MER Article Ten Years of the Los Angeles Eight Deportation Case Ten years after their January 1987 arrest, the Los Angeles Eight are still on trial. While the courts continue to debate the case, the seven Palestinians and one Kenyan [1] continue to face separation from their families and homelands and the prospect of forced deportation. Initially charged under the McCarthy-era Phyllis Bennis • 8 min read
Camille Mansour, Beyond Alliance Camille Mansour, Beyond Alliance: Israel and US Foreign Policy (Columbia, 1994). This long overdue inquiry into what Camille Mansour, with typical understatement, calls “the privileged character of American-Israeli relations”(p. xi) provides an exceptionally lucid analysis of a central feature of Joe Stork • 3 min read
MER Article Column: Funding Agents During World War II, the British ambassador in Cairo, Lord Killearn, complained about the sudden influx of American experts into the country under the auspices of US Lend-Lease assistance. Inquiries into the exact size of railroad track gauge in the Egyptian countryside, he was convinced, were a thi Al Miskin • 3 min read
MER Article The Media and the Polls In the relationship between public opinion and government decision-making, the trajectory of influence goes from top to bottom. Policymakers try to mold public opinion to suit their needs, not mold policies to suit the public. On many controversial foreign policy issues, there is often a gap between informed public opinion (Author not identified) • 8 min read
MER Article From Broadcasting to Narrowcasting Transnational media conglomerates and television networks from RCA to Associated Press to CNN have created and dominated a model of broadcasting which might be called “centralized global broadcasting.” Worldwide restructurings and rapid technological advances, though, have ushered in a new model of Hamid Naficy • 9 min read
MER Article "Giving Good Bite" Network researchers who book “experts” say they look for someone who can “give good bite.” Two of the most conspicuous prime-time sound bite experts during the war against Iraq were Anthony Cordesman and Fouad Ajami. These sketches were prepared by Sandrine Bretonniere. Anthony Cordesman: “We Must (Author not identified) • 3 min read
MER Article Who Owns the News? TELEVISION ABC Capital Cities bought ABC, with its 230 affiliated stations, for $3.4 billion in 1986. Also owns: 8 TV stations; 9 dailies, 74 weeklies (Kansas City Star); radio networks with 3,000 affiliated stations; 21 radio stations; a cable programming company; some 60 publications (Women’s Wea Sally Ethelston, Martha Wenger • 3 min read
MER Article Power Structure of the American Media me•di•a pl. of medium 2. an intervening thing through which a force acts or an effect is produced 3. any means, agency or instrument; specif., a means of communication that reaches the general public and carries advertising. —Webster’s New World Dictionary Laura Flanders, Joe Stork • 12 min read
MER Article Orientalizing America: Beginnings and Middle Passages In the quincentennial year of 1992, critical Middle East studies can and should play a powerful, constructive role in the battles against right-wing efforts to deny the multicultural strands of American and Western identity. The usual reaction is to attack ethnocentrism, stereotyping and the Orientalism of establishment culture. But such Michael M.J. Fischer • 14 min read
MER Article American Jews and Palestine In 1988, in the midst of the intifada, American Jews mustered their forces in opposition to an Israeli government policy and forced the government to back down. At issue was the Israeli government’s decision to change the Law of Return to recognize only Orthodox converts to Judaism. The same America Marilyn Neimark • 16 min read
MER Article Bush Locks Horns with Shamir On January 21, six days into the US air war against Iraq, Israeli Finance Minister Yitzhak Modai took advantage of Washington’s praise for Israel’s “restraint” in the face of 11 Scud missile attacks to drop a bombshell of his own. Before the assembled Jerusalem press corps, he advised visiting Deput Jeffrey Blankfort • 5 min read
MER Article Message of National Churches of Christ on Gulf Crisis A MESSAGE OF NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CHURCHES OF CHRIST IN THE USA ON THE GULF AND MIDDLE EAST CRISIS, NOVEMBER 14-16, 1990 [Excerpts] We stand at a unique moment in human history, when all around us seemingly impregnable walls are being broken down and deep historical enmities are being healed. And y (Author not identified) • 5 min read
