Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts

VIDEO: A Banned Segment From Saturday Night Live



The 1998 Robert Smigel animated short film "Conspiracy Theory Rock", part of a March 1998 "TV Funhouse" segment, has been removed from all subsequent airings of the Saturday Night Live episode where it originally appeared. NBC claimed the edit (critical of their parent company) was done because it "wasn't funny". NBC is owned by General Electric/Westinghouse.

We Are The Government: The Power Of Jury Nullification

by John W. Whitehead. Saddled with a corporate media that marches in lockstep with the government, elected officials who dance to the tune of their corporate benefactors, and a court system that serves to maintain order rather than mete out justice, Americans often feel as if they have no voice and no recourse when it comes to holding government    ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: A Debatable 'Debate'

An illustration of what's wrong with the media.     The so-called "debates," among too many Republicans to have a debate, are yet another painful sign of how much words and ideas have degenerated in our times. No one expects these televised sound bites and "gotcha" questions to be anything like the historic Lincoln-Douglas debates on the   ... MORE

Why Do Media Still Take FBI Terror Warnings Seriously?

by Adam Johnson.    Zero for 40 at predicting attacks. On Monday, several mainstream media outlets repeated the latest press release by the FBI that country was under a new “heightened terror alert” from “ISIL-inspired attacks” “leading up to the July 4th weekend.” One of the more sensational outlets, CNN, led with the breathless warning on   ... MORE

Kate Vinton: Feds Subpoena Libertarian Media Site Over Posted Reader Comments Threatening Silk Road Judge

Rhetorical criticism treated as actual threats.  The Department of Justice issued a grand jury subpoena to Reason.com last week, asking the libertarian media site for the identities of six readers who had posted comments threatening Silk Road Judge Katherine Forrest. Blogger Ken White obtained the subpoena and published it in a post on      ... MORE

Lenore Skenazy: Cops And Media Applaud Local Busybody For Bravely Harassing Dad Who Briefly Left Kid Alone

Minding other people's business.  Area-man Mark Herrmann didn’t choose to be a hero. No, no, he was just minding his own business when he noticed that a child’s life was in mortal danger. He acted decisively—ensuring the child’s safety, and guaranteeing a police investigation into the negligent parent’s actions. Thanks to the video of the       ... MORE

Mark Cuban Says Net Neutrality Will ‘Fuck Everything Up’

by Dawn Chmielewski. Billionaire investor and ABC “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban unloaded on the Federal Communications Commission’s plan to fundamentally change how it oversees the open Internet. “That will fuck everything up,” said the voluble Cuban in remarks Wednesday at the Code/Media conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel, Ca.  ... MORE

Michael Brown, Officer Wilson and The Ferguson Riots

by Thomas Sowell. Everyone seems to have an opinion about the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri. But, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, “You’re entitled to your own opinion but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” Soon after the shooting death of Michael Brown, this 285-pound young man was depicted as a “gentle giant.” But, after a   ... MORE

Another White House Mouthpiece Joins Up With MSNBC

Propaganda repository gets new blood.  MSNBC: The place where ex-White House aides go to be unbiased. Or, well, something like that. There was a time, years ago, when MSNBC was still pretending to have straight news reporting by not letting hosts like Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews anchor election coverage. But that’s clearly a     ... MORE

Grant Duwe: The Truth About Mass Public Shootings

Why do the numbers appear to be going up? Because previous shootings have been underreported. The findings from two separate reports released in the last month—one by the FBI and the other by progressive investigative media outlet Mother Jones—have been offered up as evidence that "mass shootings" are occurring more      ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: Predatory Journalism

Exploiting the ignorant.  The New York Times is again on the warpath against what it calls "predatory lending." Just what is predatory lending? It is lending that charges a higher interest rate than people like those at the New York Times approve of. According to such thinking — or lack of thinking — the answer is to have the government set an interest  ... MORE

Jacob Sullum: New Survey Data Deflate Two Drug Scares

The drug war is dependent on deception.   Survey data released this month by the federal government cast doubt on a couple of widely accepted beliefs about drug use trends: 1) that the nation is in the midst of an escalating "heroin epidemic" and 2) that loosening marijuana prohibition encourages teenagers to smoke pot. In the National  ... MORE

IBD Editorial: Press Helps Obama Censor The News

It's not often that the press exposes its own bias.     But a Washington Post story this week reveals both the Obama administration's attempts to censor the news and the media's complicity in that effort. For decades, news outlets have relied on pool reports from a rotating group of White House correspondents who follow the president  ... MORE

Damon Root: Two Jeers For Eric Holder

His real "signature achievement."     In an interview conducted yesterday with The Daily Beast, outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder cited criminal-justice reform as his "signature achievement" as America's top law enforcement official. "After years of over-reliance on incarceration as a criminal-justice strategy, we finally started to  ... MORE

Ed Krayewski: The Role of the Media in the War on Drugs

The strategic air support.     The media's often called the fourth estate. Where's that come from? In the Middle Ages in Europe the first estate was the nobility, the second estate was the clergy, and the third estate was peasants, everyone else. Together the three estates constituted a feudal "realm." The king existed outside the     ... MORE