Mark Crispin Miller


Mark Crispin Miller is professor of media studies at New York University.

Background and career

Miller graduated from Northwestern University with a BA in 1971, Johns Hopkins University with an MA in 1973, and a Ph.D. in 1977. His parents, Jordan and Anita Miller, founded Academy Chicago Publishers.
Miller is known for his writing on American media and activism advocating democratic media reform, his books include Boxed In: The Culture of TV, Seeing Through Movies, Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections, and Mad Scientists, a study of war propaganda.
In the introduction to Seeing Through Movies, Millerhe argues that the nature of American films has been affected by the impact of advertising. Miller has said that the handful of multinational corporations in control of the American media have changed the focus of youth culture away from values and more towards commercial interests and personal vanity.

Political and social commentary

In a June 2001 profile in The New York Times, Miller told Chris Hedges of his desire "to, as a public intellectual, take a fresh look at the news that we take in daily from TV, news that is astonishingly empty and distorts reality".
According to Miller's book, Fooled Again, the 2000 and 2004 U.S. Presidential election were stolen. Miller presents evidence supporting his contention that the outcome of both elections was altered and controlled by a small minority. He states that the American voting populace can no longer assume that their votes will be accurately assessed, and that the installation of electronic voting machines in state after state is a fundamental flaw in the U.S. electoral system. He appeared in the 2004 documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave, which focuses on the hidden mechanics of the media, its role as it should be and what it actually is, and how it shapes U.S. politics.
Miller is a 9/11 truther. and is a signatory to the 9/11 Truth Statement. Interviewed by the New York Observer website, Miller said anyone using the conspiracy theory description "in a pejorative sense is a witting or unwitting CIA asset". Following a "truthers" symposium on 9/11, "Justice in Focus", Miller told Vice the official explanations for 9/11 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy "are just as unscientific as the ones that everybody feels comfortable ridiculing", referring to conservatives dismissal of global warming. Miller shows his students the anti-vaccination film Vaxxed made by the disgraced physician Andrew Wakefield. He has defended the false claims made in Vaxxed of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and the assertion that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been involved in a cover-up.

Books

Miller's books include: