Reading the Media

Episode 2

Flo Kennedy Reads U.S. Press on South Africa

With dry wit and unremitting intensity lawyer, actor, and activist Florynce “Flo” Kennedy investigates the way U.S. media acted in support of apartheid in South Africa through what it published (or didn’t) in this 1985 episode of Paper Tiger Television. Cutting together news media describing the “petty annoyances” of racism with accounts of militarized dispossession and other anti-Black projects of the apartheid regime, Kennedy showcases how the media uses a language of neutrality to obscure its ideological commitments.

Episode 3

Noam Chomsky Reads the New York Times

Linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky discusses U.S. foreign policy towards Central America through deconstruction of an article published in The New York Times on the Nicaraguan conflict of the mid-1980s. By examining this article against the reality of the conflict, Chomsky illustrates propagandistic strategies which The New York Times, still perhaps the most regarded English-language newspaper, utilizes in order to support antidemocratic and often violent U.S. foreign policy towards Central America.

Episode 4

Martha Rosler Reads Vogue

Vogue: It is glamour. It is excitement, romance, drama, wishing, dreaming, winning, success. The artist Martha Rosler is known today for, among other work, her videos exploring the semiotics of gendered labor and her collages restaging and interrogating scenes of American consumption, domesticity, and war. This 1982 episode of Paper Tiger Television itself has a collage-like structure, focusing on impressions, personal stories and, most provocatively, looking at Vogue's place in creating and recreating class power.

Episode 5

Murray Bookchin Reads Time Magazine

Historian, political philosopher, environmentalist, and anarchist Murray Bookchin demonstrates how Time magazine obliterates time in this 1982 episode of Paper Tiger Television.