Jeff Cohen
Jeff Cohen was associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group FAIR, and former board member of Progressive Democrats of America. In 2002, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC (overseen by NBC News). He is the author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media - and a cofounder of the online action group, www.RootsAction.org. His website is here: http://jeffcohen.org
Articles by this author
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Views Monday, September 16, 2019 What George Carlin Taught Us About Media Propaganda by Omission: On Bernie Sanders, Medicare for All, and the Green New Deal In the old George Carlin joke, the TV sportscaster announces: “Here’s a partial score from the West Coast – Los Angeles 6.” For a brilliant comedian like Carlin—who skewered corporate power , class structure and political / media propaganda—that’s one of his more innocuous jokes. But it’s sharply... Read more |
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Views Saturday, August 17, 2019 Memo to Mainstream Journalists: Can the Phony Outrage; Bernie Is Right About Bias Mainstream journalists are having a ridiculous hissy fit over Sen. Bernie Sanders’ suggestion that there may be a connection between the owner of a news outlet and the content or biases of that outlet’s coverage. If Sanders had suggested that Rupert Murdoch’s ownership of Fox News impacts its... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, June 25, 2019 Meet the 'Bad Blues': House Democrats Who Deserve to Be Primaried by Progressives The following report is by no means exhaustive—only illustrative. There may well be a Democratic member of Congress near you not included here who serves corporate interests more than majority interests, or has simply grown tired or complacent in the never-ending struggles for social, racial and... Read more |
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Views Friday, March 22, 2019 Let’s Not Restore or Mythologize Obama With former Vice President Joe Biden seemingly ready to join the presidential race, a Washington Post reporter wrote: “Biden and his allies picture an election that poses a choice between four more years of Trump disruption and a chance to restore the Obama administration.” Ah, the hope of an Obama... Read more |
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Views Thursday, March 07, 2019 This Jew Tells Speaker Pelosi: "You May Well Prove Ilhan Omar Correct" Speaker Nancy Pelosi is reportedly still considering a symbolic “show vote” in Congress on an anti-Semitism and “hate” resolution – which would offer all the authenticity and honesty of a Soviet show trial. If Pelosi proceeds, it will prove Rep. Ilhan Omar’s point about the inordinate influence... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, March 05, 2019 WaPo Warns Dems That Progressive Policies Could Bring Them Many Victories A standard bias in news coverage in elite outlets ( Washington Post , New York Times , NPR , etc.) is centrism —using an allegedly objective voice to warn against or critique “extremism” of left and right. Centrist bias sometimes takes the form of inaccurate critiques of broadly popular progressive... Read more |
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Views Monday, January 21, 2019 The System’s Falling Apart: Were the Dogmatic Marxists Right After All? As a young activist in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, I heard plenty of Marxist dogma from left-wing sects that proselytized in major colleges and cities about how “monopoly capitalism is entering its final crisis.” The warnings of apocalyptic collapse were constant. They sounded absurd, more so as... Read more |
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Views Monday, January 14, 2019 Corporate Media Bias on 2020 Democratic Race Already in High Gear After having been a mainstream TV news pundit, I’m unfortunately addicted to cable news (mostly MSNBC and CNN ) and all the blather and repetition—laughably overhyped as "breaking news." Even when it's the same news that’s been breaking... and breaking... for hours or days. But I'm more bothered by... Read more |
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Views Sunday, October 21, 2018 Democratic Autopsy: One Year Later In October 2017, a team of progressive researchers published “ Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis ,” which probed the causes of the disastrous 2016 election defeat. The report came in the wake of the party leadership’s failure to do its own autopsy. In a cover story for The Nation , William... Read more |
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Views Monday, October 15, 2018 Few Democrats Offer Alternatives to War-Weary Voters Chants of “No More War” from delegates at the 2016 Democratic National Convention gave voice to sentiments that still resonate through the base of the party and the broad U.S. public , notably in communities with higher rates of military sacrifice . While Trump’s 2016 victories in swing states may... Read more |