The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — One of the themes that emerges from this life analysis is that kids need heroes to inspire and emulate. That’s why it’s so important for young women to have role models, along with African Americans and other minorities in America. All I can do…
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” — Thomas Jefferson,…
By Ken Buck – Special to the New American Journal – The first brilliant idea Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page had was to “crawl” — and trawl — the World Wide Web. Using spiders, it would copy what it found, create vast databases of web content, and then “index” that content, evaluating it…
By Glynn Wilson — WASHINGTON, D.C. — Elon Musk of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, the methhead hacker/programmers at Google and YouTube and their lobbyists in Washington, as well as their Republican friends in the House, do not want to hear this. But there is little doubt that more government regulation of social media is…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. – Ahh, did you have a nice break curled up on the couch watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on NBC? Or did you spend too much time arguing with relatives about politics while stuffing your face and drinking too much? For me, it was…
Editor’s Note: This news comes with no personal regrets, since I didn’t know either of the deceased. But I knew Jack Neely some when writing for Metro Pulse myself, one of the most interesting alternative weeklies in the country in print and online in the late 20th century. It’s a sad day when anyone dies,…
By Glynn Wilson – APPOMATTOX, Virg. — We didn’t make it here in time for Memorial Day, but National Park Service rangers and volunteers say nearly 500 people showed up for the playing of “Taps” and holiday weekend programs. I don’t know for sure, but considering that Confederate sympathizers seem to generate more engagement these…
You can’t report ‘both sides’ and be ‘accurate.’ It’s a fallacy – By Glynn Wilson – This morning and this week I feel a little bit like Ernest Hemingway as depicted in the movie “Papa: Hemingway in Cuba” based on his life there. That is to say I am having trouble writing a lede sentence…
By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — Since the early days of science and later objective journalism, we have known that reaching breakthroughs in knowledge is gained over time in fits and starts. A scientist, or a journalist for that matter, practicing the American invention of objective journalism, becomes immersed in the literature of a…
By Joe Romm – Amidst backlash and subscription cancellations for hiring extreme climate science denier, colunnist Bret Stephens, the New York Times offered a stunning defense: There are “millions of people who agree with him.” With that ‘logic’, the Times could hire as a columnist former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke — or…
By Bernie Sanders – MEDIA SHAPES OUR VERY LIVES. It tells us what products we need to buy and, by the quantity and nature of coverage, what is “important†and what is “unimportant.†Media informs us as to the scope of what is “realistic†and “possible.†When we see constant coverage of murders and brutality…
Oh, and Alabama’s Jeff Sessions is about to be U.S. Attorney General – The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Let me start this morning by repeating the two key words guaranteed to make the Facebook home page news feed and the FB trending news feed: This column is about fake news and golden…
The mainstream, corporate news media sacrificed democracy for ratings. By Thom Hartmann – AlterNet – The media are engaged in an orgy of navel-gazing about the Trump presidency, but they’re totally, utterly, absolutely, no-way-in-hell willing to gaze at their own navel. Did Russian hackers revealing that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile had put their…
Connecting the Dots – By Glynn Wilson – As I sit here on a mild winter day on the Gulf Coast drinking coffee from Kenya, eating a banana from Mexico and reading the latest news on “fake news,” I’m thinking it might be preferable to simply log off and eat nails than to have to…
The media must not excuse the racism, misogyny, nativism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia because we think Trump voters have legitimate gripes. By Neal Gabler – It didn’t take a clairvoyant to predict that President-elect Donald Trump would be almost instantly normalized by the press since he had already been normalized by them when he was a…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – In the Huge wave washing over the American landscape after the tsunami of Donald Trump’s surprising ride to president of the United States on a surfboard constructed of bullshit, mainstream news organizations and Democrats are beating up on Mark Zuckerberg and poor Facebook, blaming the widespread sharing…
Media Incest On Display: Will Anyone Notice? The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – On the eve of the Republican convention in Cleveland Ohio, a remarkable thing happened. No, not another police shooting. Not just a tell all article about Donald Trump. It is an event that should send shock waves through the capitalist…
By Todd Gitlin – To readers who follow taxes and finance — subjects often introduced with the adjective “arcane†— David Cay Johnston is one of America’s best-known reporters. Johnston has worked on the staffs of Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and from 1995 to 2008, The New York Times, where his…
By Glynn Wilson – Defying the odds and the oddsmakers in the mainstream media, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is still alive in the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and one of the reasons his campaign resonates with so many people is because the traditional press in America would rather focus on the conflict…
Who Will Hold Them Accountable? – The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – There is so much rotten egg on so many faces in Alabama this week it is hard to decide where to begin. But I guess the biggest news is the egg all over the faces of just about every major law…
