Economic Injustice and the Media
An excellent article appeared at CommonDreams.org and Consortium News by Michael Winship about media reform and economic injustice. He wrote about the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis last weekend, the one where Bill Moyers skewered Bill O'Reilly's hatchet man, gotcha producer in public, on video, much to that man's embarrassment and well deserved deflation.
Winship wrote: "As Moyers has pointed out, [net] neutrality sounds too much like Switzerland, and as my colleague Patric Verrone, president of the Writers Guild, West, says, the notion of fighting for neutrality seems oxymoronic. So, “Internet freedom” it is.
"Marty Kaplan, director of the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center, told those gathered they were a crowd that 'may not color inside the lines but sure can connect the dots.'
"Yet as perceptive and informed as attendees were, sadly absent from the weekend’s energetic dialogues was any significant discussion of this country’s economy, the vast gap between rich and poor, the way gross inequality in such desperate times is being largely ignored by the media, our candidates and the progressive movement.
And then he proceeded to mention the following: “The economic crisis is just not that compelling or sexy to the many progressives who are stirred into action by every ugly utterance by Bill O’Reilly,” media activist and journalist Danny Schecter writes.
"Thirty six and a half million Americans – one in eight Americans, one in six children – that we KNOW of, because there are no good ways to really measure – live below the official federal poverty level, $20,000 a year for a family of four.
"Half of us – half! – will have gone through a year or more of poverty by the time we turn 60.
"[John McCain] He counts among his economic advisors Carly Fiorina, fired chief executive of Hewlett Packard, where you’ll recall she was accused of breathtaking mismanagement and street-bully tactics.
"Of her role in the McCain campaign, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management told The New York Times, 'You couldn’t pick a worse, non-imprisoned C.E.O. to be your standard-bearer.'
"[Barack Obama's]economic policy director, Jason Furman, has been a defender of Wal-Mart and was director of former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, a group of Wall Street Democrats committed to continuing Bill Clinton’s economic doctrine – i.e., growth based on deficit reduction and free trade.
"Both candidates need economic advisors untainted by association with corporate interests, folks who know what it’s like to have to live on macaroni instead of meat, to spend sleepless nights in subways or shelters, to let diseases like cancer and diabetes gnaw away at a person’s insides because they can’t afford medicine and doctors.
"And the media need to tell their stories, not only to make the rest of us aware and stir us to action, but also to validate and empower with Webspace, column inches and airtime the plight of those so afflicted, to bring dignity and gravitas to their predicament.
"Attention must be paid."
On this Father's Day, many fathers' jobs have been outsourced or offshored and dads are struggling, along with mothers, to feed, clothe, shelter ( to pay their mortgage or rent if their houses haven't already been foreclosed) their families. They now must pay $4.00 a gallon gasoline to get to work or the supermarket where the food prices have skyrocketed. These fathers pay for health care if they have it (50 million can't afford it) and even if they do have health care, it's almost unaffordable. And many of these fathers have to decide between paying the utilities or taking a child to the doctor.
Life under the Bush authoritarian, war mongering, government of, by, and for Bushite haves and have mores, anti-common good, you're-on-your-own regime.
Winship wrote: "As Moyers has pointed out, [net] neutrality sounds too much like Switzerland, and as my colleague Patric Verrone, president of the Writers Guild, West, says, the notion of fighting for neutrality seems oxymoronic. So, “Internet freedom” it is.
"Marty Kaplan, director of the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center, told those gathered they were a crowd that 'may not color inside the lines but sure can connect the dots.'
"Yet as perceptive and informed as attendees were, sadly absent from the weekend’s energetic dialogues was any significant discussion of this country’s economy, the vast gap between rich and poor, the way gross inequality in such desperate times is being largely ignored by the media, our candidates and the progressive movement.
And then he proceeded to mention the following: “The economic crisis is just not that compelling or sexy to the many progressives who are stirred into action by every ugly utterance by Bill O’Reilly,” media activist and journalist Danny Schecter writes.
"Thirty six and a half million Americans – one in eight Americans, one in six children – that we KNOW of, because there are no good ways to really measure – live below the official federal poverty level, $20,000 a year for a family of four.
"Half of us – half! – will have gone through a year or more of poverty by the time we turn 60.
"[John McCain] He counts among his economic advisors Carly Fiorina, fired chief executive of Hewlett Packard, where you’ll recall she was accused of breathtaking mismanagement and street-bully tactics.
"Of her role in the McCain campaign, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management told The New York Times, 'You couldn’t pick a worse, non-imprisoned C.E.O. to be your standard-bearer.'
"[Barack Obama's]economic policy director, Jason Furman, has been a defender of Wal-Mart and was director of former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, a group of Wall Street Democrats committed to continuing Bill Clinton’s economic doctrine – i.e., growth based on deficit reduction and free trade.
"Both candidates need economic advisors untainted by association with corporate interests, folks who know what it’s like to have to live on macaroni instead of meat, to spend sleepless nights in subways or shelters, to let diseases like cancer and diabetes gnaw away at a person’s insides because they can’t afford medicine and doctors.
"And the media need to tell their stories, not only to make the rest of us aware and stir us to action, but also to validate and empower with Webspace, column inches and airtime the plight of those so afflicted, to bring dignity and gravitas to their predicament.
"Attention must be paid."
On this Father's Day, many fathers' jobs have been outsourced or offshored and dads are struggling, along with mothers, to feed, clothe, shelter ( to pay their mortgage or rent if their houses haven't already been foreclosed) their families. They now must pay $4.00 a gallon gasoline to get to work or the supermarket where the food prices have skyrocketed. These fathers pay for health care if they have it (50 million can't afford it) and even if they do have health care, it's almost unaffordable. And many of these fathers have to decide between paying the utilities or taking a child to the doctor.
Life under the Bush authoritarian, war mongering, government of, by, and for Bushite haves and have mores, anti-common good, you're-on-your-own regime.
Comments