Channels calling for war. Studios populated with former generals talking military tactics. Social media messaging apps flooded with fake news and propaganda. Al Jazeera‘s excellent media programme ‘The Listening Post‘, hosted by Richard Gizbert, takes a look at the war-mongering, hate-spewing, “unjournalistic ranting” of primetime TV in India. *** Rohit Chopra, an associate professor at…
Tag Archives: The Listening Post
‘A determined political operation has turned new media into a propaganda tool: not pluralistic and interactive, but relentlessly one-way and single-themed’
*** The weaponisation of Indian broadcast and digital media by Hindutva forces has been a key force-multiplier in coarsening the discourse and manufacturing consent, to be encashed at the ballot boxes. In this, the first of a two-part excerpt from his new book Freedom, Civility, Commerce, journalist and academic Sukumar Muralidharan argues that the eagerness…
Could the media end up killing Barack Obama?
Al Jazeera’s media show The Listening Post on how 24×7 media is dangerously inflaming passions against US President Barack Obama with lies, untruths, rhetoric—a little like the way a newspaper advertisement greeted John F. Kennedy the day he arrived in Dallas in 1963. Also read: How global media covered Barack Obama inauguration ‘The media’s obsession…
How the global media covered the swine flu
Al Jazeera‘s media show The Listening Post on how the mainstream media reacted—and over-reacted—to the H1N1 virus, secure in the knowledge that no one would ever accuse them of overkill. And how the digital purveyors of the rumours on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc, were themselves victims. Also read: 8 dos (and don’ts) on how to…
Understanding the Susan Boyle phenomenon
One hundred million views on YouTube later, Richard Gizbert, host of Al Jazeera‘s media show Listening Post, declares that the Susan Boyle phenomenon was “no car crash, but no accident either.” Also read: The 10 craziest things about Susan Boylemania
How the Indian media covered the 2009 poll
Blogs, internet chats, Jaago Re, Jai Ho!, Lead India, microsites, rock concerts, TV commercials… The 2009 general election has not been short of media noise. But has it really spurred youngsters to shut up and vote? Or is it all blather and brand building with an embedded social message? Meenakshi Ravi of Al Jazeera‘s media…
How Cisco helps China in internet censorship
It’s not just authoritarian governments that are preventing citizens and activists from accessing news and views that they would not like them to lay their eyes and ers on. Transnational corporations that supply the technology to make access possible in the first place are playing a hand, according to Al Jazeera‘s media show, The Listening…
How global media covered Obama inauguration
“Over two days, newspapers around the world published 1.2 million articles. Over one 24-hour period, the global radio and television coverage combined added up to 20 million minutes; to watch it all it would have taken a human being 38 years,” reports Richard Gizbert of Al Jazeera English on the inauguration of Barack Obama as…
IJR 