Tag: RootsAction

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.