In yesterday’s OpEdge entry, I analyzed how the media covered the release of the U.S. Census Bureau’s recent voluminous report. I found it strange that the New York Times decided to focus its coverage on the fact that the suburbs have seen a large increase in the percentage of foreign-born residents and not on the […]
By vote of news coverage, one of the secondary news stories today is the release yesterday of the “5-Year American Community” study by the U.S. Census Bureau. The way that the news media covered the news is an interesting case study on how the media sifts through facts and decides what’s important and what’s not. […]
I thought I was done raging about the fact that so many liberal commentators are holding the Comedy Central rally up as the one mass initiative on the liberal side of the aisle during the last election season, especially when comparing liberal mass actions to the Glen Beck rally and other Tea party confabulations. These […]
Thirty years ago on the evening of December 8, I was working as a fill-in writer for the award winning 10:00 pm news show on KTVU, the independent Oakland, California broadcast television station. (To give you a flavor of what it was like to be in TV news in the early 80’s: a month earlier, […]
Read More… from I’m old enough to remember where I was the night John Lennon died.
Most of what we hear out of Washington, from Republicans especially but also from Democrats, is that the federal deficit has grown so much that if we don’t address it now, our economy will enter rapid and permanent decline. And yet our elected officials are negotiating to extend temporary tax cuts, not just to the […]
Last June, The New Yorker ran a feature story about the founder and head honcho of Wikileaks, Julian Assange. In conversations, more than one person who doesn’t like what Wikileaks is doing has referred to that article, and in particular his quote about the possibility that his leaks hurt innocent people. The quote is bolded […]
A few months back, I was very happy that Wikileaks leaked U.S. government documents, because the material demonstrated a pattern of misconduct and abuse in the conduct of current U.S. wars. It was exhilarating to see yet more proof of the disastrously stupid strategy and illegal tactics the Bush II administration took in Iraq and […]
“The Born Loser” comic strip is Chip Sansom’s often funny take on living in a Rodney Dangerfield world in which the main character never gets any respect. Yesterday’s strip, carried in hundreds if not thousands of newspapers, is a sweetly surreal mélange of Rip-van-Winkle quaintness and ideological imperative. The dialogue in the strip goes like […]
Read More… from Chip may be a little slow on social trends but he certainly gets the ideology.
In Shakespeare’s version of the Julius Caesar story, Caesar struggles against his assassins in the Senate chambers until he sees his good friend and protégé Brutus draw his knife, at which point Caesar whimpers, “Et tu, Brute, so fall Caesar.” “Et tu” is Latin for “You, too?!” The “Et tu, Brutus” moment for a true rendering […]
Read More… from Et tu, Frank. So dies an accurate history of the last election.
The old expression, “the devil is in the details,” certainly applies to propaganda. Writers, editors, publishers, photographers, filmmakers and illustrators often will pretend to be objective in their communication while loading up the details with images, statements and facts that support the hidden message they want to make. As frequent OpEdge readers will note, the […]
Read More… from They say the devil is in the details, and all too often, so is the propaganda.