In an interesting two-part series published by Nieman Watchdog, former executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism and reporter for the Washington Post John Hanrahan explores why the mainstream media so often ignores antiwar protests in the US.

After discussing several prominent protests over the last couple years that have recieved short shrift or no attention at all from the mainstream media despite their newsworthiness, Hanrahan asks Vernon Loeb, local editor of the Washington Post, about the paper’s policy in covering activism and why they have often not covered large demonstrations in the capital. Not surprisingly:

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With the scandal around Rupert Murdoch growing by the day, a full-fledged boycott of News Corp. has been launched on the internet. According to the Washington Post:

Boycottmurdoch.com was registered Sunday, with a plan to convince readers “that Murdoch’s tabloid news media … propagate a false image of the world, exaggerate news stories, and spin an agenda which fits Murdoch’s business interests and highly conservative political outlook.”

Boycott Murdoch Facebook and Twitter pages sprung up, garnering hundreds of followers within days.

While the boycott has recieved coverage on many mainstream news outlets, it has yet to gain much traction. The Facebook page has less than 700 fans and the Twitter page is approaching only 1,000 followers. To make even a small dent in Murdoch’s bottom line, the boycott will need to metastasize and quickly.

One thing that makes a complete boycott of all things Murdoch difficult, is the breadth of his holdings. As NPR explains, if you don’t want any of your money going to Murdoch, here are a few things that would be off limits:

• You couldn’t go see Brad Pitt and Terence Malick’s new, critically acclaimed art house film The Tree of Life. It’s distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, a subsidiary of Fox Filmed Entertainment and NewsCorp. (That means you couldn’t watch Natalie Portman in Black Swan either.)

• You couldn’t watch any of your favorite sitcoms on the online video site Hulu.com, which is a NewsCorp joint venture with NBC Universal and Disney.

• You couldn’t watch Dog Whisperer on the National Geographic Channel. (Fox owns a majority share of the network.)

• You couldn’t read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Post.

• You couldn’t attend a Los Angeles Lakers or New York Rangers game, since Murdoch has partial ownership in both of those major league sports teams. (He also owns parts of the Staples Center and Madison Square Garden; so no Lady Gaga concerts in the Big Apple either.)

• You couldn’t watch American Idol on Fox or buy any albums or singles by the winners and contestants of the show. That means you, Crystal Bowersox fans.

• You couldn’t buy any book published by HarperCollins since NewsCorp owns that company as well. So forget picking up an extra copy of a J.R.R. Tolkien book.

• If you’re Australian, you couldn’t attend a National Rugby League game, or read GQ Australia.

While this list is only partial, boycotting Murdoch’s empire is far from impossible. It simply would mean making some sacrifices, which is necessary for all nonviolent action, and choosing more carefully which news, entertainment and sports to watch or read.

If you haven’t noticed, Glenn Beck – Fox News’ vitriolic voice of “reason” and “values” – is gone.  Thursday, June 30 marked the end of Beck’s controversial career with Fox but his pandering continues on The Glenn Beck Program that is broadcast nation-wide.  While talk-radio remains a favorite medium for right-wing ideology – and quite successfully at that, considering top three talk syndicates are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, respectively – what is more significant is what the ousting of Beck may mean for Fox News.

The 24/7 news channel has enjoyed extraordinary ratings since 9/11, promoting a concoction of unwavering patriotism, “fair and balanced” reporting, and disdain for dissent.  But Beck’s departure and recent rating reports suggest that Fox News’ hold on the American psyche is loosening.  The Fox News network ratings have been in a steady decline while viewership, particularly in the 25-54 demographic, of CNN and MSNBC has been on the rise.  There is no disputing that Fox still dominates the cable news sphere, but the drop in its ratings, the rise in its competitors and the increased attention to its modus operandi could signal a new era of sanity for grassroots organizers seeking media reform and progressive change.

A recent piece in Dissent by Mark Engler argues that Beck’s signing off is the result of a successful boycott campaign by Color of Change that targeted corporate advertisers on the program:

I think we need to take time to recognize the innovative and relentless boycott that set out to strip Glenn Beck of his sponsors. The boycott was amazingly effective at doing just that—ultimately convincing several hundred corporations (including major names such as Wal-Mart, GEICO, and Procter & Gamble) to agree not to advertise on his show.

Engler explicates the success of the boycott in light of other ruminations regarding Beck’s signing off.  What is of importance for activists – particularly those engaged in media reform – is the point Engler makes about how the organizers framed the boycott by not going the traditional route of targeting consumers. Engler writes:

[It] wasn’t about getting the average American not to watch the show….The Beck boycott was far more strategic. Its organizers identified wary advertisers as their point of leverage, targeted specific corporations that were buying ads, and used the announcement of each new company that agreed to withdraw as a way to build momentum.

Surely the Color of Change campaign played a role in bringing increased scrutiny of Beck’s paranoia-laden “journalism.”  Identifying a weak point in Beck’s armor – that his network is a for-profit venture reliant on advertisers and viewers – allowed Color of Change to employ a time-proven tactic of people-power through the use of petitions to signify widespread support of getting Beck off the air and taking it not to Fox but to the corporate advertisers it relies upon for revenue.

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In this week’s episode of People & Power, Al Jazeera goes to Spain to tell the story of why they have risen up over the last month. The show includes some wonderful footage from the protests and insightful interviews with Spanish academics and activists that help put the nonviolent movement in context.

To read our report on how Spain’s Real Democracy Now movement got started, click here.

I was on RT, Russia’s 24/7 English-language news channel, yesterday to talk about the news that the US has stepped up its covert war in Yemen in recent weeks with increased strikes by fighter jets and armed drones.

Last week, Fox News announced that Glenn Beck will lose his show later this year. While this decision was likely made for a variety of reasons, including his falling ratings, the ad boycott launched by Color of Change in July 2009, after Beck called President Obama a racist, clearly played an important role.

In an article at Alternet, Color of Change executive director James Rucker explains the logic of the boycott and how it worked this way:

…it was based on a simple theory: Beck’s rhetoric was so egregious, so far over the line of decency, that few advertisers would want to associate their brand with Beck. If we could convince advertisers to abandon Beck’s show, and stay away, this would make Beck a financial liability for Fox News Channel, ultimately leading to his show’s demise.

The theory proved true: 285,000 people signed our petition to Beck’s advertisers, and hundreds of major companies made sure their ads would not appear during his show. Beck could not attract major advertisers for more than a year, so demand for ad space (and hence, the price of ads) on his TV show plummeted, hurting Fox’s bottom line.

As Jason Easley writes at PoliticusUSA:

By mid-September 2009, the boycott was costing News Corp $600,000 a week. Despite the financial losses Rupert Murdoch stuck with Beck because his ratings were still high, and the company believed that Beck was right. However Beck’s ratings plunged in 2010, and the advertisers never came back.

After Beck had lost half of his audience by July of 2010, 15 of the 27 ad slots on his show were unpaid ads. The situation continued to get worse. By March 2011, 400 advertisers were boycotting Glenn Beck’s program. In the first quarter of 2011, Beck was still bleeding viewers to the tune of 500,000 a night.

While I’m sure we have not heard the last of Glenn Beck, this successful nonviolent action dealt a serious blow to the Glenn Beck brand by helping to remove his most influential platform.

With all the ruckus of the U.S.-NATO intervention in Libya, even the in-depth 24-hour news coverage that saturated us with images of Egypt, Tunisia and Wisconsin have been relegated from the headlines to brief news bits.  Even more neglected is the case of Yemen, where pro-democracy protests have been rocking public squares for months. Using tactics such as sit-ins and civil disobedience, the opposition, with its plan for a peaceful transition of power, is growing in its support for Saleh’s deposition.  The pro-democracy movement has refused Saleh’s offer of amnesty to military and government dissenters and negotiations with the President broke down last week.  Since then, the violence against pro-democracy protesters seems to have increased and there is an emerging counter-movement supporting Saleh that has engaged in violence with the state security forces.  Yesterday, 1,600 people were injured by police in Taiz as the resistance spreads and President Saleh’s 32-year rule is unraveling. But the international community has refrained from weighing in on the Yemen uprising.

Context is everything in understanding why international diplomacy takes a front seat in the news cycle and the courageous people power and nonviolence sits quietly in the back.  In Libya, as this site has been keen to point out in various posts, the nonviolent uprisings did not coalesce into a movement because the context was not properly prepared.  As Stephen Zunes argued, Libya pro-democracy, nonviolent forces lacked strategy and when the violent, state repression came down with a heavy hand, they lacked the training and organizing to remain nonviolently disciplined.  The case for foreign military intervention was argued on humanitarian reasons (which are apparently of little concern, because thousands of Yemenis are being targeted by security forces loyal to Saleh and 300 have been reported killed).

Jeremy Scahill’s recent article, “The Dangerous US Game in Yemen” gives context for why there has not yet been a massive outcry of humanitarian support for the people of Yemen.  The U.S. wants Saleh in power in Yemen for the stability to continue its proxy-war against Al Qaeda which has found, strangely, enough state support in Yemen to not have fled to any other number of unstable areas to continue its activities (a place like, say, Libya).

The reason the U.S. is supporting the rebel forces in Libya is that Gaddafi has long been a thorn in the side of the American-led war on terror.  He has played a dicey game of diplomacy that kept him isolated from the U.S. but never a full blown target for American counter-terrorism (although Libya has long appeared on Cheney’s list of countries to attack).  So the understanding of how conflicts are characterized by the media, both mainstream and otherwise, needs to dig deeper into the unique, cultural contexts with which these uprisings arise and the historical contexts that determine why and when foreign military intervention becomes an option.  And then we must ask the question: how sincere can U.S. (or other foreign support) for people’s liberation movements be when they question economic and policy interests?

With any solid nonviolent movement, in addition to training, strategy and organizing, a solid analysis needs to take place.  For those of us who support democracy and nonviolent people power, we would do well to take the time to hit the alternative history books, media centers, and voices from people on the ground for the strengthening of our own contextualizing analysis.

Fox News Latino ran an article last week that clearly revealed its slant: “Cuba: If Egypt did it, Why Not Cuba? Some Ask, as Scores Take to the Streets.”

In the piece, Elizabeth Llorente interviews Cuban dissidents and Cuban-Americans who argue that Cuba is far more repressive than Egypt, but that an uprising on the island nation is ultimately inevitable.

(While I’m no expert on Cuba, the claim that it’s much worse than the countries in the Middle East seems really far-fetched. Can anyone who does know more about Cuba let me know in the comment section how Cuba’s political system compares to Egypt under Mubarak or other dictatorial regimes in the region?)

Not surprisingly, NPR took a different approach to the same question in this segment.

While Nick Miroff reports that Castro’s opponents do claim he is more controlling than dictators in the Middle East, he points out that:

Even Jonathan Farrar, the top U.S. official in Cuba, acknowledged in a leaked 2009 cable that Cuba’s dissidents are divided and have little following on the island.

Moreover, Miroff also notes that according to Amnesty International there are only five political prisoners in Cuba at the moment. As terrible as that is, to put it in context, the United States is still holding 172 prisoners in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay, almost all of whom have never been charged with any crime.

Last week, I was on Russia Today (RT), Russia’s 24/7 English-language news channel, to discuss ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s role in the Iraq war and the use of torture on the day that his new memoir Known and Unknown was released. Click here to watch the video.

Just last week I found myself falling asleep to a seemingly unending White House press conference about Egypt aired in its entirety by CNN. When I came to and switched over to the live feed on Al Jazeera’s website, I saw that the most-watched news channel on the Internet didn’t bypass its amazing coverage for the Robert Gibbs snoozefest. It merely condensed his talking-points-memo jargon into one concise meaningless sentence about “monitoring a fluid situation” and “reviewing our assistance posture” before moving on to better, more interesting things. I couldn’t believe an American cable news network had been topped so effortlessly. If anything, our TV news is supposed to be entertaining.

CNN must have realized its airing of press conferences and Egyptian state TV wasn’t enough because this week everyone’s favorite intrepid broadcast journalist Anderson Cooper was live on the scene. And he didn’t waste any time making headlines. Less than three days after arriving in Cairo, Cooper and his crew were attacked by pro-Mubarak thugs in Tahrir square. Fortunately, he escaped without serious injury to steal attention away from the protests and looting of the Egyptian Museum, as Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri satirized:

OH MY GOSH, THEY ATTACKED ANDERSON COOPER!

Stop the presses! Forget all that. This is Anderson Cooper we’re talking about here! THE Anderson Cooper, of CNN fame! Sure, the museum may contain manuscripts, but Anderson’s eyes contain volumes.

I know the Egyptian Museum hosts valuable artifacts, but how does it look in a tight black t-shirt? They may have sphinx memorabilia. But Anderson Cooper is a real-life sphinx, shrouded in questions and mystery.

The blue steel of his eyes is probably worth, like, eight hundred times all the lapis lazuli in the Egyptian Museum.

Beneath this humor, however, are signs of a major strategic error on Mubarak’s part, which Petri also notes:

Some Mubarak supporters punched him? If I had any vestiges of support for Mubarak, they are gone! How dare they lay hands on this shining tabernacle of manly virtue? Sure, he’s a news reporter in a volatile area, and that comes with certain risks. But he’s Anderson Cooper, a name which can also be rendered: “He Whose Porcelain Beauty Is To Be Handled With Utmost Care Wherever In The World He May Be Located.”

Before Cooper was attacked, the mainstream media was having a hard time, as Dustin Howes put it earlier, “distinguishing the players” and instead “portrayed the events in a way that the casual observer might think that all sides are instigating violence.” But now that narrative can change. That’s what happens (or should happen) when a leader lets his thugs beat up one of America’s most recognizeable TV personalities—he loses any chance of garnering sympathy or benefit of the doubt.

Unfortunately, Cooper isn’t the only journalist to have had a run in with Mubarak’s thugs. According to Democracy Now!, “Journalists with CBS News, ABC News, BBC, the Washington Post, Australian Broadcasting, Danish TV2 News and Swiss television were also reportedly attacked.” But, of course, they don’t look as good in a tight black t-shirt.

So can Cooper’s star power help to prevent further injury to journalists? Perhaps not, as Cooper’s latest tweet, just two hours ago, indicates: “Situation on ground in #egypt very tense. Vehicle I was in attacked. My window smashed. All ok.”

THEY ATTACKED ANDERSON COOPER, AGAIN!

But Cooper and other journalists on the ground in Egypt can, through their bravery, show the world what ordinary Egyptians are facing and why their demands for a new and democratic state must be met. Perhaps such public awareness can sway the forces still holding Mubarak in power to action—not the least of which is our financial backing of the military. Is it time for that review yet?