Occupy Phoenixville/Films For Action will kick off its documentary film series on January 21, 2012 by showing “The Corporation” at 6 pm at the Schuylkill Friends Meetinghouse.
A dangerous thing can occur when you start learning about what's really going on in the world. The problems start to seem so complex, and you're just one person, doubts begin to creep in. You sincerely want to help change the world, but from all this knowledge you start to believe that the world is too out of control and too big to change, so you end up not doing anything.What aspiring...
Let me speak to you about dumbness because that is what schools teach best. Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance: you didn't know something, but there were ways to find out if you wanted to. Government-controlled schooling didn't eliminate dumbness - in fact, we now know that people read more fluently before we had forced schooling - but dumbness was transformed.Now dumb people...
Driving to the airport to pick up a friend, I stop at a red light. My eyes wander to a bus-stop bench across the intersection. 'Norma Whitfield - Your Real-Estate Connection.' Wham. Before I even have time to react, the advertisement has entered my mind and lodged itself between the folds of my thoughts. Another chunk of my mental landscape, grabbed without consent.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, President Bush asked the American public to “never entertain outrageous conspiracy theories.” The irony of his statement is easily lost. Most people consider themselves reasonable, thoughtful individuals that don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but the Official story of 9/11 – that 19 radical terrorists conspired for several years to hijack...
The most memorable reporting I've encountered on the conflict in Iraq was delivered in the form of confetti exploding out of a cardboard tube. I had just begun working at the MIT Media Lab in March 2006 when Alyssa Wright, a lab student, got me to participate in a project called "Cherry Blossoms." I strapped on a backpack with a pair of vertical tubes sticking out of the top; they were...
“The one who controls the search results controls the searcher” may be an apt motto for our era. The sad truth about the Internet is that what started as a liberating multiplicity of informational sources has dwindled to a handful of knowledge-monopolies with Google and Wikipedia leading the pack.
Warren Buffett, who knows a thing or two about wealth, has noted that because of the way the tax code is structured, he effectively pays taxes at a lower rate than the secretaries who work for him, concluding: "There's class warfare, all right. But it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
It is not a secret that the US government uses aggressive propaganda techniques. Furthermore, even when the US government is not directly manipulating the major news organizations, the media tends to support the official position. If the news organizations and the government are sometimes misleading the public, what can we do? The first step to fight the propaganda is to know when we are being...
New York City woke up this morning to find that some committed satirists had delivered unto them a remarkably well-rendered facsimile of the New York Times, filled with earnest and hopeful headlines from the future -- specifically July 4, 2009 -- in which the Iraq War is over, Bush is indicted for treason, and columnist Thomas Friedman has confessed: "I have no business holding a pen, at least...
Activists protesting the war at last week’s Democratic National Convention have come and gone. Banners were unfurled. Protesters marched and chanted. Puppets of Bush and company provided comic relief. But looking back at the conference, there is no clear sign that any of these efforts have gotten us any closer to ending the war.
Two cups of McDonald’s iced coffee (BUY!) sit on a Fox TV news desk, a punch-you-in-the-face product placement (BUY!) to chase down your morning news. The funny thing is, the coffee is not actually real. The Las Vegas Sun comments on a growing trend in news stations across the country.
After airing a five-minute segment on the recent controversy surrounding racy photos of a teenage Disney star, longtime Nightline anchor Cynthia McFadden left the viewing audience with these words to ponder: “Just another distraction to keep our minds away from the things that really matter.” With grim resignation, McFadden did her best to project the image of a grizzled...
After having their plans rejected once by British planning institutions, a small group of families has been granted permission to build a small ecovillage in the Welsh countryside. The tiny village, to be called Lammas, is planned to cover a 74 acre site of pasture and woodland.
The New York Times has exposed a secret Pentagon campaign to infiltrate the media with pro-war propaganda.The scheme reaches all the way to the Bush White House, where top officials recruited dozens of "military analysts" to spread favorable views of the war via the news. Many of these propaganda pundits didn't reveal that they were working from Pentagon scripts or lobbying for companies seeking...
The idea is simple: take your TV, your DVD player, your video iPod, your XBOX 360, your laptop, your PSP, and say goodbye to them all for seven days. Simple, but not at all easy. Like millions of others before you, you’ll be shocked at just how difficult - yet also how life-changing - a week spent unplugged can really be.
While the Iraqi government continued its large-scale military assault in Basra, the NPR reporter’s voice from Iraq was unequivocal on the morning of March 27: “There is no doubt that this operation needed to happen.”Such flat-out statements, uttered with journalistic tones and without attribution, are routine for the U.S. media establishment. In the War Made Easy documentary film, I put it this...
Not just a book reviewof Thomas de Zengotita's MediatedAsk yourself: is there anything you do that remains essentially unmediated, anything you don't experience reflexively through some commodified representation of it? Birth? Marriage? Illness? Think of all the movies and memoirs, philosophies and techniques, self-help books, counselors, programs, presentations, workshops . . . and the...
Devon Grey's new trilogy, The Corporate Media Survival Guide introduces viewers to television's hidden technology and the unspoken corporate agenda that surrounds it. To view "How The News Works"...
The top 25 most censored stories of 2007:#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy# 7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq#8 Pentagon...