Posts Tagged ‘ Msnbc ’

Stephen Colbert Befuddles Some Media Commentators

January 23, 2012
By

Stephen Colbert’s super PAC exposes the corporate news media’s incapability to express what would be in normal life circumstances a totally justified sense of righteous outrage. Why do people become upset with the notion of anonymous corporate donors filling the coffers of Super PACS and corporations being considered “people?” It must offend a sense...

Read more »

Occupy Wall Street: “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

October 29, 2011
By

When MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow recently asked the journalist and commentator Frank Rich on her show if he believed the “physical manifestation of discontent” was imperative to the Occupy Wall Street movement’s cause, Rich replied that it was “not always that important” since the movement was polling well among Americans. I disagree. The ideas that...

Read more »

Losing the Narrative on Public Employee Unions

March 4, 2011
By

Despite what some polls are telling us the Democrats at the national level are rapidly losing the narrative thread on the issue of collective bargaining rights for public employees. The frame of the “debate” on public worker pensions, and the role of labor unions in American society generally, has already largely moved in the...

Read more »

Corporate Media Lose A Progressive Voice

January 23, 2011
By

I was pretty surprised while watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann to hear Olbermann, in a rather matter-of-fact way, tell his viewers that tonight would be his last show. It takes years to build up a TV news show “brand.” And Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show dated back to the darkest days of the one-party Republican...

Read more »

Why Liberals Don’t Stand a Chance in the Corporate Media

October 6, 2010
By

Last March, when President Obama announced he was fast-tracking a bunch of deepwater oil leases, mainstream media commentators told us what a politically sophisticated move it was. He was showing the “courage” to defy his base among the anti-drilling crowd and when those dolphin-huggers screamed foul, he stood his ground. A few weeks later,...

Read more »

An Unsanitized Look at the Origins of the Iraq War

August 31, 2010
By

Neo-conservatives within the Bush Administration – Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, and others, repeatedly told us on TV that individuals who opposed President George W. Bush’s attack, invasion, and occupation of...

Read more »

The Wrath of Suburbanites and Independents

November 4, 2009
By

Suburbanites and independent voters in Virginia and New Jersey broke Republican in yesterday’s election. Last night I saw CNN’s John King tell his viewers that this phenomenon could only mean that people are sending a signal to President Barack Obama that they’re fed up with “all that spending” in Washington. King’s assertion is interesting...

Read more »

Time Magazine Gives Glenn Beck a Rave Review

September 18, 2009
By

Time magazine’s cover story on Glenn Beck by David Von Drehle is a clinic for journalism students who wish to learn about faux balance, false equivalencies, straw men, and omissions of important facts. Nowhere in this piece does Mr. Drehle mention the fact that sixty-two of Beck’s sponsors have yanked their ad buys to...

Read more »

Bill O’Reilly-Keith Olbermann Feud Ends with a Corporate Handshake?

August 10, 2009
By

According to Brian Stelter, writing in the New York Times business section, it was FOX News director Roger Ailes who cooked up the original scheme to blunt Keith Olbermann’s withering criticism of Bill O’Reilly. The plan entailed O’Reilly and Glen Beck aiming their barbs, not at Olbermann or his show Countdown on MSNBC, but...

Read more »