TONIGHT ON THE TERRORDOME: Jack Shaheen on Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People

6 PM Mountain Time CJSR FM88.5 Edmonton cjsr.com worldwide Few institutions exercise as much power over national and international society as corporate media. Corporations and the newspapers, magazines, movie studios, television networks, video games designers, web portals and more that they own offer a non-stop menu of images, sounds, and text for us to consume. And while corporate powers like to tell us we have the freedom to choose anything on the menu, we’re conditioned to be unaware of one critical fact: we don’t get to write the menu in the first place. Corporate apologists tell media critics they’re merely serving people what they want, and if people didn’t want it, they wouldn’t watch it, listen to it or read it. But let’s take the case of political hip hop, which was enormously popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When major corporations took an interest in the multimillion dollar profits of hip hop, they bought out the small labels which were distributing ...