Is U.S. public television being corporatized?

I was interviewed by The Real News Network on the topic of "Public Broadcasters Relying More and More on Corporate Funding." View it here.

Margaret Sanger -- flawed heroine

Sanger is proof that media heroes are sometimes flawed. This article from Women's E-News discusses her flirtation with eugenics-oriented arguments in support of birth control in the early 1920s.

Dinner with Amy Goodman

In the early 1900s, the socialist Appeal to Reason newspaper offered yachts, fruit farms and motorcycles as premiums to bring in revenue and subscriptions. Democracy Now! offers Dinner and a Show with Amy Goodman.

After meeting Amy at a dinner party, Regis and his sidekick acknowledge that their Regis and Kelly TV show is about "nothing."

Is Colbert today's Upton Sinclair?

Stephen Colbert accepted the challenge of experiencing difficult working conditions. Here he is doing farm labor.

Students today carry on Ida B. Wells' legacy

In last dozen years, Northwestern University journalism students and their professor have been instrumental in proving the innocence of many prisoners in Illinois, several of whom had been sentenced to death. Their investigative journalism ultimately sparked the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois

Lynching prompted the classic Billie Holiday song,"Strange Fruit," which she recorded independently in 1939 -- getting around the objections of Columbia, her record label: "Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." It ultimately became her biggest selling record. Time magazine denounced the song as a "piece of musical propaganda." The song's lyrics were inspired by this photograph of a 1930 lynching in Indiana.

Re Legacy:There may be a few newspaper editors who ignored or apologized for racist lynchings who have schools named after them. But so does Ida B. Wells.  Click here to see Ida's high school in San Francisco (just across the park from the famous "painted ladies" Victorian houses.)

Kurt Vonnegut quote

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"  (H/t Eileen O.)

Journalists Re-fight Old Battles; Expose Recurring Wrongs

Dissident journalists of the past exposed many social problems (like the labor weeklies spotlighting the problem of people being jailed simply for being in debt) and brought about reform. The practice was outlawed. But other journalists --  years or generations later -- may have to keep exposing the issue . . . as these investigative journalists for the big mainstream daily in Minneapolis recently did.

"It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found."

I.F. Stone pointed out that some reforms don't happen except through the work of generations of journalists and democracy activists:

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing - for the sheer fun and joy of it - to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it.”