Overview

Inside MSNBC Barack Obama wasn't the only beneficiary of the calamitous Republican rule under George W. Bush in the 2000s. Something of an industry punchline since its formation in 1996, MSNBC suddenly gained a comprehensible voice during the era, while pinning its hopes upon the inspiring Senator from Illinois. Obama's presidential victory in 2008 spelled success for the network, which saw a sizable ratings increase, and began positioning itself as a viable alternative to the right-wing propaganda machine of Fox News. However, after a close examination of the station's programming, and an analysis of their celebrity talking heads, troubling questions about the state of the American media arise. In Medium Blue: the Politics of MSNBC, media analyst Michael Arria provides the first book-length investigation into the remaking of MSNBC as a cable network designed to advance the neoliberal ideology of the new Democratic Party. Arria depicts a network devoted to defending the Democratic Party's policies at all costs. His in-depth analysis provides new details on the firing of Phil Donahue, the termination of Keith Olberman and Cenk Uygur, the personal and professional interconnections between MSNBC producers and commentators to the DNC and the Obama White House. He shows how MSNBC has shilled for the Obama administration's wars, defended its illegal spying, tarred whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, backed Obama's wars and failed to hold our broken political system accountable. Medium Blue serves as lucid guide to help you navigate through the nightly propaganda of America's most popular liberal network.

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Animal fables, jungle books, Aesopian tales were the discursive evidence of cross-species interaction that survived into modernity as children's literature. When the carceral replaced the domestic system, as the zoos, circuses, and laboratories became the primary site of interaction replacing the barnyard and the wild wood, the animals began to resist. Here are their hidden stories. Jason Hribal takes us behind the zoo scenes, the phoney exhibits, and cute displays to reveal an ugly economy of exploitation, international trafficking in exotic animals, over-work, cruelty in training, incessant and insolent teasing from the public. He chronicles the escapes, the assaults, the demand of food, and the refusals to reproduce that resulted. Here is animal resistance neither wild nor instinctual but responses to specific injustices. Single-minded, eccentric, and delightfully cranky, Hribal is the annalist non pareil of animal escape. With light but unforgiving misanthropy he carefully names the animals (the pachyderms - Jumbo and Tinkerbelle, the primates - Moe, Kumang, Little Joe, the sea lions, dolphins, and Orcas (Corky, Kasatka) while leaving the keepers, trainers, and showmen in shameful anonymity. From the escape of Tatiana, the Siberian tiger from the San Francisco zoo, to the latest orca killing Hribal relentlessly gathers the evidence to witness these risings of the creatures. &#8212Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto and The London Hanged Jason Hribal stacks up the evidence, and the conclusions are inescapable. Zoos, circuses and theme parks are the strategic hamlets of American's long war against nature itself. &#8212Susan Davis, author Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience Jason Hribal's Fear of the Animal Planet does a great service in chronicling the resistance of nonhuman animals against the multiplicity of human institutions of exploitation and oppression. It is a timely and vitally i

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Jason Hribal: Jason Hribal is an independent historian, who teaches in the field of adult education. He is the contemporary editor of John Oswald's 1791 classic, The Cry of Nature: An Appeal to Mercy and to Justice on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals (2000).

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