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Edited on Sat Dec-03-05 09:27 PM by swag
A long and comprehensive article that reads like an epilogue to Robert McChesney's prescient Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (Open Media, 1997).
This article is quite detailed and well documented. It touches on a multitude of current issues (election fraud, Iraq reporting, labor issues, poverty in America) and the American press coverage (or lack of coverage) of those issues.
Massing's latest article enumerates, with a cold empirical eye, the forces colluding to prevent the exercise of what we, in the United States, used to call journalism. Wolf Blitzer, Judy Miller, network news anchors, and others are amply represented herein. Following the link, or better yet buying the December 15 New York Review of Books is highly recommended.
Your local newspaper's editorial board or ombudsman might also appreciate this article. Cable "news" stations also enjoy defending themselves, and so would enjoy having this story forwarded to them by their loyal viewers, the patrons of their advertisers.http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18555an brief excerpt: On August 30—the same day the waters of Lake Pontchartrain inundated New Orleans—the Census Bureau released its annual report on the nation's economic well-being. It showed that the poverty rate had increased to 12.7 percent in 2004 from 12.5 percent in the previous year. In New York City, where so many national news organizations have their headquarters, the rate rose from 19 percent in 2003 to 20.3 percent in 2004, meaning that one in every five New Yorkers is poor. On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I—and many editors of The New York Times—live, the number of homeless people has visibly grown. Yet somehow they rarely appear in the pages of the press.
In 1998, Jason DeParle, after covering the debate in Washington over the 1996 Welfare Reform Act as well as its initial implementation, convinced his editors at The New York Times to let him live part-time in Milwaukee so that he could see Wisconsin's experimental approach up close. They agreed, and over the next year DeParle's reporting helped keep the welfare issue in the public eye. In 2000, he took a leave to write a book about the subject,<4> and the Times did not name anyone to replace him on the national poverty beat. And it still hasn't. Earlier this year, the Times ran a monumental series on class, and, in its day-to-day coverage of immigration, Med- icaid, and foster care, it does examine the problems of the poor, but certainly the stark deprivation afflicting the nation's urban cores deserves more systematic attention.
In March, Time magazine featured on its cover a story headlined "How to End Poverty," which was about poverty in the developing world. Concerning poverty in this country, the magazine ran very, very little in the first eight months of the year, before Hurricane Katrina. Here are some of the covers Time chose to run in that period: "Meet the Twixters: They Just Won't Grow Up"; "The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America"; "The Right (and Wrong) Way to Treat Pain"; "Hail, Mary" (the Virgin Mary); "Ms. Right" (Anne Coulter); "The Last Star Wars"; "A Female Midlife Crisis?"; "Inside Bill's New X-Box" (Bill Gates's latest video game machine); "Lose That Spare Tire!" (weight-loss tips); "Being 13"; "The 25 Most Influential Hispanics in America"; "Hip Hop's Class Act"; and "How to Stop a Heart Attack."
The magazine's editors put special energy into their April 18 cover, "The Time 100." Now in its second year, this annual feature salutes the hundred "most influential" people in the world, including most recently NBA forward Lebron James, country singer Melissa Etheridge, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, Ann Coulter (again!), journalist Malcolm Gladwell, and evangelical best-selling author Rick Warren. Time enlisted additional celebrities to write profiles of some of the chosen one hundred—Tom Brokaw on Jon Stewart, Bono on Jeffrey Sachs, Donald Trump on Martha Stewart, and Henry Kissinger on Condoleezza Rice (she's handling the challenges facing her "with panache and conviction" and is enjoying "a nearly unprecedented level of authority"). To celebrate, Time invited the influentials and their chroniclers to a black-tie gala at Jazz at Lincoln Center in the Time-Warner Building.
A staff member of Time's business department told me that the "100" issue is highly valued because of the amount of advertising it generates. In 2004, for instance, when Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina was named a "Builder and Titan," her company bought a two-page spread in the issue. Because Time's parent company, Time Warner, must post strong quarterly earnings to please Wall Street, the pressure to turn out such moneymakers remains intense. By contrast, there's little advertising to be had from writing about inner-city mothers, so the magazine seems unlikely to alter its coverage in any significant way.
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