Posts

Yellow Journalism: The FOX in the Chicken House

Yellow journalism is more than sensational stories about celebrity lawsuits, alien babies, Elvis sightings, nude photos of Princess Kate, or, my personal favorite, the World Weekly News claim that Abraham Lincoln was a woman and John Wilkes Booth was his jilted lover. All of these fall under the broad banner of yellow journalism, defined as manipulating or manufacturing news for the purpose of boosting profits and influencing public opinion. Yellow journalism techniques include sensationalism, altering photos to elicit a particular response in the viewer, misleading headlines, selecting quotes or interview clips in order to highlight (or hide) a particular point of view, manufacturing false news, omitting factual details in order to influence a particular audience, failing to make a clear distinction between opinion and news. The list could go on, but you get the idea. Before radio and television, citizens got their news from newspapers. As sales and profits increased, so did com
Post a Comment
Read more

Citizens United: The Death Rattle of Jeffersonian Democracy

By Jamie York Our Constitution and Bill of Rights is a model for people in developing countries around the world. And rightly so! It gives citizens -- we the people -- the power and authority over government. People everywhere dream of this. As do we, since the reality has never caught up with the dream. Even so, in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a major blow to the dream of democracy. In Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission , the high court ruled that corporations are persons, with the same First Amendment rights as living, breathing people. Corporations, which should still be considered artificial legal entities to conduct business on a limited scale, were given constitutional protection as though they were alive. The ruling itself did not even have to mention personhood at all, but the effect of this ruling has been deep and profound, and may lead to our undoing as a nation. The main thrust of the ruling allows unlimited corporate spending to influence the o
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Occupy Wall Street? Ask Orwell.

By Jamie York Why occupy Wall Street? Well, the short answer is that corporations have overthrown the United States. I had a teacher in middle school who spoke about the dangers of monopolies and how concentrated corporate ownership resembled a dictatorship. She was right. The richest one percent control trillions of dollars. The more entrenched corporate conglomerates become in the systems of power, the harder it is to remove them. They control production, transportation and distribution of essential consumer goods and they have created a system to manipulate markets, create shortages, raise demand, raise prices, and avoid federal taxes. They WANT to tank the economy, and natural disasters, terrorism, and prolonged economic downturns help them do just that. It gives them the opportunity to privatize with impunity and create special emergency rules to speed up the process. They can keep people so afraid of losing their jobs that they are willing to accept wage and benefit cuts. New Orl
Post a Comment
Read more

MSNBC full of crap about Libya

MSNBC is so full of crap about Libya as a humanitarian mission. It's about oil, not Libyan freedom. China is far worse for repression, yet it floods our markets with cheap consumer goods and funds our huge debts from war spending and tax cuts for the rich, so we just turn our heads about repression in China. What hypocrites! It makes no difference which corporate political party occupies the White House, for the pandering to Big Oil continues unchecked. Of course, this is nothing new. Expansion and private control of resources has been our shameful legacy ever since Columbus set foot in the hemisphere. This is no way to share a fragile planet.
Post a Comment
Read more

The Corporate Attack on Unions and Collective Bargaining

By Jamie York Corporations – emboldened by a 2010 Supreme Court ruling allowing them unlimited spending in U.S. elections, and bolstered by a pro-corporate Congress – are now poised to eliminate the right of union workers to bargain collectively for fair wages and benefits. The right to strike is embedded in the American psyche. Americans overwhelmingly support the right to negotiate a fair contract for wages and benefits. Without such protection, employers can impose any hours they wish, hire and fire at will, and pay starvation wages with no health or retirement benefits whatsoever. And this is their goal. Corporate lobbyists and their mouthpieces in Congress and the media know full well what the impact of the actions will be on U.S. elections. Without dues collected from unions, financial support for Democrats and Independents would drop, thereby providing Republican corporatists and Teabaggers with a better chance at victory. Deny the opposition campaign money. This is behind the
Post a Comment
Read more

Insurance Lobby Media Strategy: Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

By Jamie York Bill Clinton told columnist Joe Klein that the biggest mistake he made with his health care reform proposal was his support for universal coverage (Time, 8/10/09, p. 35.). The insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists were ruthless and had a well-directed campaign against universal coverage. Clinton was blindsided and had thought he had no choice but to cower and try to sneak away from the fight as the lobbyists got their message across in the media while the voices of single payer advocates were drowned out. While Clinton may think that advocating single payer insurance was a mistake, I think it was his finest hour. His mistake was not that he supported single payer, but that he failed to stand up for single payer as logical and viable. He didn’t even try to fight the insurance lobby. “Hillary, “ he cried, “help me Hillary!” And so the insurance industry reformed itself and “managed care” came into being. At that time there were 33 million people without health coverage and
Post a Comment
Read more

Twitter, #iranelection and the pitfalls of Groupthink

By mediagonebad While I wholeheartedly support genuine movements for freedom and democracy anywhere in the world, I find it interesting that so many Americans have jumped on the #iranelection bandwagon without taking the time to learn about Iran, its culture, its mullahs (supreme leaders), its wars, and its history with the United States. Groupthink is a decision-making process that occurs when an idea is put forth and becomes publicly accepted without proof. Groupthink is like an intellectual snowball effect carried from person to person with little, if any, firsthand knowledge or scientific scrutiny. The effect of Groupthink is that it makes the quest for historical truth that much harder when people already accept a given idea as the truth. Ordinarily, one would gather information from first-hand sources, then form an opinion and subject it to examination and reexamination. Groupthink forgoes this process and leads directly to an opinion. Fact: There has been no vote recount in Ira
Post a Comment
Read more