The Republicans' Manufactured Media War (Truthout)

This excerpt is from an article exclusively  published at Truthout. May not be reprinted without their permission.

The Republicans' Manufactured Media War
Sunday, 08 November 2015                   
  

By Michael Corcoran, Truthout | News Analysis

After the first Republican presidential debate on August 6, 2015, Donald Trump, a former reality television star, made a joke about the moderator's menstrual cycle. Trump also spoke of how he wants to build a $6.4 billion security wall along the border and charge the bill to the Mexican government (which is understandably befuddled by the candidate's "enormous ignorance"). At the second GOP debate on September 16, Dr. Ben Carson answered a question about his flat-tax proposal that made it painfully clear he does not understand the difference between progressive taxation and socialism. Using Carson's criteria, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were both socialist presidents.

These ridiculous comments from past debates came from the two front-runners in the Republican primary - who both complain about a lack of substance in presidential debates.

These kinds of ironies abound in the Republican candidates' latest crusade against the media. The Republicans took issue with several of the moderator's questions in the October 28, 2015, GOP presidential debate in Colorado. Since then a wave of Republican anger has erupted over the way "the media" handles the presidential debates. The crux of the argument is that CNBC - and the rest of the media - have what Carson calls "a political agenda" to discredit the Republican candidates. The issue has dominated the news cycle, led some candidates to make a list of demands for future debates and prompted some high-profile candidates to support suspending future debates on NBC platforms.

There is no doubt that presidential debates in America, for both parties, are deeply flawed and lacking in substance. The politicians and the media all share in the blame for this. But the Republicans' latest campaign is not an effort to solve this problem but rather an effort to scare the public into believing that the mainstream media are conspiring to advance a leftist agenda.

If one looks beyond the GOP's alarmist rhetoric, however, a different reality emerges. The truth is that CNBC's coverage is extremely hostile to the left and embraces the GOP's worldview in many ways. Further, the relationship between its parent company, Comcast, and the Republican Party, is just one example of just how the corporate media and the GOP have many shared interests. This latest anti-media blitz following the CNBC debate is merely a disingenuous act of political theater
Read the rest at Truthout.

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Protecting the Shield: Why ESPN Can't be Trusted to Cover the NFL (Truthout)

This excerpt is from an article published at Truthout.

Protecting the Shield: Why ESPN Can't Be Trusted to Cover the NFL
Sunday, 27 September 2015                       
By Michael Corcoran, Truthout | News Analysis


The National Football League (NFL) is not merely a sports league that helps entertain the US public. While football is just a game, the NFL is a major institutional power that uses billions of tax dollars to subsidize its owners, tries to weaken unions in courts and is potentially complicit in an increasingly disturbing mental health crisis among its workforce. In light of this, the league warrants close scrutiny and investigation from the media.

The organization that should be the most important watchdog of the league is ESPN, which as the largest sports media company in the world has the resources and reach to truly serve as a check on the league's power. Unfortunately, ESPN is too compromised to be trusted in this role. Its NFL broadcasts are worth billions, and an examination of its coverage shows that ESPN's priorities are not investigating the league, but protecting it.

In early September, Judge Richard Berman nullified the NFL's four-game suspension of famed quarterback Tom Brady. The suspension, affirmed by the league's commissioner, Roger Goodell, was for Brady's alleged role in the "Deflategate" scandal - arguably one of the most ridiculous cases in the history of US jurisprudence.

The judge ruled against the NFL on September 3 for not giving Brady a fair hearing in his appeal, and for punishing him for a rule that doesn't exist: alleged "general awareness" of an alleged equipment violation (deflating air out of a football). In two brutal hearings in open court (August 12 and August 19), Berman ripped the NFL's lack of due process and its "independent" report, aimed at rubber-stamping Goodell's "own brand of industrial justice," as Berman called it.

Read the rest at Truthout

Blaming the Victims: Media Bias Against Struggling Millennials (Truthout)

Originally published by Truthout. 

Michael Corcoran
November 20, 2013

It has become a common refrain in the mainstream media: The economic problems that young people face are the product of generational laziness and a sense of entitlement. People between the ages of 16 and 24 have an unemployment rate of 16.3 percent, more than twice the national average, and an alarming 36 percent of adults age 18-31 are living with their parents.

"Word that six million young people are not working or studying comes as no surprise to anyone with a millennial in the basement," writes Jennifer Graham in an op-ed titled "A Generation of Idle Trophy Kids," for the Boston Globe. Millennials' describes, loosely, the generation born between 1980 and 2000. "It's young people who don't leave the house at all, not because they're scared like agoraphobics, but because their needs are met and they're content."

To say that Graham's article is a woeful oversimplification would be to give it way too much credit. The article is an embarrassing debacle, filled with worthless platitudes to support an argument that is insulting not only to young and poor people but to anyone who values critical-thinking skills. Graham fails to provide any serious examination of the economic conditions facing young people, and the article lacks any significant data to back up her claim that millennials are a "minimally employable crop" of slackers who lack "the motivation to provide for themselves."

She also seems to make the racist and classist assumption that all young people are white, privileged members of the middle class who have the luxury of returning to suburban homes (as opposed to, say, park benches or homeless shelters) when they lack steady employment. Conveniently, she ignores things like the fact that 57 percent of young black adults are either "near" or in "deep poverty."

It is tempting to ignore such a weak and unsubstantiated argument, but this will not do, given that the Globe's article is rather consistent with a widespread, systemic media bias against not only young people but poor and working-class people in general. The implication is unambiguous: Poor people, of all ages, are that way because they are lazy, entitled or amoral - never mind the actual economic conditions they face.

In fact, as if they were intentionally attempting to demonstrate the narrow parameters of debate that exist in mainstream media circles, even an article by a Globe editorial board member (who is a millennial) that aims to refute Graham's op-ed, manages to repeat some of its most galling weaknesses, including a notable lack of evidence to back up its claims. The rebuttal, like the original op-ed, turns what should be a serious issue - poverty among young adults - and reduces it to a few witty jokes ("we'll take responsibility for Miley Cyrus") and hipster phrases (the article concludes as such: "(drops mic) I'm out"). The article also falls into the familiar trap of assuming that all young people are privileged whites whose main priority is not finding food and shelter but having "the nice things we grew up with." This presumes of course, that all young people grew up with "suburban homes," computers, digital cable and other elements of the four-car-garage lifestyle the author describes. It might interest the Globe editorial board to know that most young people in today's world did not grow up in such decadence, and many barely scraped by and have no family support. This collection of Globearticles is basically a back-and-forth between white people discussing decidedly first-world problems.

The Globe's worthless offerings on the subject notwithstanding, there can be no doubt that the issue of the economic plight of young people is worth examining. But to do so requires a serious look at the real economic conditions young adults face and the reasons these conditions exist. Graham's article, and many others like it, generally fail to consider the context in which young people are struggling to find decent jobs, including thelong-term economic impacts of deregulation and neoliberalism pushed by state managers and wealthy elites for some three decades now, which have kept wages stagnant for people of all ages, including young people; theimpact of the 2008 economic crisis (mostly caused by people born well before 1980); the college affordability crisis; and the fact that low-wage service-sector jobs tend to be where job growth is.

Read the rest here. 

Michael Corcoran Discusses the Death of Keynesian Economics With Rick Smith

From Truthout

Michael Corcoran Discusses the Death of Keynesian Economics with Rick Smith

Monday 31 October 2011

by: Rick Smith, The Rick Smith Show | Radio Interview

Press play to listen to Michael Corcoran's interview with Rick Smith about his latest story, "Democrats and the Death of Keynesian Economics":

Click here, to listen to more interview with Truthout authors on The Rick Smith Show.

Democrats and the Death of Keynesian Economics

Originally published at Truthout. '

It is quite remarkable, given the nature of the recent debate overeconomic policy in Washington, that a Wikipedia articles exists today called, "2008-2009 Keynesian resurgence." Today, both political parties have had an obsession with "austerity measures" for at least last year or so - which includes putting Medicare andSocial Security on the chopping block. Barack Obama's weak job bill, which was dead on arrival, only further demonstrates how twisted priorities are in Washington. So, it is actually hard to believe that, in the aftermath of the near-collapse of the economy in 2008, Maynard Keynes, who advocated government intervention in the economy to increase demand during downturns, was making a comeback.

But for a brief moment in time, this was indeed the case. After the 2008 bailout of Bear Stearns, Martin Wolf, an economics writer for the Financial Times and normally a staunch supporter of free-market globalization, wrote: "Remember March 14 2008: it was the day the dream of global free market capitalism died." In the same article, he quoted Joseph Ackerman, the chief executive of Deutsche Bank, saying: "I no longer believe in the market's self-healing power." In an October 10 article, The Washington Post - in all seriousness - suggested that the current economic crises meant the "The End Of American Capitalism" as we know it. The cover of Time magazine in February 2009, said, "We are all Socialists Now," referencing the need for government intervention to save us from the ills of capitalism. "Whether we want to admit it or not," the article observed, "the America of 2009 is moving toward a modern European state."

As frightening and tragic as the economic crisis of 2008 was, having these widely held doctrinal assumptions about the power of the so-called "free market" spun on their head did provide some hope. Maybe there could be some sort of shift toward a more humane mixed economy that reined in the horrific excesses of contemporary capitalism. The country was optimistic; a new president had just been elected and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, famously said that he "never wanted a serious crisis to go to waste." The Nation magazine even called for a "New New Deal."

What followed, unfortunately, was a very underwhelming flirtation with Keynesian policies (such as the too-small stimulus bill in 2009), which was then swiftly overwhelmed with bipartisan discussions about how to gut government spending and create on austerity movement. This occurred despite the fact that the need for Keynesian economic policies are just as great now, in the face of crippling unemployment, as they were in 2008-09.

Read the rest here.