Tag: Jeff Cohen

Jeff Cohen, media critic and lecturer, according the bio posted on his site jeffcohen.org, “is founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, where he is an associate professor of journalism.  His latest book is Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.  He has been a TV commentator at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, and was senior producer of MSNBC’s Phil Donahue primetime show until it was terminated three weeks before the Iraq invasion.  Cohen founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986.”

Cohen’s columns on media issues have been widely published online at sites including HuffingtonPost, CommonDreams and Alternet, as well as in many media dailies, including USA Today, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Atlanta Constitution, and Miami Herald”.

Here Cohen talks with The Real News Network’s Paul Jay about founding a new netroots organization called RootsAction to be a separate independent force in US politics, saying that most current net based organizing groups are too connected to a corporatized Democratic Party that ties their hands – and that:

RootsAction was launched to be a totally independent force online for action, the idea being that the independent media have boomed–Democracy Now! Real News, Common Dreams, Truthout, Laura Flanders and GRITtv – yet people – there’s millions of people now getting their news every day, and they understand that the problem in this country isn’t just the fanatical, anti-science, anti-intellectual right wing, but another aspect of the problem is the corporatization of the Democratic Party.

So for those millions of people that get their news that’s pretty complete, there’s not an action group online that is mobilizing those millions of people, because the existing liberal netroots, many of the groups are just too close to the Democratic Party and Democratic Party leadership. So the idea behind RootsAction was to mobilize millions of people online who get the news every day from independent media and would like an independent politics to match their independent media.

Journalism professor Jeff Cohen of FAIR and the Park Center for Independent Media on the struggle within the Democratic Party, starting from the Viet Nam War:

There’s no doubt that there’s an awakening. What concerns me is that the liberal base, the Democratic Party base, has never been more educated, in my view, and that’s because of the independent media. The democratic base is against an imperial foreign policy. The democratic base is for real medicare for all, or at least the strongest public option that would really hurt private insurance. There’s an understanding of history, and again it’s largely because the independent media is giving us the news in real time, every day when we click on the computer and we watch Real News, we watch Democracy Now.

What hasn’t translated is while we have this boom in independent media on the Internet, we don’t have a boom of independent politics.

What I believe are needed are new groups, that will be on the Internet, mobilizing the millions to make the kinds of demands of the Democrats that the right wing base, which has clearly transformed the country, the right wing base in the Republican Party not only took over a major party, they haven’t let up on that party until their agenda is put in place, whereas on our side we don’t have that.

What needs to happen, this is what a few groups are doing, Progressive Democrats of America is one, the idea is we need to take over that major political party.

When people talk about change, and then they deliver only for insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street, you vote them out. You primary them. You know this is what the right wing has done for decades. It’s what they’re doing now.

What we get from MoveOn historically and other groups is apologies for democratic office holders who have faked left with their rhetoric and then governed for big business. And what we need is to primary these people.

Frankly… I would love to see a primary challenge to Obama when he’s up for re-election.

Because unless you build a base through elections and then you hold the officials accountable, then you’ll never get anywhere.

This is Part 3. Part 1 of this interview is here. Part 2 is here.

Part 4 is still to come…

Here is the second part of Paul Jay’s talk with journalism professor Jeff Cohen of FAIR and the Park Center for Independent Media.

Cohen here goes into much more depth about the history and the evolution of the corporate influences that took took both Democrats and Republicans to the far right in a long attempt beginning in the late 1960’s and 70’s at taking over the Republican Party, at marginalizing the left, the antiwar movement, and progressives, and then a corporate movement beginning in the 80’s to coopt the Democratic Party, and how we got into the current political situation.

Part 1 of this interview is here.

Part 3 is still to come…

Jeff Cohen is a media critic and lecturer, founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, a national center for the study of media outlets that create and distribute content outside traditional corporate systems and news organizations, where he is an associate professor of journalism.

Cohen also founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986.

Here Cohen talks with Paul Jay of The Real News about the larger significance and social context of the Massachusetts election, about the message of “change” that has been a staple of Democratic candidates for decades, and about the the term “swing voter” and what it means in the context of today’s politics, and concludes that the key attribute of swing voters is that they are not ideological at all, and that if Obama and the Democrats don’t deliver real change they will simply vote against them.

In other words it seems that people like your average (if there is such a thing) DD’er are representative of a very large segment of the population, and hold the future of political parties in their hands, from what Cohen is saying here.

He also tackles the question of why it is that Democrats seem to be never able to deliver on their messages of change, and comes out with some very interesting observations.

Cohen’s own site is JeffCohen.org

I get the strange feeling for some reason that Cohen might have been reading DD and places like it.

Part 2 of this interview is here.