Screeinng of “Stripped for Parts” documentary 3/29/7 PM CST.
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Spreading Media Greatness South
Article in The Guardian by Rachel Savage, 3/26/25
Headline: “Trump names pro-Israel media activist as US ambassador to South Africa”
Subhead: “Leo Brent Bozell III, founder of a conservative media group, is president’s nomination amid rising diplomatic tensions”
“Donald Trump has nominated a conservative, pro-Israel media activist as US ambassador to South Africa, at a time when the relationship between the two countries is at a nadir.
“Leo Brent Bozell III founded the Media Research Center – whose website states it is ‘a blog site designed to broadcast conservative values, culture, and politics [and] to expose liberal media bias’ – in 1987.
“His son Leo Brent Bozell IV was sentenced to 45 months in prison in May 2024 for assaulting police and smashing windows in the 6 January 2021 Capitol riots. He was released in January as part of Trump’s mass pardon.”
Journalists in Danger
Article in Bellingcat by Staff. 3/27/25
Headline: “Shot From Above: The Dangerous Work of Drone Journalists in Gaza”
“According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 165 Palestinian journalists have been killed since the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023. In fact, according to CPJ, last year was the deadliest year for journalists worldwide since they began documenting deaths in 1992.
Gathering aerial footage of Gaza is a dangerous task, and Bellingcat along with our partners at Forbidden Stories, Le Monde, Die Zeit, Der Standard, Paper Trail Media, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) and RFI identified several cases where drone journalists were killed or injured shortly after capturing aerial images.
The Gaza Project is a collaborative investigation coordinated by Forbidden Stories, involving more than 40 journalists representing 12 media outlets (Forbidden Stories, Paper Trail Media, RFI, Bellingcat, Die Zeit, Le Monde, France 24, ARIJ, The Seventh Eye/Shakuf +972 Magazine, ZDF and Der Standard) who continued the work of Gazan journalists and investigated about the threats and difficulties they are facing.
Progressive Media Activist Dies
Article in Free Press by Timothy Karr, 3/27/25
Headline: “Free Press Mourns the Death of Co-Founder and Scholar Robert W. McChesney”
“McChesney was the author or editor of 27 books, including Rich Media, Poor Democracy; The Problem of the Media; and Digital Disconnect. He co-authored several books with his frequent co-author and close friend John Nichols, including The Death and Life of American Journalism and Dollarocracy. McChesney was the president of Free Press in its early years and served on its board of directors afterward. . .”
“While McChesney spent much of his career charting the problems of the media and the critical junctures that created our current crises, he believed fundamentally in the public’s ability to solve those problems and build a media system that serves people’s needs and sustains democracy. . .”
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Article in The Nation by John Nichols, 3/27/25
Headline: “Robert McChesney, the Great Champion of Journalism and Democracy, Has Died”
“The academic and activist inspired generations of people to challenge corporate power and support a media reform movement that lives on.
“Bob McChesney, who died on Tuesday at the age of 72, first introduced himself to me almost 30 years ago, on the set of a public television news program in Madison, Wisconsin. Bob was a distinguished University of Wisconsin professor who was gaining an international reputation for his groundbreaking analysis of the threat to democracy posed by corporate control of media. Raising his arguments in books, speeches, and frequent C-Span appearances, he was well on his way to becoming one of the great public intellectuals of his time. . .”
“The program was framed as a debate about the future of journalism. Bob was positioned as the doomsayer, warning about how media consolidation was killing journalism. . .”
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/robert-mcchesney-obituary/
Texting the Media
Article in Media Matters by Matt Gertz, 3/27/25
Headline: “Fox defense for negligent texting of war plans: Top Trump national security officials are incompetent”
“Fox News personalities’ new argument in support of their former colleagues who discussed pending military strikes on an unsecured text chain is that those former colleagues — now America’s top military, national security, and intelligence officials — are easy to deceive. . .”
“But on Tuesday, they came up with a new excuse — one which amounts to arguing that the nation’s top national security officials are morons.
“When Fox host Laura Ingraham asked Waltz to explain Goldberg’s presence on the Signal chat, Waltz dissembled.
“ ‘I’m not a conspiracy theorist,’ Waltz began, before offering a conspiracy theory in which ‘somehow’ Goldberg ‘gets on somebody’s contact and then gets sucked into the group.’
The national security adviser added that Goldberg may have somehow ‘deliberately’ ensured that his contact information was attached to a Trump official’s contact name, adding that the administration has ‘the best technical minds’ trying to ascertain how such a thing happened. . .”
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Article in Daily Kos by Oliver Willis, 3/26/25
Headline: “Media downplays Trump team’s massive leak fiasco as mere ‘blunder'”
“Many mainstream media outlets are minimizing or trivializing the Trump administration’s leak of highly sensitive war plans, and in doing so, they are echoing President Donald Trump’s spin on the scandal.
“After The Atlantic reported on Monday that top Trump officials had mistakenly included the outlet’s top editor in an unsecured group chat, Trump told reporters that the breach was merely a ‘glitch.’ And Trump’s allies struck the same tone in appearances in right-wing media.
On Tuesday, USA Today described the incident as a ‘relatable fail.’ In the story, reporters Jessica Guynn and Bailey Schulz likened the leak of war plans to ill-timed responses in family group texts.
Checkmate, Media!
Article in The Bukwark by Andrew Egger, 3/27/25
Headline: “The Only Strategy They Know”
“When the Signalgate story broke, we thought to ourselves: Okay, that’s the most politically self-destructive thing the White House will do for a while. But we were wrong. Somehow, the White House’s political response to the story has been even dumber.
“Yesterday, JVL (Joanathan V. Last) took stock of the administration’s clown car of flailing responses: the inexplicable attempt to paint the release of authentic internal screenshots as a ‘hoax,’ the bizarre assertions that the information in the chat wouldn’t have been classified, the attempts to turn the whole thing into a ‘Jeffrey Goldberg sucks and can’t be trusted’ media story.
“Since then, things have gotten sillier still. On Wednesday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt scolded the White House press corps for prioritizing the story over news of U.S. business investment or Trump’s latest ‘election integrity’ executive order. JD Vance jeered at Goldberg for declining to publish the name of a CIA officer involved—an action Goldberg took at the request of Trump’s CIA. Donald Trump himself complained that the story was a ‘witch hunt’ and suggested that ‘I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you.’ (All the more reason not to share attack plans on it, then!) . . .”
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PBS Indoctrinating Our Kids?
Article in New York Times by Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum, 3/26/25
Headline: “Elmo and Elon Musk Are Cited as G.O.P. Lawmakers Grill PBS and NPR“
Subhead: “Dark pronouncements by Republicans about a ‘communist agenda’ espoused by public media were intercut with lighter references to “Sesame Street” and ‘Curious George.’ “
“Congressional Republicans laced into PBS and NPR on Wednesday, accusing the country’s biggest public media networks of institutional bias in a fiery hearing that represented the latest salvo against the American press by close allies of the Trump administration.
“Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who organized the hearing — which she called ‘Anti-American Airwaves’ — opened her remarks by deriding PBS and NPR as ‘radical left-wing echo chambers’ that published skewed news reports and indoctrinated children with L.G.B.T.Q. programming.
“The leaders of both PBS and NPR testified that those claims were untrue, arguing that their stations served as a crucial source of accurate information and educational programming for millions of Americans, even as the NPR chief executive acknowledged regrets for posting critical remarks about President Trump before she joined the broadcaster. . .”
“Representative Stephen Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that Republican lawmakers would rather go after Big Bird than President Trump. “If shame was still a thing, this hearing would be shameful,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/business/media/pbs-npr-congress-hearing-republicans.html
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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Liam Scott, 3/26/25
Headline: “NPR and PBS Leaders Face Grilling Before House DOGE Subcommittee”
Subhead: “We are essential, especially in remote and rural places,” the head of Alaska Public Media testified.”
“It was standing room only at Wednesday’s House subcommittee hearing on the public broadcasters NPR and PBS.
“Titled ‘Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable,’ the hearing, held by the DOGE subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, comes as various Republican lawmakers have spent the past few weeks making a rallying cry out of their calls to pull federal funding from the broadcasters over perceived liberal bias. . .”
“Press freedom groups, meanwhile, say the hearing is taking place in the context of a broader campaign against the media in the United States in the form of lawsuits, government investigations, and hostile rhetoric from officials.
“This fits into the broader pattern that we’ve been observing since Trump became president of using the government as a tool to harm the media in any way,” said Clayton Weimers, the head of the US office of Reporters Without Borders.
“Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican and the subcommittee’s chair, began the hearing by recounting how she—and her three children—grew up watching PBS. Her tone quickly shifted.
“ ‘NPR and PBS have increasingly become radical, left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy, white, urban liberals and progressives who generally look down on and judge rural America,’ Greene said in her opening statement, claiming that the broadcasters are ‘brainwashing and trans-ing’ children. . .”
“Maher (NPR CEO) and Kerger (PBS CEO) defended the broadcasters. ‘I do not believe we are politically biased,’ Maher said at one point. ‘We are a nonpartisan organization.’
“Kerger highlighted PBS’s educational programming for kids, which she said especially benefits children whose families cannot afford pre-kindergarten. ‘I strongly believe that the programming we offer to prepare children for the future is the most essential work that we do today,’ she said.
“Public media has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades. A 2017 national survey from Rasmussen Reports found that just 21 percent of Americans—including less than a third of Republicans—supported cutting federal support of public broadcasting”.
https://www.cjr.org/news/npr-and-pbs-leaders-face-grilling-before-house-doge-subcommittee.php
Media Tiptoeing Through . . .
Article in The New Republic by Parker Molloy, 3/26/25
Headline: “Renaming Reality: Trump’s Gulf Power Play and Media’s Timid Response”
Subhead: “News outlets revealed their editorial backbones when covering NASA astronauts’ splashdown.”
“When NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams splashed down last week after more than nine months in space, they landed in more than just water—they landed in a live demonstration of how quickly media organizations will bend to political pressure.
“The body of water where their capsule touched down has been called the Gulf of Mexico for over 400 years. But since Trump signed an executive order renaming it the ‘Gulf of America’ earlier this year, news outlets have suddenly found themselves navigating turbulent editorial waters, revealing quite a bit about their institutional backbone in the process.
“Oliver Darcy at (the always excellent) Status captured this phenomenon perfectly in his analysis over the weekend. ‘When news anchors tiptoe around the name Gulf of Mexico,’ he wrote, ‘it’s not just semantics—it’s a glimpse at how the press starts to flinch under political pressure.’ Darcy pointed out how this kind of linguistic control is a classic authoritarian tactic: ‘In China, Taiwan doesn’t exist—at least not as a country. On official maps, it’s a province. The government enforces strict language about Taiwan’s status, shaping how its people—and the rest of the world—talk about it.’ ”
https://newrepublic.com/article/193157/trump-gulf-america-media-timid-response
Wrong Signal Sent to Media
Article in Mediaite by Colby Hall, 3/25/25
Headline: “Trump Just Handed His Biggest Enemy in Media a Slam Dunk”
“President Donald Trump insisted that information leaked to Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg was not classified multiple times during a White House press availability Tuesday afternoon. But his defiant tone may have just backed his administration into a corner of litigious federal investigations, potentially giving one of his most prominent and influential critics a major win.
“On Monday, Goldberg dropped a bombshell report about Trump National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally adding him to a group chat in which the principals committee – the heads of the top American national security agencies — discussed plans to strike Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen earlier this month.”
https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/trump-just-handed-his-biggest-enemy-in-media-a-slam-dunk/
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Article in Daily Mail by Laura Parnaby, 3/25/25
Headline: “Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg threatens to release MORE war plans texts after being included in group chat”
“Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, told Tim Miller on the Bulwark Podcast his team is mulling over releasing the full trove of Signal app messages.
” ‘My colleagues and I and the people who are giving us advice on this have some interesting conversations to have about this,’ Goldberg told the podcast.
” ‘But just because they’re irresponsible with material, doesn’t mean that I’m going to be irresponsible.’
“Goldberg made the jaw-dropping revelation on Monday that Trump’s national security team had added him to a top secret chat about military strikes in Yemen.”
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Article in Raw Story by Damoel Hampton, 3/24/25
Headline: ” ‘Disaster’: Hegseth’s rant attacking reporter who got his war plan lights up social media”
“Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth found himself under fire on social media as he lashed out at a journalist who appeared to be inadvertently included in a private group chat on the app Signal — and was privy to top-secret war plans.
“On March 15, just hours before the U.S. launched a series of strikes, Hegseth shared operational details in a Signal group chat that mistakenly included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Goldberg wrote Monday. The leaked information contained operational details of upcoming strikes on Yemen, specifics on targets, weapons to be deployed and the sequence of attacks. . .”
“. . .Predictably, social media critics lit up at Hegseth’s comments. . .”
https://www.rawstory.com/pete-hegseth-2671396988/
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Article in The Hill by Dominick Mastrangelo, 3/25/25
Headline: “Atlantic editor suggests he’s open to sharing Hegseth’s full war plans texts publicly “
“Jeffery Goldberg, the top editor of The Atlantic, said he could be open to sharing more details from a Signal group chat he was mistakenly added to by top U.S. officials that contained secret war plans. . .”
“. . .Goldberg reported he saw in a message, sent to the group by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, specific weapons systems, human targets and other top secret information before he left the chat. He did not publish the specific information as part of his report, citing national security concerns.
“. . .During a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe contended that the Signal chat in question did not include classified information.”