Where's the Beef?

(original graphic here)

(Update below)

Over the past week or so there were some very important stories that somehow just didn't make it into the main NPR news shows:

• Georgia inmates organized a historic, peaceful multi-institutional strike and the best NPR could muster was a segment on Talk of the Nation that discussed the general topic of jobs in prisons.
• Senate Republicans essentially told seriously ill 9/11 first responders to go die, but it just wasn't terribly important to NPR. There was someone who did cover it, though.
• There was protest at the White House with over 130 people getting arrested. Those arrested included nobodies such as Daniel Ellsberg, some alleged Pulitzer Prize winner, a former CIA analyst, and war veterans. NPR's on-air response - yawn... Wait, it did get a mention from Mara Liasson who got out her trusty FOX converter and turned these 135 arrested citizens and noteworthies into anonymous "dozens."

Maybe I'm being a bit hard on NPR, after all there is only so much time in a broadcast and it's important to touch on the finer things in life like cappuccino ala Milton Friedman, $60 a bottle wine tasting with Scott Simon, and exciting mail-order gourmet meats (click the graphic at the top of the post) that will help a Tea Party crooner give money to groups like Focus on the Family. Oh baby, life is good!

To their credit, the NPR "Two Way" bloggers did have posts on the anti-war protest and on Pat Boone's creepy creds, but those posts were brief, and don't begin to compare with the exposure of featured, on-air news stories. Furthermore, as readers of this blog have pointed out, the online snippets and AP-wire feeds allow NPR to claim that they are covering news that they are essentially ignoring.

Update (12-23-10)

On Thursday morning, NPR covers the passage of the reduced First Responders bill and essentially ignores the media criticism of John Stewart's scathing episode against the non-coverage of the Republican attempts to kill the original Zadroga bill. It's really a brazen piece of hypocrisy and I'd recommend people to visit the story and post comments...

Prison Nation

ATC had a piece about Colorado agriculture using prison labor to make up for a shortage of seasonal workers. As I listened to the report I kept thinking that its not really fair to report on prison labor without contextualizing it in the current growth of the prison industrial complex and the horrific history of convict leasing.

A brief bit of searching will turn up some fascinating history such as this resource from Florida, the state I was born and raised in, or this general history of the practice. In fact, even NPR has covered convict leasing a few times in the past.

As far as the current prison system, it would have been interesting to hear from someone at Critical Resistance or the Prison Activist Resource Center which has a link to information on prison labor.