A founder and president of the Media Research Center, a top media watchdog organization, analyzes the prevalence of today's liberal media bias, identifying the ways in which major news outlets distort the news and manipulate the national agenda, and predicting a downfall in liberal media power. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.
The coining of novel lexical items and the creative manipulation of existing words and expressions is heavily dependent on contextual factors, including the semantic, stylistic, textual and social environments in which they occur. The twelve specialists contributing to this collection aim to illuminate creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles, but also examine 'critical creativity' determined by language policy, as well as diachronic phonetic variation in creatively-coined words. The data, based either on large corpora or smaller hand-collected samples, is drawn from advertising, the daily press, electronic communication, literature, spoken interaction, cartoons, lexical ontologies and style guides. The coining of novel lexical items and the creative manipulation of existing words and expressions is heavily dependent on contextual factors, including the semantic, stylistic, textual and social environments in which they occur. The twelve specialists contributing to this collection aim to illuminate creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles, but also examine 'critical creativity' determined by language policy, as well as diachronic phonetic variation in creatively-coined words. The data, based either on large corpora or smaller hand-collected samples, is drawn from advertising, the daily press, electronic communication, literature, spoken interaction, cartoons, lexical ontologies and style guides. Each study analyses novel formations in relation to their contexts of use and inevitably leads to the crucial question of creativity vs. productivity. By focussing on creative lexical formations at the level of parole, these studies provide insights into morphological theory at the level of langue, and ultimately seek to explain lexical creativity as a function of language use.
Weapons of Mass Deception reveals: How the Iraq war was sold to the American public through professional P.R. strategies. "The First Casualty": Lies that were told related to the Iraq war. Euphemisms and jargon related to the Iraq war, e.g. "shock and awe," "Operation Iraqi Freedom," "axis of evil," "coalition of the willing," etc. "War as Opportunity": How the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq have been used as marketing hooks to sell products and policies that have nothing to do with fighting terrorism. "Brand America": The efforts of Charlotte Beers and other U.S. propaganda campaigns designed to win hearts overseas. "The Mass Media as Propaganda Vehicle": How news coverage followed Washington's lead and language. The book includes a glossary — "Propaganda: A User's Guide" — and resources to help Americans sort through the deceptions to see the strings behind Washington's campaign to sell the Iraq war to the public.
The transformation of schooling from a twelve-year jail sentence to freedom to learn. John Taylor Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction , now available in paperback, focuses on mechanisms of traditional education which cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a byproduct of rote-memorization drills. Gatto's earlier book, Dumbing Us Down , introduced the now-famous expression of the title into the common vernacular. Weapons of Mass Instruction adds another chilling metaphor to the brief against conventional schooling. Gatto demonstrates that the harm school inflicts is rational and deliberate. The real function of pedagogy, he argues, is to render the common population manageable. To that end, young people must be conditioned to rely upon experts, to remain divided from natural alliances and to accept disconnections from their own lived experiences. They must at all costs be discouraged from developing self-reliance and independence. Escaping this trap requires a strategy Gatto calls "open source learning" which imposes no artificial divisions between learning and life. Through this alternative approach our children can avoid being indoctrinated-only then can they achieve self-knowledge, good judgment, and courage.
Is the internet a suitable linguistic corpus? How can we use it in corpus techniques? What are the special properties that we need to be aware of? This book answers those questions. The Web is an exponentially increasing source of language and corpus linguistics data. From gigantic static information resources to user-generated Web 2.0 content, the breadth and depth of information available is breathtaking – and bewildering. This book explores the theory and practice of the “web as corpus”. It looks at the most common tools and methods used and features a plethora of examples based on the author's own teaching experience. This book also bridges the gap between studies in computational linguistics, which emphasize technical aspects, and studies in corpus linguistics, which focus on the implications for language theory and use.
This innovative and comprehensive collection of essays explores the biggest threats facing humanity in the 21st century; threats that cannot be contained or controlled and that have the potential to bring about human extinction and civilization collapse. Bringing together experts from many disciplines, it provides an accessible survey of what we know about these threats, how we can understand them better, and most importantly what can be done to manage them effectively. These essays pair insights from decades of research and activism around global risk with the latest academic findings from the emerging field of Existential Risk Studies. Voicing the work of world leading experts and tackling a variety of vital issues, they weigh up the demands of natural systems with political pressures and technological advances to build an empowering vision of how we can safeguard humanity’s long-term future. The book covers both a comprehensive survey of how to study and manage global risks with in-depth discussion of core risk drivers: including environmental breakdown, novel technologies, global scale natural disasters, and nuclear threats. The Era of Global Risk offers a thorough analysis of the most serious dangers to humanity. Inspiring, accessible, and essential reading for both students of global risk and those committed to its mitigation, this book poses one critical question: how can we make sense of this era of global risk and move beyond it to an era of global safety?
Could Al Franken and his left-wing cronies possibly be right? Is liberal media bias just a myth propagated by conservatives, and have the mainstream media actually swung to the right? Absolutely not. In the new book Weapons of Mass Distortion, L. Brent Bozell III—founder and president of the Media Research Center, America’s largest and most respected media watchdog organization—presents the definitive account of how liberal bias in the news industry is alive and well. But here’s the thing: The liberal media are headed for a downfall. Bozell demonstrates how their monopoly on information is at last coming to an end, in large part because journalists continue to deny the bias that infects their news coverage. His unrivaled expertise allows him to show readers exactly how the media landscape is changing—and to expose the even bigger changes that are coming. Marshaling an astonishing amount of evidence, Bozell documents exactly how the news media deliberately attempt to set the national agenda through their slanted coverage. In the process he destroys the arguments that Franken and many other left-wing commentators have put forward regarding media bias. Weapons of Mass Distortion also reveals: • How the liberal media’s slanted coverage of President George W. Bush will play a huge role in the 2004 elections • Why liberals’ claims about the influence of Fox News and the “conservative media” are wrong—and deliberately misleading • How the mainstream press has waged war on the war on terrorism • Never-before-told stories of how leading journalists, behind the scenes, betray the liberal bias they so forcefully deny in public—incidents that Bozell has witnessed firsthand • How the same journalists who condemn the Right for “hate speech” regularly launch (and get away with) vicious personal attacks on conservatives • Clear evidence that the major news outlets are hemorrhaging viewers, readers, and listeners precisely because of their liberal bias By dominating the news media for so long, liberals have been able to control what we see and hear. But as Bozell makes clear, the Left will lose that control soon enough.
One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2022 The disturbing eyewitness account of how a new breed of Republicans—led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn—far from moving on from Trump, have taken the politics of hysteria to even greater extremes and brought American democracy to the edge The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a terrible day for American democracy, but many people dared to hope that at least it would break the fever that had overcome the Republican Party and banish Trump's relentless lies about the stealing of the 2020 election. That is not what happened. Instead, “the big steal” has become dogma among an ever-higher percentage of American Republicans. What happened to the Republican Party, and America, during the Trump presidency is a story we more or less think we know. What has happened to the party since, it turns out, is even more disquieting. That is the story Robert Draper tells in Weapons of Mass Delusion. Through his extraordinarily intrepid cross-country reporting, Draper chronicles the road from January 6 to the 2022 midterms among the Republican base and in the U.S. Congress, rendering unforgettable portraits of how Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk came to shape their party’s terms of engagement to an extent that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. He also brings to life the efforts of a dwindling group of Republicans who are willing to push back against the falsehoods, in the face of a group of ascendent demagogues who are merrily weaponizing them. With a base whipped up into a perpetual frenzy of outrage by conspiracy theories—not just about the big steal but about COVID and vaccines, pedophilia and Antifa and Black Lives Matter and George Soros and President Obama, and on and on and on—the forces of reason within the GOP are on the defensive, to put it mildly. The book also benefits greatly from reporting conducted in Texas, Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and other bellwether states in the country of the mind one might call a fever of undending conspiracies. Robert Draper has been a wise, fearless, and fair-minded chronicler of the American political scene for over twenty-five years. He has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. He has never seen it this ugly. Ultimately, this book tells the story of a fearful test of our ability, as a country, to hold together a system of government grounded in truth and the rule of law. Written on the eve of the 2022 midterm elections, Draper’s account of a party teetering on the precipice of madness reveals how the GOP fringe became its center of gravity.
This book offers a critical introduction to the media as well as a “self defense” against the “spin” of politicians, advertising, and assorted propagandists. Its interdisciplinary application of principles of critical thinking and argumentative rhetoric can be incorporated into a diverse range of college courses, including communication, journalism, rhetoric, and media criticism. Lazere offers a basic guide to and critique of the semantic complexities of terms such as liberal, conservative, left, and right, as well as related words like democracy, freedom, capitalism, and socialism. He provides student guides for understanding opposing viewpoints between conservative and liberal polemicists on controversial issues in current politics and media, such as the nation’s wealth gap, including the rhetoric of economic arguments and the use and interpretation of statistics. His book offers insights into understanding the positions behind many other well-publicized debates in American society—from women’s rights to racial attitudes to the role of government. Lazere provides students with tools for understanding and argumentation, showing how to recognize logical fallacies, verbal slanting, and emotional appeal through connotative language—and how to discern intentions behind political and other advertisements. In contrast to most textbooks’ approach to logical fallacies that assumes they result only from unintentional lapses in reasoning, this book confronts the hard truth that real-life arguments frequently are tainted by deliberate deception. Chapter 3 surveys various influences on political bias in the media, while Chapter 4 examines special pleading, conflicts of interest, invective, smearing, and hype—as propagated by sources like lobbies, public relations agencies, think tanks, advocacy, and political advertising. Key features of the text: