David Sirota's Blog, page 4

The Tucson Shooting's Most Important Questions

Since the shooting in Tucson on Saturday, lots of important questions have been raised -- questions that go to issues than transcend even the monumentally horrific shooting itself. In the interest of summation, here are the best questions I've seen on Twitter, Facebook, in the blogosphere, on radio and elsewhere.

- If after a calculated political assassination attempt we cannot talk about the downsides of a right-wing media that effectively endorses political violence, when can we talk about t...

Silence Is Complicity and Defensiveness Is Endorsement

I've just finished up three hours of the most difficult radio I've ever had to do. The topic, of course, was the horrific shooting in Tucson, which has deeply affected me, as it has many others. As someone who had to flee the Capitol on 9/11, was warned of anthrax contamination in the congressional office I was working in, and has faced various threats of violence during my media career, I was shaken by the scenes in Arizona more so than by any other news imagery in a long time.

The reason the...

The Money Paradox

If there's one thing you can still count on from today's increasingly erratic politics, it is pure unadulterated paradox. In a Washington circus that features as many morons as oxymorons, we have self-described deficit hawks who promote tax cuts, alleged war opponents who back war escalations, and supposed anti-government conservatives who press to expand the national security state. Heck, we even have senators who famously brag of voting for things before voting against them.

That said, for s...

Ted Williams and the Triumph of American Dream Propaganda

Thanks to near-ubiquitous national media coverage, you probably know by now that Ted Williams was a homeless and jobless man who is now being offered fairly major media jobs because he had the random luck of becoming a YouTube sensation. This is certainly a heartwarming story, and we should all be genuinely happy for Williams. It's a blessing when anyone is lifted out of such destitution.

However, there's a dark side to all this. No, not about Williams (who himself rightly acknowledges that th...

What Spielberg/Lucas Classics Teach Kids About 21st Century America

Even in as chaotic and random a world as we live in now, Americans have come to rely on a few rock-solid inevitabilities during the Christmas/New Years season. We know jingle-bell muzak will fill our department stores. We know Fox News will provide breathless dispatches from the frontlines of the War on Christmas. We can bank on Dick Clark (with an assist from Ryan Seacrest) counting down the seconds as the ball drops in Times Square. And, even more so than at any other time of year, we can c...

New York Provides a Snowy Glimpse Into America's Future

"Welcome to the New Normal."

Those words should be displayed at New York's airports as a welcome to bedraggled travelers during the Northeast's latest "snowpocalypse." Why? Because the Big Apple's much-lamented paralysis this week is a critical cautionary tale for everyone. As I show in my new newspaper column, the episode warns us about the kind of thing that's likely coming to the rest of America as we now willfully mix three toxic problems.

The first of those is global climate change. Though...

The New York Times' Versailles Manifesto

Today's "journalists," like Matt Bai of the New York Times, see no difference between themselves and those they serve. Indeed, when they hear the term "political elites" -- they now see themselves in the mirror.

The New York Times' Versailles Manifesto

Over the years, we've all seen solid examples of the Versailles mentality in our media -- ie. the mentality that glorifies Washington and its inhabitants as heroes saving the rest of America from itself. But usually these examples are a bit subtle in how they weave the arrogance into the prose. Usually, you have to really stop and do a careful double-take when you see a piece of Versailles propaganda.

That's why this recent piece from the notoriously servile Matt Bai in the New York Times is s...

Meet the Gecko and Flo -- The Faces of Economic Death

If you've turned on the tube these last few weeks, you've probably been a collateral casualty of the biggest televisual war of attrition in recent memory. No, I'm not talking about the scripted skirmishes between cable channels, nor am I referring to the Battle of Zombie Talking Points that ate most of our brains during the election. I'm talking about the now never-ending throwdown between two of the most in-your-face salespeople our mediascape has ever manufactured: Geico's unnamed gecko and...

Question: What's With Our New 1980s Fetish? Answer: We're Going Back to Our Future

As Tron: Legacy becomes the top grossing movie in America this weekend, we need to ask a seemingly trivial but oh-so-important question: What's with our newfound 1980s fetish? Though the original Tron has a loyal following (of which I include myself), it was a commercial disappointment. And yet it was updated in blockbuster $170-million-dollar fashion. Clearly, in light of that history, the driving force behind it being remade is the ascendant 1980s zeitgeist, especially considering that it w...