Month: June 2005

For those who don’t know her, Amy Goodman’s work embodies meticulous care, huge talent, outrageous courage, and tireless audacity. The show she hosts, Democracy Now!, is one of the few effective sources of honest analysis and reporting in the United States.

Over the past few years ,Pacifica Radio authorities have coercively transformed a people’s network into a nearly mainstream structure. They have claimed to be trying to increase Pacifica’s progressive outreach, but even Pacifica’s authorities can’t expect anyone to believe that attacking Democracy Now! is progressive. Cutting off Democracy Now would sunder Pacifica’s ties with its progressive listenership and its current donor base. The intent of such actions can only be to replace Pacifica’s progressive audience with a more upscale and mainstream one. In short, Pacifica’s leadership wants radio content that will get them invitations to hobnob with CEOs of the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. read more

In April, five people were shot dead in Bolivia, a military policeman was lynched, and the president declared a state of siege following a general strike that shut down much of the nation. At the end of it all, for the first time in a decade anywhere in the world, US and British corporate giants — the targets of the protest — were booted out of the Andean nation, a stunning reversal of the march of globalization.

You didn’t read that story? Come now, it was right there in the Washington Post — in paragraph 10, on page 13 of the "Style" section. I kid you not: the style section. It dangled from the bottom of a cute little story on the lifestyle of some local anti-WTO protesters. And so, one of the most extraordinary international stories of the year just went PFZZZT!!! and disappeared from sight. read more

In Indonesia, devout Muslim women named Gayatri or Laxmi read the Bhagavad Gita. Meanwhile, in India, Muslims and Hindus share a culture of co-existence and assimilation. Yet, such realities are largely concealed by a cultural mafia that legitimizes and markets stereotypes. They would have people believe instead that all Muslims are fundamentalists, all Christians are out to convert the world, and all Hindus are fanatics.

What is Ganesha doing in the Indonesian drawing room of a devout Muslim? How come women who pray to Allah five times a day are named Parvati, Laxmi, Gayatri, or Devi? Are these social aberrations? No, they’re the norm in thousands of Muslim households in Indonesia. In one of several visited during a recent trip, I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. The book wasn’t just sitting on a shelf, it was being assiduously studied, with paragraphs underlined and notes in the margins. read more

Possibly the greatest testament to the media’s power over mass consciousness is its ability to rewrite and even erase history. As the world plunges headlong into what’s been labeled the Information Age, for example, Western-dominated mass media – with the sometimes unwitting assistance of new Internet-based enterprises – have so far convinced most of their avid consumers that we’re dealing with unique issues and a revolutionary new environment that makes old debates about mass communication irrelevant. In reality, it’s just a case of media-induced amnesia. read more