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• Reader Comments (8)

  Page 1 of 1 pages

  yes! corporate shills and republicans have completely dominated the professorships of most universities. what do you think they’re “teaching”?!

  it’s pathetic that students actually pay to listen to this drivel. only the students and they’re work (i.e. papers, college radio, etc.) can combat this shill.

  the children and the students are our future. support their cause.

  Posted by jt on Oct 23, 2003 at 3:40 AM

  Greetings,
    This notion is exactly the kind of activity the ‘left’ must begin to consider seriously.  We’ve given up the turf to the reactionaries and they have taken over. How can we be surprised?
   
    Its time to find new ways to resist in the _public sphere_; we have to do the groundwork, just like they do.  We need to confront them on their own ground and respond openly and with integrity to the lies, disiformation, and mystification. 
    The only problem with this idea is that money controls who gets air time.  Thus, we have to fall back on old methods; door to door organizing; neighborhood rallies; education programs for those cut off by the Machine from layoffs, downsizing, etc.  We need to get back in their faces, folks!  Its past time.

  Posted by ryokan on Oct 23, 2003 at 8:06 AM

  The problems of the left are not just the lack
  of support we give the students, but also how they
  present their side. The left, for some reason, has
  taken up stance of talking down to very people
  we need to be talking with. The middle class
  workers and the poor. They embrace such scholars
  as Noam Chumsky and Howard Fisk and look down
  on anyone who is not completely familiar with
  them. The left is too satisfied with intelecualizing
  a problem, rather than just telling it like it is.
  Stop “preaching to the chior” and start talking to
  the people and students in a way that they understand,
  about those things that the people feel the most
  strongly about. That is where the “right” has been
  beating the “left”. Use language that the people
  understand, not some “pie in the sky” concept that
  only someone with a Masters Degree can comprehend.
  We need more Harry Trumans types. People who are
  willing to shoot from the hip, so to speak.

  Posted by Chris on Oct 25, 2003 at 4:24 AM

  Interesting. I write for a Labor Paper and you’d think we’d have progressives and those who work for an hourly wage reading our material and embracing the very fine work we do to expose the corporate BS. (I recently did a researched piece on Walmart and how little you really save by shopping there. And how the company damages local economies. I had ONE person commennt on the article.)

  Most times when I call workers/people to write articles about them and their ‘successes’ and so forth I almost always get a cold shoulder. Why? They’d rather be written about in a mainstream medium. Even when they know that media will NEVER present their story framed from a worker’s point of view.

  So like most things American it’s all about celebrity and the path to that lies in mainstream media.

  Posted by Chris Stevens on Oct 27, 2003 at 8:27 PM

  It is sad that the left is castigated for ‘intellectualising’ problems which suggests that the right are too stupid to consider intellectual problems. It is possible to tell it like it is in an intellectual way without stooping to rhetoric and bushisms about good and evil and how the poor must be crushed.  In their own minds the right think they are beating the left but those minds are too simple to understand the real arguments.

  Posted by intellectual on Oct 28, 2003 at 3:48 PM

  I’m curious to see if the writer can cite any examples of lefty publications losing funding because they are, as Mischa Gaus writes, “easy targets for conservative campus groups that attack by taking over student finance committees or pressuring administrators to stop funding political speech.” Gaus’ arguments would carry more weight if they had any facts to support them.

  Posted by Greg Weatherford on Nov 17, 2003 at 11:11 PM

  The Student Underground at Boston University, the Innovator at Governor’s State University in Illinois, the Messenger at City College of New York—just three examples, all destroyed by administrative pressures. More importantly, conservative groups have been pushing court cases for years trying to destroy the funding base for progressives. And even if they lost the Southworth case, lots of others are in the pipeline.

  http://www.indypress.org/ipanews/cajp_awards.html
  http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030217&c=1&s=waligore

  Posted by mg on Nov 22, 2003 at 2:03 AM

  Thank you, Mischa. Next time be sure to include information—and anecdotes—that support your thesis rather than simply stating points and expecting readers to believe them. These student publications should work to become independent from student government and other sources of political pressure. At my university, Virginia Commonwealth, student media is funded directly by student fees—they get 23 percent of the student activity fee—after the student government attempted to de-fund the student newspaper. Some members of the SGA found the publication too aggressive in its coverage. It was not, however, progressive; the newspaper was more mainstream. The point being, any media worth its salt will irritate the powers that be now and again. For that reason, no media outlet—right, left, middle, whatever—should be financially tied to those powers. The problem is with the funding system, not with some mythic right-wing consortium.

  Posted by Greg Weatherford on May 4, 2004 at 8:01 PM

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