Episode 1175
Ports at the center of global capitalism.
May 13 2020
If you look at what people sort of senior levels in the BBC have said about this, it's this idea that the BBC needs to be a calm space where people, when they surface from their echo chambers, can find reliable information and not feel like they're being attacked for their views. But the problem with that is, first of all, not all echo chambers are equal. Um, you know, social media increasingly has been colonized by far right ideas and rhetoric and propaganda. The other problem is that that only works if the kind of the impartial balanced space that you are providing as the alternative is actually doing the job it should do, which is to tell the truth. On a key issue of the day, the Gaza War, the BBC has not been able to kind of tell the truth about what's happening in as clear and focused away as as we need it to.
Daniel Trilling returns to discuss his new Equator piece, "Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco: How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart."
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Ben Freeman
Dec 2
A Trillion Dollar War Machine Keeps Americans Poor and at War / William Hartung & Ben Freeman
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Apr 30 2020
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome the Moment of Truth, and the conclusion of the 4-part semi-fictional expose of one doctor’s degradation from healer to heel.
Fame was taking our Odd Couple for a lovely jaunt. Dr. Dave made guest appearances on sitcoms, and Mel was jobbed into a number of cable network talent exhibits. About the time Mel started doing the “Big Balls Show” on MTV alongside fellow thinly-disguised fictional standup, Kimmy Jimmel, he began adopting a definitively rightwing stance on issues about which he had no business opining.
Mel: What is it about the Middle East that causes people to be violent, do you think? Dave. Is it something in the soil? Is it –
Dave: (sarcastically) No, it’s two hundred years of oppression by the West, that’s what the liberal, the politically correct —
Mel: – is it the humus? The babaganoush? The crappy music? What is it?
Well, what are you implying, Mel and Dr. Dave? Is it just that dark people on the other side of the world have more violence in their blood or genes? Is it their religion? Their swarthiness? Middle East experts and armchair scholars alike knew that the region had been carved to pieces and raped by the colonizing powers, and the CIA had, as recently as 1953, overthrown the elected Mossedegh government in Iran to install the Shah, and were – even as Dave and Mel were busy disparaging knowledge – continuing their manipulations of peoples, their propping up of dictators, and facilitating when not outright committing the murders of political leaders in the region. The West was not an innocent observer. Radios could be heard across the nation being smashed in fury.
This was no longer a “hip” sex advice show slipping common-sense abstinence, monogamy, condom-wearing, and heterosexual-leaning advice “under the radar.” This was a couple of media figures peddling naked rightwing racist and corporatist propaganda.
And that’s how Dr. Dave finally found his ideological home in the Fox News milieu.
He tried to make it as an actor, no one knows why – I guess he figured if a rightwing toady like Ben Stein could do it, so could he – but someone who’s handsome because there’s nothing wrong with him isn’t a particularly memorable face. Safer to build on his brand as the new, less repulsive Dr. Laura (not fictional. Why keep up the pretense?). And that’s exactly what he... read more