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Podcast for Saturday, November 29, 2008 [ 4:42:20 | 129.24 MB ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (285)

• Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. Chris spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is the author of the best selling “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” which was a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. He was also part of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Chris will be on to discuss his most recent columns at truthdig.org, “America’s Wars of Self-Destruction.”
• Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author, most recently, of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America. This week, she wrote the Nation article, “Obama Needs a Protest Movement.”
• journalist and author George Packer was on to discuss his latest story in the New Yorker, “The New Liberalism.” In that article, George writes, “Reagan couldn’t cancel Roosevelt’s legacy; Obama won’t be able to obliterate Reagan’s.” George’s most recent book is “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq” which came out in 2005.
• journalist Robert Parry, whose work can be found at ConsortiumNews.com, returns to This is Hell! In 1984, Bob won the prestigious Polk Award for National Reporting by breaking many of the Iran-Contra stories for Newsweek and The Associated Press. His recent columns include, “Obama, Ask the Kremlin about Gates,” “Iraq War Foes Get Short Shrift,” and “What Must Be Done Now!.”
• journalist, lecturer and media critic Jeff Cohen is the founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media and endowed chair/associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College. Jeff also founded FAIR, the national media watch group, launching FAIR’s magazine, Extra!, and their nationally-syndicated radio show, “CounterSpin.” Jeff formerly co-wrote – with past This is Hell! guest Norman Solomon – the nationally-syndicated Media Beat column. Jeff was Communications Director of the Kucinich for President campaign in 2003. Jeff also was a daily commentator on MSNBC in 2002, a weekly panelist on the Fox News Channel’s “News Watch” from 1997–2002, and a co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire” in 1996. He was senior producer of MSNBC’s Phil Donahue show until it was terminated on the eve of the Iraq war. His most recent book is “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media,” which you can buy through his web site. This week, Jeff wrote the article, “What Indy Media Heroes and History Can Teach Us.”
• BlackCommentator.com editorial board member Larry Pinkney writes the column “Keeping It Real.” Larry is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil/political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Larry will be on to discuss his two-part BlackCommentator piece entitled, “An Obama Presidency: More of the Same – Only Worse.” Here’s links to part one and part two. His most recent column is called, “Prepare for Repression, Subterfuge and Continuing Wars.”

Our irregular correspondents were:

• Dan “The Auto Man” Litchfield returned with a report on America’s beleaguered industry …
• and Kevan Harris, ‘The Radical Pessimist,’ was radically pessimistic.