tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42358913284413244162024-03-05T03:33:37.719-08:00American Media WatchWatching the American media: how they report the news, business, politics, the economy, entertainment and social media...etc.
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.comBlogger139125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-79493276244584900102016-10-23T14:04:00.000-07:002016-10-23T14:04:00.018-07:00Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy<br />
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<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/jimmy-carter-is-correct-t_b_7922788.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy</a></h1>
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<span class="timestamp__date--published" style="box-sizing: inherit;">08/03/2015 11:48 am ET</span> | <span class="timestamp__date--modified" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><strong style="box-sizing: inherit;">Updated</strong> Aug 03, 2016</span></div>
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<span class="author-card__details-container" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #999999; display: block; font-family: NotoNashkArabic, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><a class="author-card__details__link" data-beacon="{"p":{"lnid":"author"}}" data-plid="eric-zuesse" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/eric-zuesse" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none;"><span class="author-card__details__name" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061; font-size: 0.8125rem; letter-spacing: -0.01em; padding-right: 2px;">Eric Zuesse</span></a></span><span class="author-card__microbio" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #999999; display: block; font-family: NotoNashkArabic, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px; max-width: 400px;">Investigative historian</span><span class="author-card__microbio" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #999999; display: block; font-family: NotoNashkArabic, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px; max-width: 400px;"><br /></span><span class="author-card__microbio" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #999999; display: block; font-family: NotoNashkArabic, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px; max-width: 400px;"><br /></span><span class="author-card__microbio" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #999999; display: block; font-family: NotoNashkArabic, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px; max-width: 400px;"><img src="http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2486902/images/n-JIMMY-CARTER-628x314.jpg" /></span><br />
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<a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":1,"plid":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=16&v=hDsPWmioSHg"}}" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=16&v=hDsPWmioSHg" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;">On July 28,</a> Thom Hartmann interviewed former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and, at the very end of his show (as if this massive question were merely an afterthought), asked him his opinion of the 2010 <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">Citizens United</i> decision and the 2014 <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">McCutcheon</i> decision, both decisions by the five Republican judges on the U.S. Supreme Court. These two historic decisions enable unlimited secret money (including foreign money) now to pour into U.S. political and judicial campaigns. Carter answered:</div>
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It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we’ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. ... At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.”</div>
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He was then cut off by the program, though that statement by Carter should have been the <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">start</i> of the program, not its <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">end</i>. (And the program didn’t end with an invitation for him to return to discuss this crucial matter in depth — something for which he’s qualified.)</div>
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So, was this former president’s provocative allegation merely his opinion? Or was it actually lots more than that? It was <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">lots</i> more than that.</div>
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Only a single empirical study has actually been done in the social sciences regarding whether the historical record shows that the United States has been, during the survey’s period, which in that case was between 1981 and 2002, a democracy (a nation whose leaders represent the public-at-large), or instead an aristocracy (or ‘oligarchy’) — a nation in which only the desires of the richest citizens end up being reflected in governmental actions. This study was titled <a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":2,"plid":"http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=/PPS/PPS12_03/S1537592714001595a.pdf"}}" href="http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=/PPS/PPS12_03/S1537592714001595a.pdf" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;">“Testing Theories of American Politics,”</a> and it was published by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page in the journal <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">Perspectives on Politics</i>, issued by the American Political Science Association in September 2014. I had summarized it earlier, on April 14, 2014, while the article was still awaiting its publication.</div>
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The headline of my summary-article was <a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":3,"plid":"us-oligarchy-not-democracy-says-scientific-study"}}" href="http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/04/14/us-oligarchy-not-democracy-says-scientific-study" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;">“U.S. Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy Says Scientific Study.”</a> I reported:</div>
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The clear finding is that the U.S. is an oligarchy, no democratic country, at all. American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it’s pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation’s ‘news’ media).</div>
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I then quoted the authors’ own summary: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”</div>
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The scientific study closed by saying: “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.” A few other tolerably clear sentences managed to make their ways into this well-researched, but, sadly, atrociously written, paper, such as: “The preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of ‘affluent’ citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do.” In other words, they found: The rich rule the U.S.</div>
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Their study investigated specifically “1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the general public asked a favor/oppose question about a proposed policy change,” and then the policy-follow-ups, of whether or not the polled public preferences had been turned into polices, or, alternatively, whether the relevant corporate-lobbied positions had instead become public policy on the given matter, irrespective of what the public had wanted concerning it.</div>
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The study period, 1981-2002, covered the wake of the landmark 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision, <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">Buckley v. Valeo</i>, which had started the aristocratic assault on American democracy, and which seminal (and bipartisan) pro-aristocratic court decision is described as follows by <a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":4,"plid":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo"}}" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;">wikipedia</a>:</div>
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[It] struck down on First Amendment grounds several provisions in the 1974 Amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act. The most prominent portions of the case struck down limits on spending in campaigns, but upheld the provision limiting the size of individual contributions to campaigns. The Court also narrowed, and then upheld, the Act’s disclosure provisions, and struck down (on separation of powers grounds) the make-up of the Federal Election Commission, which as written allowed Congress to directly appoint members of the Commission, an executive agency.</div>
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Basically, the <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">Buckley</i> decision, and subsequent (increasingly partisan Republican) Supreme Court decisions, have allowed aristocrats to buy and control politicians.</div>
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Already, the major ‘news’ media were owned and controlled by the aristocracy, and ‘freedom of the press’ was really just freedom of aristocrats to control the ‘news’ — to frame public issues in the ways the owners want. The media managers who are appointed by those owners select, in turn, the editors who, in their turn, hire only reporters who produce the propaganda that’s within the acceptable range for the owners, to be ‘the news’ as the public comes to know it.</div>
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But, now, in the post-<i style="box-sizing: inherit;">Buckley-v.-Valeo</i> world, from Reagan on (and the resulting study-period of 1981-2002), aristocrats became almost totally free to buy also the political candidates they wanted. The ‘right’ candidates, plus the ‘right’ ‘news’-reporting about them, has thus bought the ‘right’ people to ‘represent’ the public, in the new American ‘democracy,’ which Jimmy Carter now aptly calls “subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”</div>
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Carter — who had entered office in 1977, at the very start of that entire era of transition into an aristocratically controlled United States (and he left office in 1981, just as the study-period was starting) — expressed his opinion that, in the wake now of the two most extreme pro-aristocratic U.S. Supreme Court decisions ever (which are <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">Citizens United</i> in 2010, and <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">McCutcheon</i> in 2014), American democracy is really only past tense, not present tense at all — no longer a reality.</div>
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He is saying, in effect, that, no matter how much the U.S. was a dictatorship by the<a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":5,"plid":"http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/u-s-wealth-concentration-the-most-accurate-current-estimates/"}}" href="http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/u-s-wealth-concentration-the-most-accurate-current-estimates/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;">rich</a> during 1981-2002 (the Gilens-Page study era), it’s far worse now.</div>
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Apparently, Carter is correct: <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">The New York Times</i> front page on Sunday 2 August 2015 bannered, <a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":6,"plid":"us/small-pool-of-rich-donors-dominates-election-giving.html"}}" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/us/small-pool-of-rich-donors-dominates-election-giving.html" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;">“Small Pool of Rich Donors Dominates Election Giving,”</a> and reported that:</div>
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A New York Times analysis of Federal Election Commission reports and Internal Revenue Service records shows that the fund-raising arms race has made most of the presidential hopefuls deeply dependent on a small pool of the richest Americans. The concentration of donors is greatest on the Republican side, according to the Times analysis, where consultants and lawyers have pushed more aggressively to exploit the looser fund-raising rules that have fueled the rise of super PACs. Just 130 or so families and their businesses provided more than half the money raised through June by Republican candidates and their super PACs.”</div>
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The <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">Times</i> study shows that the Republican Party is overwhelmingly advantaged by the recent unleashing of big-corporate money power. All of the evidence suggests that though different aristocrats compete against each other for the biggest chunks of whatever the given nation has to offer, <a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":7,"plid":"http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/06/bill-gatess-idiocy-or-is-it-psychopathy.html"}}" href="http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/06/bill-gatess-idiocy-or-is-it-psychopathy.html" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;">they all compete on the same side against the public</a>, in order to lower the wages of their workers, and to lower the standards for consumers’ safety and welfare so as to increase their own profits (transfer their costs and investment-losses onto others); and, so, now, the U.S. is <a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":8,"plid":"http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/the-top-1-of-americas-top-1/"}}" href="http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/the-top-1-of-americas-top-1/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;">soaring again toward Gilded Age economic inequality</a>, perhaps to surpass the earlier era of unrestrained robber barons. And, the <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">Times</i> study shows: even in the Democratic Party, the mega-donations are going to only the most conservative (pro-corporate, anti-public) Democrats. Grass-roots politics could be vestigial, or even dead, in the new America.</div>
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The question has become whether the unrestrained power of the aristocracy is locked in this time even more permanently than it was in that earlier era. Or will there be yet another FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) to restore a democracy that once was? Or is a president like that any longer even possible in America?</div>
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As for today’s political incumbents: they now have their careers for as long as they want and are willing to do the biddings of their masters. And, then, they retire to become, themselves, new members of the aristocracy, such as the Clintons have done, and such as the Obamas will do. (Of course, the Bushes have been aristocrats since early in the last century.)</div>
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Furthermore, the new age of aristocratic control is <a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":9,"plid":"http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/opinion-concentrated-wealth-widespread-stupidity-end-of-democracy/"}}" href="http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/opinion-concentrated-wealth-widespread-stupidity-end-of-democracy/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;">not merely national but international in scope</a>; so, <a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":10,"plid":"http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/worlds-richest-80-people-own-same-as-worlds-bottom-50/"}}" href="http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/worlds-richest-80-people-own-same-as-worlds-bottom-50/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;">the global aristocracy</a> have probably found the formula that will keep them in control until they <a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":11,"plid":"http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/how-obamas-trade-deals-are-designed-to-end-democracy/"}}" href="http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/how-obamas-trade-deals-are-designed-to-end-democracy/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;">destroy the entire world</a>. What’s especially interesting is that, with all of the many tax-exempt, “non-profit” “charities,” which aristocrats have established, none of them is warring to defeat the aristocracy itself — to defeat the aristocrats’ system of exploitation of the public. It’s the one thing they won’t create a ‘charity’ for; none of them will go to war against <a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":12,"plid":"http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/how-obamas-trade-deals-are-designed-to-end-democracy/"}}" href="http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/how-obamas-trade-deals-are-designed-to-end-democracy/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;">the expoitative interests of themselves and of their own exploitative peers. They’re all in this together</a>, even though they do compete amongst themselves for dominance, as to which ones of them will lead against the public. And the public seem to accept this<a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":13,"plid":"http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/the-constitution-of-the-eus-dictatorship/"}}" href="http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/the-constitution-of-the-eus-dictatorship/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;">modern form of debt-bondage</a>, perhaps because of the ‘news’ they see, and because of the news they don’t see (such as this).</div>
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of <a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":14,"plid":"http://www.amazon.com/Theyre-Not-Even-Close-Democratic/dp/1880026090/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1339027537&sr=8-9"}}" href="http://www.amazon.com/Theyre-Not-Even-Close-Democratic/dp/1880026090/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1339027537&sr=8-9" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;"><i style="box-sizing: inherit;">They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010</i></a><i style="box-sizing: inherit;">,</i> and of<a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":15,"plid":"http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Q1H4EG"}}" href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Q1H4EG" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;"><i style="box-sizing: inherit;">CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity</i></a>.</div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-77859774932615880892016-04-04T07:08:00.000-07:002016-04-04T07:08:03.158-07:00Is America and its Media Becoming Fascist? / Is America Already a Fascist State?<img src="http://uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/dropzone/2015/06/cp5.png" /><br />
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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2002/10/26/is-america-becoming-fascist/" target="_blank">Is America Becoming Fascist?</a></h1>
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<span class="post_author_intro" style="font-family: 'Signika Negative', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">by</span> <span class="post_author" itemprop="author" style="color: #1e1e1e; font-family: 'Signika Negative', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; word-wrap: break-word;"><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/author/anis-shivani/" rel="nofollow" style="color: #1e1e1e; margin: 0px 0px 0px 5px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; word-wrap: break-word;">ANIS SHIVANI</a></span></div>
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Since mainstream left-liberal media do not seriously ask this question, the analysis of what has gone wrong and where we are heading has been mostly off-base. Investigation of the kinds of under-handed, criminal tactics fascist regimes undertake to legitimize their agenda and accelerate the rate of change in their favor is dismissed as indulging in “conspiracy theory.” Liberals insist that this regime must be treated under the rules of “politics as usual.” But this doesn’t consider that one election has already been stolen, and that September’s repeat of irregularities in Florida was a clear warning that more such thuggery is on the way. If the “f” word is uttered, liberals are quick to note certain obvious dissimilarities with previous variants of fascism and say that what is happening in America is not fascist. It took German justice minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin to make the comparison explicit (under present American rules of political discourse, she has been duly sacked from her cabinet post); but at the liberal New York Times or The Nation, American writers dare not speak the truth.</div>
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The blinkered assertion that we are immune to the virus ignores degrees of convergence and distinction based on the individual patient’s history. The Times and other liberal voices have been obsessed over the last year with the rise of minority fascist parties in the Netherlands, France, and other European countries. They have questioned the tastefulness of new books and movies about Hitler, and again demonized such icons of Nazism as Leni Riefenstahl. Is this perhaps a displacement of American anxiety onto the safer European scene, liberal intellectuals here not wanting to confront the troubling truth? The pace of events in the last year has been almost as blindingly fast as it was after Hitler’s Machtergreifung and the consolidation of fascist power in 1933. Speed stuns and silences.</div>
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Max Frankel, former editor of the Times, quotes from biographer Joachim Fest in his review of Speer: The Final Verdict: ” . . .how easily, given appropriate conditions, people will allow themselves to be mobilized into violence, abandoning the humanitarian traditions they have built up over centuries to protect themselves from each other,” and that a “primal being” such as Hitler “will always crop up again.” Is Frankel really redirecting his anxiety about the primal being that has arisen in America? When Frankel says that “Speer far more than Hitler [because the former came from a culturally refined background] makes us realize how fragile these precautions are, and how the ground on which we all stand is always threatened,” is this an oblique reference to the ground shifting from under us?</div>
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The proposed Iraqi adventure, which is only the first step in a more ambitious militarist agenda, has been opposed by the most conservative warmongers of past administrations. If the test of any theory is its predictive capacity, Bush’s extreme risk-taking is better explained by the fascist model. Purely economic motives are a large part of the story, but there is a deeper derivation that exceeds such mundane rationales. Several of the apparent contradictions in Bush’s governance make perfect sense if the fascist prism is applied, but not with the normal perspective.</div>
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To pose the question doesn’t mean that this is a completed project; at any point, anything can happen to shift the course of history in a different direction. Yet after repeated and open corruption of the normal electoral process, several declarations of world war (including in three major addresses, and now the National Security Strategy document), adventurous and unprecedented military doctrines, suspension of much of the Bill of Rights, and clear signals that a declaration of emergency to crush remaining dissent is on the way, surely it is time to analyze the situation differently.</div>
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Absent that perspicacity, false diagnoses and prescriptions will continue. It is fine to be concerned about tyrannous Muslim regimes, and surely they need to set their own house in order, but not now, not in this context, and not under the auspices of the American fascist regime. Liberals don’t yet realize, or fail to admit, that they may have been condemned to irrelevance for quite some time; the death blow against even mild welfare statism might already have been struck.</div>
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The similarities between American fascism and particularly the National Socialist precedent, both historical and theoretical, are remarkable. Fascism is home, it is here to stay, and it better be countered with all the intellectual resources at our disposal.</div>
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American fascism is tapping into the perennial complaint against liberalism: that it doesn’t provide an authentic sense of belonging to the majority of people. And that is a criticism difficult to dismiss out of hand. As the language of liberalism has become flat and predictable, some Americans have become more ready to accept an alternative, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it sounds vigorous and muscular.</div>
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America today is seeking a return to some form of vitalism, some organic, volkisch order that will “unite” the blue and red states in an eternal Volkgemeinschaft; is in a state of perpetual war and militaristic aggression targeting all potential counters to hegemony; has been coercing and blackmailing its own victims and oppressed (justified by anti-political correctness rhetoric) to return to a mythical national consensus; has introduced surveillance technology to demolish the private sphere to an extent unimaginable in the recent past; and fetishizes technology as the futuristic solution to age-old ills of alienation and mistrust.</div>
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And we are right in the mainstream of the Western philosophical and political tradition in this subtle (overnight?) transformation. Liberal democracy was replaced by Mussolini by these two Holy Trinities: Believe, Obey, Fight, and Order, Authority, Justice. These slogans seem to replace every liberal system sooner or later. Italian propagandistic slogans included: War is to man as childbirth is to woman, and Better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep. Sooner or later, the mob is persuaded that fascism best addresses its unfulfilled spiritual and psychological needs. Sooner or later there is a Hitler, and even if there isn’t a leader as charismatic as him, there is an anti-modernity counter-revolution.</div>
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The enlightenment everywhere has contained the seeds of its own destruction. Fascism merely borrows from the enlightenment’s credo that violence may sometimes be necessary to achieve valid political ends, and that human reason alone can lead humanity to utopia. Is Nazism an absolute aberration? Is America totally immune to fascism? Then we might as well discredit Rousseau’s “general will,” Hegel’s historical spirit, Goethe and Schelling’s romanticization of nature and genius, Darwin’s natural selection, and Nietzsche’s superman. When all is said and done, a Kant or Mill is never a match for a Nietzsche or Sorel. Industrial malaise (now post-industrial disorder), evaded by the dead-ends and delusions of liberalism, leads only to a romantic revolution, which is fine as long as it is in the hands of Byron, Keats, Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold, but becomes eventually converted to a propaganda-saturated Third Way. Since liberalism doesn’t take up the challenge, fascism steps in to say that it offers an answer to centrifugal difference and lack of common purpose, and that it will dare to link industrial prosperity with communal goals.</div>
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How great a deviation from the roots of the enlightenment, the foundations of its self-justification, is the Manichean demonization of enemies, aliens, impure races, and barbaric others? America today wants to be communal and virile; it seeks to overcome what is presented by propagandists as the unreasonable demands for affirmative action and reparations by minorities and women; it wants to revalorize nation and region and race to take control of the future; it seeks to remold the nation through propaganda and charismatic leadership, into overcoming the social divisiveness of capitalism and democracy.</div>
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We have our own nationalist myths that our brand of fascism taps right into. In that sense, America is not exceptional. In the near future, America can be expected to embark on a more radical search to define who is not part of the natural order: exclusion, deportation, and eventually extermination, might again become the order of things. Of course, we can notice obvious differences from the German nationalist tradition: but that is precisely the task of scholars to delineate, rather than pretend that fascism occurred only in Italy and Germany and satellite states in the first half of the century, and occurs today only in Europe in minor movements that have no chance of gaining political supremacy.</div>
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It is wrong to pretend that fascism takes hold only in the midst of extreme economic depression or political chaos. (A perception of crisis or instability is indispensable to realizing fascism, however.) Fascism can emerge when things are not all that bad economically, politically, and culturally. The surprise about Weimar Germany is how well the political system was at times working, with proportional representation (almost an ideal of strong democracy theorists) providing political expression for a full range of ideologies. Germany was economically strong, an industrial powerhouse, despite having had to overcome massive disabilities imposed by the Versailles Treaty. In the early thirties, Hitler’s rise was facilitated by massive unemployment (perhaps forty percent of Germans were unemployed), but this was a phenomenon throughout the Western world.</div>
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The key point to note is that at many junctures along the way, it was possible that Hitler’s rise might never have happened. And that the elites accepted Hitler as the best possible option. All this makes Hitler and Nazism unexceptional. The basic paradigm remains more or less intact: we only have to account for variations in the American model. Capitalism today is different, so are the postmodern means of propaganda, and so are the technological tools of suppression. Besides, American foundational myths vary from European ones, and the romanticism propounded by Goethe, Schelling, Wagner and Nietzsche contrasts with a different kind of holistic urge in America. But that is only a matter of variation, not direct opposition. Liberals who say that demographics work against a Republican majority in the early twenty-first century do have a point; but fascism can occur precisely at that moment of truth, when the course of political history can definitely tend to one direction or another. A mere push can set things on a whole different course, regardless of underlying cultural or demographic trends. Nazism never had the support of the majority of Germans; at best about a third fully supported it. About a third of Americans today are certifiably fascist; another twenty percent or so can be swayed around with smart propaganda to particular causes. So the existence of liberal institutions is not necessarily inconsistent with fascism’s political dominance.</div>
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With all of Germany’s cultural strength, brutality won out; the same analysis can apply to America. Hitler never won clear majorities; yet once he was in power, he crushed all dissent. Consider the parallels to the fateful election of 2000. Hitler’s ascent to power was facilitated by the political elites; again, note the similarities to the last two years. Hitler took advantage of the Reichstag fire to totally change the shape of German institutions and culture; think of 9/11 as a close parallel. Hitler was careful to give the impression of always operating under legal cover, even for the most massive offenses against humanity; note again the similarity of a pseudo-legal shield for the actions of the American fascists. One can go on and on in this vein.</div>
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If we look at Stanley Payne’s classical general theory of fascism, we are struck by the increasing similarities with the American model:</div>
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A. The Fascist Negations</div>
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Anti-liberalism Anti-communism Anti-conservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups . . .[are] more willing to undertake temporary alliances with groups from any other sector, most commonly the right).B. Ideology and Goals</div>
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Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state. Organization of some new kind of regulated, multi-class, integrated national economic structure. The goal of empire. Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed. C. Style and Organization Emphasis on aesthetic structure . . .stressing romantic and mystical aspects. Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships and style and the goal of a mass party militia. Positive evaluation and use of . . .violence. Extreme stress on the masculine principle. Exaltation of youth. Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command.</div>
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American fascism denies affiliation with liberalism, communism, and conservatism. The first two denials are obvious; the third requires a little analysis, but fascism is not conservatism and it takes issue with conservatism’s anti-revolutionary stance. Conservatism’s libertarian strand, an American staple (think of the recent protestations of Dick Armey, the departing Bob Barr, and the Cato Institute against some of the grossest violations of civil liberties), would not agree with fascism’s “nationalist authoritarian state.” Reaganite anti-government rhetoric might well have been a precursor to fascism, but Hayekian free market and deregulationist ideology cannot be labeled fascism.</div>
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Continuing to look at Payne’s list, we note that the goal of “empire,” that much proscribed word in official American vocabulary, has found open acceptance over the last year among the fascist vanguard. Voluntarism has been elevated to iconic status in the current American manifestation of fascism. It takes a bit more effort to notice American fascism’s “emphasis on aesthetic structure. . .stressing romantic and mystical aspects,” but reflection suggests many innovative stylistic emphases. The mass party militia, especially large bands of organized, militarized youth, seems to be missing ? for now. Violence is glorified for its own sake. The masculine principle has been elevated as the basis of policy-making. Command is authoritarian, charismatic, and personal. It is true that a charismatic leader like Hitler is missing from the scene; but one would have to ask if this is not a redundancy in the American historical context. Perhaps we are a society mobilized by very small degrees of charisma, unlike more informed, impassioned, ideologically committed electorates.</div>
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Roger Griffin holds that fascism consists of a series of myths: fascism is anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-rational, charismatic, socialist, totalitarian, racist and eclectic. If one wishes to argue that American fascism is by no means socialist, one ought to take a deeper look at National Socialism’s conception of socialism. In a sense, America is a socialist society, to the extent that the government is the main driving force behind technology, innovation, and science: the military-industrial-academic complex. National Socialism was comforting to the right-wing capitalists because they believed that socialism was a convenient fiction for the ideology. Nevertheless, fascism’s vitalism and holism militate against any facile interpretations of what socialism means. Fascism is eclectic and ready to abandon economic principle for what it perceives as the greater good of the nation. As Sternhell has described it for Germany, fascism in the American synthesis is a cultural rebellion, a revolutionary ideology; totalitarianism is of its very essence. There are more similarities than immediately apparent between Marxism as it was put into practice by the twentieth century communist states, and “socialist” ideology put into practice by the various fascist states.</div>
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Ian Kershaw has evaluated the similarities between Italian and German fascism:</div>
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Extreme chauvinistic nationalism with pronounced imperialistic expansionist tendencies; an anti-socialist, anti-Marxist thrust aimed at the destruction of working class organizations and their Marxist political philosophy; the basis in a mass party drawing from all sectors of society, though with pronounced support in the middle class and proving attractive to the peasantry and to various uprooted or highly unstable sectors of the population; fixation on a charismatic, plebiscitary, legitimized leader; . extreme intolerance towards all oppositional and presumed oppositional groups, expressed through vicious terror, open violence and ruthless repression; . glorification of militarism and war, heightened by the backlash to the comprehensive socio-political crisis in Europe arising from the First World War; . dependence upon an “alliance” with existing elites, industrial, agrarian, military and bureaucratic, for their political breakthrough; . and, at least an initial function, despite a populist-revolutionary anti-establishment rhetoric, in the stabilization or restoration of social order and capitalist structures.</div>
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Viewed in this perspective, in only the last few months America has advanced tremendously from emerging to realized fascism. Its imperialist and expansionist tendencies need to be couched less and less in Wilsonian idealist terms for mass acceptance. Unions can still be considered an oppositional, populist force, but working class cohesion has nearly been destroyed. Still, it needs to be said that instead of fascism appealing across class and geographical lines, the country remains divided between the liberal (urban, coastal) and proto-fascist (rural, Southern) factions. Also, the plebiscitary leader has not yet fully emerged. Oppositional groups are often self-silencing, but the most of the ruling establishment continues to practice a mild form of liberalism, and hopes that if things get too out of hand it can mobilize public opinion against brutal suppression. Although not all elites have yet been co-opted, think of Dershowitz’s advocacy of torture and Larry Summers’s patriotic swing. There is general agreement on militaristic aims. The attempted stabilization of the social order in the form of the culture wars fought in the previous decade is one of the less appreciated manifestations of emerging fascism.</div>
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George Mosse describes fascism as viewing itself in a permanent state of war, to mobilize masculine virile energy, enlisting the masses as “foot soldiers of a civic religion.” As Mosse points out, fascism seeks a higher form of democracy even as it rejects the customary forms of representative government. Propaganda is pervasive in America; we only need to delineate its descent from the Nazi form. Mosse rejects the notion that fascism ruled through terror; “it was built upon a popular consensus.” Fascism is a higher consensus seeking to bring about the “new man” rooted in Christian doctrine. Can there be a better description of the nineties American culture wars instigated by the proto-fascists than the following?:</div>
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When fascists spoke of culture, they meant a proper attitude toward life: encompassing the ability to accept a faith, the work ethic, and discipline, but also receptivity to art and the appreciation of the native landscape. The true community was symbolized by factors opposed to materialism, by art and literature, the symbols of the past and the stereotypes of the present. The National Socialist emphasis upon myth, symbol, literature and art is indeed common to all fascism.</div>
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Most of this is obvious, except the reference to literature and art; but think of the fetishization of the Great Books and the mythical classical curriculum by Bennett and his like. In thus viewing fascism above all as a cultural movement, the objection might be raised that American fascism lacks a distinctive stylistic expression that iconizes youth and war. Instead, it might be argued that it suffers from callow endorsement by dour old white males, whose cultural appeal is limited in the discredited stylistic forms they employ. To some extent this is true, but one must never underestimate the fertile ground American anti-intellectualism provides for more banal forms of propaganda and cultural terrorism than needed to be deployed by Nazism. (Eminem does electrocute Cheney in his video, but in real life Cheney rules.) American communication technology, as was true of Nazi Germany, has pioneered whole new methods of trivialization of “mass death” and elevation of brutality as a “great experience.”</div>
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War is both necessary and great, and that is America’s continuation of the fascist fascination with revitalization of “basic moral values.” Furthermore, the puritanism of American fascism does not necessarily conflict with the Nazi emphasis on style and beauty: Nazism annexed “the pillars of respectability: hard work, self-discipline, and good manners,” which explains “the puritanism of National Socialism, its emphasis upon chastity, the family, good manners, and the banishment of women from public life.” The analogs to Karl May’s widely circulated novels in Weimar and Nazi Germany can probably be found here, as can America’s answer to Max Nordau, rebelling against decadence in art and literature, and maintaining that “lack of clarity, inability to uphold moral standards, and absence of self-discipline all sprang from the degeneration of their [artists’] physical organism.” Think only of the demonization of Mapplethorpe and others, the emasculation of the NEA, and the continued attack on alleged artistic degeneracy. We must be willing to consider expanded definitions of how romanticism has been incorporated by American fascism.</div>
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Liberals might complain that in America there hasn’t been a declared revolution, a transformation that asserts itself as such. But as noted above fascism simply takes over the liberals’ language of “clarity, decency, and natural laws,” as well as its ideals of “tolerance and freedom.” That sounds like the sleight-of-hand performed by the fascists here. As Mosse says:</div>
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Tolerance. . .was claimed by fascists in antithesis to their supposedly intolerant enemies, while freedom was placed within the community. To be tolerant meant not tolerating those who opposed fascism: individual liberty was possible only within the collectivity. Here once more, concepts that had become part and parcel of established patterns of thought were not rejected (as so many historians have claimed) but instead co-opted – fascism would bring about ideals with which people were comfortable, but only on its own terms.</div>
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So to be liberal means to be intolerant, out of sync with the American democratic spirit. That suggestion has taken hold among large numbers of people.</div>
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The current American aesthetic appreciation of technology (“smart” bombs) is also of a piece with Hitler’s passion. Fascism is not a deviance from popular cultural trends, but only the taming of activism within revived nationalist myths. Mosse holds that fascism didn’t diverge from mainstream European culture; it absorbed most of what held great mass appeal. It never decried workers’ tastelessness; it accepted these realities. The same principles apply to American fascism.</div>
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Umberto Eco, in his essay “Ur-Fascism,” identifies fourteen characteristics of “eternal fascism”: not all of them have to be present at the same time for a system to be considered fascist, and some of them may even be contradictory: “There was only one Nazism, and we cannot describe the ultra-Catholic Falangism of Franco as Nazism, given that Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian, otherwise it is not Nazism.” Eco is intelligent enough to suggest a family of resemblance, overlap, and kinship, and the analyst’s task is to note which particular characteristics apply to a system, and understand the reasons for the absence of others, rather than dismiss the fascist categorization if a single feature from a previous fascist variant doesn’t apply: “Remove the imperialist dimension from Fascism, and you get Franco or Salazar; remove the colonialist dimension, and you get Balkan Fascism. Add to Italian Fascism a dash of radical anti-Capitalism (which never appealed to Mussolini), and you get Ezra Pound. Add the cult of Celtic mythology and the mysticism of the Grail (completely extraneous to official Fascism), and you get one of the most respected gurus of Fascism, Julius Evola.” It is noteworthy about Eco’s matrix that all fourteen of his characteristics of ur-fascism apply to America to some degree: 1. “the cult of tradition” (which may be “syncretic” and able to “tolerate contradictions”); 2. “the rejection of modernism” and “irrationalism”; 3. “the cult of action for action’s sake”; 4. “dissent is betrayal”; 5. “fear of difference,” or racism; 6. “the appeal to the frustrated middle classes” [this seems to cause the most trouble to American liberals; Eco clarifies, “In our day, in which the old ‘proletarians’ are becoming petits bourgeois (and the lumpen proletariat has excluded itself from the political arena), Fascism will find its audience in this new majority.]; 7. “obsession with conspiracies,” along with xenophobia and nationalism; 8. “the enemy is at once too strong and too weak” [note the simultaneous characterization of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and no doubt future Islamic “terrorists” as capable of irrevocably harming us and being impotent to really do so]; 9. ‘Pacifism is. . .collusion with the enemy,” “life is a permanent war,” and only a “final solution” can herald an age of peace; 10. “scorn for the weak” imposed by a mass elite; 11. “the cult of death” [American fascists ascribe this characteristic to terrorists, when in fact it is one of their own supreme defining characteristics]; 12. transferring of the “will to power onto sexual questions,” or “machismo”; 13. “individuals have no rights,” and fascism “has to oppose ‘rotten’ parliamentary governments”; and 14. “Ur-Fascism uses newspeak.”</div>
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No doubt, fascism is a descriptor too carelessly thrown around; but Nixon and Reagan, no matter how reprehensible their politics, were not quite fascist. Bush is the most dangerous man in contemporary history: Hitler didn’t have access to weapons that could blow up the world, and no American or other leader since World War II with access to such weapons has been as out of control. Perhaps a non-controversial statement may be that the fascist tendency always exists, at the very least latent and dormant. But when more and more of the latency becomes actualized, there comes a point when the nature of the problem has to be redefined. We may already have crossed that point. As Eco notes, “Ur-Fascism can still return in the most innocent of guises. Our duty is to unmask it and to point the finger at each of its new forms ? every day, in every part of the world.” And as Eco reminds us, Roosevelt issued a similar warning.</div>
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Since liberals don’t understand the magnitude of the crisis global capitalism faces, they don’t understand the extent of the desperate, last-ditch effort to find an ideological glue (“terror”) to hold together the centrifugal forces in the American population. Part of the confusion is that this is fascism but not really fascism ? it is only its simulation, although no less horrifying for that reason ? because all the twentieth-century ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, and socialism) are rapidly dissolving.</div>
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ANIS SHIVANI studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels, The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He welcomes comments at: <a href="mailto:Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu" style="color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu</a></div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-45952000111938169472016-04-03T18:43:00.000-07:002016-04-03T18:43:25.654-07:00Why The Major Media Marginalize Bernie<br />
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Why The Major Media Marginalize Bernie</h1>
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<span class="timestamp__date--published" style="box-sizing: inherit;">03/31/2016 10:44 am ET</span> | <span class="timestamp__date--modified" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><strong style="box-sizing: inherit;">Updated</strong> 3 days ago</span></div>
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SCOTT OLSON VIA GETTY IMAGES</div>
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“Bernie did well last weekend but he can’t possibly win the nomination,” a friend told me for what seemed like the thousandth time, attaching an article from the<i style="box-sizing: inherit;">Washington Post</i> that<a data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":0}}" href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fblogs%2Fplum-line%2Fwp%2F2016%2F03%2F28%2Fsanderss-plan-to-win-nomination-by-flipping-super-delegates-is-a-long-shot%2F&t=ZTE3ZjA0MTBjMTJjMmFlMGFiNGU3ZDcwZTg2YTE1YzliYTkxZTM0NCxlUjVIVlJMTA%3D%3D" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;"> shows</a> how far behind Bernie remains in delegates.</div>
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Wait a minute. Last Tuesday, Sanders won 78 percent of the vote in Idaho and 79 percent in Utah. This past Saturday, he took 82 percent of the vote in Alaska, 73 percent in Washington, and 70 percent in Hawaii.</div>
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In fact, since March 15, Bernie has won six out of the seven Democratic primary contests with an average margin of victory of 40 points. Those victories have given him roughly a one hundred additional pledged delegates.</div>
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As of now, Hillary Clinton has 54.9 percent of the pledged delegates to Bernie Sanders’s 45.1 percent.That’s still a sizable gap - but it doesn’t make Bernie an impossibility.</div>
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Moreover, there are 22 states to go with nearly 45 percent of pledged delegates still up for grabs - and Bernie has positive momentum in almost all of them.</div>
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Hillary Clinton’s lead in superdelegates will vanish if Bernie gains a majority of pledged delegates.</div>
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Bernie is outpacing Hillary Clinton in fundraising. In February, he raised $42 million (from 1.4 million contributions, averaging $30 each), compared to her $30 million. In January he raised $20 million to her $15 million.</div>
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By any measure, the enthusiasm for Bernie is huge and keeps growing. He’s packing stadiums, young people are flocking to volunteer, support is rising among the middle-aged and boomers.</div>
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In Idaho and Alaska he exceeded the record primary turnout in 2008, bringing thousands of new voters. He did the same thing in Colorado, Kansas, Maine, and Michigan as well.</div>
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Yet if you read the <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">Washington Post </i>or <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">the New York Times</i>, or watch CNN or even MSNBC, or listen to the major pollsters and pundits, you’d come to the same conclusion as my friend. Every success by Bernie is met with a story or column or talking head whose message is “but he can’t possibly win.”</div>
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Some Sanders supporters speak in dark tones about a media conspiracy against Bernie. That’s baloney. The mainstream media are incapable of conspiring with anyone or anything. They wouldn’t dare try. Their reputations are on the line. If the public stops trusting them, their brands are worth nothing.</div>
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The real reason the major media can’t see what’s happening is because the national media exist inside the bubble of establishment politics, centered in Washington, and the bubble of establishment power, centered in New York.</div>
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As such, the major national media are interested mainly in personalities and in the money behind the personalities. Political reporting is dominated by stories about the quirks and foibles of the candidates, and about the people and resources behind them.</div>
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Within this frame of reference, it seems nonsensical that a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont, originally from Brooklyn, who calls himself a Democratic socialist, who’s not a Democratic insider and wasn’t even a member of the Democratic Party until recently, who has never been a fixture in the Washington or Manhattan circles of power and influence, and who has no major backers among the political or corporate or Wall Street elites of America, could possibly win the nomination.</div>
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But precisely because the major media are habituated to paying attention to personalities, they haven’t been attending to Bernie’s message - or to its resonance among Democratic and independent voters (as well as many Republicans). The major media don’t know how to report on movements.</div>
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In addition, because the major media depend on the wealthy and powerful for revenues, because their reporters and columnists rely on the establishment for news and access, because their top media personalities socialize with the rich and powerful and are themselves rich and powerful, and because their publishers and senior executives are themselves part of the establishment, the major media have come to see much of America through the eyes of the establishment.</div>
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So it’s understandable, even if unjustifiable, that the major media haven’t noticed how determined Americans are to reverse the increasing concentration of wealth and political power that have been eroding our economy and democracy. And it’s understandable, even if unjustifiable, that they continue to marginalize Bernie Sanders.</div>
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<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">ROBERT B. REICH’s new book, “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few,” is now out. His film “Inequality for All” is now available on DVD and blu-ray, and on Netflix. Watch the trailer below:<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9REdcxfie3M" style="box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 100%;" width="560"></iframe></em></div>
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Follow Robert Reich on Twitter: <a class="follow-author__link" data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":1}}" href="http://www.twitter.com/RBReich" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e7061;" target="_blank">www.twitter.com/RBReich</a></div>
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<br />NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-73848431961844656902016-03-16T19:16:00.000-07:002016-03-16T19:16:39.966-07:00Aiding and Abetting: How an Uncritical Media Helped Trump's Rise<a class="header-logo" href="http://www.spiegel.de/" style="background-color: white; color: #990000; float: left; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; margin: 19px 0px 0px 12px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.3s ease-in-out;"><img alt="SPIEGEL ONLINE" height="32" src="http://www.spiegel.de/static/sys/v10/logo/spiegel_online_logo_460_64.png" style="border: 1px solid rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.498039);" title="SPIEGEL ONLINE" width="230" /></a><a class="channel-name" href="http://www.spiegel.de/international" style="background-color: white; color: white; display: block; float: left; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 2.5rem; font-weight: bold; margin: 19px 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase; transition: color 0.3s ease-in-out;">INTERNATIONAL</a><br />
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<span class="headline-intro">Aiding and Abetting:</span> <span class="headline" style="color: #c11919;">How an Uncritical Media Helped Trump's Rise</span></h2>
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An Essay By <a class="autor-link js-author-link" data-authorid="1195" href="http://www.spiegel.de/impressum/autor-1195.html" rel="author" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.3s ease-in-out;">Holger Stark</a></div>
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In his campaign, Donald Trump has successfully steered clear of the checks and balances presidential candidates are usually subjected to.</div>
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<strong>Donald Trump abuses members of the media and wants to limit American press freedoms, even as he exploits them to field his own message. But his rise can also be traced to the failures of journalists, who remained disturbingly uncritical for far too long.</strong></div>
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<i>Forbes</i> writer Clare O'Connor? "Dummy." AP reporter Jill Colvin? "One of the truly bad reporters." CNN Journalist Sara Murray? "Absolutely terrible." Arianna Huffington? "Liberal clown." Fox moderator Megyn Kelly? "A bimbo" with "blood coming out of her wherever."</div>
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<span style="line-height: 19.488px;">It would be hard to top the insults that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has unleashed on female journalists. Trump is a chauvinist who can't tolerate criticism from self-confident women. But these reporters are only his most prominent victims. Trump has demanded the removal of debate hosts, he has sued TV channels and during his appearances, journalists regularly become the target of verbal attacks. At almost every one of his rallies, there is a moment when he pauses, points to the journalists squeezed behind the press barriers, and says: "Those are miserable people!"</span><span style="line-height: 19.488px;"></span></div>
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The longer this election continues, the more apparent it is becoming that this candidate is changing the fundamental relationship between the media and the American political world. The democratic public sphere, one of the pillars of every democracy, is facing two threats: Trump's brute attacks and the media's own failure. Many newsrooms didn't fulfill their democratic duty to monitor Trump, and to perform checks and balances, letting him get away with insults, lies and far-fetched promises. When it comes to Trump, the critical public sphere has shown itself to be dysfunctional far too often in the last few months.</div>
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Trump maintains a schizophrenic relationship with the media. On the one hand, he exploits it in order to spread his message and propaganda. On the other, though, he has nothing but contempt for journalists. He would even like to restrict press freedom, most recently through a proposal to strengthen libel laws by raising financial penalties so high they could put entire news organizations out of business. The proposed legislation could be described as a weapon directed at Trump's critics -- he's even explicitly named the <i>New York Times </i>and the <i>Washington Post</i>, two of the American newspapers who are going after him the most aggressively, as targets. The proposal offers a taste of what America would be like under a President Trump. These days, America feels a bit like Hungary.</div>
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<b>The Twitter Election</b></div>
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Trump has also understood better than any other candidate how to harness social media in order to circumvent the critical public sphere. On Twitter he now has 6.7 million followers, and over 1 million on Instagram. The <i>New York Times</i>, in comparison, has a total circulation of about 2 million. Trump recently claimed that having his Twitter account was "like owning the <i>New York Times</i> without the losses." He has made it his policy to entertain his followers regularly, sometimes with over 20 tweets per day, allowing him to create his own stream of news.</div>
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The calculus behind this is simple: With Twitter and Facebook, the traditional media have partly lost their function as gatekeepers. Social networks allow direct communication between politicians and the people. Journalists no longer have a monopoly on information and communication. That isn't a bad development per se. The direct communication made possible by the Internet is, of course, technically democratic -- even egalitarian. But it can also result in the loss of the context, the discourse and the fact-checking normally associated with political debate. It also erodes the filtering function of the media. Barack Obama was the first politician to make use of this principle of direct communication during his 2008 campaign, and later during his time in the White House.</div>
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But Trump has expanded and perfected this method of circumventing journalists, and thus created his own parallel public sphere, with followers who are all too willing to believe him. And when he has no argument left with which to counter his critics, he can write a terse, mean Tweet arguing that he is merely being attacked by the liberal media establishment. No matter what the media say, if there is any doubt, it is a lie. It is the American version of "Lügenpresse," or "lying press," a <a class="text-link-int lp-text-link-int" href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/most-germans-think-the-press-is-lying-to-them-about-refugees-a-1079049.html" style="color: #990000; transition: color 0.3s ease-in-out;" title="slur that has become commonplace">slur that has become commonplace</a> during the recent right-wing protests in Germany.</div>
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In his contempt for democratic discourse, Trump has some notable similarities to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in a way serves as Trump's role model. The Russian once told a French journalist that, if he has so much pity for the victims of the war in Chechnya, he should circumcise himself. It was Trump-speak long before the real-estate tycoon even stepped onto the political stage.</div>
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It is no coincidence that Trump treats Russia with kid gloves. He says he has a good personal relationship with Putin, and that the Russian is a strong, impressive national leader. Putin and Trump are united in their loathing of the idea that a critical public sphere is part of a functioning democracy. They want to issue orders to people rather than explain things. This disdain makes them both fundamentally anti-democratic. So far, though, the outcry on the subject in the United States has been weak.</div>
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<b>Failure to Counter Trump</b></div>
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Lots of American media outlets, especially large TV stations, have viewed Trump so far as entertainment. No word is too dirty to be put on the air somewhere, and Trump has a screen presence unlike any other candidate. Former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich described the mechanics of this election to the hosts of "Fox & Friends," a show on the arch-conservative Fox News channel thusly: "Donald Trump gets up in the morning, tweets to the entire planet at no cost, picks up the phone, calls you, has a great conversation for about eight minutes, which would have cost him a ton in commercial money, and meanwhile his opponents are all out there trying to raise the money to run an ad." Of the show, which long offered Trump a regular platform, Gingrich said: "You could say that Trump is the candidate 'Fox & Friends' invented."</div>
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A power dynamic of superiority and subordination has emerged with Trump and some journalists that should not exist in a democracy.</div>
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Investigative reporting is one of the fundamental elements of democracy. It exists to bring to light the kind of information the powerful would often prefer to hide. In no other country is this tradition as strong as it is in the US, the home of the Watergate investigation. But when it comes to Trump, investigative journalism has failed. In contrast to, for example, Hillary Clinton in this election, there have been no big, </div>
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groundbreaking pieces of reporting dealing with his past, his serious financial mistakes and bankruptcies that cost the state and society dearly. About the brutality he displays when people get in his way. About the rumors about his alleged ties to the New York mafia. About his tax returns which, unlike all the other candidates, he has not yet released.</div>
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His campaign thrives on his appearance as an all-powerful figure and infallible businessman. One suspects that there is another Trump who operates at the boundaries of that which is allowed, and often beyond it. But the only image of Trump that exists is a distorted one that he created and largely shapes himself. The media hasn't managed to correct that image.</div>
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Why? One leading Washington journalist argues that it's because it was not only the journalists, but also the other candidates' election strategists who underestimated Trump. Normally, the managers of each campaign tend to gather as much dirt as they possibly can about their opponents which, when the time is right, they spread. This didn't happen to Trump, he argues, because, like most journalists, the other candidates believed Trump would flame out. He argues that many news organizations only recently truly woke up. Perhaps too late.</div>
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<b>Unlikely News Hero</b></div>
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Shamefully, it is Fox News, of all places, that has demonstrated that there is a different way of dealing with Trump. The candidate had threatened to boycott a TV debate against his Republican rivals that Fox was going to air shortly before the first caucuses in Iowa. The debate was to be moderated by Megyn Kelly, who had dared to ask Trump critical questions during an earlier debate.</div>
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Prior to the debate, the TV channel released a statement lambasting Trump. Trump demanded an apology. If it did not come, he said, he wouldn't take to the stage. Roger Ailes, the powerful head of Fox News, spoke with Trump several times on the phone but didn't apologize, and did not remove his host. Kelly moderated the evening's debate, and Trump stayed away. Four days later, he lost Iowa.</div>
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<span style="line-height: 19.488px;">Trump has since figured out the connection between his absence from TV and his result in the caucus. He took part in the next debate organized by Fox in early March. Megyn Kelly didn't hold back, confronting him with quotes from his earlier speeches that contradicted his current positions, and forced him to admit in public that he was politically "flexible." It hurt him.</span></div>
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There is no guarantee that an aggressive confrontation with Donald Trump would lead fewer people to vote for him, or more to recognize his deeply authoritarian style of politics. Fox has nevertheless shown Trump how it could happen. One would hope that the next time Trump agitates against minorities or threatens members of the media, that assembled journalists would turn off their cameras and all leave the premises.</div>
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If Trump actually becomes his party's candidate or, even worse, becomes the next president of the United States of America, the damage to democracy would be significant not only because it would turn America into an autocratic nation, but because it would mean that, in this election, the principle of public scrutiny and thus democracy would have failed.</div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-43094772961177902452016-03-02T06:00:00.000-08:002016-03-02T06:00:14.966-08:00Bernie Bias: The Mainstream Media Undermines Sanders at Every Turn Thru Super Tuesday and Beyond<img alt="Home" src="http://www.alternet.org/sites/all/themes/custom/alternet/logo.png" /><br />
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ELECTION 2016</div>
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<a href="http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bernie-bias-mainstream-media-undermines-sanders-every-turn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Bernie Bias: The Mainstream Media Undermines Sanders at Every Turn</a></h1>
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The pattern is to ignore, downplay and mischaracterize Sanders' positions.</div>
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<em>By</em> <em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/rima-regas" style="color: #f1602c; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Rima Regas</a></em> / <span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://alternet.org/" style="color: #f1602c; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">AlterNet</a></span></span></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #444444;">September 2, 201</span></em></div>
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Who knew, when Bernie Sanders announced a run in the Democratic primary, that not only would he meet with hostility from his main opponent's chief surrogates, but that the media would acquiesce and even collude to such a great degree?</div>
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When analyzing the quantity and content of the vast majority of what is said and written about Sanders, his campaign platform, and appearances, one finds a running theme across the so-called liberal media. The New York Times has been called out by more than one analyst, myself included, for its complete lack of serious coverage of Bernie Sanders.</div>
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Since joining the staff at the New York Times, Maggie Haberman has written about Sanders on fewer than a handful of occasions, while she has written about the other candidates in the race more often. While it is understandable that Hillary Clinton would be the subject of more numerous articles, it makes no sense for Martin O'Malley to have more articles written about him than Sanders, given the pecking order that emerged right from the start, yet that is what has transpired so far.</div>
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In articles that address various aspects of the Democratic side of the primary, Senator Sanders' ability to succeed is always described in doubtful terms, even as Hillary Clinton's troubles in the polls are being described. The New York Times has published fewer than a dozen pieces that are Sanders campaign-specific and each is problematic in the way he is portrayed. Most often, Sanders' age and hair are highlighted, and the incorrect moniker "socialist" is applied. (Socialist and Democratic socialist are not interchangeable terms.)</div>
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While the age of a candidate might matter to some when thinking about a candidate's experience or mental capacity, Bernie Sanders is 73, only six years older than Hillary Clinton. His mental capacity has never been a subject of contention. One can only conclude from the repetition of negative references, that writers are attempting to condition readers into thinking of Sanders as the "unkempt" elderly stereotype.</div>
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Most presidential candidates have been older than 60. Think of Ronald Reagan. The distance between 67 to 73, in human years, isn't that significant from either the experiential or health standpoints. If anything, Sanders' breakneck schedule, accounting for work in the Senate, crisscrossing the nation to hold rallies, and appearing on cable news shows demonstrates a high level of mental and physical energy.</div>
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The most harmful way anti-Sanders media bias has been manifested is by omission. In this respect, the New York Times is joined by the vast majority of the mainstream media in not typically reporting on Sanders, especially on policy. Overall there is a version of a “wall of silence” built by the media when it comes to serious reporting and analysis of his policies; or when analyzing or reporting on the policies of his opponents, a failure to mention Sanders' in contrast, especially when his is the more progressive position. This behavior hasn't gone unnoticed by readers. You can see numerous complaints from readers about the Times organization's bias toward Sanders. You see it in the New York Times comments section, on the Facebook pages and comments sections of all the major publications, and just about everywhere else. Readers complain about the lack of substantive coverage as well as the bias in what little is published. The Times' Jason Horowitz' <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/21/us/politics/bernie-sanders-evokes-obama-of-08-but-with-less-hope.html" style="color: #f1602c; text-decoration: none;">piece,</a> "Bernie Sanders Draws Big Crowds to His 'Political Revolution" drew over 1600 comments, double what the most popular columns usually fetch, with most in protest over the obvious bias of the piece and the Times' egregious lack of coverage of Bernie Sanders news.</div>
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Bernie Sanders' campaign has centered around economic justice and his plans to reform banking, taxation, trade, stimulate the economy, promote manufacturing at home, and institute jobs programs. I've yet to see side-by side comparisons of the top two Democratic candidates' prescriptions for the US economy. Most economists and economic writers chose to publish pieces on the Clinton economic plan before she gave her speech. Few wrote about it after, and with reason: The speech didn't deliver much in the way of specifics, and was vague about policies that the voting public expects. Sanders' version of an economic plan has yet to garner serious analysis and discussion. Both Clinton and Sanders base their economic prescriptions on economist Joseph Stiglitz' most recent work, <a href="http://www.rewritetherules.org/" style="color: #f1602c; text-decoration: none;">Rewrite The Rules</a>. Paul Krugman has, on three occasions, talked up Hillary Clinton's economic platform, specifically on wages, without so much as mentioning Sanders. Clinton favors a minimum wage of $15 per hour in New York City, and $12 an hour nationally. Sanders has called for the minimum wage to be raised to $15 an hour for everyone. The Times had reported, in May, that Stiglitz' work would likely greatly influence Clinton's platform. If it has, one wouldn't know it, judging by subsequent writings.</div>
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<strong>Plan for Racial Justice</strong></div>
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While news outlets were reporting on the disruptions of Sanders by the Black Lives Matter movement, few followed up on the story as Sanders began to respond positively. Sanders gave a major <a href="http://www.rimaregas.com/2015/07/berniesanders-speech-to-sclc-blog42/" style="color: #f1602c; text-decoration: none;">speech</a> to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on July 27. It received very little attention from the press. And within a week, Sanders delivered his answer to Black Lives Matter, by way of a plan. The New York Times has yet to make mention of Sanders' <a href="https://berniesanders.com/issues/racial-justice/" style="color: #f1602c; text-decoration: none;">plan for racial justice</a>, link to the senator's website, or publish it outright in an article. And the media has ignored the fact that the racial justice plan has received praise among a number of Black Lives Matter leaders, including activist Deray McKesson.</div>
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Clarence Page recently <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/page/ct-bernie-sanders-donald-trump-megyn-kelly-perspec-0812-20150811-column.html" style="color: #f1602c; text-decoration: none;">wrote</a> about Sanders in an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune. He took a tack that many in the press now use: comparing and contrasting Sanders to Donald Trump. Given the kinds of controversy Trump has kicked up with his racial statements, and the treatment Sanders has received over his racial justice bona fides, it is no surprise that many of Sanders' supporters are angry. Page begins his op-ed with: "The farther the left and right wings in politics move toward extremes, an old saying goes, the more they resemble each other."</div>
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In any other context, that kind of contrast might have been fair, but not in a piece about Trump and Sanders. In his third paragraph, Page writes: "In recent days we have seen how both Trump, now a seasoned reality TV star, and Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist, have faced sharp criticism within their separate political tribes for omitting or offending key constituencies."</div>
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While it is true enough that Trump has been making racially offensive statements about all constituencies that aren't key to his campaign, that same accusation does not apply to Bernie Sanders, who in stark contrast to his main opponent, has never, in 50 years of documented political activism and public office, uttered a racially offensive statement, or favored policies that are detrimental to minorities.</div>
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Page praises Sanders' plan for racial justice, without any discussion of its points and then goes on to characterize the diversity of Sanders' supporters: "But his impressively huge crowds have been even less diverse than his 95-percent-white home state of Vermont." There's not been a study or poll of the crowds at Sanders events. From what I could see of Sanders' Los Angeles and New Orleans rallies, the crowds seemed to match the diversity of the locale. Of note is the fact that there hasn't yet been a large-scale poll of the black community on its support of Sanders following the publication of his plan for racial justice.</div>
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Over a month after the publication of Sanders' plan for racial justice, the media continues to portray him as someone who is racially wounded, when to begin with, that "problem" came into existence the day of the Netroots Nation disruption under the guise of eliciting needed policy from all candidates, even those who are considered friends. As the top Democratic candidate continues to owe such "needed policy," Hillary Clinton continues to enjoy <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/8/19/9174077/hillary-clinton-black-lives-matter" style="color: #f1602c; text-decoration: none;">relative insulation</a> from the perception of having any racial wounds, in spite of a record of promoting policies that have led to the very reasons for the birth of Black Lives Matter.</div>
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Over at Vox, coverage of Sanders by everyone but Ezra Klein has mostly been overtly negative. Dara Lind address a portion of the race issues in her <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/7/20/9005855/black-twitter-bernie-sanders" style="color: #f1602c; text-decoration: none;">interview</a> of comedian Roderick Greer, who came up with the Twitter hashtag BernieSoBlack. But that <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/7/20/9001639/bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter" style="color: #f1602c; text-decoration: none;">piece</a> contained much more than an explanation of some funny hashtag, and all of it was slanted in the direction of stripping Sanders of his civil rights achievements, even as the piece was titled to indicate Greer's frustration at Sanders' supporters. Attacking Sanders' supporters and portraying them as racist or borderline racist has been a running theme in the press. Since his record on civil rights cannot be impeached and he has never committed a racial faux-pas, the only way to attack him on race is through his supporters, and that is how in piece after piece, Sanders' record is being sullied.</div>
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The attacks on Sanders began with a curious refusal to give him any credit for taking part in the civil rights movement, and have been followed up by pieces designed to paint him as dispassionate about human rights and racial justice. Few are those who cite Sanders' longstanding near-perfect rating by the NAACP and ACLU, or mention those, like Senator Cory Booker, who have spoken up in defense of Sanders' lifelong record with the African-American community.</div>
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<strong>Since when don't records matter?</strong></div>
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Up until Bernie Sanders, a politician's record has always been the measure by which evaluations are made. This is of particular import here because Sanders' main opponent, Hillary Clinton, also has a very long record and it isn't being scrutinized. When Clinton met with protesters in New Hampshire and she was confronted with policies of hers and Bill Clinton's that have harmed the black community, little was made of it in the press. All chatter about Clinton's behavior at that meeting has practically come to an end, and she has yet to publish her own policy proposals for racial justice.</div>
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Sanders has focused his tenure as a public official on economic justice. That doesn't mean he paid no attention to racial justice. His stump speeches, with few exceptions, make mention of the racial disparities in our society. One example that comes to mind is Sanders' appearance in front of the <a href="http://www.rimaregas.com/2015/07/msm-tries-to-drive-a-wedge-between-blacklivesmatter-progressives-berniesoblack-happens-blog42/" style="color: #f1602c; text-decoration: none;">Council of La Raza</a>, where he spent several minutes addressing racial disparities harming African Americans. </div>
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The characterization that Sanders' position on solving the problems of racial injustice is through addressing economic inequality is patently false. Sanders has long been on record as saying that racial inequality is a separate problem that needs to be addressed in parallel. Almost to a voice, the U.S. mainstream press corps avoids any mention of that in order to cement the perception that Bernie Sanders isn't serious about redressing America's original sin.</div>
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At a time when economic and racial inequality are at their deepest, we are again at a similar moment in time as when the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking out in favor of racial unity to fight poverty and inequality. In one of his last <a href="http://www.rimaregas.com/2015/08/a-quote-from-mlks-three-evils-of-society/" style="color: #f1602c; text-decoration: none;">speeches,</a> "The Three Evils of Society," King described the conditions we find ourselves in today. His prescription came in the form of his Poor People's Campaign, uniting the nation's whites and blacks to fight for economic justice. It is painful to hear and read those who are intimately familiar with King's speeches joining in the same behaviors as the rest of their colleagues in the media in praising Bernie Sanders and putting him down all at once, at times even using the very same Martin Luther King quotes included in Sanders' plan for racial justice.</div>
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To Martin Luther King Jr., racial, educational and economic justice were always inexorably tied. To James Baldwin, racial, educational and economic justice were indivisible from each other. It takes a rare cynic who is well versed in the writings of Baldwin and King to use them as bludgeons against Sanders, all the while withholding salient facts from the public, so it can do its job as described in Baldwin's <em>The Fire Next Time</em>:</div>
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“And here we are at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”</div>
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In the absence of fair media coverage, how do we create the consciousness of the others? How do we achieve our country? How do we avoid repeating history?</div>
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<em>Rima Regas is a Southern California-based writer and commentator with a passion for progressive politics, and social and economic justice. Her career has included stints as a congressional staffer, graphic designer, technical writer and editor. Follow her on Twitter @Rima_Regas and Blog#42 at<a href="http://www.rimaregas.com/" style="color: #f1602c; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">www.rimaregas.com</a></em></div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-57064486676730325912016-01-28T17:19:00.002-08:002016-01-28T17:19:22.028-08:00Media Bias Helps Promote Suffering / Suffering Promotes Profits and Seldom Solves or Resolves Social Problems<img alt="Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice" height="200" src="http://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/themes/dissident/images/header.jpg" width="760" /><br />
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<a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/01/media-bias-helps-promote-suffering/#more-61432" target="_blank">Media Bias Helps Promote Suffering</a></h1>
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by James Hoover / January 27th, 2016</div>
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CBS’s <em>60 Minutes</em> often provides important information
about vulnerable and suffering Americans. Last Sunday, the program
centered on billionaires sharing their wealth with the needy and
forgotten people in some states deprived of health care, though the <em>60 Minutes</em> segment doesn’t use the word deprived.<br />
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Where <em>60 Minutes</em> fails in the health care segment involves
not informing the audience about the real circumstances leading to the
exclusion of health care services we all have a right to enjoy.<br />
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The <em>60 Minutes</em> segment focuses on two registered nurses who
drive the Health Wagon through six counties in the Appalachian area,
providing free health care service to anyone in need. The Health Wagon’s
clients are the sick and uninsured, people not able to afford health
care, but still covered in 30 other states under Obamacare’s Medicaid
expansion.<br />
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The episode doesn’t mention why the expansion is refused in the 20
states, including those in the Appalachian area, only that those states
claim to fear the future cost. It is people who cannot afford to
purchase Obamacare, even with a subsidy, who seek help. The Obamacare
Medicaid expansion actually provides for these people in all states, and
includes those who earn 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL) or
less, the FPL being $15,856 for individuals.<br />
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The <em>60 Minutes</em> segment only categorized them as falling in
the unintended gap of lost coverage, as though their exclusion is an
unintentional accident wrought by 20 states fearful of the expense. In
actuality, those 20 Republican-controlled states would save money by
instituting Medicaid expansion coverage under Obamacare. With no
apparent rationale for those states to refuse coverage, one could only
conclude that rejection of the coverage is only political.<br />
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When Scott Pelley first aired this segment in April of 2014 there
were 20 Republican states rejecting over 3 million people qualified for
coverage. He only said that the federal government covered the expense
for 3 years. Not mentioned was that Obamacare would <a href="http://www.cbpp.org/research/how-health-reforms-medicaid-expansion-will-impact-state-budgets">cover</a>
90% of the cost in all the years thereafter. Also a disingenuous
exclusion was the fact that the Medicaid expansion coverage actually
saved money when considering the cost of alternative expenses (without
the coverage) for the uninsured sick, expenses like emergency room care.<br />
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Furthermore, since 2014, Indiana has opted into <a href="https://www.statereforum.org/Medicaid-Expansion-Decisions-map?gclid=CL6osYTgxcoCFU9hfgod1VcG5w">coverage</a>
while Alabama and South Dakota are considering it. A bitter fight
between newly elected Democrat, Governor McAuliffe, who seeks to expand
Medicaid, and the Republican legislature, which rejects expansion, is
still expected to shut out entitled Virginia residents. Last Sunday’s <em>60 Minutes</em>, which repeated this April, 2014, segment, did not mention these <a href="https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/resources/primers/medicaidmap">updates</a>, including the GOP’s exclusion in most states they control.<br />
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The point can easily be made that mainstream media fails to cover the
truth about important issues and how those issues affect us and our
more vulnerable fellow citizens. Such issues must contribute to what and
whom we vote for. Withholding these truths only helps to contribute to
misinformed voting or to an inclination not to vote.<br />
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Even life or death situations like the poisoned water in Flint,
Michigan did not warrant informative reporting until MSNBC exposed
Republican governor Rick Snyder for his reckless disregard for life and
health, approving a new corrosive water source to save money. His action
or inaction had a direct connection to lead poisoning of children, even
ignoring for several months unsafe lead counts in their bloodstreams.<br />
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Though skirting the blame, the <em>60 Minutes</em> segment did show
that policies have impacts on lives. For example, the one patient
treated by the Health Wagon, featured and interviewed by Scott Pelley,
died three months after the interview. It was pointed out that Linda
Moore, the patient, would probably still be alive if she had had health
coverage when Obamacare was implemented the first day of 2014. Pointed
out too were the neglected health risks such as cancer, diabetes, and
heart disease, including how accompanying pain and death could have and
should have been avoided.<br />
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We could well ask how many more will die as a result of dangerous
partisan games played by Republican-controlled states. There are still
17 Republican-controlled states that are responsible for this suffering,
even death. Standing in marked contrast to such heartless treatment are
the kind and dedicated people who assist these forgotten Americans.<br />
<br />
Not speaking the truth about the political party that is to blame and —
what we can only conclude — are petty, spiteful, and partisan reasons
for not providing coverage to which Americans are entitled is wretched
and irresponsible.<br />
<br />
This doesn’t just apply to CBS, but to all mainstream media. One can
expect bias and vitriol to emanate from Fox News and right-wing media,
but the corporate media has diffused blame for GOP obstruction for too
long over both parties.<br />
<br />
Such treatment only encourages more of the same. For as Republicans
see no price is paid for their government shutdowns, budget blackmail
options, loan default threats, and crisis legislating, they are only
encouraged to do more of the same.<br />
<br />
Since President Obama took office in January of 2009, the Republican
Party began its Machiavellian policies in earnest. Let me review just a
few of the most flagrant actions and lies, many bordering on traitorous.
Unbiased reporting would have rendered them ineffective:<br />
<br />
• Before Obama’s first Inaugural Address in 2009, senior GOP members
of Congress had already met with conservative movement leaders and
Republican strategists and agreed to ignore the electoral mandate and
commit the party to a course of absolute obstruction, including spending
bills to dig us out of the recession.<br />
<br />
• Mitch McConnell publically announced his number one priority to make Obama a one-term president on October 23, 2010.<br />
<br />
• Lies perpetrated by Republicans, and these are just a few: Obama
doubled the deficit; Man-made climate change is a hoax; Tax cuts
stimulate the economy; Voter fraud is a serious issue; Obama not born in
US; Obamacare has ‘death panels.’<br />
<br />
• Speaker of the House John Boehner violated a 216 year-old federal law
by “joining with the leader of a foreign nation, Benjamin Netanyahu,
against his own president.” Forty-eight GOP Senators undermined Obama
nuclear treaty with Iran.<br />
<br />
• Republicans waste millions by voting to repeal Obamacare over 60 times since it was passed.<br />
<br />
• List of things Republicans demanded under threat of a government
shutdown or default: balanced budget amendment; approved Keystone XL;
cut funding for Planned Parenthood; Medicare privatization; Paul Ryan
tax reform; defunding Obamacare (<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/32-republicans-who-caused-the-government-shutdown/280236/">shutdown</a>15
days in October, 2013); Trillions in budget cuts (2012 near default and
resulting credit downgrade); accepting 10,000 Syrian refugees.<br />
<br />
Such policies and actions should have been reported honestly and
without any bias. Right-wing media function as allies for the right-wing
cause. Mainstream media’s bias is more corporate in the vein of profit,
propriety or entertainment.<br />
<br />
But the reasons are incidental. Right-wing and mainstream media in
their own way do damage. Right wing sources just cement the polarization
that conservatives must maintain to stay in power. Mainstream media is a
second punch that helps to promote a self-indulgent culture that feeds
on the material and philosophical goods of a crony capitalist system.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="author">
James Hoover is a recently retired systems
engineer. He has advanced degrees in Economics and English. Prior to
his aerospace career, he taught high school, and he has also taught
college courses. He recently published a science fiction novel called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Visitors-James-Hoover-ebook/dp/B00BVOL8V4">Extraordinary Visitors</a> and writes political columns on several websites. <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/author/jameshoover/">Read other articles by James</a>.</div>
<div class="author">
<br /></div>
<div class="author">
<br /></div>
<div class="postmeta">
This article was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2016 at 10:15am and is filed under <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/capitalism/" rel="category tag">Capitalism</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/culture/" rel="category tag">Culture</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/democrats/" rel="category tag">Democrats</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/healthmedical/" rel="category tag">Health/Medical</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/media/" rel="category tag">Media</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/obama/" rel="category tag">Obama</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/right-wing-jerks/" rel="category tag">Right Wing Jerks</a>. </div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-69941421451530691022016-01-25T10:23:00.000-08:002016-01-25T10:23:57.504-08:00Corporate Media Won’t Tell You Hillary Clinton is a Lying Fascist<br />
<img alt="Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice" height="200" src="http://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/themes/dissident/images/header.jpg" width="760" /><br />
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<a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/10/corporate-media-wont-tell-you-hillary-clinton-is-a-lying-fascist/" target="_blank">Corporate Media Won’t Tell You Hillary Clinton is a Lying Fascist</a></h2>
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by Jack Balkwill / October 22nd, 2015</div>
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<blockquote style="background: url("images/quote.png") no-repeat; color: #444444; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 60px;">
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
She was practiced at the art of deception<br />I could tell by her blood-stained hands</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
— Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM_p1Az05Jo" style="color: #333333;">You Can’t Always Get What You Want</a>,” from the Rolling Stones’ 1969 album <em>Let it Bleed</em></div>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Right now, you’re probably asking yourself, “What does Jack think of Hillary Clinton?” Well, I’m glad you asked.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
In fact, Madam Hillary, the leading candidate for CEO of the United States of Corporate Empire, is being buried in money by environmental polluters, defense cheats, banksters, and other oligarchs and plutocrats because she’s shown unwavering loyalty to these scum of the earth all her life. Shall we go back to the beginning?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
In one of her older, smoldering lies, Hillary claimed to have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary, famous for climbing Mount Everest. The problem with this is that Sir Edmund didn’t climb Mount Everest and become famous until six years after Hillary Rodham was born.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
During the October 13th debate she began her comments with “I have been very consistent over my entire life, I have always fought for the same values and principles.” She often fabricates that she has always been a progressive, but her “values and principles” are not progressive.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Even in her teens, when Hillary worked on the Nixon campaign, and later became a Goldwater Girl, in support of two of the most right wing Republican politicians in US history. In college, she was president of Wellesley Republican Youth. Does this sound like “always been progressive?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
When she became a Democrat she joined husband Bill in the leadership of the Democratic Leadership Council, a corporate-funded group whose goals were clearly to clone a second Republican Party of the Democrats, so that their brand of <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/09/how-we-may-begin-to-dismantle-fascism-in-america/" style="color: #333333;">fascism</a> would not be distinguishable from that of the former.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Bill and Hillary have always presented themselves as a team, and you won’t hear Hillary disagreeing with Bill’s free trade accomplishments, which destroyed millions of good factory jobs for America’s working class. Or Bill’s deregulation of media, which allowed the giants to merge and extend corporate power by keeping the masses ignorant. Or deregulation of banking, eventually leading to the massive 2008 recession resulting in millions losing jobs and more millions losing homes, as bankers, no longer restricted, became reckless with the extended economy.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
In her last run for the presidency, in 2008, none other than Rupert Murdoch held a fundraiser for Hillary. Should one ask why the king of right wing media would support a “progressive” candidate? Murdoch is not known for wasting money. He knew she would represent his “values.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Even the Clinton family friends appear to be Republican. During the 2008 race, Bill Clinton remarked that he didn’t know how Hillary would be able to run against their friend <a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/01/25/bill-clinton-john-mccain-and-hillary-are-very-close/" style="color: #333333;">John McCain</a>. It’s been reported that when Obama got the nomination, Bill Clinton <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/22/bill-clinton-mccain_n_5609245.html" style="color: #333333;">advised</a> John McCain during the 2008 campaign.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Former First Lady Barbara Bush praised family friend Bill Clinton “I think that he thinks of George a little bit like the father he didn’t have, and he’s very loving to him. And I really appreciate that.” If the Clintons are progressive, why do they have right wing friends?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Even daughter Chelsea, who married a Wall Street banker, is a friend of Ivanka Trump, daughter of The Donald who leads Republican candidates at this time. Bill and Hillary attended Trump’s last wedding. One almost expects to hear the <em>déjà vu</em> of Bill whining that he doesn’t know how Hillary can run against her friend Trump.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
In fact, in his current election campaign, Trump is running a video <a href="http://www.ktvz.com/news/politics/trump-video-highlights-bill-clinton-praise/35947644" style="color: #333333;">highlighting praise</a>from Bill Clinton, ending with “Thank you Bill.” The Trump campaign opens the video with a suggestive question: “An endorsement from Bill Clinton?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
When in the Senate, Hillary voted for the Bush agenda — the Patriot Act, Iraq War, the fascist line. She co-sponsored a bill that would make it a crime to burn the American flag, long a favorite of Republicans, and she supports the death penalty, which is opposed by nearly all progressives.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
After Hillary pushed for war with Libya and President Obama obliged by bombing that suffering nation (which has not recovered to a functioning government), she was delighted that President Gaddaffi was savagely tortured to death, after having been shot several times, remarking: “We came, we saw, he died,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y" style="color: #333333;">followed by a maniacal laugh</a>.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
On the campaign trail, Hillary often cites her time on the board of the Children’s Defense Fund in an attempt to show that she is progressive, but she doesn’t talk about her husband’s “Welfare Reform,” which threw poor children into the streets (two-thirds of those on welfare were children). The founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, Marion Wright Edelman, said of that move by Bill Clinton, “His signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.” Edelman’s husband resigned from the Clinton Administration over Clinton’s cruelty toward these disadvantaged children.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Selling out the American people pays handsomely. Bill Clinton left the White House falling into immense wealth, as his corporate friends paid him off for his service to them, with $200 thousand a night speeches. It’s been reported that he’s made over <a href="http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/politician/president/bill-clinton-net-worth/" style="color: #333333;">$100 million from speeches alone</a> since leaving the White House. Simply putting the money into his bank account would have looked too much like the payoff of bribes.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Hillary brings in similar loot from speech fees, book deals and other sources, capitalizing on what she calls “public service,” as though she cared a wit about the public interest. Hillary tells us, in another of her lies, that she and Bill left the White House “dead broke.” But we <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jun/10/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-says-she-and-bill-were-dead-broke/" style="color: #333333;">we find that</a> “In 1999, they bought a five-bedroom home in Chappaqua, N.Y., for $1.7 million. In December 2000, just as they were leaving the White House, they bought a seven-bedroom house near Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. The price was $2.85 million.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Hillary Clinton is not a progressive, but the opposite, a classic <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/09/how-we-may-begin-to-dismantle-fascism-in-america/" style="color: #333333;">fascist</a>. She is currently running her campaign on a platform of lies, and if she is elected president, will reverse her faux progressive positions on anything of importance and sell out the American people, together with the people of the planet, in order to please those whom she’s always served, the wealthy and their corporations, at any cost to the public interest.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
The majority of voters who vote Democrat say they are voting “lesser evil,” and if they don’t, the evil Republicans will get in. No Republican could have gotten away with what President Obama did, when George Bush was so despised by the public and Obama increased his hated agenda, starting his presidency by finishing the bailout of banksters and increasing troop strength in Afghanistan by 30,000.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
No Republican could have gotten away with Bill Clinton’s “free trade” deals, “welfare reform,” deregulation of banking and media. The system encourages people to vote for great evil. There is nothing lesser about the evil of Democrats other than their rhetoric.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Jill Stein is running for president with no coverage by corporate media, because they fear her like none of the others. She would actually represent the public interest and democracy, the two things the establishment fear more than anything. They will cover anyone before Jill Stein, or anything she represents, which is all censored out of the mainstream press.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
But the mainstream press have been pushing Hillary for years, long before she announced her decision to run for President. Hillary represents the same thing as corporate media—rule by plutocratic oligarchy, so the disgusting corporate “journalists” are kneeling and kissing her butt to find favor with their establishment bosses.</div>
<div class="author" style="background: rgb(250, 236, 235); border-top-color: rgb(181, 125, 119); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 20px; padding: 10px 14px;">
Jack Balkwill is an activist in Virginia. He can be reached at<a href="mailto:libertyuv@hotmail.com" style="color: #333333;">libertyuv@hotmail.com</a> <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/author/jackbalkwill/" style="color: #333333;">Read other articles by Jack</a>.</div>
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This article was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2015 at 2:17am and is filed under <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/democrats/" rel="category tag" style="color: #333333;">Democrats</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/elections/" rel="category tag" style="color: #333333;">Elections</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/fascism/" rel="category tag" style="color: #333333;">Fascism</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/media/" rel="category tag" style="color: #333333;">Media</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/right-wing-jerks/" rel="category tag" style="color: #333333;">Right Wing Jerks</a>.</div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-13763927873844233612016-01-21T07:00:00.000-08:002016-01-21T07:00:23.535-08:00Do Not Let The Establishment Divide Us – We Are All Americans<br />
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<a href="http://endoftheamericandream.com/" style="color: #103ef4; text-decoration: none;" title="End Of The American Dream">End Of The American Dream</a></h2>
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The American Dream Is Becoming A Nightmare And Life As We Know It Is About To Change</div>
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<a href="http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/do-not-let-the-establishment-divide-us-we-are-all-americans" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Do Not Let The Establishment Divide Us – We Are All Americans</span></a></h2>
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<img alt="" src="http://endoftheamericandream.com/wp-content/themes/atahualpa/images/icons/user.gif" style="background: none; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px -1px; padding: 0px;" /> By Michael Snyder, on January 26th, 2011<div style="margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
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<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<a href="http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/do-not-let-the-establishment-divide-us-we-are-all-americans/bush-obama-clinton" rel="attachment wp-att-896" style="color: #103ef4; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-896" height="177" src="http://endoftheamericandream.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Bush-Obama-Clinton-250x177.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: left; margin: 10px 10px 5px 0px;" title="Bush Obama Clinton" width="250" /></a>Have you ever noticed how almost all the mainstream news stories carried on the major news networks are slanted in a way that is intended to divide Americans? The truth is that the “establishment” is constantly trying to divide us and get us fighting with one another. They pit the Republicans against the Democrats (even as though control both sides). They pit one race against another. They pit one gender against another. We are told that the rich are against the poor, the north is against the south, urban is against rural and that there are even “generational battles” going on. Frustration and hate are rapidly growing in the United States today, and a lot of that frustration and hate is unfortunately aimed at the targets that the mainstream media has programmed all of us to hate. Meanwhile, those at the top of the pyramid who are controlling the whole game love it when we are divided because we can never become united and challenge their control.</div>
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But the truth is that we are all Americans. If this country goes down, it is going to take all of us down with it. A house that is divided can never stand.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Unfortunately, America is more divided today than ever. Many Democrats have an absolutely explosive hatred for the Republican Party. Many Republicans can’t stop thinking about how much they hate Barack Obama and the Democrats. Meanwhile, those that control both parties at the highest levels are loving it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Why do you think they call them “establishment Republicans” and “establishment Democrats”? It is because the “establishment” controls them both.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">
So just who is the “establishment”?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Well, they are headed by the ultra-wealthy international banking elite. They fund the campaigns of “establishment” candidates from both political parties. The shadowy “think tank” organizations that they have founded have provided the vast majority of the personnel for all presidential administrations since World War 2.</div>
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If you don’t believe this, just check it out for yourself. Do some research on past presidential administrations and take a look at just how many cabinet members belonged to organizations such as The Bilderberg Group, The Trilateral Commission and The Council on Foreign Relations. You will be absolutely astounded.</div>
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You see, the truth is that the “Republican Party” and the “Democratic Party” are simply two franchises that are controlled by the exact same owners.</div>
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For much more on who “the establishment” is, the following are a few good points to start….</div>
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*<a href="http://www.prisonplanet.com/bilderberg-owned-publication-the-economist-yes-powerful-globocrat-elites-are-running-things-its-not-a-conspiracy.html" style="color: #103ef4; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Bilderberg Owned Publication The Economist: Yes, Powerful “Globocrat” Elites Are Running Things, It’s Not A Conspiracy">Bilderberg Owned Publication The Economist: Yes, Powerful “Globocrat” Elites Are Running Things, It’s Not A Conspiracy</a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">
*<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/1/" style="color: #103ef4; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="The Rise of the New Global Elite">The Rise of the New Global Elite</a></div>
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*<a href="http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/only-23-percent-of-americans-believe-that-the-federal-government-has-the-consent-of-the-governed" style="color: #103ef4; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" title="Only 23 Percent Of Americans Believe That The Federal Government Has The Consent Of The Governed">Only 23 Percent Of Americans Believe That The Federal Government Has The Consent Of The Governed</a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">
But you never hear much about the “anti-Bilderberg” movement or the “anti-Federal Reserve” movement on the nightly news.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">
Instead, we are constantly being programmed that the real “fight” is the Republicans vs. the Democrats.</div>
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The vast majority of Americans are imprisoned within this artificial left/right paradigm and they can’t seem to break out of it.</div>
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But even when the establishment does not have us fighting about politics they are dividing us in other ways.</div>
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For example, it seems like almost every issue becomes about “race” these days. The mainstream media loves to play up tensions between the races.</div>
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And so what are we seeing in America today? Sadly, our country is becoming more divided among racial lines than ever before.</div>
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Take the issue of illegal immigration. The media portrays those that are against illegal immigration as a bunch of “anti-Mexican” racists and those that are in favor of illegal immigration as “pro-Mexican” human rights activists.</div>
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But the truth is that many of those that are most against illegal immigration are Americans of Mexican descent that came to America legally and that have worked hard to build a great life in the United States. They resent all of the cheaters that are just hopping over the border and taking advantage of the system.</div>
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The other day I wrote an article entitled “<a href="http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/is-illegal-immigration-destroying-the-southwest-united-states-17-immigration-facts-that-very-few-people-are-talking-about" style="color: #103ef4; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" title="Is Illegal Immigration Destroying The Southwest United States? 19 Immigration Facts That Very Few People Are Talking About">Is Illegal Immigration Destroying The Southwest United States? 19 Immigration Facts That Very Few People Are Talking About</a>“, and I quickly received some comments claiming that I was a racist and that I was full of hate.</div>
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Well, nothing could be further from the truth. I believe that all people are of equal value and deserve to be loved and respected. People on one side of a border are not more “valuable” than people on the other side of a border. I simply want everyone to come through the “front door” so that we can stop the endless parade of gang members and drug dealers that are constantly pouring into the United States unchecked.</div>
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So is wanting all immigrants to go through the same legal process an irrational demand?</div>
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Of course not.</div>
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But the establishment media wants to make every issue about hate and about division.</div>
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And if there are some voices that the establishment media does not control that makes them even more nervous.</div>
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Take the Tea Party movement for example. Now there are a lot of things about the Tea Party movement that are far from perfect, but in that movement there is just a hint of independence from the establishment.</div>
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So how has the mainstream media reacted to the Tea Party movement?</div>
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Well, they mock and demonize those in the movement every time they can.</div>
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Tea Party activists are called “crazy”, “loco”, “insane”, “wacky”, “kooky” and “extremists”. They are laughed at by network anchors while they are being interviewed. There were even several very highly publicized law enforcement documents that circulated around the Internet last year that referred to Tea Party activists as potential terrorists.</div>
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So why are Tea Party activists vilified by the mainstream media so much? Well, it is because that movement represents a sliver of a chance that the American people may take back control of the political process in this country.</div>
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The establishment cannot let that happen, because their whole system depends on control.</div>
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When this country was originally founded, we were not a divided nation. It was the founding fathers vs. the monarchy and the financial establishment of England. Our founders were mocked and ridiculed and very few people gave them any chance of succeeding. Fortunately our founding fathers won and they were able to establish this great nation.</div>
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Well, once again today those fighting against the “financial establishment” are being mocked and ridiculed. Politicians <a href="http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/a-mistake-of-historic-proportions-11-reasons-why-america-should-have-elected-ron-paul-instead-of-barack-obama" style="color: #103ef4; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" title="such as Ron Paul">such as Ron Paul</a> that point out that ultra-wealthy international bankers use the Federal Reserve to manipulate and control our financial system are marginalized by the mainstream media. But fortunately the American people are starting to wake up.</div>
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You just can’t keep truth down forever. Eventually it will rise. The following is a brief 5 minute speech by Ron Paul on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Let it be a reminder to all of us that we need to be united if we want to have any hope of turning America back around….</div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-22949734560312548452015-09-27T06:36:00.000-07:002015-09-27T06:39:28.660-07:00The lost meaning of ‘objectivity’<a href="http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/" style="background-color: #333333; border: 0px; color: #2b86a5; font-family: ff-meta-serif-web-pro; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 10px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="American Press Institute" class="logo" src="http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/wp-content/themes/american-press-institute/img/american-press-institute.png" style="border: 0px; float: left; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 1.2em 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /></a><span style="background-color: #333333; color: #555555; font-family: ff-meta-serif-web-pro; font-size: 10px; line-height: 10px;"></span><span style="background-color: #333333; color: #555555; font-family: ff-meta-serif-web-pro; font-size: 10px; line-height: 10px;"></span><br />
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Insights, tools and research to advance journalism</div>
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The lost meaning of ‘objectivity’</h1>
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One of the great confusions about journalism, write Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-Journalism-Newspeople-Completely/dp/0307346706" style="border: 0px; color: #2b86a5; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Elements of Journalism</a>, is the concept of objectivity.<br />
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When the concept originally evolved, it was not meant to imply that journalists were free of bias. Quite the contrary.<br />
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The term began to appear as part of journalism after the turn of the 20th century, particularly in the 1920s, out of a growing recognition that journalists were full of bias, often unconsciously. Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information – a transparent approach to evidence – precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.<br />
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In the latter part of the 19th century, journalists talked about something called “realism” rather than objectivity. This was the idea that if reporters simply dug out the facts and ordered them together, truth would reveal itself rather naturally.</div>
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Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information – a transparent approach to evidence</div>
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Realism emerged at a time when journalism was separating from political party affiliations and becoming more accurate. It coincided with the invention of what journalists call the inverted pyramid, in which a journalist lines the facts up from the most important to the least important, thinking it helps audiences understand things naturally.<br />
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At the beginning of the 20th century, however, some journalists began to worry about the naïveté of realism. In part, reporters and editors were becoming more aware of the rise of propaganda and the role of press agents.<br />
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At a time when Freud was developing his theories of the unconscious and painters like Picasso were experimenting with Cubism, journalists were also developing a greater recognition of human subjectivity.</div>
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The method is objective, not the journalist.</div>
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In 1919, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, an associate editor for the New York World, wrote an influential and scathing account of how cultural blinders had distorted the New York Times coverage of the Russian Revolution. “In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see,” they wrote. Lippmann and others began to look for ways for the individual journalist “to remain clear and free of his irrational, his unexamined, his unacknowledged prejudgments in observing, understanding and presenting the news.”<br />
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Journalism, Lippmann declared, was being practiced by “untrained accidental witnesses.” Good intentions, or what some might call “honest efforts” by journalists, were not enough. Faith in the rugged individualism of the tough reporter, what Lippmann called the “cynicism of the trade,” was also not enough. Nor were some of the new innovations of the times, like bylines, or columnists.</div>
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The solution, Lippmann argued, was for journalists to acquire more of “the scientific spirit … There is but one kind of unity possible in a world as diverse as ours. It is unity of method, rather than aim; the unity of disciplined experiment.” Lippmann meant by this that journalism should aspire to “a common intellectual method and a common area of valid fact.”<br />
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To begin, Lippmann thought, the fledgling field of journalist education should be transformed from “trade schools designed to fit men for higher salaries in the existing structure.” Instead, the field should make its cornerstone the study of evidence and verification.<br />
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Although this was an era of faith in science, Lippmann had few illusions. “It does not matter that the news is not susceptible to mathematical statement. In fact, just because news is complex and slippery, good reporting requires the exercise of the highest scientific virtues.”<br />
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In the original concept, in other words, the method is objective, not the journalist. The key was in the <i style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">discipline </i>of the craft, not the aim.<br />
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This point has some important implications.<br />
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One is that the impartial voice employed by many news organizations – that familiar, supposedly neutral style of newswriting – is not a fundamental principle of journalism. Rather, it is an often helpful device news organizations use to highlight that they are trying to produce something obtained by objective methods.<br />
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The second implication is that this neutral voice, without a discipline of verification, creates a veneer covering something hollow. Journalists who select sources to express what is really their own point of view, and then use the neutral voice to make it seem objective, are engaged in a form of deception. This damages the credibility of the craft by making it seem unprincipled, dishonest, and biased.</div>
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The impartial voice employed by many news organizations – that familiar, supposedly neutral style of newswriting – is not a fundamental principle of journalism.</div>
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Reporters have gone on to refine the concept Lippmann had in mind, but usually only privately, and in the name of technique or reporting routines rather than journalism’s larger purpose. The notion of an objective method of reporting exists in pieces, handed down by word of mouth from reporter to reporter.<br />
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Developmental psychologist William Damon at Stanford, for instance, has identified various “strategies” journalists have developed to verify reporting. Damon asked his interviewees where they learned these concepts. Overwhelmingly the answer was: by trial and error and on my own or from a friend. Rarely did journalists report learning them in journalism school or from their editors.</div>
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Many useful books have been written. IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors) for instance, has tried to develop a methodology for how to use public records, read documents, and produce Freedom of Information Act requests.<br />
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By and large, however, these informal strategies have not been pulled together into the widely understood discipline that Lippmann and others imagined. There is nothing approaching standard rules of evidence, as in the law, or an agreed-upon method of observation, as in the conduct of scientific experiments.<br />
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Nor have older conventions of verification been expanded to match the new forms of journalism. Although journalism may have developed various techniques and conventions for determining facts, it has done less to develop a system for testing the reliability of journalistic interpretation.<br />
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<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">This guide, like many of the others in API’s Journalism Essentials section, is largely based on the research and teachings of the Committee of Concerned Journalists — a consortium of reporters, editors, producers, publishers, owners and academics that for 10 years facilitated a discussion among thousands of journalists about what they did, how they did it, and why it was important. The author, Walter Dean, was CCJ training director and API Executive Director Tom Rosenstiel formerly co-chaired the committee.</em></div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-40076899147064614212015-09-27T06:14:00.000-07:002015-09-27T06:14:29.121-07:00How “Neutral” Reporting is Biased<br />
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MODERN AMERICAN POLITICS IS FILLED WITH PARTISANSHIP, LEGALIZED CORRUPTION AND EXTREMISM. ON THIS SITE YOU WILL FIND ARTICLES ON A VARIETY OF SUBJECTS AND POINTS OF VIEW THAT ARE NOT NORMALLY PORTRAYED IN THE CORPORATE MEDIA–DON’T EXPECT ANY SUGAR-COATING, PANDERING OR INTEREST MONEY PROPAGANDA HERE.</h2>
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<a href="http://theprogressivecynic.com/2012/10/19/how-neutral-reporting-is-biased/" target="_blank">How “Neutral” Reporting is Biased</a></h2>
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(c) Josh Sager – August 2012</div>
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Many in the American mainstream media currently prize neutrality in their reporting over virtually all other values. The American media’s neutrality in reporting manifests as their giving equal credence, focus and criticism for all sides of an argument, without passing judgment as to the validity of the argument. While acting as the neutral reporter, the media simply reports what the different sides of a debate assert, and does not act as fact-checker; the neutral reporter trusts the different sides of an argument to present factual arguments and acts simply as a debate moderator (asking questions and ensuring that the answers are heard by the audience), rather than a journalist.</div>
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When talking about neutral reporting, it is very important to differentiate it from the idea of objective reporting. Unlike with neutral reporting, objective reporting comes from giving no side of an argument an advantage, yet holding all sides to the facts. Any misstatement of the facts or attempt to obfuscate the issues by any side of the argument is challenged by the objective reporter. The ideal media acts as objective reporters, not neutral reporters, and serve as the impartial referees which hold all politicians to the facts—ensuring that citizens are able to rationally determine accountability for their politicians.</div>
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While neutrality is sometimes a commendable and beneficial component of an unbiased media outlet, it can easily become a form of bias. In situations where an argument is between a rational individual and an irrational individual—rather than two rational actors—neutrality is heavily biased in favor of the irrational arguer. When the neutral media does not fact-check politicians who attempt to argue using nonsensical or nonfactual arguments, it allows politicians to promote arguments with no real basis in fact.</div>
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A non-factual argument, while incorrect, is often far easier to perpetuate than a rational argument; non-factual arguments are based upon fictions which are tailored to support the argument, and reject all opposing evidence. In the absence of fact-checkers, the fictional constructs of non-factual arguments can easily trick the uninformed into supporting policies which cannot work in real life, and have little basis in reality.</div>
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A neutral media, like the one in the United States, provides the perfect medium for the propagation of non-factual arguments. By endlessly repeating all sides of an argument, without checking to see if the arguments are based in reality, the neutral media gives credibility to nonsensical arguments. The neutral status of the media creates the public perception that the sides covered by the media are factual and rational. Unfortunately, the credibility given to nonsensical arguments when they are repeated by the mainstream media allows for non-fictional arguments to be mainstreamed in ways which would be impossible with an objective media.</div>
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Probably the greatest example of the distortive effect of neutrality can be found in the modern debates over tax cuts. Large segments of the Democratic Party and the entire Republican Party have argued that tax cuts are needed to bolster the failing economy and promote growth; this is a falsehood, and has been used to promote terrible economic policies. It is true that some tax cuts, in some situations, can spur economic growth, but this is not always the case. It is common knowledge among economists that tax cuts are not the economic panacea which they are portrayed as by politicians, but the media continues to perpetuate this falsehood simply because politicians claim it to be true.</div>
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<strong style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 22.4px; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Recent Examples of Situations Where Neutrality has become Biased:</strong></div>
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<li style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 22.4px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Claiming that Washington gridlock is bipartisan—While Washington is always engaged in argument, the modern Republican Party has acted to obstruct everything within their power; this <a href="http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/republicans-unprecedented-obstructionism-by-numbers" style="color: #10759c; font-family: inherit; font-size: 22.4px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.25s ease-out; vertical-align: baseline;">obstruction is not bipartisan, and is not normal</a>.</li>
<li style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 22.4px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Portraying Obama as a radical liberal—Regardless of what many claim, Obama is not a radical liberal. Obama is a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/27/vote-obama-centrist-republican" style="color: #10759c; font-family: inherit; font-size: 22.4px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.25s ease-out; vertical-align: baseline;">center-right</a> politician who holds many of the same views/supports the policies of the Republican Party of the late 20<span style="bottom: 1ex; font-family: inherit; font-size: 18.816px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: 0px; line-height: 0; position: relative; vertical-align: baseline;">th</span> century.</li>
<li style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 22.4px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Not debunking Republican “Job Bills”—The Republican Congress has passed numerous tax cuts which they have called jobs bills. Despite this label, studies of these bills have shown that they <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/republican-jobs-bills_n_1687647.html" style="color: #10759c; font-family: inherit; font-size: 22.4px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.25s ease-out; vertical-align: baseline;">create no jobs</a>and are “Jobs Bills” in name only.</li>
<li style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 22.4px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Not calling the US drone program extreme—Both parties support the use of drones to kill suspected terrorists, even if the suspects are Americans; this <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/06/05/electing_an_assassin_in_chief_salpart/" style="color: #10759c; font-family: inherit; font-size: 22.4px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.25s ease-out; vertical-align: baseline;">policy is extreme and an abrogation of contemporary due process</a>, yet it is not questioned in the media. Just because both political sides consider targeted assassinations a non-issue, the media fails to point out just how objectively aberrant the policy is.</li>
<li style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 22.4px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Calling global warming controversial—When politicians assert that that global climate change is a controversial theory, the media has consistently refused to point out that global climate change is<a href="http://www.ucsusa.org/ssi/climate-change/scientific-consensus-on.html" style="color: #10759c; font-family: inherit; font-size: 22.4px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.25s ease-out; vertical-align: baseline;">accepted scientific fact</a>. A vast majority of scientists (essentially all scientists not employed by extraction companies) agree that global climate change is real and man-made.</li>
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If Americans wish to have a functional government which passes fact-based policy, we must demand that our media not only refuse to take sides in their political reporting but also ensure that all politicians base their policies upon factual arguments. Unless our politicians are forced to live within the facts by the media, they will be able to convince the public to support irrational policies. The media is not only the neutral mouthpiece for politicians to sell their policies, but the institution from which accountability is created.</div>
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Neutrality between the liar and the truth teller is not actually neutral (not that the sides are usually this clear-cut), but rather a form of bias which threatens to allow the liar to portray their lies as truth. The media in the United States must recognize this crucial distinction and begin to return to its role as the objective referee. Unless the media begins this return to its roots, it will likely become little better than an organization of stenographers, who are merely used to spread non-factual political propaganda.</div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-30571318153927881602015-09-17T18:20:00.001-07:002015-09-17T18:25:39.078-07:00Corporate Press Fails to Trump Bigotry<h2>
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<a href="http://fair.org/home/corporate-press-fails-to-trump-bigotry/" target="_blank">Corporate Press Fails to Trump Bigotry</a></h1>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px;"><b>by Chip Berlet</b></span></span><br />
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<em>Depiction of Donald Trump in the <strong>LA Times</strong>, which described the candidate as “polarizing.” (photo: Robert Gauthier / <strong>LAT</strong>)</em></div>
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The outlandish rhetoric of Republican presidential wildcard Donald Trump has left many journalists at a loss for words—words such as bigotry, xenophobia, racism, sexism and demagoguery.</div>
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Some media outlets raised these issues. Yet many reporters (or perhaps their editors) still seem reluctant to move past the aphasic and simplistic sports-reporting model, in which ideological content analysis is renounced.</div>
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An example of a typical article is the piece on Trump’s stump speech by Michael Finnegan and Kurtis Lee in the <b>Los Angeles Times</b> (<a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/la-na-trump-national-security-20150915-story.html" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">9/15/15</a>). It is well-written, colorful and even includes the obligatory single sentence from an anti-Trump protester. Yet there is little serious political or historic context.</div>
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One line does note that Trump borrowed from “Richard Nixon’s polarizing pledge to stand up for the ‘silent majority’ amid the social upheaval of the 1960s.”<a href="http://www.c-span.org/video/?153819-1/silent-majority-speech" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;"> Nixon’s speech</a>, however, concerned support for the Vietnam War. A more apt comparison would have been Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to garner votes from white voters (<b>The Nation</b>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">11/13/12</a>).</div>
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Journalists and scholars familiar with the rise of contemporary right-wing populist political parties and social movements in Europe, however, recognize that xenophobic, anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric can lead to acts of violence.</div>
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For several years, I have had editors tell me that the contention that right-wing rhetoric can lead to violence is a liberal myth. Right-wing media pundits certainly reject this claim. Yet this is a well-studied chain of events, analyzed by scholars since the rise of fascism in Europe following World War I and the Nazi genocide during World War II. So I wrote a survey of the scholarship as a book chapter titled “<a href="http://www.academia.edu/6920071/Heroes_Know_Which_Villains_to_Kill_How_Coded_Rhetoric_Incites_Scripted_Violence" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">Heroes Know Which Villains to Kill</a>: How Coded Rhetoric Incites Scripted Violence.” In it, I summarized the consensus:</div>
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The leaders of organized political or social movements sometimes tell their followers that a specific group of “Others” is plotting to destroy civilized society. History tells us that if this message is repeated vividly enough, loudly enough, often enough, and long enough—it is only a matter of time before the bodies from the named scapegoated groups start to turn up.</div>
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Freedom of speech is not the issue. A free and open debate is a necessity for democracy. Trump therefore is not legally culpable for any acts of violence against his named scapegoats. Trump should be held accountable on a moral basis by the media for his using the<a href="http://www.tools-of-fear.net/" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;"> tools of fear</a>, such as demonization and scapegoating, that put real people at risk for attacks.<br />
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<em>Photo from a <strong>Nation</strong> piece on Trump, which noted the “xenophobia at the heart of Trump’s campaign.” (photo: Jonathan Ernst/<strong>Reuters</strong>)</em></div>
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The progressive press has done a better job of pointing out this ugly potential. Writing for <b>The</b><b>Nation </b>(<a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/shouting-back-at-donald-trump/" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">9/14/15</a>), Julianne Hing argued, “It’s clear that the xenophobia at the core of Trump’s campaign is resonating, and his antics are already echoing beyond the campaign trail into both culture and policy.” Hing quotes Mario Carrillo of the immigrant rights group United We Dream as saying Trump’s “rhetoric is leading to real-life consequences.”</div>
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Many instances of physical attacks are chronicled in Hing’s article, although motivation is usually unclear. One pair of attackers did tell police they were directly influenced by Trump’s rhetoric, according to the <b>Associated Press</b> (<a href="http://bigstory.ap.org/article/3ccf3e0dca664295b90274a37449a87b/brothers-denied-bail-charges-they-beat-homeless-immigrant" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">9/3/15</a>). Trump said he does not condone violence. Nonetheless, immigrant rights activists worry violence will increase.</div>
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Adele Stan in the <b>American Prospect</b> (<a href="http://prospect.org/article/nation-sociopaths-what-trump-phenomenon-says-about-america" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">9/9/15</a>) put it boldly:</div>
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What Trump is doing, via the media circus of which he has appointed himself ringmaster, is making the articulation of the basest bigotry acceptable in mainstream outlets, amplifying the many oppressive tropes and stereotypes of race and gender that already exist in more than adequate abundance.</div>
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The headline for Evan Horowitz’s piece in the <b>Boston Globe</b> (<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/08/19/donald-trump-blazes-european-path-american-politics/i5PXZAuuALf39tfb0EQ6pL/story.html" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">8/19/15</a>) claims “Donald Trump Blazes a European Path in American Politics,” and Horowitz asks, “Does Donald Trump represent the emergence of a new force in American politics, a right-populist movement that could reorganize the American” political spectrum? Missing is the fact that, from President Andrew Jackson in the early 1800s through George Wallace in the 1970s to Pat Buchanan, there have been right-wing populist movements in the United States. It is not a European import.</div>
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Part of this confusion over Trump is definitional: Scholars write entire books trying to map out the contours of right-wing political and social movements, especially the line dividing right-wing populism and neofascism. The pre-eminent scholar in this area, University of Georgia’s Cas Mudde, explained in the <b>Washington Post</b> (<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/08/26/the-trump-phenomenon-and-the-european-populist-radical-right/" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">8/26/15</a>):</div>
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The key features of the populist radical right ideology – nativism, authoritarianism, and populism – are not unrelated to mainstream ideologies and mass attitudes. In fact, they are best seen as a radicalization of mainstream values.</div>
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For many scholars, right-wing populism is classified as part of the “radical right,” while the term “extreme right” is reserved for insurgent groups seeking to overturn the constitutional order.</div>
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In his book <i>Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, </i>Mudde lists as common “extreme right” features nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democracy and the strong state, including a law-and-order approach.</div>
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In his <i>Ideology of the Extreme Right</i>, Mudde wrote:</div>
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The terms neo-Nazism and to a lesser extent neo-fascism are now used exclusively for parties and groups that explicitly state a desire to restore the Third Reich (in the case of neo-fascism the Italian Social Republic) or quote historical<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialism" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;"> National Socialism</a> (fascism) as their ideological influence.</div>
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That’s not Trump. His ideology and rhetoric are much more comparable to the European populist radical right, akin to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, the Danish People’s Party or Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. All of them use the common radical right rhetoric of nativism, authoritarianism and populism.</div>
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<em><strong>Salon</strong>‘s headline on Trump: He’s not, actually.</em></div>
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“Donald Trump Is an Actual Fascist” trumpets the headline in <b>Salon</b> (<a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/07/25/donald_trump_is_an_actual_fascist_what_his_surging_popularity_says_about_the_gop_base/" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">7/25/15</a>) for Conor Lynch’s confused and badly researched article on Trump. Ignoring the current rise of xenophobic neo-fascist groups in Europe, Lynch tells us that “fascism died in the mid-20th century.”</div>
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Undermining <b>Salon</b>’s headline, Lynch tells us the “GOP are obviously not fascists, but they share a family resemblance.” The resemblance, according to Lynch, is explained in the famous quote attributed to Italy’s fascist dictator during World War II, Benito Mussolini:</div>
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Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.</div>
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According to Lynch, this “definition may very well fit the GOP ideology: a kind of corporate fascism.” Alas, the quote is a hoax, widely circulated on the internet but<a href="http://www.politicalresearch.org/2005/01/12/mussolini-on-the-corporate-state/#sthash.H6NETour.dpbs" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">debunked</a> years ago. Mussolini never wrote or said anything like that, since the fake statement refutes Mussolini’s views on fascism.</div>
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More complicated is the detailed and erudite polemic in <b>Truthout</b> (<a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32800-political-frauds-and-the-ghost-of-totalitarianism" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">9/15/15</a>) by Henry A. Giroux, expanded from <b>Tikkun </b>(<a href="http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/donald-trump-and-the-ghost-of-totalitarianism" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">9/9/15</a>). In “Political Frauds and the Ghost of Totalitarianism,” Giroux invokes the theories of world-famous philosopher Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism. He warns that widespread civic illiteracy in the US population is more than the media manufacturing “ignorance on an individual scale”; it is, in fact</div>
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producing a nationwide crisis of agency, memory and thinking itself…a kind of ideological sandstorm in which reason gives way to emotion, and a willful limitation on critical thought spreads through the culture as part of a political project that both infantilizes and depoliticizes the general public.</div>
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According to Giroux, “Donald Trump is not the singular clown who has injected bizarre and laughable notions into US politics; he is the canary in the mineshaft warning us that totalitarianism relies on mass support and feeds on hate, moral panics” and what Arendt called the “<a href="http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=12466" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude</a>.”</div>
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<em>Xenophobic cartoon, 1899.</em></div>
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Yet long before the appearance of totalitarianism in the modern era, the United States saw mass movements that used force to subjugate or purge the degraded and demonized “Other.” As a nation, we enforced white Christian nationalism through the genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement and mass murder of black people for profit. For many decades, immigrants including those who were Irish, Italian, Polish or Russian were second-class citizens, not considered “white.” Women had few rights and were treated as the property of their fathers, then their husbands. Jews were perpetual outsiders. People with unpopular religious views were shunned and in some instances killed. Chinese were excluded, Japanese were interned in camps. Nativist racism periodically has cut a bloody gash through our body politic, without reliance on totalitarianism.</div>
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Trump is not an example of creeping totalitarianism; he is the white man growing hoarse with bigoted canards while riding at the forefront of a new nativist movement. Adele Stan bluntly suggests that to “ask if the rogue Republican’s surge is good for Democrats is the wrong question.” Instead, we need to ask what is wrong with America, “that this racist, misogynist, money-cheating clown should be the frontrunner for the presidential nomination of one of its two major parties?”</div>
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Trump feeds the resentment felt by many people who are white, male, straight or Christian who feel displaced by “Others” taking over “their” nation. These people see themselves as the real producers of value in the United States, and consider the disparaged “Others” to be parasites. Thus the 2012 campaign of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was built around the clandestine theme of mobilizing the “makers” against the “takers,” as reported by Eric Schulzke in the <b>Deseret News</b>(<a href="http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865562693/Makers-takers-and-Mitt-Romneys-47-percent-comment.html" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">9/19/12</a>). This is called “producerism” by scholars, and it is a central element of right-wing populism in the United States.</div>
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What fuels this sort of bitter backlash movement now? The late scholar Jean Hardisty of Political Research Associates argued in 1995 that a<a href="http://www.jeanhardisty.com/writing/articles-chapters-and-reports/the-resurgent-right-why-now/" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;"> confluence of several historic factors</a> has assisted the success of the right in the United States:</div>
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<li style="list-style-type: square; margin: 0px 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px;">a conservative religious revitalization,</li>
<li style="list-style-type: square; margin: 0px 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px;">economic contraction and restructuring,</li>
<li style="list-style-type: square; margin: 0px 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px;">race resentment and bigotry,</li>
<li style="list-style-type: square; margin: 0px 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px;">backlash and social stress, and</li>
<li style="list-style-type: square; margin: 0px 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px;">a well-funded network of right-wing organizations.</li>
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“Each of these conditions has existed at previous times in US history,” wrote Hardisty:</div>
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While they usually overlap to some extent, they also can be seen as distinct, identifiable phenomenon. The lightning speed of the right’s rise can be explained by the simultaneous existence of all five factors. Further, in this period they not only overlap, but reinforce each other. This mutual reinforcement accounts for the exceptional force of the current rightward swing.</div>
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Scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in <i>Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s</i>, suggest that this set of circumstances makes many Americans fear the end of the “American Dream.” This backlash is picking up speed. The Republican voter base in the Tea Party long ago shifted its attention away from fiscal restraint toward anti-immigrant xenophobia, banning abortion and pushing gay people back into the closet.</div>
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Many scholars of fascism and neofascism now suggest right-wing populism can metamorphosize into these fascistic totalitarian forms, but they recognize that it seldom does–and that fascist movements seldom gain state power. Yet the demonization and scapegoating that accompanies right-wing populism in the United States is breeding a counter-subversion panic targeting immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, feminists, gay people, liberals and leftists. Planned Parenthood has become a special target to appeal to the Christian Right.<br />
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<em>Authoritarian, xenophobic nativism is not a European import in the United States.</em></div>
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While racism is not confined to the American South, a recent study by sociologists Rory McVeigh and David Cunningham, described on<b>Brandeis Now</b> (<a href="http://www.brandeis.edu/now/2014/december/cunningham-kkk-impact.html" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">12/4/14</a>), found that a significant predictor of current Republican voting patterns in the South is the prior existence of a strong chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the area in the 1960s. McVeigh writes on the London School of Economics website (<a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2014/12/17/ku-klux-klan-activism-in-the-1960s-is-linked-to-the-souths-swing-to-the-republican-party/" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">12/17/14</a>) that although “populist politics appealed to many Southern voters in earlier times, the Southern Democratic Party was also a key instrument in the defense of white privilege and racial oppression.”</div>
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The passage of federal Civil Rights Act in 1964 propelled many Democratic Party “Dixiecrats” into the Republican Party, where they now appear at campaign rallies in freebie “gimme hats” touting Monsanto, Koch brothers fertilizers and Coors beer. They choose racial privilege over economic security. That’s <a href="http://whatsthematterwithkansas.com/" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;"><i>What’s the Matter With Kansas</i></a>. Now this mass base cheers Trump on while he is<a href="http://www.jeanhardisty.com/writing/books/" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;"> <i>Mobilizing Resentment</i></a>–the title of Hardisty’s 1999 book about the rise of right-wing politics in the US.</div>
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McVeigh argues that it is shifts in power dynamics and hierarchies in economic, political and social spheres that launch the processes in which radical right-wing groups attract members, and sometimes a mass base large enough to intrude into the larger society. Using as his analytical example the Klan in the 1920s, McVeigh demonstrates that the right-wing KKK in the 1920s was composed of white people attempting to defend their relatively more privileged position in the social, political and economic life of their communities (<b>E-Extreme</b>, <a href="http://www.publiceye.org/research/sociology/mcveigh-pdm.pdf" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">2-3/10</a>).</div>
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According to McVeigh, in his book <i>The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics</i>, “the Klan can best be understood as a response to devaluation in the economic, political and status-based ‘purchasing power’ of the movement’s constituents.” McVeigh adds that “right-wing movements often provide individuals with an effective vehicle for preserving status-based interests as well as political and economic interests.”</div>
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During the 1920s, millions of Americans joined the Klan, turning it into a major electoral force in several states with an important role in national politics. The tropes of racial threats posed by people of color as rapists and murderers were glued to the American psyche even before decades of stories planted by Klan organizers in their stump speeches for membership, notes Gerald Horne of the University of Houston, whom I interviewed for the <b>Washington Spectator</b> (<a href="http://washingtonspectator.org/from-the-kkk-to-the-ccc-to-dylann-roof/" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">8/1/15</a>) after Dylann Roof allegedly murdered nine black people in a historic Charleston, South Carolina, church. Roof told a participant in a Bible study: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country…and you have to go.”</div>
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In covering the story, the<b> New York Times</b> (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/us/politics/views-on-race-and-gop-ties-define-group-council-of-conservative-citizens.html?_r=0" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">6/22/15</a>) invented a cowardly phrase, “white primacy,” to describe the blatantly white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens, where Dylann Roof apparently learned this storyline.</div>
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On the day of the Republican candidates debate, the<b> New York Times</b> (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/us/politics/donald-trump-firework-of-campaign-trail-shows-a-more-measured-side.html?ribbon-ad-idx=4&rref=politics&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Politics&pgtype=article" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;">9/16/15</a>) burnished Trump’s rising star, declaring that Trump was starting to:</div>
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conform to some of the demands of a presidential race, making him, in some ways, more of a typical politician. It suggests that, as much as the Republican electorate is becoming more comfortable with the idea of Mr. Trump as its standard-bearer, he is embracing the rituals and expectations of the role, too.</div>
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The Trump candidacy and the shooting in Charleston are connected thematically by a mobilization to defend white nationalism while the racial and ethnic face of America changes hue. The populist right and the extreme right fuel each other. The more we as a nation ignore this process of nativist demonization, the more targets will be painted on the backs of our neighbors. History will record how long these right-wing backlash movements will spread their virulent rhetorical venom in our nation. But as Arendt observed, history judges us as individuals as to whether or not we stood up and spoke out against the banality of evil.</div>
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<i>Chip Berlet has written about bigotry for over 40 years, much of it while an analyst at Political Research Associates. He is co-author with Matthew N. Lyons of </i>Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort <i>and has published scholarly articles on the dynamics of right-wing populism, fascism and totalitarianism. Additional resources for this article are at</i><a href="http://www.researchforprogress.us/jump/fair2015.html" style="color: #596d9f; text-decoration: none; visibility: hidden;"> http://www.researchforprogress.us/jump/fair2015.html .</a></div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-40802311487477021402015-08-31T06:33:00.002-07:002015-08-31T06:41:37.780-07:00This Bernie Sanders interview proves mainstream media is the ward of the Military Industrial Complex (VIDEO)<h2>
<a href="http://egbertowillies.com/"><span style="font-size: x-large;">EgbertoWillies.com</span></a></h2>
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Bernie Sanders handled the spokeswoman of the military industrial complex very well</h2>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x33oykx" width="480"></iframe><br />
<a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x33oykx_this-bernie-sanders-interview-proves-mainstream-media-is-the-ward-of-the-military-industrial-complex_news" target="_blank">This Bernie Sanders interview proves mainstream...</a> <i>by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/ewillies" target="_blank">ewillies</a></i>
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Senator Bernie Sanders was interviewed by a ward of the military industrial complex and excelled with the appropriate answers. It will only get worse.</div>
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Martha Raddatz was on a mission. On the day where new poll numbers were released that showed Bernie Sanders credibly catching on in Iowa, it was evident that he has to be taken even more seriously. It is not enough for other candidates and political operatives to disparage Bernie Sanders. It is time that ‘journalists’ under the direction of the military industrial complex get involved.</div>
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Raddatz questions were no longer conversational. Her attempt with her leading questions were to be confrontational. Bernie Sanders kept his composure and answered them all effectively. He explained that his votes against both Iraq wars were correct.</div>
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Most countries in the world were united against Iraq each time and as such Iraq would have eventually succumbed to the pressure. That would have saved hundreds of thousands of human lives and trillions of dollars that could have otherwise been invested in the nation’s education and infrastructure. The country’s monies would have been distributed across the nation instead of to the few who profit from the military industrial complex.</div>
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Bernie’s answers were too correct. Raddatz had to attempt the condescending attack that implies Sanders was a weak pacifist dove. “Can you imagine Iran or Russia signing some sort of agreement in the future given your record on your reluctance to use force,” Martha Raddatz asked. “Because there is always that threat of force. But they may look at you and say ‘Bernie Sanders wouldn’t do anything about this’.”</div>
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The sly smirk on Bernie Sanders face as he got the gist of the question was evident. He understood exactly what was going on. He knew the military industrial complex’s narrative was at work in Raddatz’s question. His answer was simple. “I think they would be making a very very big mistake,” Sanders responded. “I believe the United States should have the strongest military in the world. We should be working with other countries in coalition. And when people threaten the United States, or threaten our allies, or commit genocide, the United States with other countries should be prepared to act militarily.”</div>
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Bernie Sanders then reminded Raddatz that our choices for war even in recent history has proven to be wrong. It had destabilized the world.</div>
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Raddatz then tried to create a rift between President Obama and Sanders by asking if he supported the drone program given his recent votes. He gave an answer right down the middle. In effect he will support it where it works and would not where it would cause more harm.</div>
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The video clip is an example of how the corporate media influenced by the military industrial complex attempt to inject themselves into the body politic in order to effect a particular outcome. They must be called out every single time.</div>
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</footer>NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-5173189971557208222015-08-24T11:10:00.000-07:002015-08-24T11:10:29.429-07:00The vast right-wing conspiracy is still real. Also, the media is really stupid<span style="font-size: x-large;">SALON</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/03/09/the_vast_right_wing_conspiracy_is_still_real_also_the_media_is_really_stupid/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The vast right-wing conspiracy is still real. Also, the media is really stupid</a></h1>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Fake scandals consume the news cycle. The real scandals go uncovered and unremarked. Our press is officially a joke</span></h3>
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Let me start by admitting, upfront, how truly fucking boring I find the Hillary Clinton e-mail story. Not only is it <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/03/hillary-email-scandal-not-so-fast.html" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: red; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">unclear</a> whether the former Secretary of State and future presidential candidate did anything illegal, but the fact that she’s <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/03/09/the_vast_right_wing_conspiracy_is_still_real_also_the_media_is_really_stupid/[http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/03/05/hillary-clinton-emails-state-department/24417671/" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: red; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">willing to turn her emails over</a> to the State Department casts doubt on the Republican fever dream that her now-infamous private in-box will contain mash notes from foreign donors to her husband’s foundation, or explicit instructions to her underlings to shred vital documents related to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.</div>
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It’s not a non-story, exactly. It’s more like a fishing expedition, a la Whitewater and<a href="http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1996-01-10/news/1996010097_1_clinton-first-lady-travelgate" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: red; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Travelgate</a> and the <a href="http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1923941" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: red; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Clinton Christmas card list</a>.</div>
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The primary motive of such stories isn’t really to root out genuine instances of moral turpitude. It’s to retail a narrative of insinuation that sells newspapers and baits clicks, one that the press has been working for three decades solid when it comes to the Clintons.</div>
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Emailgate (as it will surely be dubbed) is a story that arises from confirmation bias—without the confirmation of wrongdoing. Because the media have portrayed the Clintons as slippery and secretive for so many years—masters of the massive cover-up!—we should all assume that Hillary doing business on her private email is slippery and secretive and evidence of some massive cover-up.</div>
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But if you look at the history of the Clinton scandals, none of them, other than the Lewinsky nonsense, ever amounted to a hill of beans. All they did was prove to American news consumers (and to Hillary in particular) that the media really were engaged in a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/hillary012898.htm" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: red; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“vast, right-wing conspiracy”</a> to take her family down.</div>
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Which might be part of why she wanted her email on a private, secured system.</div>
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You think?</div>
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What the Hillary email kerfuffle demonstrates more broadly is the warped filter our Fourth Estate uses in making editorial decisions.</div>
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After all, if reporters wanted to critique Hillary Clinton’s record as Secretary of State—something they <em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">should</em> be doing, given her ambitions—they would do well to …<em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">critique her record as Secretary of State</em>. They might look at the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/11452114/Libya-chaos-deepens-as-Isil-strikes-threaten-to-halt-oil-production-and-government-bombs-Tripoli-airport.html" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: red; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">chaotic state of Libya</a>, for instance, whose “liberation” Clinton helped engineer. They might scrutinize the policies she advocated in Syria and Egypt. They might, in other words, offer some perspective on how Clinton views the world and America’s role in it.</div>
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These issues, however, are complex and nuanced. They require a grasp of our diplomatic and military aims in several countries, the extent to which Clinton shaped those aims, the nature of our involvement in those countries, and the results of that involvement.</div>
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That’s not easy reporting. It takes time and money and patience. And it relies on a rather earnest conception of the “public interest,” (i.e. that citizens actually <em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">want to know</em> how Hillary Clinton views the world and America’s role in it).</div>
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It’s much easier, of course, to produce stories that fit into the ready-made scandal template, which consists of:</div>
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a.) The dogged (and sometimes paranoid) pursuit of a smoking gun that will justify all the journalistic insinuation, or;</div>
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b.) Some private transgression, usually sexual in nature.</div>
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Nearly every major political story of the past decade falls into one of these two categories, from Obama’s birth certificate to Solyndra to the IRS farrago, from Monica Lewinsky to Mark Sanford to Anthony Weiner.</div>
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Week after week, reporters at major news outlets serve up these lurid morsels, and the usual Greek chorus of cable TV pundits and political handicappers chew them over for as long as the flavor lasts.</div>
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What’s at stake in these stories is almost never the morality of the policies enacted by our elected or appointed leaders. It’s ratings, pure and simple.</div>
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We’ve reached a point where traditional journalism is being steadily squeezed out by the toxic amorality of scandalism.</div>
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For an especially disheartening example of this paradigm in action, consider the hue and cry over Bill O’Reilly’s serial exaggerations concerning his derring do as a reporter.</div>
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By all indications, the media believes that the boastful lies he told decades ago to make himself seem brave are more important than the glaring deceits he peddles every night on his show.</div>
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But just imagine if reporters focused on those, rather than leaving Jon Stewart to do the dirty work?</div>
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Ditto the sad saga of Brian Williams. The NBC anchor carried the Pentagon’s water for years when it came to our disastrous adventure in Iraq. But his journalistic credibility only came under fire when he lied about his helicopter coming under fire in the field.</div>
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Or consider the coverage of the NFL’s woes this past season. For nearly a month, reporters whipped themselves into a froth over the off-the-field transgressions of two star running backs, Ray Rice, who knocked his wife unconscious in an elevator, and Adrian Peterson, who was indicted on child injury charges for disciplining his four-year-old son.</div>
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On the very same day that the Peterson story broke, a report surfaced revealing that the NFL’s own actuaries estimated that 30 percent of former players would suffer long-term cognitive ailments (i.e. nearly a third of the employees in America’s most famous workplace could expect to face brain damage).</div>
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This was shocking news, especially in light of the league’s longstanding efforts to deny, or obscure, the link between football and brain trauma.</div>
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And yet the vast majority of the ensuing coverage focused on what sort of punishment Rice and Peterson should or would receive, and whether NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had handled the scandals properly.</div>
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This is what scandalism does: it reduces the public discourse to a giant gossip session. It focuses our collective attention on the wrong questions.</div>
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It may turn out that Hillary Clinton wanted a private email system so she could hide nefarious deeds. But it’s much more likely that this “scandal” will turn out to be more sound and fury, signifying nothing.</div>
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The beauty of scandalism, from a business perspective anyway, is that scandal stories don’t have to lead to a revelation of corruption to be considered successful. They don’t have to deliver on their promise, so long as the pitch is seductive enough to dominate the news cycle.</div>
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To use an analogy more appropriate to the milieu: scandalism is the journalistic equivalent of spam.</div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-54401365341233740332015-04-08T07:21:00.003-07:002015-04-08T07:21:49.846-07:00Trends: Demographics and Political Views of News Audiences<a class="pewresearch" href="http://www.pewresearch.org/" style="background-color: #f0f0e6; border: 0px; color: #231f20; float: left; font-family: franklin-gothic-urw, Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 10px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 1em 0px 0px; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="Pew Research Center" src="http://www.people-press.org/wp-content/lib/img/pew-research-center.svg" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /></a><br />
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U.S. Politics & Policy</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">IN CHANGING NEWS LANDSCAPE, EVEN TELEVISION IS VULNERABLE</span></h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/2012/09/27/section-4-demographics-and-political-views-of-news-audiences/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Section 4: Demographics and Political Views of News Audiences</a></h2>
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In general, the regular audiences for most television and print news outlets tend to be older than the public as a whole. Yet there are some notable exceptions. As was the case two years ago, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show have the youngest audiences of the 24 news sources tested: 43% of Colbert’s regular audience is younger than 30, as is 39% of the Daily Show’s regular viewers. Just 23% of the public is 18-to-29.</div>
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Regular readers of the New York Times also tend to be younger than average. Nearly a third (32%) of regular Times readers – are younger than 30.</div>
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In contrast, political talk shows, particularly conservative talk programs, have older audiences. Large majorities of the regular viewers of Sean Hannity (66%) and The O’ Reilly Factor (64%) are 50 and older. Just 43% of all Americans are 50 and older. And while just 17% of the public is 65 and older, 42% of regular Hannity viewers and 40% of regular O’Reilly viewers are in that age category.</div>
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Liberal talk show audiences also skew older, but not as dramatically. Still, among regular Hardball watchers, 59% are 50 or older, and 28% are at least 65. Among regular Rachel Maddow viewers, 57% are 50 or older and 25% are at least 65.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-41.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046437" height="678" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-41.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #41" width="292" /></a>Men dominate the regular audiences of the financial publications included in the survey: 73% of the regular readers of the Economist and Bloomberg Businessweek are men as are 71% of regular Wall Street Journal readers.</div>
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Men also comprise smaller majorities of the regular audiences for several other news outlets, including Rush Limbaugh listeners (59%), viewers of Colbert (58%) and the Daily Show (56%), as well as regular viewers of Hannity (57%) and O’Reilly (56%).</div>
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In contrast, women make up nearly three-quarters (73%) of the regular audience for daytime talk shows, such as The View or the Ellen DeGeneres Show.</div>
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The regular viewers of MSNBC also are mostly women (62%). By comparison, the regular audiences for both CNN and Fox News are more evenly divided between women and men.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-42.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046438" height="688" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-42.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #42" width="295" /></a>Many regular news audiences have more education than the general public. And in general, regular readers of newspapers and magazines are more educated than the audiences of television shows or networks.</div>
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Nearly two-thirds (64%) of the regular readers of magazines such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic and Harpers are college graduates, as are 63% of readers of the Economist and Bloomberg Businessweek. More than half of the regular readers of the Wall Street Journal (56%), New York Times (56%) and news magazines (53%) also are college graduates. NPR’s audience also is relatively well educated (54% are college graduates). Just 29% of all Americans are college graduates.</div>
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By comparison, 29% of CNN’s regular audience, 26% of MSNBC’s audience and 24% of Fox News’s regular audience completed college.</div>
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Regular viewers of daytime talk shows are less educated than the public as a whole. Among this group, just 19% have four year degrees, 26% have attended some college and 54% have a high school diploma or less education.</div>
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Other high earners include readers of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times—38% of each group has a family income of at least $75,000—and Daily Show and Maddow viewers (37% each).</div>
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The income distribution of many audiences comes close to matching that of the general public, including audiences of show such as the O’Reilly Factor and Hardball, USA Today and network evening news. The income profiles of all three major cable news network audiences also closely track the general public.</div>
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Daytime talk show watchers stand out as the least well off regular audience. About half (51%) have family incomes of less than $30,000, while three-in-ten have $30,000-$74,999 incomes. Just 12% have incomes of $75,000 or more.</div>
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News Audiences’ Political Views</h3>
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Since 2010, there has been little change in the ideological views or partisan leanings of news audiences. The regular audiences for Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly continue to be dominated by conservatives: About seven-in-ten or more of each of these audiences describe their political views as conservative, compared with 35% of the general public. And while Republicans comprise just 24% of the public, they make up half or more of the regular audiences of these three news outlets.</div>
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On the other hand, the regular viewers of Rachel Maddow are mostly liberal (57%); this is the only news audience tested in which liberals make up a majority. Just 22% of Americans are liberals. Liberals also make up 48% of regular viewers of Hardball, 43% of Daily Show viewers and 40% of Colbert viewers.</div>
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Majorities of the Maddow (74%) and Hardball audiences (65%) are Democrats, as are more than half of regular MSNBC viewers (58%) and regular readers of the New Yorker and similar magazines (57%). Among the public, just 32% are Democrats.</div>
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Yet the regular audiences for a number of news sources differ only modestly from the public ideologically or politically. Many of the most popular news sources—network evening news, daily newspapers and morning news, for example—have audiences whose partisan and ideological breakdowns are fairly similar to the public’s. This also is the case for the regular audiences for Sunday morning news shows, business magazines, and both USA Today and the Wall Street Journal.</div>
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Attitudes about the News</h3>
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A majority of Americans (55%) say they trust a few news sources more than others; fewer (42%) say the news media “are pretty much the same.” These opinions have changed very little since 2004. For the most part, regular news audiences are more likely than the public to say they trust a few news sources more than others.</div>
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Fully eight-in-ten readers of magazines such as the New Yorker, Atlantic and Harpers, and Hannity, Maddow and O’Reilly viewers say there are a few sources they trust more than others. By contrast, just half of regular viewers of daytime talk shows trust some news sources more than others; nearly as many (45%) say the media are pretty much the same.</div>
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A majority of the public (64%) also continues to prefer to get political news from sources that have no particular political point of view; just 26% prefer news from sources that share their political views. Majorities of most news audiences say they want news with no political point of view, including seven-in-ten or more Colbert and Daily Show viewers, Economist readers, NPR listeners and readers of the New Yorker and similar magazines.</div>
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However, only about four-in-ten viewers of Hardball (37%), Hannity (41%), Maddow (43%) and listeners of Limbaugh (44%) say they prefer to get news from sources that don’t have a particular political point of view.</div>
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Political Knowledge</h3>
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The public was asked four questions to measure knowledge of political news and current events. The questions concern which party controls the House of Representatives, the current<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-46.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046442" height="707" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-46.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #46" width="294" /></a>unemployment rate, the nation that Angela Merkel leads and which presidential candidate favors taxing higher-income Americans. Overall, just 14% of the public got all four questions right. Slightly more people (17%) got all four wrong. Most news audiences, however, scored substantially better than the public.</div>
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Almost four-in-ten of Rachel Maddow’s audience (38%) answered the four questions correctly, as did 36% of readers of magazines such as the New Yorker and 34% of Wall Street Journal readers. Audiences for several other news outlets, including NPR (33% all four correct), the Daily Show (32%), Hardball (32%) and the New York Times (31%) fared nearly as well.</div>
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The daytime talk show audience fared poorly on the knowledge questions, with just 4% answering all four correctly. Among this group, 18% answered none of the questions correctly.</div>
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Slightly more than half the public (54%) knew that the Republican Party controls the House of Representatives. The percentage is down substantially from 2010, when 70% knew the Democrats controlled the House. This decline is reflected across most news audiences.</div>
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About half the public (52%) also knew that the national unemployment rate is about 8%. Almost all regular audiences were at least as likely as the general public to get this question right.</div>
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Just 22% of the public identified Germany as the country that Angela Merkel leads. Many audiences fared somewhat better on this question than the public as a whole, but most regular readers, viewers and listeners did not know this or offered no response.</div>
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Two-thirds of the public knew that Barack Obama—not Mitt Romney—is more supportive of increasing taxes on higher-income people. Majorities of all news audiences answered this question correctly.</div>
<a class="breadcrumb" href="http://www.people-press.org/2012/09/27/in-changing-news-landscape-even-television-is-vulnerable/" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="news-audiences-political-views" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="attitudes-about-the-news" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="political-knowledge" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><br />
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Pagination</h2>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-77985818573762673132015-04-08T07:17:00.001-07:002015-04-08T07:17:36.209-07:00NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-35714181330388763802015-04-08T07:12:00.000-07:002015-04-08T07:12:35.368-07:00Trends: News Attitudes and Habits<br />
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U.S. Politics & Policy</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">IN CHANGING NEWS LANDSCAPE, EVEN TELEVISION IS VULNERABLE</span></h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/2012/09/27/section-3-news-attitudes-and-habits-2/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Section 3: News Attitudes and Habits</a></h2>
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Most Americans continue to say they enjoy following the news. But the percentage saying they enjoy it “a lot,” while little changed since 2010, is significantly lower today than it was four <a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-30.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046426" height="235" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-30.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #30" width="409" /></a>years ago. Currently, 43% say they enjoy following the news a lot. That compares with 45% two years ago and 52% in 2008, 2006 and 2004.</div>
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Since 2008, there have been steep declines in the percentages of young people and liberal Democrats who say they enjoy following the news a lot.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-31.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046427" height="309" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-31.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #31" width="294" /></a>Currently, just 24% of those younger than 30 say they enjoy following the news a lot, down 14 points from 2008. There has been less change among older age groups, who continue to be more likely to say they enjoy following the news a lot.</div>
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Far fewer liberal Democrats get a great deal of enjoyment from following the news than did so four years ago, during the previous presidential campaign. Just 45% of liberal Democrats say they enjoy following the news a lot; that is unchanged since 2010, but down sharply from 67% in 2008.</div>
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Half of conservative Republicans say they enjoy keeping up with the news a lot. That is down from 57% in 2010 and 56% in 2008. There has also been a decline in enjoyment of the news among independents, from 45% in 2008 and 43% in 2010, to 38% now.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-32.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046428" height="303" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-32.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #32" width="294" /></a>As previous news consumption surveys have found, people who enjoy following the news tend to get more news from a variety of sources. Fully 71% of those who enjoy following the news a lot watched television news yesterday, compared with just 41% of those who get less enjoyment from keeping up. And newspaper reading is much higher among those who enjoy keeping up with the news a lot than among those who do not (44% vs. 17%).</div>
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People who enjoy following the news a lot also are more likely than those who enjoy it less to get news online (45% vs. 31%). But the difference is smaller in getting news from cell phones and other mobile devices. And those who get only some or little enjoyment from following the news are about as likely as those who enjoy it a lot to get news from social networks (20% vs. 24%).</div>
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About a quarter (26%) of those who get only some or little enjoyment from following the news did not get any news yesterday. That compares with just 5% of those who enjoy following the news a lot.</div>
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Most “Graze” for News</h3>
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The availability of online and digital news has increased the ability of Americans to get news when they want. In 2010, those who check in on news from time to time, as opposed to getting it at regular times, became a clear majority. That remains the case today: 57% describe themselves as the type of person who checks in on the news from time to time compared to 37% who get news at regular times.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-33.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046429" height="367" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-33.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #33" width="294" /></a>These news habits vary by age group. Nearly eight-in ten (79%) of those 18 to 29 graze the news during the day. Among those 30 to 49, 64% say their preference is to check in<br />for news from time to time, a proportion that drops to 44% for those 50 to 64 and 33% for those 65 and older.</div>
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People who get news from TV or newspapers are more likely than those who get news from digital news platforms to get news at regular times. Nearly six-in-ten (57%) of those who read a newspaper yesterday and 49% of those who watched TV news say they get news at regular times. That compares with only about a third (35%) of those who got news online or digitally yesterday and 31% of those who saw news or news headlines on social networks.</div>
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Weather News Remains Top Draw</h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-34.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046430" height="308" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-34.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #34" width="410" /></a>Despite major changes in the way Americans get news, the topics that interest people have changed very little over time. Weather continues to be the most popular news topic: 52% say they follow weather news very closely. No other type of news comes close.</div>
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About a quarter say they very closely track news about crime (28%), people and events in their community (26%) and sports (26%). Other topics, including news about political figures and events in Washington (17%) and news about international affairs (14%) are less popular.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-35.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046431" height="351" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-35.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #35" width="409" /></a>There are age differences in interest in news about number of subjects, particularly political figures and events in Washington: Just 5% of those younger than 30 follow this news very closely, the lowest of any age group. And only 43% of young people follow Washington news very or fairly closely; 57% say they follow it not too closely or not at all closely. Majorities in older age groups follow Washington news at least fairly closely.</div>
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Interest in Local, National, International News</h3>
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Majorities say they follow local (57%) and national news (54%) most of the time, whether or not something important is happening. But that is not the case when it comes to international <a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-36.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046432" height="248" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-36.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #36" width="293" /></a>news. Only about four-in-ten (39%) follow overseas news most of the time, compared with 56% who follow it only when something important is happening.</div>
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These views have changed little in recent years. But in 2004, 52% said they followed international news most of the time, whether or not something important was happening. That fell to 39% in 2006 and remained at that level in 2008 and in the current survey.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-37.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046433" height="208" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-37.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #37" width="408" /></a>A Pew Research Center report in June found that news interest in individual foreign news stories to that point in 2012 had been lower than in 2011, when the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the “Arab spring” and the killing of Osama bin Laden occurred. (See<a href="http://www.people-press.org/2012/06/06/interest-in-foreign-news-declines/" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“Interest in Foreign News Declines,”</a> June 6, 2012.)</div>
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Notably, there are large educational differences in the numbers following national news most of the time, but not international news. College graduates (69%) are far more likely than those with some college experience (53%) or those with a high school education or less (44%) to say they follow national news most of the time, regardless of whether something important is happening. But comparable percentages of all three groups say they follow international news most of the time (43% of college graduates, 40% of those with some college, 37% of those with no more than a high school education).</div>
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Most Want News with No Point of View</h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-38.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046434" height="395" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-38.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #38" width="294" /></a>Nearly two-thirds (64%) of the public say they prefer getting political news from sources that don’t have a particular point of view, compared with 26% who would rather get news from sources that share their political perspective. This is on par with opinions since 2006.</div>
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There continue to be sizable educational differences in opinions about political news with a point of view: 75% of college graduates, and 69% of those with some college experience say they prefer political news with no point of view. That compares with 53% of those with no more than a high school education.</div>
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Majorities across the political spectrum say they would rather get news with no particular point of view. Conservative Republicans are significantly more likely to express this view than they were in 2010 (58% now, 48% then). There have been more modest changes in the views of other political groups.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-39.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046435" height="396" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-39.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #39" width="294" /></a>Most Americans also continue to reject the idea that the news media are all pretty much the same. More than half (55%) say there are few news sources they trust more than others; 42% say the news media are pretty much the same.</div>
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As in previous surveys, conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats are more likely than moderates and independents to say that there are a few news sources they trust more than others. About seven-in-ten conservative Republicans (73%) and liberal Democrats (70%) express this view, compared with about half of independents (52%), moderate and liberal Republicans (51%) and conservative and moderate Democrats (49%).</div>
<a class="breadcrumb" href="http://www.people-press.org/2012/09/27/in-changing-news-landscape-even-television-is-vulnerable/" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="most-graze-for-news" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="weather-news-remains-top-draw" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="interest-in-local-national-international-news" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="most-want-news-with-no-point-of-view" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><br />
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Pagination</h2>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-58003780243729288722015-04-08T06:34:00.000-07:002015-04-08T06:34:46.394-07:00Trends: Online and Digital News<br />
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U.S. Politics & Policy</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">IN CHANGING NEWS LANDSCAPE, EVEN TELEVISION IS VULNERABLE</span></h3>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.people-press.org/2012/09/27/section-2-online-and-digital-news-2/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Section 2: Online and Digital News</a></span></h2>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-19.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046415" height="416" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-19.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #19" width="294" /></a>The percentage of Americans getting news from online and digital sources continues to grow, and that trend has been sustained in the last two years by an increase in the use of mobile devices.</div>
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The share saying they got news online yesterday is unchanged since 2010, at 34%. However, when those who get news from cell phones, tablets and other mobile devices are added, that figure grows to 39%. (The 2010 survey asked only about news online.)</div>
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The explosive growth of social networking sites has been another contributor to the online search for news, with the percentage saying they saw news or news headlines on social networking sites the previous day increasing from 9% in 2010 to 19%.</div>
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Many of the same trends also are evident in where people regularly get news. The percentage of Americans who regularly go online for news – those who get news online three days a week or more – has not increased. In the new survey, 46% say they get news online at least three days a week, which is unchanged since 2010.</div>
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However, the percentage who regularly get news on a cell phone, tablet or other mobile device has nearly doubled since 2010, from 9% to 15%, and the number regularly seeing news on social network sites has almost tripled, from 7% to 20%.</div>
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In the shifting online landscape, the use of mobile devices and social networking sites have replaced a traditional tool — search engines — as the driver of growth in finding news online. Search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo continue to be the largest single tool in finding news online, but the substantial growth in their use between 2008 and 2010 has leveled off.</div>
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Other online platforms have had less impact than social networking sites. Just more than one-in-ten (12%) regularly get news from reading blogs, a figure that has changed little since 2008. About the same percentage (13%) regularly gets news by email. Just 5% say they regularly get news by listening to podcasts. And just 3% of the general public regularly follows news on Twitter.</div>
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About half (46%) of the public says they get news online three days a week or more, with about a third (32%) going online for news every day. Neither figure has changed much since 2010; in 2008, 37% said they went online for news at least three days a week and 25% got news online daily.</div>
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There continue to be sizable age and educational differences in online news use. Nearly two-thirds of college graduates (65%) regularly get news online, compared with just 28% of those with no more than a high school education.</div>
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Only about one-in-five (22%) of those 65 and older get online news regularly, by far the lowest percentage of any age group.</div>
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<a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="online-news-sources" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><h3 style="border: 0px; font-family: abril-text, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 2em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0.5em 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Online News Sources</h3>
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There has been little change since 2010 in the websites people go to most for news and information. Yahoo, mentioned by 26% of online news users, is the top destination, as it was two years ago, while 17% name Google or Google News, 14% CNN, 13% local news sources and 11% MSN.</div>
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About one-in-ten online news users (9%) cite Fox as their top news destination. Nearly one-in-five Republicans (18%) name Fox as their top online news source, compared with 4% of Democrats and 8% of independents. By contrast, there are only slight partisan differences among those who mention MSNBC as the online source they use most often for news and information.</div>
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</h3>
<a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="news-online-mobile-social-networks" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><h3 style="border: 0px; font-family: abril-text, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 2em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0.5em 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
News Online, Mobile, Social Networks</h3>
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In the current survey, 46% say they get news at least three days a week online or on a cell phone or mobile device; that is unchanged from 2010, when the question only asked about getting news online.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-22.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046418" height="360" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-22.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #22" width="294" /></a>However, an increasing percentage says they get news on a cell phone, tablet or other mobile device. Currently, 15% say they regularly get news on one or more of these devices, up from 9% in 2010. In part, this is being driven by the increased internet availability on mobile devices. Two years ago, only about a third of the public (31%) said they accessed the internet on their cell phones. But today, more than half (55%) say they access the internet on a cell phone, tablet or another mobile device.</div>
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The percentage regularly getting news from a social networking site, such as Facebook, Google Plus or LinkedIn, also has increased dramatically – from just 2% in 2008, to 7% in 2010 and 20% currently.</div>
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These trends are complementary: Those who have smartphones – about half of the public (48%) – are far more likely to regularly see news or news headlines on social networking sites than those who do not (29% vs. 11%). Similarly, those who have iPads, Kindle Fires and other tablet computers (21% of the public) also are much more likely to get news from social networks than are those who do not own these devices.</div>
<a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="more-get-news-from-mobile-devices" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><h3 style="border: 0px; font-family: abril-text, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 2em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0.5em 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
More Get News from Mobile Devices</h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-23.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046419" height="458" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-23.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #23" width="294" /></a>An increasing proportion of Americans say they regularly get news on a cell phone, tablet or other mobile device. But this growth has been driven mostly by the greater availability of mobile internet access. Mobile internet users themselves are no more likely to regularly get news on these devices than they were two years ago.</div>
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Among the public, 15% regularly get news on a cell phone or another mobile handheld device, up from 9% two years ago. About three-in-ten (28%) mobile internet users say they regularly get news from one of these devices, which is virtually unchanged from 2010 (27%).</div>
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People younger than 50 are far more likely than older Americans to regularly get news on a mobile device. This primarily reflects the huge disparity in mobile internet access among younger and older Americans: 75% of those younger than 50 say they access the internet on cell phone, tablet or other mobile device. That compares with just 30% of those 50 and older. (For more on increased mobile internet use, see <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Cell-Internet-Use-2012/Main-Findings/Cell-Internet-Use.aspx" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“A Majority of Adult Cell Owners [55%] Now Go Online Using their Cell Phones,”</a> June 26, 2012, Pew Internet & American Life Project.)</div>
<a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="mobile-news-apps-also-increase" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><h3 style="border: 0px; font-family: abril-text, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 2em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0.5em 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Mobile News Apps Also Increase</h3>
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As news consumption on cell phones and other mobile devices has increased, so has the use of news apps, which allow people to access news and news headlines on their mobile devices. In the current survey, a quarter of all Americans, including 45% of mobile internet users, say they have ever downloaded a news app to their cell phone, tablet, or another mobile device. In 2010, 16% of the public, and only 20% of mobile internet users, said they had ever downloaded a news app.</div>
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Those who have downloaded news apps tend to be young, well-educated and wealthy. More than four-in-ten (43%) of those with family incomes of $100,000 a year have ever downloaded a mobile news app; that compares with just 19% of those with incomes of $30,000 a year or less. Even among mobile internet users, there are sizable income differences: Fully 60% of mobile internet users with incomes of at least $100,000 have downloaded a news app, compared with 40% of those with incomes of $30,000 or less.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-24.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046420" height="286" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-24.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #24" width="409" /></a>Not surprisingly, those who have downloaded news apps are far more likely than other Americans to get news from digital sources. Fully 70% say they got news online or digitally yesterday. Yet they are not any less likely than others to get news from traditional sources.</div>
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More than half (54%) of those who have downloaded news apps say they watched television news yesterday and 39% listened to radio news. Among all adults, 55% watched TV news and 33% listened to radio news. Comparable percentages of the public (29%) and those who have downloaded mobile news apps (30%) say they read a newspaper yesterday, but news app users are more likely to read the paper digitally and less likely to read a print version.</div>
<a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="news-on-social-networking-sites" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><h3 style="border: 0px; font-family: abril-text, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 2em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0.5em 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
News on Social Networking Sites</h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-25.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046421" height="489" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-25.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #25" width="296" /></a>The use of social networking sites such as Facebook, Google Plus or LinkedIn to get news and headlines owes in part to the substantial increase in use of social media in general by Americans. About four-in-ten (41%) of all adults say they had used a social networking site on the previous day, up from 30% in 2010, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.</div>
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Yet those who go on social networking sites also are far more likely to see news on these sites. Overall, the percentage of all Americans who regularly get news from social network sites has roughly tripled – from 7% to 20% – since 2010. And the proportion of social networkers who regularly get news there has more than doubled, from 16% to 36%).</div>
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Young people, who use social network sites at much higher rates than do older adults, increasingly use Facebook and other social network sites to get news. About a third or more of those ages 18 to 39 regularly see news or news headlines on social networking sites. Two years ago, fewer than one-in-five in younger age groups said they regularly got news on social networking sites.</div>
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Twitter for News</h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-26.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046422" height="291" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-26.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #26" width="294" /></a>Far more Americans go on social networking sites than Twitter. Just 13% of adults say they ever use Twitter or read Twitter messages. And Twitter users are less likely to get news from the site than are social network users.</div>
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Among the public, Twitter barely registers as a news source. Just 3% say they regularly get news on Twitter, while 4% sometimes get news there. Nonetheless, the percentage of Twitter users who get news on the site is growing. In the new survey, 27% say they get news regularly on Twitter while another 28% say they sometimes do this. In 2010, only 17% said they regularly got news on Twitter, while 15% said they sometimes got news on Twitter.</div>
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As is the case with social networks users, more Twitter users follow news on the site than use it to share news. About one-in-ten Twitter users (9%) regularly tweet or re-tweet news headlines; a similar percentage of social network users (10%) shares news on social network sites.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-27.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046423" height="280" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-27.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #27" width="296" /></a>Twitter users appear to be more closely connected to professional journalists and news organizations than their social networking counterparts when it comes to relying on them for online news. More than a third (36%) of those with Twitter accounts use them to follow news organizations or journalists. On social networking sites, 19% of users say they got information there from news organizations or journalists.</div>
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For the most part, those who see political news on Twitter and social network sites prefer sources with no particular point of view. About half of those who get news on Twitter (52%), and 56% of those who get news on social networks, say they prefer news sources that do not have a particular point of view. Just 26% of Twitter news users and 25% of those who get news from social networks would rather that these sources share their political point of view.</div>
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In this regard, the views of Twitter and social network users are similar to those of the general public. Most Americans (64%) say they would prefer to get news from sources that do not have a particular point of view, while 26% prefer news from sources that share their political view. (For the views of regular news audiences on this question, see Section 4: Demographics and Political Views of News Audiences.)</div>
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Getting News from Email</h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-28.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046424" height="347" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-28.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #28" width="293" /></a>There has been no growth in the past two years in the percentage of Americans that gets or shares news by email. Currently, 13% say they regularly get news by email, while 14% say they sometimes do this. In 2010, 27% said they also regularly (12%) or sometimes (15%) got new or news headlines by email.</div>
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Only 4% say they regularly use email to send news or news headlines; 11% say they sometimes do this. This also is little changed from 2010, when 3% regularly sent news stories by email and 11% said they sometimes did this.</div>
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About one-in-ten Americans (12%) say they get news directly from news organizations by email. This figure also has shown little change since 2010 (10%).</div>
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Searching for News Online</h3>
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After a sharp increase from 2004 to 2010, the use of search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing to find news has leveled off. After growing from 11% to 33% between 2004 and 2010, the number of adults who use search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo to search for news three or more days a week has steadied at 33%.</div>
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The same leveling-off of search engines also has occurred among regular online news users. Just over four-in-ten (42%) say they used search engines to find news three times a week or more. Prior to that, the number of online news users who frequently turned to search engines had jumped from 19% in 2004 to 44% in 2010.</div>
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There are few demographic differences when it comes to search engine use. As with other online news activity, older Americans and those with high school educations or less use search engines somewhat less than do younger people and college graduates.</div>
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Reading Political Blogs</h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-29.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046425" height="381" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-29.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #29" width="188" /></a>Slightly more than one-in-ten (12%) of all Americans regularly read blogs about politics or current events and another 21% say they read them sometimes. Just less than half (45%) never read blogs or do not use the internet. The numbers of those who read blogs regularly are little changed since 2008.</div>
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There is little partisan difference when it comes to blog-reading: 14% of Republicans, 13% of Democrats and 10% of independents say they read blogs about politics and current events.</div>
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Among age groups, regular blog reading is lowest among those 18 to 24 (6%) and highest among those 40 to 49 (17%). There is little difference in blog reading among the age groups in between. Looked at by education level, 15% of college graduates and those who have had some college regularly read blogs, a number that falls to 7% for those with high school or less.</div>
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<a class="breadcrumb" href="http://www.people-press.org/2012/09/27/in-changing-news-landscape-even-television-is-vulnerable/" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="regular-online-news-consumption" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><br />
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Pagination</h2>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-13240812368451134372015-04-08T06:02:00.002-07:002015-04-08T06:02:41.668-07:00Trends in Watching, Reading and Listening to the News<br />
<img alt="Pew Research Center" src="http://www.people-press.org/wp-content/lib/img/pew-research-center.svg" /><br />
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<span style="background-color: #f0f0e6; color: #d1a730; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 20px; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px;">U.S. Politics & Policy</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">IN CHANGING NEWS LANDSCAPE, EVEN TELEVISION IS VULNERABLE</span></h3>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.people-press.org/2012/09/27/section-1-watching-reading-and-listening-to-the-news-3/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Section 1: Watching, Reading and Listening to the News</a></span></h2>
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Television continues to be the public’s top daily news source. In the current survey, 55% say they watched the news or a news program on television yesterday. That is little changed <a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-10.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046406" height="423" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-10.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #10" width="407" /></a>from recent news consumption surveys. In the 1990s, however, far more Americans said they watched television news yesterday.</div>
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The percentages saying they listened to radio news and read a newspaper yesterday have steadily declined over the past two decades. Currently, 33% say they listened to radio news, while 29% say they read a newspaper yesterday.</div>
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Nearly four-in-ten (39%) got news online or on a mobile device yesterday, including cell phones and tablets. In 2010, 34% got news online; this did not include those who got news on a mobile device. In 2004, just 24% said they got news online during the previous day.</div>
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When other online and digital news sources are added in – including seeing news on a social network or Twitter, getting news from email and listening to podcasts – the percentage getting news digitally yesterday approaches the share watching television news (50% vs. 55%). In 2010, 44% got news from one or more digital platforms yesterday.</div>
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Traditional and Digital News Platforms</h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-11.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046407" height="332" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-11.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #11" width="410" /></a>Despite the rapid growth of digital news, more Americans continue to get news from traditional news platforms than from digital platforms. Seven in ten (71%) say they watched television news, read a print newspaper or listened to radio news yesterday. That compares with 50% who got news from one or more digital platforms.</div>
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By wide margins, Americans 50 and older continue to rely more on traditional news sources than digital sources. But the differences are more modest among those 25 to 50. And among the youngest Americans – those younger than 25 – substantially more get news digitally than from traditional news sources (60% vs. 43%).</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-12.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046408" height="376" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-12.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #12" width="411" /></a>Moreover, since 2010 there has been a sharp decline in the proportion of Americans who got news yesterday only from a traditional news platform – from 40% then to 33% currently.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/2008/08/17/key-news-audiences-now-blend-online-and-traditional-sources/" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As previous Pew Research news consumption surveys have found</a>, a plurality of Americans gets news from both traditional and digital news sources – 38% currently, up from 34% in 2010. And the percentage relying only on digital platforms for news also has increased, from 8% to 12%.</div>
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Notably, the falloff in the use of just traditional news sources has not come just among young people. Among those 40 to 49, just 24% say they got news yesterday only from televis</div>
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ion, print newspapers or radio, down from 40% in 2010. Two years ago, about as many people in this age group said they got news only from traditional platforms yesterday as from both traditional and digital platforms (40% vs. 39%). Today, nearly twice as many of those in their 40s blend digital and traditional sources as get news only from traditional sources (47% vs. 24%).</div>
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Many Young People Go Newsless</h3>
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In spite of an expanding variety of ways to get news, a sizable minority of young people continues to go newsless on a typical day. Fully 29% of those younger than 25 say they got no news yesterday either from digital news platforms, including cell phones and social networks, or traditional news platforms. That is little changed from 33% in 2010.</div>
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Older Americans are less likely to go newsless: 19% of those between 25 and 39, and smaller percentages of older age groups, say they got no news yesterday. These figures have changed little over the years.</div>
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Young people also consistently spend less time with the news than do older Americans, which is in part attributable to the relatively large share that gets no news on a typical day. In the current survey, those younger than 30 spent an average of 45 minutes getting news yesterday. Older age groups spent an hour or more with news, on average, with those 65 and older spending an average of 83 minutes with the news yesterday. Age differences in time spent with the news have changed little since the 1990s.</div>
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People Spend More Time with TV News than Online/Mobile Sources</h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-14.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046410" height="237" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-14.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #14" width="410" /></a>While the proportion of Americans who get news from any online or mobile source now rivals the share watching television news, people spend far more time with television news than online news.</div>
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On average, television news viewers spent 52 minutes watching TV news yesterday; fully half (51%) watched television news for an hour or more. Online and mobile news consumers spent 40 minutes on average with news online, and just 30% spent an hour or more. About half (49%) of those who got online or mobile news yesterday spent less than 30 minutes getting news from those sources.</div>
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In fact, people spent more time on average getting news from radio than getting news online. And while just 30% of online news consumers spent an hour or more getting news from online and mobile sources, 41% of radio news listeners did so.</div>
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News and Daily Life</h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-15.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046411" height="421" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-15.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #15" width="409" /></a>Far more older Americans get news on a typical day than engage in a variety of other routine activities. Higher percentages of those 50 and older got news yesterday than visited with family or friends, called a friend or relative just to talk, or watched something other than news on television.</div>
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But for young people, news faces stiff competition from a number of other daily pursuits, particularly social networking. Among those younger than 25, as many used Facebook or another social networking site yesterday as got news from all sources combined (76% vs. 71%).</div>
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More young people go on social networking sites than watch news or entertainment programs on television; just 40% of those younger than 25 watched something other than news on TV yesterday. Even among those 30 to 49, nearly as many used social networking sites (49%) as watched entertainment television (55%).</div>
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Gaming also has become an increasingly popular daily activity. In 2006, 17% played games on a computer or video game console yesterday; in the current survey, 33% say they played a game yesterday on one of these formats or on a mobile device. Among those younger than 30, more played a game yesterday than watched TV news.</div>
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Daily and Regular News Consumption</h3>
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The long-term trends in regular news consumption are generally similar to trends in where people got news yesterday. Among television news sources, the percentage saying they regularly watch local TV news has dipped below 50% for the first time (48%). And the percentage watching cable news channels has fallen five points since 2010 and 2008, from 39% to 34% currently.</div>
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The regular audience for nightly network news, which declined markedly through the 1990s, has changed little in recent years. Currently, 27% say they regularly watch the nightly network news on CBS, ABC or NBC. This percentage has not varied by more than a point or two since 2006.</div>
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As in previous news consumption surveys, more say they regularly read a newspaper than say they read a newspaper yesterday. Nearly four-in-ten (38%) say they regularly read a daily newspaper, which is largely unchanged since 2010 (40%) but down eight points from 2008.</div>
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The proportion of Americans who get news online at least three days a week has leveled off, after a period of dramatic growth. Currently, 46% say they get news online or on a mobile phone or device at least three days a week, unchanged from 2010 (when the question only asked about getting news online). About a third (32%) of the public gets news online every day.</div>
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Profiles of Regular News Audiences</h3>
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As the <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2010/09/12/section-4-who-is-listening-watching-reading-and-why/" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">201o news consumption survey</a> found, there are substantial demographic and political differences among regular news audiences. In general, most audiences for individual news outlets are older than the public generally, but there are exceptions. Among 24 news outlets asked about on the survey, news comedy programs – the Daily Show and Colbert Report – attract the largest percentages of young people.</div>
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About four-in-ten regular viewers of The Colbert Report (43%) and the Daily Show (39%) are younger than 30. Among the general public, 23% are younger than 30. In contrast, audiences for cable talk shows skew much older than the public: 42% of regular Sean Hannity viewers are 65 and older, as are 40% of regular Bill O’Reilly viewers. Among the public, just 17% are 65 and older.</div>
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Business publications draw a heavily male audience: 73% of those who regularly read magazines such as the Economist and Bloomberg Businessweek are men, as are 71% of regular Wall Street Journal readers. Women comprise relatively large shares of the regular viewers of daytime talk shows, such as The View or Ellen DeGeneres (73%), and morning news shows (62%).</div>
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The cable talk shows and news comedy programs continue to attract highly ideological audiences. Fully 78% of regular Sean Hannity viewers, and about seven-in-ten Rush Limbaugh listeners (71%) and Bill O’Reilly viewers (69%), are conservatives. Slightly more than a third of all Americans (35%) describe their political views as conservative.</div>
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Rachel Maddow is the only program whose audience is more than half liberal: 57% of regular Maddow viewers are liberals. Among regular Hardball watchers, 48% call themselves liberal. Additionally, about four-in-ten Daily Show (43%) and Colbert viewers (40%) are liberals. Among the public, just 22% say they are liberals.</div>
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Pagination</h2>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-88229288624589223472015-04-08T05:36:00.003-07:002015-04-08T05:36:57.039-07:00Trends in News Consumption: 1991-2012<br />
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Pew Research Center News</h1>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.people-press.org/2012/09/27/in-changing-news-landscape-even-television-is-vulnerable/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">In Changing News Landscape, Even Television is Vulnerable</a></span></h2>
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Trends in News Consumption: 1991-2012</div>
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Overview</h2>
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The transformation of the nation’s news landscape has already taken a heavy toll on print news sources, particularly print newspapers. But there are now signs that television news – which so far has held onto its audience through the rise of the internet – also is increasingly vulnerable, as it may be losing its hold on the next generation of news consumers.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-1.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046397" height="435" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-1.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #1" width="295" /></a>Online and digital news consumption, meanwhile, continues to increase, with many more people now getting news on cell phones, tablets or other mobile platforms. And perhaps the most dramatic change in the news environment has been the rise of social networking sites. The percentage of Americans saying they saw news or news headlines on a social networking site yesterday has doubled – from 9% to 19% – since 2010. Among adults younger than age 30, as many saw news on a social networking site the previous day (33%) as saw any television news (34%), with just 13% having read a newspaper either in print or digital form.</div>
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These are among the principal findings of the Pew Research Center’s biennial news consumption survey, which has tracked patterns in news use for nearly two decades. The latest survey was conducted May 9-June 3, 2012, among 3,003 adults. For more on the growth of mobile technology, see the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism report: “<a href="http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/future_mobile_news" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Explosion in Mobile Audiences and a Close Look at what it Means for News,</em></a>” released Oct. 1, 2012.</div>
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The proportion of Americans who read news on a printed page – in newspapers and magazines – continues to decline, even as online readership has offset some of these losses. Just 23% say they read a print newspaper yesterday, down only slightly since 2010 (26%), but off by about half since 2000 (47%).</div>
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The decline of print on paper spans beyond just newspapers. The proportion reading a magazine in print yesterday has declined over the same period (26% in 2000, 18% today). And as email, text messaging and social networking become dominant forms of communication, the percentage saying they wrote or received a personal letter the previous day also has fallen, from 20% in 2006 to 12% currently. There has been no decrease in recent years in the percentage reading a book on a typical day, but a growing share is now reading through an electronic or audio device.</div>
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The changing demographics of the TV news audience are particularly noticeable in the <a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-3.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046399" height="345" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-3.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #3" width="408" /></a>audiences for local and cable news. The overall share of Americans saying they regularly watch local television news has slipped from 54% in 2006 to 48% today – and in that regard it remains one of the news sources with the broadest reach. But the number of 18-to-29 year-olds regularly watching local news has fallen from 42% in 2006 to 28% today.</div>
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Over this same period, the regular audience for cable news also has aged. In 2006 and 2008, there were only modest age differences in regular cable news viewership. But in the current survey, more than twice as many of those 65 and older as those younger than 30 say they regularly watch cable news (51% vs. 23%).</div>
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Among individual cable news outlets, CNN’s regular audience has declined since 2008. Four years ago, nearly a quarter of Americans (24%) said they regularly watched CNN; that has fallen to 16% in the new survey.</div>
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Regular viewership for both Fox News and MSNBC has not changed much in recent years.<br />About one-in-five Americans (21%) say they regularly watch Fox News, while about half as many (11%) say they regularly watch MSNBC.</div>
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Print on Paper: Going, Going …</h3>
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While Americans enjoy reading as much as ever – 51% say they enjoy reading a lot, little changed over the past two decades – a declining proportion gets news or reads other material on paper on a typical day. And there is new evidence in the survey of a shift in reading to electronic platforms.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-5.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046401" height="246" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-5.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #5" width="294" /></a>In the new survey, only 29% say they read a newspaper yesterday, with just 23% reading a print newspaper. Over the past decade, the percentage reading a print newspaper has fallen by 18 points (from 41% to 23%). Somewhat more (38%) say they regularly read a daily newspaper, although this percentage also has declined, from 54% in 2004. Figures for newspaper readership may not include some people who read newspaper content on sites that aggregate news content, such as Google News or Yahoo News.</div>
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Over the past decade, there have been smaller declines in the percentages of Americans reading a magazine or book in print (six points and four points, respectively) than for newspapers.</div>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-6.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046402" height="277" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-6.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #6" width="295" /></a>Just as online newspaper readers make up an ever-greater share of all newspaper readers, so too are more magazine readers and book readers abandoning the printed page for tablets, digital books and other devices. In the current survey, 9% of those who said they read a magazine yesterday, and 20% who read a book, read them in a non-print format.</div>
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And substantial percentages of the regular readers of leading newspapers now read them digitally. Currently, 55% of regular New York Times readers say they read the paper mostly on a computer or mobile device, as do 48% of regular USA Today and 44% of Wall Street Journal readers.</div>
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By contrast, most readers of such magazines as Harpers, the Atlantic and the New Yorker still read them in print. But even for these magazines, nearly a quarter of regular readers (23%) say they read them mostly on a computer or digital device.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="online" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a>Online News: More Mobile, More Social</h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-7.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046403" height="273" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-7.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #7" width="295" /></a>While traditional news platforms have lost audience, online news consumption has been undergoing major changes as well. Nearly one-in-five Americans (17%) say they got news yesterday on a mobile device yesterday, with the vast majority of these people (78%) getting news on their cell phone. Among smartphone owners, nearly a third (31%) got news yesterday on a mobile device.</div>
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The second major trend in online news consumption is the rise of news on social networks. Today, 19% of the public says they saw news or <a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-8.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046404" height="481" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-8.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #8" width="410" /></a>news headlines on social networking sites yesterday, up from 9% two years ago. And the percentage regularly getting news or news headlines on these sites has nearly tripled, from 7% to 20%.</div>
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In part, this is a byproduct of the explosive growth in social networking. In the current survey, 41% of all adults, including 47% of online adults, say they used Facebook or another social networking site yesterday. (For more on social networking, see surveys conducted by the <a href="http://pewinternet.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pew Internet & American Life Project</a>.)</div>
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On top of the increase in social network use, the poll finds that news is also more prevalent on social networking sites. The share of users who saw news there yesterday nearly doubled from 19% to 36% between 2010 and 2012.</div>
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The increasing use of these sites for news has not just occurred among young people. In fact, those in their 30s are nearly as likely as those 18 to 24 to say they saw news or news headlines on Facebook or another social networking site yesterday (30% vs. 34%). And about a quarter of adults in their 40s (23%) saw news yesterday on social networks, up from just 8% in 2010.</div>
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The two trends in online news consumption – growing numbers getting news via mobile devices and the increasing use of social networks – are complementary. Overall, 55% of Americans access the internet on a mobile device, such as a cell phone or tablet; among this group, 30% say they saw news on social networking sites yesterday. That compares with just 9% of Americans who are online but do not access the internet on a mobile device.</div>
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Getting News on Twitter</h3>
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<a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-9.png" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-20046405" height="281" src="http://www.people-press.org/files/2012/09/9-27-12-9.png" style="border: 0px; clear: right; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 5px 0px 15px 15px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="9-27-12 #9" width="294" /></a>While news gathering is very common among Twitter users, the overall reach is limited because the audience remains relatively small. About one-in-ten Americans (13%) ever use Twitter or read Twitter messages. By comparison, more than half (54%) ever use other social networking sites, such as Facebook, Google Plus or LinkedIn.</div>
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As a result, far fewer people get news on Twitter than on other social networking sites. Just 11% ever see news on Twitter, while 3% got news there yesterday. Nearly half of adults (47%) ever get news on Facebook and other social networking sites and 19% got news on one or more of those sites yesterday.</div>
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Nonetheless, Twitter users are increasingly getting news on the site and sharing news stories with others. Overall, 83% of Twitter users ever see news on Twitter and 26% saw news there yesterday; both percentages are up considerably from two years ago. And most Twitter users (59%) tweet or retweet news headlines on Twitter. About the same percentage of users of Facebook and other social networks (61%) use those sites for sharing news or news headlines.</div>
<a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="overview" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="cnns-losses-continue" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="print-on-paper-going-going" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="online-news-more-mobile-more-social" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><a class="toc-anchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="getting-news-on-twitter" style="border: 0px; color: #bc7b2b; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><br />
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Pagination</h2>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-61142201016771292242015-04-04T07:50:00.000-07:002015-04-04T07:50:23.669-07:00 Media Intentionally Hides Republicans’ Economic Failures And Democrats’ Success <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.politicususa.com/2015/02/23/media-conceals-gop-economic-failures-democrats-success.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Media Intentionally Hides Republicans’ Economic Failures And Democrats’ Success </a></span></h2>
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<span class="author-byline">By: Rmuse</span>
<span class="author-more"><a href="http://www.politicususa.com/author/rmuse-2">more from Rmuse</a></span></div>
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<span class="published-date">Monday, February, 23rd, 2015, 9:47 am</span> </div>
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<img alt="Media Bias meter" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-178827" height="192" src="http://mx3.politicususa.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Media-Bias-meter.jpg" width="224" /></div>
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There was a time when the media, once called the Fourth Estate, was tasked with reporting the facts and truth to “<em>comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable</em>”
with the goal of providing a voice for the powerless masses. Of course
those days are long gone. In fact, the converse is particularly true in
21st Century America. It is likely that because American media is owned
and operated by the comfortable, and that afflicted Americans are
incapable of comprehending that Republicans actively work against their
best interests, journalists report anything but the glaring truth;
Republican policies are failures and the reason the number of
“afflicted” Americans is growing. It is true that Republican policies
are why Americans are rapidly losing economic ground to the few wealthy
elites, but the media is not only culpable, they are facilitating this
country’s slide into oligarchy by perpetually campaigning for the rich
and powerful. </div>
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It is interesting to see the media give inordinate
attention to public figures intent on demeaning the President of the
United States by questioning his love for America instead of why
Republican-led states are in debt and cutting services for their
residents. This is particularly true of Sunday political programs that
provide some Americans with the only ‘news’ about their politicians’
viewpoints and opinions on why their constituents are suffering.
However, the majority of Americans get their news from local sources
that are as beholden to corporate advertising as the major networks
pandering to conservative economic ideology. Democrats are just as
guilty of failing to cite Republicans’ economic failings in states they
control and it certainly contributes to why voters sat out the last
midterm elections; they were unaware why their states are in economic
distress or how to correct the problem. A problem, by the way, that a
majority of Americans actually know exactly what it takes to correct.</div>
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The really sad fact is that there is an abundance of
empirical data proving that every state controlled by Republicans is
suffering economically, and conversely how Democratically-controlled
states are succeeding and leading the nation in economic growth.
However, these statistics never make the evening news, or Sunday
political talk shows and it is further proof that the media is actively
campaigning to impose conservative economic failings on the entire
population. In what is a telling narrative, recent polling demonstrates
that Americans overwhelmingly agree with the economic policies that
allow Democratic states to grow their economies, pay down Republican
debt and deficits, and create jobs. It is likely why the media is
concealing the key to Blue states’ success; taxing the rich and investing in people.<br />
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A recent Associated Press-GfK <a href="http://www.politicususa.com/2015/02/22/ap-gfk-poll-obama-plan-raise-investment-taxes.html">poll</a>
that found that the majority of Americans agree with President Obama’s
proposal to raise taxes on the richest income earners. This is a stark
contrast to the economic policies being imposed in Republican states, or
proposed by Koch Republicans in Congress, cutting taxes on the rich
and raising them on the poor and middle class. Republicans continue to
claim, like they have for over thirty years, that cutting taxes on the
rich grows economies, creates jobs, and provides incredible revenue
streams to invest in much-needed state programs.</div>
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Of course, the thirty year experiment in ‘trickle
down’ economics is a monumental failure, and there are no better
examples than most Republican-led states suffering massive debt, job
losses, and revenue shortfalls affecting everything from education
funding to road repair. Conversely, there are just as many examples of
Democratic-controlled states that rejected Republican economics and
raised taxes to increase revenue, create jobs, reduce deficits, and
allow for investment in areas important to the people; roads, schools,
law enforcement, healthcare and social services for the people.</div>
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For example, main stream media is deliberately
concealing several Republican-controlled states that drastically cut
taxes for the rich that led to unsustainable debt and deficits leading
to greater cuts in education, services, transportation, healthcare, and
lost jobs. The same Republican states, like Koch Republicans in
Congress, have either proposed, or are already, increasing taxes on the
poor and middle class to increase tax relief for the rich and still are
suffering revenue shortfalls.</div>
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Just a sampling of Republican-controlled states that cut taxes for the rich leading to budget <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/12/12/even-amid-recovery-state-budgets-bleed-red-ink/">deficits</a>
are; New Jersey – $2.7 billion deficit, Pennsylvania – $1 billion
deficit, Kansas – $1 billion deficit, Wisconsin – $2.2 billion budget
deficit, Arizona – $1.5 billion deficit, Alaska – $3.5 billion deficit,
Alabama -$950 million deficit, Louisiana – $1.6 billion deficit, Alabama
– $700 million deficit, Michigan – $454 million deficit, North Carolina
– $445 million deficit, and Oklahoma – $600 million deficit. Now, none
of these numbers are theoretical, conjecture, or ideological; they are
hard numbers that main stream media cannot be bothered to report on the
national level any more than the overwhelming economic successes being
experienced in Democratic-led states like California.</div>
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After twelve years of Republican economics in California, the state was left with a $42 billion deficit and high unemployment with massive program and social service cuts unable
to save the state’s economic demise. As is usually the case on the
national level, the people elected a Democratic governor and legislature
that went to the people for permission to raise taxes and save the
economy. The people had the same sentiment the recent AP/GfK poll
revealed most Americans have and they voted to raise taxes and the
results are indisputable; and not reported by the main stream media.
California’s deficit is falling rapidly, the state is investing in
education, law enforcement, healthcare, road repair, social services, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-16/brown-s-california-overtakes-brazil-with-companies-leading-world">leading</a> the nation in jobs created, and posting a $4 billion budget <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/19/us-california-budget-idUSKCN0J32CT20141119">surplus</a> this year.<br />
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This economic success should be the leading economic
news across the nation and yet, even in most California media the
reports are that Obama and Democrats are intent on continuing to destroy
the nation’s economy, and jobs, by proposing higher taxes on the very
richest Americans. Sadly, even low-intellect Californians beholden to
bible-conservative ideology believe the media and oppose the same
Democratic economic policies they are benefitting from; more jobs,
services, greater healthcare access, more law enforcement, and social
services that are the reason they flock to the Golden State to receive.
Part and parcel of the dumbing down of Americans is due to conservative
media that is likely the only ‘education’ stupid California transplants,
like the Confederate states they left, will ever experience.</div>
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Many Americans are perplexed by idiot voters’ habit
of perpetually electing Republicans to enact economic policies that are
detrimental to their supporters’ self-interests. It is likely it is
because the stupid have no idea that there are proven economic successes
in Democratically-controlled states the media never reports any more
than the Republican failures ravaging red state economies across the
nation.</div>
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Republicans are responsible for the gross income
inequality killing off the middle class and sending poor people deeper
into poverty, but they would not have such an easy time without a
willing media facilitating enactment of failed Republican economic
policies. The sad fact is that journalists would not have to explain
anything to their audience; just provide a list of red states in
economic distress and blue states experiencing budget surpluses, job
growth, and increased services. However, that would entail contradicting
Republicans. If Americans have learned anything over the past decade,
it is that the media will not do anything contrary to the whims and
wishes of their Republican masters because it would mean afflicting the
comfortable.</div>
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<strong><em>Media Intentionally Hides Republicans’ Economic Failures And Democrats’ Success</em></strong> was written by Rmuse for PoliticusUSA.</div>
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<br />NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-66157830331013883752015-01-28T06:12:00.000-08:002015-01-28T06:12:03.752-08:00Why serious people discount Fox News<br />
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<a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/01/25/254265/leonard-pitts-jr-why-serious-people.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span>Leonard Pitts Jr.: Why serious people discount Fox News</span></span></a></h2>
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By LEONARD PITTS JR.</div>
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<span class="creditline">Miami Herald</span><span class="grd">January 25, 2015</span> <span class="moddate"></span>
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Tucker Carlson said on Fox that more children die of bathtub drownings than of accidental shootings. They don't.<br />
<br />
Steve Doocy said on Fox that NASA scientists faked data to make the case for global warming. They didn't.<br />
<br />
Rudy Giuliani said on Fox that President Obama has issued propaganda asking everybody to "hate the police." He hasn't.<br />
<br />
John Stossel said on Fox that there is "no good data" proving secondhand cigarette smoke kills nonsmokers. There is.<br />
<br />
So maybe you can see why serious people - a category excluding
those who rely upon it for news and information - do not take Fox, well
... seriously, why they dub it Pox News and Fakes News, to name two of
the printable variations. Fox is, after all, the network of death
panels, terrorist fist jabs, birtherism, anchor babies, victory mosques,
wars on Christmas and Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. It's not just that
it is the chief global distributor of unfact and untruth but that it
distributes unfact and untruth with a bluster, an arrogance, a
gonad-grabbing swagger, that implicitly and intentionally dares you to
believe fact and truth matter.<br />
<br />
Many of us have gotten used to
this. We don't even bother to protest Fox being Fox. Might as well
protest a sewer for stinking.<br />
<br />
But the French and the British,
being French and British, see it differently. And that's what produced
the scenario that recently floored many of us.<br />
<br />
There was Fox,
doing what Fox does, in this case hosting one Steve Emerson, a supposed
expert on Islamic extremist terrorism, who spoke about so-called "no
go" zones in Europe - i.e., areas of Germany, Sweden, France and Great
Britain - where non-Muslims are banned, the government has no control
and sharia law is in effect. Naturally, Fox did not question this
outrageous assertion - in fact, it repeated it throughout the week - and
most of us, long ago benumbed by the network's serial mendacities, did
not challenge Fox.<br />
<br />
Then, there erupted from Europe the
jarring sound of a continent laughing. British Prime Minister David
Cameron called Emerson an "idiot." A French program in the mold of "The
Daily Show" sent correspondents - in helmets! - to interview people
peaceably sipping coffee in the no-go zones. Twitter went medieval on
Fox's backside. And the mayor of Paris threatened to sue.<br />
<br />
Last week, Fox did something Fox almost never does. It apologized. Indeed, it apologized profusely, multiple times, on air.<br />
<br />
The most important takeaway here is not the admittedly startling
news that Fox, contrary to all indications, is capable of shame. Rather,
it is what the European response tells us about ourselves and our
waning capacity for moral indignation with this sort of garbage.<br />
<br />
It's amazing, the things you can get used to, that can come to seem
normal. In America, it has come to seem normal that a major news
organization functions as the propaganda arm of an extremist political
ideology, that it spews a constant stream of racism, sexism, homophobia,
Islamophobia, paranoia and manufactured outrage, and that it does so
with brazen disregard for what is factual, what is right, what is fair,
what is balanced - virtues that are supposed to be the sine qua non of
anything calling itself a newsroom.<br />
<br />
If you live with
aberrance long enough, you can forget it's aberrance. You can forget
that facts matter, that logic is important, that science is critical,
that he who speaks claptrap loudly still speaks claptrap - and that
claptrap has no place in reasoned and informed debate. Sometimes, it
takes someone from outside to hold up a mirror and allow you to see more
clearly what you have grown accustomed to.<br />
<br />
This is what the French and the British did for America last week.<br />
For that, Fox owed them an apology. But serious people owe them thanks.<br />
<br />
ABOUT THE WRITER<br />
<br />
Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for
commentary, is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 3511 N.W. 91 Avenue,
Doral, Fla. 33172. Readers may write to him via email at
lpitts@miamiherald.com. <br />
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<br />Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/01/25/254265/leonard-pitts-jr-why-serious-people.html#storylink=cpy</div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-51486300917257661192014-08-12T08:16:00.001-07:002014-08-12T08:18:36.013-07:0015 Things Americans Would Know if There Were a "Liberal Media"<br />
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<span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Daily Kos</a></span></span></span> / <em>By</em> <em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/akadjian" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">akadjian</a></em></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">If we have a "liberal media," as conservatives absurdly claim, why isn't it flooded with stories about US prisons, wealth inequality, outsourcing?</span></h3>
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<em><span class="field field-name-field-date field-type-date field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" content="2013-08-07T10:17:00-07:00" datatype="xsd:dateTime" property="dc:date">August 7, 2013</span></span></span></span> </em> | </div>
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<a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=rnc%20&source=newssearch&cd=1&ved=0CCwQ-AsoAjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2F2013%2F08%2F06%2Frnc-hillary-clinton_n_3714811.html&ei=4y4CUtXZDIrhygG9w4Bw&usg=AFQjCNE1iiyRHDUFrMEMWLNXh8pvTkAb6g&sig2=qny7Gzx5Go9tjcPeXzXq8Q&bvm=bv.50310824,d.aWc" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Reince Priebus</a> (and apparently <a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/group-set-to-protest-liberal-media-bias-los-angeles" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">many others</a>) still thinks there's a liberal media.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
While I share Reince's frustration with the media, as a liberal, I'd like to go on record and state that the media isn't focusing on issues I care about. They seem to be far more focused on entertainment and making money.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Don't believe me?</div>
<div id="intro">
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
If you know anyone who still believes in a "liberal media," here's 15 things everyone would know if there really were a "liberal media" (inspired by Jeff Bezos' <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-06/why-is-jeff-bezos-buying-the-em-washington-post-em" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">purchase of The Washington Post</a>):</div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
<strong>1. Where the jobs went.</strong></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Outsourcing (or offshoring) is a bigger contributor to unemployment in the U.S. than laziness.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Since 2000, U.S. multinationals have cut 2.9 million jobs here while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg as multinational corporations account for only about 20 percent of the labor force.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
When was the last time you saw a front-page headline about outsourcing?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
</div>
<div alt="" class="media-image" height="336" width="480">
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/files/outsourcing_zps2cf6f1b0.jpg" rel="lightbox" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="http://cannabiswww.alternet.org/files/styles/large/public/outsourcing_zps2cf6f1b0.jpg" height="336" style="border: none;" typeof="foaf:Image" width="480" /></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.alternet.org/files/outsourcing_zps2cf6f1b0.jpg" rel="lightbox" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;"><small>Click to enlarge.</small></a></div>
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</a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Source: <em>Wall Street Journal via <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/04/19/159555/us-corporations-outsourced-americans/" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Think Progress</a>.</em></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
<strong>2. Upward wealth redistribution and/or inequality.</strong></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
In 2010, 20 percent of the people held approximately 88 percent of the net worth in the U.S. The top one percent alone held 35 percent of all net worth.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
The bottom 80 percent of people held only 12 percent of net worth in 2010. In 1983, the bottom 80 percent held 18 percent of net worth.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
<a href="http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">These statistics</a> are not Democrat or Republican. They are widely available to reporters. Why aren't they discussed in the "liberal" media?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
</div>
<div alt="" class="media-image" height="336" width="480">
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/files/ownership_occupy_poster_zps7879609f.jpg" rel="lightbox" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="http://cannabiswww.alternet.org/files/styles/large/public/ownership_occupy_poster_zps7879609f.jpg" height="336" style="border: none;" typeof="foaf:Image" width="480" /></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.alternet.org/files/ownership_occupy_poster_zps7879609f.jpg" rel="lightbox" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;"><small>Click to enlarge.</small></a></div>
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/files/ownership_occupy_poster_zps7879609f.jpg" rel="lightbox" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">
</a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Source: <em><a href="http://owsposters.tumblr.com/home" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Occupy Posters</a></em></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
<strong>3. ALEC.</strong></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
If there was a corporate organization that drafted laws and then passed them on to legislators to implement, wouldn't you think the "liberal" media would report on them?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
The <a href="http://www.alec.org/" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)</a> is such an organization. Need legislation drafted? No need to go through a lobbyist to reach state legislatures anymore. Just contact ALEC. Among other things, ALEC is responsible for:</div>
<ul>
<li>Stand Your Ground laws</li>
<li>Voter ID laws</li>
<li>Right to Work laws</li>
<li>Privatizing schools</li>
<li>Health savings account bills which benefit health care companies</li>
<li>Tobacco industry legislation</li>
</ul>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Many legislators don’t even change the proposals handed to them by this group of corporations. They simply take the corporate bills and bring them to the legislative floor.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
This is the primary reason for so much similar bad legislation in different states. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Hello ... "liberal media" ... over here!</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
They're <a href="http://www.alec.org/meetings/annual-meeting/" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">meeting in Chicago</a> this weekend. Maybe the "liberal media" will send some reporters.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
<strong>4. The number of people in prison. </strong></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Which country in the world has the most people in prison?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
You might think it would be China (with more than one billion people and a restrictive government) or former Soviets still imprisoned in Russia.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Wrong. The United States has the most people in prison by far of any country in the world. With 5 percent of the world’s population, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html?pagewanted=all" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">we have 25 percent of the world’s prisoners</a> – 2.3 million criminals. China with a population 4 times our size is second with 1.6 million people in prison.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
In 1972, 350,000 Americans were in imprisoned. In 2010, this number had grown to 2.3 million. Yet from 1988 – 2008, crime rates have declined by 25 percent.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Isn't anyone in the liberal media interested in why so many people are in prison when crime has dropped? WTF "liberal media"?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
</div>
<div alt="" class="media-image" height="322" width="480">
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/files/incarcerated_americans_zpsb7c891bd.jpg" rel="lightbox" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="http://cannabiswww.alternet.org/files/styles/large/public/incarcerated_americans_zpsb7c891bd.jpg" height="322" style="border: none;" typeof="foaf:Image" width="480" /></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.alternet.org/files/incarcerated_americans_zpsb7c891bd.jpg" rel="lightbox" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;"><small>Click to enlarge.</small></a></div>
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/files/incarcerated_americans_zpsb7c891bd.jpg" rel="lightbox" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">
</a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Source: <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-clean-fixed-timescale.svg" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Wikipedia/Justice Policy Institute Report</a>.</em></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
<strong>5. The number of black people in prison.</strong></div>
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In 2009, non-Hispanic blacks, while only 13.6 percent of the population, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">accounted for 39.4 percent of the total prison and jail population</a>.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
In 2011, according to FBI statistics, <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-43" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">whites accounted for 69.2 percent of arrests</a>.</div>
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Numbers like these suggest a racial bias in our justice system.</div>
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To me, this is a much bigger story than any single incident like Travyon Martin. Or, at the very least, why didn't the "liberal media" ever mention this while covering the Martin story?</div>
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<strong>6. U.S. health care costs are the highest in the world.</strong></div>
<div id="bookmark" style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
The expenditure per person in the U.S. is $8,233. Norway is second with $5,388.<br />
Total amount of GDP spent on health care is also the highest of any country in the world at 17.6 percent. The next closest country is the Netherlands at 12 percent.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
As a liberal, I’d like to ask why the market isn’t bringing down costs. I’d think a "liberal" media might too.</div>
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<strong>7. Glass-Steagall.</strong></div>
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Glass-Steagall separated risky financial investments from government backed deposits for 66 years.</div>
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The idea is simple. Banks were prohibited from using your federally insured savings to make risky investments.</div>
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Why is this a good idea?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Risky investments should be risky. If banks can use federally insured funds, there is no risk to them. If they win, they win. If they lose, we cover the cost.</div>
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Elizabeth Warren did a great job explaining this to the "liberal news" desk at <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mLdKtUgoiE" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">CNBC</a>.</div>
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<strong>8. Gerrymandering.</strong></div>
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When was the last time you saw a front page headline about gerrymandering?</div>
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Before the 2010 election, conservatives launched a plan to win control of state legislatures before the census. The idea was to be in power when national congressional districts were redrawn in order to fix them so Republicans would win a majority of districts.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
The <a href="http://www.redistrictingmajorityproject.com/" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Redistricting Majority Project</a> was hugely successful. In 2012, Barack Obama was elected President by nearly 3.5 million votes. In Congressional races, Democrats drew nearly 1.4 million more votes than Republicans yet Republicans won control of the House 234 seats to 201 seats.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
How is this possible?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
By pumping $30 million into state races to win the legislatures, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/the-great-gerrymander-of-2012.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Republicans redrew state maps</a> in states such as Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, Florida and Ohio to place all of the Democrats into just a few districts.<br />
In this manner, Democrats win heavily in a couple districts and lose the rest.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
In North Carolina, the statewide vote was 51 percent Democrat and 49 percent Republican yet 9 Republicans won and only 4 Democrats.</div>
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Where is your coverage of this vote stealing, "liberal media"? You're willing to cover voter ID laws, why can't you cover real vote stealing?</div>
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<a href="http://www.alternet.org/files/5459fab1-8d5b-44e5-a728-b31ed72bf00d_zps9a434c5a.jpg" rel="lightbox" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="http://cannabiswww.alternet.org/files/styles/large/public/5459fab1-8d5b-44e5-a728-b31ed72bf00d_zps9a434c5a.jpg" height="400" style="border: none;" typeof="foaf:Image" width="446" /></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.alternet.org/files/5459fab1-8d5b-44e5-a728-b31ed72bf00d_zps9a434c5a.jpg" rel="lightbox" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;"><small>Click to enlarge.</small></a></div>
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Source: <em><a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/republicans-gerrymandering-house-representatives-election-chart" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Mother Jones</a>.</em></div>
<div>
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<strong>9. The number of bills blocked by Republicans in Congress.</strong></div>
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The filibuster has been used a record number of time since Obama was elected President. From 2008-2012, 375 bills weren’t even allowed to come to a vote in the Senate because Republicans threatened the filibuster.</div>
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In 2013, during the first 6 months, <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/17449-why-we-have-a-do-nothing-congress" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Congress has only passed 15 bills</a> that were signed into law. This is 8 fewer than in the first 6 months of 2012 and 19 fewer than 2011.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Also, until the Senate recently threatened to reform the filibuster, <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/30/as-gop-senators-block-obama-s-nominees-democrats-prepare-nuclear-option.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">the GOP had succeeded in holding up 79 of President Obama’s picks</a> to the U.S. Circuit Court and Courts of Appeal. They’re blocking these appointments regardless of qualification.</div>
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Where's the coverage? Where are the reporters asking why nothing is getting done?</div>
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* crickets *</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
<strong>10. The Citizens' United Supreme Court decision.</strong></div>
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In a <a href="http://freespeechforpeople.org/sites/default/files/me10129b_public.pdf" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">2011 Hart poll</a>, only 22% of those polled had actually heard of the Citizens’ Uniteddecision before taking the survey.</div>
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If 77% believe that corporations have more control over our political process than people, why isn't the liberal media talking more about the Citizens’ United decision?</div>
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<strong>11. Nixon’s Southern Strategy.</strong></div>
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The Southern Strategy is a strategy for gaining political power by exploiting the greatest number of ethnic prejudices. Kevin Philips, Republican and Nixon campaign strategist, speaking about this strategy in <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/07/1229087/c.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;%20http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-southern.pdf" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">a 1970 interview</a> with the New York Times:</div>
<blockquote>
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that...but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.</blockquote>
This strategy has been used since President Johnson and Democrats in Congress passed the Civil Rights Act to build the Republican party.<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Examples of this strategy were evident as recently as 2008 and 2012 as Republicans took up their assault on Medicaid, Social Security, labor unions, and Obamacare – programs which, though they benefit more white seniors, retirees, women, and children, have been sold to many Americans as handouts to lazy, undeserving blacks and minorities.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Yet you never hear the "liberal media" (at least since the 1970 NY Times) talking about the use of this strategy. At least not like this:</div>
<blockquote>
"P (President) emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to." - <a href="http://home1.gte.net/res0kzdq/haldemanpage53.html" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">H.R. Haldeman's diary</a>, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff</blockquote>
<strong>12. Tax cuts primarily benefit the wealthy.</strong><br />
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A progressive tax program is designed to tax people very little as they are starting out and progressively increase their rates as they do better.</div>
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Republican plans seem designed to do exactly the opposite: shift the tax burden off of the wealthy and onto working people.</div>
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Take the repeal of the estate tax. In Ohio this was recently <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/07/1229087/c.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;%20http://www.plunderbund.com/2013/05/29/senate-gop-adds-the-gordon-gekko-tax-cut-to-the-budget/" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">repealed by Republicans</a>. The benefit is only realized by people with estates larger than $338,000 (as the first $338k was exempt) and realized most by people with even wealthier estates.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
This also explains why Republicans want to shift the system from income taxes to consumption taxes. Consumption taxes are paid most by those at the bottom as basic consumption remains the same regardless of income.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
It also explains why capital gain taxes are so low. Income through capital gains is only taxed at 20% (increased from 15% in 2012) instead of at the rate of other income (closer to 35%).</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
It also explains why <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/07/1229087/i.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;%20http://www.nationaljournal.com/economy/why-the-payroll-tax-cut-may-not-be-as-bad-as-consumers-fear-20130201" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Republicans were so willing to let the payroll tax cut expire</a>. The payroll tax cut benefited people who were getting paid, not those issuing the paychecks. How much fight did you see to save this tax cut?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
While tax cuts are sold to us as benefiting everyone, they really benefit a select few at the very top.</div>
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If everyone knew who tax cuts really benefit, would so many people vote for them?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
<strong>13. What's happening to the bees?</strong></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/science/earth/soaring-bee-deaths-in-2012-sound-alarm-on-malady.html?_r=0" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">40-50% of commercial U.S. bee hives were lost this year</a> to colony collapse disorder.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
This seems like an odd one to include, why is this important?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
The Agriculture Department says a quarter of the American diet depends on pollination by honeybees.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
<a href="http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/docs.htm?docid=15572" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Dating from 2006</a>, colony collapse disorder is a relatively new problem. More "liberal media" coverage might push the urgency of the issue.</div>
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Instead here's a typical media story about bees: <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_BEE_ATTACK?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Thousands of Bees Attack Texas Couple, Kill Horses</a>.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
<strong>14. The impact of temporary workers on our economy.</strong></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
The <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/07/08/us-companies-increasingly-turning-to-temporary-workers-to-fill-positions/" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">number of temporary workers has grown by more than 50 percent</a> since the recession ended to nearly 2.7 million.</div>
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If freelancers, contract workers, and consultants are included, the number is nearly 17 million workers not directly employed by the companies who hire them. This equals 12 percent of the workforce.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
What's the impact of a "just in time" workforce on workers and our economy? How about that for a story "liberal media"?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
<strong>15. Media consolidation.</strong></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
Six corporations - Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Viacom, Comcast, and CBS -<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">control roughly 90% of the media</a> in the U.S.</div>
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These companies are in business to make a profit.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
This is why you'll find plenty of advertisements in the media. Entertainment? Check. Sports? Definitely. Weather? Yep.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
You'll also find plenty of "if it bleeds, it leads" stories designed to hook you in. <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57596970/vendors-witnesses-recall-venice-hit-and-run-horror/" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Vendors, witnesses recall Venice hit-and-run horror.</a> <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/06/fort-hood-trial-brings-together-attacker-victims/?intcmp=trending" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Fort Hood trial turns bizarre as shooter grills witnesses</a>.</div>
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There's also plenty of political bickering: Democrats said this, Republicans said that. We let you decide (but we never weigh in with any facts or fact-checking).</div>
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What won't you hear? You won't hear the "liberal media" discuss the corporate media.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
<strong>What to make of this:</strong></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
If the media were "liberal," it would <a href="http://www.journalism.org/resources/principles" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">serve the public interest</a> and shine a light on issues like the ones above.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
More people would also have a better understanding of global warming, peak oil, population growth, political lobbying, government's role in a functioning economy, how much we spend on the military, and countless other issues.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
What you’re more likely to see in the media, however, are stories designed to get you to buy their paper, or watch their show, or listen to their radio station. If it bleeds, it leads. This is why the media is concerned with scandal, celebrities, gossip, and fear.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
If anything, our news consists of paid advertisements and outlets too scared of offending anyone to publish much of substance. Investigative journalism is also expensive; entertainment is cheap.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
The way this corporate media behaves may not be surprising. I apologize if you feel any of this is beating you over the head.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
This Buzzfeed-style list wasn't intended to introduce this idea as new (<a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/what-liberal-media" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">others</a> have done a much better job), but rather to highlight the sheer absurdity of a "liberal media" for an audience who may not see it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 22px;">
One way to approach the topic is to simply ask: If we have a "liberal media," where are the liberal stories?</div>
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<h4>
<em>ORIGINALLY POSTED TO <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/blog/akadjian/" style="color: #5f6599; font-family: Arial, sans-serif, Georgia; font-size: 10px; margin: 0px; text-decoration: none;">AKADJIAN</a> ON WED AUG 07, 2013 AT 05:02 AM PDT.</em></h4>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-76113219467384201222014-06-07T07:49:00.002-07:002014-06-07T07:54:54.122-07:00SHARING: SHARING IS CARING IS SHARING: (THE MEDIA OF LIFE)<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">THE NEW YORKER</span></b></h2>
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OCTOBER 30, 2013</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/dave-eggers-the-circle-novel-sharing-is-caring-is-sharing.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">SHARING IS CARING IS SHARING</a></span></h2>
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POSTED BY <cite class="vcard author" style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/betsy_morais/search?contributorName=Betsy%20Morais" rel="author" style="color: black; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title="search site for content by Betsy Morais">BETSY MORAIS</a></cite></div>
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War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.<br />
—<i>George Orwell, “1984”</i></div>
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Secrets are lies. Sharing is Caring. Privacy is theft.<br />
—<i>Dave Eggers, “The Circle”</i></div>
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The construction begs for comparison, and yet “The Circle” is no “1984.” In the future, according to Dave Eggers, one mega social-network corporation, the namesake of his new novel, has become the technological architect of daily life—arranging conversations, restocking pantries, making payments, and ranking human beings. The company’s leaders wear zip-up hoodies, of course, and enjoy surfing, yet they are known with reverent remove as the Three Wise Men. It’s serious business—so serious that even the parties are work, since attendance is monitored by your boss—and Eggers emulates this sobriety in his writing, which plods across the corporate campus resentfully. New hire Mae Holland, the novel’s protagonist, bounds forth into the communal ethos of her overlords, embracing her first assignment, answering e-mails that provide a “human experience” to small advertisers. Eggers seems bored by the task—Oh, must we spend another day at the Customer Experience desk, minutiae un-inspected, e-mails unread? He doesn’t want to be in the grind, or even playfully tease it. Disclosure is the story of “The Circle,” yet Eggers hardly tells enough.</div>
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But even without the searing wit of “1984,” the book is capable of landing on point—when it’s at its most irksome. Where “1984” has the vigilant Police Patrol and Thought Police, “The Circle” has SeeChange and Clarification. Surveillance isn’t a bad word; it’s a gift, even a human right. “I truly believe that if we have no path but the right path, the best path, then that would present a kind of ultimate and all-encompassing relief,” Wise Man Eamon Bailey, standing in for the role of Internet missionary, tells Mae. “We can cure any disease, end hunger, everything, because we won’t be dragged down by all our weaknesses, our petty secrets, our hoarding of information and knowledge. We will finally reach our full potential.”</div>
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The speech has a familiar ring: in September, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg wrote an open letter about the launch of News Feed, and the note resurfaced with this week’s unveiling of <a href="http://zuckerbergfiles.org/" style="color: black; outline: 0px;">The Zuckerberg Files</a>, an archive of his every public utterance catalogued by Michael Zimmer and a small team at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Digital Commons. (Zuckerberg, the social wizard who likes to keep to himself, has fittingly been made all the more transparent now that his transcripts have been neatly collected for viewing.) “When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with.” He also said that a week prior, “I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in—helping people share information with the people they want to share it with.”</div>
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Katherine Losse, Facebook employee number fifty-one and the author of “The Boy Kings”—which, <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/09/did-dave-eggers-rewrite-kate-losses-book/69631/" style="color: black; outline: 0px;">she has unsatisfactorily argued</a>, Eggers ripped off—worked in customer support before becoming Zuckerberg’s speechwriter. By 2009, as Losse was writing e-mails on behalf of her boss, Facebook was working on adjusting its privacy settings. “We are pushing the world in the direction of making it a more open and transparent place,” she quoted Zuckerberg as saying in meetings. So, too, transparency is the guiding principle of the Circle; the company’s mantra is “<small>ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN</small>.” (Deletion is outlawed.) But Mae, unlike Losse, is not quite a skeptic. Rather, she’s an earnest wannabe who divulges more and more over time, with less and less apprehension. Though Mae occasionally has impure thoughts about whether to keep to herself instead of hopping into the Circle, as employees are expected to do—with feeling!—she strives to post more. In doing so, she “feels a profound sense of accomplishment and possibility.”</div>
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Last year, Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, of Harvard’s department of psychology, published a paper titled “Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding.” As part of their study, they asked participants to undergo fMRI scans while stating opinions. The researchers found that “humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value, in the same way as with primary rewards such as food and sex.”</div>
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“The sites make the process so easy, and people see their friends sharing, and that encourages them,” Jessica Vitak, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies, told me.“So it’s kind of like ‘Hey, join this party.’” In research released last week, to be presented at a conference in February, Vitak and her co-author, Jinyoung Kim, followed Facebook users as they decided what to post. They found that, through “an often-complex thought process,” users weigh the pros and cons in deciding what to share, as a way of replicating the boundaries of offline conversation. As one participant, Zara, reflected of facing her invisible audience:</div>
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If you post this, are you okay with people, everyone seeing this? Is that okay with you? I think twice about it. And if I think it’s not a big deal, then I’ll go ahead and do it. But if I’m thinking about the repercussions of it; if I can think of a few, then I won’t do it.</blockquote>
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Among American adults on Facebook, forty-four per cent update their status at least weekly, fifty-three per cent comment on a friend’s status, and forty-eight per cent comment on a photo. Sites that tell users they’ve only filled out a limited percentage of their personal pages—Where did you go to high school? Are you in a relationship?—encourage more disclosure, no matter how seemingly mundane. “Any piece of information that people share benefits these sites, because it gives Facebook, or whatever company, a more accurate profile of the user,” Vitak said. “They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Well, there’s no such thing as bad information, in their mind. It’s adding information that’s valuable to them.”</div>
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That data collection, of demographic details, is only half of the equation; Facebook also tracks behaviors. On Tuesday, the company announced that it would start monitoring stats like how long your cursor hovers over something on the site, or whether your News Feed is visible on your screen at any particular moment. There’s no opportunity to pause for self-censorship here, it’s just seamless sharing, along the lines of an automatic Foursquare check-in or a Google Now update to let people know you’re running late. More passive modes of personal data-gathering turn up in “The Circle” more subtly, as in a silver bracelet Mae is given at the health clinic, where a message is engraved in steel above the cabinets: “<small>TO HEAL WE MUST KNOW. TO KNOW WE MUST SHARE.</small>” The band monitors her heart rate, blood pressure, caloric intake, digestive efficiency, and so on. Elsewhere, in the ChildTrack lab, biochemists are working out a way to implant a chip into children’s bones, a permanent G.P.S. (They succeed.)</div>
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Not everyone in the Eggers dystopian near-future wants to be sucked up into the social vortex. Mae’s ex-boyfriend Mercer does what he can to stay off the grid, so he can focus on his antler-chandelier business. The novel’s extremes are laid out in the dialogue between the two characters. Condensed highlights from one scene:</div>
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Mercer: “Mae, I’ve never felt more that there is some cult taking over the world.”<br />
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Mae: “You’re so paranoid.”</div>
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Mercer: “I think you think that sitting at your desk, frowning and smiling somehow makes you think you’re actually living some fascinating life. You comment on things, and that substitutes for doing them.”</div>
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The Circle is as much Google as it is Facebook (though it officially stands in for neither, as the Circle is supposed to have succeeded them). Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” is upended in Eggers’s telling: these companies may not have started out as the clubhouses of moustache-twirling villains, but, he writes, in a return to Orwell, “We’re closing the circle around everyone—it’s a totalitarian nightmare.” The <i>Wall Street Journal</i> compared “The Circle” to “The Jungle,” with the caveat that the former is “not great literature. But it is a great warning.” Other critics, including Losse, have pointed out that Eggers can’t be held up as the revelatory chronicler of an industry that he isn’t immersed in; his ominous depiction isn’t backed up by thorough inquiry. It’s a novel, though, his novel, with his anxieties. It’s the account of an observer, not a participant: maybe even the kind who comments on things, which substitutes for doing them.</div>
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Losse wrote, “We film and we post and read social media constantly in order to capture something, some exciting moment or feeling or experience that we are afraid to miss, but the things about life that we most want to capture may not be, in the end, capturable.” Whether it’s a status update or a novel, the good ones can grasp hold of their subject—if not with the completion of a circle, then at least by delivering an essential sliver of truth.</div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-35242416054741964592014-05-21T11:50:00.003-07:002014-05-21T11:52:54.398-07:00Americans Are More Likely to Be Killed by Right-Wing Terrorists Than Muslims—But the Media's Afraid to Say It<br />
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<span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://alternet.org/" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">AlterNet</a></span></span></span> / <em>By</em> <em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/cj-werleman" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">CJ Werleman</a></em></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/media/americans-are-more-likely-be-killed-right-wing-terrorists-muslims-medias-afraid-say-it?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Americans Are More Likely to Be Killed by Right-Wing Terrorists Than Muslims—But the Media's Afraid to Say It</a></span></h2>
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<span style="font-size: large;">We must confront the threat of far right extremism.</span></h3>
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<em style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 25px;"><span class="field field-name-field-date field-type-date field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" content="2014-05-20T06:52:00-07:00" datatype="xsd:dateTime" property="dc:date">May 20, 2014</span></span></span></span></em><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) labeled cattle rancher and right-wing extremist Cliven Bundy a “domestic terrorist,” the far Right went into an apoplectic state. But the Senate majority leader may have unwittingly stumbled upon an interesting and sobering fact: that when it comes to domestic terrorism, you are far more likely to be murdered by a far Right-wing American than a Muslim American, but the term “terrorist” remains reserved exclusively for acts of political violence carried out by Muslims.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">If terrorism is defined as violence against innocent civilians designed to advance a political cause, then all racist murders that occur in the U.S. are also acts of terrorism, because the perpetrators commit the violent act to send a political message to minority communities (i.e. intimidate them into a subordinate status.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Arun Kundani, adjunct professor at New York University and author of The Muslims are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the War on Terror, writes: “The definition of terrorism is never applied consistently, because to do so would mean the condemnatory power of the term would have to be applied to our violence as much as theirs, thereby defeating the word’s usefulness.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Violence carried out by far Right groups or individuals, which have racism as a central component of their ideology, is of similar magnitude to that of Jihadist violence. In the years 1990 to 2010, there were 145 acts of political violence committed by the American far Right, resulting in 348 deaths. By comparison, 20 Americans were killed over the same period in acts of political violence carried out by Muslim-American civilians.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Both categories of violence represent threats to democratic values from fellow citizens. Whereas the former uses violence to foment a change in the ethnic makeup of Western countries or to defend racial supremacy, the latter uses violence to try to intimidate Western governments into changing foreign policies. Ultimately, to be more concerned about one domestic threat of violence rather than the other implies governments and mainstream journalists consider foreign policies more sacrosanct than the security of minority citizens,” writes Kundani.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It has now been 13 years since al Qaeda and its associated forces have carried out a successful attack inside the United States. National security analyst and regular CNN contributor Peter Bergen asks, “Given this, it becomes harder to explain, in terms of American national security, why violence by homegrown right-wing extremists receives substantially less attention than does violence by homegrown jihadist militants?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">To that point, right-wing extremists have carried out a great number of high profile acts of political violence since 9/11, from the shooting at the Jewish Community Center in Kansas City, to the murders at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Attacks that have garnered fewer headlines include the 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller, who ran an abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas. His killer was tied to a number of far right-wing groups, including Sovereign Citizens, a neo-confederate movement who deny the powers of the federal government.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In a recent op-ed, Bergen juxtaposes the media and national security attention devoted to the anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing to last month’s shootings at a Jewish Community Center in greater Kansas City. On the latter, Frazier Glenn Cross, who founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party, shot and killed a 14-year-old boy and his grandfather, and one other. After being taken into custody, Cross shouted, “Heil Hitler.” In both respective attacks in Kansas and Boston, three Americans were killed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Now let's do the thought experiment in which instead of shouting "Heil Hitler" after he was arrested, the suspect had shouted "Allah Akbar." Only two days before the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, this simple switch of words would surely have greatly increased the extent and type of coverage the incident received,” observes Bergen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">John Mueller, who is a political scientist in the field of international relations, illustrates how our conception of the terrorist threat is shaped more by ideology than objectivity: “In almost all years the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Despite the far Right’s history of deadly violence, it is jihadist violence that continues to dominate media headlines and the attention of policy makers. The Southern Poverty Law Center calculates there are 939 far right-wing hate groups across the country today, including neo-Nazis, Klansmen, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, border vigilantes and others.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Since 2000, the number of hate groups has increased by 56 percent. This surge has been fueled by anger and fear over the nation’s ailing economy, an influx of non-white immigrants, and the diminishing white majority, as symbolized by the election of the nation’s first African-American president…. The number of Patriot groups, including armed militias, skyrocketed following the election of President Obama in 2008 – rising 813 percent, from 149 groups in 2008 to an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012. The number fell to 1,096 in 2013,” the SPLC calculates.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Yet terrorism and racist violence are not considered to be equally significant threats by the U.S. government and the mainstream media. “When CNN’s John King commented that the person arrested for the Boston attack had been identified as a ‘dark-skinned man,’ it was not just an individual gaffe, but the making explicit of the racial subtext to the entire discourse of counterterrorism. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews asked his terrorism expert guests whether government analysts would be able to tell from the surveillance images of the suspects if they were ‘from Yemen or other parts like that.’ The suspect’s face was being asked to reveal a racial identity that would, in turn, tell us whether he was one of ‘them’ or one of ‘us,’ and therefore what kind of emotional response to the bombing would be appropriate,” writes Kundani.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Dangerously, not only is the mainstream media shy in labeling right wing extremist groups as “domestic terrorists,” but also so is the government. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a report warning of violent right-wing extremism. The report had merely pointed out that some domestic extremists focused on single issues like immigration and abortion were interested in recruiting military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Conservative columnists cried blue bloody murder, and in the face of political controversy, the report was retracted.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2011/summer/inside-the-dhs-former-top-analyst-says-agency-bowed" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">In a 2011 interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center,</a> Daryl Johnson, the leader of the team that produced the report, argued that following the controversy, the Department of Homeland Security’s examination of such threats suffered, stating: "Since our report was leaked, DHS has not released a single report of its own on this topic. Not anything dealing with non-Islamic domestic extremism—whether it's anti-abortion extremists, white supremacists, 'sovereign citizens,' eco-terrorists, the whole gamut."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Like the violent acts we normally think of as terrorism, racist violence not only takes the lives of its immediate victims, but also sends a larger message of fear to the wider population. “In dedicating tens of billions of dollars a year to fighting a domestic threat of terrorist violence that is largely imagined, the U.S. government has neglected the challenge of creating a genuinely peaceful society. An ideologically-driven focus on Muslim Americans as the prime threat of violence goes hand in hand with a normalization of the fact that the in the U.S., 15,000 people are murdered each year,” writes Kundani.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The growth in far Right extremism is fueled not only by a right-wing echo chamber that legitimizes false propaganda about immigrants and other minorities, but also, in part, by liberal timidity, which is why Sen. Reid’s use of the term “domestic terrorist” is an important step forward in dealing with the threat of far Right extremism. I mean, terrorism.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">CJ Werleman is the author of "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Crucifying-America-alliance-between-Christian/dp/1908675209" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">Crucifying America</a>," and "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/God-Hates-Hate-Back-International/dp/095642760X" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;">God Hates You. Hate Him Back</a>." Follow him on Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/cjwerleman" style="color: #5f6599; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">@cjwerleman</a></span></div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4235891328441324416.post-4342687003979836522014-05-13T21:41:00.001-07:002014-05-13T21:41:47.577-07:00Google’s Snoops: Mining Our Data for Profit and Pleasure<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/googles-snoops-mining-our-data-for-profit-and-pleasure" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Google’s Snoops: Mining Our Data for Profit and Pleasure</a></span></h2>
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By <a class="author" href="http://www.dissentmagazine.org/author/robert-epstein/" style="color: #0991fa; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">Robert Epstein</a> - May 9, 2014 <div class="fb-like fb_iframe_widget" data-href="http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/googles-snoops-mining-our-data-for-profit-and-pleasure" data-layout="button_count" data-send="false" data-show-faces="false" data-width="100" fb-iframe-plugin-query="app_id=214067098624442&href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dissentmagazine.org%2Fonline_articles%2Fgoogles-snoops-mining-our-data-for-profit-and-pleasure&layout=button_count&locale=en_US&sdk=joey&send=false&show_faces=false&width=100" fb-xfbml-state="rendered" style="display: inline-block; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px 0px -6px 10px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; position: relative; width: 49px;">
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<em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">There was a running gag among fellow workers where we would walk by each other and whisper “Don’t be evil, pft!” and roll our eyes.</em><br style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />–Former Google employee</div>
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Google’s publicists have been working extra hard this year. Edward Snowden’s revelations have made the company look like a pawn of the NSA; Google Glass has been drawing the ire of privacy advocates around the world; and in two separate lawsuits, both of which are now moving forward over Google’s strong objections, the company has been accused of wiretapping. The first suit is testing the legality of the company’s practice (now supposedly discontinued) of collecting information from private Wi-Fi networks using its Street View vehicles, and the second is challenging its ongoing practice of analyzing the contents of all emails sent and received by Gmail users. The company defends its practice of scanning emails as a means of gathering information it uses to send people targeted ads.</div>
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Although wide-ranging, the revelations and lawsuits are overlooking an important aspect of Google’s activities that is especially worrisome—the human element. It’s not just Google’s computers that have access to those emails; employees do too, and that introduces troubling possibilities that go far beyond the mundane world of targeted advertising. Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning were just low-level workers when they got <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">ideas</em>. What kinds of crazy notions might be popping into the heads of the 30,000 prodigies at Google, Inc.?</div>
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I am singling out Google here, as opposed to other high-tech giants like Facebook, or, for that matter, the NSA itself, because Google has a unique business model that gives it unfettered access to and control over immensely rich individual “profiles” of information on a scale that is unprecedented. The model is exquisitely simple and sublimely deceptive: We give you free services that you are likely to use dozens of times a day while we invisibly track and record everything you do. Based on what we have learned about you, we then charge advertisers premium fees to reach exactly the right buyers for their products and services.</div>
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“Google’s dance,” as I have called it in previous writings, lies in masking the company’s business model behind the endless array of free services. On the surface, Google appears primarily to be an information provider, but it is actually a glorified advertising firm, with 97 percent of its revenues coming from advertisers. Users see only the surface, which they love, but would they be so enamored if they were more aware of what the surface was for?</div>
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Twenty-four hours a day, across more than sixty free product “platforms” such as Gmail, the Google search engine, YouTube, Google Plus, Google Maps, Street View, and Google Wallet, the company is storing, indexing, and cross-referencing information about the beliefs, tastes, and activities of a billion people—including you—and not just when you are online. If you have the Android system on your mobile device, Google can track you even if you are innocently reading your ePub version of <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Motorcycle Diaries</em>. If you use Google Voice, your calls are transcribed, analyzed, indexed, and added to your profile, just as if they were Gmails. And if, in the near future, you find yourself within spitting distance of someone wearing Google Glass, beware: what you do and say can be recorded. Think J. Edgar Hoover multiplied by, well, a <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">google</em> (that’s a 1 with 100 zeros after it). No other company aggregates so much individual data so aggressively, competently, and invisibly.</div>
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Just how much data does Google actually have about you? If you are active in the digital world, it probably has the equivalent of filing cabinets full—but what, exactly, is in those drawers? Google won’t say. The content is private, and Google’s privacy, unlike yours, is sacrosanct.</div>
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Google appears primarily to be an information provider, but it is actually a glorified advertising firm, with 97 percent of its revenues coming from advertisers.</div>
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Once you unknowingly give them information about yourself—even search terms you never typed fully, or draft emails you never actually sent—it is their property, which, according to their Terms of Service Agreement (to which you automatically assent when you use any Google product, even if you don’t know you’re using a Google product), they can share that information, at their discretion, with “those we work with”—or just about any agency or individual if the company has a “good faith” belief that doing so is required by law or will “protect . . . the rights, property or safety of <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Google.”</em></div>
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But not with you. Unless regulation requires it—and so far, none does—the company will never share information about <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">you</em> with <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">you</em>. Needless to say, you also have no way to spot or remove incorrect information that may have found its way into your file drawers. Many Google employees, on the other hand—especially the whiz kids on the data mining teams—can look at your personal detritus all they want.</div>
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What could possibly go wrong?</div>
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Let’s think about this in general terms, or at least in psychological terms (that’s my field). How would people behave who had easy access to the private emails of hundreds of millions of people, including those written by their ex-spouses, childhood crushes, favorite celebrities, and least favorite politicians? Would they peek now and then? And if they found some juicy tidbits, would they sometimes joke about them with office mates? If they found some serious dirt on the jerk who bullied them in high school or the blowhard right-wing congressman who is ruining America, would they be tempted to leak some info to the<em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Guardian</em> or the FBI?</div>
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And what if they could also view, in real time, which search terms people were using and which websites people were visiting, along with a record of all the search terms people had <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">ever</em> used and all the websites people had <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">ever</em> visited?</div>
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What if, with a few keystrokes, they could alter the contents of a dossier to make a competitor look like a pedophile or push their friends’ websites onto the treasured first page of search rankings—maybe even influence the outcome of a close election by making search rankings favor one candidate?</div>
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What if <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">you</em> were sitting at that desk and controlling that keyboard? Would you occasionally peek, if only to take a break from the daily grind? Would you do harmless favors for friends and family members? Would you try now and then to help the world in some small way?</div>
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<em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Of course you would</em>.</div>
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Pertinent here is a little-known 2011 book that presents a fictionalized account of the lives of Google software engineers. Written by Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff research scientist at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Silicon Jungle</em> tells an unsettling story about Stephen Thorpe, an over-the-hill programmer who competes with thousands of college-age geniuses to land one of those coveted summer internships at. . . well, Google, really, even though Baluja pretends it’s not. I’ll call it “eGoogle,” for “ersatz Google.”</div>
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Unlike Dave Egger’s recent Google-bashing novel, <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Circle</em>, <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Jungle</em> is by a knowledgeable insider. Baluja has a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon and used to be chief scientist at Lycos. He has also worked for Google for more than ten years, and, he tells me, has been prohibited by the company from talking about his book publicly—which is probably why you’ve never heard of it.</div>
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Here are a few important features of the culture at eGoogle, some almost dizzying in their implications:</div>
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Interns on the data mining teams necessarily have access to <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">all</em> eGoogle data, as do many other eGoogle employees. They need this access because their job is to find hundreds of thousands of new customers for high-rolling eGoogle customers who sell everything from ulcer medications to umbrellas. To guarantee the sale of just about anything, the interns write programs that scan the emails, search histories, and purchase histories of a billion people.</div>
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In other words, they are really mining for gold, although Baluja emphasizes that they see the challenges they are given as academic exercises; they are completely oblivious to the millions of dollars eGoogle rakes in with every new program they write. eGoogle is careful, Baluja says, to house the programmers and the accountants in separate buildings and to make sure they never meet.</div>
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What if you could view, in real time, which search terms people were using and which websites people were visiting, along with a record of all the search terms people had ever used and all the websites people had ever visited?</div>
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When the programmers are not filling coffers, they are scanning eGoogle’s massive databases for racy emails and pining over the private emails of ex-girlfriends, especially the emails with nude photos attached. When an especially titillating pic turns up, they display it on massive overhead screens for coworkers to admire. At eGoogle, everything is spectacular, even the perversions.</div>
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When, one evening, an intern is monitoring his ex-girlfriend’s online chats, he learns of a steamy party not far from the eGoogle campus, and four of the most lecherous of the interns are off and running. (We later learn who got lucky.)</div>
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Back on “campus,” one intern is made a full-time employee on the spot when he develops an app that allows eGoogle employees to zoom in on neighborhoods using eGoogle’s version of Google Earth and view, house by house, what kinds of activities people are engaged in online. When people are emailing, the houses light up brown; when they’re viewing porn, the houses light up pink. The app is an instant sensation among eGoogle employees, who are eager to see, godlike, which of their neighbors are being naughty.</div>
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Stephen’s girlfriend, meanwhile, is trying to get her doctorate at Brown University by monitoring conversations of radical Islamists on a website she’s created, but she can’t get any traffic. After Stephen mentions her dilemma to a fellow intern—one on a search-engine team—her website suddenly jumps up a gazillion slots in eGoogle search rankings, and thousands of prospective suicide bombers sign on.</div>
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The plot thickens when Stephen starts mining data for an executive at a nonprofit organization. The executive asks him to search eGoogle’s data for innocent people who are likely to turn up mistakenly on government watch lists, claiming his organization is going to help them protect themselves from overzealous government bureaucrats. Using the same techniques he uses to find widget buyers, Stephen quickly generates a list of 5,000 ideal watch-list candidates, which the scheming executive promptly sells for a seven-figure sum to Arab terrorists.</div>
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When government spooks figure out what Stephen has been doing, they make him an offer he can’t refuse: a lifetime of indentured servitude at a secret government research facility where there is no free food, the computers are clunky, and the databases are pathetically small. It’s either that or prison. How, he muses at the end of the book, can the United States ever win the war on terror when the government’s data processing resources are so paltry?</div>
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That’s the only thing Baluja gets wrong. Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s access to the databases of Google, Microsoft, and other companies were inconceivable when <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Silicon Jungle</em> was published. Baluja tells us about individual eGoogle employees who routinely feed data to the feds, but he insists that large-scale data sharing would <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">never</em> be allowed by eGoogle executives. Snowden’s disclosures, which apparently are still not complete, remind us that no digital data are ever really private—that data are always vulnerable to the wiles of determined individuals or organizations.</div>
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There is also one aspect of Baluja’s tale that is ludicrous on its face, and that is his disclaimer in the book’s introduction that eGoogle (which he actually calls “Ubatoo”) isn’t really Google. In both form and function, it certainly <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">looks</em> like Google, and Baluja also acknowledges that the “temptations, . . . ability, brains, and computational power” necessary to do the kinds of mischief he describes are real. </div>
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Google’s privacy violations vary from the petty and mundane to the truly spectacular. On the mundane side, in July 2010, a careless twenty-seven-year-old software engineer named David Barksdale was fired by Google for spying on at least four underage teens through their various Google accounts. While still employed, according to a September <a href="http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats" style="color: #0991fa; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">2010 report</a> by Gawker.com, he showed a friend the power he had over private information by pulling up his friend’s “email account, contact list, chat transcripts, Google Voice call logs—even a list of other Gmail addresses that the friend had registered but didn’t think were linked to his main account—in seconds.”</div>
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Why isn’t your massive personal profile heavily encrypted so prying eyes can’t see it—or at least not “in seconds”? Public statements in recent years by senior Google employees explain why. According to Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, “we couldn’t run our system if everything in it were encrypted because then we wouldn’t know which ads to show you.” In other words, their business model depends on lightning-quick connections between the insecure data in your digital filing cabinet and the ads supplied by their paying customers, which makes your data easy pickings for rutting David Barksdales.</div>
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In July 2010, a careless twenty-seven-year-old software engineer named David Barksdale was fired by Google for spying on at least four underage teens through their various Google accounts.</div>
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I have been a programmer most of my life and a research psychologist for more than thirty years. I can tell you with certainty that the kinds of questionable activities Baluja describes are not only plausible but inevitable in the hyper-casual high-tech environment Google maintains, no matter what internal rules may be in place. Google openly takes pride in hiring independent thinkers and letting them frolic; software engineers are officially allowed to play a whopping 20 percent of their work time. In that kind of world, anyone with sufficient password authority or technical expertise can do exactly the kinds of things Baluja depicts—and worse.</div>
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When it was revealed in 2010 that Google Street View vehicles had been secretly collecting personal information from personal Wi-Fi networks in more than thirty countries for several years, the company claimed that this was a pet project of a single software engineer—Marius Milner. Although outed in 2012, Milner, who identifies his profession as “hacker” on LinkedIn, is still employed by Google.</div>
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Its public denials notwithstanding, Google has, from the top down, consistently shown little respect for privacy. In 2009, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, expressed the philosophy that drives the enterprise: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” In other words, all information is fair game.</div>
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This helps explain projects like Buzz, a social network service that Google unveiled in 2010. Without anyone’s permission, the company instantly created an online community intended to overwhelm Facebook, just as its Gmail rollout had quickly overwhelmed Hotmail and Yahoo. The company created Facebook-like pages, already complete with friends, based on who its Gmail users—175 million of them at the time—emailed most frequently. People were so outraged by this blatant incursion into their personal lives that the platform was shut down after eighteen months.</div>
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Perhaps more outrageous, it was revealed in 2012 that Google engineers had for several years been hacking into Apple’s Safari browser, allowing them to surreptitiously monitor the search activities of millions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac users. For that little caper, Google was fined $22.5 million by the FTC—the largest fine in the agency’s history.</div>
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Comments like Schmidt’s and projects like Buzz are indicative of a kind of culture that both nurtures and encourages daring exploits like the ones in Baluja’s book, with each swashbuckling employee acting out mischievous impulses, large and small, every day. Google offers its employees an unconstrained world that is rich in resources in order to maximize creativity, and research on the creative process that I have been conducting since the 1980s shows that Google is doing things exactly right in this regard. But that kind of culture also magnifies just about every human tendency you can think of, including voyeurism, grandiosity, and greed.</div>
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How many David Barksdales and Marius Milners—individuals with the power to alter the course of a life or an industry in seconds—are, at this very moment, toying with Google’s massive, unregulated databases in ways we cannot even imagine? How many of them are getting <em style="font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">ideas</em>?</div>
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Computers are programmed and controlled by people, and nothing will ever change that simple fact. As soon as a Google computer “scans” an email—an obfuscating word for “reads”—any Google employee with sufficient password authority or technical savvy can too. When Google’s computers track and monitor people’s internet activities, so can its employees.</div>
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How much private information does Google have about you? They know, but they won’t say.</div>
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How is that information being used by the brash young techies the company takes such pride in hiring? Most likely, exactly as they please.</div>
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And how might their use of that information affect our lives in the future? No one knows—not even Google’s top executives—but Murphy’s law probably applies.</div>
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<strong style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Robert Epstein</strong><span style="font-weight: lighter;"> is Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research Technology in Vista, CA, and the former editor-in-chief of </span><em style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Psychology Today</em><span style="font-weight: lighter;"> magazine. A Ph.D. of Harvard University, he has published fifteen books and more than 250 articles on artificial intelligence, creativity, and other topics.</span></div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0