EDITION: U.S.
 
CONNECT    

Rory O'Connor
GET UPDATES FROM Rory O'Connor
 
Rory O'Connor is an author, filmmaker and journalist whose work centers around media and politics. Author of Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media (City Lights, 2012), Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio (AlterNet Books, 2008), and co-author of Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Power from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima (Sierra Club Books, 2011, Second Edition), his broadcast, film and print career has been recognized with a George Orwell Award, a George Polk Award, a Writer's Guild Award, and two Emmys, among other honors.

Co-founder and president of the international media firm Globalvision, Inc, and Board Chair of The Global Center, an affiliated non-profit foundation. O’Connor also writes the “Media Is A Plural’ blog, accessible at www.roryoconnor.org.

Blog Entries by Rory O'Connor

#january25 One Year Later: Social Media & Politics 3.0

Posted January 25, 2012 | 1/25/12

One year ago, a revolution began in Egypt that still reverberates there -- as well as among other repressive rulers and regimes in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and beyond, including thousands of miles away in New York City, where "Occupy Wall Street" protests in turn took root and then...

Read Post

Jose Antonio Vargas Is an American Hero

Posted June 22, 2011 | 6/22/11

I first met Jose Antonio Vargas in the fall of 2008, in the midst of the historic Obama campaign for the presidency. At the time, I was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of...

Read Post

"Got to Revolution"

Posted June 7, 2011 | 6/7/11

Over the past few years, the annual Personal Democracy Forum has emerged as one of the few truly essential gatherings of its type, and the recently concluded eighth PDF gathering was no exception.

Each year I go into the conference excited about one or more items on its crowded agenda,...

Read Post

Obama Comes for the Journalists

Posted May 26, 2011 | 5/26/11

German theologian Martin Niemoller was a staunch anti-Communist who supported Hitler's rise to power -- at first. He later became disillusioned, however, and led a group of German clergymen opposed to Hitler. In 1937 Niemoller was arrested for the crime of "not being enthusiastic enough about the Nazi movement" and...

Read Post

Crossing Zero: How and Why the Media Misses the AfPak Story

Posted April 14, 2011 | 4/14/11

A unique husband and wife team, Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould have reported for decades on the issues and conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the spring of 1981 they received the first visas to enter Afghanistan granted to an American TV crew and produced an exclusive news story for...

Read Post

We Media vs. Me Media

Posted April 7, 2011 | 4/7/11

I often go to media conferences - such as this week's National Conference for Media Reform in Boston, where I'll finally have an opportunity to speak out about hate speech in the media, after years of proposing such a panel - but few media chatfests are...

Read Post

No Word for Tsunami: Imagining the Unimaginable

Posted March 28, 2011 | 3/28/11

By Rory O'Connor and Richard Bell

Tsunami is a Japanese word -- one sign of the island nation's intimate relationship with the destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds it. Despite the fact that the word is one of the few from the Japanese language to attain universal use, "tsunami"...

Read Post

No Word for Meltdown: Nukespeak Returns

Posted March 15, 2011 | 3/15/11

George Orwell argued that controlling language offered the ultimate tool for getting people to accept the unacceptable -- such as the catastrophic risks of operating nuclear power plants. In Orwell's 1984, each new edition of the Newspeak dictionary had fewer words than the previous one, making it harder and harder...

Read Post

The Coming Media Convergence

Posted February 11, 2011 | 2/11/11

For the second week in a row, a top executive of one of the leading international newspapers that recently collaborated with WikiLeaks recounted what it was like to work with the group's controversial founder Julian Assange.

Ian Katz, deputy editor of the Guardian, detailed his experiences "on the hazards of...

Read Post

Richard Nixon, Liu Xiaobo, Julian Assange and Us

Posted December 13, 2010 | 12/13/10

What do Richard Nixon, Liu Xiaobo and Julian Assange have in common?

As lawyers for WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Assange began preparing for a possible indictment by US authorities, two recent, unrelated but highly relevant news items caught my attention. The first involves the gift that keeps on giving...

Read Post

Information Poverty and Giving Thanks

Posted November 23, 2010 | 11/23/10

A decade ago, I was in India, directing a documentary film about global poverty.

While shooting there, I met a mischievous, roly-poly researcher named Sugata Mitra, who was then working for NIIT, a billion-dollar Indian high tech firm with headquarters in New Delhi.

"So, you're...

Read Post

Axelrod Memo to Obama: Election 2012

Posted November 2, 2010 | 11/2/10

Mr. President,

As the world waits to see just how badly we fare in Election 2010, it's not too early to look ahead to that all-important contest just around the corner -- Election 2012.

Here's my considered assessment: as Jon Stewart might put it, dude -...

Read Post

Bill O'Reilly: Juan Williams Died for Your Sins

Posted October 21, 2010 | 10/21/10

We all know Bill O'Reilly is a good Catholic boy. After all, the top-rated Fox News (sic) Channel host took the title of his best selling A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity from Sister Mary Lurana, his third grade teacher at Saint Brigid's parochial school. Speaking as a schoolmate of...

Read Post

Everybody Knows Times Op-Ed Columnists are Lazy

Posted October 8, 2010 | 10/8/10

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich...

Read Post

Are We Entering a "Fact-Free" Period in Politics and Media?

Posted September 23, 2010 | 9/23/10

On August 29, 2008, just prior to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, presidential candidate John McCain announced he had chosen Alaskan governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. The surprising choice of the then little-known Palin captured the nation's attention; her status as just the second woman...

Read Post

"News Bias" and the Media Battle Over the Meaning of 9/11

Posted September 9, 2010 | 9/9/10

Nine long years after 9/11, the battle over the meaning of what happened to our city, our country and our world on that fateful blue-crystal morning continues unabated, with the battleground still the swirling nexus of news and politics. As usual, all sides in this cultural clash are employing the...

Read Post

Obama and the Military-Media Complex

Posted August 31, 2010 | 8/31/10

On February 27, 2009, just a month after being elected as an anti-war candidate, President Barack Obama revealed his plans for completing the combat portion of America's ongoing military involvement in Iraq. "Let me say this as plainly as I can," Obama said. "By August 31, 2010, our combat mission...

Read Post

The Tillman Story -- Just Give Us Some Truth

Posted August 16, 2010 | 8/16/10

Of the many lies George W. Bush told us about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some were larger but none worse than that told about the death of Pat Tillman.

In 2004 -- just after Bush's invasion of Iraq, ostensibly in search of those non-existent weapons...

Read Post

Big Journalism? No, Another Phony Breitbart Beatdown

Posted August 2, 2010 | 8/2/10

It's been a while since I've been called nasty names in public or accused of ill-defined but dangerous conspiracies -- which is a shame because it can be so much fun! Once, for example, the conservative crackpot David Horowitz (whom I've never met) told the Boston Globe I was a...

Read Post

America's Most Dangerous Man -- Julian Assange or Barack Obama?

Posted July 27, 2010 | 7/27/10

Why are we still in Afghanistan?

This week's release by WikiLeaks.org of a massive archive of 92,000 previously secret U.S. military documents -- a new generation's Pentagon Papers -- puts the lie once again to the tired refrain that the war in/on Afghanistan bears little resemblance to that in/on Vietnam....

Read Post