Bob McChesney - Media Matters - Audio Interviews - Chomsky Zinn and others

Bob McChesney - Media Matters - Audio Interviews - Chomsky Zinn and others



Hour-long audio interviews with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Alexander Cockburn, Norman Finkelstein, Robert Fisk, Amy Goodman, Charles Lewis, David Sirota, and Norman Solomon, broadcast on Bob McChesney's weekly call-in radio show "Media Matters" in 2004-2007 ( http://www.will.uiuc.edu/AM/mediamatters/default.htm ).



Media: Audio

Format: MPEG Layer 3 Audio (64 kbps)

Filetype: mp3

Runtime: 11 hrs.

Filesize: 288 MB

Quality: Good



Files: 11



AlexanderCockburnMediaMatters060723.mp3 (26.7 MB)

AmyGoodmanMediaMatters061231.mp3 (26.8 MB)

CharlesLewisMediaMatters040307.mp3 (24.6 MB)

DavidSirotaMediaMatters060122.mp3 (27.0 MB)

HowardZinnMediaMatters060423.mp3 (24.0 MB)

HowardZinnMediaMatters061217.mp3 (26.8 MB)

NoamChomskyMediaMatters060226.mp3 (27.3 MB)

NoamChomskyMediaMatters061203.mp3 (24.1 MB)

NormanFinkelsteinMediaMatters050828.mp3 (27.3 MB)

NormanSolomonMediaMatters060813.mp3 (26.7 MB)

RobertFiskMediaMatters070304.mp3 (26.7 MB)



Robert "Bob" W. McChesney is a professor of media studies and one of the foremost critics of American mass media. His work concentrates on the history and political economy of communication, emphasizing the role media plays in democratic and capitalist societies. Since 2002, McChesney has been the host of Media Matters, a call-in talk radio program broadcast on WILL-AM and over the internet ( http://www.will.uiuc.edu/AM/mediamatters/default.htm ).



Alexander Cockburn is a self-described radical Irish journalist who has lived and worked in the United States since 1973. Together with Jeffrey St. Clair he edits the political newsletter CounterPunch. He also writes the "Beat the Devil" column for The Nation and a weekly syndicated column for the Los Angeles Times.



Amy Goodman is an American broadcast journalist and author. A 1984 graduate of Harvard University, Goodman is best known as the principal host of Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! program, where she has been described by the Los Angeles Times as "radio's voice of the disenfranchised left". Coverage of the antiwar and anti-globalization movements — and criticism of the corporate media — are the hallmarks of her work. As an investigative journalist, she has received acclaim for exposés of human rights violations in East Timor and Nigeria.



Charles Lewis is a former "60 Minutes" producer who left the ranks of commercial journalism to found, in 1989, the Center for Public Integrity, a non-partisan group which reports on political and government workings. When commenting on his move away from primetime journalism, Lewis expressed his frustration that the most important issues of the day were not being reported. Lewis and the Center recently won the first George Polk Award for Internet Journalism for the piece "Windfalls of War."



David J. Sirota is a progressive populist American blogger, writer, and Democratic political operative. Sirota completed a book, entitled "Hostile Takeover", which argues that corporate interests are driving U.S. economic policy. The book became a New York Times Bestseller on 9 July 2006, entering at #23 on the nonfiction list. Since May 2005, Sirota has been a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post, in addition to his own blog (which is published in parallel at Working for Change). He is a regular guest on The Al Franken Show. He is senior editor at the progressive newsmagazine In These Times, writes a regular column for the liberal The Nation, and has contributed to The American Prospect.



Howard Zinn is an American historian, social critic, playwright and political scientist and author of the book A People's History of the United States. Zinn's philosophy incorporates ideas from Marxism, anarchism, socialism, and social democracy. Since the 1960s, he has been a visible figure in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the United States. Author of 20 books, including the best seller A People's History of the United States, Zinn is Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Boston University.



Noam Chomsky is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th Century. He also helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, in which he challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of mind and language dominant in the 1950s. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has also affected the philosophy of language and mind (see Harman, Fodor). According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–1992 time period, and was the eighth most cited scholar in any time period. Beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky has become more widely known — especially internationally — for his media criticism and politics than for his linguistic theories. He is generally considered to be a key intellectual figure within the left wing of United States politics. Chomsky is widely known for his political activism, and for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments. Chomsky describes himself as a libertarian socialist and a sympathizer of anarcho-syndicalism.



Norman G. Finkelstein is an American professor of political science and author. A graduate of Binghamton University, he received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Hunter College, New York University, and most recently, DePaul University, where he has been an assistant professor since 2003. The son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein is known for his writings critical of Israel's role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for his contention that the Holocaust is being exploited both for pro-Israel political ends, and for the personal financial gain of institutional actors at the expense of actual survivors. A self-described "forensic scholar," Finkelstein's books each take as their foil a work of mainstream scholarship which he purports to expose as deeply flawed and even fraudulent. The authors he has thus targeted, including Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and Alan Dershowitz, along with others such as Benny Morris whose work Finkelstein cites approvingly, have in turn accused Finkelstein of grossly misrepresenting their work, and selectively quoting from their books only what suits his purpose.



Norman Solomon is an American journalist, media critic and antiwar activist. A longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), Solomon is also the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts which works pro-actively to provide alternative sources for journalists. His weekly column, "Media Beat", has been in national syndication since 1992.



Robert Fisk is a British journalist and is currently a Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent. He lives in Beirut, Lebanon, where he has resided for over 25 years. Described by the New York Times as "probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain", he has over thirty years of experience in international reporting, dating from 1970s Belfast and Portugal's 1974 Carnation Revolution, the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, and encompassing the 1979 Iranian revolution, the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, 1991 Persian Gulf War, and 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He is the world's most-decorated foreign correspondent, having received numerous awards including the British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year award seven times. Fisk speaks good vernacular Arabic, and is one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden (three times between 1994 and 1997). In the British journalistic tradition of the foreign correspondent, Fisk has developed a personal analysis of the foreign affairs that he covers and presents them in that light, often with trenchant criticism of the British government and its allies. His admirers take this as a sign of his depth of knowledge; his critics take it as confirmation of his incorrigible bias. Fisk is a consistent critic of what he perceives as hypocrisy in British government foreign policy.