Reading the Media

Donna Haraway— of A Cyborg Manifesto fame, and one of today’s most recognized public intellectuals—reads National Geographic in this 1987 video. Interested in the ways meaning traffics between species, or rather, how meaning is made of images of interactions between species, Harraway looks into the case of Koko the gorilla, who was taught a variation of American Sign Language by her human keepers. How does the "cultured" gorilla come to represent universal man?, Haraway asks. How do relationships between human and non-human animals reveal how we think about ourselves? About gender, race, and class? Haraway untangles the web of meanings, tracing what gets to count as nature, for whom and when in this feminist journey through the anthropological junglescape.

With dry wit and unremitting intensity lawyer, actor, and activist Florynce “Flo” Kennedy investigates the way U.S. media acted in support of apartheid in South Africa through what it published (or didn’t) in this 1985 episode of Paper Tiger Television. Cutting together news media describing the “petty annoyances” of racism with accounts of militarized dispossession and other anti-Black projects of the apartheid regime, Kennedy showcases how the media uses a language of neutrality to obscure its ideological commitments.

Linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky discusses U.S. foreign policy towards Central America through deconstruction of an article published in The New York Times on the Nicaraguan conflict of the mid-1980s. By examining this article against the reality of the conflict, Chomsky illustrates propagandistic strategies which The New York Times, still perhaps the most regarded English-language newspaper, utilizes in order to support antidemocratic and often violent U.S. foreign policy towards Central America.

Vogue: It is glamour. It is excitement, romance, drama, wishing, dreaming, winning, success. The artist Martha Rosler is known today for, among other work, her videos exploring the semiotics of gendered labor and her collages restaging and interrogating scenes of American consumption, domesticity, and war. This 1982 episode of Paper Tiger Television itself has a collage-like structure, focusing on impressions, personal stories and, most provocatively, looking at Vogue's place in creating and recreating class power.

Historian, political philosopher, environmentalist, and anarchist Murray Bookchin demonstrates how Time magazine obliterates time in this 1982 episode of Paper Tiger Television.