The notion of an anti-Christ juxtaposed with Christian fundamentalism deserves no comment from The Left, Joel. Focusing on it, however, does provide amusement for those of us who remain convinced that , while religion as the opiate of the masses may have been among Karl Marx's most revolutionary of sentiments, that narcotic of today's dumbing down of America is television content, secular and non-sectarian alike. Even last evening's Frontline program "Decision 2008" deferred to the respect for religious belief without making clear which of the two presidential candidates poses the worst risk to those of us who believe that our constitution's …
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Bud Wizer
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The corporate, mainstream newsmedia as "Fifth Column" is metaphorically appropriate but factually tenable only if we can demonstrate that, as General Emilio Mola did when coining the term to describe General Franco's clandestine subversives seventy-two years ago, like-mindedness is conspiratorial. Prioritizing bottom-line initiatives is allegiance to sensible business practice within a capitalistic framework of profiteering's sustainability. It is not, necessarily, subversive or clandestine. The problem is less the magnates of media than that they engage in enterprises exploitative of ignorance and stupidity. It is our educational resources, particularly those enjoined with compulsory mandates, that pose the greatest threat to democracy. Were …
Posted to Is the Fourth Estate a Fifth Column?
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Journalists and journalism have become suspect with respect to timidity trumping temerity. If ever a time has come for the "yellow journalism" and "muckraking" of Upton Sinclair and his contemporaries to be the model of journalistic fortitude, not rectitude, it is now. The banalities of "news" advanced as perceptive, insightful, cogent and purposeful are as evident as the increase in volume for a tv commercial's soundtrack. The "mild-mannered reporter" is no longer just a cartoon character's disguise, it is a profession's countenance of the very thing that mocks its pupose, a mild manner that reveals more than its feigns. How "nice" …
Posted to Collapse of the Fourth Estate
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I stand and applaud, Mr. Moyers, once again and as usual. Your exhortations and exposition enlighten; our courage, candor and conscience contradict careerism. Those of us whose experience in mainstream journalism confirms and verifies what you posit, remain hopeful that professors of journalism concur, that applicants to schools of journalism are not screened politically, and, most of all, that journalism's doors might remain open to those not molded by conformity's deformations, academically or otherwise. Politics is ever and always who gets what, why, when and how. Journalism should, as you steadfastly remind, disallow its tendency disgrace the process.
Posted to In Praise of Reporting Reality--And The Truth
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The "military cure," as you put it, is, of course, the military disease. Americans never again will hear a Republican president advise them, as did Dwight Eisenhower, to "beware" our military-industrial complex; and The Golden Fleece award of the late Sen. Proxmire no longer graces us with its constructive criticisms and condemnations of Pentagonal profligacy. Alas, so deeply ingrained is the militaristic rationale that video games prepare children for combat, martial-arts instruction seems the preparatory coming-of-age ritual for blue-collar cannon fodder, and Congressional outbursts of lambaste for the social blasphemy of blank-check defense are impolitic. It seems more probable than when …
Posted to Shape Up and Ship Out
- Joined October 24, 2007
- Last Visit October 15, 2008
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