MoJo Sections: Media

Democracy: It's Complicated

By Mark Fiore — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:55:59 -0800

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Mark Fiore is an editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a web site featuring his work.

Why It's Not Smart to Call Women Conservatives 'Whores'

By Tana Ganeva — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:04:00 -0800

This story first appeared at Alternet.

When Alan Grayson called a female corporate lobbyist a "K-Street whore"—and was attacked as crude and sexist at the same time that he was lauded as gutsy and honest—he played a role in a familiar script: hero of the left (MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher) attacks female villain (Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin) using sexist language. Progressive feminists soul-search about liberal misogyny. Mainstream media talk about sexism for 5 seconds. Then the media move on, and no one learns a thing. Repeat.

It happened again just two weeks ago, when Olbermann called Malkin a "big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it" during the "Worst Person in the World" segment of Countdown. The creepily fleshy insult followed Olbermann's rendition of Malkin's e-mails, which he read in a Valley Girl voice to signal her presumed Barbie-doll vapidity. Megan Carpentier pointed out at the time, "A liberal, progressive critique of Malkin need not, and should not, resort to an attack on her looks or her gender or rely on silly stereotypes or imagery that brings to mind victims of domestic violence."

The Queen and I

By Kiera Butler — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:00:00 -0800

When Nahid Persson Sarvestani was a little girl in Iran in the '70s, she adored the glamorous Queen Farah. The queen's fairytale life of parties and palaces was much different from her own: Her father was ill, and her mother wove carpets 15 hours a day to support their family of 10. But as she got older, Sarvestani began to see the injustice of the monarchy and joined the secular resistance. Her 17-year-old brother was executed by the Islamic government just after the shah's regime collapsed. Twenty-nine years after the revolution, Sarvestani started making a film about her former idol and enemy, now living in exile in Paris. The result is a frank portrait of a charismatic woman who doesn't fully understand her role in her country's history.

At first, Farah, now 71, balks at the prospect of having her personal life exposed—and even after she agrees to the film, she struggles to preserve her dignity. "I have an image to maintain," she sniffs when Sarvestani tries to accompany her into a hair salon. When Farah discovers that Sarvestani was involved in the resistance, she threatens to pull out of the film, changing her mind only after Sarvestani convinces her that many Iranians—including herself—still see her as a compassionate person.

Farah does come across as kind yet genuinely naive. She says she wishes she could have done more for her subjects, telling Sarvestani, "You should have written to us, 'My mother is struggling to feed eight children; do something for us.'" When Sarvestani finally confronts Farah about the executions under the shah's regime, the queen responds simply, "The shah wouldn't personally do it." Cold comfort for the survivors, and a telling insight into the blinding power of privilege.

Credit Card Industry: S.C.R.E.W. U.

By Mark Fiore — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:56:02 -0700

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Goldman Sachs: Balloon Bank

By Mark Fiore — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:08:10 -0700

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Ralph Stanley's World of Sorrow

By Michael Mechanic — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:30:00 -0700

Q. How many Stanley Brothers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. Two. Carter Stanley to do it, and Ralph Stanley to talk about how much better the old bulb was.

That's a joke I usually apply to Vermonters, but it aptly captures one side of renowned old-time crooner Ralph Stanley, whose memoir, Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times, is out this week on Gotham Books. A recurring theme—the book is first person, as told to music writer Eddie Dean—involves a time when fellow musicians on the struggling bluegrass circuit were changing their acts to suit modern audiences and compete with rock and roll. Stanley wouldn't budge. He won't even call his music "bluegrass"—despite his close friendship with Kentucky's late Bill Monroe, the country music pioneer from whom the term originated (Kentucky being the bluegrass state). Sure, Stanley admires those fast pickers (like Monroe, Ricky Skaggs, Lester Flatt, and Earl Scruggs), but he'll just tell you he plays hillbilly music. He prefers the old lightbulb.

Book Excerpt: A Bomb in Every Issue

By Peter Richardson — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:43:22 -0700

In his absorbing new book, A Bomb In Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (The New Press), Peter Richardson chronicles the rise and fall of Ramparts, the groundbreaking muckraking magazine of the 1960s and early 1970s. In its heyday, Ramparts was one of the nation's most influential—and controversial—magazines, known for its unique mix of leftist politics, exclusive reporting, and original design.

"Ramparts changed national media and politics, not only with its stories on civil rights, Vietnam, Black Power, and the CIA, but also by demonstrating that mainstream media techniques could be used to advance leftist politics," writes Richardson. "That precedent would fuel progressive journalism for a generation." Its influence lives on in publications such as Mother Jones, which was founded by three former Ramparts editors and has published reporting by many writers who cut their teeth in its pages. Below, a few excerpts from Richardson's book, featuring cameo appearances by several journalists who will be familiar to our readers.

• • •

In May 1962, a magazine was born. Published in suburban Menlo Park, California, it described itself as "a forum for the mature American Catholic" focusing on "those positive principles of Hellenic-Christian tradition which have shaped and sustained our civilization for the past two thousand years." Its first issues debated the moral shortcomings of J.D. Salinger and Tennessee Williams. According to one designer, it looked like the poetry annual of a Midwestern girls school.

By 1968, the magazine had moved to the bohemian North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, added generous doses of sex and humor, adopted a cutting-edge design, forged links to the Black Panther Party, exposed illegal CIA activities in America and Vietnam, published the diaries of Che Guevara and staff writer Eldridge Cleaver, and boosted its monthly circulation to almost 250,000. A Time magazine headline from that period—"A Bomb in Every Issue"—described its impact. Seven years later, it was out of business for good.

Obama's Preemptive Prize

By Mark Fiore — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:58:06 -0700

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CNN Can Either Broadcast Hateful Lou Dobbs or Have a Latino Audience

By Roberto Lovato — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:48:40 -0700

This story first appeared at Alternet

As CNN begins broadcasting its Latino in America series (LIA)—its most important and expensive attempt to capture Latino audiences—Latinos are of one mind about the two faces of CNN. I know this because I just spent the last two weeks traveling the country talking to Latino communities about Lou Dobbs and CNN. I got to meet some of the more than 50,000 people who, in just the last four weeks, have signed our petition at bastadobbs.com.

What I heard among the many voices that make up the Latino United States—Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, Cubans in Miami, Mexicans and Salvadorans and many others in the Southwest—was an unexpected unity and an intense concern about CNN's Latino hypocrisy: thinking that a few hours of serious reporting on Latinos by sunny Soledad O'Brien can make up for thousands of hours of anti-Latino extremism from the dark Lou Dobbs. This paradox has Latinos everywhere asking questions about CNN—and so far we haven't gotten much in the way of answers.

One questioner was Latino media executive Jeff Valdez, who, during the Los Angeles LIA screening, pointedly asked Soledad O'Brien, "Will Latino in America include Lou Dobbs?" The answer: no. That's right, four hours about the Latino experience in the U.S., and not a word on the country's most notorious anti-immigrant, anti-Latino "news" anchor.

Zombie Zeitgeist: Why Undead Corpses Are Dominating at the Box Office

By David Sirota — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:10:50 -0700

This story first appeared at Alternet.

What's with all the zombies lately?

That could be a question about one of the hippest retro fads that pop culture has going these days. Inspired by horror genres of past, zombies have lurched back to pre-eminence in books like "World War Z," video games like "Left 4 Dead" and blockbuster films like "Zombieland." Even the highbrow producers at National Public Radio recently devoted a segment to a University of Ottawa study entitled "Mathematical Modeling of An Outbreak of Zombie Infection." Indeed, the undead have become so popular, they've spurred "zombie walks" in cities and spawned Weird Al-ish parodies through Jane Austen knock-offs like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and bands such as the Zombeatles (with their hit "Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead").

Frighteningly enough, though, that question about zombies could also be asked of America's political culture.