Loving John McCain
Eric Alterman & George Zornick : Presidential Election 2008
He' s not the maverick the mainstream media have proclaimed him to be.
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CBS' Lara Logan Slams US Iraq War Coverage
The Daily Show : Iraq War
CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan feels responsible for Americans not understanding what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Radio Nation with Laura Flanders
Radio Nation : Alternative & Independent Media
This week, Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel reflects on the role of independent media in turbulent political waters.
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Let Them Eat Waffles
Patricia J. Williams : Media
How can Barack Obama--or any candidate--overcome the sad hypocrisy of our public discourse?
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Pentagon Pundits Scandal: Ignored
Free Press : Journalists & Journalism
Why is the media ignoring one of the biggest political scandals in recent memory?
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McCain Is the Media's Maverick
Media Matters for America : John McCain
Why does the American public think John McCain is a maverick? Because the mainstream media told them so.
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Journalists As Truth-Tellers
Bill Moyers
Journalism can still make a difference, but the truth matters more. And if you can't get to the truth through journalism, there are other ways to get there.
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The Ritual Sacrifice of Samantha Power
Eric Alterman : Higher Education
A principled academic gets ground up in the media hypocrisy machine.
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Notes on a Scandal
JoAnn Wypijewski : New York
The Spitzer affair's obvious rationality continues to elude the therapists, sexperts and pundits for whom shame is the game.
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Smearing Obama
Ari Berman : Journalists & Journalism
False claims about Obama intended to stoke racial and religious fear are trickling from the far right to the mainstream media.
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Iraq's Iranian Lovefest
Robert Scheer : Iraq
Ahmadinejad's triumphal visit to Baghdad highlights the abject failure of the Bush doctrine. But US media yawned.
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When Newspapers Take a Stand
Ari Melber : Journalists & Journalism
The New York Times editorial page endorses McCain, while its news department works to discredit him. And there's nothing wrong with that.
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Conservative Cannibalism
Eric Alterman : Journalists & Journalism
Dumb and dumber: reviewing new books by David Frum and Jonah Goldberg.
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'Love Me, I'm a Liberal'
Eric Alterman : Conservatives & The American Right
Thanks to a cowed media, scaremongering is the only remaining area of conservative competence.
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Maternity Fashions, Junior Size
Katha Pollitt : Reproductive Rights
Teens getting pregnant: bad. Teens having babies: good. If this makes no sense, wake up and smell the Enfamil: it's 2008!
2007
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'Bad for the Jews'
Eric Alterman : Judaism & Jews
A paradox of American Jewish political behavior: they think like liberals, but they let belligerent right-wingers who demonize and distort their values speak for them.
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About Facebook
Ari Melber : Internet & New Media
As the old concept of privacy fades and a new one arises online, what is being lost?
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Lippmann and the News
Michael Schudson : Journalists & Journalism
In the early 1900s Walter Lippman laid the groundrules for public debate in America. Have the US media followed his prescriptions?
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Heartland Forum Tackles the Real Issues
Christopher Hayes : Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Pushing past TV's divisive debate format, a unusual forum in Iowa Saturday pushed Democratic candidates to really explain where they stand on pollution, immigration and predatory lending.
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Orwelled
A recent collection of essays brings George Orwell into the new millennium.
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Dark Rooms
The photographers who documented the Spanish Civil War captured the heart of battle in ways that now seem iconic but were then radically new.
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Debating for Dummies
Eric Alterman : Democratic Party
At the Las Vegas Democratic debate, CNN Anchors Blitzer and Malvaux twisted legitimate questions into "gotcha" traps. There's gotta be a better way.
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Of Lies, Catfights and Rock 'n' Roll
Eric Alterman : Journalists & Journalism
Official lies have always been with us. But our political life--as depicted by Maureen Dowd, among others--has been poisoned by the even more insidious unrebuttable lie.
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The New Right-Wing Smear Machine
Christopher Hayes : Internet & New Media
A web-savvy form of conservative propaganda, written anonymously and forwarded via e-mail, is altering the political landscape.
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The Liberal Hawks' Lament
Eric Alterman : Journalists & Journalism
Consider the plight of the embattled liberal hawks and their lonely struggle to discredit the left.
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Taking Celebrity Seriously
Stephen Duncombe : Electoral Politics
The Paris Principle: politics are sooo hot.
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Burns's War: What Is It Good For?
An increasingly bookless universe has become the wasteland so many have feared. In a perfect world, we'd have more Ken Burnses expressing a multiplicity of views.
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Olbermann Rules!
Marvin Kitman : Journalists & Journalism
He's the guy who put the guts back into TV journalism.
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The Presidential Pageant
Eric Alterman : Presidential Election 2008
Here they go again: Bigfoot media are crafting the narratives that will distort the candidates, the issues and the entire presidential campaign.
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It Ain't Necessarily So...
Despite what many in the media believe, the American public is interested in more than just right-wing punditry and celebrity gossip.
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End of an Era at the LA Weekly
Jon Wiener : Journalists & Journalism
The Rupert Murdoch effect: The progressive LA Weekly has gone from a well-reported newspaper to a flashy tabloid with "gotcha" articles.
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The Liberal Voice
Thanks to the potty-mouths of Bush and Cheney, we've won the right to accidentally curse on the public airwaves. Now, what about all the networks' intentional antisocial behavior?
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This Space for Sale
Barbara Ehrenreich : Corporate Media & Consolidation
The Philadelphia Inquirer is planning to run an editorial column sponsored by Citizens Bank. What's next--the Phillip Morris column on health issues?
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The Real 'Fake News'
Eric Alterman : Fox News Network
Progressives need to take on Fox News's ugly propaganda.
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Exploiting Imus
Nicholas von Hoffman : 1st Amendment
The media's superficial coverage of Don Imus avoids important questions about free speech and race.
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Rutgers Team Is an Instrument for Change
Carol Jenkins : Feminism & Women
The fact that the media is astonished that the Rutgers athletes are articulate and smart is a tragedy.
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Walter Reed Scandal: How Mainstream Media Let Us Down
Celia Viggo Wexler : US Military
Cutbacks and a penchant for profits and "happy news" hid the plight of wounded soldiers.
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L'Étranger
Patricia J. Williams : African-Americans
The media have fashioned an impossible portrait of Barack Obama: an American cleansed of the baggage of racism and slavery.
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The Daffodil Delusion: Sensationalizing Global Warming
Michael Corcoran : Global Warming & Climate Change
Media frenzy to the contrary, a warm winter doesn't point to the end of the world--scientific evidence does.
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Sold to Mr. Gordon, Another Bridge!
Alexander Cockburn : Journalists & Journalism
The New York Times's credulous reporting of flimsy "evidence" regarding Iranian weapons in Iraq is enabling Bush's anti-Iran propaganda drive.
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Mission to Caracas
Hugo Chávez's critics may mock his ideas of twenty-first-century socialism as empty rhetoric. Perhaps it's more like magical realism--still a fiction, but one to be nourished as a realizable ideal.
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Obama's Media Maven
Christopher Hayes : Campaigns & Elections
David Axelrod, Barack Obama's closest political adviser, is applying the lessons he learned from Chicago's ugly racialized politics.
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The Press and the Watada Trial
Also at stake in the trial of an Army officer who refuses to deploy to Iraq is the independence of the press.
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Iraq and the Sin of Good Judgment
Eric Alterman : Journalists & Journalism
Given their sorry records on Iraq, why are are neocon pundits worth listening to at all?
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Newspapers...and After?
John Nichols : Journalists & Journalism
Newspapers may be dinosaurs in the age of new media, but they have enough life to guide--and even define--our politics.
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Mirror, Mirror On the Web
Lakshmi Chaudhry : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
Web 2.0's greatest success capitalizes on our need to feel significant, admired and, above all, seen.
2006
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9/11: The Roots of Paranoia
Christopher Hayes : Dissent After 9/11
Public paranoia and a credulous establishment media that have failed to aggressively report on 9/11 have allowed a cult-like "Truth Movement" to fill in the gaps.
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Point, No Counterpoint: The Conservative Beat
Eric Alterman : New York Times
The New York Times editors do a service by covering right-wingers: It would make sense to similarly cover progressives. Why don't they?
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Olbermann's Hot News
Daphne Eviatar : Journalists & Journalism
News flash: Dissent sells! And the American public does have a taste for serious, high-minded news.
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Their Opportunism, Our Opportunity
Gary Younge : Electoral Politics
Mainstream media have transformed the permanent presidential campaign into a never-ending soap opera. Progressives must create the movements that will influence whoever decides to run.
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Hooray for Right-Wing Hollywood
Right-wing culture warriors gathered in LA to praise ABC for its flawed 9/11 docudrama, talk up a conservative version of The Daily Show and release a thriller fueled by a nativist agenda.
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From Flying Saucers to 9/11
Alexander Cockburn : September 11
The world is in tumult, but in the heart of Empire, the level of creative political energy runs flat along the bottom of the graph.
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Hell of a Times
Max Blumenthal : Conservatives & The American Right
A nasty succession battle is brewing at the conservative Washington Times, its newsroom abuzz with allegations of racism, sexism and unprofessional conduct.
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Lying About 9/11? Easy as ABC
Why did the network humiliate its news division, ignore historians and insult Americans with a 9/11 docudrama that it knew was a tissue of lies?
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9/11 in a Movie-Made World
What if the Twin Towers hadn't collapsed? Would the Bush Administration have so easily advanced its fear-inspired "war on terror" without the images that played on a culture's secret fears?
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Politics, the Media and 9/11
Since September 11, the Bush Administration has repeatedly exploited the threat of terrorism for political ends, from dirty bombs to sleeper cells to electoral politics.
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Israel on the Slide: Who's to Blame?
The Israeli press has criticized the Lebanon disaster from all political angles. The American press chooses to cheerlead instead, while liberal Jewry remains silent.
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Nightly Nativism
Daphne Eviatar : Immigration to the US
CNN pundit Lou Dobbs has made himself a "specialist" in channeling nativist, nationalist and even white supremacist rhetoric.
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The Problem with Pundits
Eric Boehlert : Journalists & Journalism
Pro-Lieberman Beltway pundits who whined about progressive bloggers and sounded noisy alarms about the disastrous impact of a Lamont win will have a lot of explaining to do come November.
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The Uses and Abuses of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a really bad guy. But the Bush Administration's armchair warriors mythologized him into a self-fulfilling prophecy of insurgent terror.
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Access of Evil
Amy Goodman : Corporate Media & Consolidation
Compliant coverage of the Iraq War proved the news business is morally compromised, no longer driven by creative people with something to tell but by global corporations with something to sell.
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The Political Power of Words
Dean Powers : Journalists & Journalism
The X factor in the midterm elections may well be the English language--specifically, the biased terminology that seeps unchallenged into mainstream media political coverage.
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Time Is on Their Side
Time magazine's new managing editor has inherited an editorial model that's under siege and a pundit lineup that tilts squarely to the right.
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Media Assault on Latin America
US media coverage of the rise of the Latin American left is an echo of the Bush Administration's simplistic, knee-jerk rhetoric.
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Lap Dogs of the Press
During the run-up to the Iraq War, the nation's leading print and broadcast media could have saved lives if they questioned the Administration's pronouncements. Instead, they were an echo chamber for the White House.
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The Olympics We Missed
The Winter Olympics are to NBC what icebergs were to the Titanic. Jingoistic, condescending coverage missed the real drama.
2005
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Dr. Germ and Mrs. Anthrax Set Free
Why is it not bigger news that these infamous Iraqi scientists have been quietly released from imprisonment without any charges being brought by their US captors?
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Conrad Black's Fall
Scott Sherman : White-Collar Crime
Reading Patrick Fitzgerald's sixty-page indictment of publishing magnate Conrad Black and his associates, one gets the feeling that the next stop for this high-living power-broker will be a prison cell.
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Letter from the (Outgoing) Publisher
Victor Navasky : Nation History
As Editor Katrina vanden Heuvel becomes the latest in a long line of publisher/owners of The Nation, Victor Navasky looks ahead to his new role as publisher emeritus and member of the magazine's editorial board.
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All the King's Media
William Greider : Internet & New Media
The scandals suffocating the Bush Administration seem less like Nixon and Watergate and more like Louis XV and pre-Revolutionary France. They are harbingers of a potent cultural event that may jolt the public out of complacency.
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Corrupt, Incompetent and 'Off Center'
Eric Alterman : Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
With leading Republicans facing the slammer and Bush in a tailspin, fate has given liberals a huge opportunity. Americans already share our values--we need a new language to help connect peoples' deepest needs to the liberal vision.
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Found in the Flood
Eric Alterman : Racism & Discrimination
The most remarkable aspect of the media's treatment of the hurricane coverage was the return of the poor, in coverage that was neither condescending nor condemnatory.
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In Defense of Pat Robertson
Richard Kim : Religious Fundamentalism
The wacky televangelist may have done us a favor by bringing the insanity of Bush Administration tactics into plain view.
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Witnesses to an Execution
Richard Kim : Gay & Lesbian Issues & Activism
An international furor over the hanging of "two gay teenagers" in Iran.
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The Times, It Is A-Ragin'
Eric Alterman : Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Even so-called liberal publications frequently tilt rightward.
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Lying Liars & the Presidents Who Employ Them
The media passed along without prejudice Karl Rove's deliberate distortions of Richard Durbin's words.
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The History of Smoking Guns
Alexander Cockburn : Journalists & Journalism
History is one big smoking gun, and the function of the official press is to say it isn't so.
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Clinton Agonistes
John Harris's history of the Clinton Administration deserves much of the praise it has received, but it ignores the media's anti-Clinton animus.
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In Re Newsweek: Which Side Are You On?
Eric Alterman : Conservatives & The American Right
In its campaign against Newsweek, the Bush Administration seeks to undermine already faltering public confidence.
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Genetically Speaking
Patricia J. Williams : Racism & Discrimination
There is no specific genetic marker that distinguishes one race from another.
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Good, Gray NPR
Scott Sherman : National Public Radio
Once a quirky upstart, NPR is now soberly mainstream.
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What Would Dewey Do?
Eric Alterman : Journalists & Journalism
Robert Novak has never given the impression that he cared much for the virtues of civility.
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Marla Ruzicka, Rachel Corrie and 'Credibility'
Alexander Cockburn : Peace Activism
No US Senator attended Rachel Corrie's funeral.
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'Case Closed'
Eric Alterman : US Intelligence/Covert Ops
In a more just universe, the right-wingers would give reporters the credit they so richly deserve.
2004
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The Invisible Hand Holds the Remote
What would Jesus watch? My guess is PBS.
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Where Rather Was Right
Victor Navasky : George W. Bush
What Rather got right relates to yet another presidential narrative.
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Bush Bashers & the Bashers Who Bash Them
Katha Pollitt : Activism & Organizing
It's a stretch to suggest that the anti-Bush advocates are the lefty equivalent of the hard-right disinformation machine.
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Election Matters
The most intriguing story in Washington is a subterranean conflict that reporters cannot cover because some of them are involved.
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Press Watch
Scott Sherman : Corporate Media & Consolidation
Reports paint a portrait of a timid, credulous press corps that, when confronted by an Administration intent on war, sank to new depths of docility.
2003
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Secrets, Lies and Media Privilege
Robert Scheer : New York Times
Protecting the government sources who maligned Wen Ho Lee is wrong.
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The Struggle for Russia
The ongoing human tragedy is what is missing from the US media story, the plight of most Russians is hardly ever mentioned.
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Up in Flames
Robert W. McChesney & John Nichols : Corporate Media & Consolidation
The public revolts against monopoly media.
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Liberal Signs of Life
Eric Alterman : Alternative & Independent Media
The "liberal media" is dead. Long live the liberal media.
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Saving Private Lynch: Take 2
"Her story is one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived."
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The US vs. the UK
Russ Baker : Media Coverage of the War on Terrorism
A comparison of televised media coverage of the Iraq war.
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Hour of Media Shame
Kanak Mani Dixit : Media Coverage of the War on Terrorism
One casualty of the war on Iraq has been the image of the Western media.
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Copyright Monopolies
Andrew L. Shapiro : Supreme Court
The 7-to-2 ruling in Eldred v. Ashcroft is a blow to consumer rights and free speech, and sets awful precedents.
2002
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'America's Army' Targets Youth
Jacob Hodes & Emma Ruby-Sachs : Youth
The Army's new website is part of a much larger overhaul of recruiting strategy.
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Beauty Tips and Politics
Lauren Sandler : Feminism & Women
Hot media news: Women want hard-hitting reports on issues that affect them.
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Cartooning Terror
Emma Ruby-Sachs & Asa Pittman : 1st Amendment
Now more than ever, there's a need for the critiques that political cartoons can offer.
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Huey Freeman: American Hero
Sure he's a cartoon character, but it still takes courage to speak out.
2001
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Take This Media...Please!
Al Franken & Ani DiFranco : Corporate Media & Consolidation
Comments on the media from cultural producers and critics in a range of fields.
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Stossel's Heroes
Mark Dowie : Conservatives & The American Right
The Department of Energy is pondering the most expensive environmental clean-up in world history.
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Working-Class Heroes
Joshua B. Freeman : New York City
It ought not to require mass death to remind us who keeps NYC functioning day after day after day.
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Profiles in Cowardice
Recent events show that you don't need media concentration to have homogenization of the news.
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No Vengeance, No Justice
Patricia J. Williams : Death Penalty
It is precisely the dimension of McVeigh's evil that presses us to consider most seriously the limits of state force.
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Journalism & Democracy
A reflection on journalism, democracy and the importance of being a "public nuisance."
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Commies and the Conservatives Who Love Them
Why is it so hard to find a good right-wing anti-communist when you finally need one?
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Pundits Who Predict the Future Are Always Wrong
Rick Perlstein : Electoral Politics
By refusing to remember how history always embarrasses the present, punditry only really knows how to be wrong.
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The Pardons & the Press
The insular Beltway news business is broken because too often it refuses to let the facts get in the way of a good story.
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Murdoch's Fox News
While much has been written about Fox's election night gaffe, there's been far less focus on the blatant bias of Fox's regular staff, contributors and guests.