Contents

• Cihan Aksan & Jon Bailes
  On Media: An Interview with Noam Chomsky

  “What right do we have to decide what should happen to other people? Is it because we’re so magnificent? Did we have some God given right to determine the fate of the world?”

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• Richard Keeble
  What is Journalism? Reflections and Provocations

  “Could it be that journalists’ stubborn reliance on professional notions of objectivity in our postmodern era is acting as a conservative, regressive influence on the development of the genre?”

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• Danny Schechter
  The More You Watch the Less You Know: Ten Years On

  “We had to recognize that one of the big problems of the world, the Media, was right in front of us and barely acknowledged as a problem. Its legendary “gate-keepers” were there to dumb down the content, commercialize all messaging and keep our kind of progressive content off the air.”

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• Sharon Beder
  The Role of ‘Economic Education’ in Achieving Capitalist Hegemony

  “The use of school education to teach children to appreciate the free enterprise system was carefully thought out and a conscious strategy to win people over at an early and impressionable age.”

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• Nora Barrows-Friedman
  The Consumption of War

  “It is easier to prioritize the headlines on the front page when Israeli or American blood is taken for granted as more valuable than that pumping through brown-skinned Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi.”

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• William MacDougall
  The Socialist, The Columnist, His Wife and the Prostitute

  “Here was a political story that had everything. The principled working-class politician and the prostitute, the allegations of adultery with a tabloid journalist, hotel-room orgies and swinger club visits, alleged tabloid intrigue and a political party tearing itself apart in public.”

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• Ron Jacobs
  We Can See through your Masks (Review)

  “What is often most interesting about the spate of recent books on the war in Iraq is that no matter how gloomy the authors of these books predicted the situation would get, the situation has turned out to be considerably worse.”

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• Little Big Pine
  The Gift Outright: Outright Genocide (Poetry)

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• Michael Robeson
  Embedded at Club Med, Rio (Poetry)

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• Tanya Reinhart
  Always the Victim: Israel’s Present Wars

  “It was possible for Israel to handle this incident as all its predecessors, with at most a local retaliation, or a prisoner exchange, or even better, with an attempt to solve this border dispute once and for all.”

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• J A Miller
  Ahmet’s Cafeteria: Empire and the Kindness of Strangers

  “Food is an elemental component of life and today’s empire secured its early growth and honed its ruthlessness by understanding that manipulating and controlling food was a key to power.”

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• Shepherd Bliss
  Inside a veterans’ Group: Writing about War and Peace

  “I remember a few years of relative peace. But when the bombs start falling, they seem to head right for my stomach. I feel them in my body. The casualties may be distant, but they feel close to home to me.”

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• Jerry Starr
  The Sago Mine Disaster: Deregulation and its Consequences

  “With demand and prices up, coal companies have pressured miners for more production; running around the clock shifts, even when potentially dangerous safety violations are discovered.”

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