Sheldon Rampton's News Articles

Jim Crow Propaganda

by Sheldon Rampton — September 20, 2005 - 11:27pm
  • Topics: Propaganda, Race / Ethnic Issues

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    The term "Jim Crow" was originally taken from a character performed in blackface by Thomas Rice, a pre-Civil War white actor who dressed in rags to portray a shabbily dressed, rural black man.

    Last week I was invited to give a talk about free speech at Ferris State University in Michigan. Much to my pleasure, I discovered that one of the professors at Ferris is an old colleague, Dennis Ruzicka, who was a fellow reporter 20 years ago when we both worked for a small-town, daily newspaper in Wisconsin.

     

    After the talk, Dennis showed me around the campus. One of our most fascinating stops was the "Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia" that has been assembled by sociology professor David Pilgrim. The Jim Crow Museum contains more than 2,000 racist artifacts, dating from pre-Civil War days to the present: cartoons, Sambo masks, Coon toys, Picaninny ashtrays, Ku Klux Klan literature, postcards with Black children portrayed as "alligator bait."

    "All racial groups have been caricatured in this country, but none have been caricatured as often or in as many ways as have black Americans," Pilgrim writes. "Blacks have been portrayed in popular culture as pitiable exotics, cannibalistic savages, hypersexual deviants, childlike buffoons, obedient servants, self-loathing victims, and menaces to society. These anti-black depictions were routinely manifested in or on material objects: ashtrays, drinking glasses, banks, games, fishing lures, detergent boxes, and other everyday items. These objects, with racist representations, both reflected and shaped attitudes towards African Americans. Robbin Henderson, director of the Berkeley Art Center, said, 'derogatory imagery enables people to absorb stereotypes; which in turn allows them to ignore and condone injustice, discrimination, segregation, and racism.' She was right. Racist imagery is propaganda and that propaganda was used to support Jim Crow laws and customs."

    War is Fun as Hell

    by Sheldon Rampton — July 27, 2005 - 5:13am
  • Topics: War / Peace

    • Years of writing about public relations and propaganda has probably made me a bit jaded, but I was amazed nevertheless when I visited America's Army, an online video game website sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). In its quest to find recruits, the military has literally turned war into entertainment.

    "America's Army" offers a range of games that kids can download or play online. Although the games are violent, with plenty of opportunities to shoot and blow things up, they avoid graphic images of death or other ugliness of war, offering instead a sanitized, Tom Clancy version of fantasy combat. One game, Overmatch, promises "a contest in which one opponent is distinctly superior ... with specialized skills and superior technology ... OVERMATCH: few soldiers, certain victory" (more or less the same overconfident message that helped lead us into Iraq).

    Rhetoric vs. Reality in London

    by Sheldon Rampton — July 8, 2005 - 11:09pm
  • Topics: Iraq

    • I've had the pleasure of visiting London on several occasions. I've ridden the subways and walked the streets where Thursday's awful terrorist attacks occurred.

    Democratic Media: A Do-it-Yourself Starter Kit

    by Sheldon Rampton — June 26, 2005 - 5:07pm
  • Topics: Citizen Journalism

    • "I visit the States three or four times a year, and watching the television news in hotel rooms in the last three years has been like witnessing a time-lapse study of emasculation," writes Henry Porter, the London editor of Vanity Fair magazine, in his ruminations about the unmasking of FBI official Mark Felt as "Deep Throat," the Watergate whistleblower.

    Looking for Leads on an Environmental Story

    by Sheldon Rampton — April 27, 2005 - 10:25am
  • Topics: Citizen Journalism, Environment

    • Here's your chance to help with an important journalistic investigation. Former New York Times reporter Philip Shabecoff and his wife Alice are doing research about the links between environmental toxicants and the epidemic of children’s chronic illnesses in the United States today, and they're looking for some leads. The research will lead to a book for the general public. Beyond documenting the evidence arising from the new sciences, the Shabecoffs intend to tell stories about families and communities affected by corporate behavior. The Shabecoffs will try to ‘follow the money’ to explain government laxity.

    The following are questions for which the Shabecoffs would appreciate responses or leads to sources of information:

    Fake News? We Told You So, Ten Years Ago

    by Sheldon Rampton — March 26, 2005 - 3:40pm
  • Topics: Media, Public Relations

    • Recent reports about the Bush administration's use of fake video news releases (VNRs) have helped highlight a problem that John Stauber and I have been talking about for more than a decade. It's nice to see the New York Times start to catch on and to see some public activism starting to coalesce around the problem. I'd like to point out, though, that the problem isn't limited to the Bush administration or to government VNRs alone. In fact, corporate public relations is the biggest single source of video news releases, just as corporate PR is the biggest single source of other types of PR that pollute the media ecosystem. (The McDonald's VNR at right is a fairly typical example of the genre.)

    Call Me Stupid

    by Sheldon Rampton — February 7, 2005 - 3:40pm

    Last Friday I happened to be on a conservative radio show where I pointed out that the big winners in Iraq's recent elections were Shiite clerics with a long history of friendship with Iran - not exactly the sort of people who are likely to be long-term supporters of the Bush administration's political agenda in the Middle East. If conservatives want to celebrate the election as a victory for Iraqi self-determination, I said, they should be "careful what you wish for." Now it looks like I need to give myself the same cautionary advice.

    "Cash for Commentary" is Business as Usual

    by Sheldon Rampton — January 30, 2005 - 9:19pm
  • Topics: Right Wing, Public Relations

    • Conservative commentators Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus have been outed recently for taking money under the table to endorse Bush administration programs. These cases are only the tip of a much bigger iceberg, as you can tell from looking at the images I'm attaching here. I wrote about it three years ago in a story that described the work of conservative direct marketer Bruce Eberle, whose Omega List Company specializes in raising money using mail and e-mail.

    On a section of the website that has subsequently been removed, Omega List was quite straightforward about the fact that it pays conservative commentators to endorse clients and their causes. A series of web pages featured conservative radio show host Blanquita Cullum explaining exactly how the system works and how other radio hosts could get in on the gravy. "You do what you do best!" she said. "Get on the air and talk to your listeners! Drive them to your website by conducting a daily survey or a contest on the topic of your choosing." Eberle's "polling wizard" software, installed on the site, would then capture the names of respondents so that they could be hit up for money. "What happens next is a cakewalk," Cullum continued. "Omega will call you with an opportunity to send an endorsement e-mail to your list ... and receive a royalty for lending your name to a cause, organization or product you believe in. ... Omega gives you their specialized software absolutely FREE and presents you with an opportunity to earn an extra $25,000 or more annually."

    No Shame

    by Sheldon Rampton — January 30, 2005 - 3:02am
  • Topics: Iraq, Public Relations

    • Thanks to PR Watch forums contributor "El Gringo" for calling our attention to a really atrocious example of dishonest propaganda. The graphic at right is by Linda Eddy, an artist for the website, IowaPresidentialWatch.com. Owned by Roger Hughes, chairman of the Republican Party in Hamilton County, Iowa, the website spent the recent U.S. presidential election calling Democratic candidate John Kerry a habitual liar and comparing him to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels -- which is awfully ironic in light of its own promotion of a big lie.

    The image you see here might lead you to believe that the child in the picture has been made "glad" and secure thanks to the U.S. troop presence in Iraq. As "El Gringo" discovered, however, Lindy Eddy doctored the photograph. The original photo, taken by a journalist, depicted a young girl who had just received bullet wounds during a firefight in which her mother was killed and her father was wounded. Eddy doctored the photo by erasing the little girl's own face (which carries the listless expression you would expect from an injured child) and replacing it with someone else's face to make her look positively radiant and adoring.

    From "Disinfopedia" to "SourceWatch"

    by Sheldon Rampton — January 22, 2005 - 4:08am

    If you're wondering what happened to the "Disinfopedia," our wiki-based "encyclopedia of people, issues and groups shaping the public agenda," it hasn't disappeared. We've just renamed it. It's now called SourceWatch.

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