At Media Matters, Eric Boehlert discussed FOX "news" with a former employee of FOX. Bottom line, FOX "news" is not "news" at all. Disturbing, if not unsurprising, insider observations about the total lack of objectivity.
I get much of my news from Huffington Post. It has been an excellent source for Wall Street corruption, even if those good links come at the price of also getting a steady diet of woo "medicine" and Hollywood gossip. All in all, though, Huffpo has been a steady provider of valuable information. Let me back up: Arianna Huffington has also offered some excellent advice, such as her campaign that we should all get a lot more sleep. When I first heard today's news that AOL has bought the Huffington Post, I was disappointed. That was my honest gut feeling. It immediately occurred to me that AOL will now insist that Huffpo needs to produce significantly more revenue at the expense of progressive commentary. I suspect that that there will be new political pressures to hold back stories inconvenient to the bottom line. Thus I'm not celebrating. But I also know that Arianna Huffington has long been interested in cranking out serious investigative journalism, and I know that it takes money to do this well. I'm still not celebrating. I'm apprehensive. According to John Nichols of The Nation, though, it is not necessarily time to mourn.
If, with AOL’s resources, she is able to hire more, if she and her team are able to produce more serious content and if they can identify some of those “different ways to save investigative journalism,” it is possible to imagine that the AOL–Huffington Post deal could mark a turning point in the debate about the future of journalism. That’s a lot of “ifs…”The bottom line, then, is that time will tell . . .
Now, in the midst of the popular uprising in Egypt, the mainstream media is educating us that Hosni Mubarak, President of Egypt, has a well-documented history of being a brutally corrupt man who has been betraying and subjugating the Egyptian people for 30 years. And see here. But why hasn't the American media been reporting on this obvious fact until recently? Have they been too busy reporting instead on Michael Jackson, Lindsay Lohan, sexual indiscretions of politicians, sporting events, horserace politics, and bickering pundits? Maybe if the American media had been doing its job reporting, even a little bit, on world politics, Mubarak's despicable rule would not have gone on this long. The undeniable fact is that our highly consolidated mega-corporate media has been closing down foreign bureaus at a startling rate:
In closing all their outposts abroad, a number of newspapers -- most notably the Boston Globe, Newsday, the Philadelphia Inquirer and some Tribune Co. papers -- put an end to long, much heralded traditions of delivering foreign news in their own way to their own readers, of covering patches of the globe that their audiences had a particular, sometimes singular, interest in. They covered breaking news and big stories, to be sure. But, perhaps more often, correspondents from these papers were ahead of the news or off it completely, telling stories about interesting people, places and customs that you just couldn't read anywhere else. They had passports. They wandered. And they took their readers with them.
Many editors say that kind of reporting was a luxury. Now, with some noteworthy exceptions, it is a relic, gone the way of paper tape and the pica pole. Unlike those artifacts of days past, foreign bureaus were not replaced by new technology. They were not replaced at all.
What else are we missing because the mainstream media would rather not spend the time and money doing real journalism covering important world events? One further note. Why are we now, finally getting any coverage on this popular uprising in Egypt? Is it because our news outlets suddenly care about burgeoning democracies, or is it that they obsess over images of people fighting in the streets. Think, also, of how the coverage of the popular uprising in Iran faded once the easily photographed violence subsided. We aren't connoisseurs of world politics. Rather, we are avid consumers of conflict pornography.This cute song is about a serious issue.
The last really good history I read was "Hellhound On His Trail, " which follows James Earl Ray's path from his childhood in Alton, Illinois through a violent intersection with the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and continues to follow Ray's trajectory with his quizzical recantations of his "life's purpose." With the same cool hand, Sides sketches the strengths and inadequacies of Dr. King's inner circle and paints larger atmospheric strokes with newspaper headlines on the increasing violence in response to desegregation and the influence of war in Vietnam on national sentiment about federal involvement in heretofore state affairs. By themselves, vignettes about Ray's lackluster career as a petty criminal, his stunted attempts at artistic grandeur and addiction to prostitutes would simply depress the reader. Here, the intentional failures and manipulations of Hoover's FBI and first-hand accounts of Ray's behavior appear like birds descending on a tragic town, flickering across the broader canvas creating momentum and dread. Awful as the true subject of this thriller may be, I found myself disappointed to reach the end.