Ott Looking Back at Exxon Valdez Spill." Counterspin (June 14, 2019) ["The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico happened from the spring through the fall of 2010. The blowout of the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 people, and countless animals, on its way to becoming the worst marine oil spill in history. It seemed to take that protracted disaster on the US coast to generate a New York Times front-page story on June 16, 2010, about oil industry ravages in Nigeria’s delta region, which, the article noted, “has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years, by some estimates.” CounterSpin had a powerful conversation that week with filmmaker and video artist Sandy Cioffi, whose film, Sweet Crude, looks at the oil industry in Nigeria, and the way it is covered in the US. ... Oil spills are often discussed in media in terms of the Exxon Valdez. But if the use of the Valdez as a touchstone might give the impression that “lessons were learned” from that 1989 disaster…. Well, that mainly applies to the lesson that not disaster, but activism—dogged, ongoing, out-of-the-spotlight, misunderstood and maligned activism—is what changes things. That’s part of what we learned when we spoke with activist and marine biologist Riki Ott in 2009—then the 20-year anniversary of that “oil spill to end all oil spills”—now many spills ago."]

Citton, Yves. "Mediarchy (Polity Press, 2019)." New Books in Communications (September 28, 2020) ["We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies. Our political regimes are based less on nations or citizens than on audiences shaped by the media. We assume that our social and political destinies are shaped by the will of the people without realizing that ‘the people’ are always produced, both as individuals and as aggregates, by the media: we are all embedded in mediated publics, ‘intra-structured’ by the apparatuses of communication that govern our interactions. In his new book Mediarchy (Polity Press, 2019), Yves Citton maps out the new regime of experience, media and power that he designates by the term “mediarchy.” To understand mediarchy, we need to look both at the effects that the media have on us and also at the new forms of being and experience that they induce in us. We can never entirely escape from the effects of the mediarchies that operate through us but by becoming more aware of their conditioning, we can develop the new forms of political analysis and practice which are essential if we are to rise to the unprecedented challenges of our time. This comprehensive and far-reaching book will be essential reading for students and scholars in media and communications, politics and sociology, and it will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the multiple and complex ways that the media – from newspapers and TV to social media and the internet – shape our social, political and personal lives today."]

Clark, Anna and Barry Meier. "The Opioid Narratives." On the Media (March 27, 2019) ["Purdue Pharma has settled a lawsuit with the state of Oklahoma for $270 million, a larger figure than two other cases the company has settled with other states. In doing so, the company also avoided a televised trial in May at a time when there's been growing public pressure on Purdue and its owners, the Sackler family, amid allegations that they misled the public about the dangers of OxyContin. Back in 2017, Bob spoke with Barry Meier about how public discourse about chronic pain and treatment have been shaped by companies like Purdue with help from physicians, consultants, and the media. Meier is a former reporter for The New York Times and author of Pain Killer: A "Wonder" Drug's Trail of Addiction and Death. Bob also interviewed journalist Anna Clark about her reporting for the Columbia Journalism Review on opioid-related death notices. Sites like Legacy.com, she explained, have often chronicled the crisis' individual human toll. "]

Clark, Kristen and David Conrad. "The Gondolier." Radiolab (June 15, 2017) ["What happens when doing what you want to do means giving up who you really are? We travel to Venice, Italy with reporters Kristen Clark and David Conrad, where they meet gondolier Alex Hai. On the winding canals in the hidden parts of Venice, we learn about the nearly 1000-year old tradition of the Venetian Gondolier, and how the global media created a 20-year battle between that tradition and a supposed feminist icon."]

Claverie, Ezra. "From off-brand to franchise: Watchmen as advertisement." Jump Cut #58 (Spring 2018) 

"The Climate of Our Disconnect." Best of the Left (May 13, 2012)

Cohen, Jeff. "Edward Herman: Master of Dissent (1925 - 2017)." FAIR (November 14, 2017)

---.  "If U.S. Mass Media Were State-Controlled, Would They Look Any Different?" Counterpunch (June 27, 2013)

Cohen, Stephen F. "Distorting Russia: How the American media misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine." The Nation (March 3, 2014)

Cole, Matthew, et al. "The Lyin', The Rich, and the Warmongers." The Intercepted (March 14, 2018) ["This week on Intercepted: Exxon Mobil is out at the State Department. A radical Christian ideologue is in. And a veteran CIA officer who tortured detainees and set up the CIA black sites after 9/11 is slated to take the helm at Langley. And all of this happened in one fell swoop on Tuesday morning. The Intercept’s Matthew Cole and Jeremy analyze the major re-shuffle in Trumpland and what it means for the future of the planet. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who led the investigation of Erik Prince and Blackwater for years in Congress, analyzes the ongoing scandal over his alleged role in the Trump era and explains why she had her house swept for surveillance when she was investigating Prince. Musical artists Ana Tijoux and Lila Downs talk about the politics of colonialism, neoliberalism, and revolution and their new collaboration on the song, “Tinta Roja.” And, fresh off her stellar debut on 60 Minutes, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos stars in “Kindergarten Cop.”"]

Committee to Protect Journalists: Defending Journalists Worldwide [New York City: "The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1981. We promote press freedom worldwide by defending the rights of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal."]

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."]

Conroy, John. "A Torture Story Without End." On the Media (July 9, 2010)

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. ["The increasing prevalence of misinformation in society may adversely affect democratic decision making, which depends on a well-informed public. False information can originate from a number of sources including rumors, literary fiction, mainstream media, corporate-vested interests, governments, and nongovernmental organizations. The rise of the Internet and user-driven content has provided a venue for quick and broad dissemination of information, not all of which is accurate. Consequently, a large body of research spanning a number of disciplines has sought to understand misinformation and determine which interventions are most effective in reducing its influence. This essay summarizes research into misinformation, bringing together studies from psychology, political science, education, and computer science. Cognitive psychology investigates why individuals struggle with correcting misinformation and inaccurate beliefs, and why myths are so difficult to dislodge. Two important findings involve (i) various “backfire effects,” which arise when refutations ironically reinforce misconceptions, and (ii) the role of worldviews in accentuating the persistence of misinformation. Computer scientists simulate the spread of misinformation through social networks and develop algorithms to automatically detect or neutralize myths. We draw together various research threads to provide guidelines on how to effectively refute misconceptions without risking backfire effects"]

Cook, Jonathan. "Ahed Tamimi Offers Israelis a Lesson Worthy of Gandhi." Counterpunch (January 10, 2018)

---. "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"]

Copps, Michael. "Former FCC Commissioner Warns About Comcast-Time Warner Merger, "Mindless" Media Consolidation." Democracy Now (February 17, 2014)

Crain, Matthew. "Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)." New Books in Media & Communications (November 15, 2022) ["The contemporary internet's de facto business model is one of surveillance. Browser cookies follow us around the web, Amazon targets us with eerily prescient ads, Facebook and Google read our messages and analyze our patterns, and apps record our every move. In Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Matthew Crain gives internet surveillance a much-needed origin story by chronicling the development of its most important historical catalyst: web advertising. The first institutional and political history of internet advertising, Profit over Privacy uses the 1990s as its backdrop to show how the massive data-collection infrastructure that undergirds the internet today is the result of twenty-five years of technical and political economic engineering. Crain considers the social causes and consequences of the internet's rapid embrace of consumer monitoring, detailing how advertisers and marketers adapted to the existential threat of the internet and marshaled venture capital to develop the now-ubiquitous business model called "surveillance advertising." He draws on a range of primary resources from government, industry, and the press and highlights the political roots of internet advertising to underscore the necessity of political solutions to reign in unaccountable commercial surveillance. The dominant business model on the internet, surveillance advertising is the result of political choices--not the inevitable march of technology. Unlike many other countries, the United States has no internet privacy law. A fascinating prehistory of internet advertising giants like Google and Facebook, Profit over Privacy argues that the internet did not have to turn out this way and that it can be remade into something better."]

Crandall, Chris, Erin Kearns and Muniba Saleem. "The Weight of Our Words." Hidden Brain (April 13, 2018) ["... we look at the language we use around race and religion, and what it says about the culture we live in."]

Crisis In Democracy: Renewing Trust in America. Aspen Institute, 2019. ["The Report of the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy."]

Cromwell, David. "Bias Towards Power *Is* Corporate Media ‘Objectivity’: Journalism, Floods And Climate Silence." Media Lens (February 13, 2014)

---. "‘How Dare You!’ The Climate Crisis And The Public Demand For Real Action." Media Lens (September 30, 2019)

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)

---. "Snowden, Surveillance And The Secret State." Media Lens (June 28, 2013)

---. "'Sworn Enemies'? A Response To George Monbiot." Media Lens (November 6, 2012)

---. "‘A Suffocating Groupthink’: Sampling The Corporate Media On Israel, Iran, Syria And Russia." Media Lens (May 16, 2018)

D, Davey. "On the 10th Anniversary of the Iraq War We Recall key Anti-War Hip Hop Songs." Davey D's Hip Hop Corner (March 19, 2013)

Davies, Andrew and Penny Woolcock. "Gang Culture: On Screen and In Print." London School of Economics and Political Science (Literary Festival 2014: Recorded on 27 February 2014 in Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building.)

"DC Think Tanks Create New Cold War Tipping Point." Media Roots (May 6, 2014)

"Developing A Media Education Language: From Persuasive Techniques to Analytical Tools." ACME (ND)

Deveraux, Ryan. "Border Patrol Agents Tried to Delete Racist and Obscene Facebook Posts. We Archived Them." The Intercept (July 5, 2019)

Deveraux, Ryan and Nicole Ramos. "Journalists, Lawyers & Activists Targeted in Sweeping U.S. Intelligence Gathering Effort on Border." Democracy Now (March 11, 2019) ["Newly revealed documents show the U.S. government created a secret database of activists and journalists who were documenting the Trump administration’s efforts to thwart a caravan of migrants hoping to win asylum in the U.S. An investigation from San Diego’s NBC 7 revealed the list was shared among Homeland Security Investigations, ICE, Customs and Border Protection and the FBI. It included the names of 10 journalists—seven of whom are U.S. citizens—along with nearly four dozen others listed as “organizers” or “instigators.” House Democrats are now calling for the full disclosure of the government’s secret list. We speak with one of the activists targeted by the government, Nicole Ramos, director of Al Otro Lado’s Border Rights Project. The project works with asylum seekers in Tijuana, Mexico. We also speak with Ryan Devereaux, staff reporter at The Intercept. In early February, he wrote an article titled “Journalists, Lawyers, and Activists Working on the Border Face Coordinated Harassment from U.S. and Mexican Authorities.”"]

Dickey, Colin. "The Rise and Fall of Facts." Columbia Journalism Review (Fall 2019)

Dickinson, Tim. "How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory." Rolling Stone (May 25, 2011)

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)

"Domestic Propaganda and News Media." History Commons (Ongoing Historical Timeline)

"Domestic violence: still not chic, artistic or cutting edge." Feministing (August 31, 2011)

Dreifus, Claudia. ""I’m not the Resistance, I’m a reporter’: An Interview with April Ryan." NYR Daily (November 12, 2018)  ["At the top of Donald Trump’s journalistic enemies list is April Ryan, the fifty-one-year-old American Urban Radio Networks correspondent. Ryan—who has covered the presidency for more than two decades—is also an on-air political analyst for CNN and the author of three books, including the recently released Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House. Around Washington, D.C., Ryan holds the title Dean of the White House Press Corps. “I watched her get up,” the president fumed last week before departing for Paris. “I mean, you talk about somebody that’s a loser. She doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing… She’s very nasty, and she shouldn’t be… You’ve got to treat the White House and the Office of the Presidency with respect.” What Trump may find disrespectful is that Ryan has a penchant for asking tough questions on topics he’d doesn’t want to hear about: voter suppression, civil rights, Russia. Ryan is also black, female, middle-aged, and resolute. In January 2018, she asked, “Mr. President, are you a racist?” This boldness has made Ryan the target of Trump’s more ardent followers. She receives frequent death threats. On a reporter’s salary, she’s had to hire a full-time bodyguard. There are reports that Cesar Sayoc Jr., who is accused of sending pipe bombs to Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Barack Obama, and others, also had Ryan on his mailing list."]

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."]

Dunning, Brian. "Animal Predictors: Psychic, Sensitive, or Silly?" Skeptoid (April 29, 2014)

Edwards, David. "The Filter Bubble - Owen Jones And Con Coughlin." Media Lens (November 14, 2018) ["In a dream, the common sense rules and rationality of everyday life are, of course, suspended – we float to the top of the stairs, a cat smiles, a person is beheaded at the dinner table and the vegetables are served. In similar vein, Iraq was destroyed in a nakedly illegal oil grab, more than one million human beings were killed, and the 'mainstream' continued to treat the criminals responsible as respectable statespeople, and to take seriously their subsequent calls for 'humanitarian intervention' in oil-rich Libya. With Libya reduced to ruins, the same journalists dreamed on, treating the same criminals with the same respect as they sought yet one more regime change in Syria. This nightmare version of 'news' is maintained by a corporate 'filter bubble' that blocks facts, ideas and sources that challenge state-corporate control of politics, economics and culture. It is maintained by a mixture of ruthless high-level control and middle- and lower-level compromise, conformity and self-serving blindness."]

Edwards, David and David Cromwell. "Anatomy of a Propaganda Blitz." Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality. Pluto Press, 2018: 1-19.

Edwards, Kellee. "The Other Side of Fear." Women on the Road #100 (July 17, 2020) ["It feels more important than ever to re-think our role models. And adventure travel journalist, pilot, and deep water diver Kellee Edwards is someone who’s been paving a path on the road, in the air, and around the globe for years. It’s not just her passion to take herself to new heights that we’re inspired by though-- it’s the way she wants to bring everyone else with her."]

"Egypt Protests 2011." Global Voices (Archive of Citizen Media Reports)

Ellsberg, Daniel. "“I Know No One More Patriotic”: Daniel Ellsberg Praises Chelsea Manning After She Is Jailed Again." Democracy Now (March 11, 2019) ["U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been sent back to jail after refusing to answer questions before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Manning had been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors in Virginia’s Eastern District to appear for questioning about her 2010 leak to WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of State Department and Pentagon documents about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manning was imprisoned from 2010 to 2017 for the leak. President Obama commuted her sentence before he left office. We speak with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg about the significance of Chelsea Manning’s actions."]

Eurozine (Europe: "Eurozine is a network of European cultural journals, linking up more than 75 partner journals and just as many associated magazines and institutions from nearly all European countries. Eurozine is also a netmagazine which publishes outstanding articles from its partner journals with additional translations into one of the major European languages.")

Evans, Richard and Bryan Stevenson. "How Germany Can Help America Remember." On the Media (July 3, 2020) ["It’s often said the North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative. That’s why the battle still rages, and still takes casualties, every single day. To chronicle the opening of a new front in the war over the Civil War, Brooke and OTM producer Alana Casanova Burgess went to Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy, to speak with public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson about his new civil rights museum and memorial. When it comes to honoring and learning from our historical ills, Stevenson says America should look to another conflicted capital city, Berlin, Germany. In this piece, Brooke also speaks with historian Sir Richard Evans, author of The Third Reich in History and Memory, about how vestiges of the Nazi regime have been carefully curated to remember the victims of the Holocaust without reverence for their oppressors."]

Fallana, Dia, et al. "Growin’ Up, Comin’ Out, Speakin’ Proud." Making Contact (June 10, 2009)

Fang, Lee. "Who Pays the Pro-War Pundits? Conflicts of Interest Exposed for TV Guests Backing Military Action." Democracy Now (September 15, 2014)

Faux, Jeff. " Education Profiteering; Wall Street's Next Big Thing?" The Real News Network (September 30, 2012)

Featherstone, Liza. "Consumer Society and the Curation of Culture." Citations Needed (November 21, 2018) ["Focus groups have long-been derided by the left, right, and center for watering down culture and reducing creative and political endeavors to dull, show-of-hand reductionism. But what if focus groups – which first arose from socialist experiments in 1920s Vienna – are not inherently bad? What if they've simply been exploited by the capitalist class and could, potentially, have much to offer a left-wing, democratic vision of the world? We are joined by author and professor Liza Featherstone to discuss the problems and potential of the much-maligned, but often scapegoated, focus group."]

Feldt, Dan. "The Secret Chats of the Alt-Right." On the Media (March 22, 2019) ["What happens behind the scenes as the foot soldiers of far-right groups debate and plan their next moves? One place to find out is on a chatroom platform called Discord. Popular among gamers and other internet-savvy communities, it's also become a home for those looking to meet like-minded white nationalists. A large trove of their back-and-forth was uncovered by the left-wing media collective Unicorn Riot, which then revealed the conversations of neo-Nazi groups such as Patriot Front and the now-defunct Traditionalist Workers Party. Unicorn Riot scored its first load of Discord chats in August 2017 — the weekend of the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. It reported stories, shared the leaked chats and built a database of hundreds of thousands of messages completely open to the public. Bob speaks with Dan Feidt, co-founder of Unicorn Riot, about what his team has learned since the project began."]

Ferguson, Leo. "Combating Antisemitism." On the Media (May 3, 2019) ["After the attack in Pittsburgh, Bob spoke with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice organizer Leo Ferguson about how to understand the roots of antisemitism and the way it has functioned throughout history in order to help make sense of the threat it poses today. This week, Bob again speaks with Ferguson, who argues that we need to call out and root out antisemitism where we see it — but that the work of combating antisemitism also includes building cross-cultural coalitions that fight against white supremacy and for economic justice."]

Filippo, Maria San. "Provocateurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media (Indiana University Press, 2021)." New Books in Media & Communications (April 13, 2021) ["Twenty-first century media has increasingly turned to provocative sexual content to generate buzz and stand out within a glut of programming. New distribution technologies enable and amplify these provocations, and encourage the branding of media creators as "provocauteurs" known for challenging sexual conventions and representational norms. While such strategies may at times be no more than a profitable lure, the most probing and powerful instances of sexual provocation serve to illuminate, question, and transform our understanding of sex and sexuality. In Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media (Indiana UP, 2021), award-winning author Maria San Filippo looks at the provocative in films, television series, web series and videos, entertainment industry publicity materials, and social media discourses and explores its potential to create alternative, even radical ways of screening sex. Throughout this edgy volume, San Filippo reassesses troubling texts and divisive figures, examining controversial strategies--from "real sex" scenes to scandalous marketing campaigns to full-frontal nudity--to reveal the critical role that sexual provocation plays as an authorial signature and promotional strategy within the contemporary media landscape."]

Fogg, B.J., et al. "A History of Persuasion, Pt. 3." On the Media (August 28, 2019) [On how the tech innovators that started our social media platforms were trained at Stanford University in the creation of addictive behaviors through their technological devices. Features the authors: - Alexandra Rutherford, Professor in the Department of Psychology at York University in Toronto and author of Beyond the Box: B.F. Skinner's Technology of Behaviour from Laboratory to Life, 1950s-1970s
- Ian Leslie, author of The Scientists Who Make Apps Addictive

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "The Medium is the Message." Weird Studies #71 (April 15, 2020) ["On the surface, the phrase "the medium is the message," prophetic as it may have been when Marshall McLuhan coined it, points a now-obvious fact of our wired world, namely that the content of any medium is less important than its form. The advent of email, for instance, has brought about changes in society and culture that are more far-reaching than the content of any particular email. On the other hand, this aphorism of McLuhan's has the ring of an utterance of the Delphic Oracle. As Phil proposes in this episode of Weird Studies, it is an example of what Zen practitioners call a koan, a statement that occludes and illumines in equal measures, a jewel whose shining surface is an invitation to descend into dark depths. Join JF and Phil as they discuss the mystical and cosmic implications of McLuhan's oracular vision."]

Foster, John Bellamy and Robert W. McChesney. "The Internet's Unholy Marriage to Capitalim" Monthly Review (March 2011)

"FOX News Lies About 'Violent Wisconsin' Protests." YouTube (March 1, 2011)

Frank, Casey. "How Investigative Reporting & Survivor Testimony Toppled Billionaire Serial Abuser Jeffrey Epstein." Democracy Now (July 9, 2019) [ Michael Benton -- I complain a lot about the failures of corporate media. I would like to step back and give a nod of appreciation to the Miami Herald for their impressive and difficult investigative reporting - good episode looking into their work on this issue when powerful people just wanted it to go away. This is what we want to see from the fourth estate, watchdog journalism that isn't afraid to defend the powerless. --  "Billionaire hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein was charged in a Manhattan federal court Monday with sex trafficking and conspiracy. He is accused of sexually assaulting and trafficking dozens of underage girls between 2002 and 2005 at his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida. Epstein, who has counted Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton among his friends, pleaded not guilty and is being held in jail until his bond hearing next week. Several accusers were present in federal court in Manhattan on Monday. In November 2018, the Miami Herald published a series of articles by investigative reporter Julie Brown exposing Epstein’s crimes and the high-powered people, such as President Trump’s Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who protected him. Epstein’s arrest after more than a decade of accusations is in part being hailed as a feat of local investigative journalism. We speak with Casey Frank, the senior editor for investigations at the Miami Herald."]

Frank, Joshua and Jeffrey St. Clair. "Ghosts in the Propaganda Machine." Counterpunch (January 5, 2018)

Gilbert, Sophie. "The Lazy Trope of the Unethical Female Journalist." The Atlantic (August 20, 2018)

Gilbertson, Annie."Policing the Police." On the Media (April 2, 2019) ["California recently passed a law that eliminates some of the barriers to accessing records on egregious police misconduct and deadly use of force. With the floodgates open, journalists, like KPCC investigative reporter Annie Gilbertson, are elated and terrified. Just one police violation can come with hundreds of associated documents for journalists to comb through. So, instead of fighting tooth and nail for the scoop, over 30 media organizations across the state are teaming up to share resources, bodies and insight as they begin the arduous task of combing through the newly-available records. The coalition is called the California Reporting Project. Bob Garfield talked with Gilbertson about what the project is uncovering."]

Gillmor, Dan. We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. (O'Reilly Media,2004)

On the Media (April 19, 2019) ["Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World, explains that we're living in a century-old bargain between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of society: the rich get rich, and the rest of us get downstream benefits. Giridharadas and Bob talk about the origins of this bargain — and what needs to shift if we hope to see meaningful structural solutions to society's most pressing challenges."]

Giroux, Henri, Kathleen Higgins and Jason Stanley. "The Truth about 'Post-Truth.'" Ideas (July 18, 2017) ["The election of Donald Trump has ignited talk that we're now living in a "post-truth" era. But are we? Where does the idea that the truth no longer exists come from? Or the notion that the truth doesn't matter anymore? Host Paul Kennedy talks to thinkers who argue that the story began years earlier, with a kind of collective identity crisis: authoritarianism can become attractive when you no longer remember who you are."]

Global Voices: Advocacy ["Global Voices Advocacy is a project of Global Voices Online. We seek to build a global anti-censorship network of bloggers and online activists throughout the developing world that is dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online. The aim of this network is to raise awareness of online freedom of speech issues, and to share tools and tactics with activists and bloggers facing censorship on different parts of the globe. The network is meant not only to provide support to its members, but also to produce educational guides about anonymous blogging, anti-censorship campaigns, and online organizing. By collaborating with software developers, activists, and bloggers, the network hopes to design new and more appropriate tools to protect our rights on the Internet. The Director of Global Voices Advocacy is Sami ben Gharbia, a Tunisian free speech advocate and blogger based in the Netherlands. From China, John Kennedy contributes regular updates on citizen media and censorship. Additionally, dozens of volunteers contribute articles."]

Global Voices: Citizen Media Stories from Around the World ("Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.")

Goodman, Amy. "Four Days in Occupied Western Sahara—A Rare Look Inside Africa’s Last Colony." Democracy Now (August 31, 2018) ["In this exclusive broadcast, Democracy Now! breaks the media blockade and goes to occupied Western Sahara in the northwest of Africa to document the decades-long Sahrawi struggle for freedom and Morocco’s violent crackdown. Morocco has occupied the territory since 1975 in defiance of the United Nations and the international community. Thousands have been tortured, imprisoned, killed and disappeared while resisting the Moroccan occupation. A 1,700-mile wall divides Sahrawis who remain under occupation from those who fled into exile. The international media has largely ignored the occupation—in part because Morocco has routinely blocked journalists from entering Western Sahara. But in late 2016 Democracy Now! managed to get into the Western Saharan city of Laayoune, becoming the first international news team to report from the occupied territory in years."]

Gosztola, Kevin and Dorian Warren. "Occupy Wall Street Emerges as “First Populist Movement” on the Left Since the 1930s." Democracy Now (October 10, 2011)

Gourevitch, Philip. "Reporting the Story of a Genocide." Conversations with History (February 11, 2000)

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 Forbes reporter 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."]

Greenwald, Glenn. "A Massive Surveillance State": Glenn Greenwald Exposes Covert NSA Program Collecting Calls, Emails." Democracy Now (June 7, 2013)

---. "AP believes it found evidence of Iran's work on nuclear weapons: A primitive graph provided by 'a country critical of Iran's atomic program' indicts the news outlet more than Tehran." The Guardian (November 28, 2012)

---. "Glenn Greenwald." 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."]

---. "Glenn Greenwald Speaks Out on Edward Snowden and the NSA Revelations." We Are Many (June 2013)

---. "Is Facebook Operating as an Arm of the Israeli State by Removing Palestinian Posts?" Democracy Now (January 2, 2017) ["Facebook is being accused of censoring Palestinian activists who protest the Israeli occupation. This comes as Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked reportedly said in December that Tel Aviv had submitted 158 requests to Facebook over the previous four months asking it to remove content it deemed “incitement,” and said Facebook had granted 95 percent of the requests."]

---. "Norway Attacks Expose U.S. Media’s Double Standard on 'Terrorism.'" Democracy Now (July 26, 2011)

---. "Obama's kill list policy compels US support for Israeli attacks on Gaza." The Guardian (November 15, 2012)

---. "State department attacks CNN for doing basic journalism: Obama officials hide behind Ambassador Stevens' family to delegitimize reporting that reflects poorly on them." The Guardian (September 24, 2012)

---. "The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened." The Intercept (December 9, 2017)

---. "Where is Edward Snowden? Glenn Greenwald on Asylum Request, Espionage Charge; More Leaks to Come." Democracy Now (June 24, 2013)

---. "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 David Cay Johnston. "As Mueller Finds No Collusion, Did Press Overhype Russiagate?" Democracy Now (March 25, 2019) ["As congressional Democrats call on the Justice Department to release the full Mueller report, we speak to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who have closely followed the probes into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election: Glenn Greenwald, a founding editor of The Intercept and a leading critic of the media coverage of alleged Russian collusion, and David Cay Johnston, formerly of The New York Times, now founder and editor of DCReport.org, who has written critically about Donald Trump for decades. His most recent book is “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.”"]

Greenwald, Glenn and Jeremy Scahill. "Death By Metadata: Jeremy Scahill & Glenn Greenwald Reveal NSA Role in Assassinations Overseas." Democracy Now (February 10, 2014)

---. "Defying Threats to Journalism, Jeremy Scahill & Glenn Greenwald Launch New Venture, The Intercept." Democracy Now (February 10, 2014)

---. "Report: Obama Administration Considers Assassinating Another American Overseas." Democracy Now (February 10, 2014)

Greenwald, Glenn and Tom Engelhardt. "A Conversation." Lannan Lectures (September 27, 2017)

Greenwald, Glenn and Trevor Timm. "The DNC’S Lawsuit Against WikiLeaks Poses a Serious Threat to Press Freedom." The Intercept (April 20, 2018)

Grossman, Andrew. "The Perverse Privilege of Degradation: American Politics in the Age of Assimilation." Bright Lights Film Journal #74 (November 2011)

---. "When the World Was Wide(r): A Requiem for PBS." Bright Lights Film Journal #79 (February 2013)

Guevara, Marina Walker. "Paradise Found." On the Media (November 10, 2017) ["A year and a half after the explosive leak of the Panama Papers revealed the shady, yet entirely legal, offshore banking practices of world's richest people and companies, a new trove of documents was announced: the Paradise Papers. This time, the leak discloses the financial dealings of some familiar names and faces, including members of the Trump Administration. The public officials acknowledge and defend the practice of skirting taxes through the use of havens, and deny any possible conflicts of interest. Bob speaks with Marina Walker Guevara, Deputy Director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which facilitated reporting on the documents along with hundreds of reporters around the globe. She shares how reporters from such a large network collaborate and explores what kinds of questions we should all be asking after learning that the rich and powerful play by a different set of rules than the rest of us."]

Guevara, Marina Walker, Michael Hudson and Gerard Ryle. "Likely Largest Journalism Collaboration In History." The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (April 3, 2013)

Gupta, Arun. "Anthony Bourdain (1956 - 2018)." Jacobin (June 11, 2018) ["Anthony Bourdain’s genius was not in the kitchen. His genius was in knowing which side he was on."]

Haankes, Keegan, Rachel Janik and Michael Edison Hayden. "Shooting at Poway Synagogue Underscores Link Between Internet Radicalization and Violence." Hatewatch (April 28, 2019)

Hanarahan, Noelle and Stephen Vittoria. "'Long Distance Revolutionary': Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Journey from Black Panthers to Prison Journalist." Democracy Now (February 1, 2013)

"Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents." Reporters Without Borders (2008)

Harrington, Brooke. "Lifestyles of the Rich and Hidden." On the Media (November 10, 2017) ["A year and a half after the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers have again thrown back the curtain on the vast world of wealth that exists in offshore tax havens. But even after the two largest data leaks in history, those in the know say that we have still barely glimpsed the extent of this ecosystem. And according to Brooke Harrington, Professor of Economic Sociology at Copenhagen Business School and author of Capital Without Borders, if we really want to understand the situation, we need to look beyond the wealthy themselves and toward the industry devoted to keeping them rich and hidden. Bob talks to Harrington about the profession of "wealth management," why it's a threat to democracy and what can be done."]

Harris, Tristan. "Social Dilemma Star on Fighting the Disinformation Machine." Berkeley Talks (February 26, 2021) ["In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, former Google design ethicist and star of the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, discusses how fake news spreads faster than factual news — a result of citizens sharing emotionally resonant misinformation or disinformation, often weaponized for profit and propaganda purposes, while tech algorithms amplify the viral spread."]

Head, Billy, Claire Perkins and Julia Vassilieva. "Tuning into COVID-19: How the pandemic has changed screen content and viewing practices." Lens (July 8, 2020) ["Our experience of the coronavirus pandemic has been filtered through screens of various sizes – TV screens, computer screens, mobile phone screens. Working alongside each other, broadcast media, social media, citizen science and individually-produced footage rapidly established a distinctive "visual economy" for screen representations of COVID-19 – a set of representational norms that has blurred the boundaries between documentary, news, amateur filmmaking, and surveillance and automated images. These norms will be instrumental in how the pandemic is archived and remembered in the future. It includes a vocabulary of iconic images on our screens, the circulation of which has imbued them with highly charged affective and symbolic values."]

Hedges, Chris. "The Death of the Liberal Class." (Video of presentation at The Sanctuary for Independent Media: October 17, 2010)

---. "The Unsilenced Voice of a Long Distance Revolutionary." TruthDig (December 9, 2012)

Hernandez, Daniel. "The Surreal Life of Mexico City." The Marketplace of Ideas (August 4, 2011)

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."]

Higgins, Kathleen. "Post-Truth Pluralism: The Unlikely Political Wisdom of Nietzsche." The Breakthrough #3 (Summer 2013) ["In recent years, liberals have blamed conservatives for the declining societal respect for facts, the rise of deceptive partisan media outlets like Fox News, and the creation of an echo chamber effect in public discussion. The insinuation behind the critique is that if people only knew the truth, we wouldn’t have as many wicked problems. On the other hand, the conservative case against liberalism revolves less around declining respect for the truth and more around values such as the weakening of human will to creative greatness, which was argued by Allan Bloom. In attempting to reduce political disagreement to black and white categories of fact and fiction, liberals, like Paul Krugman, dismiss Nietzsche’s important lesson that truth is always a function of the will to describe reality, and that the plurality of viewpoints is a necessary feature, rather than obstacle, of a developed democracy."]

Hinojosa, Maria. "From the Front Lines." The UO Channel (October 9, 2018)
["The first Latina reporter to be hired by NPR, Hinojosa helped to launch Latino USA, one of the earliest public radio programs devoted to the Latino community. She has anchored the show for its entire 22-year run, and since 2000 has also been the program’s executive producer. In 2010 she became the founder, president, and CEO of Futuro Media Group, an independent nonprofit organization producing multimedia journalism that explores and gives a critical voice to the diversity of the American experience. She is also the anchor and Executive Producer of the PBS show America By the Numbers with Maria Hinojosa, through which she has informed millions about the changing cultural and political landscape in America and abroad. In her nearly 30 years as a journalist, Hinojosa has worked for CNN, PBS, CBS, WNBC, and WGBH. Her previous projects include PBS’ Need to Know series, and the WGBH/La Plaza program Maria Hinojosa: One-on-One, a talk show featuring interviews with diverse guests including actors, writers, activists, and politicians. She served for five years as a Senior Correspondent for NOW on PBS. Additionally, Hinojosa was the first Latina to anchor a FRONTLINE report: aired in October 2011, “Lost in Detention” explored abuse at immigrant detention facilities, garnering attention from Capitol Hill to both the mainstream and Spanish-language media. Throughout her career, Hinojosa has been drawn to the mission behind public media and its power to give voice to the diversity of opinions that represent the complexity of our country. Her goal as a journalist is to share America’s untold stories and to highlight today’s critical issues in a responsible and respectful manner. Hinojosa has won numerous awards for her work, including four Emmys; the 2012 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism; the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Reporting on the Disadvantaged; and the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club for best documentary for her groundbreaking “Child Brides: Stolen Lives.” In addition to broadcast work, Hinojosa has been a syndicated columnist and is the author of two books."]

---. "The Importance of Journalism for a Functioning Democracy." UO Today #685 (October 9, 2017) ["Journalist Maria Hinojosa, host of NPR’s Latino USA, and president and CEO of Futuro Media Group. Hinojosa discusses her career and the importance of journalism for a functioning democracy. She also talks about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and the federal response to the hurricane disaster in Puerto Rico."]

History Commons ("The History Commons website is operated by the Center for Grassroots Oversight ("CGO"), a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. ... The website is a tool for open-content participatory journalism. It allows people to investigate important issues by providing a space where people can collaborate on the documentation of past and current events, as well as the entities associated with those events.")

Horn, Steve. "MSNBC's (GE's) Dylan Ratigan Show "Firewater?" Series: Natural Gas Industry-Media Complex Exposed." PR Watch

Horton, Scott. "A Setback For Obama’s War On Whistleblowers." Law and Disorder Radio (August 15, 2011)

Huff, Mickey. "Project "Censored 2012": Moving Beyond Media Reform." TruthOut (September 7, 2011)

Human Resources: Social Engineering in the 20th Century (USA: Scott Noble, 2011: 119 mins)

Hussain, Murtaza. "How the U.S. Concocted a Terror Threat to Justify Syria Strikes, and the Corporate Media Went Along." Democracy Now (September 29, 2014)

Hyman, Louis. "The Radical Catalog." On the Media (October 18, 2018) ["Another chapter in the history of American consumerism came to a close this week when the retail giant Sears announced it was filing for bankruptcy and closing 142 of its unprofitable stores. As experts sifted through the details about what doomed Sears, we found ourselves reading a Twitter thread about a little-known bit of shopping history. Louis Hymanis an economic historian and professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He tweeted: "In my history of consumption class, I teach about Sears, but what most people don't know is just how radical the catalogue was in the era of Jim Crow." In this week's podcast extra, Hyman talks to Brooke about what we can learn from the way Sears upended Jim Crow power dynamics, and what lessons it offers about capitalism more broadly. His latest book is Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary."]

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."]

Jamail, Dahr, with William Rivers Pitt. "The End of Ice." Lannan Podcasts (March 13, 2019) ["Dahr Jamail is an award-winning author and journalist. In 2003 he was one of very few unembedded journalists in the early stages of the Iraq War. He has written for Le Monde Diplomatique, the Guardian, the Nation, the Huffington Post, the Sunday Herald in Scotland, and Foreign Policy in Focus, and has contributed to Democracy Now!, Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera English, the BBC, NPR, and numerous other radio and television stations around the globe. In 2008 he was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, and in 2018 the Part Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College awarded him an Izzy for his “path-breaking and in-depth reporting,” work that exposed “environmental hazards and militarism.” He is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (2007), The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (2009), and The Mass Destruction of Iraq: The Disintegration of a Nation: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible (2014). Jamail is now a senior investigative journalist for Truthout.org. There he reports on climate disruption in the Anthropocene, digesting the most cutting-edge scientific evidence for a socially conscious and activist lay audience. His new book The End of Ice (The New Press, 2018) looks at the effects of climate disruption as he witnessed them firsthand as a young mountain guide on Denali. He writes, 'On the one hand, the experience of being on ice that is thousands of years old and often hundreds if not thousands of feet thick is humbling. The accompanying awe of this reality, coupled with the sheer beauty of these landscapes carved by and now covered with glaciers is not to be missed… [but] witnessing these dramatic impacts from anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) first-hand always feels like a gut punch to me. My climbing partners and I shook our heads at the spectacle, then carried on to the edge of the glacier in order to unrope and ascend the moraine.'"]
Jensen, Robert. "Pornography as a mirror: Do we want to look?" The F Word (August 30, 2011)

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”."]

Johnson, Adam, Nima Shirazi and Josmar Trujillo. "The Rise of Superpredator 2.0." Citations Needed (July 21, 2017)  ["... about the media narrative surrounding the rise of so-called “gang raids” that have exploded over the past three years. These high-stakes, headline-grabbing spectacles target, almost exclusively, black and brown people and are carried out by hundreds of local, state, and federal officials with little scrutiny from the media."]

Johnson, Jake. "Anand Giridharadas on Sanders' Victory in Nevada: 'A Wake Up Moment for the American Power Establishment.'" Common Dreams (February 23, 2020)

Jordan, Elise. "The Last Magazine: One Year After Death, Michael Hastings’ Lost Novel Satirizes Corporate Media." Democracy Now (June 17, 2014)

"Julian Assange in Conversation with John Pilger." Top Documentary Films (2010)

Kahle, Brewster and Rick Prelinger. "The 9/11 TV News Archive: 3,000 Hours of Video News Coverage of 2001 Attacks Posted Online." Democracy Now (August 24, 2011)

---. "Pioneering Internet Archivists Brewster Kahle and Rick Prelinger on Preservation in the Digital Age." Democracy Now (August 24, 2011)

Kahn, Emcee Ayesha, et al. "Combating Islamophobia in the Media." Needs No Introduction (April 11, 2016)

Kantor, Jodi and Megan Twohey. "OTM presents: Here's the Thing with Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor." On the Media (January 29, 2020) ["Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey are the New York Times reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story. For five months -- perpetually in danger of losing the scoop -- they cultivated and cajoled sources ranging from the Weinsteins’ accountant to Ashley Judd. The article that emerged on October 5th, 2017, was a level-headed and impeccably sourced exposé, whose effects continue to be felt around the world. Their conversation with Alec Baldwin covers their reporting process, and moves on to a joint wrestling with Alec’s own early knowledge of one of the Weinstein allegations, and his ongoing friendship with accused harasser James Toback. The guests ask Alec questions about the movie industry’s ethics about sex and “the casting couch.” Over a respectful and surprising half-hour, host and guests together talk through the many dilemmas posed by the #MeToo movement that Kantor and Twohey did so much to unleash."]

Keen, Andrew, et al. "Debate: The Internet and Democracy." FORA TV (May 18, 2010)

Keller, Bill. "The Inner Lives of Wartime Photographers." The New York Times (May 8, 2011)

Kelly, Kim. "The Politics of Criticism." Columbia Journalism Review (August 8, 2019) ["My life with heavy metal, Tucker Carlson, NPR, and strong opinions.]

King, Martin Luther, Jr. "On 45th Anniversary of His Death, Martin Luther King Jr. on the Power of Media and the Horror of War." Democracy Now (April 4, 2013)

King, Shaun. "The Bigot Threatening CNN Got Out In Time for Dinner." The Intercept (January 24, 2018)

Kitty, Alexandra. "Objectivity in Journalism: Should We Be Skeptical?" Skeptic (ND)

Klein, Ezra. "Book excerpt: A better theory of identity politics." The Ezra Klein Show (January 23, 2020) ["A core argument of the book is that identity is the central driver of political polarization. But to see how it works, we need a better theory of how identities form, what happens when they activate, and where they fit into our conflicts. We’ve been taught to only see identity politics in others. We need to see it in ourselves."]

Klein, Melanie. "Make-up and Hot Pink Toenails- Not Just a Girl Thing." WIMN's Voices (April 10, 2011)

Knight, Sam. "Adam Curtis Explains It All." The New Yorker (January 28, 2021)

Koresky, Michael and Jeff Reichert. "This Means War! Introduction." Reverse Shot (June 23, 2003) ["Project for a New American Criticism,Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate the War."]

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."]

Landman, Anne. "What Happened to Media Coverage of Fukushima?" Common Dreams (June 24, 2011)

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, Jason. Nazism and Neo-Nazism in Film and Media. Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ["This timely book takes an original transnational approach to the theme of Nazism and neo-Nazism in film, media, and popular culture, with examples drawn from mainland Europe, the UK, North and Latin America, Asia, and beyond. This approach fits with the established dominance of global multimedia formats, and will be useful for students, scholars, and researchers in all forms of film and media. Along with the essential need to examine current trends in Nazism and neo-Nazism in contemporary media globally, what makes this book even more necessary is that it engages with debates that go to the very heart of our understanding of knowledge: history, memory, meaning, and truth."]

Lehmann, Chris. "Firing Lines." The Baffler (October 29, 2018) ["How a morally inert media complex supplies alibis for right-wing terror."]

Lessig, Lawrence and Jonathan Zittrain. "The Internet Kill Switch." Radio Berkman (March 16, 2011)

Levin, Yuval. "The Conservative Mind of Yuval Levin." The Ezra Klein Show (January 9, 2020) ["Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is the way we often conflate two very distinct things when we assign political labels. The first is ideology, which describes our vision of a just society. The second is something less discussed but equally important: temperament. It describes how we approach social problems, how fast we think society can change, and how we understand the constraints upon us. Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, the editor-in-chief of the public policy journal National Affairs, and the author of the upcoming book A Time to Build. Levin is one of the most thoughtful articulators of both conservative temperament and ideology. And, perhaps for that reason, his is one of the most important criticisms of what the conservative movement has become today.There’s a lot in this conversation, in part because Levin’s book speaks to mine in interesting ways, but among the topics we discuss are: The conservative view of human nature Why the conservative temperament is increasingly diverging from the conservative movement What theories of American politics get wrong about the reality of American life The case Levin makes to socialists How economic debates are often moral debates in disguise Levin’s rebuttal to my book The crucial difference between “formative” and “performative” social institutions Why the most fundamental problems in American life are cultural, not economic Why Levin thinks the New York Times should not allow its journalists to be on Twitter Whether we can restore trust in our institutions without changing the incentives and systems that surround them There’s a lot Levin and I disagree on, but there are few people I learn as much from in disagreement as I learn from him."]

Loewinger, Micah. "How Youtube's Left is Changing Minds." On the Media (July 19, 2019) ["The president’s racist tweets this weekend provoked revulsion throughout the mainstream media. But on YouTube, America’s most popular social media site, racism has found a home. Free of old-school gate-keeping, YouTube hosts a much wider political spectrum, reaching very impressionable eyes and ears. On the Media producer Micah Loewinger tells the story of three young viewers whose right-wing beliefs melted away after encountering videos by an informal movement of leftist creators known as Left Tube. He spoke with two of Left Tube's most famous personalities, Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints) and Oliver Thorn (Philosophy Tube) about how they think about crafting compelling videos. "]

Lombardi, Amy J. "On the Origins of the term 'Doublespeak.'" The Daily Doublespeak (September 4, 2008)

Ludlow, Peter. "Jailed Journalist Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years For Reporting on Hacked Private Intelligence Firms." Democracy Now (July 11, 2013)

Luxenberg, Steve. "Separate and Unequal." On the Media (March 8, 2019)  ["Throughout the 1800s, the question at the heart of nearly every political, cultural and academic conversation dealt in some capacity with whether Black Americans were eligible for full citizenship. Our collective understanding of 19th-century racial politics depends on the landmark civil rights legislation that came out of the era. One notorious decision was Plessy v. Ferguson, the case in which the Supreme Court confirmed the constitutionality of racial separation, helping to pave the way for nearly 60 years of Jim Crow laws. Though the decision was overturned by the 1954Brown v. Board of Education decision, the de facto segregation Plessy codified continues into the present. But at the time, Plessy wasn’t deemed newsworthy — at least not by the white-dominated, partisan press. To contextualize the road to Plessy, Bob spoke with Steve Luxenberg, author of the new book, Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation."]

Lynskey, Dorian. "The GOP Delusion: How Conservatives Were Mugged by Reality." 33 Revolutions Per Minute (November 8, 2012)


Lenz, Lyz. "Sorry Not Sorry." On the Media (July 15, 2020) ["Fox Primetime host Tucker Carlson has already had quite the July. On the plus side, the latest ratings for his show have made him officially the most watched cable news host. On the other side of the ledger, advertisers are fleeing his show on the grounds of not wishing to be associated with lies and hate speech. Oh, also, his head writer Blake Neff, was forced out after his explicitly racist and misogynist social media posts were unmasked online. And now Tucker is off the show for two weeks, as he put it “on a long-planned vacation.” "]

---. "Tucker Was Tucker All Along." On the Media (March 13, 2019) ["To suggest that Tucker Carlson has a tendency to hint at deeply discriminatory tropes would be cliché — but also dead-on. Just this week, thanks to newly unearthed audio released by Media Matters, the Fox News darling ditches his signature dog whistle in exchange for unmistakable and unapologetic hate speech. Who is Tucker Carlson, really? In this week's pod extra, Bob delves into the origins of the now-notorious commentator with Lyz Lenz, a writer for Columbia Journalism Review who profiled Carlson in September."]

MacKinnon, Catherine. "Lovelace." Harvard University Press Blog (August 9, 2013) ["The pornographic film Deep Throat, released in 1972, was a cultural sensation whose star, “Linda Lovelace,” was said to put a girl-next-door face on the sexual revolution. But the actual life of Linda Boreman, as depicted in the new biopic Lovelace, was one of beatings, rape, and terror. Feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, author of such works as Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and Only Words, represented Boreman after she came forward with her story, and later, with Andrea Dworkin, pursued civil rights litigation as a means to fight pornography. We asked MacKinnon about Boreman, Lovelace, and the potential impact of the film."]

Macleod, Alan. "USAID’s disinformation primer: Global censorship in the name of democracy." Monthly Review (April 9, 2024) ["A report from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) outlines how the government agency has been encouraging governments, tech platforms, establishment media outlets and advertisers to work together to censor huge swaths of the Internet. The 97-page “disinformation primer,” obtained by conservative firm America First Legal under the Freedom of Information Act, purports to be fighting fake news. However, much of the organization’s focus appears to be on preventing individuals from finding information online that challenges official narratives and leads to increased questioning of the system more generally. The document calls for regulating video games and online message boards, steering individuals away from alternative media and back towards more elite-friendly sites, and for governments to work with advertisers to cripple organizations that refuse to toe official lines financially. Furthermore, it highlights government-backed fact-checking groups like Bellingcat, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council as leaders in the fight against disinformation, despite the fact that those groups have close connections to the national security state, which is an overwhelming conflict of interest. The news that a government agency is promoting such a program is worrying enough. However, we shall also see how USAID itself has promoted fake news to push for regime change abroad."]

Maharidge, Dale. "Someplace Like America." University of California Press Blog (May 9, 2011) ["In the latest UC Press podcast, Dale Maharidge, author of Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression, talks about his experiences reporting on working-class America for the last three decades. Maharidge describes the emerging class of “new homeless” across the country, the symbolic significance of Youngstown, Ohio, and the way Bruce Springsteen took interest in the project. Maharidge also talks about the practice of “immersion journalism,” which has landed him in some dangerous situations over the years: working in a de facto slave camp in Texas, getting a gun pulled on him, and living in an abandoned grain elevator for three days. Finally, he speaks about the attack on unions in Wisconsin, and why this story matters today more than ever."]

Mander, Jerry. "Privatization of Consciousness." Monthly Review (October 2012)

Mangold, Tom. "Murder in Mayfield." BBC (May 17, 2013)

Manufacturing Consent (USA: March Achbar and Peter Wintonick, 1992)


Martin, Alfred L., Jr. "Racquel J. Gates, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2018)." Film Criticism 44.3 (Spring 2019)

Mason, Lilliana. "Anger and Identity in an Age of Polarization." On the Media (October 30, 2020) ["Anger and tribalism appear to be at an all time high, creating political and societal rifts that can seem unbridgeable. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that only 70 years ago, the country was deemed by political scientists not to be polarized enough, leading to confusion and disengagement on the part of the electorate. Since then, party lines have been crystallized, and the parties, polarized. Most people know exactly which party they belong to — leaving us with two camps that seek to destroy one another. Lilliana Mason is professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. She and Bob discuss how anger and tribal identity have gotten us to the current political moment, and how we might move past it."]

Maurizi, Stefania. Secret Power: Wikileaks and Its Enemies. Translated by Lesli Cavanaugh-Bardelli. Pluto Press, 2022. ["'I want to live in a society where secret power is accountable to the law and to public opinion for its atrocities, where it is the war criminals who go to jail, not those who have the conscience and courage to expose them.' It is 2008, and Stefania Maurizi, an investigative journalist with a growing interest in cryptography, starts looking into the little-known organisation WikiLeaks. Through hushed meetings, encrypted files and explosive documents, what she discovers sets her on a life-long journey that takes her deep into the realm of secret power. Working closely with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange and his organisation for her newspaper, Maurizi has spent over a decade investigating state criminality protected by thick layers of secrecy, while also embarking on a solitary trench warfare to unearth the facts underpinning the cruel persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks. With complex and disturbing insights, Maurizi's tireless journalism exposes atrocities, the shameful treatment of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, on up to the present persecution of WikiLeaks: a terrifying web of impunity and cover-ups. At the heart of the book is the brutality of secret power and the unbearable price paid by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and truthtellers."]

Maxwell, Richard. "Greening the Media." Team Human #2 (January 2016) ["Playing for Team Human today is Professor Richard Maxwell. Richard Maxwell is a political economist of media. His research begins at the intersection of politics and economics to analyze the global media, their social and cultural impact, and the policies that regulate their reach and operations. Richard has published on a wide array of media topics. Recent work includes The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media (Editor) Media and the Ecological Crisis (co-editor) and Greening the Media with Toby Miller. In this episode of Team Human, Professor Maxwell provides an eye opening account of the environmental damage caused by media technology, the myth of a “Post Industrial” society, and what we must do create a world sustainable for people."]

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."]

McCausland, Phil. "Mixed Messages in the Heartland." On the Media (May 15, 2020) ["During Monday's White House press briefing, President Trump asserted that, "All throughout the country, the numbers are coming down rapidly." However, the White House's own data, collected by the Coronavirus Task Force's Data and Analytics Unit, paints a drastically different picture. According to an unreleased May 7 report obtained by NBC News, infections and deaths are skyrocketing around the United States, particularly in areas of the American heartland. But the keyword here is "unreleased" — the task force has been keeping its data close to the vest, releasing it in dribs and drabs. Consequently, it's up to often under-resourced state and municipal leaders to draw their own conclusions. Phil McCausland, an NBC News reporter covering rural issues, was one of the journalists who broke the hidden-data story. He tells Bob that, absent federal data and directives, civilians in rural communities are left largely in the dark about the severity of their circumstances."]

McChesney, Robert W. and John Nichols. "The Bull Market: Political Advertising." Monthly Review (April 1, 2012)

---. "Who Will Win the Digital Revolution?" Needs No Introduction (April 21, 2016)

McIntosh, Erik. "Viewer Beware: We Need More LGBTQ TV Role Models For Kids." The Los Angeles Review of Books (November 30, 2017)

Media Bias/Fact Check  [Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC News) is an independent online media outlet. MBFC News is dedicated to educating the public on media bias and deceptive news practices. MBFC News’ aim is to inspire action and a rejection of overtly biased media. We want to return to an era of straight forward news reporting. Funding for MBFC News comes from site advertising, individual donors, and the pockets of our bias checkers. MBFC News follows a strict methodology for determining the biases of sources. Dave Van Zandt is the primary editor for sources. He is assisted by a collective of volunteers who assist in research for many sources listed on these pages. MBFC News also provides occasional fact checks, original articles on media bias and breaking/important news stories, especially as it relates to USA politics. MBFC News was founded by Dave Van Zandt in 2015. Dave studied Communications in college and over the years has focused on personal research in media bias and the role of media in politics. Dave is a registered Non-Affiliated voter who values evidence based reporting.]

Meek, Michelle. "Sex Sells—But Why? and How? Author Maria San Filippo on Sexual Provocation in Film and TV." Ms. (April 6, 2021) ["How has sexual provocation been used by female filmmakers as a feminist act? Is it possible to separate art from artists? How have sex scenes changed over the years?" In her latest book Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media, San Filippo examines the history of sexual provocation in the media. Yes, sex sells—but why and how? In particular, she examines how female and queer filmmakers coopt sexual provocation for their own radical and sometimes even radically ordinary purposes.]

Metzmeier, Kurt X. "A #metro #metoo Story — Social Media and the Law." Leo Weekly (November 20, 2017)

Miller, Daniel. "Is Disney Paying Its Share in Anaheim?: The Money Battle Outside the Happiest Place on Earth." The Los Angeles Times (September 24, 2017) [Bob Garfield reports on Disney's unsuccessful retaliation against The Los Angeles Times for this article in "Who Won the Disney Boycott."]

Milloy, Courtland and John Nichols. "Media-Consolidation/Plant-Based Diets." Ralph Nader Hour (August 31, 2019) ["John Nichols returns to about the future of newspapers in light of the latest merger between the two largest chains in the country, Gannett and GateHouse. Also, Washington Post reporter and former meat-eater, Courtland Milloy, tells us how much his health improved when he turned to a plant-based diet."]

Moody, Chris. "How Republicans are being taught to talk about Occupy Wall Street." Yahoo News (December 1, 2011)

Morales, Frank, Gary Null, Peter Phillips and Peter Dale Scott. "The Consolidation of Police State USA (The Ongoing American Military Coup)." Unwelcome Guests #618 (August 25, 2012)

Moser, Bob. "Interference 2020: The Disinformation is Coming from Inside the Country." Columbia Review of Journalism (Fall 2019)

Moskowitz, P.E. and Carolyn Rouse.  "The Mythical Bygone Glory Days of 'Free Speech.'" Citations Needed #88 (September 25, 2019) ["We are often warned by conservatives, liberals and even some on the Left that we live in a time where “free speech” is under threat from far-left forces. “Political correctness” and “snowflakes” have shut down free inquiry, specifically on college campuses, and led to a crisis threatening the very foundation of our democracy. But the origins of the label “free speech” — as it’s currently practiced — paint a much messier picture. Rather than appealing to the Vietnam-era Berkeley protest glory days, what one sees when examining the history of the concept is a temporary tactic used by the Left in the mid-to-late 1960s that has, since that late 1980s, become a far-right wedge designed to open up space for racism, eugenics, genocide denial, trans and homophobia and anti-feminist backlash. Defense of the right to keep open this space as an appeal to a universal value hides a well-funded, coordinated far-right attempt to maintain a conservative, largely male and cishet version of political correctness. On this episode, we discuss where the contemporary concept of “free speech” comes from, what its uses and misuses have been and how a rose-tinted time of pristine, perfectly free" speech never really existed. We are joined by journalist and author P.E. Moskowitz and Chair of Princeton University's Department of Anthropology Carolyn Rouse."]

Moyers, Bill. "His Legendary Journalism Career: 'Democracy Should Be a Brake on Unbridled Greed and Power.'" Democracy Now (June 8, 2011)

Moyers, Bill and Michael Winship. "Just a Couple of More Things about NPR." Bill Moyers Journal (March 18, 2011)

Mull, Amanda. "The Art of Disastertising." On the Media (April 29, 2020) ["Want to do your part in this pandemic? Why don't you try becoming a Couch Potatotriot, someone who stays home to save lives, but also eats Burger King? It's part of the company's brand pivot — one of many that companies have performed in order to keep their goods and services relevant. Another trend? Lots of somber piano music.  Despite the fact that most people are stuck at home watching Netflix, advertisers are still vying for their bucks — promising that consumers can buy what they’re selling without winding up on a ventilator. This stark change in tone and approach is what Amanda Mull, staff writer at The Atlantic, dubbed "disaster-tising" in her recent piece, "How to Advertise In a Pandemic.""]

Mullins, Paul. "The Peep Show of Death: Televising Human Remains." Archaeology and Material Culture (March 28, 2014)

"“Muscling in on the media” – a Reporters Without Borders look at organized crime." Reporters Without Borders (February 24, 2011)

Napper, Lawrence. "They Shall Not Grow Old (Peter Jackson, 2018) and the Elephant in the Room." The International Association for Media and History (October 23, 2018)

National Security Archive ["An independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University, the Archive collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The Archive also serves as a repository of government records on a wide range of topics pertaining to the national security, foreign, intelligence, and economic policies of the United States. The Archive won the 1999 George Polk Award, one of U.S. journalism's most prestigious prizes, for--in the words of the citation--"piercing the self-serving veils of government secrecy, guiding journalists in the search for the truth and informing us all." The Archive obtains its materials through a variety of methods, including the Freedom of Information act, Mandatory Declassification Review, presidential paper collections, congressional records, and court testimony. Archive staff members systematically track U.S. government agencies and federal records repositories for documents that either have never been released before, or that help to shed light on the decision-making process of the U.S. government and provide the historical context underlying those decisions. The Archive regularly publishes portions of its collections on microfiche, the World Wide Web, CD-ROM, and in books. The Washington Journalism Review called these publications, collectively totaling more than 500,000 pages, "a state-of-the-art index to history." The Archive's World Wide Web site, www.nsarchive.org, has won numerous awards, including USA Today's "Hot Site" designation. As a part of its mission to broaden access to the historical record, the Archive is also a leading advocate and user of the Freedom of Information Act. Precedent-setting Archive lawsuits have brought into the public domain new materials on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Iran-Contra Affair, and other issues that have changed the way scholars interpret those events. The Archive spearheaded the groundbreaking legal effort to preserve millions of pages of White House e-mail records that were created during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. The Archive's mission of guaranteeing the public's right to know extends to other countries outside the United States. The organization is currently involved in efforts to sponsor freedom of information legislation in the nations of Central Europe, Central and South America and elsewhere, and is committed to finding ways to provide technical and other services that will allow archives and libraries overseas to introduce appropriate records management systems into their respective institutions. The Archive's $2.5 million yearly budget comes from publication revenues, contributions from individuals and grants from foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Open Society Institute. As a matter of policy, the Archive seeks no U.S. government funding."]

Noujaim, Jehane. "Wishes for a Global Day of Film." TED (July 2006)

O'Donnell, Lawrence. "Rewrite: Bad police reporting by the NYTimes." The Last Word (August 20, 2014)

O'Neill, Terry and William Parker. "Senate Narrowly Defeats Anti-Contraception Bill as Reproductive Rights Come Under Sustained Attack." Democracy Now (March 2, 2012)

On the Media ["On the Media explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of "making media," especially news media, because it's through that lens that we literally see the world and the world sees us. While maintaining the civility and fairness that are the hallmarks of public radio, OTM tackles sticky issues with a frankness and transparency that has built trust with listeners and led to more than a tripling of its audience in five years."]

Oppenheimer, Joshua. "The Act of Killing: New Film Shows U.S.-Backed Indonesian Death Squad Leaders Re-enacting Massacres." Democracy Now (July 19, 2013)

Orwell Rolls in His Grave (USA: Robert Kane Pappas, 2003: 182 mins) [Documentary available online]

Peters, John Durham. "Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (University of Chicago Press, 2020)." New Books in Communications (November 5, 2020) ["Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, once compared the perfect search engine to “the mind of God.” As the modern face of promiscuous knowledge, however, Google’s divine omniscience traffics in news, maps, weather, and porn indifferently. Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (U Chicago Press, 2020), begun by the late Kenneth Cmiel and completed by his close friend John Durham Peters, provides a genealogy of the information age from its early origins up to the reign of Google. It examines how we think about fact, image, and knowledge, centering on the different ways that claims of truth are complicated when they pass to a larger public. To explore these ideas, Cmiel and Peters focus on three main periods—the late nineteenth century, 1925 to 1945, and 1975 to 2000, with constant reference to the present. Cmiel’s original text examines the growing gulf between politics and aesthetics in postmodern architecture, the distancing of images from everyday life in magical realist cinema, the waning support for national betterment through taxation, and the inability of a single presentational strategy to contain the social whole. Peters brings Cmiel’s study into the present moment, providing the backstory to current controversies about the slipperiness of facts in a digital age. A hybrid work from two innovative thinkers, Promiscuous Knowledge enlightens our understanding of the internet and the profuse visual culture of our time."]

Phillips, Peter. "Project Censored." Boiling Frogs (June 4, 2010)

Phillips, Whitney. "The Toxins We Carry." Columbia Journalism Review (Fall 2019) ["Disinformation is polluting our media environment. Facts won’t save us."]

Pilger, John. Pilger, John. "'Hold the front page. The reporters are missing." Media Lens (September 20, 2018)

---. The War You Don't See. (UK: 2010, 97 mins)

---. "Why the Documentary Must Not Be Allowed to Die." Counterpunch (December 12, 2017)

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."]

Poitras, Laura. "Detained in the U.S.: Filmmaker Laura Poitras Held, Questioned Some 40 Times at U.S. Airports." Democracy Now (April 20, 2012)

Pomerantsev, Peter. "The Info War of All Against All." The New York Review of Books (August 23, 2019)

Pozner, Jennifer. "On the fakeness of reality shows, how ‘the dumb bimbo’ is cast, and why actresses are shrinking." Macleans (October 20, 2010)

Project Censored (Cotati, CA: Project Censored is a student-faculty media research project in its 31st year of operation at Sonoma State University: "At Project Censored, we examine the coverage of news and information important to the maintenance of a healthy and functioning democracy. We define Modern Censorship as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story – or piece of a news story – based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth. Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions.")

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."]

Pro Publica (New York: "To expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing. ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.")

PR Watch ["The Center for Media and Democracy is a national independent, non-profit, non-partisan media, policy, and consumer watchdog group located in Madison, Wisconsin. We are fearless fighters against PR spin and propaganda: We think protecting democracy requires informing citizens not just about what’s really happening behind the scenes but also about what you can do about it. We believe in holding the powerful accountable. And we do. We believe the truth matters. And, we are willing to dig for the facts through mountains of paper and obfuscation. And, we are not beholden to or funded by for-profit corporations or the government. Our team of writers focuses on: Investigating and countering PR campaigns and spin by corporations, industries, and government agencies about issues and products that affect our health, liberty, economic opportunities, environment, and the vitality of the democratic process. Reporting that promotes informed decision-making about policies and products, especially those affecting our lives--our economy, our environment, our health, our liberty, our security, and the health of our democracy-- and aids citizen involvement and grassroots action. Advancing transparency and media literacy to help people recognize the forces shaping the information they receive about issues and products affecting their lives. And promoting "open content" media as an alternative to corporate media, so people from all walks of life can "be the media" and help write the history of companies, front groups, politicians and CEOs, and public policy."]

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."]

Read, Max. "How The Matrix Fed Our Conspiracy-Laden World." On the Media (April 12, 2019) ["When it comes to nourishing paranoiac beliefs through pop culture, one of the most iconic works is the 1999 sci-fi political parable The Matrix. A computer hacker, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, journeys into a reality he didn’t know existed and must battle the system of machines controlling all of humanity. The plot of the movie hinges around a choice Neo makes to take a red pill and to wake up from his blissful ignorance. Bob talks with Max Read, a writer and editor at New York Magazine, about what red-pilling has come to signify on the internet and in American politics, and how different groups use the potent metaphor."]

Reporters Without Borders ["... - defends journalists and media assistants imprisoned or persecuted for doing their job and exposes the mistreatment and torture of them in many countries. - fights against censorship and laws that undermine press freedom. - gives financial aid each year to 100 or so journalists or media outlets in difficulty (to pay for lawyers, medical care and equipment) as well to the families of imprisoned journalists. - works to improve the safety of journalists, especially those reporting in war zones."]

"Reporting the Egyptian Revolution." Listening Post (February 13, 2011)

Ripley, Amanda. "Complicating the Narratives." The Whole Story (June 27, 2018)  ["What if journalists covered controversial issues differently — based on how humans actually behave when they are polarized and suspicious?"]

Risen, James. "The Biggest Secret: James Risen on Life as a NY Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror." Democracy Now (January 5, 2018) ["We spend the hour with former New York Times reporter James Risen, who left the paper in August to join The Intercept as senior national security correspondent. This week, he published a 15,000-word story headlined “The Biggest Secret: My Life as a New York Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror.” The explosive piece describes his struggles to publish major national security stories in the post-9/11 period and how both the government and his own editors at The New York Times suppressed his reporting, including reports on the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, for which he would later win the Pulitzer Prize. Risen describes meetings between key Times editors and top officials at the CIAand the White House. His refusal to name a source would take him to the Supreme Court, and he almost wound up in jail, until the Obama administration blinked."]

Ritter, Scott, John Stauber, Pepi Leistyna, Loretta Alper, and Tom Scott. "Stupefying the Group Mind (Managing the Class War with PR and TV)." Unwelcome Guests #301 (April 8, 2006)

"RNC Protests 1." Mic Check Radio (August 28, 2012)

Roberts, David. "In Which CNN Devotes 7 Hours to Climate Change." On the Media (September 6, 2019) [MB -- I'm hoping this will be a tipping point in the way in which we conduct the investigation of candidate positions and, hopefully, a move away from the soundbite candidate forums of the two major parties. Fascinating example of the power of informed citizens asking pertinent questions of candidates who are allowed the time to unpack their positions ... as opposed to the media bobbleheads prompting pithy comments in the hope of a viral moment. Could you imagine the Twitter-in-Chief trying to survive a few of these 40 minute intense question-and-answer sessions?  "... CNN hosted a town hall forum with ten Democratic primary candidates discussing their policy proposals for addressing the climate crisis. The DNC declined requests from climate activists to host a themed debate for the issue, so CNN had the candidates on back-to-back for 7 hours as moderators took turns asking questions with an audience of activists, PhD students, and professors.  According to David Roberts, who covers energy and climate change for Vox, it was actually a meaningful event. The questions from audience members were personal, informed, and incisive and the candidates were surprisingly specific in their answers. Roberts tells Brooke what he learned from the town hall about different frames for discussing climate change, and how journalists are still catching up on the conversation."]

Robin, Corey. "The Peril of Laundering Hot Takes Through History." On the Media (March 1, 2019) ["This week, the House of Representatives voted to block President Trump’s national emergency declaration for building a border wall. The latest step toward constitutional crisis? An impotent gesture in the face of gathering authoritarianism? Or was it, as some have concluded, just evidence that Trump the strongman has been a weakling all along? Trump? Weak? It feels like just yesterday that the dominant analytical line was that Trump’s ascent marked the rise of authoritarianism — a line bolstered by academic research and historical antecedents. In a recent post for New York Magazine, political theorist Corey Robin argues that our collective misreading of the present arises from a misuse of the past. In the piece, he warns journalists, scholars and news consumers to beware of the “historovox”: a tendency to launder journalistic hot takes through history. Here, Robin speaks with Bob about what goes missing when pundits only look backward, and offers advice for how we might better understand the present through the past."]

Robinson, Jennifer. "Julian Assange’s Attorney Decries Espionage Charges as 'Grave Threat to Press Freedom.'" Democracy Now (May 24, 2019) ["In an unprecedented move, the Justice Department has indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on 17 charges of violating the Espionage Act for his role in publishing U.S. classified military and diplomatic documents exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The documents were leaked by U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. The Espionage Act of 1917 has never been used to prosecute a journalist or media outlet. The new charges come just over a month after British police forcibly removed Assange from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he took asylum in 2012. Initially the Trump administration indicted Assange on a single count of helping Manning hack a government computer, but Assange faces up to 170 additional years in prison under the new charges—10 years for each count of violating the Espionage Act. We speak with Jennifer Robinson, an attorney for Julian Assange. “It is a grave threat to press freedom and should be cause for concern for journalists and publishers everywhere,” Robinson says." Part two: "Daniel Ellsberg: Espionage Charges Against Assange Are Most Significant Attack on Press in Decades." Part three: "Jeremy Scahill: New Indictment of Assange Is Part of a Broader War on Journalism & Whistleblowers." Part four: "Assange Is Indicted for Exposing War Crimes While Trump Considers Pardons for War Criminals."]

Rodorff, Matthias. "Antislavery Sentiments and Experiences of African-Canadians During the Civil War Era." Slavery and Its Legacies (January 30, 2017) ["In this episode Thomas Thurston spoke with Mathias Rodorff, a PhD candidate at the University of Munich and a visiting fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center, about his current work, which investigates why Nova Scotian newspapers paid such close attention to the contest in the United States over issues of slavery, emancipation, and equality while never considering how these issues might have played out in their province. Rodorff considers this in the context of other domestic events, like the heated debates over Nova Scotia’s role in the Canadian Confederation."]

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."]

Rosen, Jay. "The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World's First Stateless News Organization." Press Think (July 26, 2010)

Rosenfeld, Seth. "Subversives." On the Media (September 28, 2012)

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."]

Ross, Alex. "The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming." The New Yorker (December 5, 2016)

Rusbridger, Alan. "Spilling the NSA’s Secrets: Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger on the Inside Story of Snowden Leaks." Democracy Now (September 23, 2013)

Rushkoff, Douglas. "Introduction: They Say." Coercion: Why We Listen To What 'They' Say. Penguin Putnam, 1999 (Excerpt)

Sanders, Bernie. "Talk About Inequality." Deconstructed (March 23, 2018) ["The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan sits down with former presidential candidate and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to talk poverty, inequality, media bias, and the 2020 presidential election."]

Scahill, Jeremy, et al. "Very Bad Men: Trump, the Saudi Crown Prince, Sexual Assaulters, and Robert Mugabe." Intercepted (November 29, 2017) ["THE UNCONSCIONABLE GENOCIDAL destruction of Yemen is continuing unabated. This week on Intercepted: Sen. Chris Murphy blasts the U.S. government for its support of Saudi Arabia and lays out his fight to end the carnage in Yemen. Jeremy tears apart Thomas Friedman’s gross love letter to the Saudi crown prince and talks about the bi-partisan war against journalism from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump. As more women come forward to name their sexual assaulters and harassers, Intercept Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed and BuzzFeed’s Katie Baker analyze this unprecedented moment. Robert Mugabe was removed in a military coup, but his successor is a brutal thug from the same party. We get analysis from Harare, Zimbabwe, about why the U.S. and Britain supported Mugabe’s repressive regime, who is in control now, and what the future holds in this mineral rich country. Comedian Joe Pera performs a dramatic re-enactment of a secret Snowden document about a summer intern at the National Security Agency who experiences culture shock. And Donald Trump stars in the exciting finale of ‘Merican Beauty.'"]

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."]

Schecter, Danny. "Nailing Osama: The Media's Delight." Al Jazeera (May 6, 2011)

Schumacher-Matos, Edward. "Attacking NPR As A Shill For Government Intelligence." NPR (August 16, 2014)

Scruggs, Ed and Sarah Tofte. "Why Did Media Overlook Sept. Shooting in Plano, Texas When Estranged Husband Killed Wife & 7 Others?" Democracy Now (November 6, 2017) ["While Sunday’s shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, has received wall-to-wall media coverage, there was another mass shooting in Texas in September that received far less attention. In Plano, Texas, a man allegedly killed his estranged wife and her friends in what appears to be the deadliest incident of domestic violence in the town’s history. Twenty-seven-year-old Meredith Hight was watching the Cowboys football game with a group of friends and family when her estranged husband reportedly entered her house and opened fire, killing her and seven other adults. The shooter was killed by police. Local news reports Hight had filed for divorce in July. Hight’s mother said her daughter “loved hosting friends and families. This was her first opportunity to do it after the divorce, and he didn’t take it well.” "]

Sen, Rinku. "Drop the I-Word: In Victory for Advocates, Associated Press Stops Using Phrase 'Illegal Immigrant.'" Democracy Now (April 4, 2013)

Shah, Anup. "Media in the United States." Global Issues (January 28, 2012) ["In recent years, the American media has been plagued with all sorts of problems including, sliding profits, scandals about manipulation, plagiarism, propaganda, lower audiences, dumbing down, and so on. Media omissions, distortion, inaccuracy and bias in the US is something acknowledged by many outside the USA, and is slowly realized more and more inside the US. However, those problems have made it very difficult for the average American citizen to obtain an open, objective view of many of the issues that involve the United States (and since the United States is so influential culturally, economically, politically and militarily around the world, they are naturally involved in many issues). Those with power and influence know that media control or influence is crucial. A free press is crucial for a functioning democracy, but if not truly free, paves the way for manipulation and concentration of views, thus undermining democracy itself."]

Sharlet, Jeff. "Norwegian Shooting Suspect’s Views Echo Xenophobia of Right-Wing Extremists in U.S., Europe." Democracy Now (July 27, 2011)

Siddiqi, Hishaam. "How to Talk about ISIS Without Islamophobia." Teen Vogue (July 18, 2016)

Sinha, Bappa. "ChatGPT: The promise, hype & concerns." Monthly Review (February 12, 2023) ["It has produced poetry, Shakespeare-like prose, software code and medical prescriptions. Teachers and educators have expressed alarm over the use of ChatGPT by students to complete assignments. News articles have excitedly announced that it has passed law, medical and MBA exams (though passing an MBA exam can hardly be taken as a sign of intelligence). Abstracts written by ChatGPT for medical research journals have fooled scientists into believing humans wrote them. Tons of articles have appeared announcing the impending demise of a whole range of professionals, from journalists, writers, and content creators to lawyers, teachers, software programmers and doctors. Companies such as Google and Baidu have felt threatened by ChatGPT and rushed to announce their own AI-powered chatbots."]

SourceWatch ["The Center for Media and Democracy publishes SourceWatch, this collaborative resource for citizens and journalists looking for documented information about the corporations, industries, and people trying to sway public opinion. We believe in telling the truth about the most powerful interests in society—not just relating their self-serving press releases or letting real facts be bleached away by spin. SourceWatch focuses on the for-profit corporations, non-profit corporate front groups, PR teams, and so-called "experts" trying to influence public opinion on behalf of global corporations and the government agencies they have captured. —Lisa Graves, Executive Director"]

Springston, Rex. "Happy slaves? The peculiar story of three Virginia school textbooks." Richmond Times-Dispatch (April 15, 2018)

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."]

Stark, Kio. "Talk to Strangers." Team Human #6 (September 20, 2016) ["Kio’s new book When Strangers Meet explores the transformative power to be found in person-to-person interactions with strangers. Kio describes how even a brief interaction can foster empathy and open up the possibility for meaningful human connection. Kio and Douglas challenge the unwritten rules of social interaction and talk about how basic human connection can spark positive social change."]

Stockton, Halle. "Fake news, clickbait, and the future of local journalism." Democracy Works #3 (March 27, 2018)

Stokes, Leah. "This Is Climate Change”: West Coast Fires Scorch Millions of Acres & Blot Out the Sun." Democracy Now (September 10, 2020) ["The skies of the Bay Area and Northern California turned a dark orange as 90 major fires burn in the western United States, from San Diego to the Canadian border. At least seven people have died as a result of the fires, which have already burned 2.5 million acres in California alone. Despite heavy coverage in the mainstream media, however, few outlets are highlighting the link between the blazes and the accelerating climate crisis. “The fact is that TV news is completely abdicating its responsibility when it comes to telling the truth of what the West is dealing with right now,” says Leah Stokes, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a researcher on climate and energy policy. “This is climate change. It’s not rocket science. And when will the media start calling it that?”"]

Stone, Oliver. "Movies, Politics and History." Conversations with History (April 21, 2016) ["Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes filmmaker Oliver Stone for a discussion of the trajectory of his career as director, screenwriter, and producer. Stone traces formative experiences, talks about different aspects of the filmmaking process including working with actors, writing screenplays, directing and post production. He focuses on the themes that have drawn him, the distinction of being a dramatist who works with historical materials, and his recent works including Alexander and the 10 part documentary on The Untold History of the United States."]

"The Surprising History of Gun Control, School Shooting Myths, and More ." On the Media (December 21, 2012)

Taberski, Dan. "What Running from Cops Learned from Cops." On the Media (June 12, 2019) ["The first episode of the TV show "Cops" aired thirty years ago, and in the ensuing decades it's become influential enough to mold the attitudes of new aspiring police officers. But if the show holds up a mirror to law enforcement in this country, it shows a warped reflection. In the podcast series "Running from Cops", host Dan Taberski and his team watched nearly 850 episodes of the show and tallied what they saw: roughly four times the amount of violent crime than there is in real life, three times as many drug crimes, and ten times the amount of prostitution. "Cops", as the podcast points out, makes the world seem more crime-ridden than in reality. It has also inspired copy-cat shows, like the popular "Live PD," that also warp depictions of what's appropriate (and legal) in policing. In this OTM podcast extra, Bob talks to Dan Taberski about the podcast's findings and what the popularity of these shows says about viewers."]

This Is What Democracy Looks Like (USA: Jill Friedberg and Rick Rowley, 2000: 72 mins) ["Recorded by over 100 media activists, this film tells the story of the enormous street protests in Seattle, Washington in November 1999, against the World Trade Organisation summit. Vowing to oppose—among other faults—the WTO’s power to arbitrarily overrule nations’ environmental, social and labour policies in favour of unbridled corporate greed, thousands of people from all around the United States came out in force to stop the summit. Against them was a brutal police force and a hostile media. This Is What Democracy Looks Like documents the struggle, as well as providing a narrative to the history of success and failure of modern political resistance movements."]

Thornton, Katie. "The Divided Dial: Episode 1 - The True Believers." On the Media (November 15, 2022) ["In 2016, Christian talk radio host Eric Metaxas begrudgingly encouraged his listeners to vote for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. By 2020, he pledged his life to fighting the “stolen election” while talking with Trump on the air. Ahead of the midterm elections, Metaxas and many of his fellow talk radio hosts made sure the falsehood of massive 2020 election fraud was top of mind — on the airwaves and beyond. And while election-denying candidates didn't do as well as many on the right had hoped, at least 170 such candidates have been elected to state and national offices, some of whom will be in charge of future elections. We meet the company whose hosts never backed down from the lies of the stolen 2020 election: Salem Media Group, the largest Christian, conservative multimedia company in the country – and perhaps the most influential media company you’ve never heard of."]

---. "The Divided Dial: Episode 2 - From Pulpit to Politics." On the Media (November 22, 2022) ["How did the little-known Salem Media Group come to have an outsized political influence? In this episode we trace the company’s rise to power from its scrappy start in the 1970s to the present day — a growth that paralleled and eventually became inextricable from the growth of the Religious Right. We learn that Salem is tightly networked with right wing political strategists, pollsters, big donors, far right leaders and Republican party mainstays thanks to their involvement with the Council for National Policy — a secretive group of Evangelical and conservative leaders. For decades, the CNP has been working behind the scenes to get a specific, highly influential subset of voters to act. And Salem has been a megaphone for their cause."]

---. "The Divided Dial: Episode 4 - From The Extreme to The Mainstream." On the Media (December 6, 2022) ["In the 1970s, talk radio was hitting its stride, with hosts and listeners from all political persuasions. But the radio dial was about to change forever. Community needs assessments, requirements to offer public service programs and multiple perspectives, and limits on how many stations a single company could own were all eradicated. Technological and legal changes would consolidate the radio industry exponentially, allowing conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh to take over the airwaves. In this episode, we look at radio’s last four decades to understand how we got to where we are today, and how conservative talk radio came to dominate a medium that once thrived on varied viewpoints."]

Tomasic, John. "Watchdog targets mayors: Stop harassing journalists covering Occupy protests." The Colorado Independent (November 16, 2011)

Tomlinson, Jay. "Compilations of Media Clips of Reports on the Occupy Movement, Pts. 1-7." Best of the Left (September - November, 2011)

"Top Censored Stories." Project Censored (Yearly report of the top 25 censored stories from 1976 to the Present)

"Top 25 Censored Stories of 2018 - 2019." Project Censored (2019) ["The presentation of the Top 25 stories of 2018-2019 extends the tradition originated by Professor Carl Jensen and his Sonoma State University students in 1976, while reflecting how the expansion of the Project to include affiliate faculty and students from campuses across North America has made the Project even more diverse and robust. During this year’s cycle, Project Censored reviewed over 300 Validated Independent News stories (VINs) representing the collective efforts of 283 college students and 24 professors from 15 college and university campuses that participated in the Project’s Campus Affiliates Program during the past year."]

Touré. "What The Hell Is Wrong With MSNBC, Part II -- A Rebuttal." Citations Needed #61 (January 9, 2019) ["In Ep. 34: 'What The Hell Is Wrong With MSNBC', we discussed with our anonymous MSNBC informant, well, what the hell was wrong with MSNBC? Why do they routinely focused on inane horserace and RussiaGate fear-mongering over objectively important topics like climate change, the destruction of Yemen, and worker strikes? One listener, former MSNBC host and current MSNBC contributor, Touré thought our episode was lacking in significant context and, in many ways, unfair. So we invited him on to discuss his issue with our critique and explore the broader, evergreen media criticism problem of trying to distinguish between a need for ratings and the more subtle influence of ideology and partisan cheerleading."]

Traister, Rebecca. "'The Anger Window' is Open." On the Media (November 14, 2017) ["New York Magazine writer Rebecca Traister says that every new revelation about sexual harassment confirms what women have always known. In her most recent article she asks "as stories about abuse, assault, and complicity come flooding out, how do we think about the culprits in our lives? Including, sometimes, ourselves.""]

"Tunisia Revolution 2011." Global Voices (Ongoing Archive of Reports)

Umansky, Eric. "Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Mueller Edition." On the Media (March 1, 2019) ["Amid Michael Cohen's explosive testimony before Congress this week, Special Counsel Robert Mueller pursued his two-pronged investigation quietly in the background: into whether President Trump, his family, or his aides colluded with Russia to help him win in 2016, and whether they’ve interfered with any investigations into election-related activity. Overwhelming and extremely difficult to parse, filled with misfires, false alarms and intoxicating intrigue, the media have turned the saga of Mueller’s secret investigation into the best-worst crime drama never written. To date, the press have reported on nearly 150 characters in the Mueller probe, including politicians, investigators, businessmen, petty criminals, offspring and erstwhile Trump aides. All potential clues with potential roles in the Special Counsel’s forthcoming final report. And so, to help you make sense of the rumors and revelations to come, we bring you the latest of our Breaking News Consumer's Handbooks: Mueller Edition."]

---. "A Fight Over Cop Misconduct Records Continues." On the Media (July 31, 2020) ["Among the concrete victories for the Black Lives Matter movement this year was the repeal of the decades-old New York State statute 50-a, opening to public scrutiny thousands of records of citizen complaints against the police. Earlier this month, New York City’s police unions joined a suit to block the wholesale release of such data — in particular, a trove of 81,000 records that had been quickly obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union. On the theory that a data dump would ring a bell that could never be un-rung, a federal judge overseeing the matter ordered NYCLU to keep the data secret for the time being. But several days later, the digital news outlet ProPublica began ringing that un-un-ringable bell. This past Sunday they released a database which describes, in limited detail, thousands of allegations made against thousands of New York Police Department officers. ProPublica described the database as “an unprecedented picture of civilians complaints of abuse by NYPD officers as well as the limits of the current system that is supposed to hold officers accountable.” Bob and ProPublica deputy managing editor Eric Umansky discuss the database, the police union lawsuit, and where we are in the struggle for police accountability. "]

"Uprising in Egypt: A Two-Hour Special on the Revolt Against the U.S.-Backed Mubarak Regime." Democracy Now (February 5, 2011)

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. "Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy." Shorenstein Center Media and Politics Podcast (August 2018)

Vittoria, Steve. "Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal." Law and Disorder (February 18, 2013)

Vogel, Joseph. "The Forgotten Baldwin." The Boston Review (May 14, 2018)

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."]

War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (USA: Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp, 2007)

Weinstein, Adam. "Who's Behind Trump's Push to Pardon War Criminals?" On the Media (May 24, 2019) ["The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had made expedited requests for paperwork needed to pardon troops “accused or convicted of war crimes, including high-profile cases of murder, attempted murder and desecration of a corpse." Another such case includes a Blackwater contractor twice convicted in the 2007 killings of dozens of unarmed Iraqi civilians. The White House's request for case histories from the Department of Justice follows Trump's pardon earlier this month of former Army 1st Lt. Michael Behenna, who had been convicted of killing an Iraqi prisoner. Adam Weinstein is an editor for The New Republic. He’s served in the Navy and worked as a contractor in Iraq in 2008. Weinstein writes there is no natural constituency — from the upper echelons of the Department of Defense to the leadership of major veteran's groups — that would support the decision. So where is the push for pardoning war criminals coming from? Bob talks to Weinstein about the influence of Fox News and the efforts of FOX and friends co-host Pete Hegseth."]

Wesch, Michael. "A Portal to Media Literacy." (University of Manitoba: June 17, 2008)

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)

---. "Structuralism and Mythology (Part 1)." Philosophize This! (March 18, 2018) ["On this episode, we talk about the mythology that underlies the media we consume and how it serves as an access point to the structures of culture."]

---. "Structuralism and Mythology (Part 2)." Philosophize This! (March 18, 2018)

Wexler, Haskell. "James Foley on the Dehumanization of War: Acclaimed Filmmaker Haskell Wexler Shares 2012 Interview." Democracy Now (September 12, 2014)

Whitlock, Craig. "'Afghanistan Papers' Reveal How Presidents & Generals Misled the American Public on War’s Progress." Democracy Now (March 9, 2020) ["Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock has just won a George Polk Award for Military Reporting for his in-depth investigation called “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War.” He joins us to describe how, after getting a tip, he fought for three years to get the federal government to release a trove of confidential interviews it conducted with people directly involved in the nearly two-decade-long war. He ultimately obtained more than 2,000 documents that revealed how presidents, generals and diplomats across three administrations had intentionally misled the American public about the longest war in U.S. history."]

---. "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. "]

Wick, Julia. "When a Billionaire Buys Your Publication." On the Media (November 10, 2017) ["For the last 20 years, the news industry has been crumbling. In an effort to stay solvent, both legacy media and digital newbies have increasingly looked toward deep-pocketed ownership to stay alive – with mixed results. One such example came last week with the sudden closure of DNAinfo and the Gothamist blog network, hyperlocal digital news outlets that provided vital reporting for the cities in which they operated. For employees, it smacked of retaliation: the closure came just one week after the NYC editorial staff had voted to unionize. When the sites came down, so did their archives, replaced with a note from billionaire owner Joe Ricketts stating that "businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure." Bob speaks with Julia Wick who, up until that moment, served as editor-in-chief of LAist, the Los Angeles outlet in the Gothamist network."]

Wu, Timothy. "America's First Lesson in the Power and Peril of Concentrated Control Over the Flow of Information." Excerpt from The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Alfred A. Knopf, 2010: 22-24.

---. "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires." The Center of Internet and Society (May 15, 2011)

Wynn, Natalie. "The Trouble with Cancel Culture." On the Media (January 31, 2020) ["There’s a standard way the conversation on "cancel culture" goes: on the one side, male comedians and right-wingers saying cancel culture is out of control, you can't say anything anymore without getting dragged. On the other, progressive think piece writers saying cancel culture is blown way out of proportion, and is really just powerful people finally being held accountable for their actions. But according to YouTuber Natalie Wynn, creator of the channel ContraPoints, neither of these argument is quite correct. Wynn herself has been canceled. Many times over. For a host of offenses. And it’s given her plenty of time to reflect on all the ways the dominant conversations around cancel culture miss the particular pernicious effects of the phenomenon. In her most recent video, "Canceling," she takes an honest look at her own cancellations and its effects, and outlines a set of principles around cancel culture to help clarify what, exactly, it is — and what it can lead to. In this conversation, Wynn breaks those principles down for Brooke."]

Yang, Amber. "The Top 25 Censored News Stories of 2017 - 2018: #13 The Limits of Negative News and Importance of Constructive Media." Project Censored (October 2, 2018)

---. "The Top Censored News Stories of 2017 - 2018: #15 Digital Justice: Internet Co-ops Resist Net Neutrality Rollbacks." Project Censored (October 2, 2018)

Yes Men Fix the World (USA: Andy Bichbaum and Mike Bonanno, 2010: 87 mins)

Yuen, Nancy Wang. "Reel Inequality." This is Not a Pipe (December 7, 2017) ["Nancy Wang Yuen discusses her book Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism with Chris Richardson. She is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Sociology Department at Biola University. She is the author of Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism (2016), the first book to examine the barriers actors of color face in Hollywood and how they creatively challenge stereotypes. Along with a team of researchers, she pioneered the first study of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders on television (2005/2006) and the 2017 study, Tokens on the Small Screen: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Prime Time and Streaming Television. Dr. Yuen is an expert speaker on race and media, appearing on BBC World TV, NPR and The Washington Post. "]

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."]

Zeiser, John W. W. "Requiem for a Media: On the Execution of LA Weekly." The Los Angeles Review of Books (December 5, 2017)

Zelinski, Sarah, et al. "Representations of Gender in Advertising." (Video made for WGST 210, University of Saskatchewan: posted on Youtube April 3, 2013)

Zimbardo, Philip. "The Psychology of Evil Inside of Trump's Concentration Camps." The Chauncey DeVega Show #255 (October 10, 2019) ["Philip Zimbardo is one of the world's leading authorities on the psychology of cruelty, groupthink, and evil. Most famous for the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, Dr. Zimbardo has written dozens of books and articles including the powerful and disturbing book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.  Dr. Zimbardo explains how America under Donald Trump is fully devolving into a state of violence, authoritarianism, and cruelty and the many ways that the Trump regime encourages thuggery against nonwhite immigrants, migrants, and refugees by law enforcement and others. Dr. Zimbardo also highlights the connections between his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment and the evil taking place inside of Donald Trump’s concentration camps. Chauncey tells some harsh truth about how the American corporate news media, many members of the Democratic Party, and too many average Americans were in denial for too long about the fascist white supremacist threat embodied by the Trump regime – and which is now fully obvious and naked in the president’s and his handlers’ recent declaration that he is a king who is above the law and cannot be impeached for any reason. Chauncey also shares his thoughts about politics of the great new film Joker and its damning indictment of neoliberalism, the culture of cruelty, and gangster capitalism."]

Zollman, Florian. "Fake News by Design." Monthly Review (March 7, 2018) ["Mainstream news media reporting and the manufacture of bloodbaths in Libya and Syria"]

Zurko, Nicholas. "Gender Inequality in Film." New York Film Academy (November 25, 2013)

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Last Sunday our 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.








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