CULTURE & IDEAS:
What’s with the iPod fetish?
Written by Juan Martinez to the Public
Editor of The New York Times,
January 31, 2004

Dear Mr. Okrent,
I am immeasurably indebted to The Times. The institution is very close to my heart. I read the paper closely, lovingly, and often. The paper’s biases are now my own, and, for the most part, I'm okay with that.

Unfortunately, there’s an unsettling bias that has popped up in the paper over the last few years that I am very curious about, and I’d like to ask your opinion on it. Specifically, what’s with the iPod fetish?

As an example, here’s what I learned from just one of the twelve iPod related articles from this past week (1/27/04 Section G page 1 “They’re Off to See the Wizards.”)...

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POLITICS & PROPAGANDA:
Journalism or Libel?
Written by Cornel West to
The New York Daily News,
September 25, 2006

To the Editor:
As a free Black man I go where I want and talk to whom I choose—yet to be wrongly accused by Adam Lisberg of waving a Venezuelan flag is inexcusable and irresponsible. Have you no shame at the Daily News?

—Dr. Cornel West
—Princeton University
—Department of Religion

EDITOR’S NOTE
In “The Big Apple hits back—hard: New York officials tell strongman where to go” Lisberg, a Daily News staff writer reported “cheering Chavez supporters—actor Danny Glover, City Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn) and celebrity Princeton Prof. Cornel West—waved Venezuelan flags and cheered as he made fun of Bush.”

EDITORIAL March 23, 2007

IN THE BEGINNING, newspapers served to expand the vital public conversations that led to the overthrow of kings. In inexpensively printed broadsides, community-based discussions about the insults of tyranny, and budding ideas of liberty, social equality and self-government moved from meeting houses, homes, coffee house tables and workshops out into the streets, feeding the vigorous public debates that are the lifeblood of democracy.

Today this has changed. If newspapers were once an extension of public debates over pressing issues, the corporate consolidation of the news media has turned the dissemination of news into a one-way street. The distance between writers and readers, between editors and ordinary people only grows...

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WAR & PEACE:
‘Economic Sanctions’ as
a ‘Necessary Cause’
Written by Noam Chomsky to
The Wall Street Journal,
July 19, 2004

To the Editor:
Editor Michael Judge writes (July 19) that “Noam Chomsky, the doyen of the blame-America intelligentsia, has even gone so far as to claim, in a Canadian documentary last year, that `The number of people killed by sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history’.”

Judge forgets to mention the source: military experts John Mueller and Karl Mueller, “Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” in that leading “blame-America” journal Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999, who write that “economic sanctions may well have been a necessary cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history.” What immediately follows is of comparable merit.

—Sincerely yours,
—Noam Chomsky, Cambridge MA