Category: Media Beat column

We saw butterflies turning into bombers. And we weren’t dreaming. At the time when the Woodstock festival became an instant media legend in mid-August 1969, melodic yearning for peace was up against the cold steel of American war machinery. The music and other creative energies that drew 400,000 people to an upstate New York farm…

A recent obituary in the New York Times told about Frank Smith, “who as an inmate leader at Attica prison was tortured by officers in the aftermath of the prisoner uprising of 1971 and then spent a quarter century successfully fighting for legal damages.” Working as a paralegal after his release, Smith was a pivotal…

No, hope does not gallop in like Paul Revere. And it certainly doesn’t arrive breathless from a corporate party convention. Movements for peace and social justice can bring realistic hope — not with rhetoric but with the tough daily tedious uplifting work of political organizing. Yes, we’d be better off with John Kerry in the…

The same broadcast networks that eagerly devote endless prime-time hours to vacuous sitcoms and unreal “reality shows” couldn’t spare a total of more than a few hours last week for live coverage of the Democratic National Convention. It’s true that complaining about scant news coverage from NBC, ABC and CBS is a bit like griping…

With two words, the governor of California has managed to highlight the confluence of anti-gay bias and misogyny. Open contempt for “girlie men” would have raised fewer eyebrows in the past. Reactions to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s put-down of Democrats in the state legislature — “if they don’t have the guts, I call them girlie men” —…