News Intelligence Analysis

 

 

 

Directory of Articles About the Media

 

 

 

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Murdoch’s Minions
Smear Bloggers
by Joe Conason

What traditional pundits once dismissed as the
unwashed peasantry of the blogosphere has risen
up to donate millions of dollars, elect Democratic
candidates and demand real change. Having inflicted
a terrible defeat on the Republicans last year, the
“netroots” progressives are preparing to achieve
historic victories in 2008.

 

 

Two Seek Large Stake in
Tribune & L.A. Times
As the deadline for bids for the Tribune
Company came and went yesterday,
the team of Eli Broad and Ronald W.
Burkle made an audacious $500 million
offer to help refinance the company while
becoming its largest shareholder.

 

Odd Couple Ponder Bid
for Tribune



Eli Broad, the straight-talking billionaire
whose art collection and philanthropic efforts
to revitalize downtown Los Angeles have put
him happily in the public eye, and Ronald W.
Burkle, the supermarket mogul, Democratic
fund-raiser and F.O.B. (friend of Bill Clinton).
The two men will decide whether their unlikely
partnership should go forward in serious pursuit
of the Tribune Company, owner of two dozen TV
stations, the Chicago Cubs and 11 daily newspapers,
including The Chicago Tribune, Newsday and —
most important to Mr. Broad and Mr. Burkle —
The Los Angeles Times.

 

Some Advertisers Shun
Air America,
a Lonely Voice From Talk Radio’s Left

By Maria Aspan

When the liberal talk radio network Air America
filed for bankruptcy protection last month,
some analysts blamed a lack of listener
interest in progressive talk radio. Now, it
seems that a lack of major advertising
dollars are responsible.

 

 

The Fairness Doctrine
How We Lost it, and Why We Need it Back

by Steve Rendall

Sinclair’s history of one-sided editorializing and
right-wing water-carrying, which long preceded
its Stolen Honor ploy (Extra!, 11–12/04), puts it
in the company of political talk radio, where right-
wing opinion is the rule, locally and nationally.
Together, they are part of a growing trend that
sees movement conservatives and Republican
partisans using the publicly owned airwaves as
a political megaphone—one that goes largely
unanswered by any regular opposing perspective.
It’s an imbalance that begs for a remedy.

 

 

 

Time for a Digital Fairness
Doctrine

By Jeffrey Chester

The debate on Sinclair Broadcasting's plans
to air an anti-John Kerry documentary on its
62 stations underscores the need for new
national safeguards for the electronic media
in the U.S. Policies that ensure that digital
media – including cable, satellite, and the
broadband Internet – have an obligation to
provide diverse viewpoints are more
necessary than ever.

 

 

Why the Democratic Ethic of the
World Wide Web May Be About to End

By ADAM COHEN
May 28, 2006

The World Wide Web is the most democratic mass
medium there has ever been. Freedom of the press,
as the saying goes, belongs only to those who own one.
Radio and television are controlled by those rich enough
to buy a broadcast license. But anyone with an Internet-
connected computer can reach out to a potential
audience of billions.

 

 

Web Changes Politics
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
WASHINGTON, March 31 — The transformation
of American politics by the Internet is accelerating
with the approach of the 2006 Congressional
and 2008 White House elections, prompting
the rewriting of rules on advertising, fund-raising,
mobilizing supporters and even the spreading
of negative information.

 

 

 

TV Stations Fined Over
CBS Show Deemed to Be Indecent
By JULIE BOSMAN
The Federal Communications Commission
leveled a record $3.6 million fine yesterday
against 111 television stations that broadcast
an episode of "Without a Trace" in December
2004, with the agency saying the CBS show
suggested that its teenage characters were
participating in a sexual orgy.

 

 

 

News Makes News:
Info War Is Now Page One in The NY Times
by Danny Schechter
New York, December 11: The new bible on how
to massage the media begins with a quotation
from Cosmo: “There is a war out there, friend,
a world war. And it’s not about those who got
the most bullets; it’s about who controls the
information: what we see and hear; how we
work, what we think. It’s all about the information.”

 

 

Battle for the Control of the Press
A Comprehensive Report
Augmented by the Yurica Report reveals a devastating
attack on our free press by the Bush administration.
A host of recent developments have made it clear that
the Bush White House is doing battle against the
journalistic standards and practices that underpin
our democracy. With its unprecedented campaign
to undermine and stifle independent journalism,
Bush & Co. have demonstrated a brazen contempt
for the Constitution and considerable fear of an
informed public.

 

 

The End of News?
By Michael Massing

In late September, the Government Accountability
Office—a nonpartisan arm of Congress—issued a
finding that the Bush administration had engaged
in “covert propaganda,” and thereby broken the
law, by paying Armstrong Williams, a conservative
commentator, to promote its educational policies.
The GAO also faulted the administration for hiring
a public relations firm to distribute video news
segments without disclosing the government’s part
in producing them

 

The Man Who Sold the War
November 17, 2005
By James Bamford
The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely
places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among
the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners
in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.
Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan
Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi
who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was
now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein.
There was only one problem: It was all a lie.

 

 

Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept
From Hill Panel

By Murray Waas,
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005
Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
President Bush was told in a highly classified
briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had
no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam
Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant
credible evidence that Iraq had any significant
collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to
government records and current and former officials
with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

 

 

The Curveball Saga
How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball'
The Iraqi informant's German handlers say
they had told U.S. officials that his information
was 'not proven,' and were shocked when
President Bush and Colin L. Powell used it in
key prewar speeches.
By Bob Drogin and John Goetz
November 20, 2005

BERLIN — The German intelligence officials
responsible for one of the most important informants
on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass
destruction say that the Bush administration and
the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during
the run-up to the war in Iraq.

 

 

Moyers Has His Say
By John Eggerton

Bill Moyers became the central figure in absentia
in the controversy surrounding former Corporation
for Public Broadcasting (CPB) Chairman Kenneth
Tomlinson. It was Tomlinson who pointed to Moyers’
Now newscast on PBS as a chief reason for his
efforts to bring “balance” to public broadcasting by
adding conservative shows. Moyers has since left
Now and is currently president of the Schumann
Center for Media & Democracy.

 

 

Not Necessarily the News
By Wil S. Hyton

Chances are you’ve never heard of Sinclair
Broadcast Group. Sure, it might be the largest
independent owner of television stations in
America, an empire of sixty channels spread
across thirty-seven cities with a signal that
reaches nearly a quarter of the TV-watching
public, but even if you happen to receive that
signal and watch it every night, getting your
Sinclair news and Sinclair weather and Sinclair
commentary from a Sinclair station, chances
are you’ve still never heard of Sinclair and have
no idea you’re watching it.

 

 

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L.A. Times Fires Longtime Progressive
Clumnist Robert Scheer
By Amy Goodman

The Los Angeles Times newspaper last week
announced that it was firing longtime columnist
Robert Scheer. Scheer has been at the Los Angeles
Times for 30 years and was one of the most
progressive voices at the paper. In recent years,
his columns took on the Bush administration and
its justifications for the invasion of Iraq. Scheer
believes that his firing was because of ideological
reasons.

 

 

A Lifelong Republican Speaks Out

IWTnews interview with Pamela de Maigret
as Independent World Television begins to be heard:

Journalist, film-maker and life-long Republican activist
Pamela de Maigret: “I think you have to ask the question,
do we have free elections in this country? I don’t think we
do. And the media is not covering this. This is one more
of those stories that Independent World Television needs
to stick with.” Watch the video interview now.

 

 

Judith Miller: The Tragic Axis
of the Neocons and the New York
Times
by Youssef M. Ibrahim
Some reporters who cover the police begin
to think of themselves as policemen. And
some, like the now infamous Judith Miller
of the New York Times, drift into thinking
they are policy-makers, wrecking in the
process the reputation of a great newspaper,
degrading essential principles of journalism,
and, in this particular case, abetting neo-
conservatives in taking America into an
extremely destructive, hopeless, and endless
war in Iraq.

 

 

Pour on the Media!
By Robert Parry
June 10, 2005
So what’s made the difference?

As George W. Bush’s poll numbers sink to his
personal lows and the mainstream news media
finally reports on the Downing Street Memo,
what political factors should get the credit for
these changes?

 

 

The American Conservative
Endorses John Kerry
"Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a
right-wing president is supposed to be, and
his continuation in office will discredit any
sort of conservatism for generations. The
launching of an invasion against a country
that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling
out of war profits and concessions to politically
favored corporations, the financing of the war
by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to
the nation’s children..."

 

 

The Venerable N.Y. Times
Endorses Kerry for President
He has qualities that could be the basis
for a great chief executive, not just a
modest improvement on the incumbent.

 

 

The Fate of America's Public
Broadcasting: Are you discouraged by
the political power of the radical Wingers in
America who seem to want to deny Americans
freedom of thought, speech and expression?
Read this exchange of letters between a television
executive and the Yurica Report's publisher,
Katherine Yurica.

 

 

Are Republican "Wingers"
Striving to Control Public Broadcasting?
At a meeting of producers and filmmakers in New
York in March, one producer drew sustained
applause for complaining that the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting was asking filmmakers "to
do the bidding of the Pentagon."

 

Kerry on the Media
Kerry's quest for information
differs dramatically to George W. Bush's
policy of allowing his aides to decide
what's important and what is not.
by John Nichols

 

 

What Has Happened to the
American Press? An interview
with Harpers Magazine Publisher
by DemocracyNow.org

 

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