Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Media”
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility. — Professor Neil Postman If …
With the first nomination contest only two days away, the corporate media reaction to Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong campaign, while not reaching Jeremy Corbyn-level hysteria, has reached a noticeable panic—one marked by let’s-not-upset-the-base qualified criticism and exquisitely curated concern-trolling. The most cynical argument being advanced is that Sanders’ support for a single-payer health program is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy, in contrast to the …
In his State of the State address Tuesday night, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder apologized for his handling of the Flint water crisis, which has left tens of thousands of residents without drinkable water. “To you, the people of Flint, I say tonight as I have before, I’m sorry and I will fix it,” Snyder said near the beginning of his …
A PBS Frontline documentary argues that supplements are useless—relying on “expert testimony” from paid Pharma representatives. Last week, PBS’s Frontline aired an hour-long program titled “Supplements and Safety.” Jointly produced by Frontline, the New York Times, and the Canadian Broadcasting Commission, the program was clearly intended to leave viewers with the one-sided impression that dietary supplements are unregulated, unsafe—and that …
This sounds good … but remember that the NSA and its British counter-part the GCHQ MASSIVELY manipulate the web – including making some websites artificially popular and others less so – to spread their influence and promote their agendas. And everyone obtains different search engine results … even if they run the exact same search. For example, Google gathers information …
The human race faces one its most dangerous centuries yet as progress in science and technology becomes an ever greater threat to our existence, Stephen Hawking warns. The chances of disaster on planet Earth will rise to a near certainty in the next one to ten thousand years, the eminent cosmologist said, but it will take more than a century …
xecutives of Al Jazeera America (AJAM) held a meeting at 2 p.m. Eastern Time to tell their employees that the company is terminating all news and digital operations in the U.S. as of April 2016, resulting in the loss of hundreds of jobs. The announcement marks a stunning and rapid collapse of what, from the start, has been a towering failure. AJAM began when …
At first glance, a poll released this week by USA Today and Rock the Vote, done by Ipsos, seems to confound our narrative that a majority of millennials identify more with progressives than conservatives. In fact, when asked that question point-blank when it comes to economic policy, 38 percent of respondents in the poll identified as conservative to some degree, …
The more social ties people have at an early age, the better their health is at the beginnings and ends of their lives, a new study suggests. Researchers say the study is the first to definitively link social relationships with concrete measures of physical well-being such as abdominal obesity, inflammation, and high blood pressure, all of which are associated with …
I watched a documentary about North Korea which explained how the government there assigns a score to each citizen, based on how large a threat to the regime s/he is perceived to be. When I lived in Taiwan under a military government years ago, such a number was encoded into every national ID card. Those citizens every interaction with the …
