Media

John Oliver is what I always wished Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert would be.  In fact, he’s what I always wished Ted Koppel or Jim Lehrer would be.

With so many people getting their news from comedians, the distinction between fake news and real news doesn’t seem very useful.  There’s news that pushes corporate propaganda with a straight face and endless respect for those in power.  And there’s news that cracks jokes and mocks and ridicules those most deserving read more

LISTEN.

Michael Arria’s new book Medium Blue: The Politics of MSNBC is a nice summary of how a liberal corporate or liberal partisan television network falls short — something of an update from Jeff Cohen’s Cable News Confidential and the bad old days when MSNBC dumped Cohen and Phil Donahue for being anti-war. It turns out the good new days of MSNBC-gone-liberal are seriously flawed as well.

The flaws do a disservice to a large section of the population, many majority perspectives, and read more

1. Any article listing the top 10 of anything will be widely read.

2. A poll of people in 65 countries, including the United States, finds that the United States is overwhelmingly considered the greatest threat to peace in the world. The consensus would have been even stronger had the United States itself not been polled, because the 5 percent of humanity living here is largely convinced that the other 95% of humanity — that read more