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 Thursday, May 31, 2007 Are Media Out to Get John Edwards? Give me a break about John Edwards' pricey haircut, mansion, lecture fees and the rest. The focus on these topics tells us two things about corporate media. One we've long known - that they elevate personal stuff above issues. The other is now becoming clear - that they have a special animosity toward Edwards . Read more |
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Views Wednesday, May 23, 2007 Don't Think of a U.S. Soldier, Unarmed, Abandoned in Iraq's Civil War! One need not be a linguist like George Lakoff to know that it's hard to win a debate on the other guy's assumptions. Or worse, the other guy's lies. For years Team Bush has sought to shroud their devastating and deepening Iraq occupation in the myth of troop protection. Read more |
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Views Wednesday, May 16, 2007 Falwell and Me It was fitting to see so much gushing on TV news about Rev. Jerry Falwell in the hours after his death. He and TV news held the same things sacred: fame, soundbites and uninformed fear-mongering. At the beginning of his rise 25 years ago, it was mainstream media complicity and gullibility that helped build Falwell's Moral Majority and the myth of its clout. As documented in Tina Rosenberg's 1982 Washington Monthly piece, "How the Media Made the Moral Majority," Team Falwell repeatedly violated the Ninth Commandment by misleading journalists about their numbers and power. Read more |
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Views Wednesday, April 04, 2007 The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader." The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several years — his last years — are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole. Read more |
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Views Wednesday, February 07, 2007 Jonah Goldberg’s Gambling Debt: Will Tribune Company Pay It? There are many shades of rightwing punditry in our country. Among the shadiest is Jonah Goldberg. With arrogance seemingly matched only by his ignorance, Goldberg was just being Goldberg when he offered this wager two years ago: Read more |
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Views Friday, February 02, 2007 Will Healthcare Timidity Trip Up Hillary Clinton? It's conventional wisdom that if Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign falters with Democratic activists in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, it will be over the issue of the Iraq war. And her vacillations on the war. Read more |
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Views Wednesday, January 24, 2007 Jim Webb Offers the Democratic Response. . .to Hillary and Obama If you watched freshman Virginia Sen. Jim Webb deliver the Democratic response to Bush's State of the Union speech, you witnessed something historic -- a Democrat on national TV unabashedly ripping into six years of Bush rule for an uninterrupted 10 minutes. With no O'Reilly or Hannity to disrupt or out-shout him. Read more |
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Views Monday, January 22, 2007 Can Indy Media Stop the Corporate Media’s Hillary Bandwagon? Prominent pundits seem ecstatic over Hillary Clinton's entry into the presidential race just days after Barack Obama's media-created candidacy became official. Media talking heads are having so much fun lately they don't seem to notice that our political system is failing to address ever-worsening problems: social, environmental, fiscal and imperial. Read more |
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Views Friday, December 29, 2006 Announcing the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2006 Competition has been fierce this year for the fifteenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes. Read more |
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Views Monday, November 27, 2006 TV Blowhard Barks at Iran: Let’s Hold CNN Accountable Turn on CNN Headline News -- a supposed "news" channel -- on weekday nights and you'll be subjected to the lectures of a loudmouthed, factually-challenged, occasionally funny know-it-all whose shtick is that he's "just a regular American schmoe." Read more |