Last year, Chinese producers released The Battle at Lake Changjin, a big-budget war movie celebrating a 1950 Chinese victory against US forces in the Korean War. The New York Times criticized the movie as a militaristic intervention by Chinese authorities into popular entertainment for propaganda purposes. However, media scholar Robin Andersen, writing for FAIR, noted that the U.S. press critique ignored the fact that the Pentagon has been influencing Hollywood films producing U.S. propaganda for decades. She joins the Project Censored Show to explore the close ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood and their ongoing efforts to rewrite history and demonize counter narrative sources. Later in the show, Andersen addresses the danger of applying corporate media “both-sides-ism” and false equivalency as part of News Abuse analysis in the latest Project Censored book, State of the Free Press 2022. In the second half of the show, media scholars Nicholas Baham III and Nolan Higdon speak about their new book, The Podcaster’s Dilemma: Decolonizing Podcasters in the Era of Surveillance Capitalism, and how corporate media might attempt to co-opt the new medium given its popularity and success at reaching more diverse audiences. Their groundbreaking study is both cautionary and optimistic regarding prospects for this relatively new but wildly popular medium.
Notes:
Robin Andersen is professor emerita at Fordham University; she also writes for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and once again compiled the News Abuse chapter in Project Censored’s annual book, State of the Free Press 2022. Professors and authors Nicholas Baham III and Nolan Higdon have made multiple appearances as guests on the the Project Censored Show and were podcasters themselves. Their new book, Podcaster’s Dilemma, is both a scholarly analysis of the fast-growing podcasting sector, and an examination of podcasting’s potential as a force of decolonization.
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