Today's Stories

March 10 , 2009

Franklin Spinney
What Israeli Peace Process?

Reuven Kaminer
Pure and Unadulterated Racism

March 9 , 2009

Pam Martens
Madoff and the Sorkin Affair

Ralph Nader
Too Big...Period

Peter Lee
Meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: the US's Worst/Best Hope for Afghanistan?

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Charade

Peter Morici
Fixing the Banks: Treasury's Doomed Strategy

Dean Baker
Why Do We Need a Private Health Insurance Industry, Anyway?

Steve Ault
Kiss Thailand's Tolerance for Gays Goodbye

Stephen Lendman
Guantánamo Under Obama

Farooq Sulehria
Tennis Without Spectators

Belén Fernández
Chávez, a Cockfight and the Caracazo

Website of the Day
How Lincoln Learned to Read

March 6-8 , 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Harlots High and Low

Chris Floyd
Tangled Up in Karl

Uri Avnery
Remember Ophira?

Dave Lindorff
Kiss the Banks Goodbye

Mark Weisbrot
The Crisis vs. the Dogma

David Ker Thomson
Against Work

Phil Aliff
Soldier Suicides

Rebekah Ward
Georgia Injustice: Another Young Life Wrecked

Tracey Briggs
How Capitalism Feels in the Head

Dean Baker
Depression Nostalgia?

Daniel P. Wirt, M.D.
Remove the Handle From the Health Insurance Misery and Death Pump

Carl Finamore
The Recovery Plan: Save Us From Those Who Would Save Us

Wajahat Ali
The Pakistani Monster

David Michael Green
Smart is the New Stupid

David Macaray
The Minimum Wage Revisited

Michael Dickinson
On Financial Fools Day

Susie Day
Line in the Sand

Bob Sommer
Echoes of the Townhouse Explosion

Ben Sonnenberg
No Forgiveness for the Bourgeoisie: Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel"

David Yearsley
Sonic Fakery in "Slumdog" From the Mozart of Chennai

DC Larson
They're Writing Those Depression Songs, Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Live Truth: Music Sans Headphones

Poets' Basement
Dominquez, MacNeil and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Environment & Obama: a Conversation with Jeffrey St. Clair

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

Benjamin Dangl
Striking a Blow Against the Beer Cartel: a Grassroots Victory in Utah

Christopher Brauchli
The New Leaders of the GOP

Website of the Day
The Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Is Nancy Pelosi Really Against War Crimes?

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

Anthony DiMaggio
From Bush to Obama: Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Dennis Ross and Iran: the Fox and the Chicken Coop

Mischa Gaus
The Banks' War on Workers

Felice Pace
The Economy and the Big Picture

Mike Whitney
Is Free Market Capitalism Possible Without Accountability?

Lee Sustar
Blaming the Autoworkers

Peter Lee
The Other Side of the Coin in Afghanistan

Nicole Colson
Ruining Young Lives for Profit

Roger Burbach
Et Tu, Daniel? The Betrayal of the Sandinista Revolution

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah Has No Robes

Missy Beattie
Owning Disaster

Dave Lindorff
America's Stupid Health Care Debate

Robert David Steele Vivas
Intelligence for the President--and Everyone Else

John Ross
Teotihuacan Gets Mickey-Moused

Ralph Nader
Civic Heroism Awards

Yves Engler
Haiti's Harsh Realities

Alan Farago
The Story of Leonard Abess, Banker

Zulfikar Majid
Understanding Kashmir

David Yearsley
Don't Stay Up Too Late, Johan!

Charles R. Larson
Sleeping with Dogs

Kim Nicolini
Spitting at Dark Times: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Wanna Be a Garage Rock Star

Poets' Basement
Puthoff, Payne, Gaffney and Gray

Website of the Weekend
Sleep Now in the Fire

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

March 10 , 2009

Shortchanging Citizens, Damaging the Profession

How Anthropology Disparages Journalism

By BRIAN McKENNA

Where is anthropology's Ida Tarbell? Its I.F. Stone? Its Lincoln Steffens? All were outstanding journalists, chroniclers of the culture, resources and power of their times.

And where is anthropology's Juan Cole? Its Stanley Aronowitz? Its Noam Chomsky? A historian, sociologist and linguist respectively. All are academicians. All are well known public writers.

With an upcoming Yalta-esque American Anthropology Association conference in December 2009 titled, "The End/s of Anthropology," academic anthropology continues to worry about its future while imploring its members to get more involved in public life outside of the ivy. Of course that's something applied anthropologists (in the break-away Society for Applied Anthropology) have been doing for decades. One wonders how the conference will showcase journalism, one of the most consequential forms of public anthropology. Typically the anthropology profession - both academic and applied - looks skeptically at journalism.

A common refrain among academic anthropologists is this: "I never talk to journalists, they always get me wrong. I just can't trust them." Whenever I hear this my mind churns, "Then why don't you become the journalist and write it yourself?" Applied anthropologists are more inclined to write an occasional journalistic piece, but it's not viewed as a central focus of applied work. Again, why not become the seasoned journalist?

Is there a career danger for an anthropologist in wanting to be a relevant, publicly engaged writer? Maybe. Consider, why is it that some of U.S. culture's most talented writers, like David Moberg (senior editor for In These Times) and Kurt Vonnegut felt as though they had to drop out of anthropology graduate programs, (University of Chicago) just inches from the dissertation finish line, to become public communicators, public intellectuals, novelists and journalists?

Hermetically Sealed Classroom, Dusty Journals

Too many academic anthropologists are marooned in the coffin-boxes of university classrooms, their pearls of wisdom echoing wistfully off of hermetically sealed-walls. Paradoxically, just outside of campus bounds, local TV and radio programs - which can potentially educate millions - are staffed by their freshly minted (and inexperienced) former students! These are campus graduates of journalism, broadcast communications, speech, and/or theater programs where they were groomed in the practical arts of elocution and head bobbing for the airwaves and/or TV cameras. According to the FCC, these are supposed to be democratic public airwaves. But in practice, under corporate hegemony, they are mostly off limits to Ph.D.s, social scientists and even investigative journalists, i.e. thinkers and social critics. Anthropologists must fight for access to these spaces. Meanwhile they must circulate their voices in a multitude of public fora in local newspapers, the alternative press, the Internet, public television and public radio.

I worked as a development consultant on FRESH AIR with Terry Gross in Philadelphia in 1991. The show now reaches 4.5 million listeners daily and is in Europe on the World Radio Network. Ms. Gross and her colleagues have featured the work of numerous anthropologists such as David Kertzer, Peter Goldsmith, Sam Charters (musical anthropologist) and medical anthropologists Paul Farmer and Terry Graedon. When I left to pursue a Ph.D. I told Ms. Gross and her staff, "you help do the work of a great many anthropologists, getting the message out about their work. Keep it up." The broadcast could conceivably profile an anthropologist every week to great effect, but does not. We cannot depend on what Anthony Giddens called the double hermeneutic (interpreters of our interpretations) line of gatekeepers like Gross for our public media education. Anthropologists have no choice. They must become media makers and journalists themselves. This will be tough in a field, anthropology, that does not provide systematic education on "how to become a public intellectual" in its curricula, pedagogy, modes of evaluation or reward structure.

Cracking Chaucer

What makes a good journalist? In a telling Slate Magazine article, "Can Journalism School Be Saved?" editor Jack Shafer said that "I'd rather hire somebody who wrote a brilliant senior thesis on Chaucer than a J-school M.A. who's mastered the art of computer-assisted reporting. If you can crack Chaucer, you've got a chance at decoding city hall." (Zenger 2002)

Anthropologists can crack Chaucer and much more. Anthropologists can debate Foucault, survive in foreign lands with little more than the grit of our teeth and write insightful interpretations of the global/local intersections of capital. Anthropologists would make great journalists, albeit if they learned to write more quickly, urgently, succinctly and in a public voice.

There are models. Barbara Nimri Aziz is host, executive producer and anthropologist for WBAI radio-Pacifica. Cambridge educated Gillian Tett, Ph.D. is a journalist for Britain's Financial Times. Maria Vesperi was a reporter and an anthropologist.

Unfortunately, anthropologists rarely write urgently about the local culture for the general public. It's even rarer for them to do it in their own hometowns where they live. But journalists - particularly investigative muckraking journalists - do. And at a time when corporate media has fired too many investigative journalists, anthropologists need to pick up the slack. Both professional anthropology and professional journalism are in free fall. End is a keyword in both realms. As in "End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate (2006), by top investigative journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. The two recently published a AAA series "Pulse of the Planet" to good effect. Counterpunch is necessary reading for all my University of Michigan-Dearborn students.

And yet, few citizens know about the powerful ethnographic studies that quietly sit in libraries, on dissertation shelves, or in journals like American Ethnologist or Human Organization. Our material rarely sees print in the local "Metro Times" or "City Paper." Why not write for both audiences, academic and popular?

But, That's not anthropology!

Anthropologist James Lett is a former broadcaster and present-day anthropologist. In 1986 he wrote abut his dual life commenting that found it "remarkable that [the] similarities [between the two professions] are not more widely appreciated. As an anthropologist, I have been trained to observe, record, describe, and if possible, to explain human behavior, and that is the essence of what I do every day as a journalist." (Lett 1986)

I interviewed an anthropologist/journalist for this article who asked to remain anonymous. Now an assistant professor she confided that she kept her graduate student journalism quiet because of how it was talked down. "When someone mentioned Deborah Tannen [a popular linguistic anthropologist] professors' eyes would roll." She said that since anthropology and journalism have so much in common "anthropologists struggle "to define their discipline as unique." "They want to distance the profession from journalism. . .you know, how anthropology is always struggling to legitimate itself."

Anthropologist Thomas McGuire exemplifies this type of border patrol work in defense of anthropology in a recent article called, "Shell Games on the Water Bottoms of Louisiana: Investigative Journalism and Anthropological Inquiry"(Walters et al 2008). In it he discusses the work of two investigative journalists working for the New Orleans Times-Picayne daily newspaper who exposed political corruption over oysterbeds. He argues that investigative journalists, despite seeking to uncover the truth like anthropologists, fail to be anthropologists because they frame a story "like a picture is framed to separate it from the background to focus attention." They do not tell us enough about why things happened from a larger perspective, he says. He also submits that investigative journalism is not anthropology because it is limited "by what their readers will bear," and by a "moral imperative that cuts them short (p 119)."

Excuse me? McGuire has evidently never read anything by Mike Davis, Upton Sinclair or Jeffrey St. Clair whose "Been Brown so Long it Looked like Green to Me," analyzes perceptively capitalist corruption in Louisiana. I myself have learned more about how the media operates from non-anthropologists like Upton Sinclair (see his The Brass Check) and McChesney than any anthropologist. Incidentally it is noteworthy that the two reporters were able to impact public policy to a far greater degree than McGuire who, as evidenced from his piece, does not do journalism.

Some anthropologists argue that journalism has little or no sophisticated social theory. That's true for mainstream journalists but not for many of the investigative journalists I know. Moreover a significant amount of anthropology fails to adequately theorize its own imperial context of privilege. According to Laura Nader, "it is often the case that the critical potential of a discipline is obliterated as soon as the disciplines gets institutionalized and transformed into an industry." (Nader: 100). Nader argues that the thrust of American anthropology has supplied the ideological support for imperialism and colonialism, studying down not up, studying away not in their own backyards. The context of most academic anthropology is the university, and the best critiques of the university have not come from anthropologists but educators, sociologists and historians.

Captive Intellectuals

To better understand McGuire one must read Russell Jacoby. In his "The Last Intellectuals, American Culture in the Age of Academe" (1987) Jacoby talks about how the growing academic culture of the 1950s absorbed a great many of our great public writers (like Tarbell, Stone and Steffens) turning them into academics where they lost a public voice. "For many younger intellectuals the dissertation was the cultural event and contest of their lives. . .the dissertation became part of them. The rhetoric, the style, the idiom, the sense of the 'discipline' and ones place in it: these branded their intellectual souls. The prolonged, often humiliating effort to write a thesis, to be judged by ones doctoral advisor and a committee of experts gives rise to a network of dense relations and deference that clung to their lives and future careers. . .earlier intellectuals were almost completely spared this rite." (Jacoby:18)

Twenty-two years later Jacoby's analysis still rings true. Anthropology programs remain too aligned with an academic culture that creates socialization experiences that have little to do with engaging the public directly.

A Burgeoning Movement of Anthropological Journalists?

It is interesting that the push for anthropology and journalism often comes from students. That is true for the California State University-Fullerton where students organized a "Society of Anthropology in Journalism" recently. That's also true at the University of Arizona where Hecky Villanueva told me, "A number of us here at the University of Arizona have long debated the relationship between anthropology and popular writing." They insist that anthropologists must write in accessible styles for diverse audiences. In their 2007 paper "Lessons from New New Journalism" Villanueva and four student colleagues reviewed "the work of five popular nonfiction writers to determine the extent to which their approachable writing styles are compatible with anthropological rigor and nuance."

Internationally there are some important developments. As Jeremy MacClancy, Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University in the UK said, "If anthropologists have something to contribute directly to journalism, then the doors open for those who know how to write. Personally, my colleagues (e.g. Professor Joy Hendry, a Japanologist, and Simon Underdown, a paleobioanthropologist in my department) and I have found it relatively easy to get on national BBC radio programs and sometimes into the national press, but only when we are able to illuminate clearly a current affair. In France, Marc Abeles used to write frequently for the French quality press. In Spain, anthropologists, like many intellectuals there, can have a significant presence, e.g. Joseba Zulaika in the Basque Country, even though he is based in the Centre for Basque Studies, Nevada."

McCalancy mentions obstacles: "Many anthropologists, especially younger ones, do not know how open the UK national press and media are to approach by anthropologists." Then there are "pressures to publish and other increasing demands on our time; a very understandable fear of being made into 'Dr Rent-a-quote'; little (albeit increasing) recognition for public anthropology by Heads of Faculty; and lack of successful models to emulate."

In short, anthropology programs need to bridge with communications departments and create courses and programs in "Anthropology & Journalism" to help create the critical public intellectuals of the 21st century. Such programs will not only attract journalism majors to anthropology but will help equip students with skills to popularize critical knowledge.

One thing is certain. We need a new wave of writers and journalists, unafraid to do the most radical thing imaginable: simply describe reality. Their ranks will largely come from freethinkers, dissenting academics and bored mainstream journalists who rediscover what got them interested in anthropology in the first place, telling the truth.

A version of this article was published in the Society for Applied Newsletter, February 2009 edition, Tim Wallace, Editor

References

Azia, Bartbara Nimri. For more information see: http://www.cunepress.com/

Brian Burke, Phil Leckman, Andrea Sturzen, Kathleen Van Vlack, and Hecky Villanueva 2007 Lessons from New New Journalism. Arizona Anthropologist #17.

Cockburn, Alexander and Jeffrey St. Clair. 2006 End Times The Death of the Fourth Estate. Oakland:AK Press.

Hoffman, Daniel 2004 Anthropological Quarterly.

Jacoby, Russell. 1987 The Last Intellectuals, American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York:Basic.

Lett, James 1986 Communicator (Journal of the Radio-Television News Directors Association) May XL(5):33-35.

MacClancy & McDonaugh (eds.) 1997 Popularizing Anthropology. London: Routledge.

MacClancy (ed.) 2002 Exotic No More. Anthropology on the front-lines. Chicago: U Chicago Press.

McGuire, Thomas R. 2008 Shell Games on the Water Bottoms of Louisiana: Investigative Journalism and Anthropological Inquiry. In Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology. Bradley B. Walters et al eds. Pp. 117-134. Maryland:Alta Mira.

Nader, Laura and Ugo Mattei. 2008 Plunder, When the Rule of Law is Illegal. Mass.:Blackwell.

Sinclair, Upton. 1919 The Brass Check. A Study of American Journalism, with an introduction by Robert W. McChesney and Ben Scott. (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2003).

St. Clair, Jeffrey. 2004 Been Brown so Long it Looked Like Green to Me. Monroe:Common Courage.

Zenger, Alex Peter. 2002 Getting Real in Local TV. The City Pulse. Feb. 16. P. 4 (Zenger is a pen name for Brian McKenna)

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