Journalism

Eating Oil: “The War On Bugs” Sounds A “Pharm Alarm” About the Toxic History of American Agriculture

By Rob Williams

Read more about this book at Chelsea Green Publishing.

Ever since I read the provocatively hilarious book WHERE THE GIRLS ARE, I've enjoyed Susan Douglas' commentary. Here, she comments on how banal "horse race coverage" of the presidential "election" (and I use the term loosely) remains.

News You Can Lose
By Susan J. Douglas

Read the whole article here.

Remember how Dubya got kid-glove treatment during the 2000 debates, while the press incessantly ridiculed Al Gore? Well, here we go again.

From ACME advisory board member Peter Phillips.

An Election Without Meaning

By Peter Phillips

Rob sez: Kudos to ACME partners John Stauber, Sheldon Rampton and Diane Farsetta at the Center for Media and Democracy for their cutting-edge work on this issue.

One might argue that most of what passes for "news" on television is "fake" - a small sliver of our daily reality extruded through a variety of epistemological, economic, and political filters like so much shredded wheat.

But the widespread use of VNRS (video news releases) smacks of propaganda of the highest order. Thanks to CMD, this debate, on the heels of FCC fines, seems like a step in the right direction.

The crux of Tom Regan's thesis (article below) is: "The reality in today's world of online journalism is that both old and new views count, and traditional journalists ignore this at their own peril."

He defines "new" news views as youth interests such as stories about the iPhone and "old" views as NY Times stories about the Iraq war. I see it as more than youth vs aged.

Equipped with a $1.7-million grant from the Knight Foundation and $2 million of institutional support, a bold experiment is underway at Stony Brook University on Long Island: Whan happens when you teach media literacy to students across all college disciplines? For details: http://commcgi.cc.stonybrook.edu/artman/publish/article_1246.shtml

Here's a question. Should the news try to be objective? There is no doubt that Olbermann is a brilliant, articulate, analytic genius whose passion tends to agree with mine, and I love him. But, should we evolve toward a news environment that is totally composed of competing one-sided shows (like Olbermann and O'Reilly)? That seems to be the direction we are heading.

Censored!
The Top 10 Big Stories American Mainstream Media Missed in the Past Year

Here are the top-10 most underreported or ignored stories of the past year, from ACME partner Project Censored.

Visit Project Censored for the complete list of 25.

And see ACME's home page for our Project Censored classroom guide - ways to use this annual book in your civics, journalism, social studies, communications, history, or language arts classroom.

1. Good-bye, habeas corpus

ACME advisory board member and independent Canadian journalist/author Naomi "No Logo" Klein, whom I first heard speak on "No Logo" at the NMMLP-sponsored Taos Talking Picture Festival almost a decade ago, is back with a brand-new book called "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism."

I've read all four excerpts online - the book will no doubt pack a tremendous wallop - seeking to expose the new post-9/11 "military/industrial/terror" complex that is re-making corporate globalization using radical free market "shock doctrine" techniques.

Youth media and literacy were key topics at Journalism That Matters: The DC Sessions," a gathering of more than 150 journalists, bloggers, educators and activists Aug. 7-8, 2007, in Washington, D.C. The Media Giraffe Project at UMass convened the two-day gathering as part of a year-long effort to establish "The Next Newsroom," -- a prototype news organization in a U.S. community that will be created from scratch.