Category: Media

Taking the Side of the Billionaires

Exclusive: America’s Right pitches itself as populist, taking the side of the common man against “big guv-mint” and “lib-rhul elites,” but its actual policies from the NFL lockout to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget side with the billionaires in what amounts…

The Gospel According to Dylan

Bob Dylan, the great poet/songwriter, turned 70 this week, prompting remembrances of how his words, music and anti-authoritarian vision helped shape generations of Americans, especially the one that came of age during the Vietnam War in the 1960s, as Gary…

Wall Street Was ‘Too Big to Jail’

HBO’s new docudrama on the Wall Street crash of 2008 details the frantic government efforts to stabilize the banking system and stave off a global depression, but the program misses the systemic fraud and other crimes that were at the…

Perp-Walking the Wrong Banker?

The sexual-assault arrest of International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn touched off a frenzy of media coverage in New York, including repeated showing of the French banker looking disheveled in handcuffs. But Danny Schechter pines for the day when the…

Halberstam’s ‘Best-Brightest’ Blunder

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam shaped the American narrative of the Vietnam War, making it a cautionary tale about the folly of action-oriented intellectuals who surrounded President John F. Kennedy and whose hubris supposedly plunged the nation…

Mitch Daniels, Architect of US Debt Crisis

Exclusive: Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is the new Republican darling of the Washington establishment, which hails him as a “fiscal conservative” who would be “serious” about addressing the nation’s staggering debt problem. But his many admirers forget to mention what…

How Fox News Outfoxes Americans

To understand how so many average Americans can be duped into embracing right-wing positions that go against their own interests, you must look at  how Fox News (and right-wing media outlets) use faux populism and phony outrage as propaganda techniques,…