President Obama, in his visit to China, held a "town meeting" with
Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the
value of freedom of information, saying that he is a "supporter of
non-censorship" and that open access to information was a "source of
strength."
Suppose President Obama and his aides had decided to take on the worst offender among the big insurance companies this fall.
Suppose the White House had highlighted the failure of the company to
provide quality care, the abuses in which it has engaged and the
behind-the-scenes campaigning by a self-interested corporation to
influence the health-care debate in a manner that helps it while
harming Americans.
What kind of a public debate can we have on the most vital issues of the day in the
United States? A lot depends on the media, which determines how these issues are framed for most people.
Hypocrisy is far too common a feature of our political culture to comprehensively chronicle, particularly when there is a change of party control and each side starts doing exactly that to which they spent the last several years vociferously objecting; see here for a vivid example of that dynamic, from a new Pew poll released today:
It was probably a given that the
corporate press would mangle the debate over this year's healthcare
reform legislation, considering their poor showing in the healthcare
debate of the early '90s (Extra!, 7-8/93).
The only questions were when and how.
A battle is raging over the future of
books in the digital age and the role that libraries will play. One
case now before a U.S. federal court may, some say, grant a practical
monopoly on recorded human knowledge to global Internet search giant
Google. The complex case has attracted opposition from hundreds of
individuals and groups from around the planet.
On Sunday, Meet the Press hosted a panel discussion
to debate two primary issues: (1) foreign policy -- specifically, the
war in Afghanistan, and (2) health care. The panel: Rudy Giuliani,
Tom Friedman, Harold Ford, Jr., and Tom Brokaw (as Jay Rosen often notes, Meet the Press is doing a fantastic job of fulfilling its pledge to present "fresh voices" in its discussions).
August 29 marked the fourth
anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf
Coast. The devastation wrought by both the hurricane itself and the
government's inept response prompted remarkably critical corporate
media coverage that promised to fight for Katrina survivors and change
the way we talk about poverty and race (FAIR Media Advisory, 9/9/05).
This month, a lot of media stories have compared President
Johnson's war in Vietnam and President Obama's war in Afghanistan. The
comparisons are often valid, but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned
-- the media's insistent support for the war even after most of the
public has turned against it.
Writing about Barack Obama's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Politico's Mike Allen (5/27/09) declared:
The media's left-of-center bias is rarely more
apparent than during court fights. The coverage running up to the pick
was slanted heavily toward the notion of how "pragmatic" Obama's legal
views are and how unlikely he was to pick a liberal.
