Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Citations Needed, Episode 25: The Banality of CIA-Curated Definitions of ‘Democracy’


Few words elicit such warm feelings as the term "Democracy." Wars are supposedly fought for it, foreign policies are built around it, protecting and advancing it is considered the United States' highest moral order.

Democracy's alleged opposite - broadly called "authoritarianism," "autocracy" or "tyranny” - is cast as the ultimate evil. The stifling, oppressive boot of the state that curtails liberties and must be fought at all costs. This is the world in which we operate and the one where the United States and its satellite media and NGO allies fight to preserve and defend democracy.

So how is "democracy" defined and how are those definitions used to justify American exceptionalism? Where do positive and negative rights come into play, and how do societal choices like illiteracy, poverty, and hunger factor into our notions of freedom?

On today's episode, we discuss the limits of democracy rankings, the oft-cited "Polity IV" metric devised by the CIA-funded Center for Systemic Peace, and more with guest George Ciccariello-Maher.

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The Show



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The Guest

George Ciccariello-Maher is a political theorist, professor and author of the books We Created Chávez, Building the Commune, and most recently, Decolonizing Dialectics. Follow him @ciccmaher.



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Citations Needed is available on iTunes, Soundcloud and LibSyn (here’s the RSS feed). You can also check us out on Twitter and Facebook.

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Want More?

For further reading, show notes, a periodic newsletter, and more exclusive content, please visit our Patreon page and sign up to support the show!


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Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. Our Production Consultant is Josh Kross. The theme is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

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Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Citations Needed, Episode 24: Highlighting Alternative Media - The Moral Limits of Dunking on Thomas Friedman


At Citations Needed we enjoy nothing more than ragging on corporate media - indeed, it’s our primary job. But can constant snark and negativity breed cynicism? Recent feedback from some of our listeners has us wondering if the act of media criticism need also make room for some media complimenting, lest we succumb to the forces of defeatism.

In this episode, rather than critiquing the myriad problems with the corporate press, we decided to highlight two smaller media organizations fighting back against tremendous forces - in this case, environmental destruction of native lands and the carceral state – by building alternate systems of communication, news-gathering, storytelling, and organizing.

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The Show



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The Guests

Jade Begay is a filmmaker and media strategist with Indigenous Rising Media, an Indigenous Environmental Network Project. She is also currently a Sustainability and Justice Communications Fellow at Resource Media.

Jay Donahue is a member of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization building a movement to abolish the prison industrial complex. The Abolitionist newspaper, a publication distributed free of charge to over 5,500 people in prisons, jails, and detention centers throughout the United States, is a project of Critical Resistance.
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The Organizations

Learn more about the organizations highlighted in this episode, sign up for their newsletters, and donate to support their work.

Indigenous Rising Media
Critical Resistance
The Abolitionist
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Citations Needed is available on iTunes, Soundcloud and LibSyn (here’s the RSS feed). You can also check us out on Twitter and Facebook.

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Want More?

For further reading, show notes, a periodic newsletter, and more exclusive content, please visit our Patreon page and sign up to support the show!


***

Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. Our Production Consultant is Josh Kross. The theme is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

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Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Citations Needed News Brief: Why the Media Should Stop Calling it a "Government Shutdown"


On this all-access News Brief, Adam and Nima discuss why it's not a "government shutdown" but a liberal government shutdown – or, more precisely, a backdoor right-wing coup.



Head over the our Patreon page and sign up to support the show. You'll get all the exclusive content!

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Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.


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Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Citations Needed, Episode 23: The Media's Grim Addiction to Perseverance Porn


We’ve all seen these feel good segments on the local news. The adorable and resourceful seven-year-old in California who's been recycling cans since he was three and now has $10,000 saved up for college. The Oklahoma community that chipped in to buy a car for a beloved Walmart greeter so she wouldn't have to walk to work in the bitter cold anymore. The “inspiring teen” who returned to his fast food job soon after being injured in a car accident.

No doubt, these are all heartwarming tales of perseverance in the face of adversity, a testament to the can-do spirit of average citizens––but they're also something else: ideological agitprop meant to obscure and decontextualize the harsh realities of poverty, the exorbitant cost of higher education and healthcare, and the profound absence of basic social services in the United States.

What are the origins of this ethos? Whom does it benefit and, perhaps most important of all, how does the media consistently work to reinforce this "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mythology?

We are joined by Tony Valdés of the Children’s Crisis Treatment Center.

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The Show



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The Guest

Antonio "Tony" Valdés is CEO of the Children’s Crisis Treatment Center, a Philadelphia nonprofit agency specializing in providing behavioral health services to children and families.




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Citations Needed is available on iTunes, Soundcloud and LibSyn (here’s the RSS feed). You can also check us out on Twitter and Facebook.

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Want More?

For further reading, show notes, a periodic newsletter, and more exclusive content, please visit our Patreon page and sign up to support the show!


***

Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. Our Production Consultant is Josh Kross. The theme is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

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Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Citations Needed, Episode 22: Trumpwashing -- How the Media Uses Trump to Launder Our Criminal Past


The unique threat and vileness of Donald Trump’s presidency can’t be overstated. Since he took office a year ago, he’s increased civilian deaths in Afghanistan by 50%, increased civilian deaths in Syria and Iraq (surpassing Obama’s death toll in just under 7 months), issued dozens of nuclear threats against North Korea, unraveled the Iran deal, bombed Hezbollah, Iranian and SAA positions in Syria, signed a smash and grab tax bill for billionaires, and issued order after order making life hell for immigrants and other vulnerable communities.

With this unique threat comes a rhetorical habit of "Trumpwashing," the absolution, rehabilitation and rewriting of the history of American politics and empire prior to 2017.

The desire to revamp the image of the pre-Trump Republican party and the United States in general – “Trumpwashing,” to use a term coined by The Electronic Intifada's Ali Abunimah - is a favorite rhetorical tic of Russia-obsessed democrats and centrist extremists whose primary charge is treating the phenomenon of Donald Trump as anomalous from American history, rather than its most pure, and even logical, manifestation. This trope - in addition to denying the realities of the past hundred years of American politics and policy - carries with it pernicious long term effects.

We discuss this broader narrative with The Intercept's Jon Schwarz.

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The Show



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The Guest

Jon Schwarz is a Senior Writer at The Intercept. He has contributed to many other publications, such as the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and Slate, as well as NPR and “Saturday Night Live.”




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Citations Needed is available on iTunes, Soundcloud and LibSyn (here’s the RSS feed). You can also check us out on Twitter and Facebook.

***

Want More?

For further reading, show notes, a periodic newsletter, and more exclusive content, please visit our Patreon page and sign up to support the show!


***

Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. Our Production Consultant is Josh Kross. The theme is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

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Tuesday, January 9, 2018

The Myriad Deaths of Liberal Zionism


Every so often, just like its necessary counterpart "the two-state solution," a new obituary is written for Liberal Zionism.

The latest, penned by recently hired New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, laments the Trump administration's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and promise to soon move the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv. Goldberg writes that, among other egregious consequences, the formal American recognition, "endangers whatever thin chance remains of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the alternative to a two-state solution is one state, a greater Israel that includes the occupied territories. That state can be Jewish or it can be democratic, but it cannot be both. Trump's embassy decision was thus another nail in the coffin of liberal Zionism."

Liberal Zionism can be defined in myriad ways, but it is perhaps most generously described, as +972 Magazine's Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man wrote in 2014, as "the belief — or at least the hope — that Israel can reconcile and balance being a Jewish and a democratic state, serving both as the realization of Jewish national self-determination and as a modern liberal state that guarantees equality to all its citizens regardless of their religion or ethnic heritage."

Goldberg's new analysis is sharp, well-written, and a welcome departure from the usual automated Israeli apologia so frequent in the mainstream media, especially The New York Times itself. She doesn't shy away from using the term "apartheid" to describe the reality of Israel's oppression and deliberate destruction of Palestine:
Supporters of Israel hate it when people use the word "apartheid" to describe the country, but we don't have another term for a political system in which one ethnic group rules over another, confining it to small islands of territory and denying it full political representation.
Once the ruse of the ever-elusive "two-state solution" is finally revealed as the 70 year old sham that it is, the Palestinian-led campaign for full and equal rights will surely gain support. As this happens, Goldberg notes, "most of the world — including most of the Jewish diaspora — will have a hard time coming up with a decent justification for opposing a Palestinian campaign for equal rights." She even throws in an apt comparison of "Israel's apologists" to Jim Crow segregationists.

This is all well and good. But we've been here before.

Handwringing over the demise of an inherently anachronistic ideology - so-called "liberal" Zionism - is well-trodden territory.

Just three years ago, The New York Times itself published effectively the same article, entitled, "The End of Liberal Zionism."


Soon thereafter, Bernard Avishai published his own thoughts on the matter in The New Yorker, headlined, "Is Liberal Zionism Impossible?"


Soon thereafter, Rabbi Bruce Warshal chimed in via the pages of the Sun-Sentinel's Jewish Journal.


Michelle Goldberg herself has expounded on the same topic before. Days after the New York Times' 2014 obit, Goldberg published her own take in The Nation, entitled, "Liberal Zionism Is Dying. The Two-State Solution Shouldn’t Go With It."


The following year, also in The Nation, Ali Gharib wrote of "Michael Oren and the End of Liberal Zionism."


That same year, 2015, saw Damon Linker write in The Week "that American liberals are deceiving themselves when they insist, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Zionism (in any form) is perfectly compatible with liberalism."

More recently, the death knell of liberal Zionism sounded from college campuses in the United States:


Closer to the beginning of this decade, it was Peter Beinart who sounded the alarm, and whose commentary was soon responded to in turn.


In 2012, The Atlantic's Jacob Heilbrunn even suggested Beinart might resurrect the ailing ideology:


Meanwhile, the right-wing FrontPageMag rejoiced in the ashes of this wishy-washy form of settler-colonialism.


Of course, the fallacy of these frequent pre- and postmortems was already revealed back in 2014 (if not decades earlier by Palestinians and others who were never fooled by the obvious contradiction of "liberalism" and the notion that the collective right of colonists to self-determination supersedes the human and civil rights of the indigenous people displaced and dispossessed by those colonists.)

In a rebuttal to the original 2014 New York Times oped, Ha'aretz columnist Asher Schechter wrote that liberal Zionism has never been anything but a fantasy - "a narrative" that "served as a powerfully convenient fiction, both for liberal diaspora Jews who wanted to be Zionists without some of the moral dilemmas involved, and for pro-Israeli lobbyists who tried to enlist the liberal intelligentsia in their fight to legitimize Israel."


Will we see more doleful obituaries in the future? Probably. But for those who believe in true equity, international law, and full human rights for all, let's hope Goldberg's new death notice is finally terminal.

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Saturday, January 6, 2018

Recycled Obituaries for the Always-Elusive "Two-State Solution"

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, and Palestinian Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat address reporters on the Middle East Peace Process Talks at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on July 30, 2013.
[State Department]

Oh look! The New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief, David M. Halbfinger, wrote today that the hope for a "two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict" looks more elusive than ever before.

While hinting at the incompatibility of democracy and Zionism without explicitly saying so, Halbfinger notes, "For the Israelis, absorbing three million West Bank Palestinians means either giving up on democracy or accepting the end of the Jewish state." Then, with the assumption that full and equal rights will never be granted to Palestinians throughout the entirety of their own homeland, he suggests that two-states has long been the "best hope" for Palestinians "unwilling to live under apartheid-like conditions or military occupation."

As a result, Halbfinger explains, the idea of "one state" is gaining traction among both Israelis and Palestinians - albeit with very different concepts of what that would mean.

But this choice between apartheid and a state that actually provided equal rights for all living under it has existed since the advent of Israel in the late 1940s, and even long before. And yet, the time for negotiating a solution is always just about up, the window of opportunity closing rapidly, and all the while, the dutiful press breathlessly reports from the foot of the death bed.

In recent years, as number of Israeli settlers colonizing Palestine has steadily increased, the demise of the "two-state solution" continues to be declared. Here's a quick look back at some of these obits.

January 2, 2017: "The Two-state Solution Is Already Dead," Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz.


December 29, 2016: "Mr. Kerry, the 2-state solution isn’t at risk, it’s already dead," Avi Issacharoff, The Times of Israel.


October 23, 2016: "The two-state solution is dead. Let's move on," Talal Jabari, +972.


October 24, 2016: "As Long As Israel Continues Its Settlements, A Two-State Solution Is Impossible," Saeb Erekat, The Washington Post.


October 18, 2016: "The Death of the Two-State Solution," Sandy Tolan, TomDispatch.


April 21, 2016: "The Quiet Death of the Two-State Solution," Yossi Mekelberg, Chatham House.


August 13, 2015: "Jimmy Carter: Two-state solution is dead, Israel to blame," Avi Lewis, The Times of Israel.


August 6, 2015: "The end of the two-state solution," Avi Issacharoff, The Times of Israel.


July/August 2015: "The Death and Life of the Two-State Solution," Grant Rumley and Amir Tibon, Foreign Affairs.


September 14, 2013: "Two-State Illusion," Ian S. Lustick, The New York Times.


March 11, 2013: "The End of the Two-State Solution," Ben Birnbaum, The New Republic.

October 28, 2012: "Homeland No More: The End of the Two State Solution," Joseph Dana, Los Angeles Review of Books.


October 23, 2012: "The death of the Israel-Palestine two-state solution brings fresh hope," Rachel Shabi, The Guardian.


July 1, 2010: "Is the Two-State Solution Already Dead?" Hasan Afif El-Hasan, Algora Publishing.


January 23, 2009: "Time Running Out For A Two-State Solution?" 60 Minutes.


May 3, 2003: "The Slow Death of the Two-State Solution," Alain Epp Weaver, The Christian Century.



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Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Citations Needed, Episode 21: Quantifying Negative Media Portrayals of People of Color



According to one 2014 study, 75% of white Americans don’t have any non-white friends. Put another way, white people’s perception of African Americans and other people of color comes primarily from media representations rather than actual interactions. As such, how communities of color are portrayed in the media – from news and opinion pages to movie and TV screens – is tremendously important.

Two newly-published reports reveal how these perceptions are consistently distorted to over-emphasize Black and Latinx criminality, center white people in sympathetic portrayals as either victims or heroes, and overwhelmingly lump immigration coverage in with coverage of crime and violence.


In this episode, we discuss the bare statistics of how people of color, immigrants, and the poor are shown in media, why it matters, and the consequences of media makers from newsrooms to Hollywood perpetuating destructive stereotypes.

We're joined by some of the people behind these reports, Lucy Odigie-Turley of The Opportunity Agenda and Nicole Rodgers of Family Story.

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The Show



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The Reports

Redefining Sanctuary: Analysis of public attitudes and media coverage of sanctuary jurisdictions and related immigration policies

Lucy Odigie-Turley | December 2017 | The Opportunity Agenda

A Dangerous Distortion of Our Families: Representations of Families, By Race, In News and Opinion Media

Dr. Travis L. Dixon | December 2017 | Color Of Change

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The Guests

Lucy Odigie-Turley is the Opinion and Media Research Coordinator with The Opportunity Agenda. An experienced communication researcher with training in both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, Lucy conducts and organizes multi-methods research to assess dominant media narratives and public opinion about poverty, immigration, and criminal justice.


Nicole Rodgers is the founder and executive director of Family Story, a communications and research organization that elevates stories of diverse families. A strategist with broad expertise in communications, branding, and research in the public interest, Rodgers is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Role Reboot, an online magazine dedicated to storytelling and social critique from a new generation of Americans rethinking “traditional” family, breaking through stereotypes, and bucking expectations about gender roles.
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Citations Needed is available on iTunes, Soundcloud and LibSyn (here’s the RSS feed). You can also check us out on Twitter and Facebook.

***

Want More?

For further reading, show notes, a periodic newsletter, and more exclusive content, please visit our Patreon page and sign up to support the show!


***

Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. Our Production Consultant is Josh Kross. The theme is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

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