182 posts tagged with media and politics.
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"I do not mean to imply that my youthful Idealism was repelled by this"
William S. Burroughs: 'When Did You Stop Wanting to Be President?' (slyt) Here is the original article including Burroughs text.
( note George Romney)
đ§ The Savala Vadađ§
There's a cost to awareness
It's one of the most chilling things I've ever seen: the legacy media abandoning even their false neutrality to create a totally alternate reality, for the direct benefit of the worst person imaginable. It was an open capitulation to the fascist demand that media enter their misinformation stream and report on whatever it is they want said as if it were real. And it created permission for low-information people, who don't give a shit for anything beyond their own ease, to ignore reality; false equivalence where a more principled neutrality would delineate the differences. And so the seagulls descended. from The Seagulls Descend by A.R. Moxon [more inside]
How Vince McMahon Explains the 21st Century
The Hideous Spectacle of Vince McMahon Tim Marchman and Tom Scocca discuss Vince McMahon + The WWE, what makes a scandal, and what it means that the ringleader of wrestling has been an absolute monster this whole time. (SL: The Indignity on Substack) [CW: sexual abuse]
A Land of Contrasts ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Sinicisation
How China is tearing down Islam [ungated; viz. cf.] - "Thousands of mosques have been altered or destroyed as Beijing's suppression of Islamic culture spreads."[1,2] [more inside]
We need fact crusaders
Fact-checking can be nuanced, and every misstatement is not an intentional lie. But many of the lies we see today are obvious. Journalists need to call them out prominently, not just in the 14th paragraph of a story. People read headlines. So journalists must put corrections in headlines. Instead of writing a story headlined âTrump says UAW talks don't matter because EV shift will kill jobs,â news outlets should write stories headlined âTrump lies about electric vehicles during speech to auto workers.â This type of headline would not be a cheap shot. Trumpâs September speech to non-unionized auto workers was stuffed with lies. From the October 30, 2023 issue of Stop the Presses newsletter by Mark Jacob, former metro editor of the Chicago Tribune and former Sunday editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. [more inside]
October is Gay Recruitment Month!
TheRighting is a media company that aggregates articles from various right-wing media outlets and also publishes original reporting on the world of conservative media. They also post excellent analysis, such as the ranking of right-wing websites by unique visitors. [more inside]
The Polarization Dogma
The fact that it obscures the actual political conflict is the feature, not the bug of the âpolarizationâ narrative. (Thomas Zimmer on Substack)
Project 2025
Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump's vision - "Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president's return â or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Joe Biden in 2024." [link-heavy FPP] [more inside]
Remember how it improved society somewhat
You might already know that political / reporting / general nonfiction comics outlet The Nib is closing down at the end of August. It was too good to last.
You might not know that The Nib is making all fifteen issues of the magazine free to download as PDFs! Consider kicking back a few bucks to help them preserve the website in the meanwhile.
You might not know that The Nib is making all fifteen issues of the magazine free to download as PDFs! Consider kicking back a few bucks to help them preserve the website in the meanwhile.
Derailing the defund
Controversial sending off for Lineker
The BBC's Match of the Day (MOTD) is the longest running football television programme in the world. It is currently hosted by Gary Lineker, former England striker and 1990 World Cup semi-finalist and Golden Boot winner. Lineker, very famously, was never given either a red or yellow card in his professional career. But the BBC have given him one now. [more inside]
On Max Headroom: The Most Misunderstood Joke on TV
Like the show it uses as a jump-off point, the YouTube video "On Max Headroom" is not just about one pretend-robotic talking head. It's about pretending, about talking heads, and about the media landscape 20 minutes into the future. [more inside]
people with little power or authority at work or when acting as citizens
I want a prominent media home that reflects our size and heterogeneity. I want stories about wealth as opposed to income inequality and its effect on intergenerational and social mobility. I want stories that arenât just about our problems, but that are also told by, for, and with us. We are civic participants who matter. I want us to set the terms of debate. What could the political effects be of a media that actually served working-class Americans?
Five Tropes Local TV News Uses to Dehumanize Homeless People
"Rightwing demagogues like Tucker Carlson incite against the homeless on a nightly basis, but mainline outlets also help stigmatize the unhoused, only with more subtlety." Political writer Adam Johnson shines a light on 5 tropes commonly used to dehumanize the unhoused in mainstream news (with receipts).
"I have chills"
Coup or counter?
Turkey, Poland, or America? Zeynep Tufekci argues that Trump is attempting a coup to stay in power after losing last month's election. She then invites MetaFilter's own Maciej Ceglowski to offer an opposing perspective and hosts his rebuttal in her same Substack transmission. [more inside]
âabsolutely feel that the Hungarian government is in their pocketsâ
In the autumn of 2019, the German Embassy in Budapest invited Hungarian journalists working for several independent outlets for an off-the-record discussion to talk honestly about the media situation in Hungary. After several journalists complained about the attitude of German corporations doing business with the government toward Hungarian media freedom, a high-ranking German diplomat reacted by saying that he is fully aware of this and ashamed of himself. âBut please understand that this is Germany, which is a democracy where the Federal Foreign Office cannot put pressure on German companies[...]â
The chickenization of everything
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (thread) - "Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem... because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize opposition to the status quo."[1,2,3] [more inside]
#UntrendOctober
"Why donât we have space to do longform?â
The Messengers: One Small Magazineâs Fight for the Indian Mind (The Virginia Quarterly Review): "The implications, if true, meant major election fraud in the worldâs largest democracy. Did they want to look into it? Jose glanced at me, almost helplessly. He had never imagined that his little magazine, with limited funding, a staff of thirty-eight people, and an inclination toward fiction and poetry, would ever become one of the only outlets breaking major, sensitive political stories in a country of over one billion people. âThis is the job for leading newspapers and weeklies, but nobody was stepping in to cover them,â he told me after hanging up the phone. He couldnât help but feel obligated. âHow are you supposed to respond to stories which are journalistic but nobody else is doing them?â
The Dream Of The 90s
â Writing about South Park, a silly cartoon, in the middle of an eminently predictable and yet entirely unanticipated global pandemic has an uncanny quality, like meeting a time traveler and realizing that he is you. If I could travel back in time now and meet myself circa, say, 2005, just a few years out of college and struggling to figure out how to become a writer, and tell that younger me that in 15 years, nearing 40 years old, Iâd be locked in the house during a plague year writing a review of the political valences of South Park, which would still be on the air, Iâd have probably gone to business school sooner than I did. Oh well.â Watching South Park At The End Of The World - Jacob Bacharach (The New Republic)
They Who Must Sell Are Not Free
â Anarchists, far from ignoring âhuman nature,â have the only political theory that gives this concept deep thought and reflection. Too often, âhuman natureâ is flung up as the last line of defence in an argument against anarchism, because it is thought to be beyond reply. This is not the case, however. First of all, human nature is a complex thing. If, by human nature, it is meant âwhat humans do,â it is obvious that human nature is contradictory â love and hate, compassion and heartlessness, peace and violence, and so on, have all been expressed by people and so are all products of âhuman nature.â An Anarchist FAQ
âAll modern media is made with unpaid labor. We wanted to change that.â
âMeans TV officially launched last week, offering 75 hours of content, including comedy and original animations, as well as more than a dozen feature-length films. In just three days it attracted nearly 2,000 subscribers, each signing up to pay $10 a monthâ Revolution and Chill: the Anticapitalist Streaming Service Thatâs Netflix for the 99% (Novara Media) â Post-capitalist entertainment is just entertainment thatâs created without the extracting, corrosive, and corruptive effects of capital. Instead of entertainment thatâs produced with money from venture capital firms that are invested in bombs and wars, itâs produced cooperatively, and itâs centering stories of working-class people that arenât heard in the media today.â The Founders of Means TV on Their Post-Capitalist Streaming Service (Hour Detroit) Means.Tv User Guide Means TV on YouTube An interview with Means TV co-creator Sara June on Pod Damn America Means TV previously âwhen youâre poor, everybody thinks youâre lying.â
Facebook Politics
âFacebook promised to ban white nationalist content from its platform in March 2019, reversing a years-long policy to tolerate the ideology. But Red Ice TV is just one of several white nationalist outlets that remain active on the platform today. â White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook. The company won't act (Guardian) âSo the fear is that Zuckerberg is trying to appease the Trump administration by not cracking down on right-wing propaganda.â Inside Mark Zuckerberg's private meetings with conservative pundits (Politico) âInternal documents show Facebookâs own marketing strategy was influenced by what it learned from its valued customer, the Trump campaign.â (Buzzfeed) âAfter the 2016 presidential election, Republican Party officials credited Facebook Inc. with helping Donald Trump win the White House. One senior official singled out a then-28-year-old Facebook employee embedded with the Trump campaign, calling him an âMVP.â Now that key player is working for the other sideâas national debate intensifies over Facebookâs role in politics.â (WSJ)
"More likely than not, if you are reading this, this is about you."
"I often think of groups like this during evenings I spend on my couch. As I fold laundry half-heartedly, I watch TV and clutch my phone. I refresh my Twitter feed to keep up on the latest political crisis, then toggle over to Facebook to read clickbait news stories, then over to YouTube to see a montage of juicy clips from the latest congressional hearing. I then complain to my family about all the things I donât like that I have seen. What Iâm doing, that isnât politics." Politics is for Power, Not Consumption:
Political hobbyism takes well-meaning citizens away from pursuing power. (Boston Review)
Greetings Comrades, Like And Subscribe
Since Leftist Youtube has become a thing as Breadtube or Leftube, why not pull some smaller and lesser known accounts? On Strategies for Post-Capitalism by Mexie "Even if we take all their money we still have to deal with the super-rich as people." - Capitalist Realism by Radical Reviewer - "Anti-Capitalism is popular within capitalistic art. We need to talk about Cyperpunk" by Yaz Minksy on science fiction's trans, queer, anarchic roots - The Cult Of Work and why Frank Grimes is the bad guy by Renegade Cut - So, What is Good Praxis? by Bemundolack - Neolberalism, The Highest Stage Of Capitalism by Ray Ramses - What does Totalitarianism look like in mass media? by Tash Renyolds - The Paradox of Punishment by The People's Bayonet (with additional ASL work) - Well There's Your Problem "The Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse" with special guest Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner- "So what happens when I find a text which isn't a euphemism? And what would it feel like to close the loop? To act on those ideas?" Subtlety is Dead: Communism and 'A Bewitching Revolution'
ATTN:
The Politics of Succession - "Succession is all but overtly inspired by the Murdoch family, whose multi-continental media empire played a crucial role in making Donald Trump's presidency possible." [more inside]
Liberals fail to vet Montreal candidate.
Justin Trudeau Wore Brownface at 2001 âArabian Nightsâ Party While He Taught at a Private School. Trudeau admits to 2nd incident where he donned makeup and sang 'Day O' in high school talent show. Global News has obtained video showing [Prime Minister] Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau in blackface, the third instance of racist dress to come to light in 12 hours. The photo, the fallout and the folly of Trudeauâs brownface disgrace.
"an ultraconservative news outlet and a conspiracy warehouse"
Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times (NBC News) [more inside]
Quillette, "Archie Carter" and the working class hoax
How the right wing fell for its own fables about the working class (WaPo) "...this isnât just a story of a clever guy outwitting lax fact-checkers and revealing a siteâs conservative biases. It also sheds light on the way right-leaning commentators depend on the voice of an imagined white working class to legitimize and advance their own viewpoints â viewpoints that are often opposed to those of the real working class. And itâs not just websites like Quillette that fall for that hoax. Politicians and voters buy into this imagined narrative, too." [non-paywall archive link]
Your Data, Your Money, Your Laws
Your data could be at the centre of the fight against big tech (NYT) - "Furman, a Harvard professor advising the British government on tech regulation, said that rather than relying on antitrust law alone, countries should create a dedicated regulator for the tech industry, to match those covering the banking, health and transportation sectors of the economy. He said a watchdog with expertise in the field could better review a company's behavior and use of data on a case-by-case basis." [more inside]
sbt-ethereum
Ethereum for humans - "A bit pathetically, much of what I have been doing for the past two years is working on a software project called sbt-ethereum."[1] [more inside]
Technology, Law and Political Economy for Humans
How China Is Planning to Rank 1.3 Billion People - "Yet educated, urban Chinese take a positive view, seeing social credit systems as a means to promote honesty in society and the economy rather than a privacy violation, according to a poll by Mercator Institute for China Studies."[1] [more inside]
Common Wealth and Collective Power
Bernie Sanders' plan to empower workers could revolutionise Britain's economy (among others') - "Giving employees a stake in firms would reshape power: this could be the start of a transatlantic challenge to neoliberalism." [more inside]
It's pseudos all the way down
How to Escape Pseudo-Events in America: The Lessons of Covington. "In an era defined by virality, is there any way to stop a non-story from becoming a real one? What the Covington saga reveals about our media landscape." [more inside]
"Citizens agenda." Dorky name. It works.
In November, Jay Rosen outlined an alternative approach to covering elections: "The idea was very simple: campaign coverage should be grounded in what voters want the candidates to talk about. Which voters? The ones you are trying to inform." As Rosen clarifies in a new thread, the solution for the "500 or so people who produce campaign coverage in the national press" isn't just "more issues" or "more policy" because the problem is at the level of purpose. WaPo's Margaret Sullivan backs up the call for an overhaul. [more inside]
Truth Sandwiches
How the media should respond to Trumpâs lies: a linguist explains how Trump uses lies to divert attention from the âbig truths.â "George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkeley ... recently published an article laying out the mediaâs dilemma. Trumpâs 'big lie' strategy, he argues, is to 'exploit journalistic convention by providing rapid-fire news events for reporters to chase.' According to Lakoff, the president uses lies to divert attention from the 'big truths,' or the things he doesnât want the media to cover. This allows Trump to create the controversies he wants and capitalize on the outrage and confusion they generate, while simultaneously stoking his base and forcing the press into the role of 'opposition party.'" [ViA] [more inside]
Some 41
The dawn of television promised diversity. Here's why we got "Leave It to Beaver" instead. [more inside]
Trump Has Changed How Teens View the News
âThere was no assumption that the news would convey the truth or would be worthy of their trust,â the study reported.
Teenagers, in particular, appear to be increasingly questioning the credibility and value of traditional media organizations.
Journalistic Deficiencies: Metaphors Differ
David Roberts argues that journalists' desire to appear unbiased impacts their ability to understand the substance:
[I]magine covering substantive disputes every day but not allowing yourself to develop opinions about them. It takes will & effort! [ . . . ] Political/policy analysis, when done well, is developed through dialog. [ . . . ] It's a muscle that requires exercise. And "objective" reporters don't exercise it. [ . . . ] I've seen it again & again: when I can cajole "objective" reporters into sharing their opinions on, oh, the national debt, or climate policy, or electoral dynamics, those opinions are almost always shockingly flat-footed & childlike.[Threadreader link for the twitter averse] [more inside]
âeasier to take the line that the work is open to many interpretationsâ
Why are game companies so afraid of the politics in their games? [Polygon] âGame publishers are lathering their productions with the stark imagery of modern political divisions, while at the same time denying any topical intent. Their strategy, according to industry sources ranging from developers to publicists, is to profit from emotive societal divisions, while ducking difficult conversations about what their works might signify. Their games garner publicity and a sense of cultural relevance, but the companies avoid the challenge and expense of controversy. In the words of one senior game industry publicist I spoke to, under conditions of anonymity: âItâs bullshit. They want to have their cake and eat it too.â In the past few years, weâve seen repeated examples of the quasi-political AAA game. â [more inside]
âYou get the feeling they support it so they donât have to feel guiltyâ
Current Affairs, the magazine of politics and culture, now has Current Affairs: The Podcast where editors (Brianna Joy Gray, Oren Nimni, Lyta Gold, Nathan J. Robinson, and Pete Davis) discuss current issues from the left. The pilot episode includes a discussion of Universal Basic Income Vs. a Job Gaurentee, modern monetary theory , how the rich already have a UBI, why canât we have both, and what would the wrong kind of UBI look like.
Younger/older divide on social internet vs. social media
The way you value social media may have a lot to do with your age. "...Young progressives grew up in a time when platform monopolies like Facebook seemed inextricably intertwined into the fabric of the internet. To criticize social media, therefore, was to criticize the internetâs general ability to do useful things like connect people, spread information, and support activism and expression. The older progressives, however, remember the internet before the platform monopolies..."
It was like I was a vampire & any photon of Trump would turn me to dust.
It was just going to be for a few days. But he is now more than a year into knowing almost nothing about American politics. He has managed to become shockingly uninformed during one of the most eventful chapters in modern American history. He is as ignorant as a contemporary citizen could ever hope to be.
Twitter: What does it take for us to all quit?
@Jack has been a busy boy recently: Twitter banned a popular account because dumb nazis fell for a prank (or pretended to). In fairness, so did fox. Twitter announced new rules to prevent abuse and harassment - the main outcome of which appears to be banning bisexuals. Nazis, an extremely favored user group on Twitters, are likely to be okay. A Twitter engineer identified Russian bots in 2015 and was told to "stay in lane". The thing Jack does want from employees, instead of raising obvious problems? Relentless optimism.
But what do we need to know for the exam?
At Literary Hub, Emily Temple has gathered up "10 College Classes to Read Along with This Semester" and "The Classes 25 Famous Writers Teach." Syllabuses on other media suggest how Richard Lemarchand (designer on Uncharted) teaches video game design [PDF], how David Isaacs (consultant on M*A*S*H, Cheers, Frasier, etc.) teaches comedy, or how video/performance artist Patty Chang teaches video/time-based art [PDF]. Syllabuses related to current events suggest how Noam Chomsky (who has joined the U. of Arizona) co-teaches politics [PDF], how Chris Holmes teaches about gun violence, or how Jacob Remes (interviewed this week about Puerto Rico) teaches critical disaster studies [PDF]. [Previously: 1M+ syllabuses / autodidact course catalog.]
If Mark Zuckerberg runs for president, will Facebook help him win?
Facebook can shift elections. Thatâs why, with rumors swirling that the social media CEO might run, transparency is needed now more than ever.
What We Know â And Donât Know â About Hate Crimes in America
The FBI is required by law to collect data about hate crimes in the United States, but local jurisdictions aren't required to report incidents up to the federal government. As a predictable consequence, the FBI's data is incomplete. To help fill in the gaps, ProPublica's Documenting Hate is constructing a non-public-facing database to offer a broader picture of hate crimes and bias incidents in the U.S., and reporting on their preliminary findings, including recent surges in visits to white supremacist websites, an interview with a scholar of the far-right and the New York Police Department's rare diligence in tracking hate crimes. [more inside]
âThe best books... are those that tell you what you know already.â
Why '1984' is a 2017 Must Read by Michiko Kakutani [The New York Times] â1984â shot to No. 1 on Amazonâs best-seller list this week, after Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to President Trump, described demonstrable falsehoods told by the White House press secretary Sean Spicer â regarding the size of inaugural crowds â as âalternative facts.â It was a phrase chillingly reminiscent, for many readers, of the Ministry of Truthâs efforts in â1984â at âreality control.â To Big Brother and the Party, Orwell wrote, âthe very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.â Regardless of the facts, âBig Brother is omnipotentâ and âthe Party is infallible.â [more inside]