Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Time Magazine Sucks

Time Magazine asks YouTubers to pick who they want to be "Person of the Year." I think it is a lame idea but an opportunity to look at the kinds of things Time Magazine has done and is doing now.

War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death Norman Solomon, author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, points out that "The Sept. 25 edition of Time Magazine illustrates how the U.S. news media are gearing up for a military attack on Iran." - Media Tall Tales for the Next War

Norman Solomon noted the above and in his article, When Journalists Report for Duty, Solomon points out the ugly essay, "The Case for Rage and Retribution," written by Time regular Lance Morrow.

Time published Morrow's ugly essay the day after 9/11. Here is part of it: "A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage. What's needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury--a ruthless indignation that doesn't leak away in a week or two, wandering off into Prozac-induced forgetfulness or into the next media sensation (O.J.... Elian... Chandra...) or into a corruptly thoughtful relativism (as has happened in the recent past, when, for example, you might hear someone say, "Terrible what he did, of course, but, you know, the Unabomber does have a point, doesn't he, about modern technology?")."

Notice Morrow is manipulatively discouraging the public from even thinking about what the motive was for the 9/11 attack. He wants unthinking rage and the motive swept under the rug.

"Time magazine correspondent Laurence Zuckerman and a colleague found serious evidence of Contra links to cocaine trafficking, but their story was blocked from publication by top editors. A senior editor admitted privately to Zuckerman: "Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you'd have no trouble getting it in the magazine." (The N.Y Times and Washington Post both endorsed aid to the Contra army, despite massive documentation from human rights monitors that they targeted civilians for violence and terror.)" - Jeff Cohen

"Time magazine's senior international correspondent Aparisim Ghosh argued against U.S. troop withdrawal (12/11/06) in favor of, among other things, "30,000 more coalition soldiers and a real willingness to thrash the Shi'ite militias, something they've avoided so far," a process that "may take five more years. But if the U.S. leaves sooner, Iraq will devolve into an even bigger mess." Speaking of military and foreign policy experts, it's not clear how many would see a declaration of war against the Shi'ite majority's militias would accomplish anything beyond increasing the 62 percent of Shi'ite Iraqis who already approve of attacks on U.S. forces (PIPA, 9/27/06)." - Withdrawing From Debate on Iraq Public's view too 'extreme' for media discussion

Time Covers Coulter: Magazine's Cover Story a Sloppy, Inaccurate Tribute to Far-Right Pundit "a puff piece that gave Coulter a pass on her many errors and vicious, often bigoted rhetoric."

Time Magazine has a history of not standing up for what is right. Take a look, as FAIR points out, at what they said about Martin Luther King:

Martin Luther King gave a speech called "Beyond Vietnam." In that speech, King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

"From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 - and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi."" - The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV

Re: TIME Person of the Year 2006

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well said. These are among the many reasons I stopped bothering with 'Time' magazine years ago. Want the news and some responsible commentary? Read 'The Nation'...