Tonight on GRITtv our weekly media roundtable looks at the continuing fascination with Barack Obama’s supposed hypocrisy. It dominated the Sunday talk shows, but is it news? Justin Peters, Managing Web Editor at Columbia Journalism Review’s campaign desk says it’s hardly a shift and that the Senator used exactly the same language in an interview with CBS in February. The coverage is an example of a bad trend in journalism: reporting the debate but not the policy. He’s joined by Erica Gonzalez, an Editor at El Diario/La Prensa, and Theodore Hamm, Editor of The Brooklyn Rail and author of The New Blue Media.
And an interview with Sekou Siby, co director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY), on their recent victory: a $3.9 million settlement in a lawsuit filed against the Fireman Hospitality Group of New York. Their model of organizing restaurant employees is spreading to other cities. Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, and soon Miami. Find out here how they did it and what it means.
Finally a conversation with documentary filmmaker James Spooner. Spooner discusses being Black in the largely white world of punk music, his love/hate relationship with the whole scene, and why punk rock really raised him. Spooner is also the organizer of the Afro-Punk festival, a celebration of film and music at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) this week in Brooklyn, NY.
And Live From Main Street. Laura heads to Miami's Lyric Theater for a town hall style forum on the economy, politics, and more. Don’t miss it.
If Obama’s is not a shift why do so many media outlets on the “left” need to shift themselves now?
Its a curious thing to see Tom Hayden as well at the Nation now claim Obama (oh, no, much more personal, “Barack”) is in trouble. We’re the ones at risk. Hayden knew as well as did everyone else cheerleading from the “left” that the Obama campaign had nothing whatsoever to do with the antiwar cadre but let the charade roll on with astroturfing from his campaign managers and MoveOn. They made us waste alot of time. And alot of energy when these doubts could have been raised months and months ago.
And forget George Lakoff and the movement of perpetual political psychoanalysis, too. To hell if we don’t know what we want.
By Nettle on July 7th, 2008 at 10:42 pm