From the Media Matters web site

Top Editors Call For The Wall Street Journal To Tell The Truth About Rove

The Wall Street Journal publishes a weekly column by Karl Rove. In the midst of a campaign to build a "permanent" conservative majority, Rove co-founded a super PAC that Vanity Fair says will spend over a billion dollars this election cycle. But to Rupert Murdoch's Journal, Karl Rove is just a guy who used to work for George W. Bush. Despite it being standard practice, the Journal refuses to disclose Rove's super PAC role. When asked by Investigative reporter Joe Strupp, newspaper editors across the country denounced the Journal's practice of non-disclosure: http://mm4a.org/PCsB7H

Newsweek Exemplifies Media Vulnerability

Respected economists like Brad DeLong and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman noted gross factual inaccuracies in Niall Ferguson's Newsweek cover story.Newsweek took no responsibility for any inaccuracies though, casually admitting that they don't even fact check the articles they publish. Against a backdrop of shrinking newsrooms and layoffs, I explained how the conservative echo chamber exploits such vulnerabilities:  http://mm4a.org/RAlguR

Media Ignore Record Ice Melt

Scientists last week announced that this year's Greenland ice melt has shattered all previous records. The lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center toldMedia Matters' Jill Fitzsimmons "I absolutely think the media should cover this more, along with the record-breaking pace of Arctic sea ice loss for the summer." And yet this story received no mention at all by any broadcast network, cable news network, or major newspaper. Find out what the media isn't telling you about the increasing pace of climate change:http://mm4a.org/Pudk8Z

Elephants In The Room

Fox distorted President Obama's remarks tying business success to "this unbelievable American system" that happens to include government spending on infrastructure. Independent fact checkers thoroughly debunked the Fox-fueled 'you didn't build that' smear. Jon Stewart mocked Fox for the self-evident distortion. The Republican National Committee on the other hand adopted the distortion as a theme for this year's convention. And wouldn't you know - Fox praised the RNC for doing so. But as Eric Hananoki noted, the Convention is being held in an arena built by Florida taxpayers:  http://mm4a.org/NFDfOM

FAIR's Janine Jackson on Media Matters

http://will.illinois.edu/mediamatters/

Media Matters with Bob McChesney

Sundays at 1 pm Central on AM580

Media Matters features host Bob McChesney in conversation with a variety of guests. Listeners may call with comments or questions.

Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The media are central to all our lives," he says. "Yet the media are the most frequently misunderstood parts of our lives. We want to help people understand the role of media in society."

Subscribe to the Media Matters podcast
Subscribe to the Media Matters weekly email newsletter
Media Matters on Facebook

Media Matters programs & archives:

Sunday, May 06, 2012

FAIR's Janine Jackson joins Bob this Sunday

Janine Jackson is program director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and producer/co-host of FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin. She contributes frequently to FAIR's magazine, Extra! and co-edited The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the '90s (Westview Press).

She has appeared on ABC's Nightline and CNN Headline News, among other outlets, and has testified to the Senate Communications Subcommittee on budget reauthorization for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Her articles have appeared in various publications, including In These Times and the UAW’s Solidarity, and in books including Civil Rights Since 1787 (New York University Press) and Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism (New World Library).

Jackson is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and has an M.A. in sociology from the New School for Social Research. Janine was one of Media Matters' first guests ten years ago.

Audio archives:

Play now:

Download: mp3 file

Show links:

• Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

• 
  

Alperovitz- America Beyond Capitalism

http://will.illinois.edu/mediamatters/

Gar Alperovitz dicusses America Beyond Capitalism.

As discontent with the economic and political status quo mounts in the wake of the “great recession”, America Beyond Capitalism is a book whose time has come. Gar Alperovitz’s expert diagnosis of the long-term structural crisis of the American economic and political system is accompanied by detailed, practical answers to the problems we face as a society. Unlike many books that reserve a few pages of a concluding chapter to offer generalized, tentative solutions, Alperovitz marshals years of research into emerging “new economy” strategies to present a comprehensive picture of practical bottom-up efforts currently underway in thousands of communities across the United States. All democratize wealth and empower communities, not corporations: worker-ownership, cooperatives, community land trusts, social enterprises, along with many supporting municipal, state and longer term federal strategies as well. America Beyond Capitalism is a call to arms, an eminently practical roadmap for laying foundations to change a faltering system that increasingly fails to sustain the great American values of equality, liberty and meaningful democracy.

Gar Alperovitz has had a distinguished career as a historian, political economist, activist and government official. He is currently the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland. He grew up in America’s heartland in Racine, Wisconsin, in the 1940s, and received a bachelor of science degree from the University of Wisconsin; a masters degree from the University of California at Berkeley; and his Ph.D. in political economy as a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University. After completing his studies he served as a legislative director in both houses of Congress and as a special assistant in the State Department. Among his many achievements is having been the architect of the first modern steel industry attempt at worker ownership in Youngstown, Ohio. In addition to America Beyond Capitalism, he has authored Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance, and The Decision To Use the Atomic Bomb, and his articles have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The Nation. He is a founding principal of the University of Maryland-based Democracy Collaborative, a research institution developing practical, policy-focused, and systematic paths towards ecologically sustainable, community-oriented change and the democratization of wealth.

Audio archives:

Play now:

Download: mp3 file

Show links:

• Gar Alperovitz's website

The dumbing down of higher education in the USA

Media Matters with Bob McChesney

Sundays at 1 pm Central on AM580

Media Matters features host Bob McChesney in conversation with a variety of guests. Listeners may call with comments or questions.

Bob McChesney is a research professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Information and Library Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The media are central to all our lives," he says. "Yet the media are the most frequently misunderstood parts of our lives. We want to help people understand the role of media in society."

Subscribe to the Media Matters podcast

Subscribe to the Media Matters weekly email newsletter

Media Matters on Facebook

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Author Richard Arum discuss higher education.

In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on Higher Education: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there?

For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list.