To begin this week’s show, Mickey welcomes back media scholar Nolan Higdon. They discuss his new podcast Disinfo Detox and recurring special feature “The Gaslight Gazette,” which analyzes current events and media coverage of them through a critical media literacy lens aiming to deconstruct deceptive media messaging. They also discuss legacy media’s failure to adequately cover Joe Biden’s physical and cognitive decline in the last election, which a new book co-authored by CNN’s Jake Tapper addresses. The authors shift blame from corporate media to the Democratic Party, without noting their own lack of in-depth coverage, even though there were stories published at the time in the independent press.

Later in the show Eleanor Goldfield and Mickey present another installment in their “Is This the Best We Can Do?” segment that analyzes the competency of current government appointees for the positions they fulfill. They examine recent cases of astonishing ignorance by two of Trump’s department heads, as well as the way Biden’s former State Department spokesman changed his story once out of office.

Nolan Higdon teaches in the Education Department at the University of California Santa Cruz campus. He’s also written extensively on media issues and is a frequent guest on the Project Censored Show.

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