Media Resources

THE WRECKING CREW: How Conservatives Rule
by Thomas Frank
In his previous book, Thomas Frank explained why working America votes for politicians who reserve their favors for the rich. Now, in The Wrecking Crew, Frank examines the blundering and corrupt Washington those politicians have given us. Casting back to the early days of the conservative revolution, Frank describes the rise of a ruling coalition dedicated to dismantling government. But rather than cutting down the big government they claim to hate, conservatives have simply sold it off, deregulating some industries, defunding others, but always turning public policy into a private-sector bidding war. It is no coincidence, Frank argues, that the same politicians who guffaw at the idea of effective government have installed a regime in which incompetence is the rule. Nor will the country easily shake off the consequences of deliberate misgovernment through the usual election remedies. Obsessed with achieving a lasting victory, conservatives have taken pains to enshrine the free market as the permanent creed of state.

NEMESIS: The Last Days of the American Republic
by Chalmers Johnson
The author of Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire explores the U.S. addiction to war and its corrosive impact on democratic institutions. Our vast network of global military bases fall in the same category as war: they're addictive. Once they're built everyone in the area becomes economically dependent on them, and they're impossible to close without a firestorm of outrage. Meanwhile we ignore healthcare, education, and the environment, bankrupting our budget, and mortgaging our children's future. So long as our leadership thinks we're the world's policeman the downward spiral continues. Yet what's at stake is far greater than our budget or even the lives squandered. We must change course or face the end of the American experience itself. As Johnson admonishes, "Failing such reform, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us."

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
by Naomi Klein
Got a hurricane, a tsunami, chaos in the streets, an economic upheaval, planes crashing into buildings? While the public sees horrific disasters, industrial and political elites see big opportunities to coerce policies that never would have been possible in calmer times. In fact, without them, their idea of "progress" would never be possible. 9/11 led to huge corporations making a killing on the "War on Terror." The Iraqi chaos: a new law allowing Shell and BP to claim the country's oil reserves. The Asian tsunami: beaches auctioned off to tourist resorts. Hurricane Katrina: public housing, hospitals and schools never reopened as upscale condos and for-profit charter schools take their place. Privatization, and the new profit centers created from it, are always the result. Naomi Klein calls this disaster capitalism. This is a real standout book and essential reading to understand the disaster our insane economic orthodoxy has wrought.

The End of America:
Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot
by Naomi Wolf
Wolf shows that there are ten classic steps dictators or would-be dictators always take when they wish to close down an open society. Each of those steps is now underway in the United States today. Among the first lessons the author drives home is that democracy is NOT a spectator sport. As Wolf says, "... the founders did not mean for powerful men and women faraway from the citizens... to protect freedom. They meant for us to do it." The End of America will shock, enrage, and motivate---spurring us to act, as the Founders would have counted on us to do in a time like this. (Paperback: 192 pages)

Broken Government:
How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches
by John W. Dean
In his eighth book, Dean takes the broadest and deepest view yet of the dysfunctional chaos and institutional damage that the Republican Party and its core conservatives have inflicted on the federal government. The last Republican Congress, Dean contends, rubber-stamped Bush's policies, shut Democrats out of the legislative process, neglected pressing issues and made a shambles of government finances. Meanwhile, the Bush administration---the worst presidency ever---has sought to replace constitutional checks and balances with a unitary executive that brooks no congressional interference and undermines civil rights. All of this is enabled by the swelling ranks of fundamentalists on the federal bench and Supreme Court.

It Can Happen Here:
Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush
by Joe Conason
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross." ---Sinclair Lewis, author of It Can't Happen Here, 1935
We live in a society where government conspires with big business and big evangelism; where ideologues and religious zealots attack logic and the scientific method; and where the ruling party seeks a perpetual state of war to hold on to power, and they are willing to lie, torture, and steal to achieve their ends. Conason has traced a direct intellectual line from the neoconservatives running the country today straight back to Nazi Germany through Leo Strauss.

State of War:
The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration
by James Risen
Insider accounts of malfeasance in the Iraq War, the massive ongoing N.S.A. eavesdropping operation -- done with almost no judicial or congressional oversight -- on the phone calls and emails of Americans, the rapid transformation of Afganistan into a narco-state supplying 80% of the world's opium under American authority, and the outsourcing of torture. The hidden history of domestic spying, abuses of power, and outrageous operations -- hidden events that make a mockery of the current debate.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
by John Perkins
In this riveting personal story, John Perkins tells of his own inner journey from willing servant of empire to impassioned advocate for the rights of oppressed people. According to Perkins, "Economic hit men are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign aid organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources."

What's the Matter with Kansas?:
How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
by Thomas Frank
Thomas Frank turns his eye on what he calls "the Great Backlash" - the popular revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment. Marshaling public outrage over everything from improper flag display to un-Christian art, the backlash has achieved the most unnatural of alliances, bringing together blue-collar midwesterners and Wall Street business interests, workers and bosses, populists and right-wingers.

Fooled Again
by Mark Crispin Miller
If you assumed that election-tilting fraud in the 2004 Bush victory was a little too conspiritorial or just wishful thinking on the part of zealots, you owe it to yourself to revisit this issue in light of Mark Crispin Miller's original reporting in Fooled Again. He uncovers a pattern -- not one overwhelming fraud but thousands of little ones -- which is, in Miller's view, the new Republican electoral strategy. This incendiary new book presents massive documentation that the election was stolen and describes the mind-set, among both the major parties and the media, that could permit it to happen again.

Peruvian Rebel:
The World of Magda Portal, with a Selection of Her Poems
by Kathleen Weaver
Magda Portal (1900–1989) played a historic role in the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), which began as a Marxist-inspired but non-Communist radical movement with cells based in both Europe and Latin America in the 1920s before it became a full-fledged political party in Peru in 1931.
"Kathleen Weaver's biography of Magda Portal brings to life ... one of the key figures in the twentieth-century struggles of oppressed people in Latin America." —Howard Zinn

Media Studies

The New Media Monopoly
by Ben H. Bagdikian
The most respected critique of modern mass media ever issued, this is the story of the chilling effects of corporate ownership and mass advertising on the nation's news. Bagdikian exposes how the concentration of U.S. media into fewer and fewer hands, now just a handful of powerful corporations, has narrowed the political discourse of the country and served as a crucial instrument in shifting the political culture towards what just a few decades ago would have been considered the extreme right.

The Republican Noise Machine:
Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy
by David Brock
Your guide to how the mainstream media became a mouthpiece for the right-wing echo machine. The result, Brock says, is a public discourse in which the line between fact and opinion is blurred, poorly funded liberal voices get shouted down, and "no issue can be honestly debated and no election can be fairly decided." David Brock is the president and founder of Media Matters for America, a progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Click here for a full review of this title.

Manufacturing Consent:
The Political Economy of the Mass Media
by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

Tragedy and Farce:
How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy
by John Nichols, Robert W. McChesney and Tom Tomorrow (Illustrator)
The authors assert, as A.J. Liebling once observed, freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns the press, and the megacorporations that control the media have used their freedom to convert the news into a source not of information but of entertainment, thereby abdicating the responsibilities of a "democracy-sustaining journalism" -- namely, to keep an eye out on those in power, expose them when they're committing crimes and serve the truth. With a wealth of fads and celebrities to cover, who has time to explore voter fraud or the war in Iraq in any depth?

Suggested Viewing

Capitalism: A Love Story
A Film by Michael Moore. Now on DVD for sale or rent.
Michael Moore is doing a yeoman's job exposing capitalism's excesses, shouting horror stories that the corporate media rarely even whispers. Excellent muckraking but a bit too much polemic, Moore is on firmest footing when making the case for banking reform, ending the privatization of social institutions, and taking a fresh look at FDR's "Second bill of Rights" which would have guaranteed healthcare, job security, and a decent pension for all. (Click here for full review.)

Food, Inc.
Click for preview
For most Americans, the ideal meal is fast, cheap, and tasty. Food, Inc. examines the costs of putting value and convenience over nutrition and environmental impact. Director Robert Kenner explores the subject from all angles, talking to authors, advocates, farmers, and CEOs, like co-producer Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma), Gary Hirschberg (Stonyfield Farms), and Barbara Kowalcyk, who's been lobbying for more rigorous standards since E. coli claimed the life of her two-year-old son.

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media
Filmmakers Mark Achbar and Peter Witonick focus on Chomsky's activities as a political dissident and media critic. Particular attention is paid to his contention that the American mass media serves as a form of "thought control in a democratic society," with major news organizations systematically bending the truth to support the status quo. The synergy of government and big media businesses cooperating to produce an effective propaganda machine in order to manipulate public opinion is effectively illustrated.
Special features: Extended excerpts from the 1969 "Firing Line" debate with William F. Buckley Jr.; Never-before-seen 1971 discussion with Michel Foucault

Orwell Rolls in His Grave
directed by Robert Kane Pappas
Orwell Rolls in His Grave questions whether the bleak, feverishly regulated world of author George Orwell's 1984 is no longer a dire fictional account of government power gone wrong but a creeping reality of recent American media trends. The film focuses on the media's least covered topic -- itself -- in an effort to trace the process by which newsworthy stories are either dismissed entirely or distorted into something more politically suitable for the heads of various media conglomerates.

Sicko
directed by Michael Moore
In Sicko director Michael Moore skewers greedy corporate execs and politicians who oversee the American healthcare system, cataloging its myriad faults and contrasting it with popular, successful universal healthcare systems in Canada, England, France, and even communist Cuba. Moore also interviews people who have immigrated from the U.S. in search of better care. Besides his trademark wacky humor, Moore's sensitivity to the plight of 9/11 rescue workers strangling in red tape demonstrates his maturity as a director. This documentary will make you laugh and cry, and ultimately believe that we Americans are better than the HMOs that are failing to serve us.

Why We Fight
directed by Eugene Jarecki
Why We Fight is an unflinching look at the anatomy of American war making. Granted unparalleled Pentagon access, the director launches a nonpartisan inquiry into the forces--political, economic, and ideological--than drive Americans to fight and why America seemingly is always at war. Unforgettable, powerful and at times disturbing, Why We Fight will challenge viewers long after the last fade-out.

Who Killed the Electric Car?
directed by Chris Paine
Who Killed the Electric Car? is a 2006 documentary film that explores the birth, limited commercialization, and subsequent death of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the 1990s. The film explores the roles of automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, the US government, batteries, hydrogen vehicles, and consumers in limiting the development and adoption of this technology. Good news! Public demand and rising oil prices are now giving the electric car a new life. During an interview with CBS News, director Chris Paine announced that he would be making a sequel called Who Saved the Electric Car?

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
written and directed by Alex Gibney
A multidimensional study of one of the biggest business scandals in American history in which top executives from the 7th largest company in this country walked away with over one billion dollars, leaving investors and employees with nothing. The film features insider accounts and rare corporate audio and video tapes that reveal colossal personal excesses of the Enron hierarchy and the utter moral vacuum that posed as corporate philosophy. The human drama that unfolds within Enron's walls resembles a Greek tragedy and produces a domino effect that could shape the face of our economy and ethical code for years to come. A perfect double-feature with the eye-opening 2004 documentary The Corporation.

The Corporation
a film by Jennifer Abbott, Mark Achbar and Joel Bakan
An epic in length and breadth, this documentary aims at nothing less than a full-scale portrait of the most dominant institution on the planet Earth in our lifetime -- the corporation. It begins with the revelation that, according to a Supreme Court ruling, a corporation must be considered a person rather than an entity. The Corporation defines this endlessly mutating life-form in exhaustive detail, measuring the many ways it has not only come to dominate but to deform our reality. The movie performs a running psychoanalysis of this entity with the characteristics of a prototypical psychopath: a callous unconcern for the feelings and safety of others, an incapacity to experience guilt, an ingrained habit of lying for profit, etc.

Wal*Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
a film by Robert Greenwald
"Wal*Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" tells the story of five people --- current and former employees as well as family business owners --- affected by the policies of the retail behemoth and the way the company cracks down on union organizing activities.
Roger Ebert: "Two Thumbs Up. I don't go to Wal*Mart because the cheaper prices are not as important to me as the thought that I'm getting those cheaper prices at the cost of the lives and labor of Wal*Mart employees ... Basically, if you look at this movie, balance it off some of the answers and listen to the whole story, Wal*Mart on balance has not been good for America."

Jesus Camp
a film by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady
Religious fanaticism. Dumping democracy for a "Christian nation" in America. Training young soldiers in "God's Army" for a world-wide war between Christians and Muslims. Speaking in tongues. Manipulating children. What more could you ask for? It's all on display in this documentary about the right-wing Christian movement in America. Infiltrating the government and creating a Christian state based on right-wing political values is their stated goal; they're right and everyone else is wrong. Smarmy power broker Ted Haggard is seen smooth talking campgoers before his fall. Required viewing for an understanding of the forces that have taken control of large swaths of America.

Cost of the War in Iraq

"Inside Job"

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Politics

Media Studies

Suggested Viewing

Cost of the War in Iraq

"Inside Job"

National and International News on the Web:

Media Watchdogs on the Web:

National Publications:

Environmental News:

Television:

Web TV

Progressive Radio on the Air:

Progressive Radio on the Web: Listen Online at These Sites...

Suggested Reading

Politics

Media Studies

Suggested Viewing

Progressive Radio on the Web:
Listen Online at These Sites...