Journalism Glance
Power and the media are not just about cosy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable reporters and the nexus of power that runs between White House and state department and Pentagon, between Downing Street and the foreign office and the ministry of defence. In the western context, power and the media is about words - and the use of words.It is about semantics.It is about the employment of phrases and clauses and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history; and about our ignorance of history. More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power.
Alcohol companies are increasingly using the latest new media technologies — including cellphones, social networking sites, YouTube and other features of the expanding digital universe — to reach young drinkers, a new report contends.
In a blatant example of mainstream media censorship, by the national broadcaster in Ireland RTE, who have an obligation to inform the public and to give a fair and balanced viewpoint, Monday nights airing of The Frontline on RTE 1, hosted by Pat Kenny, we witnessed the type of censorship one would expect from a Third World dictatorship. Up to the point where the lady in the audience mentions the Bilderberg Group and Trilateral Commission meeting in Dublin last week, Kenny remains silent but immediately steps in to talk over the questioner.
The FBI launched three separate investigations into the leaking of classified material made public by newspaper columnist Robert Novak in the 1980s, newly obtained records show.
Even as headlines and broadcast news are dominated by BP's fire-ravaged, sunken offshore rig and the ruptured well gushing a reported 210,000 gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico, there's another important story involving Big Oil and pollution -- one that shatters not only the environment but the essential First Amendment right of journalists to tell truth and shame the devil.
The director Michael Moore says that a federal judge’s ruling to allow Chevron to subpoena footage from the documentary “Crude” could have dire consequences on the documentary filmmaking process, and urged that film’s director to resist the subpoena if he can.
Mass media are media forms designed to reach the largest audience possible. They include television, movies, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, records, video games and the internet. Many studies have been conducted in the past century to measure the effects of mass media on the population in order to discover the best techniques to influence it. From those studies emerged the science of Communications, which is used in marketing, public relations and politics. Mass communication is a necessary tool the insure the functionality of a large democracy; it is also a necessary tool for a dictatorship. It all depends on its usage.
