Political Media Review

Hollywood’s Exploited is an interdisciplinary collection designed to analyze the cultural narratives and political economy of Hollywood through Henry Giroux’s work on public pedagogy. In the foreword, renowned cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg describes the book as a “critical pedagogy of Hollywood”

The belief higher education is about the spirit of inquiry and exploring ideas has been central to education itself for centuries. Consider where many young people first encountered great literature, thoroughgoing thinkers and spaces for political debate.

“There is an opportunity before us to reinvigorate journalism and, with that, democratic governance in the United States. But we need to correctly understand the source of the problem to prescribe the solutions…

In mid-January, I received a mass email asking me to donate $10 for bottled water and other supplies for participants in an important immigrant rights march in Phoenix.

Brilliant debunking of anything you thought was ever good about corporations (which may not have been much). Bakan goes through the rise of the entity of the corporation, from its humble beginnings a mere 150 years ago, to the Globe-strangling monster that it is today.

After reading No Logo, you may feel that Bill Hicks was understating things a little: by the end of the first chapter you’ll be en route to the nearest McDonalds with a crate of Molotov cocktails. No Logo is a book about brands, which means it’s a book about popular culture – Golden Arches, the Nike “swoosh”, Tommy Hilfiger jackets and Starbucks coffee. It’s about the television you watch and the newspapers you read, the theme parks you visit and the films you go to see. It’s about magazines and rock music, universities and the Internet. In short, it’s a book about everyday reality – or, rather, what lies behind it.

Why We Fight, produced by Eugene Jarecki, is a brilliant critical film about how the military industrial complex has been developed and promoted post-9/11. It includes clips of the Iraq War, speeches by former President Bush, and amazing interviews with top scholars and experts, from former CIA agents to members of the Department of Defense such as Gore Vidal, Chalmers Johnson, Joseph Cirincione, Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, Wilton Sekzer, Sen. John McCain, James Roche, and Gwynne Dyer.