By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

Ericalterman

Eric Alterman is one of the US’ most influential journalism academics. A Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism, Brooklyn College, City University of New York and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Alterman He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation, a fellow of the Nation Institute and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., where he writes and edits the “Think Again” column.

Eric Alterman was an identified member of JournoList – an email group of approximately 400 “progressive” and socialist journalists, academics and “new media” activists.

JournoList members reportedly coordinated their messages in favor of Barack Obama and the Democrats, and against Sarah Palin and the Republican Party in the 2008 election.

Alterman was also a protege and defender of radical journalist I.F. Stone. In the 1990s, information was released proving that Stone had been a paid Soviet agent. Eric Alterman called the Stone-KGB stories “smears,” “phony,” and “pathetic,” dismissing the whole contretemps as “an almost entirely bogus controversy over whether Stone ever willingly spied for the Russians or cooperated with the KGB in any way. He did not.”

A far leftist like his mentor Stone, Alterman was on the staff of the Guardian, a now defunct Maoist journal and a former affiliate of the far left Institute for Policy Studies, which had its own ties to Soviet intelligence in the 1970s and ’80s.

Eric Alterman also signed an April 2003 Statement on Cuba, initiated and circulated by prominent Democratic Socialists of America Marxist Leo Casey, calling for the lifting of trade sanctions against Cuba.

The petition criticized Cuba’s poor human rights record, but shared the blame for Cuba’s problems with reactionary elements of the U.S. administration…

The democratic left worldwide has opposed the U.S. embargo on Cuba as counterproductive, more harmful to the interests of the Cuban people than helpful to political democratization. The Cuban state’s current repression of political dissidents amounts to collaboration with the most reactionary elements of the U.S. administration in their efforts to maintain sanctions and to institute even more punitive measures against Cuba.

More here.