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Showing posts with label mainstream media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mainstream media. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Stories NOT really in the mainstream news

Brought to you by Truthout, a liberal non-profit media organization.

Will the Courts Save the Dreamers?

By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout | News Analysis
Thousands of immigrants and supporters join the Defend DACA March to oppose the President Trump order to end DACA on September 10, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo: David McNew / Getty Images)Thousands of immigrants and supporters join the Defend DACA March to oppose the President Trump order to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program on September 10, 2017, in Los Angeles, California. (Photo: David McNew / Getty Images)
With 17 states filing two lawsuits over Trump's DACA rescission, it is more likely that the fate of the Dreamers will be decided in the US Supreme Court rather than in Congress, which would have to defy years of history to agree on comprehensive immigration reform. But if Trump gets to appoint one more justice to the court, DACA may well be struck down.
Read more...






 

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Quick, go to the mainstream news ...

... pick any source:

TV
Newspaper
Internet
Radio
Magazine
whatever ...

Think mainstream, like

ABC/NBC/CBS/Fox/CNN
NY Times, Washington Post
Yahoo News/Google News
NPR/Talk radio
Newsweek/Time
whatever ...

Now, how many of these stories do you see there?

2014.1.21.RX.thumb

Six Drugs Whose Dangerous Risks Were Buried So Big Pharma Could Make Money

By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet | Report    
 

The Toxic Chemical Spill Crisis in West Virginia Will Happen Again. Here's Why

By Dennis Trainor Jr, Popular Resistance | Video Report    
 
2014.1.21.Obama.NSA.thumb

Five Criticisms of Obama's NSA Speech

By Kevin Mathews, Care2 | News Analysis    
 
2014.1.21.Jamail.Main

BP Employees, Outraged by Lack of Compensation, Warn Oil Spill Victims

By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report    
 

Children Burned With Cigarettes by Israeli Soldiers in Illegal Settlement

By Nora Barrows-Friedman , The Electronic Intifada | Report    
 
Go ahead, check. Seriously, do it.
 
I bet you won't find any.
 
Why not?
 
Read the material on corporate ownership of the media. If they don't want you to know it or don't feel it is profitable to show it, it will not be there. It is that simple.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Stories NOT in the news today

Here are some important news stories and serious media analyses that are NOT in the mainstream news today.

The first is about the shift from a social welfare state (where we aim to help our fellow citizens by providing for their general welfare, as noted in our nation's founding documents) to a social control state (where we aim to control everything people do in order to protect them from serious threats
(both imagined or manufactured and real).

The second is about the growing and impressive power of large banks (the very actors who were found to be responsible for crashing the US economy in 2008).

2013 0821rob sf

2013 0827aa1

The Leveraged Buyout of America


Now you won't see these stories in the mainstream news (since they are owned and operated by large corporations. But you will see them in and hear about them in TruthOut, PBS, NPR, ProPublica, etc.

So use those sources as much as you can.

Monday, July 16, 2012

How corporations control America

Well, it is safe to say that you will not see articles like this in the mainstream (i.e., corporate) news).

This is from Alternet:
Photo Credit: Viajar24h.com
The great power struggle of the 20th century was the competition between Soviet-style communism and "free-market" corporatism for domination of the world's resources. In America, it's taken for granted that Soviet communism lost (though China's more capitalist variant seems to be doing well), and the superiority of neo-liberal economics -- as epitomized by the great multinational corporations -- was thus affirmed for all time and eternity.

There's a small problem with this, though. An old bit of wisdom says: choose your enemies carefully, because over time, you will tend to become the very thing you most strongly resist. One of the most striking things about our victorious corporations now is the degree to which they've taken on some of the most noxious and Kafkaesque attributes of the Soviet system -- too often leaving their employees, customers, and other stakeholders just as powerless over their own fates as the unhappy citizens of those old centrally planned economies of the USSR were back in the day.

It's not just that the corporations have taken control over our government (though that's awful enough). It's also that they've taken control over -- and put serious limits on -- our choices regarding what we buy, where we work, how we live, and what rights we have. Our futures are increasingly no longer our own: more and more decisions, large and small, that determine the quality of our lives are being made by Politburo apparatchiks at a Supreme Corporate Soviet somewhere far distant from us. Only now, those apparatchiks are PR and marketing executives, titans of corporate finance, lobbyists for multinationals, and bean-counting managers trying to increase profits at the expense of our freedom.

The rest of the article discusses how Americans are being controlled by large corporations, generally even as it highly pleases us because first and foremost we are consumers looking to simply buy (and have) more for less (and as little as possible). In other words, we like it.

There is information here about how it impacts shopping, health care, education, and on and on.

The only mention of crime is this:

"Our increasingly privatized and militarized law enforcement is starting to owe a lot to the brutal Soviet policing style, too. We have gulags now -- and the corporations are running them, too."

That is something that is lost on even most criminal justice majors -- the links between large corporatiosn and crime control mechanisms such as policing and especially corrections. And as long as the media are owned and controlled by corporations with the same overriding interests of making profit, they probably will not learn such lessons.

Friday, September 30, 2011

American citizen killed without trial

Remember when Republicans said Obama was "soft on terrorism."

Here is the response:

First, the US has killed more suspected high level members of al-Qaeda using predator drone strikes in President Obama's first three years than we did under President Bush did in eight years.

Second, President Obama drew down troops in Iraq and ordered a surge of troops in Afghanistan in order to increase the odds of victory there so that we can get out in the next two years.

Third, Obama created the team and the authorized the specific mission that killed Usama bin Laden (UBL).

Now, the news media report that a major al-Qaeda operative in Yemen has been killed by the US. This guy, Anwar al-Awlaki, was directly inolved not only in 9/11 but also reportedly counseled subsequent attackers including the Fort Hood shooter and the "underwear bomber" among others.

The only problem is, he was an American citizen. And he was killed without trial.

I am not saying this is right or wrong, only that it is an issue worth addressing. And yet, in this story in the mainstream press, there is no mention of it. Yes, they say he was an American citizen, but they do not even raise the issue of what are the implications for Constitutional rights in the war on terrorism.

(For the record, I did write a letter to the editor calling on President Obama to respect the Constitutional rights of all Americans in such cases, which would require capturing Americans suspected of terrorism and giving them trials, assuming they were not killed during capture).

However you feel about the issue--frankly, I can see both sides of the argument--it is still sad that we are sacrificing certain rights in order to achieve victory in this war.

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” -- Benjamin Franklin, 1755

And not a word about it in the press.

http://news.yahoo.com/prominent-us-born-al-qaida-cleric-killed-yemen-104110647.html

Monday, August 15, 2011

I see WHITE people

Turn on CSPAN and you'll see lots of white people. Whites are highly overrepresented among lawmakers.

And the mainstream media are becoming whiter too.

From the article:

"As the American Society of Newspaper Editors has reported, racial and ethnic minorities make up less than 13 percent of newsroom employees. Minority ownership of television stations hovers around 3 percent, while radio station ownership is at 7 percent, despite the fact that the minority population of the U.S. is roughly 28 percent."

In the book I show the benefits of alternative media. One of them is non-corporate owned media are more demographically diverse. They also show a wide range of viewpoints that you don't tend to see in the mainstream press.

As noted in this article: "The role of the news media is to provide a forum for discussion and engagement for all people in society."

But if you rely on the corporate media for information, you're getting very limited, pro status quo viewpoints from an increasingly white population.

http://www.truth-out.org/media-growing-more-white-what%E2%80%99s-fcc-doing-about-it/1313244498

Thursday, January 13, 2011

You've already forgotten about BP haven't you?


Because it's barely in the news.

But nothing in the Gulf of Mexico is better.

And BP marches on, unimpeded by law enforcement or government interference.

Luckily we have media organizations like Truth-out that still think this is an important story.


http://www.truth-out.org/the-tragic-state-gulf-mexico-sampling-reveals-oil-and-dispersants-mississippi-coast66726