David Barsamian is an award-winning investigative journalist and the founder of Alternative Radio, an internationally syndicated, weekly radio show now in its 28th year of operation. One of the great and oft-overlooked intellectual luminaries of the late twentieth century, Barsamian has co-written a number of books with great thinkers and activists of our time like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Richard Wolff. His lecture circuit spans the globe, and he recently made an appearance at the San Jose Peace And Justice Center to speak about his life, his work, and the state of domestic and global affairs.
“I started by myself in the mid-1980s because I was frustrated with the media, and I was particularly frustrated with NPR,” Barsamian explained. [E]veryone feels really good about NPR because people speak complete sentences in English, they don't yell, they seem to be very reasonable. But if you peel away that kind of etiquette, that veneer, you find embedded in NPR stories...about the benevolence of the United States and its benign intent in what it's doing around the world, and being the indispensable nation and the only country that can really deliver justice to people.”
Barsamian's biggest issue with the corporate media is their lack of contextualization in reporting, and the intellectual dishonesty with which they blanket the airwaves. “One of the big failures of the media, of course, is that things happen in isolation...There's no background, there's no history.” he continued. “You can trust the corporate media: to lie to you, to fabricate, to invent, to destroy, you can absolutely depend on them. In that way, they are fulfilling their societal function of manufacturing consent, of lining up people to support corporate power, to look to corporations as their savior.”
To find out more about David Barsamian and find out where to listen to Alternative Radio, please visit their website, www.alternativeradio.org.