Mainstream Media Watch
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Welcome to Media Watch,
We at ZCom of course provide media, yet we are definitively not in the mainstream. What swims there are corporate and governmental entities that overwhelmingly - when presenting news and social analysis at all - take as a given support for elite machinations and maintanence of elite structures. Understanding this system supporting media, dissecting its deceptive manipulations, combating its oppressive implications, and pressuring it to contain better even against its own inclinations, is the aim of our attention to mainstream media - as well as, in time, replacing it in toto.
Here too, however, you will find articles and content about alternative media - its efforts, logic, etc.
Please send any ideas you may have for other or additional content from our database you think ought to appear in content boxes on this page.
Thank You.
Latest Media
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The fake grassroots campaign run by grouse shooters is just one instance of the way democracy is being bypassed
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Moody: The Rank and File’s Paper of Record
The history of Labor Notes shows that labor’s strength — and socialists’ relevance — depend on a militant and independent rank and file
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Porter: How Media Distorted Syrian Ceasefire’s Breakdown
Coverage of the breakdown of the partial ceasefire in Syria...
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Giroux: Donald Trump and the Plague of Atomization in a Neoliberal Age
This week, Donald Trump lowered the bar even further by...
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Monbiot: The climate crisis is already here – but no one’s telling us
The media largely relegate the greatest challenge facing humanity to footnotes as industry and politicians hurtle us towards systemic collapse of the planet
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Cole: Russian & Iranian Press deplore Hillary Clinton Hawkishness; Israelis complain she’s Dove
How is the international press responding to the Democratic National Convention and the formalization of Hillary Clinton’s status as the party’s standard-bearer in the presidential campaign?
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Cole: Is the French Press Right to stop Printing Pictures, Names of Terrorists?
We are privileging certain kinds of violence and magnifying it through the press and social media
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It all comes down to the same thing in the end. If Muslims attack us, they are terrorists. If non-Muslims attack us, they are shooters. If Muslims attack other Muslims, they are attackers
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Figlerowicz: The Gatekeepers Aren’t Gone
Viral content seems democratic. But it’s still mostly controlled by big media companies
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Cook: Guardian sinks into gutter on Corbyn – again
Surprise, surprise, the supposedly liberal Guardian’s coverage of this incident is as appalling as that found in the rightwing Telegraph
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Giroux: The Violence of Forgetting
What I have called the violence of organized forgetting signals how contemporary politics are those in which emotion triumphs over reason, and spectacle over truth, thereby erasing history
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Goldenberg: Biggest US Coal Company Funded Dozens of Groups Questioning Climate Change
The funding spanned trade associations, corporate lobby groups, and industry front groups as well as conservative thinktanks and was exposed in court filings last month
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Raina: A Triumph Only On Television
Sifting truth from hype is now a patriotic task. Look how the BJP's Assam win was pitched as an India-shaking success
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Fisk: How do we separate the truth from the lies when reporting war crimes?
Each false atrocity bleeds into the body of evidence of other, real crimes, contaminating the truth for decades to come
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Chomsky: The Legacy of the Obama Administration
Electoral campaigns, especially in the US, are being run by the advertising industry
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Baroud: Time to End the ‘Hasbara’: Palestinian Media and the Search for a Common Story
Not only are Palestinians expected to demolish many years of Israeli disinformation but also to construct their own narrative that is free from the whims of factions and personal gains.
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Pearson: Media Wars: The Role of the Left When Venezuela’s Imperfect Revolution is Under Attack
The best way to counter the media war on Venezuela is to do what they don't do: offer in depth, contextualised, critical coverage
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Mcchesney: Mainstream Corporate Media Covering 2016 Election Through Eyes of Clinton Campaign
A look at how the media is covering the race for the White House and a private monopoly that has too much political influence and political power
ZMag Media
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Herman: Public Editors & Structural Bias
Sullivan claims that the NYT has and should maintain “abiding attention to society’s have nots.” To the war on labor and decline of labor unions, which they have scanted for years?
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Wittner: Getting the Story Wrong: The Distortion of Politics by the Press
On the night of April 22, three days after the presidential primary, seven words buried at the end of a Times Union blog let slip the fact that Sanders had won the 20th Congressional district
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Koehler: Opening the Closed Political Culture
In just over a dozen words, the paper managed not only to trivialize everything two presidential candidates stood for, and not only to reference the myth that Nader caused Al Gore to lose an election he didn’t in fact lose, but also to obliterate the last six months of a presidential campaign that had permanently shaken up the political status quo
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Herman: News Fit to Print But Not Printed, Part Two
In Part 1, I began with a case where the New York Times belatedly acknowledged that it had failed to print news fit to print, news which, not coincidentally, contradicted a party-line theme the editors had enthusiastically and uncritically supported five years earlier
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Herman: News Fit to Print But Not Printed, Part One
The daily front page claim by the management of the New York Times that they provide “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is comical in its audacious scope. “All” covers an awful lot of ground, and if pressed the editors might even concede that something “fit to print” might occur in places not covered by their journalists or correspondents
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If Hillary Clinton was Queen of Chaos, Obama is surely King. Iraq, Libya, and Syria have been reduced to a chaotic state, and Obama has a heavy responsibility for these developments. There was also Obama’s widening use of drone warfare and declared right and intention to bomb any perceived threat to U.S. “national security” anyplace on earth.
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Herman: Western Aggression is the Highest Form of Terrorism
The U.S. invaders of Iraq in 2003 proudly announced a “shock and awe” purpose in their opening assault, clearly designed to instill fear; that is, to terrorize the victim population along with the target security forces
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Herman: Failed: What Experts Got Wrong About Global Warming
An important feature of Weisbrot’s analysis is his recognition of the extent to which policy failures have flowed from biased analyses that serve a small elite and punish the majority, and that policy successes have often followed the loss of power by those serving elite interests
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Chomsky: Rekindling the Radical Imagination
For the radical imagination to be rekindled and to lead the way out of this desert, what is needed is people who will work to sweep away the mists of carefully contrived illusion, reveal the stark reality, and become directly engaged in the popular struggles
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Herman: More Nuggets From the Nuthouse
I’ve long been intrigued by the ways in which neo-liberal class warfare is normalized and even made to seem an advance in social welfare.
Video Media
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Harrison: Wikileaks: Interview with Investigations Editor Sarah Harrison
Interview on the case of Julian Assange, the findings of the UN working group on arbitrary detention, national security, international law and how one can support whistleblowers
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Cohen: Why Is The Western Media Ignoring The New Cold War?
Interview on Russia, NATO, and our mainstream media's refusal to report on the New Cold War
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Solomon: Trump, Sanders’ Next Steps & Media Coverage of the 2016 Race
The debate continues on racist remarks, Clinton’s plan to reach out to Sanders supporters, and the decision by the Associated Press and NBC to call the race for Clinton on the eve of the California primary
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Nader: The U.S. Political & Media System Is Designed to Obstruct, Silence Third-Party Candidates
Interview on the elections
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Brand: Why Would Fox Defend Police Pulling Guns On Children?
Discussion on how Fox News reacts to the video that shows a policeman pointing a gun at children at a pool party in Texas
Blogs Media
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: Media Coverage Misrepresents Yemen’s Real Problems
Yemen has found itself splashed all over the news again...
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Peterson: Srebrenica-Related Graves Through 2002
On behalf of the Bosnian Serb defendant Ljubiša Beara in...
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Paul: ‘The War You Don’t See’: Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine
Global Policy Forum, Blog http://globalpolicyinbrief.blogspot.com/ Seven months prior to the...
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Kearns: The “middle class mob”: press coverage of Saturday’s UK Uncut action
Discourses around protests develop pretty quickly such that it's tricky...
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Sinclair: Email exchange with the BBC’s Mark Mardell about US military aid to Egypt
Please see below an email exchange I had in January...
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Campagna: What Are We Struggling For? – Seminar
Last year’s student protests saw a new generation take to...
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Dominick: NY Times’s Sympathy for the Devils
I've spent my entire adult life writing media analysis, so...
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Peterson: Solidarity Versus Indifference — Part 4
When citizens of foreign countries are denied their democratic rights,...
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Peterson: Solidarity Versus Indifference — Part 3
When citizens of foreign countries are denied their democratic...
Media (Main) Links
Audio Media
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Schechter: Michael Albert On Participatory Media
A former member of Students for a Democratic Society, Michael would go on to develop, along with Robin Hahnel, an alternative to market capitalism called participatory economics.
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Wilpert: Announcing TeleSUR English
Greg Wilpert is director of teleSUR English, a newly launched multimedia website that is sponsored by teleSUR, the Latin American TV channel that is funded by the left governments of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, Nicaragua, and Cuba
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Bennis: Afghanistan after the Wikileaks War Logs
Interview about the impact of the Wikileaks documents and the...
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Pilger: Journalism and the War on Terror
John Pilger is an acclaimed Australian journalist and documentary maker....
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Robbins: Address to National Association of Broadcasters
A renowned actor, director and writer, Robbins used his keynote...