Name: News Brief: Rightwing Media's Increasingly Goofy, Hyper-Militarized Non-Solutions to Mass Shootings by Citations Needed Podcast
Duration: 23 min 40 s
Description: In this News Brief, we discuss the phoned-in, cynical response by Republicans to mass shooting and how they've devolved into self-parody.

the rest of the world is crying  and  laughing at you

Ted "What's a Fire Code" Cruz and his One Door policy. Truly the one of the greatest minds in the modern GOP.  /s

Your show makes me feel less alone in the world. Thank you for your work on this pod.

"Investigative journalism." It’s a term that conjures imagery of committed, industrious newsrooms like those in the Oscar-winning films All the President’s Men or Spotlight, filled with intrepid reporters dutifully scouring documents, scrutinizing photographs and taking secretive yet explosive phone calls at all hours of the night. It’s a rallying cry for TED Talkers and Brookings Institute essayists, many of whom extol the virtues of scrappy and scrupulous reportage that succeeds in taking down a crooked politician, exposing a company’s abusive policy, or otherwise changing the course of history.

It’s common to think of investigative journalism as an honorable line of work - after all, investigative reports have exposed powerful misdeeds, labor abuses, air and water pollution, and racism in healthcare. But this isn’t the only form of investigative reporting in the United States. Too often, stories characterized as well-meaning investigative reports - local news pieces alerting viewers to the “dangers” of bail reform, or New York Times scoops on government “leaks” demanding billions more for military spending--end up reinforcing the very power structures they’re supposed to be challenging.

While the title of “investigative journalist” is so often used as a catch-all term for a noble tireless, truth-seeking, deep-digging reporter who, like a determined fictional detective, follows a twisted trail of breadcrumbs to their blockbuster end, why should we assign valor to what can often merely be the lazy practice of government and corporate stenography? Or laundering intelligence or pro-police propaganda?

On this episode, we discuss the ways in which investigative journalism is portrayed as an inherent good even when it serves powerful interests, how professional norms in the journalism industry seek to remove power dynamics in deciding what leaks are important and who is leaking them, and why investigative reporting without politics isn’t an inherently subversive or moral enterprise.

Our guest is Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting's Jim Naureckas.

Ep 156: How the "Investigative Journalism" Aesthetic Can Be Used to Launder Power-Serving Narratives

"Is it a higher compliment to be called a) a person of real feeling, or b) a consistently reasonable person?" "Are you more successful at a) following a carefully worked-out plan, or b) dealing with the unexpected and seeing quickly what should have been done?" "Which word in each pair appeals to you more? a) scheduled, or b) unplanned?"

Questions like these are posed to millions of current and prospective workers and students every year. They come from personality tests, whether the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Clifton StrengthsFinder, or other surveys purporting to assess personality traits and job aptitude. Through a series of tens to hundreds of questions, personality inventories claim to identify qualities like dominance, neuroticism, or introversion, synthesize a user profile, and determine that user’s fitness for a given job.

But beneath this ostensibly neutral goal of matching a person with their ideal form of employment lies a much more sinister aim: Identifying and weeding out would-be dissenters, labor organizers, and union sympathizers. Additionally, studies have shown repeatedly that commercial personality tests like the commonly used Myers-Briggs have little to no scientific value. Why, then, does their use continue–with anywhere from 60 to 80% of prospective workers taking a personality test–and given their anti-labor history, what harms do they pose?
On this episode, we examine the history of personality testing used in military, educational, and corporate settings; the relationship between personality assessments, labor law, and the corporate consultancy class; how personality testing threatens the livelihoods of people based on race, disability, and other factors; and media’s role in laundering tests as benign instruments of self-realization.

Our guest is writer Liza Featherstone.

Episode 159: The Anti-Worker Pseudo-Psychology of Corporate Personality Testing

In this News Brief, we discuss the phoned-in, cynical response by Republicans to mass shooting and how they've devolved into self-parody.

News Brief: Rightwing Media's Increasingly Goofy, Hyper-Militarized Non-Solutions to Mass Shootings

“Follow The Data” is the name of a Bloomberg Philanthropies podcast that debuted 2016. “How Data Analysis Is Driving Policing,” a 2018 NPR headline read. “Data suggests that schools might be one of the least risky kinds of institutions to reopen,” an opinion piece in The Washington Post told us in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Over the last 20 or so years, a trend of labeling concepts as “data-driven” emerged. It applied, and continues to apply, to policies affecting everything from education to public health, policing to journalism. Decisions affecting these areas will be more thoughtful, the idea goes, when informed and supported by data. In many ways, this has been a welcome development: The idea that a rigorously scientific collection of information via surveys, observation, and other methods would make policies and media stronger seems unimpeachable.

But this isn’t always the case. While gathering “data” is a potentially beneficial process, the process alone isn’t inherently good, and is too often used to obscure important and requisite value-based or moral questions, assert contested ideological priors and traffic in right-wing austerity premises backed by monied interests. When our media tell us a largely unpopular, billionaire-backed idea like school privatization, “targeted” policing, or tax incentive handouts to corporations have merit they’re backed by “the data,” what purpose does this framing serve? Where does the data come from? Who is funding the data gathering? What data are we choosing to care about and, most important of all, what data are we choosing to ignore?

On today’s episode, we’ll look at the development of the push to make everything data-driven, examining who defines what counts as “data,” which forces shape its sourcing and collection, and how the fetishization of “data” as something that exists outside and separate from politics is more often than not, less a methodology for determining truth and more a branding exercise for neoliberal ideological production and reproduction. 

Later on the show, we’ll be speaking with two guests: Abigail Cartus is an epidemiologist at Brown University. She focuses on perinatal health and overdose prevention in her work at The People, Place & Health Collective, a Brown School of Public Health research laboratory.

Episode 162: How the "Data-Driven" Label Sanitizes Cruel Austerity Politics

Economist Michael Hudson explains the inflation crisis and the US Federal Reserve's "austerity program to reduce wages." So-called experts are openly calling to boost unemployment. A depression is coming, in which the poor will suffer so the rich can get richer.

VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-AJwMvCxwm0

Read Prof. Hudson's article "The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages": https://michael-hudson.com/2022/06/the-feds-austerity-program-to-reduce-wages

Economist Michael Hudson on inflation and Fed plan to cut wages: A depression is coming

Japan's longest serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe tried to rewrite the genocidal history of the fascist Japanese empire. And he and his Nazi-collaborating grandfather enjoyed staunch Western support.

After World War II, the US government pardoned and recruited many of the fascists who had led imperial Japan, like Abe's grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, putting in power war criminals who had committed genocide in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia, carrying out biological warfare, human experimentation, and mass sexual slavery.

Benjamin Norton discusses how Japan's political system still today is a one-party right-wing regime run by descendants of these fascist war criminals.

VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5WWJ3EOmPkY

SOURCES: https://multipolarista.com/2022/07/09/fascism-japan-shinzo-abe-empire

US-backed fascism in Japan: How Shinzo Abe whitewashed genocidal imperial crimes

The US military spends more than the next 9 biggest countries combined. The expected 2023 Pentagon budget is $840 billion. Donald Trump and Joe Biden have spent $220 billion more than even cold warrior Ronald Reagan.

VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=h0BZso9Yb30

Research by Stephen Semler at https://stephensemler.substack.com

US military spending eclipses the world - and grew at record levels under Trump and Biden

The US-dominated IMF has said a "wave of debt crises" may be coming in the Global South, warning "the worst is yet to come," as the depreciation of most currencies against the dollar and rising interest rates make it hard for countries to service their dollar-denominated debt.

Political economist Radhika Desai discusses the imperialist nature of the international financial system, and parallels to the "Third World debt crisis" of the 1980s.

VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lPTiSi8h8oQ

Follow Prof. Desai on Twitter at https://twitter.com/raddesai
Read her article on inflation: https://multipolarista.com/2022/11/07/inflation-neoliberal-financialization
Geopolitical Economy Research Group: https://geopoliticaleconomy.org
Check out the International Manifesto Group: https://internationalmanifesto.org

Is debt crisis coming in Global South, with war, interest rate hikes, overvalued dollar?

Patreon only: Jeff Sachs on Anthony Fauci and the lab leak theory. https://www.patreon.com/posts/75690871

Jeff Sachs talks about the proxy war in Ukraine and how the West provoked Russia. Norman Solomon talks about the "Don't Run, Joe" campaign, why Biden 2024 would be a "disaster," and the danger of corporate Democrats.

Jeff Sachs is an economist, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network. 

Norman Solomon is an American journalist, media critic, author, activist and is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," will be published by The New Press in June 2023.

For the rest of the discussion with Jeffrey Sachs, to receive bonus content, support independent media and to help make this program possible, please join us on Patreon at - https://www.patreon.com/thekatiehalpershow

Jeff Sachs On Ukraine Proxy War & Norman Solomon on 'Don't Run, Joe'

more pai mei please 

www.patreon.com/generationloss

generationlosspod@gmail.com

352 // Kill Bill (2003,2004)

Released in the middle of the Obama era, George Clooney's THE IDES OF MARCH (2011) has a lot to tell us about a time when the horizons of possibility were contracting. That's right, folks - it's time to have fun with a good, old-fashioned Politics Movie™.

Join us on Patreon for an extra episode every week - https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus

Michael and Us

#454 - The Liberal Imagination

Citations Needed is a podcast about the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. It is hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, and produced by Florence Barrau-Adams.

News Brief: Rightwing Media's Increasingly Goofy, Hyper-Militarized Non-Solutions to Mass Shootings

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