Subjects Archives: Media

Journalistic standards simply don’t apply when it comes to the NYT’s coverage of Venezuela’s radical right-wing opposition, argues University of Oriente Professor Steve Ellner.

Before Jo Johnson and Sam Gyimah, there was David Willetts. As the Minister of State for Universities and Science from 2010 until 2014, under the Tory-led ‘coalition’ government, Willetts oversaw the introduction of a market into the English higher education system – often referred to as ‘marketisation’.

Transport has undergone enormous changes in recent decades, both in Scotland and across the world. Some have been cyclical: in Scotland’s capital, trams were built, dismantled, and then reintroduced. In other areas, we have seen consistent trends like the steady deregulation and privatization of services, which has left Edinburgh as the sole city in Scotland with a municipal bus operator.

For many years now, observers have been ringing the death knell for the U.S. labor movement. West Virginia teachers haven’t just pumped life back into that movement—they’ve reaffirmed the fundamental principle that the key to building power and winning is for workers to withhold their labor.

This article argues that Marx, too, knew more about the future than his present. Indeed, far from being merely a theorist of mid- to late-19th century capitalism, he elaborated the basic mechanisms, tendencies, counter-tendencies, contradictions, and social antagonisms that still shape capital accumulation and bourgeois societalization at the start of the 21st century.

In the last decades, Western mainstream media have produced biased news and facilitated a selective discourse of shaming accompanied by devastating military interventions.

It takes three days on the open sea to journey from the Marshall Islands capital to Enewetak Atoll. You can’t see the atoll until you’re just miles away as it’s only feet above sea level. As you get closer, the sun fades behind clouds and the islands are shrouded in mist. Beaches are fringed not by coconut palms but Australian pines, trees praised for soaking up salt-spray and airborne radionuclides.

The term “white working class” captured much of the media analysis which sought to explain Trump’s meteoric rise and subsequent victory to the highest office in the United States. The obsession with polling and voting trends based in demographics is certainly nothing new.

The liberation of women must be at the heart of the struggle for socialism, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY

TIM YOUNG demonstrates how Western coverage of South America is heavily biased against the continent’s progressive leaders, movements and governments.

“An archaeological object, especially iconic, should not be banned from Facebook,” the Museum of Natural History in Vienna said.

The Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick of Che Guevara black and red portrait fame has done it again: He has painted a minimalist poster of another iconic leader of her people and of a worldwide liberation movement, this time of an oppressed child who had slapped power with her bare truth. When I read his rationale for painting the new portrait I cried. The man’s pacifism, sincerity, and especially his concern for Ahed Tamimi’s life touched me.

On university campuses around the world, “free speech” is becoming the favourite slogan of the right, sure to be raised during campus political controversies.

Last September, Verge writer Cat Ferguson uncovered that Google had unwittingly allowed shady generators to manipulate its AdWords system.

As far back as 1835, perhaps our nation’s earliest and most astute observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, understood the power of the media. He described the press as “the chief democratic instrument of freedom.” But today our “instrument of freedom” seems to mean the freedom to enrich oneself privately, whatever it takes. How did we get to this sad state?

Here’s an experiment for you-ask five people if they know where the “millennial” label came from. Chances are that none of them will know. In fact, not much is known about the meaning of the label, other than it being a synonym for “young people” or a catch-all term for those who are “x-to-x” years old.

Race/isms Book Forum is a new series aimed at bringing established and emerging voices together in conversation around recent work that critically engages our world’s racial scripts, past and present. The structure of the forum is straightforward. We invite three to four thinkers to grapple with a book, highlighting a section of it, and then provide the author(s) an opportunity to respond however they see fit.

Even in a comic-book movie, black American men are relegated to the lowest rung of political regard. So low that the sole white leading character in the movie, the CIA operative Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), gets to be a hero who helps save Wakanda.

How does the rate of school shootings in the U.S. compare with countries where is more difficult to obtain guns?

The British conservative media and party establishment are renewing their attempts to paint Jeremy Corbyn as a traitor. But given the failure of this approach in the past, why would they attempt it again?