I'm Susie Wiseman and this is Jacobin Radio. On today's podcast we listen to audio of an event I participated in earlier this month along with journalist Robert Sheer and Mark Cooper in a wide-ranging

discussion of media and democracy from the Vietnam War to the consolidation of alternative facts in the digital era, held at the Red Cat Theater in Los Angeles.

The panel culminated the exhibition Words of Others, Leon Ferrari, and rhetoric in times of war that used

journalism cut and spliced from the Vietnam War in the mid-60s to indict political practice

and the political rhetoric of the time at the beginning of the great rebellion of the 60s that ended in the mid 70s with the coup in Chile followed a year later by the ferocious repression under the Dirty War in Federis, Argentina.

I provide a background by looking at what was behind the social conflicts of these two periods,

the 60s, and the present, because looking at social

conflict and crises best reveals how society works when it isn't working.

Robert Sheer, renowned journalist and former editor of Ramparts, the great alternative magazine from

the 60s that Ferrari used for his work tells the story of Ramparts and provides an inside

look as no one else can of the way the war was conducted, including

the widespread secrecy and surveillance of the FBI in an attempt to crush dissent.

Journalist Mark Cooper looks at media delivery in the present

digital era of democratized information that has introduced new potential and new

dangers. He says the new curbs to the democratization of the media come from an abundance

of unfiltered information and fragmented consciousness. All this coming up on Jacobin

Radio.

All right, everybody can hear all right. Thank you.

This exhibit, I hope you've had a chance to see it, because Ferrari exhibits, it uses journalism

that's cut and spliced from the war in Vietnam.

In the mid-60s is an indictment of political practice

and the political rhetoric of the time.

...