San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Media

The Most Important Stories That the Corporate Media Didn’t Tell You in 2014

by

By Jim Miller

We live in troubled times but are increasingly ill equipped to deal with them. The average American is awash in a sea of ghastly, contextless headlines punctuated by inane trivia and pointless titillation. Somewhere between the latest massacre and Kim Kardashian’s most recent booty shot we got lost.

Indeed, some studies have even shown that the more news we consume the less we actually know. That’s because so much of what we have come to think of as “news” is really a form of corporate propaganda, a depthless mass of factoids designed to not interfere with the bottom line. Thus we know less as we amuse ourselves to death.

So what, more precisely, have we been missing?   [Read more…]

The 2014 P.U.-litzers

by

Some of the stinkiest reporting from the past year

Originally posted at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

It’s that time of year again, when FAIR looks back at the year and recalls some of the stinkiest media moments. There were, of course, many contenders– but only a select few can make the list.   [Read more…]

Stories from the Weekend: NYC Cop Killing Brings Out the Fear Mongers

by

By Doug Porter

Two New York City policemen were gunned down in cold blood as they sat their patrol car in Brooklyn and Saturday. The gunman had a long history of mental illness and a criminal record to match. He used social media to brag about his murderous intent, saying it was revenge for police injustices.

Cable news networks and social media were all over it. It took about a half hour before I saw the first threats against Rev. Al Sharpton on Facebook. A rep for the NYPD union declared the city a war zone, blaming Mayor Bill de Blasio, saying he had blood on his hands. Former mayor Rudi Giuliani blamed the President and Attorney General. Fox News interspersed film clips of NYC protesters advocating violence with clips of an Al Sharpton speech in Washington.

The usual fear-mongers to wasted no time using these senseless deaths as an opportunity to denigrate those who’ve been protesting police shootings of civilians in recent months. There is, of course, no connection. But look for the nation’s press to back away from reporting on future protests. The taint is in the air, even if the facts don’t support the narrative.   [Read more…]

Video Interview with Balboa Park Protestors about Justice and Race Relations

by

By Horacio Jones

Since the grand jury decisions in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, Americans have had to face the issues of race and police brutality once again. Many have taken to protesting as a way to have their voices heard. On December 13, 2014 there were numerous nationwide protests and I caught up with some of the protestors in Balboa Park to get their opinions on race relations with the police and what can be done to improve them.

No matter which side you are on, freedom of speech is paramount to the successful resolution of this obvious problem regarding police killing unarmed citizens.   [Read more…]

Sony Pictures Cyber Attack: Pearl Harbor or Forrest Gump?

by

By Doug Porter

Yesterday Sony Pictures did what many businesses would in similar circumstances – it assessed risks relative to reward and chose to pull the plug on a soon-to-be-released movie comedy, ‘The Interview.’

The $44 million film staring Seth Rogen and James Franco about an assassination attempt on North Korea’s leader was supposed to debut on Dec. 25, Christmas Day.

Now it’s dead in the water, with company reps saying, “Sony has no further release plans for the film.”

This decision was the end result of a hacking of Sony’s computer system by the “Guardians of Peace,” a group the US government says has links to North Korea. Unreleased films, company emails, employee information, threats to employees and their families and promises of violence against theaters and the public have all surfaced on the internet in recent days.

Today I’ll take a look at the implications of both the attack and Sony’s decision to capitulate.   [Read more…]

Torture Tuesday: A Study in Manufacturing Consent

by

By Doug Porter

If you are unfortunate enough to be aware of the news today, you’ll be a witness to our country’s greatest exercise in what Walter Lippmann and subsequently Noam Chomsky called ‘manufactured consent.”

I’m referring to the release of the heavily redacted summary of the the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the use of torture. By the end of the day, via the conclusions of the chattering class, the American public will know three things:

  • US policy following the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks included broadly worded permissions to engage in torture.
  • There is controversy over whether torture was effective.
  • Oversight of the intelligence apparatus in the government is a danger to our national security.

  [Read more…]

A Day of Protests in San Diego and Around the Nation

by

By Doug Porter

The big news in downtown San Diego yesterday, if you are a reader of the local daily newspaper, was the bomb squad being called in to investigate a discarded sex toy left on the ground near the federal courthouse.

In keeping with UT-San Diego’s historic lack of coverage, there was no mention of early morning protests temporarily causing a McDonald’s franchise in City Heights to lock their doors. Or the members of the City Council who came out at 6am to stand with the demonstrators. Or the 150 or so protesters who marched all over downtown for a three hour period mid-day, targeting not only fast food stores but federal immigration enforcement, and echoing nationwide dismay over recent killings at the hands of law enforcement officers.

Local TV stations sent cameramen to get a bit of footage of the downtown demonstrations. KUSI, KFMB, Fox5, and 10news all used a local wire service for their actual reporting on the demonstration.

Now I know these demonstrations weren’t “page one or lead story” news by contemporary journalism standards. Something is happening here in San Diego and around the country. There is a larger story about inequality and injustice. And it’s not going away.   [Read more…]

I’m in San Diego and I Can’t Breathe

by

By Doug Porter

The national chattering class finally found a dead black man they can get behind yesterday as a grand jury in Staten Island refused to indict the policeman who was videotaped choking Eric Garner.

Since videos exist showing both the arrest and the subsequent four minute delay before officers attempted CPR, it’s not possible to easily weasel out of the conclusion this was -at a minimum- a case of criminally negligent homicide, as concluded by Fox legal expert  Judge Andrew Napolitano.

The “best” lame excuses coming out of the flat-earther set were that Garner died because he was obese or that the “nanny state” laws taxing tobacco were to blame. Nobody’s called him a “thug”–yet.

Largely peaceful demonstrations (there were arrests for acts of civil disobedience) happened around the country, and are expected to continue into the weekend. Today I’ll share some of the reactions appearing in the news and social media.   [Read more…]

SeaWorld Stock Tanks As Financials Disappoint and Protests Continue

by

By Doug Porter

Attendance and revenues continue to fall at SeaWorld, according to financial reports released today. The stock market reacted to the news, sending shares in the company down 10.3% by mid-day. 

Third-quarter net income fell 28%, revenues fell 8% and  attendance at SeaWorld’s parks also declined year-over-year, with attendance in the third quarter totaling 8.4 million visitors, down from 8.9 million a year ago.  According the Bloomberg’s Business Insider, the price for stock in SeaWorld has fallen 51% since the movie Blackfish premiered on July 19, 2013.    [Read more…]

After the Wars, City Heights

by

A reminder of San Diego’s refugee resettlement in a time of terror

Why does City Heights physically look the way it does and why does it have such distinctive demographics? The case can be made that City Heights has been shaped both by design–the adoption of the Mid-City Plan in 1965– and by happenstance in the form of the fall of Saigon one decade later.

The Mid-City Plan provided a blueprint of sorts for stimulating business and commercial growth that is reflected in the built environment.  The fall of Saigon and the subsequent resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees in City Heights also became a blueprint of sorts for influencing the ever changing demographics of the individuals who would move within the built environment.   [Read more…]

Parsing the Pitchmen for Plots in a Political Graveyard

by

By Bob Dorn

Get ready for the message: Democrats need to move toward the center. That’s it, that’s all you need to know from the political professionals whom we pay to tell us who we are and what we think.

Picture them. You have Brian Williams, the hippest of that knot of strange guys in a hotel bar who anchor the nightly news of the three traditional used-to-be’s: ABC, CBS and NBC. The truth is, these guys don’t really carry the anesthesia and toxins for our political elite; they just introduce the heavyweights who do. But they’re the most important of the traditional media.

Scott Pelley, and what’s-it over at ABC and Brian Williams are the ones in the bar who seem to know who’s got the goods. They mostly look like second-stringers, or backup singers; their too-tight suits and subtle blebs help us see they’re just like us, just folks who’ve been placed momentarily in the spotlights and the corner offices. But they’re the ones who point their fingers and start up the choruses of specialists who call out the numbers and quote the right people and bring on the soloists and the experts.   [Read more…]

November 2014 Election Analysis and Results

by

By Doug Porter

History repeated itself last night. Going back to Franklin D Roosevelt, where the party of Herbert Hoover picked up seven US Senate seats and eighty-one US House seats, the political party of a second term president usually gets its ass kicked in the final mid-term election of that administration. It happened to Presidents Eisenhower, Reagan, and Bush.

The most notable exception would be the 1998 midterms elections, where damage to the GOP brand brought about by their failed impeachment attempt, marked first time since 1822 that the party not in control of the White House failed to gain seats in the mid-term election of a President’s second term.

There will be lots of finger-pointing going on today and in the weeks to come. My takeaways are that micro-targeting and millions invested in Get Out The Vote campaigns can’t overcome a weak message. On a national level the Republicans knew what they were against specifically and for in a very general sense; the Democrats failed to tell anybody what they were for, in large part because many of them tried to run against a sitting President from their own party.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry