The Los Angeles Times has had enough of President Bannon and his toady Donald Trump attacking journalists, saying they should “keep its mouth shut” and calling them the “enemy of the people”. They have a new line of swag called the “Free Speech Collection“: In the collection are two different styles of t-shirts and mugs: They sent out an email […]

Over the past month and a half since the election, LOLGOP and I have been exhorting folks listening to our podcast to activate and be present in the lives of their state legislators, members of Congress, and their U.S. Senators. In fact, the cold open to our last podcast is a recording of us calling Senator Debbie Stabenow’s office to […]

On Monday of this week, Donald Trump revoked the media credentials of journalists working for the Washington Post covering his events. This follows on the heels of his blacklisting of multiple other national media outlets including Gawker, BuzzFeed, Foreign Policy, Politico, Fusion, Univision, Mother Jones, the New Hampshire Union Leader, the Des Moines Register, the Daily Beast, and Huffington Post. […]

The Snyder administration had long been thought to be using fees to process FOIA requests as a way to avoid transparency and to scare off inquisitive journalists and private citizens from poking around in their (public) affairs. Then, last October, the fine folks at Progress Michigan got definitive proof that FOIA fees were being wielded as a weapon against transparency. […]

Over the past several years, I have written about how corporate front groups, largely funded by corporatists like the Koch brothers and their network of fake grassroots (“astroturf”) groups, manipulate the media to serve their corporate bottom lines. They use this network to amplify their corporate messages, disguised as “reporting” or “news”, jacking up their search engine hits, and ensuring […]

In Frederick County, Maryland, there lives a man named Kirby Delauter. Delauter is an anti-tax, anti-liberal City Council member and he hates the “liberal media”. He hates the “liberal media” so much that, when they published an article that mentioned him, he immediately took to the Book of Faces to issue a threat to the journalist who had the unmitigated […]

This news is three weeks old but I wanted to highlight it because Michigan Radio is one of the premier news sites in our state, one I am proud to support with a monthly donation. The station won the Michigan Association of Broadcasters “Public Radio Station of the Year” in March. In a state with so many excellent public radio […]

Wifeproud The American Journalism Review recently relaunched itself as a web-only publication, a major move for a major publication. The central article on the newly launched site is a piece by Jackie Spinner titled “‘Identity Crisis’ in Photojournalism”. It’s a terrific piece that discusses the new trend of major print media outlets shedding photographers and having their writers taking photos […]

Let’s stop this talk about Democrats refusing to negotiate and compromise. It’s a lie. [Photo credit: Chris Savage | Eclectablog] I am continuously astonished by how well Republicans are able to shape reality and perceptions. Honestly, with enough focus group work by Pete Luntz and poll-testing of messaging, they can convince Americans of nearly anything. The fact that our media […]

This is a pretty astounding headline: A finish in the top 3 would translate into an Iowa win for Romney That’s the Detroit Free Press headline of a reposting of a Des Moines Register piece originally titled “More than winning, front-runners must meet expectations, experts say”. There was a time when the Freep was “the liberal newspaper” in Michigan and […]

There has been a LOT of complaining about the poor messaging coming out of the White House. It’s hard to find anyone on the anti-Obama left that doesn’t have some negative thing to say about it, in fact. What most people don’t realize is that the White House has pretty fantastic messaging when it comes to the main media sources. […]