Thursday, March 31st, 2016
Gerry Smith , - Bloomberg Technology
Stephan: Six companies control 90% of the media in the United States. They operate with only one consideration, maximum profit. The traditional function of media in democracy from Benjamin Franklin until the 1980s, to be the Fourth Estate, the investigator for and chronicler of the people is of interest only if it increases profits. If you were designing a media to support democracy would it be devoting most of its coverage to Donald Trump?
Here is the latest on media consolidation. Like the banks these media mega-corporations must be broken if an educated democracy in the U.S. is to survive.
Newspapers have settled on a strategy to stop withering away: feast on each other for survival.
For the owners of big-city dailies like the Chicago Tribune and Denver Post, buying smaller publications and slashing costs has become a way to buy time while figuring out how to make more money online. That was the logic behind the recent failed attempt by Tribune Publishing Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times, to buy two Southern California newspapers.
Last year, the industry saw the most deals for the largest amount of money since the 2008 financial crisis, with 70 daily newspapers being sold for a combined $827 million, according to mergers-and-acquisitions adviser Dirks, Van Essen & Murray. Gannett Co. bought 15 dailies, including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; Tribune snapped up the San Diego Union-Tribune; and Warren Buffett’s newspaper chain acquired the Free Lance–Star in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Even after last year’s surge of activity, more deals may be coming. The pressure to combine is only expected to grow because several media companies have spun off their lucrative TV stations, leaving newspapers to fend for […]
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Thursday, March 31st, 2016
Stephan: Here is another Red values state governor and legislature, this time it's Florida, passing laws that take away a woman's control over her own body. I must confess my amazement that we are not seeing mass demonstrations of women, electronically and physically, outraged by this war to subjugate and control them, as a gender. It outrages me, and I am a man. And the cultural and political impact of this is to increase the momentum of the Great Schism Trend.
We are very quickly becoming a country where women in Red value states will have little or no access to pregnancy termination, and will see a significant degradation in female healthcare generally. Meanwhile their Blue Value state sisters will have control over their bodies, and will enjoy superior overall healthcare. Already women in Mississippi live four fewer years than their Blue value state sisters.
My prediction: in those Red Value states they will see a significant rise in self-administered or back alley abortions with a concomitant increase in the sort of abortion crises we used to see in American emergency rooms prior to Roe v. Wade.
Florida Republican Govenor Rick Scott
Credit::AP/Chris O’Meara
For some time now, we’ve been following a long series of red-state reproductive Jim Crow laws incrementally making it more and more difficult for women to retain sovereignty over what happens inside their bodies. Each new law seems to get creepier than the last, especially a recent law signed by Indiana Governor Mike Pence that not only forces women to undergo unnecessary medical procedures but also effectively bans all abortions after 20-weeks, even in the event of pregnancy-related threats to the lives of women — and criminalizes doctors who perform abortions knowing the fetus is suffering from a severe physical deformity or disease.
Of course many of the laws being proposed and passed are direct reactions to the series of deceptively edited YouTube videos alleging that Planned Parenthood has been somehow illegally harvesting and selling fetus body parts. As many of us are aware, countless nonpartisan fact-checkers have debunked the claims made in the videos; around a dozen state investigations have cleared […]
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Wednesday, March 30th, 2016
Stephan: Tonight Ronlyn and I went to see Michael Moore's new movie Where to Invade Next. I urge you to go see it. It is SR made into a movie and it will leave you, at least it did us, with very conflicted emotions -- much as I feel many days doing SR itself.
I came home after the movie to do today's edition, having picked some candidate stories and the first one I read was this extraordinary New York Times interview with Donald Trump. As I read it I thought about the candidacies of both Trump and Ted Cruz. Just looking domestically at the Red value states one can see what Trump's and Cruz's version of America looks like in miniature. The interview also made me consider their geopolitics, particularly Trump's. All I could see was international contempt and endless geopolitical crisis. It's really rather scary.
Donald J. Trump at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, earlier this month. In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Trump agreed with a suggestion that his foreign policy ideas might best be summed up as “America First.”
Credit: Mark Makela/The New York Times
Over two telephone conversations on Friday, Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, discussed his views on foreign policy with Maggie Haberman and David E. Sanger of The New York Times. Here is an edited transcript of their interview (or just the highlights).
HABERMAN: I wanted to ask you about some things that you said in Washington on Monday, more recently. But you’ve talked about them a bunch. So, you have said on several occasions that you […]
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The 2016 annual meeting for the Organization of American Historians (OAH) will feature a session focusing upon the provocative book One Nation Under God by Princeton history professor Keven M. Kruse. In One Nation Under God, Kruse argues that the idea of the United States as a Christian nation does not find its origins with the founding of the United States or the writing of the Constitution. Rather, the notion of America as specifically consecrated by God to be a beacon for liberty was the work of corporate and religious figures opposed to New Deal statism and interference with free enterprise. The political conflict found in this concept of Christian libertarianism was modified by President Dwight Eisenhower who advocated a more civic religion of “one nation under God” to which both liberals and conservatives might subscribe. Kruse concludes that with the polarization of America in the 1960s over such issues such as school prayer and the war in Vietnam, politicians such as Richard Nixon abandoned the more inclusive civic religion of the Eisenhower era. Kruse writes that by the 1970s “the rhetoric of ‘one nation under […]
