Radical media, politics and culture.

Mainstream Media

October 4, 2001 - 9:53pm -- nomadlab
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

Autonomedia writes: "October 2 — Noam Chomsky, MIT Professor and outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy, discusses U.S.-Muslim relations and possible reasons for the tensions between the two. Professor Chomsky addressed the MSNBC.com chat audience through a typist over the phone from Boston. Chat producer Will Femia moderates.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/637155.asp#BODY"


or to read the transcript without the ads go to:
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=01/10/03/0667590

September 30, 2001 - 5:48pm -- autonomedia
News
Mainstream Media

The New York Times has apparently adopted a policy to "not engage"
any of the eleven writers listed on an internal memo circulated by Times staffer Michaela Williams. All the writers are co-plaintiffs in a well-known class-action lawsuit by the Authors Guild and the National Writers Union against the Times over electronic rights and royalties disputes.


Three key documents in the dispute are reproduced here verbatim.


Missouri School of Journalism Associate Professor and previous Times freelance writer Mary Kay Blakely, one of the eleven blacklisted, has responded to the Times action in a letter to Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, reproduced below:

September 30, 2001 - 4:22pm -- autonomedia
Mainstream Media

An international Gallup Poll on terrorism has some interesting factoids about the 9/11 bombing attacks.


For example, only two countries of those polled yielded a majority saying the
U.S. should attack those responsible rather than extradite the terrorists to
stand trial: USA and Israel.


Many respondents, in South America and Asia particularly, say they believe U.S. foreign policy has a negative rather than a positive effect inside their home countries.


Something like half of all respondents believe the attacks will precipitate "global economic crisis".


And, in a telling statistic, almost ninety percent of respondents all over the world say they learned of the attacks within the single first hour after their occurrence!


September 25, 2001 - 7:39pm -- nomadlab
Mainstream Media

Louis Lingg writes: "Pakistani site dawn.com has posted an op-ed piece by Zubeida Mustafa examining the role of both the U.S. and Pakistani media in propelling the present crisis."

September 22, 2001 - 5:40pm -- Stenglander
Mainstream Media

alex writes: Here's a link to an excellent article in the New Yorker by William T. Vollmann about his time in Afghanistan ... even if the reader is one who can't stand Vollmann, his take is always unique, useful:

http://www.newyorker.com/FROM_THE_ARCHIVE/ARCHIVES /?010924fr_archive05

And below, also from the New Yorker, Susan Sontag's reaction was more than I would have expected from her:

"The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.

August 16, 2001 - 10:47pm -- autonomedia
Mainstream Media

"Autonomedia writes: "The New York Times is running an article on Alger Hiss.


The Alger Hiss case, which swirled through the second half of the 20th
century with low-tech evidence like documents that may or may not have come
from a certain manual typewriter, has made it into the 21st century and
onto the Internet. And so has the debate."
"

August 5, 2001 - 5:37pm -- nomadlab
Mainstream Media

Autonomedia writes: "TOP 25 CENSORED STORIES OF 2000:
Project Censored has released it's 25th annual list of the most important stories of the year that were overlooked (censored) by the mainstream media.

August 2, 2001 - 4:30pm -- autonomedia
Mainstream Media

Today's NY Times offers the following Lumumba editorial:

EDITORIAL OBSERVER

The Rise and Violent Fall of Patrice Lumumba

By BILL BERKELEY

There is a scene in the director Raul Peck's chilling biographical film
"Lumumba" in which the title character, the doomed Congolese Prime Minister
Patrice Lumumba, played by Eriq Ebouaney, confers alone with his army chief
of staff, the soon-to-be military strongman Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.

July 27, 2001 - 8:42pm -- Uncle Fluffy
Mainstream Media

Louis Lingg writes: "cnet is reporting that the media behemoths are now turning their attention from Napster and DeCCS to libraries, the most obvious place to get free information.

Judith Platt, spokeswoman for the Association of American Publishers: "They've [librarians] got their radical factions, like the Ruby Ridge or Waco types who want to share all content for free."

Miriam M. Nisbet, legislative counsel for the American Library Association: "The mission of libraries is to ensure access. The nature of copyright is to restrict access. There's a real tension there."

Are the days of borrowing books for free over? They will be if the champions of the DMCA get their way."

July 23, 2001 - 11:08pm -- Stenglander
Mainstream Media

Uncle Fluffy writes: "the BBC has a decent set of articles on Refugees.
Fifty years after the adoption of the UN Convention on Refugees, the decade we live in has seen more of the world's people than ever before seeking refuge from war, persecution or disaster. This special report tells the stories behind the statistics, using first-person testimonies and in-depth interviews to trace the journey from home into exile. It asks why refugees are still fleeing, where they go, and examines how we treat them."

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