By Steve Rhodes

I hate the cliche of starting a story with a dictionary definition, but in this case I’m going to do it because “scathing” is the Word of the Moment:

scath·ing
ˈskāT͟HiNG/
Adjective.
Witheringly scornful; severely critical.
“She launched a scathing attack on the governor.”
Synonyms: devastating, extremely critical, blistering, searing, withering, scorching, fierce, ferocious, savage, severe, stinging, biting, cutting, mordant, trenchant, virulent, caustic, vitriolic, scornful, sharp, bitter, harsh, unsparing; raremordacious.

Oh please let’s start using raremordacious, I’m begging you all!
And why are we honoring this word today? Because it is the adjective used so abundantly in describing the Department of Justice’s “pattern and practice” report on the Chicago Police Department. To wit:

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Posted on January 18, 2017

Many of American journalism’s best-known and most cherished stories are exaggerated, dubious, or apocryphal. They are media-driven myths, and they attribute to the news media and their practitioners far more power and influence than they truly exert.
In Getting It Wrong, writer and scholar W. Joseph Campbell confronts and dismantles prominent media-driven myths, describing how they can feed stereotypes, distort understanding about the news media, and deflect blame from policymakers.
Campbell debunks the notions that the Washington Post’s Watergate reporting brought down Richard M. Nixon’s corrupt presidency; that Walter Cronkite’s characterization of the Vietnam War in 1968 shifted public opinion against the conflict; and that William Randolph Hearst vowed to “furnish the war” against Spain in 1898.
This expanded second edition includes a new preface and new chapters about the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, the haunting Napalm Girl photograph of the Vietnam War, and bogus quotations driven by the Internet and social media.

Posted on January 9, 2017

By W David McCausland/The Conversation

An interesting new book on how to improve the Scottish economy has a twist between its covers: it isn’t really about economics and the story it tells is not particularly unique to Scotland.
Tackling Timorous Economics is more about how the political and economic system in developed economies has become broken and how we might fix it. It should therefore be of interest well beyond Scotland’s borders. And it will challenge you to reflect on your own views on big issues like inequality and economic policy.

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Posted on January 6, 2017

By SIU Press

With the election of our first black president, many Americans began to argue that we had finally ended racism, claiming that we now live in a postracial era.
Yet near-daily news reports regularly invoke white as a demographic category and recount instances of racialized violence as well as an increased sensitivity to expressions of racial unrest.
Clearly, American society isn’t as color-blind as people would like to believe.
In Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education, contributors reveal how identifications with racialized whiteness continue to manifest themselves in American culture.

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Posted on January 5, 2017

By The Old Paths Baptist Church of Minnesota

A Satanic stronghold on North Milwaukee Avenue.

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Posted on December 21, 2016

By James Q. Whitman/Aeon

On June 5, 1934, about a year-and-a-half after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany gathered at a meeting to plan what would become the Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi race regime.
The meeting was an important one, and a stenographer was present to take down a verbatim transcript, to be preserved by the ever-diligent Nazi bureaucracy as a record of a crucial moment in the creation of the new race regime.
That transcript reveals a startling fact: the meeting involved lengthy discussions of the law of the United States of America.

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Posted on December 16, 2016

By A.C. Thompson/ProPublica

Chip Berlet has spent the past four decades studying right-wing political movements as a writer, activist and scholar.
Now retired, he worked for many years as a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a think tank based in the Boston area.
Working with Matthew N. Lyons, Berlet co-wrote Right-Wing Populism: Too Close for Comfort, which traces the politics back to the 1600s. He’s well-positioned, then, to make sense of the forces propelling President-elect Donald Trump’s ascendance.
While many observers have portrayed Trump’s rise as a total break from the traditions of American politics, Berlet takes a different view: as he and Lyons write, “demagogic appeals,” “demonization,” and apocalyptic thinking “have repeatedly been at the center of our political conflicts, not on the fringe.”

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Posted on December 15, 2016

By James Painter/The Conversation

The deafening silence around climate change in the presidential campaign has left leading climate scientists baffled by the absence of debate about the “greatest issue of our time.”
Some commentators have laid the blame firmly on the media for sticking too closely to the political agendas set by the candidates.
But it’s not just in the U.S. where climate change and environmental issues have been virtually ignored. In the UK, a study by Loughborough University found that during the Brexit referendum, television news bulletins in the six-week period in May and June dedicated no time at all to environmental issues – despite the fact that much of UK environment policy is determined by the EU. Print media did little better.
So what’s going on? Part of the challenge is that TV editors often see climate change as too niche or too preachy. Another is that many audiences find the issue too remote, too frightening, or too consistently depressing. In many countries too, experienced specialist reporters, including science and environment correspondents, are on the decline because of cuts driven by dwindling revenue for legacy media.
In the UK, a 2016 report showed that of the 700 journalists surveyed, just over half self-identified as specialists. But while the most populous beats were business, culture, sports and entertainment, there were “few politics, science, or religious specialists.”

New Kids On The Climate Beat

The gap is partly being filled by “digital-born” players such as Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and Vice, who are the subject of our new book Something Old, Something New.

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Posted on December 14, 2016

By John Broich/The Conversation

How to report on a fascist?
How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people?
These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

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Posted on December 13, 2016

By Stephanie Schorow/The Conversation

During a celebration of Donald Trump’s election triumph, members of the alt-right’s white supremacist in-house think tank, the National Policy Institute, were filmed extending a stiff arm in the iconic “Heil Hitler” salute of Nazi Germany. Ensuring there would be no mistaking the gesture, the NPI’s president, Richard Spencer, shouted, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”

The video echoed, on a small scale, mass rallies that were once held in Nazi Germany. Huge crowds with their arms raised “were an essential part of Nazi propaganda, designed to demonstrate public solidarity with the policies of the Nazi Party,” writes Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell in Propaganda & Persuasion.

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Posted on December 7, 2016