By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. – Try to imagine the reaction inside the Hoover building at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue as arguably the most corrupt and incompetent president in American history openly committed treason on foreign soil in Helsinki, Finland on Monday. If anyone other than Attorney General Jeff Sessions of Alabama was in charge…
By Glynn Wilson – APPOMATTOX, Virg. — We didn’t make it here in time for Memorial Day, but National Park Service rangers and volunteers say nearly 500 people showed up for the playing of “Taps” and holiday weekend programs. I don’t know for sure, but considering that Confederate sympathizers seem to generate more engagement these…
By Glynn Wilson – Let’s review. There is much hand-wringing in the news of late about how Facebook lost control of all the data it collects on users, how that data was used by Cambridge Analytica to potentially swing the 2016 presidential election away from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, and how Facebook and Google…
By Glynn Wilson – This may be the most important news you read this week, maybe this month. So you think the exposure of “fake news” in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election and all the stories about how Facebook data was compromised and used to manipulate voters was the end of the controversy?…
You can’t report ‘both sides’ and be ‘accurate.’ It’s a fallacy – By Glynn Wilson – This morning and this week I feel a little bit like Ernest Hemingway as depicted in the movie “Papa: Hemingway in Cuba” based on his life there. That is to say I am having trouble writing a lede sentence…
So far the reaction has been ho hum from the press and media, when it should have been a legal declaration of war in retaliation. By Glynn Wilson – After spending the past decade sucking much of the world into its universe like a black hole swallowing up surrounding stars, and convincing 2 billion people…
An tech investor explains why the social media platform and the search engine business models are such a threat to democracy with suggestions on how to fix the problems. By Roger McNamee – In early 2006, I got a call from Chris Kelly, then the chief privacy officer at Facebook, asking if I would be…
By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — Since the early days of science and later objective journalism, we have known that reaching breakthroughs in knowledge is gained over time in fits and starts. A scientist, or a journalist for that matter, practicing the American invention of objective journalism, becomes immersed in the literature of a…
By Glynn Wilson – MOBILE, Ala. — Some people in Mobile like to brag that Alabama’s port city held the first Mardi Gras celebration in 1703 and the first formally organized Mardi Gras parade in the United States in 1830. But there is little doubt that it was New Orleans that made Mardi Gras world…
By Glynn Wilson – MOBILE, Ala. — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg showed up on the Gulf Coast Sunday just in time for Mardi Gras and had people speculating that he may have a political future in mind. Dutifully, all three local television news stations covered the visit like any other celebrity sighting. But due to a…
Oh, and Alabama’s Jeff Sessions is about to be U.S. Attorney General – The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Let me start this morning by repeating the two key words guaranteed to make the Facebook home page news feed and the FB trending news feed: This column is about fake news and golden…
The mainstream, corporate news media sacrificed democracy for ratings. By Thom Hartmann – AlterNet – The media are engaged in an orgy of navel-gazing about the Trump presidency, but they’re totally, utterly, absolutely, no-way-in-hell willing to gaze at their own navel. Did Russian hackers revealing that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile had put their…
Connecting the Dots – By Glynn Wilson – As I sit here on a mild winter day on the Gulf Coast drinking coffee from Kenya, eating a banana from Mexico and reading the latest news on “fake news,” I’m thinking it might be preferable to simply log off and eat nails than to have to…
The media must not excuse the racism, misogyny, nativism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia because we think Trump voters have legitimate gripes. By Neal Gabler – It didn’t take a clairvoyant to predict that President-elect Donald Trump would be almost instantly normalized by the press since he had already been normalized by them when he was a…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – In the Huge wave washing over the American landscape after the tsunami of Donald Trump’s surprising ride to president of the United States on a surfboard constructed of bullshit, mainstream news organizations and Democrats are beating up on Mark Zuckerberg and poor Facebook, blaming the widespread sharing…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Isn’t it about time someone did a take down on the Internet meme? If we truly want to change people’s attitudes and create a more just world, what the world needs is scientifically objective journalism, not more partisan viruses of the mind being spread in all the…
Media Incest On Display: Will Anyone Notice? The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – On the eve of the Republican convention in Cleveland Ohio, a remarkable thing happened. No, not another police shooting. Not just a tell all article about Donald Trump. It is an event that should send shock waves through the capitalist…
Why the social-media honeymoon may be over for some activists. By Sarah Jaffe – Around the country, thousands have returned to the streets again to protest the deaths of black people at the hands of the police. One of those deaths, the shooting of 32-year-old Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, was broadcast on Facebook…
