Editorial Content

Thom Hartman Interviewed by FCM

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Spencer Graves, president of Friends of Community Media,  interviewed prominent liberal talk show host and prolific author Thom Hartman which will air on Tuesday 11/26/24 6-6:30 CST on community radio station KKFI FM 90.1 on the Radio Active public affairs show in Kansas City. . The interview is also available on Wikiversity and will be available on the Pacifica Network.

Mr. Hartman spoke in September at the Grass Roots Radio Conference in New Orleans, attended by a representative of FCM on the topic of promoting democracy on our media platforms.

He has a streaming radio show at https://www.thomhartmann.com/radio/listen-live

Information about Thom Hartman may be found on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Hartmann

To listen to the interview at 6:00 Central Time you may logon to kkfi.org.  https://kkfi.org/

 

 

 

 

 

Too Late to Save the Media?

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Article in Common Dreams by Thom Hartmann 11/24/24

Headline: “Will Trump’s Return Coincide With the Death of Progressive Media?”

Subhead:  “We all must support (and share with our friends) those outlets where we find useful news and information. If we fail to do so, America’s media landscape may soon mirror those of the autocratic nations the incoming president so admires.”

“Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?

Without the rightwing media juggernaut, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t be president next year and wouldn’t have won in 2016. That said, the progressive media landscape looks like it might be about to get a whole lot worse.

Comcast, which owns NBC and its subsidiaries CNBC and MSNBC (among other media outlets) announced this week that they’ll be spinning off MSNBC (among others) next year.

And the consequences are already showing up. It was reported this week that Rachel Maddow just took a substantial annual pay-cut because of the uncertain future of the network.”

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/progressive-media-trump

Media Kissing the Ring

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Article in Freepress by Craig Aaron, 11/15/24

Headline:  “Media and Tech Billionaires Helped Elect Trump — and Now They’re Ready to Serve”

Subhead:  “First, they come for the media”

“Surveying the wreckage after the 2024 election, many post-mortems have tried to explain the tactical or messaging mishaps that led to Trump’s victory. But a lot of them have missed the most obvious culprit: the media.

“Yes, in this case, it is appropriate to blame the messengers —– or at least their billionaire bosses.

“In 2024, instead of acting as a check on power, the media aided and abetted Trump’s restoration at every turn — whether by outright manipulating their platforms to push Trump propaganda, relentlessly amplifying racist conspiracy theories, suppressing political content while groveling before Republican politicians, abandoning political endorsements and undermining their own journalists, profiting off the relentless onslaught of misleading political ads, or focusing on the horse-race stories, opinion-poll watching and fake scandalizing that infects political reporting everywhere.”

“. . . Trump and those around him have learned from other strongmen that rule once-democratic societies. Look at Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022 that the path to power is to “have your own media.” Or Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, where some of Trump’s biggest backers have tested these strategies and staged a right-wing media takeover, leading to a dangerous alternate reality on the airwaves that conceals war crimes and attacks dissenters. . . ”

https://www.freepress.net/blog/media-and-tech-billionaires-helped-elect-trump-and-now-theyre-ready-serve

Defending Legacy Media Over Internet Media?

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Article in The Washington Post by Catherine Rampell, 11/5/24

Headline:  “Opinion:  This election year, legacy media consumers came out on top”

Subhead:  “We’ve made our share of mistakes, but readers of traditional media understand the stakes of this election.”

“. . . If you had consumed all your election news this year exclusively from The Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or other journalistic dinosaurs, you’d probably be well-informed. You’d have a sense of what the stakes are this election. You might even know what the candidates stand for! The same cannot be said if you instead primarily relied on TikTok influencers, random bros with podcasts or Discord streams, and Elon Musk’s X platform.”

“. . . We traditional journalists don’t get things right all the time. We have biases we’re often blind to. We make errors of omission, commission and emphasis. But we are (usually) embarrassed when we get stuff wrong, and we have procedures for transparently correcting our mistakes.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/05/media-2024-presidential-election/

Is Newspaper Not Endorsing, Endorsing?

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Update

Article in The Guardian by Lois Beckett, 10/25/24

Subhead:  “Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the newspaper in 2018, wouldn’t let board endorse Harris”

“Nearly 2,000 Los Angeles Times subscribers cancelled their subscriptions to the paper, citing ‘editorial content’ reasons, after Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s billionaire owner, refused to let its editorial board endorse Kamala Harris for president. And that was just on Tuesday and Wednesday.

“After the paper’s editorials editor, Mariel Garza, resigned in protest on Wednesday, two more members of the  Los Angeles Times editorial board resigned on Thursday.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/25/los-angeles-times-owner-blocks-harris-endorsement

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Article in The Guardian by Lois Beckett, 10/23/24 Wed 23 Oct 2024 21.05 EDT

Headline:  “LA Times editor resigns after owner blocks presidential endorsement”

Subhead:  “Mariel Garza says she is ‘standing up’ after billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong quashes support for Kamala Harris”

“Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, refused to allow the newspaper’s editorial board to endorse Kamala Harris for president, the former editor of the paper’s opinion section told a media news outlet on Wednesday.

Mariel Garza, a veteran California journalist who has worked for the Times’ editorial board for nearly a decade, resigned from the paper in protest of Soon-Shiong’s decision, she told the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR).

“ ‘In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up,’ ” Garza told CJR.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/oct/23/la-times-editor-resigns-presidential-endorsement

No Media in Gaza?

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Article in Common Dreams by Jessica Corbett, 10/21/24

Headline: “House Dems Push Biden to Fight for Global Media Access to Gaza”

Subhead: “It is imperative that the United States urge Israel to allow independent access for U.S. and international journalists, in the interest of transparency, accountability, and the fundamental principle of press freedom.”

“Over five dozen Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday urged the Biden administration to “take immediate action to advocate for unrestricted, independent media access” to the Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces have killed at least 42,603 people and injured another 99,795 since last October.

“It is imperative that the United States urge Israel to allow independent access for U.S. and international journalists, in the interest of transparency, accountability, and the fundamental principle of press freedom,” the lawmakers—led by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.)— wrote to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-media

 

Media Cleansing

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Article in Dawn by Muna Khan, 10/13/24

Headline: “Disgraced Media “

A view from Pakistan

“LAST week, I wrote a piece on Western media’s coverage of the war in Gaza for Prism on the Dawn website. I re-read part of Edward Said’s 1981 book Covering Islam on how the Western media distorts the portrayal of Islam and depictions of Muslims as “fanatical, violent, lustful and irrational”. I often return to this book as it remains relevant. It’s a sad indictment on the Western media whose reporting on Muslims and Palestinians has resulted in their dehumanisation over the decades.

“Despite knowing all this, I felt foolish when I read how The New York Times told its staff to restrict using words like ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ and avoid ‘occupied territories’ in their reporting on Gaza. This was revealed by The Intercept in April which received a copy of the internal memo the paper sent to its staff. They also told staff not to use the word ‘Palestine’ “except in very rare cases”. It is mind-boggling.”

https://www.dawn.com/news/1864892/disgraced-media

 

Repeating a Lie in the Media Doesn’t Make it True

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Article in Daily Kos by Xaxnar, 9/19/24

Headline: “Must-Read from Jamison Foser – How the media fails us by “Privileging the lie”

“When a news report treats the truthfulness of a lie as an open question, it privileges the lie. When a news report devotes more and more prominent space to recounting the lie and the liar’s defense of it than it does making clear that it’s a lie, the article privileges the lie. When a news report focuses on the target of a lie’s struggle to deal with the impact of the lie, the article privileges the lie. And when a news report focuses on the topic of the lie — even if it does a good job of making clear the lie is a lie — it privileges the lie, because it allows the liar to set the topic of conversation, and thus increases the electoral salience of a topic the liar believes is to his benefit.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/19/2270386/-Must-Read-from-Jamison-Foser-How-the-media-fails-us-by-Privileging-the-lie?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

Are Media Strait-Jacketed About Sane-Washing?

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Article in Raw Story by Tom Boggioni, 9/14/24

Headline: “Mary Trump bashes media outlets for ‘sane-washing’ Donald’s ‘delusional’ rants”

“During an appearance on MSNBC on Saturday morning, Donald Trump’s psychologist niece fumed at media outlets that have been accused of “sane-washing” her uncle’s rambling speeches and answers to question to make it appear he was delivering a coherent messag

. . . “”The problem is that, it’s not simply that many media outlets think that they need to translate Donald. First of all they are not telling us that is what they are doing but they are just pretending that he said these understandable coherent things.”

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-sane-washing-mary-trump/