Famed TV news interviewer Mike Wallace died Saturday at the age of 93, the last giant of a pioneering era that revealed both the power of television to do good and its many failings. Danny Schechter recalls Wallace as a…
Category: Media
GOP Five’s Code: ‘Power Is Power’
Exclusive: Both the mainstream U.S. press and some on the Left underestimate the danger to the Republic from having a Republican majority on the Supreme Court rendering decisions based on partisan needs not constitutional principles, a threat that surfaced in…
What’s Happening in Syria?
It’s difficult to know what’s happening in Syria not only because of the confusing violence but because the Western news media has lost nearly all credibility when it comes to reporting on Muslim countries, at least those on America’s and…
What’s Not Good for the Country
Exclusive: Many in the Washington Establishment including key parts of the press fancy themselves doing what’s “good for the country” by shielding Americans from painful realities, like the emerging crisis over a partisan-driven Supreme Court. But the hard truth, not easy…
Bin Laden’s Personal Debt to Bush
Exclusive: President George W. Bush not only botched the Afghan and Iraq wars but he bungled his “dead or alive” pursuit of Osama bin Laden, assuring al-Qaeda’s leader nine more years of life and the opportunity to father four more…
The Founders’ ‘Musket Mandate’
Exclusive: The negative tone of the Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court suggests that the Affordable Care Act, with its individual mandate to buy health insurance, may be overturned as “unconstitutional” by a partisan 5-4 vote. But key Founders had a…
National Outrage over Trayvon Case
Despite attempts in the right-wing media to smear 17-year-old Trayvon Martin with references to minor school disciplinary problems, the overall reaction across the United States has been outrage over his slaying and the lack of an arrest, what Sherwood Ross calls a…
How Friedman Fixes Mideast Faults
Official Washington treats New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman as an oracle on the Middle East, but his commentary is often pedestrian and wrongheaded, as it was disastrously on the Iraq War. But Friedman has now proclaimed what must be done to…
TV Stations Resist Listing Ad Buyers
Among the “winners” in Election 2012 will surely be the giant corporations that own many U.S. television stations as they rake in billions of dollars in SuperPAC and other political spending for attack ads. But these stations aren’t eager to make…
Nature of Self-Defeating Convictions
One of the curious realities of modern America is how many people especially white males have been propagandized into siding with a “free-market” power structure that treats them like tissue paper, to be used and thrown away. Poet Phil Rockstroh…