Jokes about a Republican fact-free universe have circled the late-night and high-brow magazine circuits since the Bush-Cheney public relations program to build support for the invasion of Iraq. On the first day of the 2016 Republic National Convention, we got to see what a fact-free universe looks like. Speaker after speaker bemoaned that the United […]
News reporting has never been objective. From the selection of which stories to cover to the determination of which people to quote and what words to use to describe reality, the political and social beliefs of media outlets and their owners—and on occasion of the journalists—have always shaped media coverage. Here are some of the […]
Read More… from Do the mainstream news media really want Donald Trump to be our next president?
Those like Rudy Giuliani who believe that the Black Lives Matter movement has led to an increase in violence against police officers have not read the statistics. Killings of American police officers are way down, from 27.88 per 100,000 to 7.16 per 100,000 since 1976. Fewer police fatalities have occurred during the presidency of Barack […]
The rearguard action against raising the minimum wage continues quietly in the opinion pages of our major newspapers, and it’s one of the reasons that progressives, liberals and centrists should vote party line Democratic this fall. Simply put, the Democrats want to raise the minimum wage and the Republicans want to keep it at $7.25 […]
I was dismayed to learn that a new study published by JAMA Dermatology, a respected scholarly publication, finds that 62% of a representative sampling of 3,316 American women said they completely remove their pubic hair. I was also shocked, as in my decades as a heterosexual adult male, I never encountered a shaved vagina. (I […]
The New York Times soiled itself twice this past weekend, on the front page of the Saturday print edition and in the Sunday editorial section. The Saturday front page was more disturbing, because it suggested that the news-gathering operation, which so often has given more coverage to Republican candidates than to Democrats in the 21st […]
You may have missed the thorough verbal whipping Hillary Clinton gave to Donald Trump’s economic ideas and business history this week. The New York Times put it on page A14, although there was a tease for it at the very bottom of page one. You could not find it on the Google News home page […]
Read More… from Trump’s answer to Hillary’s reasoned attacks is a series of Big Lies
Lately I’ve been wondering if Donald Trump is trying to lose the election. Maybe he started running as a way to burnish his brand, similar to what Ben Carson evidently was doing. What he wanted to do was raise his awareness, especially among the uneducated, so he could continue to place his name on dubious […]
Read More… from Is Trump trying to dump the election? Or is he just one crazy, if lucky, narcissist?
In what many are calling a brilliant marketing coup, Sprint is using the same actor who used to be in the Verizon “Can you hear me now?” commercials, sporting the same goofy black glasses, to talk about how great the Sprint network is for cellphones—excuse me, hand-held computers that also take photos and makes phone […]
Read More… from Is the “Can you hear me?” guy more famous than Spencer Tracy or Christopher Marlow?
The first time Muhammad Ali—then known as Cassius Clay—beat Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight title later unfairly stripped from him, it was a big media event in the days in which there were many more newspapers, but only three television networks. Mass culture tended to be more homogeneous than today: people heard the same […]