In the Public Interest

At the Cedar Lane Unitarian Church in Bethesda, Maryland on the morning of February 19, 1996, there was a memorial service to celebrate the life of an extra ordinary musician, Randy Hostetler, age 32. In a short hour, his friends, younger brother, Eric, and his parents, Jim and Zona, through their pastor, conveyed the iconoclastic…

Its Presidential Primary Time and never before have so many state primaries been stacked together so closely on the calendar. The politicians hone their 5 minute speeches about “getting this country moving again,” tailor their sound bites to 5, 10 and 20 seconds with suitable slogans and flood the television with their vapid self-advertisements. What…

Will the new labor leadership at the AFL-CIO of John Sweeney and Richard Trumka shake up this giant passive organization of trade unions into a new dynamic? They certainly talk that way in the few weeks since they moved into the AFL headquarters near The White House in Washington, D.C. There is no way to…

First, some short items. Jodie Allen, the editor of The Washington Post’s Sunday “Outlook” section, is not like The Wall Street Journal’s editors. But on the subject of the law of torts for wrongfully injured persons, she shares the same ideology, which is to mind the tort deformers’ diatribes, and who cares about the facts?…

The repeated characterization of Senator Bob Dole as “too old”, “a grumpy old man,” and other appellations by the media, not to mention his Republican opponents for the Presidential nomination, is pure ageism discrimination. Dole will be 73 years old on July 22, 1996. He carries a daily Senatorial load and a travel schedule for…

We are constantly being told that the information age is engulfing the world, but much of it seems to be bypassing the banking industry. Many of the inner workings of the industry are revealed only when the taxpayers are called on for billions of dollars to bail out failed institutions. Certainly that was true when…

Nothing is tougher for politicians and editorial writers than admitting a mistake. Two years ago, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was ratified by the Congress amidst a tidal wave of propaganda and promises from corporate America and the Clinton Administration and echoed on the editorial pages of many of the nation’s most powerful…

Steve Forbes and his fortune are running for Presi­dent. The media dutifully report the swelling polit­ical advertising budget that has raised him in the polls ahead of other Republican primary candidates, and surveys show him second to Dole in some early primary states. But because Forbes has no voting record and has held no public…

The Big Lie and the Big Dollar are at work again in California. Both have greased two referendums onto the March ballot that would further the ongoing corporate drive to destroy those laws of America that protect your safety and your savings. One referendum is designed to severely limit the rights of shareholder-owners to sue…

The most useful thinking about the media starts with not thinking like the media. This is not easy to do, because corporate-controlled communications systems tend to lead their audience and, for the most part, their critics into accepting assumptions that confine their reactions within a conceptual cocoon. Consider television. Try asking your friends, for ex­ample,…