#sclmb

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In the 1970s, Phil took progressive issues and mainstreamed them to millions through his syndicated daytime show. He was a pioneer in syndication. He also pioneered on the issues; his most frequent guests on his daytime show were Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem, and Rev. Jesse Jackson. They appeared dozens of times as Phil boosted civil rights, women’s rights, and consumer rights. He regularly hosted Dr. Sidney Wolfe warning of the greedy pharmaceutical industry and unsafe drugs. Raised a Catholic, he also featured advocates for atheism.

Mainstream media obits will likely focus on his daytime TV episodes that included male strippers or other titillation, but Phil was serious about the issues—and did far more than most mainstream TV journalists to address the biggest issues.

I was a senior producer on Phil’s short-lived MSNBC primetime show in 2002 and 2003. It was frustrating for us to have to deal with the men Phil called “the suits”—NBC and MSNBC executives who were intimidated by the Bush administration and resisted any efforts by NBC/MSNBC to practice journalism and ask tough questions of Washington before our young people were sent to Iraq to kill or be killed. Ultimately, Phil was fired because—as the leaked internal memo said—Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war.”

But before we were terminated, we put guests on the screen who were not commonly on mainstream TV. We offered a full hour with Barbara Ehrenreich on Labor Day in 2002; a full hour with veteran journalist Studs Terkel; interviews with progressive members of Congress, including Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich; and segments with the "maverick" Texas Observer columnist Molly Ivins; and offered platforms to foreign policy experts like Phyllis Bennis and Laura Flanders as well as Palestinian advocates, including Hanan Ashrawi.

No one on American television cross-examined Israeli leaders like Phil did when he interviewed then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They seemed stunned—never having faced such questioning from a U.S. journalist.

But “the suits” ruined our show when they took control and actually mandated a quota system favoring the right wing: If we had booked one guest who was antiwar, we needed to book two that were pro-war. If we had one guest on the left, we needed two on the right. When a producer suggested booking Michael Moore—known to oppose the pending Iraq war—she was told she’d need to book three rightwingers for political balance.

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Piedraluz se inspira en el término de una relación amorosa en nuevo single “Final”

http://dlvr.it/SclMbs

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Consider these findings from a 2014 study: Asked what they view as an ideal pay ratio between CEOs and unskilled workers, Americans pointed to a ratio of 7-to-1. The real ratio at the time? 354-to-1. Meanwhile, Americans thought that the actual ratio was more like 30-to-1, about an order of magnitude off from reality.

Media That Benefit From Inequality Prefer to Talk About Other Things

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Jen Sorensen: Pundits pave the way to hell

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Our corporate-owned media system too often functions as a corporate-friendly propaganda system, and it operates smoothly. It typically operates without orders from the owner or top management, and without firings for blatantly political reasons.

Memo to mainstream journalists: Can the phony outrage; Bernie is right about bias

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I'm an old guy, and one of my political frustrations throughout my life is that there have been so many right-wingers who seem to have massive amounts of power even though no one elected them to any office and no elected official ever appointed them -- it seems that they just hang out a shingle and then the next thing you know, they're remaking the country.

In my youth it was Phyllis Schlafly, who stopped the Equal Rights Amendment in its tracks. Later it was Grover Norquist, who swore nearly every Republican member of Congress and congressional candidate to a no-tax-increase pledge, and then Leonard Leo, who remade the federal bench in his own right-wing Opus Dei image. And now we have Chris Rufo, who gave us the "critical race theory" moral panic, has been a leading demonizer of trans people, and now has led the successful movement to depose Harvard president Claudine Gay.

I know that Leo gets right-wing billionaire cash not because the billionaires necessarily care about restricting abortion or expanding gun rights, but because the judges Leo picks are invariably pro-plutocrat. I know that Rufo gets right-wing billionaire cash because getting conservative and right-centrist voters worked up about cultural issues is a surefire way of getting them to vote for Republicans, who will then reliably vote to cut the taxes and regulations the billionaires hate. I get it, but it's frustrating. Conservative supervillains don't just stir the pot -- they actually change Americans' lives. Right-wingers use the power they have, even when they don't hold the White House or have congressional majorities. Democrats are much more timid about using power, even when they've won it from voters.

Who on the left might be considered an unelected, unappointed, highly successful change agent/gadfly/scourge of the opposition? George Soros? The right demonizes him. But when you do this from the right, the "liberal media" will embrace you, not demonize you.

[azspot]

That’s because the New York Times is an active and eager participant in a right-wing culture war intended to demonize and destroy any institutions that might provide the slightest bit of resistance to Trumpist authoritarianism.

The New York Times is a right-wing newsletter, with recipes

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My advice to political reporters is this: Yes, Trump insulting Harris in racist and misogynistic ways is inevitable, given his character. But that doesn’t mean it’s not news. Rather, it makes it a way to write about his character. Take advantage of that opportunity.

Don’t treat Trump like he has no agency

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Voters who rely solely on traditional news sources are presented with a version of Trump that bears little resemblance to reality.

From Rambling to Rational: The Media’s Trump Sanewashing Problem

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The NYT is really at its worst in this year’s campaign cycle, to the point that I’m a bit at a loss to imagine what’s going on in the newsroom. Their behavior is so programmatic that I have to think they’re consciously pursuing an obsessive, almost lunatic version of “balance” in their coverage of both presidential campaigns. It’s so over the top and calculated that it ends up feeling less like news coverage and more like an attempt to be a third side—not even being a referee but an advocate set against both campaigns on behalf of some imagined and very Rube Goldberg jerry-rigged “centrism”. Nate Cohn’s weird freak-out about how Harris was far to the left on economic policy right after she moved into the lead spot was a foretaste of what we’ve had ever since.

Fixed Narratives, Fixing Narratives

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CNN is facing a backlash from its own staff over editorial policies they say have led to a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza.

Journalists in CNN newsrooms in the US and overseas say broadcasts have been skewed by management edicts and a story-approval process that has resulted in highly partial coverage of the Hamas massacre on 7 October and Israel’s retaliatory attack on Gaza.

“The majority of news since the war began, regardless of how accurate the initial reporting, has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,” said one CNN staffer. “Ultimately, CNN’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza war amounts to journalistic malpractice.”

According to accounts from six CNN staffers in multiple newsrooms, and more than a dozen internal memos and emails obtained by the Guardian, daily news decisions are shaped by a flow of directives from the CNN headquarters in Atlanta that have set strict guidelines on coverage.

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The dialectic within journalism encompasses what could be termed, on one hand, a politics of erasure and distortion, and on the other, a politics of moral witnessing. The politics of erasure is apparent in how corporate mainstream media disproportionately covers Israel’s aggressive actions in Gaza and portrays Trump as a conventional political candidate rather than an authoritarian threat to democracy both domestically and internationally. This erasure is also evident in how far-right journalism consistently distorts the truth when reporting on issues that conflict with reactionary conservative politics.

Corporate Media in the Age of Fascist Politics: Firewalls of Ignorance and Disappearance

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Uri’s account of the deliberate effort to undermine Trump up to and after his election is also bewilderingly incomplete, inaccurate, and skewed. For most of 2016, many NPR journalists warned newsroom leadership that we weren’t taking Trump and the possibility of his winning seriously enough. But top editors dismissed the chance of a Trump win repeatedly, declaring that Americans would be revolted by this or that outrageous thing he’d said or done. I remember one editorial meeting where a white newsroom leader said that Trump’s strong poll numbers wouldn’t survive his being exposed as a racist. When a journalist of color asked whether his numbers could be rising because of his racism, the comment was met with silence. In another meeting, I and a couple of other editorial leaders were encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton. Another colleague asked what to do if one candidate just lied more than the other. Another silent response.

NPR: The public broadcaster’s problems are deeper than “wokeness.”

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If you are a New York Times staffer—even one like Hughes, who mostly writes magazine profiles that have nothing to do with Palestine—and you sign an open letter in support of Palestine, you have crossed a bright red line and gone so far beyond the limits of your job description that there can be no future for you at the paper. Even if you’re a freelancer like Keiles, it’s deemed untenable for your association with the Times to continue. However, if you are Nicholas Confessore, and you want to directly link protests against the war on Gaza to the idea that left-wing activism at universities is “dangerous,” and you also want to accept the idea that leftists have been “indulged” at these campuses, and that “woke-ism” is a thing at all, you not only get to do that, but they will put it on the front page of the newspaper. They will also blast it out to their readers in a news alert.

The New York Times' Rules About Its Palestine Coverage Sure Are Interesting

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Chait doesn’t trouble himself to say which of the actions that these lefties are promoting amount to bad policy and are politically damaging to boot. The push to regulate cryptocurrencies? The lawsuits to break up the monopolies that stifle competition? The move to enable the 20 percent of American workers who are bound by noncompete agreements that keep them from seeking different jobs? The efforts to enable workers to join unions without fear of being fired? The enforcement of trade laws preventing sham Mexican unions? The ruling that companies that break U.S. labor laws during union elections must then recognize the union? None of this, and in fact no action outside of legislation—which Congress drives as much as the president—is mentioned at all. Without getting into, or even near, specifics, Chait sees unnamed, undiscussed Biden officials’ tenures as something to be repudiated.

There Are Some Damned Good Reasons Why Joe Biden Moved to the Left