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Click here to download a free copy.May 19, 2005 | gregpalast.com
It's appalling that this story got out there," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on her way back from Iraq.
What's not appalling to Condi is that the US is holding prisoners at Guantanamo under conditions termed "torture" by the Red Cross. What's not appalling to Condi is that prisoners of the Afghan war are held in violation of international law after that conflict has supposedly ended. What is not appalling to Condi is that prisoner witnesses have reported several instances of the Koran's desecration.
What is appalling to her is that these things were reported. So to Condi goes to the Joseph Goebbels Ministry of Propaganda Iron Cross.
But I don't want to leave out our president. His aides report that George Bush is "angry" about the report-not the desecration of the Koran, but the reporting of it.
And so long as George is angry and Condi appalled, Newsweek knows what to do: swiftly grab its corporate ankles and ask the White House for mercy.
But there was no mercy. Donald Rumsfeld pointed the finger at Newsweek and said, "People lost their lives. People are dead." Maybe Rumsfeld was upset that Newsweek was taking away his job. After all, it's hard to beat Rummy when it comes to making people dead.
And just for the record: Newsweek, unlike Rumsfeld, did not kill anyone-nor did its report cause killings. Afghans protested when they heard the Koran desecration story (as Christians have protested crucifix desecrations). The Muslim demonstrators were gunned down by the Afghan military police-who operate under Rumsfeld's command.
Our secretary of defense, in his darkest Big Brother voice, added a warning for journalists and citizens alike, "People need to be very careful about what they say."
And Newsweek has now promised to be very, very good, and very, very careful not to offend Rumsfeld, appall Condi or anger George.
For their good behavior, I'm giving Newsweek and its owner, the Washington Post, this week's Yellow Streak Award for Craven Cowardice in Journalism.
As always, the competition is fierce, but Newsweek takes the honors by backing down on Mike Isikoff's expose of cruelity, racism and just plain bone-headed incompetence by the US military at the Guantanamo prison camp.
Isikoff cited a reliable source that among the neat little "interrogation" techniques used to break down Muslim prisoners was putting a copy of the Koran into a toilet.
In the old days, Isikoff's discovery would have led to congressional investigations of the perpetrators of such official offense. The Koran-flushers would have been flushed from the military, panels would have been impaneled and Isikoff would have collected his Pulitzer.
No more. Instead of nailing the wrong-doers, the Bush administration went after the guy who reported the crime, Isikoff.
Was there a problem with the story? Certainly. If you want to split hairs, the inside-government source of the Koran desecration story now says he can't confirm which military report it appeared in. But he saw it in one report and a witness has confirmed that the Koran was defiled.
Of course, there's an easy way to get at the truth. Release the reports now. Hand them over, Mr. Rumsfeld, and let's see for ourselves what's in them.
But Newsweek and the Post are too polite to ask Rumsfeld to make the investigative reports public. Rather, the corporate babysitter for Newsweek, editor Mark Whitaker, said, "Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges and so will we." In other words, we'll take the Bush administration's word that there is no evidence of Koran-dunking in the draft reports on Guantanamo.
It used to be that the Washington Post permitted journalism in its newsrooms. No more. But, frankly, that's an old story.
Every time I say investigative reporting is dead or barely breathing in the USA, some little smart-ass will challenge me, "What about Watergate? Huh?" Hey, buddy, the Watergate investigation was 32 years ago-that means it's been nearly a third of a century since the Washington Post has printed a big investigative scoop.
The Post today would never run the Watergate story: a hidden source versus official denial. Let's face it, Bob Woodward, now managing editor at the Post, has gone from "All the President's Men" to becoming the President's Man-"Bush at War." Ugh!
And now the Post Company is considering further restrictions on the use of confidential sources-no more "Deep Throats."
Despite its supposed new concern for hidden sources, let's note that Newsweek and the Post have no trouble providing, even in the midst of this story, cover for secret administration sources that are favorable to Bush. Editor Whitaker's retraction relies on "administration officials" whose names he kindly withholds.
In other words, unnamed sources are okay if they defend Bush, unacceptable if they expose the administration's mendacity or evil.
A lot of my readers don't like the Koran-story reporter Mike Isikoff because of his goofy fixation with Monica Lewinsky and Mr. Clinton's cigar. Have some sympathy for Isikoff: Mike's one darn good reporter, but as an inmate at the Post/Newsweek facilities, his ability to send out serious communications to the rest of the world are limited.
A few years ago, while I was tracking the influence of the power industry on Washington, Isikoff gave me some hard, hot stuff on Bill Clinton-not the cheap intern-under-the-desk gossip-but an FBI report for me to publish in The Guardian of Britain.
I asked Isikoff why he didn't put it in Newsweek or in the Post.
He said, when it comes to issues of substance, "No one gives a sh-," not the readers, and especially not the editors who assume that their US target audience is small-minded, ignorant and wants to stay that way.
That doesn't leave a lot of time, money or courage for real reporting. And woe to those who practice investigative journalism. As with CBS's retraction of Dan Rather's report on Bush's draft-dodging, Newsweek's diving to the mat on Guantanamo acts as a warning to all journalists who step out of line.
Newsweek has now publicly committed to having its reports vetted by Rumsfeld's Defense Department before publication. Why not just print Rumsfeld's press releases and eliminate the middleman, the reporter?
However, not all of us poor scribblers will adhere to this New News Order. In the meantime, however, for my future security and comfort, I'm having myself measured for a custom-made orange suit.
Greg Palast was awarded the 2005 George Orwell Prize for Courage in Journalism at the Sundance Film Festival for his investigative reports produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation. See those reports for BBC, Harper's, The Nation and others at www.GregPalast.com.
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THE WRONG sort of snow finally pushed Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow, over the edge. Enraged with Russia's hopeless weather forecasters, he has vowed to fine them for any more inaccurate, misleading or unreliable predictions. As reported in yesterday's Times, he admonished them in the following, memorable terms: "You are giving us bullshit."
On the other side of the world, Harry G. Frankfurt, the moral philosopher and professor emeritus at Princeton University, would have smiled sagely at that remark. After decades of exploration in the thorniest thickets of philosophy, he has just published a slim treatise entitled On Bullshit (Princeton University Press), an earnest intellectual inquiry into this most pungent and slippery of philosophical concepts. His short theory of bullshit is a testament for our times.
We all think we can identify bullshit. We know when we are talking bullshit ourselves, and we have all been guilty of it at times, in the pub or the pulpit, though some of us produce more than others. Politics thrives on bullshit, while lawyers, advertisers, public relations consultants and talk show hosts produce the stuff in its purest form. Very occasionally, columnists have been known to lapse into it. Every language in the world has a word for it. But what is bullshit? The concept is universally recognised, yet as Professor Frankfurt writes, "the most basic and preliminary questions about bullshit remain, after all, not only unanswered but unasked."
He begins, like all good philosophers, by defining what bullshit is not. Bullshit is dishonest, yet it is not necessarily mendacious. The bullshit artist may not tell you the truth (though he may do so inadvertently), but he is not deliberately lying. This is because bullshit cares nothing for truth or falsehood, accuracy or error, and that is its force and danger.
Both the liar and the honest man must have regard for truth, the former to subvert it and the latter to propagate it. Bullshit, by contrast, is fundamentally unconcerned with truth or falsehood, but only with appearance, effect and persuasion, however transitory. Yuri Luzhkov was not accusing the Moscow weather forecasters of lying, or yet of trying to predict the weather and honestly failing; he was accusing them of not caring about the true weather. The essence of bullshit is getting away with it, with persuading listeners or readers of a sincerity that is, by definition, phoney. The bullshit artist simply does not care about truth: "He pays no attention to it at all," writes Professor Frankfurt. "By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are."
Yet we tolerate bullshit, even though we feign to disregard it. Lies make us morally enraged; mistakes, even honest ones, are unacceptable. The politician or businessman who lies to us, or fouls up, must go; but he can bullshit us with almost perfect impunity. We shrug, we may even grin ruefully, but in our craven hearts we know we are being fed a bluff, on-the-hoof hokum, and we do not care.
Perhaps our ancestors were just as susceptible to bullshit, purveying it and accepting it, as we are. Indeed, as the late Ronald Bell, the Tory MP, once observed, "the connection between humbug and politics is too long established to be challenged." Yet bullshit has surely expanded as fast, if not faster, than the growth of communications generally. The internet is a natural septic tank for it. More than ever, public figures are required to opine on everything, even (and perhaps especially) when they have no idea what they are talking about. During the year when I was parliamentary sketchwriter, I cannot remember a single occasion on which an MP conceded ignorance on any subject whatsoever. Professor Frankfurt is clinical and devastating: "The production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic."
In a sense, the quest to define bullshit is the oldest one in the philosopher's book. Socrates himself explored the tension between rhetoric or sophistry, arguments intended to persuade regardless of whether they were true, and the deeper quest for understanding through philosophy. In this respect, it is worth noting that the term "bull", with a similar meaning, is probably far older, etymologically, than the modern bullshit: the original word seems to have come from the Latin bullire, to boil, bubble or froth. At its source, then, the term has nothing to do with barnyard excrement, but rather the appropriate evocation of pure hot air.
Bullshit makes quite good intellectual fertiliser. Indeed, the American term "bull session" means an occasion to bat around outrageous ideas without concern for accuracy. But cumulatively, and unchecked, bullshit undermines what Professor Frankfurt calls "the possibility of knowing how things really are". Improvised, instantly disposable pseudo-knowledge becomes more important than reality. In a culture where bullshit is endemic, political debate, intellectual argument and appeals for our money and our votes, are all judged on whether they are persuasive, rather than accurate, honest or realistic. Appearance becomes more important than objective fact; we hark to the purveyor of cogent humbug, and sceptically wonder whether anything is true.
If there is one aspect of Professor Frankfurt's thesis that does not go far enough, it is in exploring the distinctively public nature of the subject. Bullshit is not a private matter, but a display, deployed to convey a specific, positive impression to others, regardless of accuracy. It is, in essence, spin.
When Tony Blair says he is a "pretty straight kind of guy", he is implicitly asking his listeners to set aside notions of objective truth and believe in his sincerity. This has become the currency of our political culture. In a world of bullshit, truth seems unknowable, so we are asked to trust the persuasive authenticity of our leaders, who offer to be true, not to the facts, but to themselves. Yet human nature, moral philosophers agree, is impossible to know. In Professor Frankfurt's concluding words: "Our natures are elusively insubstantial . . . and insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit."
With the election we face a fresh torrent of sincerity; but at least the Moscow mayor and the Princeton philosopher have teamed up to prove that it is possible to cut the crap, and seize the bull by the horns.
Join the Debate
Send your e-mails to [email protected]
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February 26, 2005 | Consortiumnews.com
If one accepts George W. Bush's lecture to the Russians that democracy requires a free press unafraid to criticize national leaders, then what kind of political system exists in the United States where the news media seems so scared of Bush that it shies away from mentioning the president's autocratic tendencies?
For the American press, there appears to be no bigger taboo than against questioning Bush's sincerity when he presents himself as the grand promoter of democracy around the world.
Lost to history, apparently, is the moment in December 2000 when Bush joked that "if this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier so long as I'm the dictator." More substantively, that same month, Bush got five political allies on the U.S. Supreme Court to shut down vote counting in the key state of Florida and hand him the White House.
Bush seized that victory despite the fact that Al Gore got more votes nationally and apparently would have carried Florida and thus the Electoral College if all legal votes in the state were counted. [For details on the Election 2000 results, see Consortiumnews.com's "So Bush Did Steal the White House."]
Election 2004
In Election 2004, Bush's supporters took a number of actions designed to suppress the votes of African-Americans and other groups likely to favor Democratic challenger John Kerry. For instance, Democratic precincts in the pivotal state of Ohio were shorted on voting machines, creating long lines and preventing many voters from casting ballots.
Even now, Ohio Republican officials continue to battle appeals by citizen groups to investigate Nov. 2's election irregularities. A thorough investigation also could look at why so many ballots in Democratic precincts either didn't record votes for president or awarded them to obscure third-party candidates. [For a surprisingly skeptical view of Bush's Ohio victory, see Christopher Hitchens's article, "Ohio's Odd Numbers," Vanity Fair, March 2005.]
Before the election, Bush could have ordered Republicans in Ohio and elsewhere to desist from any voter suppression, but he didn't. Now, he could demand full cooperation with citizens trying to investigate what happened on Nov. 2.
But George W. Bush has never stood up for democratic principles when his personal power or his legitimacy could be put in doubt. The same could be said of his father. The Bushes seem to love democracy only when they are assured of winning. [See Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]
Even at times between presidential elections, George W. Bush has shown no interest in playing fair with Democrats. Most notably, he doesn't restrain his aggressive aides and ambitious supporters such as Karl Rove and Grover Norquist when they try to tilt the playing field permanently to the advantage of conservatives and Republicans. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush & the Rise of Managed Democracy."]
Bush was silent, too, when House Majority Leader Tom DeLay took extraordinary actions in Texas to gerrymander congressional districts with the goal of assuring continued Republican control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
War Debate
This hostility toward meaningful democracy carries over to policy debates. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, instead of encouraging a full and vigorous debate, Bush mocked anti-war demonstrators as a "focus group" and signaled his backers that it was okay to intimidate Americans who questioned his case for war.
So conservative pundits saw no problem in painting former weapons inspector Scott Ritter as a traitor when he objected to Bush's claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Bush backers organized a boycott of the Dixie Chicks because one of the group's singers criticized the president. Some Bush backers symbolically drove trucks over the group's CDs.
When actor Sean Penn lost work because of his Iraq War opposition, pro-Bush MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough chortled, "Sean Penn is fired from an acting job and finds out that actions bring about consequences. Whoa, dude!"
As justification for depriving Penn of work, Scarborough cited a comment that Penn made while on a pre-war trip to Iraq. Penn said, "I cannot conceive of any reason why the American people and the world would not have shared with them the evidence that they [Bush administration officials] claim to have of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." [MSNBC transcript, May 18, 2003]
With Bush's quiet backing, the president's supporters also denigrated skeptical U.S. allies, such as France by pouring French wine into gutters, and U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix for failing to find WMD in Iraq in the weeks before the U.S. invasion. CNBC's right-wing comic Dennis Miller likened Blix's U.N. inspectors to the cartoon character Scooby Doo, racing fruitlessly around Iraq in vans.
At no time publicly did Bush urge his followers to show reasonable respect for Iraq War critics. It was all-hardball-all-the-time, a message not lost on news executives as they fell in line behind the administration's WMD rationale for war.
MSNBC made an example of war critic Phil Donahue by booting him off the network as it competed with Fox News to see which cable news channel could wave the flag more enthusiastically. The Washington Post editorial page dropped all sense of professionalism when it referred to Iraq's supposed possession of WMD stockpiles as fact, not allegation.
As it turned out, of course, the Iraq War critics were right. Bush's claims about Iraq's WMD turned out to be bogus, as even Bush's arms inspectors David Kay and Charles Duelfer concluded in reports written after the invasion.
Notably, however, none of the pundits and journalists who got the Iraq War rationale wrong paid with their jobs. Indeed, some top journalists who fell for Bush's false claims, such as Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, not only continue to thrive but still lambaste those who don't show sufficient enthusiasm for Bush's Iraq policies. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Washington's Ricky Proehl Syndrome."]
No Accountability
Virtually the entire Washington press corps seems to recognize that it's not allowed to suggest that Bush is a hypocrite when he wraps himself in the cloak of democracy.
That was true again during Bush's Second Inaugural Address, which used the words "freedom" and "liberty" over and over again. The sincerity behind the speech drew little or no skepticism from the mainstream press despite Bush's post-Sept. 11, 2001, assertion of nearly unlimited executive power.
In the so-called "war on terror," Bush has asserted the right to detain U.S. citizens without trial once he labels them "enemy combatants." Administration lawyers also have argued that Bush can waive legal restrictions on torture. Meanwhile, Muslims in the United States have complained about discriminatory prosecutions based on flimsy evidence and extraordinary secrecy.
Still, the Washington press corps never challenges Bush when he lectures other countries about democracy as he did in Russia on Thursday, Feb. 24. The only doubt expressed gently by the White House press corps was that perhaps Bush didn't confront his friend Vladimir Putin very strenuously over Russia's democratic shortcomings.
At a joint Bush-Putin press conference, Bush was taken at face value when he described the unalterable principles of democracy as the "rule of law and protection of minorities, a free press and a viable political opposition" even though his record arguably shows that he doesn't accept any of the four.
Bush also portrayed himself as a good example of a political leader who can't get away with hiding his mistakes.
"I live in a transparent country," Bush said. "I live in a country where decisions made by government are wide open and people are able to call people [like] me to account, which many out here do on a regular basis. I'm perfectly comfortable in telling you, our country is one that safeguards human rights and human dignity."
Got Jobs?
One Russian questioner challenged Bush on the issue of press freedom, apparently referring to pressure that Bush's conservative supporters have brought to bear on U.S. news organizations to oust journalists who have criticized Bush.
"Why don't you talk a lot about violation of rights of journalists in the United States, about the fact that some journalists have been fired?" the questioner asked.
Bush responded with a joke, which played to the U.S. journalists in the room.
"Do any of you all still have your jobs?" Bush joshed, adding: "People do get fired in American press. They don't get fired by government, however. They get fired by their editors or they get fired by their producers or they get fired by the owners of a particular outlet or network.
"Obviously there's got to be constraints. I mean, there's got to be truth. People've got to tell the truth. And if somebody violates the truth and those who own a particular newspaper or those who are in charge of a particular electronic station need to hold people to account."
What neither Bush nor Putin addressed, however, is the common reality of how their two systems work, using pressure from their political allies to influence the decision about whether a journalist is fired for making a mistake or gets a free pass.
So, on one hand, an accomplished journalist like former CBS producer Mary Mapes is shown the door for not adequately checking out a purported memo about Bush shirking his National Guard duty. On the other hand, a Bush ally like the Washington Post's Hiatt keeps his prestigious job despite buying into Bush's false Iraq WMD claims.
The key difference was that powerful voices in the conservative media demanded the head of Mapes, who months earlier had broken the Abu Ghraib sexual abuse scandal. There was no comparable pressure for punishing journalists, such as Hiatt, who had violated journalistic rules by treating a disputed claim Iraq's WMD as a settled fact.
The double standard was even more glaring since the facts contained in the questionable Bush-Guard memo were true, while the assertions about Iraq's WMD were not only false but have contributed to the deaths of nearly 1,500 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis. [For more on these media double standards, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Bush Rule of Journalism."]
Still, Bush was clearly right at Thursday's press conference when he declared that a free press "is an important part of any democracy" and that "the sign of a healthy and vibrant society is one where there's an active press corps."
But the opposite would seem to hold equally true: that the timidity of the U.S. press corps in holding Bush accountable is a sign that American democratic institutions are neither vibrant nor healthy.
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Intervention Magazine War, Politics, Culture
An unscripted, off the cuff, unflattering remark about the President's agenda or policies can cost a journalist his job.
On the February 11th PBS "News Hour," host Jim Lehrer darkly cautioned syndicated journalist Mark Shields to "watch your metaphors, please," after Shields made an allusion to the Kool Aid that the Rev. Jim Jones used to kill his followers at the Jones Town colony in Guyana, decades ago.This is just another troubling example of journalists being told to watch their mouths when criticizing the President.
Lehrer's Stern Warning
The Lehrer-Shields dialogue went like this:
Lehrer was talking with conservative columnist Richard Lowry and Mark Shields of the Washington post about President George W. Bush's recent campaign to "sell" his Social Security plan to the public. Lehrer asked Lowry about the effectiveness of Bush's "selling his crisis message on Social Security." Lowry said that Republican support in the House of Representatives "firming up" and Bush would win if some Democrats would come on board.
Lehrer then asked Mark Shields what he thought.
JIM LEHRER: Mark?
MARK SHIELDS: It's a great screenplay. It's a great screenplay. It really is. The president spending political capital. Rich is right. Jim, we can't call them town hall meetings. They aren't town hall meetings; they're pep rallies, they're pre-selected. You can't get in there unless you've signed on, unless you've drunk the Kool-Aid and said you're totally with the president. So these are not town meetings.
JIM LEHRER: [sternly] Watch your metaphors, please!
MARK SHIELDS: [defensively] It really is. They're pep rallies. And I think Rich is absolutely right. The president is behind the eight ball on this politically.
This was on PBS, the American citizens' television station. I was witnessing the chillingly tragic consequence of the Bush Administration's attempts at public mind control.
This dawned on me because I'd just returned to the 'States' after having spent three weeks working on a project in recently freed Eastern Europe. The irony of this is that pre-Cold War communist countries were repeatedly accused by American leaders of brain washing their people, of using state-sponsored propaganda, and a plethora of other approaches to public mind control. Now, the Bush Administration had successfully accomplished with subtlety what the Soviet Union had been unable to do with its heavy handed approach.
In Bush's world, American journalists must be careful of what they think -- and especially say when their comments are carried on the airwaves.
CNN's News Chief Loses Job After Comments on Iraq War
Think I'm exaggerating? The very same day as Lehrer warned Shields on PBS about "watching his metaphors," The New York Times reported, "CNN News Chief Quits Following Controversial Remarks." This underscored what not saying nice things about the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq can lead to.
CNN's Chief News Executive Eason Jordan quit Friday, February 11, 2005, amid a furor over remarks he had made at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last month about journalists killed by the U.S. military in Iraq. During a panel discussion, Jordan had said that he believed several journalists who had been killed in Iraq by coalition forces that included American troops had been targeted. That did it. Soon Jordan was made to recant.
"I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise," he said in a memo to CNN staff members.
So apparently it is forbidden for American journalists to dare imply that Bush's army in Iraq may have targeted journalists.
Jordan was speaking at what was initially a very mild panel discussion titled "Will Democracy Survive the Media?" The flap came after Jordan said that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience.
The discussion was moderated by David R. Gergen, Director for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. The panel included Richard Sambrook, the worldwide director of BBC radio, U.S. Congressman Barney Frank, Abdullah Abdullah, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Afghanistan, and Eason Jordan. The audience was a mix of journalists, World Economic Forum attendees, and a US Senator from Connecticut, Chris Dodd.
Jordan, an advocate for protections for journalists overseas, was responding to a comment by Congressman Frank that the 63 journalists killed in Iraq were collateral damage. CNN previously reported that most of the journalists were killed by anti-U.S. forces but that the Pentagon has acknowledged killing some journalists accidentally.
However, one witness at the Davos meeting, a Florida businessman named Rony Abovitz, said he was shocked by Jordan's initial claim and asked him to prove it.
"I was quite surprised, especially by his passion for what he was saying," Abovitz wrote in an entry detailing Jordan's comments on a blog from the World Economic Forum. "I thought that this was a huge story, very damning to the U.S., if true."
Abovitz said that others in the room, including Sen. Christopher Dodd, and Rep. Frank, joined in the debate, which became heated before being broken off. But Abovitz, who co-founded a medical technology company in Hollywood, Fla., said that he felt obliged to blog it after realizing that others weren't going to report on it.
Abovitz, who has been deluged by requests for interviews, said both the right and the left have used this as a way of moving their agendas forward. But he said that wasn't his intention.
"My real interest is in this concept of transparency, accountability and objective fairness in media," Abovitz wrote. "These were values discussed at the WEF, and right in front of my eyes they were being put to a serious test."
"Due to the nature of the forum, I was able to directly challenge Eason, asking if he had any objective and clear evidence to backup these claims, because if what he said was true, it would make Abu Ghraib look like a walk in the park. David Gergen was also clearly disturbed and shocked by the allegation that the U.S. would target journalists, foreign or U.S. He had always seen the U.S. military as the providers of safety and rescue for all reporters.
"Eason seemed to backpedal quickly, but his initial statements were backed by other members of the audience (one in particular who represented a worldwide journalist group). The ensuing debate was (for lack of better words) a real 'shit storm.'"
Intensifying the issue was the fact that the session was a public forum attended by a U.S. Congressman and a U.S. Senator that was presented in front of an international crowd, and was being broadcast,
However, Rebecca MacKinnon, describing herself as a recovering TV reporter-turned-blogger, posted the following comments in her article "Blogstorm Descending on CNN" at the Captain Ed Weblog (2/2/05). Writes Mackinnon:
"Right-wing blogs, including Little Green Footballs, have moved their sights from CBS to CNN. At the center of the blogstorm are comments made by my former boss Eason Jordan at Davos, in which he alleged that the U.S. military had been targeting journalists in Iraq."
Mackinnon continues,
"The official WEF summary does not mention Eason's remarks, and there is no transcript or webcast. But I was in the room and Rony's account is consistent with what I heard. I was also contributing to the Forumblog, but to be honest, Jordan happens to be my former boss who promoted me and defended me in some rather sticky situations after my reporting angered the Chinese government.
"As CNN's 'senior statesman' over the years, Eason has done some things I agreed with and other things I wondered about. But at least when it came to China, he was no apologist and defended my reports on human rights abuses and political dissent."
CNN Backs Jordan, Sort Of, With Too Little, Too Late
On February 7, 2005, CNN finally responded to the allegations that Jordan had committed an irresponsible act of journalistic "misconduct" in Davos, Switzerland:
"Many blogs have taken Mr. Jordan's remarks out of context. Eason Jordan does not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists. Mr. Jordan simply pointed out the facts: While the majority of journalists killed in Iraq have been slain at the hands of insurgents, the Pentagon has also noted that the U.S. military on occasion has killed people who turned out to be journalists. The Pentagon has apologized for those actions. Mr. Jordan was responding to an assertion by Cong. [Barney] Frank that all 63 journalist victims had been the result of 'collateral damage'."
Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin blogged her follow-up on this story after speaking with Rep. Barney Frank (who reiterated Jordan's fateful words at Davos) and with David Gergen, who had moderated the panel discussion.
According to Gergen (who has known Jordan for 20 years), Jordan had, in fact, said that journalists in Iraq had been targeted by military "on both sides." Jordan then "realized as soon as the words had left his mouth that he had gone too far" and "walked himself back."
Gergen told Malkin that he asked Jordan point blank whether [or not] he believed the policy of the U.S. military was to sanction the targeting of journalists. According to Gergen, Jordan answered no, but then proceeded to speculate about a few incidents involving journalists killed in the Middle East -- a discussion which Gergen decided to close down because "the military and the government weren't there to defend themselves."
Thus, in Gergen's account, Jordan did not appear to have "walked himself back" far enough for Gergen to think it appropriate for the discussion to have continued.
But in Bush's New World Order, by February 7, 2005, seasoned journalist Jordan had already been driven from his newsroom -- permanently. So then the issue is not simply whether or not journalists are targeted in Iraq by American troops, which is still unresolved. Rather, today's issue is that American journalists who open their mouths and don't follow some kind of ideological line are targeted at home. For a free and democratic society, that should be frightening.
Frederick Sweet is Professor of Reproductive Biology in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. You can email your comments to[email protected]
Posted Friday, February 18, 2005
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02-23-2005 | Tallahassee Democrat
SPECIAL TO THE MIAMI HERALD
The news media got an unusual bashing during last year's bitter electoral campaigns. They got slapped around from all sides, and everybody argued about how the media tried either to undermine Bush or discredit Kerry or both.
Still, it's never clear why some media wrongs are made into a big deal while others slip by. Take the CBS "60 Minutes" report on Bush's military nonservice: The story itself was old, the dubious evidence was of dubious importance, and the broadcast had no discernible effect. It became a major scandal anyway.
On the other end of the scale is an instance of clear-cut media wrongdoing that involved unquestionably fraudulent evidence and had dramatic consequences. This one, however, has gone largely unremarked. It is the famous incident involving Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean that is known as The Dean Scream.
And with Dean's recent appointment as Democratic Party chairman it's being hauled out as constituting the ceiling on whatever political ambitions he might still have, proof that he's shaky, unstable, unfit to serve - Howard Dean's Chappaquiddick.
You've seen the clip. After Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl, it's the most famous news video of 2004. Dean is addressing campaign supporters after he lost the Iowa party caucuses in January. He's screaming for no apparent reason, practically shrieking, ticking off the states where he's vowing to continue the race. His face is red, his voice breaking. He looks deranged. It's a portrait of a man out of control. It's documentary evidence that Dean lacks the temperament for high office.
In fact the Dean Scream was a fraud, probably the clearest instance of media assassination in recent U.S. political history.
Last year, a young cable news producer attended one of our twice-yearly Ethics Institutes at Washington and Lee University, in which students and journalists gather to discuss newsroom wrongdoing. He brought two clips.
The first was the familiar pool footage of Dean in Iowa. The candidate filled the screen, no supporters were visible. Crowd noise was silenced by the microphone he held, which deadened ambient sounds. You saw only him and heard only his inexplicable screaming.
The second clip was the same speech taped by a supporter on the floor of the hall. The difference was stunning. The place was packed. The noise was deafening. Dean was on the podium, but you couldn't hear him. The roar from his supporters was drowning him out.
Dean was no longer scary, unhinged, volcanic, over the top. He was like the coach of a would-be championship NCAA football team at a pre-game rally, trying to be heard over a gym full of determined, wildly enthusiastic fans. I saw energy, not lunacy.
The difference was context. As psychiatrist R.D. Laing once wrote: We see a woman on her knees, eyes closed, muttering to someone who isn't there. Of course, she's praying. But if we deny her that context, we naturally conclude she's insane.
The Dean Scream footage that was repeatedly aired rests on a similar falsehood. It takes a man who in context was acting reasonably, and by stripping away that context transforms him into a lunatic.
But that clip was aired an estimated 700 times on various cable and broadcast channels in the week after the Iowa caucus. The people who showed that clip are far more technically sophisticated than I and had to understand how tight visual framing and noise-suppression hardware can distort reality.
True, some network news executives commented afterward that perhaps the footage was overplayed and offered the bureaucrat's favorite bromide, that hindsight is 20/20. But the media establishment has never acknowledged this as a burning matter of ethical harm.
That's because the Dean Scream incriminates the entire professional mission of television news, which is built around the primacy of the picture. TV producers don't profess to offer meaning and context; they get you the visuals, unless they're gory or obscene. The notion that great footage would be not shown just because it's profoundly misleading - that's a possibility few TV news executives would entertain.
That's why they're not eager to see the Dean Scream enter the canon of journalistic sin. And if that leaves Howard Dean's political future hobbled by a lie, so be it.
Edward Wasserman is Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University. He wrote this column for The Miami Herald. Contact him at [email protected].
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February 20, 2005 | The Observer
The reporter who wasn't is part of a wider press scandal, writes Paul Harris in New York
For two years Jeff Gannon cut an unobtrusive figure at White House press conferences. The shaven-headed, craggily handsome man worked for an obscure news agency called Talon News, known for its conservative sympathies. He was often the subject of jokes by colleagues on weightier news organisations.
No one is laughing now, because Gannon was far from being a harmless distraction. He was writing under a false name and working for a Republican front organisation. Suddenly, his 'softball' questions to White House officials looked less like eccentricities and more like plotting by an administration which has frequently displayed a dark mastery of the arts of press control.
When it emerged that Gannon was also linked to gay prostitution websites and might be a gay prostitute himself, the scandal as to how he was allowed daily access to the White House grew even murkier. The American media is now being forced to confront the possibility that Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, was simply a Republican plant, used by officials, including President George W Bush, to ask easy questions in difficult press conferences. 'The idea of having a mole in the White House press corp is amazing, but that's what it looks like,' said Jack Lule, a journalism professor at Lehigh University.
But the Gannon affair, which has shocked much of America's political establishment, is just the latest scandal in the media establishment. Newspapers including the New York Times and USA Today have been hit by plagiarism and forgery scandals. Other papers and television stations have been consumed with a soul-searching inquest into how they were misled about non-existent Iraqi weapons programmes. Added to that is growing evidence of a White House campaign to bypass or control the media in its everyday presentation of government policy , which included paying one journalist hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote its policies.
Last week a federal watchdog warned the Bush administration that any video news releases must state that the government is the source. Twice in two years, government departments have been accused of distributing fake news packages, using actors as journalists.
On the internet, the mainstream media is derided and scorned. One question is dominating US newsrooms and television studios: ignored, scandalised and now corrupted, just what is America's mainstream media for anymore?
The extent of the Bush White House's command and control of the press corps is often revealed in the seemingly innocuous White House pool reports. These are dispatches dutifully filed by a correspondent assigned to travel with Bush and contain little but lists of endless meetings, meals eaten and clothes worn. But no detail is too small to be ignored by Bush's ever-watchful press handlers. One report, on 13 August 2004, contained a remark from Bush that it was a 'good question' as to who to support if Iraq's soccer team played the United States in the Olympics. Officials scurried to 'correct' it. 'To clear up any possible misconception ... the president would of course support the American soccer team in any hypothetical game with Iraq,' a new report said. 'The initial report should have done more to reflect the exchange was mainly in jest.'
Such micromanagement has been a hallmark of the Bush White House and its all-powerful policy guru, Karl Rove. Added to that has been what appears to be a concerted effort to subvert the mainstream media.
Administration officials were recently revealed to have paid three senior journalists to promote or design policies. More than $240,000 of taxpayers' cash was paid to black pundit Armstrong Williams to push the agenda of Bush's education department. Critics were blunt in their assessment of what Armstrong's contract with the government meant. 'It is propaganda,' said Melanie Sloan of watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics.
At the same time, Bush has held fewer Washington press conferences than any of his modern predecessors, while courting local media, such as small city newspapers, which are perceived as easier to steamroll. During last year's election campaign Bush avoided interviews with leading newspapers, such as the Washington Post , but frequently invited reporters from smaller swing state publications to speak with him on Air Force One. Vice-president Dick Cheney took the strategy one step further and banned New York Times reporters from travelling with him.
The media has not helped its own case. First, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was found to have plagiarised numerous stories. The incident cost Blair his job, forced the editor to resign and was the subject of fevered Manhattan dinner party chatter for months. Then USA Today 's top foreign reporter, Jack Kelley, was discovered to have fabricated stories from around the world and invented interviews and witnesses from Cuba to Jerusalem.
Right-wing media ratcheted up the long-standing conservative complaint that the media is dominated by liberal publications. Though many journalism experts deny that is the case, the image has settled in the American consciousness, forcing newspapers, magazines and television stations to go out of their way to prove they are not liberal. 'We have a conservative media and also a mainstream media, which is also now fairly conservative because it has been forced to deny being liberal,' said Lule.
The Gannon case is a prime illustration. If, during the Clinton administration, a fake reporter from a Democrat front organisation, using a false name, had been exposed as attending White House press conferences it would have been a national scandal. If he had then been shown to be a gay prostitute, the scandal could have threatened a Democrat presidency. With 'Gannon' and Bush there has been no such outcry. The mainstream media has approached the story warily, while right-wing organisations such as Fox News have largely ignored it.
That has created a vacuum in the US media. It is a space being filled by 'bloggers' from both left and right who write personal journals, or weblogs, on the internet. It is here that the real media battles are now being fought. The internet has become a sort of Fifth Estate as the Fourth Estate of the mainstream media has slid toward irrelevance. The groundwork was done mainly by the right. Internet gossip hound Matt Drudge, whose Drudge Report is a key source for every American political journalist, struck the first blow with his breaking of the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Since then a plethora of right wing blogs have sprung up. Unlike Britain, where political blogs are barely part of the debate, internet sites in America are seen as a vital political tool. Conservative bloggers have taken two big scalps recently. Last year bloggers questioned the veracity of a CBS news report on Bush's National Guard service. They dumped enough doubt on the story to cause four CBS reporters to lose their jobs, tarnish the reputation of legendary anchor Dan Rather and insure that the substance of the CBS story - whether Bush fulfilled his service - never emerged as an election issue.
Last week, CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, resigned after an internet campaign prompted by his claim that American soldiers targeted journalists in Iraq. Though Jordan said that his remarks had been misinterpreted, the bloggers' revenge was so vehement he ended his 23-year CNN career. One anti-Jordan website, Easongate.com, crowed openly when he quit: 'To every reader, commentator, e-mailer and blogger that committed to this cause, thank you.'
The left has also had victories. It was not the mainstream media that exposed Gannon, but left-wing website Media Matters for America which enlisted other liberal bloggers to help. All the significant breaks in the story emerged online, forcing Gannon to resign, reveal his real name and go into hiding.
Some commentators see the emergence of blogging as a media force as a liberating phenomenon. Unlike the mainstream media, blogging is cheap, easy and open to anyone regardless of qualification or background or money. 'Blogging gives a voice to those who were previously silent,' said Ananda Mitra, a communications professor at Wake Forest University.
Others see it as part of the trend towards partisan journalism. Spearheaded by the nakedly right-wing Fox News, journalism in America has come to resemble a political shouting match rather than any form of debate of the issues. But with soaring viewership, Fox has emerged as one of the most powerful forces in the media landscape. Other networks, such as CNN and MSNBC, have sought to copy Fox's personality-led and opinion-based news.
The media is in the midst of a transformation which the Bush administration is keen to foster. They have discovered that a partisan and atomised media can be controlled, manipulated and used to an unprecedented degree.
It is a lesson that liberals are also learning. In answer to the talk radio of Rush Limbaugh - one of America's most popular and conservative commentators - liberal groups have set up Air America. Defying the critics, it has established itself as a left-wing radio network every bit as ruthless in skewering its opponents' points of view as its right-wing equivalents. In answer to right-wing television, former presidential candidate Al Gore is rumoured to be seeking backers to finance a liberal television network. Now both sides are equally ready and willing to use any means necessary to tear the other apart. The old-fashioned mainstream media is disappearing. 'Once that pattern is put in place, it is going to be hard to break,' said Lule.
How the media shot themselves in the foot
A series of scandals have not helped the American media's reputation and its struggle for independence.
New York Times
Reporter Jayson Blair was fired and the newspaper's editor forced to resign after Blair was found to have plagiarised numerous stories.
USA Today
Foreign reporter Jack Kelly was discovered to have invented stories, interviews and witnesses from around the world.
CBS
Four reporters lost their jobs and the reputation of legendary anchor Dan Rather was tarnished after doubts were cast on a news report of Bush's National Guard Service.
CNN
Chief news executive Eason Jordan resigned his 23-year career after he claimed that American soldiers had deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq.
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Feb 06, 2005 | Wired News
WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon's chief investigator is looking into the military's practice of paying journalists to write articles and commentary for a website aimed at influencing public opinion in the Balkans, officials said Friday.
At the request of Larry Di Rita, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon's inspector general, Joseph Schmitz, is reviewing that case and also looking more broadly at Pentagon activities that might involve inappropriate payments to journalists.
Di Rita said he had no reason to believe any inappropriate activities had taken place but wanted a comprehensive review to "help ensure our processes are sufficiently sensitive to this matter." He stressed that the web projects are done in close coordination with the State Department.
The Balkans website, called Southeast European Times, as well as a second aimed at audiences in north Africa, have no immediately obvious connection to the U.S. government but contain a linked disclaimer that says they are "sponsored by the U.S. European Command." That is the military organization based in Germany responsible for U.S. forces and military activities in Europe and parts of Africa.
The second site, called Magharebia and aimed at the Maghreb region that encompasses Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, is still in development and has not reached the stage of having paid correspondents, said Air Force Lt. Col. Derek Kaufman, a European Command spokesman.
Both sites carry news stories compiled from The Associated Press, Reuters and other news organizations. The Pentagon's role in these websites was first reported by CNN on Thursday.
The Balkans website also has articles and commentary by about 50 journalists who Kaufman said are paid by European Command through a private contractor, Anteon, an information technology company based in Fairfax, Virginia.
The websites are examples of what the military calls "information operations," or programs designed to influence public opinion by countering what the Pentagon considers to be misinformation or lies that circulate in the international news media. The Pentagon's use of the websites has raised questions about blurring the lines between legitimate news and what some would call government propaganda.
The Balkans site grew out of the U.S. air war against Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in 1999, Kaufman said. It sought to counter what U.S. officials considered a Serb propaganda machine that made effective use of the internet.
The site aimed at north Africa was started in October 2004 and is a new "weapon" in the global war on terror.
"This specifically is trying to reach a youthful audience that is potentially ripe for extremist messages and terrorist recruitment," Kaufman said. "It's very much an effort to provide a voice of moderation, but it's not disinformation. Every printed word is the truth."
Di Rita said in an interview Friday that he approves of the effort to present information to counter anti-American internet material, but he wants to make sure it is done properly and transparently. He said he first learned of the Southeast European Times site last week.
Kaufman said information warfare experts at European Command do not edit the stories written by contributing journalists for Southeast European Times, but they "review" the stories after they are processed by Anteon editors, and they sometimes change the headlines. He cited as an example a proposed headline that originally read, "Croatian Prime Minister Remembers Holocaust Victims," which European Command changed to "Croatian Prime Minister Remarks on Dangers of Extremism," which Kaufman said "more closely reinforced" the U.S. message.
About 50 paid correspondents contribute to Southeast European Times, including one American journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Kaufman said. Another European Command spokesman, Air Force Maj. Sarah Strachan, said many of the journalists work primarily for news organizations, although she said the details of those employers could not be provided for privacy reasons.
Kaufman said the journalists are paid according to the number of words in their articles that are approved for posting on the website, at a rate set by Anteon.
In a letter Thursday to the Pentagon inspector general, Di Rita asked for a comprehensive review in light of recent disclosures that other government agencies paid journalists to promote administration policies.
"I have no reason to believe there might be a problem," Di Rita wrote, but he said a review was called for in view of the Defense Department's size and its complex budgeting structure.
Without mentioning him by name, Di Rita alluded to the case of commentator Armstrong Williams, who was hired by the Education Department -- through a contract with a public relations firm -- to produce ads that featured former Education Secretary Rod Paige and promoted President Bush's No Child Left Behind law. Two other cases of columnists being paid to help promote administration policies have come to light in recent weeks, and Bush said Jan. 26 that the practice must stop.
"It would be most helpful to review activities going back six to eight years, as I assume many existing relationships have continued for that many years or longer," Di Rita wrote, noting the Southeast European Times operation. "It would be appropriate to review that activity and others like it."
It was not clear Friday whether other U.S. military commands have similar website operations. Navy Capt. Hal Pittman, the chief spokesman at Central Command, responsible for U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, said, "We're reviewing the utility of this kind of website."
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In a media saturated democratic society like the US, the relationship between the media and those who govern it is both intimate and complex. Presidents are elected because they know how to present their message in the media and how to manipulate and control media.
In many ways, elections have become media contests. There is still the effort to energize and organize voters on Election Day. But a significant component of electoral politics has become the candidate's efforts to establish a media-driven message. In some instances this involves tens of millions of dollars in evocative paid advertising. In others, it involves carefully constructed events, designed solely for their media impact.
In all cases, candidates seek to gain control of how their image and message is projected, while at the same time attempting to put themselves in the position of defining their opponent's image and message.
In this era of all-pervasive media, examples of the above are plentiful. Jimmy Carter was no match for that master of the media, Ronald Reagan. George Bush devastated Michael Dukakis because he succeeded in defining him as a weak liberal.
Similarly, while riding high with his popularity as victor of the Gulf War, Democrats took advantage of Bush's delay in beginning his re-election campaign and succeeded in defining him as a "failed president" who, while winning foreign wars, ignored domestic economic needs.
Clinton, like Reagan, was a master of the media. Time and again, he successfully used it define himself and his message to overpower and drown out competing messages.
In instances where Clinton could not overcome the preponderance of negative press instigated by the Republican-led House and Senate, harped on by ideologically motivated right-wing commentators and then echoed by more mainstream media, the White House would go around the national media and give local press, starved for "exclusives," direct access to the president.
George W. Bush did much the same during his two campaigns for president. When plagued by reports of "not so youthful" indiscretions, or reporting on his failed policies, Bush gave himself to local media outlets casting himself as "a regular guy," a man of character and resolve, fighting Washington politics and the "Washington media."
Contemporary presidents have learned that the media has to be mastered not only to be elected, but to govern. Reagan, for example, escaped a humiliating withdrawal from Lebanon, following the devastating attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut with a quick victory in Grenada. Clinton, fairly or not, was accused of much the same with the surprise attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan.
George H.W. Bush's conduct during the Gulf War is probably the most successful example of this point. For months after deploying a substantial force in the Arabian Gulf, the president and his spokespeople consistently maintained that the forces were there only to "defend and deter."
Meanwhile, the administration worked slowly but steadily built public support for future action. In September of 1990, the US public was not prepared for an assault on Iraq or a substantial effort to liberate Kuwait. Different messages were tried and tested daily, the public's reactions to these messages were examined and evaluated. There was an observable shift in public attitudes during the next four months. This media-driven public relations campaign worked. By the time the war actually began, the public was ready and Congress supportive.
Similarly, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the second Bush administration used the power of the presidency and the public's insecurity resulting from 9/11 to move a pliant national media to build the campaign for war.
The media was, in all these instances, managed in the service of policy and governing, and did not play an independent role in examining administration campaign efforts. As I've noted earlier, too often, media merely "records and reports" what government officials say and does not search for the truth. In fact, only when major dissident voices were raised did the media cover "the other side" and then, in a "he said-she said" format. Thus it was, in the lead-up to the Iraq war, that only after "quotables" like former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft spoke out, or when former Vermont Governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean built a bottom-up campaign in opposition to the war, were serious questions about Iraq policy raised in the mainstream media.
These challenges have been further fed by new questions that are now being asked, now that stubborn Iraqi realities have defied the administration's fantasy scenario about the war's successes. The administration's response to all of this has been vigorous and sustained. They have denigrated opponents, preyed on fear and relied on patriotic fervor, and managed an effective counter media campaign effort to win the day with public opinion - at least for now.
And so it is that while technically free of government influence, US media is nevertheless profoundly influenced by political and governmental factors. And the interrelationship of political, cultural and commercial consideration combine to make the US media more responsive to these pressures and as a result less free and less inquisitive.
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The observant will have noticed that we hear little from the troops in Iraq and see almost nothing of the wounded. Why, one might wonder, does not CNN put an enlisted Marine before a camera and, for 15 minutes without editing, let him say what he thinks? Is he not an adult and a citizen? Is he not engaged in important events on our behalf?
Sound political reasons exist. Soldiers are a risk PR-wise, the wounded a liability. No one can tell what they might say, and conspicuous dismemberment is bad for recruiting. An enlisted man in front of a camera is dangerous. He could wreck the governmental spin apparatus in five minutes. It is better to keep soldiers discreetly out of sight.
So we do not see much of the casualties, ours or theirs. Yet they are there, somewhere, with missing legs, blind, becoming accustomed to groping at things in their new darkness, learning to use the wheelchairs that will be theirs for 50 years. Some face worse fates than others. Quadriplegics will be warehoused in VA hospitals where nurses will turn them at intervals, like hamburgers, to prevent bedsores. Friends and relatives will soon forget them. Suicide will be a frequent thought. The less damaged will get around.
For a brief moment perhaps the casualties will believe, then try desperately to keep believing, that they did something brave and worthy and terribly important for that abstraction, country. Some will expect thanks. But there will be no thanks, or few, and those quickly forgotten. It will be worse. People will ask how they lost the leg. In Iraq, they will say, hoping for sympathy, or respect, or understanding. The response, often unvoiced but unmistakable, will be, "What did you do that for?" The wounded will realize that they are not only crippled, but freaks.
The years will go by. Iraq will fade into the mist. Wars always do. A generation will rise for whom it will be just history. The dismembered veterans will find first that almost nobody appreciates what they did, then that few even remember it. If-when, many would say-the United States is driven out of Iraq, the soldiers will look back and realize that the whole affair was a fraud. Wars are just wars. They seem important at the time. At any rate, we are told that they are important.
Yet the wounds will remain. Arms do not grow back. For the paralyzed there will never be girlfriends, dancing, rolling in the grass with children. The blind will adapt as best they can. Those with merely a missing leg will count themselves lucky. They will hobble about, managing to lead semi-normal lives, and people will say, "How well he handles it." An admirable freak. For others it will be less good. A colostomy bag is a sorry companion on a wedding night.
These men will come to hate. It will not be the Iraqis they hate. This we do not talk about.
It is hard to admit that one has been used. Some of the crippled will forever insist that the war was needed, that they were protecting their sisters from an Islamic invasion, or Vietnamese, or Chinese. Others will keep quiet and drink too much. Still others will read, grow older and wiser-and bitter. They will remember that their vice president, a man named Cheney, said that during his war, the one in Asia, he "had other priorities." The veterans will remember this when everyone else has long since forgotten Cheney.
I once watched the first meeting between a young Marine from the South, blind, much of his face shot away, and his high-school sweetheart, who had come from Tennessee to Bethesda Naval Hospital to see him.
Hatred comes easily. There are wounds and there are wounds. A friend of mine spent two tours in Asia in that war now little remembered. He killed many people, not all of them soldiers. It is what happens in wars. The memory haunts him. Jack is a hard man from a tough neighborhood, quick with his fists, intelligent but uneducated-not a liberal flower vain over his sensitivity. He lives in Mexican bars few would enter and has no politics beyond an anger toward government. He was not a joyous killer. He remembers what he did, knows now that he was had. It gnaws at him. One is wise to stay away from him when he is drinking.
People say that this war isn't like Vietnam. They are correct. Washington fights its war in Iraq with no better understanding of Iraq than it had of Vietnam, but with much better understanding of the United States. The Pentagon learned from Asia. This time around it has controlled the press well. Here is the great lesson of Southeast Asia: the press is dangerous, not because it is inaccurate, which it often is, but because it often isn't. So we don't much see the caskets -for reasons of privacy, you understand.
The war in Iraq is fought by volunteers, which means people that no one in power cares about. No one in the mysteriously named "elite" gives a damn about some kid from a town in Tennessee that has one gas station and a beer hall with a stuffed buck's head. Such a kid is a redneck at best, pretty much from another planet, and certainly not someone you would let your daughter date. If conscription came back, and college students with rich parents learned to live in fear of The Envelope, riots would blossom as before. Now Yale can rest easy. Thank God for throwaway people.
The nearly perfect separation between the military and the rest of the country, or at least the influential in the country, is wonderful for the war effort. It prevents concern. How many people with a college degree even know a soldier? Yes, some, and I will get e-mail from them, but they are a minority. How many Americans have been on a military base? Or, to be truly absurd, how many men in combat arms went to, say, Harvard? Ah, but they have other priorities.
In 15 years in Washington, I knew many, many reporters and intellectuals and educated people. Almost none had worn boots. So it is. Those who count do not have to go, and do not know anyone who has gone, and don't interest themselves. There is a price for this, though not one Washington cares about. Across America, in places where you might not expect it-in Legion halls and VFW posts, among those who carry membership cards from the Disabled American Veterans-there are men who hate. They don't hate America. They hate those who sent them. Talk to the wounded from Iraq in five years
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A spin cycle out of control
By Daniel Schorr
WASHINGTON Washington these days feels a little like Moscow in Soviet times when the government routinely dispensed information to the public and the public routinely didn't believe it. The two main newspapers were the Communist Party organ, Pravda, (Truth) and the Soviet government organ, Izvestiya (News). People used to say, "There is no Izvestiya in Pravda and no Pravda in Izvestiya."
For three years our leaders told us that Iraq for sure had weapons of mass destruction ... well, pretty sure ... well, maybe. One war later, after scouring the countryside, the government admits that there weren't any such weapons. If President Bush were to go on TV one of these days and say that Iran has developed a nuclear bomb, requiring American action, who would believe him?
On a less momentous scale, who can believe TV news reports when they may turn out to be government-financed videos? Have you ever seen the report on the drug benefits of the Bush Medicare act that ran on 40 local TV stations, complete with the "out-cue": "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting"? The Department of Health and Human Services paid her to play the role of reporter. Or, did you see the report on the antidrug campaign produced by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, narrated by nonjournalist Mike Morris?
Or, more recently, the TV and newspaper comments of Armstrong Williams, praising the Bush No Child Left Behind education act, bought with $240,000 of Education Department money?
Education Secretary Rod Paige, shocked, says he is ordering an investigation of "perceptions and allegations of ethical lapses."
Appropriation bills often contain a prohibition on the use of taxpayer money for government propaganda. That has certainly been violated many times. Would it be too much to require that these pseudo-news reports at least reveal the source of their funding? If people knew it came from the government, they might not believe it.
How did we ever get to this point?
Journalism's vacation from the truth
One day after Tucker Carlson, the co-host of CNN's "Crossfire," made his farewell appearance and two days after the network's new president made the admirable announcement that he would soon kill the program altogether, a television news miracle occurred: even as it staggered through its last steps to the network guillotine, "Crossfire" came up with the worst show in its 23-year history.
.This was a half-hour of television so egregious that it makes Jon Stewart's famous pre-election rant seem, if anything, too kind. This time "Crossfire" was not just "hurting America," as Stewart put it, by turning news into a nonsensical gong show. It was unwittingly, or perhaps wittingly, complicit in the cover-up of a scandal.
.I do not mean to minimize the CBS News debacle and other recent journalistic outrages at The New York Times and elsewhere. But the Jan. 7 edition of CNN's signature show can stand as an exceptionally ripe paradigm of what is happening to the free flow of information in a country in which a timid news media, the fierce (and often covert) Bush administration propaganda machine, lax and sometimes corrupt journalistic practices, and a celebrity culture all combine to keep the public at many more than six degrees of separation from anything that might resemble the truth.
.On this particular "Crossfire," the featured guest was Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, talk-show host and newspaper columnist (for papers like The Washington Times and The Detroit Free Press, among others, according to his Web site).
.Thanks to investigative reporting by USA Today, he had just been unmasked as the frontman for a scheme in which $240,000 of taxpayers' money was quietly siphoned to him through the Department of Education and a private public relations firm so that he would "regularly comment" upon (translation: shill for) the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind policy in various media venues during an election year.
.Given that "Crossfire" was initially conceived as a program for tough interrogation and debate, you'd think that the co-hosts still on duty after Carlson's departure might try to get some answers about this scandal, whose full contours, I suspect, we are only just beginning to discern.
.But there is nothing if not honor among bloviators.
."On the left," as they say at "Crossfire," Paul Begala, a Democratic political consultant, offered condemnations of the Bush administration but had only soft questions and plaudits for Williams. Three times in scarcely as many minutes Begala congratulated his guest for being "a stand-up guy" simply for appearing in the show's purportedly hostile but entirely friendly confines. When Williams apologized for having crossed "some ethical lines," that was enough to earn Begala's benediction: "God bless you for that."
."On the right" was the columnist Robert Novak, who "in the interests of full disclosure" told the audience he is a "personal friend" of Williams, whom he "greatly" admires as "one of the foremost voices for conservatism in America." Needless to say, Novak did not have any tough questions, either, but we should pause a moment to analyze this "Crossfire" co-host's disingenuous use of the term "full disclosure."
.Last year Novak had failed to fully disclose - until others in the press called him on it - that his son is the director of marketing for Regnery, the company that published "Unfit for Command," the Swift boat veterans' anti-Kerry screed that Novak flogged relentlessly on CNN and elsewhere throughout the campaign. Nor had he fully disclosed, as Mary Jacoby of Salon reported, that Regnery's owner also publishes his subscription newsletter ($297 a year).
.Nor has Novak fully disclosed why he has so far eluded any censure in the federal investigation of his outing of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, while two other reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time, are facing possible prison terms in the same case. In this context, Novak's "full disclosure" of his friendship with Williams is so anomalous that it raised many more questions than it answers.
..
That he and Begala would be allowed to lob softballs at a man who may have been a cog in illegal government wrongdoing, on a show produced by television's self-proclaimed "most trusted" news network, is bad enough. That almost no one would notice, let alone protest, is a snapshot of our cultural moment, in which hidden agendas in the presentation of "news" metastasize daily into a Kafkaesque hall of mirrors that could drive even the most earnest American into abject cynicism. But the ugly bigger picture reaches well beyond "Crossfire" and CNN.
.Williams has repeatedly said in his damage-control press appearances that he was being paid the $240,000 only to promote No Child Left Behind. He has also routinely said that he made the mistake of taking the payola because he was not part of the "media elite" and therefore didn't know "the rules and guidelines" of journalistic conflict-of-interest.
.His own public record tells us another story entirely. While on the administration payroll he was not only a cheerleader for No Child Left Behind but also for President George W. Bush's Iraq policy and his performance in the presidential debates. And for a man who purports to have learned of media ethics only this month, Williams has spent an undue amount of time appearing as a media ethicist on both CNN and the cable news networks of NBC.
.He took to CNN last October to give his own critique of the CBS News scandal, pointing out that the producer of the Bush-National Guard story, Mary Mapes, was guilty of a conflict of interest because she introduced her source, the anti-Bush partisan Bill Burkett, to a Kerry campaign operative, Joe Lockhart. In this Williams's judgment was correct, but grave as Mapes's infraction was, it isn't quite in the same league as receiving $240,000 from the United States Treasury to propagandize for the Bush campaign on camera.
.Williams also appeared with Alan Murray on CNBC to trash Kitty Kelley's book on the Bush family, on CNN to accuse the media of being Michael Moore's "P.R. machine" and on Tina Brown's CNBC talk show to lambaste Stewart for doing a "puff interview" with John Kerry on "The Daily Show" (which Williams, unsurprisingly, seems to think is a real, not a fake, news program).
.But perhaps the most fascinating Williams TV appearance took place in December 2003, the same month that he was first contracted by the government to receive his payoffs. At a time when no one in television news could get an interview with Dick Cheney, Williams, of all "journalists," was rewarded with an extended sit-down with the vice president for the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a nationwide owner of local stations affiliated with all the major networks.
.In that chat, Cheney criticized the press for its coverage of Halliburton and denounced "cheap shot journalism" in which "the press portray themselves as objective observers of the passing scene, when they obviously are not objective."
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The Excellence in Journalism project has been going on for five years. Having analyzed nearly 24,000 spots aired by 172 TV channels, researchers came to the conclusion that channels owned by small companies produce better quality news shows than those controlled by larger companies; they also display more daring and ingenuity. But even they rarely risk taking on the role as an enlightener: This does not pay. As a result, the majority of Americans know very little about what is going on in the world or about the world itself for that matter.
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David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine lacks the insights of Thomas Frank's book, but it provides a gossipy history of the rightwing takeover of the US media. Brock is unfair to some people, myself included, and mischaracterizes as rightwing some media personalities who are under rightwing attack.
Brock is as blindly committed to his causes as the rightwing zealots he exposes are to theirs. Unlike Frank, he cannot acknowledge that the rightwing has legitimate issues.
Nevertheless, Brock makes a credible case that today's conservatives are driven by ideology, not by fact. He argues that their stock in trade is denunciation, not debate. Conservatives don't assess opponents' arguments, they demonize opponents. Truth and falsity are out of the picture; the criteria are: who's good, who's evil, who's patriotic, who's unpatriotic.
These are the traits of brownshirts. Brownshirts know they are right. They know their opponents are wrong and regard them as enemies who must be silenced if not exterminated.
Some of Brock's quotes from prominent conservative commentators will curl your toes. His description of the rightwing's destruction of an independent media and the "Fairness Doctrine" explain why a recent CNN/Gallup poll found that 42% of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 terrorist attack on the US and 32% believe that Saddam Hussein personally planned the attack.
A country in which 42% of the population is totally misinformed is not a country where democracy is safe.
[Oct 14, 2004] Tamotsu Shibutani Obit On August 8, 2004, Tamotsu (Tom) Shibutani died quietly in his sleep from heart failure at age 83. He greatly contributed to the understanding mass disinformation with his work Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (1966). His famous first book, Society and Personality (1961) became a major success and was translated into Russian and Spanish. In it he identified three distinct definitions for the concept of reference group: groups that serve as points of reference, groups to which we aspire; and groups whose perceptions are assumed by the individual or "actor". A set of reference groups is closely related to an individual's "significant others" - those who are directly responsible for the internalization of norms . Shibutani first used the concept of reference group as a tool to explain inconsistent and contradictory behavior typical for most people. He noted "The inconsistency in behavior as a person moves from one social context to another is accounted for in terms of a change in reference groups..."
Shibutani also examined social status in reference groups. An individual's behavior is therefore directly related to the actual or anticipated reactions of the group for which he or she is performing. What's less expected, however, is the fact that many people may assume opinions and perspectives of groups with which they've never directly interacted, and which may, in fact, not even exist. To illustrate, Shibutani uses the example of individuals striving to improve their status. He says these individuals are more motivated by the thoughts and actions of persons in the social strata to which they aspire to than the opinions in the group to which they belong. Many people attempt to live up to the standards of social circles to which they aspire through the various media of mass communication. He stated that "There are as many reference groups for each person as there are communication channels in which he participates".
On August 8, 2004, Tamotsu (Tom) Shibutani died quietly in his sleep from heart failure at age 83. Tom wrote several very influential books and his contributions to sociology are immeasurable. Although his intellect was impressive, he was a humble man, giving unstintingly to others while assiduously avoiding the limelight. We have lost one of sociology's stellar contributors.
Tom was born in Stockton, California, in 1920, as the only child of two first-generation Japanese immigrants. For many, the American Dream is for children of immigrants to take advantage of a free public education and reach positions of respectability, and Tom did. He entered Stockton Junior College at age 18, where he was deeply impressed with John Dewey's work, and he became a pragmatist for the rest of his life. At the age of 20, Tom transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he further broadened his intellectual horizons. As Tom finished his undergraduate degree, W.I. Thomas and Dorothy Thomas (his mentors) encouraged him to enter graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he found Louis Wirth's courses to be especially impressive, along with courses from Everett Hughes, Herbert Blumer, and others.
During World War II, Tom spent two years in the Army, and then continued his education at Chicago on the GI Bill. (Later we wrote The Derelicts of Company K [1978] to reveal the absurdities he experienced during the war.) He earned his Ph.D. in 1948 and was given an instructorship at the University of Chicago. In 1951, Tom moved to the University of California at Berkeley and began to synthesize many of the ideas he had been developing for years. His famous first book, Society and Personality (1961) became a major success and was translated into Russian and Spanish. The book presents a conceptual scheme developed from the work of Dewey, Mead, and the Chicago School.
In 1961, Tom came to the University of California at Santa Barbara and began working with Kian M. Kwan on ethnic relationships. Together they published Ethnic Stratification in 1965, presenting a theory based on data drawn from around the world, covering 5000 years of history. Extensive data support their conclusion that most ethnic groups that initially experience hostility eventually learn to live with each other over time.
Tom's next book, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (1966), demonstrated that rumors are not merely the result of faulty communication. In ambiguous situations, people often respond like pragmatic problem-solvers, pooling their intellectual resources-which include accurate data, guesses, beliefs, speculation-constructing consensus from whatever sources that are available. Since much of life is filled with ambiguity, this book is of much greater importance than is suggested by describing it as a study of rumor. Many of the most crucial personal, group, governmental and international decisions have to be made with inexact information. The increasingly rapid pace of social and environmental change necessitates increasingly rapid decision making amidst a flood of information, making the study of collective information processing in ambiguous situations critical.
Social Processes (1986) reflects the sophistication of a maturing scholar in synthesizing macro and micro theoretical perspectives. This book blends Tom's expertise in social psychology with observations about whole social systems to generate empirically testable propositions for solving many problems of current social interest.In 1984 Tom was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1998 he was honored with the George Herbert Mead Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.
Tom loved grappling with ideas and writing, saying of his own work: "The pragmatic search for answers to questions is not always an orderly process. Side projects have frequently intruded that disrupted current projects. Some of these looked like they could be handled in several months or a year; but took five or ten or fifteen years to complete." This is why Tom has a succession of different books on disparate subjects and different areas of specialization. When asked why he has written few articles, he replied: "The books say it all."
Tom is survived by his wife, Sandra, along with countless friends, colleagues and former students. He is greatly missed for his wise and caring ways, which leave wonderful memories for all of us who knew him.
The Village Voice Nation ON Desperadoes by John Powers
In dissecting the debates, Fox has proved far shrewder than the fair-and-balanced squads at CNN, whose hedging liberal commentators make Kerry look as blunt as a cudgel, and out there on MSNBC, that small, nearly invisible planet where Joe Scarborough has his own country and front man Chris Matthews keeps imploding from his own hollow enthusiasm. While most of America was bored into a coma by Cheney's debate with Edwards, Matthews' panel of pundits (with the honorable exception of Ron Reagan) rushed to declare the vice president a knockout winner, oohing and aahing over his authoritative presence, chiding the yapping Edwards' "inexperience," and trying to predict which of Cheney's magisterial putdowns would make history's show-reel. They were blissfully unaware that, back here on Earth, Edwards was thought to have earned at least a tie, if not an outright victory, and Cheney's supposedly devastating gibe about never having met his opponent before that night's debate would promptly be exposed as a rhetorical flourish, er, lie. Roll tape, Brian Williams!
As usual, MSNBC's post-debate analysis revealed nothing about the event in question but spoke eloquently about its commentators' values. The scary truth is not that this ship of fools is manned by clandestine right-wingers (indeed, Scarborough flaunts his red neck as if it were filet mignon), but that Matthews and reporter Andrea Mitchell are depressing exemplars of the professional ethos of those who've spent too long inside the Beltway. Where most of America rightly recoils from guys like Cheney-a run-to-fat version of The Simpsons' Mr. Burns-this mean, paternalistic macher fills pundits with awe. (To be sure, Andrea's well-trained: She shares her marital bed with Alan Greenspan.) Bedazzled by the vice president's hushed tones and bureaucratic machinations, they view him with the cowed reverence Hollywood types once showed industry puppet master Lew Wasserman. Me, I wonder how anyone can be so wowed by the "experience" of a man who had two separate cracks at Iraq-a dozen years apart-and managed to get it wrong both times.
September 6, 2004 Guardian Unlimited Special reports Writing the script for terror Peter Preston, The Guardian Media-makers must defuse these weapons of mass hysteria
... For the difficult, inescapable thing, watching those pictures, is an eery feeling of manipulation. Somebody planned this and reckoned the cameras would be there. Take a panning shot of Middle School No 1, go in close on the gym, frame the fleeing children from handy roof tops and let's see plenty of greenery, let's make Beslan like downtown Smallville or Littlehampton. We seemed to look down on a leafy stage set for carnage; and someone knew we would be watching.
Perhaps, in another life, that someone might have found other uses for his talents: orchestrating Republican conventions or the backdrops at Brighton next month. He could have been super spin doctor, feted and interviewed. But instead, in the service of Chechnya, he sat alone in a darkened room and thought hard.
What kind of outrage makes world news these days? Those early al-Qaida bomb blasts in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi seem pretty outdated now to be honest, just big bangs with loads of dead, no pictures beyond more destruction. Who cares about blowing holes in ships or trains? The wonder of 9/11 was the pictures, the twin towers toppling. Play it again, Sam. Osama had made No 1.
How do you follow that? By seizing a Moscow theatre, maybe, by making a stage your stage. Putin couldn't pretend that wasn't happening; the curtain rose on his front doorstep. But the trouble was that the theatre doors were locked, that the cameras couldn't peer inside. You had to rely on imagination - on the thought that this could be Broadway or the West End - and it wasn't enough. You needed a brand new wheeze.
Politicians and their intelligence advisers, of course, are always wittering on about WMD. They read Tom Clancy and multiply the threat because that's their particular obsession. It is what seems real to them. But why bother hitting Wall Street, or even Walsall, with hi-tech trappings when there are so many easier pickings on offer?
Beslan, North Ossetia. What kind of dateline is that? An obscure town near the Chechen border. A suitable target for infiltration, no nuclear scientists required. Just take a school hostage and see what happens.
Hostage-taking on a grand scale means time, among other things: time for the camera teams to arrive, time for the crisis and pressure to build. Will Putin give in? He can't. It would be the end of him. So it will all come to slaughter and bitter tears. But he'll have to let CNN, BBC and the rest see what happens if he wants to make this terrorism international. And then the world will, too, see what we Chechens can do.
Someone, that someone, wrote the script. Someone with despair in his heart calculated how it would work out - and break from behind the borders of control that stop us seeing what happens inside Chechnya. Someone wanted to put his case on the international map. Mission accomplished.
And for his next trick? An old peoples' home, a nursery, a hospital? There is no limit to the targets that may be chosen by terrorists who expect to die but know that they will make a splash in the process. There is no limit to the soft touches that cannot be anticipated or defended. Frontiers are meaningless, because pictures have no frontier. Fear needs no visa.
Two bleak things follow. One is that - whether or not it exists on any organised level - we shall gradually come to identify a force called international terrorism, a force defined not by the coordination of its strikes or creeds but by the orchestration of its inhuman propaganda. I manipulate, therefore I exist.
The other thing is self-knowledge for media-makers and media-watchers. If the malignant message is itself a device, a weapon of mass hysteria, how do we defuse it? By a suppression that undermines free society, that gives terror its victory? Or by the realisation that we are not puppets, that we must see and explain for ourselves. That we have a duty of understanding.
[Sept 26, 2004] Boston Globe - Opinion - Op-ed - A hidden hand By Ed Fouhy Television is the only medium of journalism in which there is a hidden hand behind some of the journalism that reaches the screen.
AT ITS BEST journalism is supposed to be a search for truth. As the scandal at CBS News has shown again, however, television network news organizations have for too long tolerated a system of deceptive reporting about who is the real author of the journalism that viewers see on their screens. The world is now aware that it was Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer, who found, wooed, and received documents from Bill Burkett, the former Texas National Guard officer who now cannot authenticate those documents. It was the anonymous Mapes, not the anchor star Dan Rather, who was the real journalist behind the Bush National Guard documents story. According to The
Washington Post , Rather had little involvement in reporting the story; Mapes wrote the script, and he read it.The situation in which CBS News now finds itself is not very different from earlier scandals at NBC, where a newsmagazine producer wired a truck to heighten a simulated gas tank explosion, or CNN, where a team of producers collaborated on "Tailwind," a story from the Vietnam War whose sources recanted after the broadcast. Peter Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, later said he had no role in reporting the story despite the fact that it was he who presented it on the air. He later left the network.
Television is the only medium of journalism in which there is a hidden hand behind some of the journalism that reaches the screen.
Network television, unfortunately, has not been straight with its audience. Oh, sure, there are a few programs that grudgingly put the story producer's name on the screen for a few seconds, notably the Sunday edition of "60 Minutes," long the gold standard for newsmagazine journalism. But how many viewers are aware that the producer whose name appears over Dan Rather's shoulder was, in all likelihood, the journalist who originated the story idea, researched and reported it, found and preinterviewed the sources who appear on camera, and may have thought up the questions the star correspondent asked in the on-camera interview seen by home viewers? Behind that practice is the firm if untested belief that the audience is so gullible that it believes on-camera news stars are able to do well-reported, well-produced stories, often investigative pieces involving hundreds of hours of tough reporting and digging, and still show up every week or every night looking tanned, rested, and well tailored.
Economics is at the heart of the deception. Top correspondents have, for the last two decades, been able to command salaries that are more consistent with the compensation paid entertainers than the more modest salaries earned by most journalists, a generally underpaid lot.
Corporate bosses who sign the stars' paychecks can be forgiven if they want their luminaries on screen as often as possible. News executives have done a poor job of explaining to their bosses that investigative journalism is tedious, exhausting work. So they hire aspiring journalists who are willing to work for less and won't demand on-screen credit. Most are first-rate professionals who labor tirelessly but anonymously.
Network stars compound this deception by their willingness to play along, to take credit for the work behind the story they are fronting for. Who wouldn't enjoy the public acclaim, the adoring autograph seekers, the black tie awards dinners that attend the role of fearless journalist despite the fact the deception is known to their colleagues, if not to the public? But now that system has turned on Rather, a lightning rod for Republicans since the Nixon days. They won't be satisfied until he's gone, but his resignation would not cure the credibility problem created by this increasingly outdated system sure to come under more intense fire by the artillery of bloggers.
POLITICAL AMAZON The Great American Polling Fraud
Currently academic demands on my time preclude me from spending much time on political research. However, the use of bogus polls to manipulate Americans (especially voting Americans) is one of my hot-button issues. So, out of curiosity, I evaluated the information I could easily find regarding the poll quoted and--once again--found that the poll's methodology was flawed, and the results in question for bias.
This has been an ongoing problem for years, and I believe it is the #1 fraud being perpetrated upon Americans. Many news media, polling groups, and special-interest groups (including political candidates' campaigns) fund, support and/or reference polls that are obviously flawed.
So, despite the demands on my time and increasingly limited cranial resources, I have allotted enough to do a brief overview and give a few examples.
I hope that another political activist, with more time than I have currently available, will be able to pick up the standard and carry forth the expose on The Great American Voting Fraud, perhaps by starting a daily analysis of the polls, to document the bogus polls being used to manipulate America's voters.
If nothing else, reading 20 Questions A Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results , and keeping them on hand so you can assess a poll/analysis for validity, and then sharing the information with your friends, will be a great start towards distributing the tools we need to stop the media's manipulation of Americans.
... ... ...
We see and hear about polling results all the time. On CSPAN, the American Enterprise Institute represents frequently support their opinions by nebulous poll references ("Polls show that....," without ever giving specifics regarding the poll being referenced). Political candidates either crow about, or try to ignore, poll results, depending on whether the polling numbers are "good" or "bad" for the candidate. Talking-head pundits (in all types of media, from TV, to radio, to internet websites) frequently reference an unidentified poll's results to "prove" their point. And all over the internet, posters on message boards slavisly follow poll results, and post them as if they are the alpha and the omega in evaluating a political candidate or issue.
However, many poll producers--whether out of ignorance or dishonest intent--conduct polls which are either so unscientifically--or dishonestly--constructed that the polling results are absolutely worthless in predicting anything about an upcoming election.
The vast majority of the time it takes a great deal of effort to verify that a poll whose results are referenced in the media was actually conducted in a way that would produce valid results, and that the journalist's article/analysis of the poll is valid. This is far more time than the average American voter has to verify that the American media to which they read, watch or listen is giving them accurate information.
The fact that polls have become one of the dominant features in news coverage of campaigns and elections, the fact that referenced polls are often very difficult to find for assessment of their validity, and the fact that so many polls are worthless or fraudulent, put the American voters at great risk for being manipulated by those referencing the polls to vote, or act, in a way that benefits those quoting the polls.
LA Weekly Columns On Kitty Galore The Bush Dynasty and media hypocrites by John Powers
Being every bit as low-minded as the next media whore, I raced through Kitty Kelley's The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty in search of the nasty factoids that Kelley always serves up like so many canapйs. Who wouldn't love the idea that, back in college, Laura Bush was "the go-to girl for dime bags of marijuana"? It explains that gaga smile.
Like the aging Madonna (currently pursuing kabbalistic truth in Israel, accompanied, it seems, by less evolved bodyguards), Kelley is a master at shaping pop iconography. Only this assisted-blond dynamo doesn't reinvent her own image: She works on the famous and powerful. Once Kelley has finished exposing some celebrity's feet of mud, you never see him or her in the same way again. What she can't change is the way mainstream media see her. They blame her salaciously readable biographies for helping fix the template of our tabloid era.
These days, going after a populist rabble-rouser like Kelley - how dare such a vulgarian impinge on sacred journalistic turf! - is how the media elite proves itself high-minded, nonpartisan, and unsullied by the incessant coverage of Scott Peterson and Michael Jackson. That's why it's plunged itself into an orgy of hypocrisy over her latest book, milking the very lurid material it pretends to find appalling. Predictably, Michiko Kakutani, the O-Ren Ishii of book reviewers, cut The Family to ribbons in The New York Times. Yet lest we think the Gray Lady somehow clueless or snobby, the paper just as predictably took care to run a long "Home & Garden" piece about Kelley's Georgetown sanctuary by Bush-coddling-reporter-turned-restaurant-critic Frank Bruni. Her books sell like hotcakes, after all.
For several days, the diminutive author was seemingly everywhere - up at dawn talking to Matt Lauer on Today, sharing afternoon delight with Chris Matthews on Hardball, then spending a NewsNight with Aaron Brown. A normal person who tuned in to these interviews might have expected to learn all sorts of fascinating details about the powerful clan that has produced two of our last three presidents and, if all goes according to plan, will inaugurate a third in 2008 (although I suspect that smooth, pretty-boy Jeb can't handle body shots any better than Oscar de la Hoya). But rather than ask about our first family, all these big-name interviewers behaved as if The Family wasn't about the Bushes but actually about Kitty Kelley. Just as reasonable questions about George W. Bush's National Guard service have been swallowed up by bickering over typefaces and superscripts (nice work, Gunga Dan), so Kelley spent her airtime being grilled about her use of rumors and unnamed sources. You would think the president wasn't claiming the election was about "character."
While the Kelley interviews all covered roughly the same territory, each offered its own special whiff of self-aggrandizement and corruption. Looking as if he'd just escaped from some gulag for the formerly handsome, Matt Lauer went after Kelley - for three straight days - armed with talking points he'd gotten from the White House's Dan Bartlett. The prosecution took a different tack at MSNBC. Winston Churchill once said that the Germans are always at your throat or at your feet. Perhaps taking this as a compliment, the great Churchillian Chris Matthews spent the first half-hour of last Wednesday's Hardball all but throttling Kelley, quoting passages from her book and asking her to defend them with ashen-faced grimness. Then, having proved his hard-balled integrity, he spent the rest of the hour kowtowing to Seymour Hersh, a great investigative reporter who also uses unnamed sources - and on subjects far more important than doing coke at Camp David. Matthews showed so much more respect for Hersh, you had to wonder why he opened the show with Kitty. Actually, you didn't.
Lauer and Matthews appeared untroubled about attacking Kelley's book while exploiting it to boost their ratings. Not so CNN's Aaron Brown, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale of television news. Brown clearly realizes that 24-hour cable news has become a trough for sleaze, yet his agonized conscience never stops him from shoveling in more slop, albeit with a heavy sigh. While he treated Kelley more courteously than either Matthews or Lauer did - if Aaron has any vanity, it's that he's a mensch - he also refused to address what she was saying about Bush family values. Instead, he ruefully stitched a scarlet G on her chest for dealing in gossip - you know, the kind of rumor, innuendo and speculation that runs on CNN every day of the week as "news."
Happily, Kelley is no Hester Prynne, and she faced her prosecutors with remarkable sang-froid, confident that she was telling undeniable truths about the Bushes that the supposedly respectable press is unwilling or afraid to reveal. A scandalmonger of the old school, she even vaunted all the lawyers who okayed her work. The more she talked, the more she resembled a successful society madam explaining the facts of life to a puritanical young D.A. who wants to save society by closing the local whorehouse. You may think I'm low, Kelley's whole manner said, but it's amazing how many of your colleagues use my services. Perhaps you've done so yourself. There are valuable truths about human nature to be learned within the walls of a brothel.
Just so. To be sure, not all the things one learns from the Kelley oeuvre could be called edifying. Her books appeal to schadenfreude and a resentment of celebrity that grows ever stronger in a surreal culture where even Luke Wilson is deemed worthy of a half-hour on Biography. I can't honestly say that I'm a better person for reading His Way, Kelley's great unauthorized biography of Frank Sinatra, but it wasn't unilluminating to discover that, when romantic Ol' Blue Eyes wasn't falling for women, he was apt to be bashing them with telephones. Such is the visceral poetry of tabloid America.
You get the same pop kick from The Family, which flaunts the gutbucket prose of unconscious pulp ("The Bushes went into retirement like Salvation Army bell ringers, eager to rake in as much money as fast as they possibly could") and tells scads of unflattering stories, old and new, about nearly a century of Bushwah. How Barbara (who's variously compared to Ma Barker and a "bull dyke") was so insecure about her frumpiness that she once railed at Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin for wearing a short skirt, snapping that it looked "awful, awful, awful." (Martin replied that she was just showing off her good legs.) Or how Dubya, when asked what he talked about with his father, shocked the reporter by answering, "Pussy." One wonders whether this was before or after his daily Bible study.
Skewering The Family, Kakutani (who has all the pop-culture instincts of, well, a Bush) dumped on Kelley for ignoring serious political issues. Which is like faulting Eminem for not being Yo-Yo Ma. It is Kelley's function in American culture to give popular expression to the dark, personal dramas of well-known people whose private lives are routinely airbrushed into bright fantasies that bear no resemblance to human life. Kelley's book not only delivers the dirt you'll rarely if ever get in The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly, let alone on Fox News, but it reminds you that personal dirt is the rich soil of day-to-day political life - whether it's Barbara hating the Reagans for treating her and George like servants, Dubya bursting into obscene rages at reporters during his father's presidential campaigns (which helps explain his manner during press conferences) or Bush I underestimating Bill Clinton in part because he thought the Arkansas governor too low-class to be a real competitor.
Just as Fahrenheit 9/11 presented a counternarrative to the official version of George W. Bush's presidency, so Kelley's book tells a tale that most Americans have never heard. It's the story of a well-born New England family that affects good-natured charm but has a sense of entitlement so vast it had to relocate to Texas to fit it all in. Reading The Family, you grasp that the Bushes, rather like the Kennedys before them, are tribal, class-obsessed, fanatical about loyalty and utterly ruthless. They'll do whatever it takes to win - smear John McCain and John Kerry, question Michael Dukakis' patriotism, even oppose the Civil Rights Act (Bush I was running for office in the South at the time).
Is everything in The Family literally true? Beats me. But it comes closer to reality than George W. Bush's deadeningly bogus A Charge To Keep: My Journey to the White House. In fact, if I had to choose between Kitty Kelley's version of the Bushes and, say, Tom Brokaw's, I'd put more trust in the little blond lady to tell me the truth without fear or favor. Oscar Wilde famously said that we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars. It's Kelley's fate, and perhaps her disreputable virtue, that when she tells us about the stars, she never lets us forget the many things going on in the gutter.
John Powers' Sore Winners (and the Rest of Us) in George Bush's America is available in bookstores everywhere. He can be reached at www.sorewinners.com.
The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly
"Caution: You're about to enter a no-spin zone" is the warning with which Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly kicks off his no-holds-barred cable news program, The O'Reilly Factor, every night. O'Reilly is the reigning king of cable news, with a huge lead in the ratings, two best-selling books and a nationally syndicated radio program.
O'Reilly's "no spin zone" motto is clever marketing-- but who's keeping track of O'Reilly's own spin? From his support for Bush's tax cuts and a war with Iraq to his attacks on everything from National Public Radio to "welfare mothers," O'Reilly consistently concocts evidence to support his conservative talking points. Sometimes it's even hard to keep track of O'Reilly's opinions: after the September 11 attacks, he advocated devastating bombing against civilian targets in a number of countries, including Libya ("Let them eat sand."). Questioned about it a few weeks later, O'Reilly was spinning: "I never said bomb a civilian. I would bomb military targets. I would bomb military targets.... I'm not talking about civilians."
Slashdot Your Favorite Political Weblogs
| Re:Annenberg FactCheck (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20, @08:43PM (#10303718) |
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| Hey, this looks good. Thanks. | ||
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| Yeah I have to agree, Fact Check is pretty good.
MensNewsDaily.com [mensnewsdaily.com] collects pretty good commentary from a number of contributers on a number of issues that aren't forefront on the MSM. Their articles are short and poigniant. They have a forum you can discuss the articles in, so I would call that a blog. Powerlineblog.com [powerlineblog.com] is pretty reasonable for commentary and was one of the big players in Rathergate. INDCJournal might be less reasonable but they have the quickest footwork in the business. They'll be the ones to call the sources, call experts, etc... Footwork that is a lost art in journalism. But their commentary is a bit off-balance and can often trip themselves up. Little Green Footballs is often misunderstood, but I like them. They do their job very well. Even better though is Watch [windsofchange.net] which is devoid of the sophmoric commentary. But then there is an upper eschelon, which FactCheck belongs to, as does Belmont Club [blogspot.com]. When Belmont treats an issue, you've got gold. |
URBAN vs. RURAL....Bill Bishop of the Austin American-Statesman, continuing his series of stories about the changing demographics of the American electorate, gets to the heart of things this weekend:
The nation has gone through a big sort, a sifting of people and politics into what is becoming two Americas. One is urban and Democratic, the other Republican, suburban and rural.
....In the 1980 presidential race, Democratic and Republican counties on average had about the same number of voters. By 2000, however, the average Democratic county had three times as many voters as the average Republican county, according to study of election results by Statesman statistical consultant Robert Cushing.
In the country's most partisan counties - those where one party wins by more than 20 percentage points - the split is overwhelming. In 2000, the average landslide Democratic county was eight times larger than the average landslide Republican county. In 1980, the average landslide Republican county was more populous than the average partisan Democratic county.
Urban rural, urban rural, urban rural: say it over and over. That's the big split in American politics, and as Bishop points out, the difference is becoming starker every year.
And if you're curious, the Statesman also has a list of the 100 most Democratic counties (in 2000) and the 100 most Republican counties. It's sort of scary to find out that my home, famously conservative Orange County, doesn't even come close to making the "most Republican" list. I guess I'm just lucky I don't live in Glasscock County, Texas.
[Sept 20, 2004] Philadelphia Inquirer 09-09-2004 Spinsanity
While a few media outlets tried to set the record straight, many were content to pass on the spin without clarification or comment. Until the media hold politicians accountable for dishonest claims and attacks on open debate, political deception will remain all too easy.
[Sept 20, 2004] Spinsanity - Countering rhetoric with reason Book of the authors of the site
An excerpt from the media chapter of All the President's Spin:
Bush's White House has broken new ground in its press relations strategy, exploiting the weaknesses and failings of the political media more systematically than any of its predecessors. The administration combines tight message discipline and image management Reagan's trademarks with the artful use of half- or partial truths and elaborate news management Clinton's specialties in a combination that is near-lethal for the press.
These techniques are effective precisely because they prey on four key weaknesses of contemporary journalism. First and foremost, reporters are constrained by the norm of objectivity, which frequently causes them to avoid evaluating the truth of politicians' statements. In addition, because reporters are dependent upon the White House for news, the administration can shape the coverage it receives by restricting the flow of information to the press. The media are also vulnerable to political pressure and reprisal, which the Bush White House has aggressively dished out against critical journalists. Finally, the press' unending pursuit of scandal and entertaining news often blinds it to serious issues of public policy.
By aggressively deploying its communications strategy against a media establishment wary of giving credence to charges of liberal bias and fearful of challenging a self-described "war president" after Sept. 11, Bush has successfully dissembled about public policy on a far more consistent basis than his predecessors. Do President Bush's tax cuts primarily benefit the wealthy or the middle class? Was there clear evidence that Iraq was attempting to produce nuclear weapons or was connected to al Qaeda? What role have tax cuts played in the recent growth of federal budget deficits? There are answers to all of these questions, but the media are frequently reluctant to point out the misinformation in Bush's statements about such controversial policy issues. By using every advantage it can muster against the media, the Bush administration has dedicated itself to transforming the press from a watchdog to a mouthpiece for its spin. (Read the whole excerpt.)
An interview with the authors:
Alternet: Why did you decide write this book, given that there are so many other book bashing Bush out there already?
Brendan Nyhan: We felt like the books out there on Bush don't really do justice to what has gone on over the last four years. Bush is the leader in the arms race of political spin. But no one was adequately explaining how he was getting away with it or focusing on how the media has let him get away with it.
Alternet: Did you feel that the other books were not tough enough on him or is it that they were too shrill in accusing him of lying?
Bryan Keefer: There are a lot of Bush-bashing books out there for example, David Corn's book is called The Lies of George W. Bush. But the administration is in fact very good at not lying, saying things that have a kernel of truth but when taken as a whole are very misleading. (Read the whole interview.)
[Sept 17, 2004] Journalism Under Fire
Journalism has been a continuing course in adult education my own; other people paid the tuition and travel, and I've never really had to grow up and get a day job. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I've enjoyed the company of colleagues as good as they come, who kept inspiring me to try harder.
They helped me relearn another of journalism's basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. Unless you're willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you've got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of "bias", or these days even a point of view, there's no use even trying. You have to love it, and I do. I remember what Izzy Stone said about this. For years he was America's premier independent journalist, bringing down on his head the sustained wrath of the high and mighty for publishing in his little four-page I.F. Stone's Weekly the government's lies and contradictions culled from the government's own official documents. No matter how much they pummeled him, Izzy Stone said: "I have so much fun I ought to be arrested."
That's how I felt 25 five years ago when my colleague Sherry Jones and I produced the first documentary ever about the purchase of government favors by political action committees. When we unfurled across the Capitol grounds yard after yard of computer printouts listing campaign contributions to every member of Congress, there was a loud outcry, including from several politicians who had been allies just a few years earlier when I worked at the White House.
I loved it, too, when Sherry and I connected the dots behind the Iran-Contra scandal. That documentary sent the right-wing posse in Washington running indignantly to congressional supporters of public television who accused PBS of committing horrors! journalism right on the air.
While everyone else was all over the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio, Sherry and I took after Washington's other scandal of the time -- the unbridled and illegal fundraising by Democrats in the campaign of 1996. This time it was Democrats who wanted me arrested. .
But taking on political scandal is nothing compared to what can happen if you raise questions about corporate power in Washington. When my colleagues and I started looking into the subject of pesticides and food for a Frontline documentary, my producer Marty Koughan learned that industry was attempting behind closed doors to dilute the findings of a National Academy of Sciences study on the effects of pesticide residues on children. Before we finished the documentary, the industry somehow purloined a copy of our draft script we still aren't certain how and mounted a sophisticated and expensive campaign to discredit our broadcast before it aired. Television reviewers and editorial page editors were flooded in advance with pro-industry propaganda. There was a whispering campaign. A Washington Post columnist took a dig at the broadcast on the morning of the day it aired without even having seen it and later confessed to me that the dirt had been supplied by a top lobbyist for the chemical industry. Some public television managers across the country were so unnerved by the blitz of dis-information they received from the industry that before the documentary had even aired they protested to PBS with letters prepared by the industry.
Here's what most perplexed us: Eight days before the broadcast, the American Cancer Society an organization that in no way figured in our story sent to its three thousand local chapters a "critique" of the unfinished documentary claiming, wrongly, that it exaggerated the dangers of pesticides in food. We were puzzled. Why was the American Cancer Society taking the unusual step of criticizing a documentary that it had not seen, that had not aired, and that did not claim what the society alleged? An enterprising reporter in town named Sheila Kaplan looked into these questions for Legal Times and discovered that a public relations firm, which had worked for several chemical companies, also did pro bono work for the American Cancer Society. The firm was able to cash in some of the goodwill from that "charitable" work to persuade the compliant communications staff at the Society to distribute some harsh talking points about the documentary talking points that had been supplied by, but not attributed to, the public relations firm.
Others also used the American Cancer Society's good name in efforts to tarnish the journalism before it aired; including right wing front groups who railed against what they called "junk science on PBS" and demanded Congress pull the plug on public television. PBS stood firm. The documentary aired, the journalism held up, and the National Academy of Sciences felt liberated to release the study that the industry had tried to demean.
They never give up. Sherry and I spent more than a year working on another documentary called Trade Secrets, based on revelations found in the industry's archives that big chemical companies had deliberately withheld from workers and consumers damaging information about toxic chemicals in their products. These internal industry documents are a fact. They exist. They are not a matter of opinion or point of view. And they portrayed deep and pervasive corruption in a major American industry, revealing that we live under a regulatory system designed by the industry itself. If the public and government regulators had known over the years what the industry was keeping secret about the health risks of its products, America's laws and regulations governing chemical manufacturing would have been far more protective of human health than they were.
Hoping to keep us from airing those secrets the industry hired a public relations firm in Washington noted for using private detectives and former CIA, FBI, and drug enforcement officers to conduct investigations for corporations. One of the company's founders was on record as saying that sometimes corporations need to resort to unconventional resources, including "using deceit", to defend themselves. Given the scurrilous underground campaign that was conducted to smear our journalism, his comments were an understatement. Not only was there the vicious campaign directed at me personally, but once again pressure was brought to bear on PBS through industry allies in Congress. PBS stood firm, the documentary aired, and a year later the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Trade Secrets an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism.
've gone on like this not to regale you with old war tales but to get to a story that is the one thing I hope you might remember from our time together this morning. John Henry Faulk told me this story. Most of you are too young to remember John Henry -- a wonderful raconteur, entertainer, and a popular host on CBS Radio back when radio was in its prime. But those were days of paranoia and red-baiting the McCarthy era and the right wing sleaze merchants went to work on John Henry with outlandish accusations that he was a communist. A fearful CBS refused to rehire him and John Henry went home to Texas to live out his days. He won a famous libel suit against his accusers and wrote a classic book about those events and the meaning of the first amendment. In an interview I did with him shortly before his death a dozen years ago John Henry told the story of how he and friend Boots Cooper were playing in the chicken house when they were about twelve years old. They spied a chicken snake in the top tier of nests, so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry told it to me, "All the frontier courage drained out our heels actually it trickled down our overall legs and Boots and I made a new door through the henhouse wall." His momma came out and, learning what the fuss was about, said to Boots and John Henry: "Don't you know chicken snakes are harmless? They can't hurt you." And Boots, rubbing his forehead and behind at the same time, said, "Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know that, but they can scare you so bad, it'll cause you to hurt yourself." John Henry Faulk told me that's a lesson he never forgot. It's a good one for any journalist to tuck away and call on when journalism is under fire.
Our job remains essentially the same: to gather, weigh, organize, analyze, and present information people need to know in order to make sense of the world. You will hear it said this is not a professional task John Carroll of the Los Angeles Times recently reminded us there are "no qualification tests, no boards to censure misconduct, no universally accepted set of standards." Maybe so. But I think that what makes journalism a profession is the deep ethical imperative of which the public is aware only when we violate it think Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Jim Kelly. Ed Wasserman, once an editor himself and now teaching at Washington and Lee University, says that journalism "is an ethical practice because it tells people what matters and helps them determine what they should do about it." So good newsrooms "are marinated in ethical conversations What should this lead say? What I should I tell that source?" We practice this craft inside "concentric rings of duty and obligations: Obligations to sources, our colleagues, our bosses, our readers, our profession, and our community" and we function under a system of values "in which we try to understand and reconcile strong competing claims." Our obligation is to sift patiently and fairly through untidy realities, measure the claims of affected people, and present honestly the best available approximation of the truth and this, says Ed Wasserman, is an ethical practice.
It's never been easy, and it's getting harder. For more reasons then you can shake a stick at.
One is the sheer magnitude of the issues we need to report and analyze. My friend Bill McKibben enjoys a conspicuous place in my pantheon of journalistic heroes for his pioneer work in writing about the environment; his bestseller The End of Nature carried on where Rachel Carson's Silent Spring left off. Recently in Mother Jones Bill described how the problems we cover conventional, manageable problems, like budget shortfalls, pollution, crime may be about to convert to chaotic, unpredictable situations. He puts it this way: If you don't have a job, "that's a problem, and unemployment is a problem, and they can both be managed: You learn a new skill, the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates to spur the economy. But millions of skilled, well-paying jobs disappearing to Bangalore is a situation; it's not clear what if anything the system can do to turn it around." Perhaps the most unmanageable of all problems, Bill McKibben writes, is the accelerating deterioration of the environment. While the present administration has committed a thousand acts of vandalism against our air, water, forests, and deserts, were we to change managers, Bill argues, some of that damage would abate. What won't go away, he continues, are the perils with huge momentum the greenhouse effect, for instance. Scientists have been warning us about it since the 1980s. But now the melt of the Arctic seems to be releasing so much freshwater into the North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is alarmed that a weakening Gulf Stream could yield abrupt and overwhelming changes, the kind of climate change that threatens civilization. How do we journalists get a handle on something of that enormity?
Or on ideology. One of the biggest changes in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. How do we fathom and explain the mindset of violent exhibitionists and extremists who blow to smithereens hundreds of children and teachers of Middle School Number One in Beslan, Russia? Or the radical utopianism of martyrs who crash hijacked planes into the World Trade Center? How do we explain the possibility that a close election in November could turn on several million good and decent citizens who believe in the Rapture Index? That's what I said the Rapture Index; google it and you will understand why the best-selling books in America today are the twelve volumes of the left-behind series which have earned multi-millions of dollars for their co-authors who earlier this year completed a triumphant tour of the Bible Belt whose buckle holds in place George W. Bush's armor of the Lord. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the l9th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative millions of people believe to be literally true.
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Chauvinism is extreme and unreasoning partisanship on behalf of a group to which one belongs, especially when the partisanship includes malice and hatred towards a rival group. The term is derived from Nicolas Chauvin, a soldier under Napoleon Bonaparte, due to his fanatical zeal for his Emperor.
The term entered public use due to a satirical treatment of Chauvin in the French play La Cocarde Tricolore (The Three-colored Cockade).
The origin of the term and early usage indicate that it was coined as a term for excessive nationalism or patriotism. Today it is most often used to reference racism or sexism.
In "Imperialism, Nationalism, Chauvinism", The Review of Politics, p. 457, Hannah Arendt describes the concept:
- Chauvinism is an almost natural product of the national concept insofar as it springs directly from the old idea of the "national mission." ... (A) nation's mission might be interpreted precisely as bringing its light to other, less fortunate peoples that, for whatever reason, have miraculously been left by history without a national mission. As long as this concept did not develop into the ideology of chauvinism and remained in the rather vague realm of national or even nationalistic pride, it frequently resulted in a high sense of responsibility for the welfare of backward peoples.
The word does not require a judgment that the chauvinist is right or wrong in his opinion, only that he is blind and unreasoning in coming to it, ignoring any facts which might temper his fervor. In modern use, however, it is often used pejoratively to imply that the chauvinist is both unreasoning and wrong.
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Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, ; Page C03
When he appeared on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News Channel show last week, Georgetown law professor David Cole was impressed that the hard-charging host played, as part of his opening commentary, "a balanced sound bite" from the chairman of the 9/11 commission.
Cole was less impressed when an aggravated O'Reilly stopped the taping of "The O'Reilly Factor" and killed the sound bite. And when Cole brought up the incident during his interview, he says, O'Reilly "exploded," called him an SOB and declared he would never be invited back.
O'Reilly says a left-wing academic is using a minor staff mistake to try to discredit the program. "We're trying to be fair," he says. "We're trying to give the other point of view so people can see who has the stronger argument. It's really depressing that the discourse has sunk to this level."
The heated words -- which were edited out of the program seen by viewers -- involved O'Reilly's criticism of the New York Times and its coverage of the controversy over whether there were links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
In kicking off what he called "no-spin coverage" of the issue, O'Reilly began the show by saying that "the Times and other newspapers have been under heavy fire for their misleading headlines, basically saying there was no link" between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
As Cole listened from Washington, the program played a clip of commission chairman Thomas Kean saying: "There is no evidence that we can find whatsoever that Iraq or Saddam Hussein participated in any way in attacks on the United States -- in other words, on 9/11. What we do say, however, is there were contacts between Iraq and Saddam Hussein, excuse me, al-Qaeda."
O'Reilly complained that this was the wrong sound bite. In retaping the commentary, he paraphrased one of Kean's points but not the other: "Governor Thomas Kean says definitely there was a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. And he's the 9/11 investigative chief, but that's not enough for the Times."
"I was sort of astonished he would do it so brazenly in front of guests," says Cole, an activist attorney who has challenged the USA Patriot Act in court.
O'Reilly calls "totally absurd" the suggestion that he cut the sound bite "because it didn't fit my thesis." A producer had simply selected a clip that wasn't right for the segment, he says.
But Cole says: "Here he is castigating the New York Times for misleading its readers, and he was misleading his viewers. I wish the show had been live because I'd love for his viewers to see what he was up to."
What viewers saw was a lively debate among O'Reilly, Cole and Mark Jacobson, an Ohio State instructor who helped shape the Pentagon's policy on Guantanamo Bay prisoners. The only clue that there was a blowup at the end of the interview -- when Cole was asked to leave -- is that O'Reilly didn't thank his guests, ending the segment instead with a closing comment.
"We make mistakes because we bring in people who are trying to cause trouble," he says of Cole. "I thought he was a rational person."
Cole was just getting started. He discussed the matter on the Air America radio show of the commentator's most vocal critic, Al Franken. He also submitted an op-ed piece about the incident to several news organizations, including The Washington Post, and still hopes it will be published.
O'Reilly sees this as part of "a pretty well organized campaign" on the left to monitor his television and radio shows. He cited an appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor" last week by John Podesta, former chief of staff in the Clinton White House, who now heads a liberal think tank called the Center for American Progress.
Podesta complained that "you compare Bill Moyers to Mao Zedong. You say that's a joke. You compare Al Franken to Joseph Goebbels, you know, the Nazi propagandist."
"That was Michael Moore, by the way," said O'Reilly, adding that such comments were often satirical. "I said that Michael Moore is a propagandist and so is Joseph Goebbels. And then I explained what propaganda is."
"It's a two-way street here, buddy," Podesta said at one point. "You do this all the time as well, you label people, you smear people."
O'Reilly also cites what he calls a false claim by Moore, in publicizing his film "Fahrenheit 9/11," that O'Reilly had "banned" him after a contentious interview. The host insists that is not the case and typical of his liberal detractors.
"They're trying to say that we're liars," says O'Reilly. "If you can't beat 'em, slime 'em."
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Back in days when liberals ruled the roost in America, a trio of conservatives helped turn the tide with bold ideas and personal stature:
Barry Goldwater was a flinty, conviction-driven prophet; Ronald Reagan brought sunny optimism to the movement; William F. Buckley Jr. was the erudite pundit whose arched eyebrows and flicking tongue made him a comedians' delight.
Nowadays, gorged with political power and fueled by corporate power, conservatism has lost its class.
The political right's public forum has become the partisan, one-sided echo chamber of talk radio, where seldom is heard a dissenting word.
On the screen, our culture is debased and debate stifled by Rupert Murdoch's media empire (Fox News Channel). Where once there was Buckley, now we see Fox loudmouth Bill O'Reilly shouting "Shut up! Shut up!" and "I don't care what you think!" at the anti-war son of a World Trade Center victim before cutting off the young man's microphone.
Al Franken was a master satirist on "Saturday Night Live," co-authoring such famous skits as the one in which a hunched, sweating Richard Nixon (played by Dan Aykroyd) prowled the White House carrying on imagined conversations with his predecessors' portraits.
The advent of right-wing media has inspired fear, but transformed Franken into a fearless critic of those who (he says) "distort, lie, cheat and shill for the Bush administration."
With help from an unsuccessful Fox lawsuit to block its publication and a Los Angeles Book Fair confrontation with O'Reilly -- who shouted "Hey, shut up! You had your 35 minutes. Shut up!" at him -- Franken's latest book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" is atop the best seller lists.
"The mainstream media is cowed," Franken said in an interview this week. "The drumbeat of repetition from the right -- 'liberal media,' 'liberal media' -- has scared them. They don't want to be accused of being liberal.
"This administration has also used intimidation by denying access to those who dare question. (Hearst columnist) Helen Thomas is being shut out because she has the nerve to ask some real questions."
Hard words, but lately others have dared to speak them.
In his Tuesday speech here, former President Clinton spoke of the "supine mood" of establishment media in not daring to criticize Bush.
CNN's crack foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour acknowledged last week that the press muzzled itself during the Iraq War.
"I'm sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News," she said. "And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of work we did."
What happens in a climate of intimidation? A quartet of costs to democracy would include:
- The loss of genuine debate: The kind of probing, honest exchange of viewpoints, a hallmark of Buckley's "Firing Line," has been supplanted by shouting matches.
The illusion of balance is sometimes provided, as on the Fox show where rising right-wing propagandist Sean Hannity is set up to work over the (in Franken's words) "moderate milquetoast?" Alan Colmes.
A part of it may be that the new warrior class of conservative intellectuals has a yawning secret to hide. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Dick Armey, George Will, Bill Bennett, Tom DeLay and Bill O'Reilly share a common trait: Not one of these architects or cheerleaders for our Iraq policy served in the military or Vietnam.
- The loss of needed criticism: In the 1950s, a time of Red-hunting in Washington, D.C., and complacency in the country, a man raised in Edison and educated at Washington State used the tube to provoke and challenge.
Edward R. Murrow exposed the lies and distortions of Sen. Joe McCarthy, and with such programs as "Harvest of Shame" (on the plight of migrants) exposed the country's social problems.
"People think twice now before speaking out," said Franken. "A part of it is media conglomeration: Clear Channel owns four times as many radio stations as anyone else.
"If you are a musician and against war, you look what happened to the Dixie Chicks: Clear Channel organized burning of their records and did not play them."
The advent of propaganda: The conservative media have the power to "push" a party line across the country.
Talk radio and the popular Drudge Report Web site feast on daily talking points of the Republican Party, with no one to talk back.
"It is pretty well organized, but a lot of them don't need talking points," said Franken. "It's an echo chamber in which the message gets heard pretty quick."
In the Fox News Channel, America comes as close as has ever been the case to a state television network.
- The loss of diversity: Rush Limbaugh was correct to describe his followers as "dittoheads." Right-thinking is the watchword of America's 1,300 talk radio stations, an estimated 95 percent of them on the political right.
How many progressive voices to do you hear on KVI and KTTH, Seattle's two prime talk stations?
Uniformity is stifling, whatever its ideology: This space takes frequent pokes at the insularity and political correctness of the Seattle Left.
In the land of right-wing talk, and bland television, much gets suppressed. Questioning of war gets shouted down.
"You were sickening then: You are sickening now," Fox's business editor, Neil Cavuto, told one unfortunate dissenter.
So do other questions that need airing: Why is the Interior Department, overseeing America's public lands, run de facto by a former coal lobbyist?
Why has the Bush administration rewritten Clean Air Act rules to let mining waste be dumped into surrounding waterways?
A fledgling Chicago-based outfit called AnShell Media is reportedly working to bring some liberal voices to the radio waves.
In the meantime, defying the invective of Rupert Murdoch's minions, Franken is out raising hell. More power to him.
Remember that the Sun-Times is part of the Conrad Black Hollinger media empire, which is adamantly pro-Bush and pro-Iraq war. Richard Perle, for instance has close financial and "journalistic" ties to the Hollinger media empire, including more than 400 daily and weekly newspapers in Canada, the United States, Britain, Israel and Australia.
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...facts, ideas and voices in our culture are filtered by a propaganda system promoting the goals of powerful interests. This is not achieved through any kind of conspiracy but through the operation of market forces allied with "man's capacity of not observing what he does not want to observe", such that "he may be sincere in denying a knowledge which he would have, if he wanted only to have it", in the words of psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan.
But how far do the effects of this system of filtering extend into our ideas about ourselves and the world?
Consider, for example, that the same filtering influences the literature we read. Noam Chomsky argues that George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 (both standard school texts) are as highly-regarded as they are, not because they provide particularly astute insights into modern systems of tyranny, but because they constituted suitable satirical attacks against our long-time enemy the Soviet Union. Chomsky comments:
"Fame, Fortune and Respect await those who reveal the crimes of official enemies; those who undertake the vastly more important task of raising a mirror to their own societies can expect quite different treatment. George Orwell is famous for Animal Farm and 1984, which focus on the official enemy. Had he addressed the more interesting and significant question of thought control in relatively free and democratic societies, it would not have been appreciated, and instead of wide acclaim, he would have faced silent dismissal or obloquy."
(Noam Chomsky - Deterring Democracy, Hill And Wang, 1992, p.372)Historian Howard Zinn explains Plato's standing as one of the "untouchables" of modern culture by the fact that he advocated blind obedience to government, and thus has long been in favour with governments and educational systems working to instil the 'right' attitudes in the young. In the Crito, for example, Plato has Socrates refuse to escape from prison on the following grounds, here paraphrased by Zinn:
"'No, I must obey the law. True, Athens has committed an injustice against me by ordering me to die for speaking my mind. But if I complained about this injustice, Athens could rightly say: 'We brought you into this world, we raised you, we educated you, we gave you and every other citizen a share of all the good things we could'. Socrates accepts this, saying: 'By not leaving Athens, I agreed to obey its laws. And so I will go to my death'."
(Howard Zinn, Failure To Quit, Common Courage Press, 1993, p.154)It is important to be aware of the anti-democratic nature of these arguments and of the high regard in which they are held in modern 'democratic' states, Zinn argues, because they are a way of thinking which every nation-state drums into the heads of its citizens from the earliest possible age.
In their book Political Shakespeare, Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield even dare to suggest that one reason why Shakespeare has been so popular for so long is because his writing promotes an essentially right-wing view of the world, one suitable to the long-standing requirements of the ruling elite. They quote academic Rachel Sharp, who writes:
"The power relations which are peculiar to market society are seen as how things have always been and ought to be. They acquire a timelessness which is powerfully legitimised by a theory of human nature... Political struggles to alter present-day social arrangements are seen as futile for 'things are as they are' because of man's basic attributes and nothing could ever be very different." (Quoted Dollimore and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare, Manchester University Press, 1985, p.138)
This was certainly the view of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who wrote that Shakespeare's plays have continued to be admired for so long because they "correspond to the irreligious and immoral frame of mind of the upper classes of his time and ours".
(Quoted, George Orwell, Inside The Whale And Other Essays, Penguin, 1962, p.104)
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In his classic work, Obedience to Authority, psychologist Stanley Milgram explained how ordinary people, through their unthinking abdication of responsibility, make great evil possible:
"The most common adjustment of thought in the obedient subject is for him to see himself as not responsible for his own actions. He divests himself of responsibility by attributing all initiative to... a legitimate authority. He sees himself not as a person acting in a morally accountable way, but as the agent of external authority." (Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.25)
It doesn't matter what job we are doing, or how much we are paid, our actions always have consequences, and we are always responsible for them. It will surely not impress the grieving parents of an incinerated Iraqi child in February that Bruce sees herself as 'just the person who reads the autocue'. We are never 'just' any job description - we are human beings with moral responsibilities.
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The French philosopher Jean Guehenno has said that "the worst betrayal of intelligence is finding justification for the world as it is". But this is often the role played by experts, to explain the everyday as normal, justifiable, requiring little change, but rather "stability" and few upsets to "world order" unless controlled by us. In fact, the everyday is a horror for many people - the half of the planet that lives in absolute poverty, as well as the victims of torture and repression in the US and British-backed client states, for example.
Elites throughout history have presented their policies as in the natural order of things, which helps to obscure the pursuit of their own particular interests. An important aspect of the ideological system is rendering a single view dominant or "natural", presenting current policies as inevitable, and undermining the possibility of alternatives. "Globalisation" is presented by elites as such a natural phenomenon, and critics ridiculed as Luddites who cannot stop the inevitable march of history. These curiously Marxist, determinist views mask the elite's goal under globalisation of promoting total global economic "liberalisation" - a far from inevitable outcome, but a strategy chosen by the liberalisation theologists of New Labour, and their allies among the transnational elite.
If the current horrible policies are "normal", the alternatives are "unthinkable". Even to mention the indictment of Tony Blair for war crimes, to oppose British cooperation with the US because it is a consistent supporter of human rights abuses overseas, or even to end arms exports is "unthinkable" in the mainstream and would invite ridicule.
Take the Guardian's Ian Black, who writes that a key aim of the International Criminal Court is to avoid: "politically motivated or frivolous investigations - what one expert calls the 'nutcase factor': for instance, of the possible pursuit of [Northern Ireland secretary] Mo Mowlam or Tony Blair for crimes against humanity". Only "nutcases" could possibly believe Our Leader could ever be guilty of crimes against humanity. (One such "nutcase" is former US Attorney General, Ramsay Clark, who lodged a complaint against Britain in July 1999 for war crimes during its assault on Yugoslavia.)
A customary way for the elite to deflect criticism is to term it a "conspiracy theory", which is common across the ideological system. There is a good reason for it. British elites have built a fundamentally secretive political system for which they are minimally accountable to the public. As noted in chapter 13, they believe the public should have only a marginal say in this system outside elections, and - to judge from some of the views expressed in the Scott inquiry - neither do they think the public should even know what the decision-making processes are. Elites are especially keen to deflect criticism exposing how the system works, which is more threatening than criticising specific policies (which can be dismissed as "exceptions"). The term "conspiracy theory" is often deployed once criticism has moved beyond the specific and is closer to exposing how the system as a whole works.
My view is that "ordinary people" - and I count myself as one of these - generally distrust their sources of information and know, ultimately, not to believe what they read or see. This is partly because ordinary people, in my view, have a much healthier scepticism of those in power than those closer to power or those aspiring to the political class. People have little stake in the elite and therefore have no reason to trust it.
But I do not believe that people can be aware of the extent to which to which they are being misinformed. Foreign policy is different from domestic issues, where you only have to spend time in a hospital or have a child who goes to school, to know the state of public services. But with foreign policy people are overwhelmingly reliant on news rather than personal experience, which makes indoctrination much easier. Even if people have enough self-defence mechanisms to avoid being directly told what to think, it is very likely that the media tells them what to think about.
It is not that one cannot discover much about the reality of government policy. All the sources I have used in this book are public. But you have to make a real effort, and spend considerable time, which is simply not possible for most people. It involves proactively looking for alternative sources of information, usually a variety of different sources, to piece together an accurate picture, and then weighing these against mainstream sources.
It also involves what the great Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiongo has called "decolonising the mind". Ngugi was referring to Africans needing to free themselves from ideologies often subconsciously adopted under colonialism. The British public needs, in my view, to do the same thing, and consciously unlearn most of what we have been informed about and "educated" on regarding Britain's role in the world. This applies not only to the media, but to school and university too. Again, these are not easy tasks.
Overall, I believe that people are being indoctrinated into a picture of Britain's role in the world that supports elite priorities. This is the mass production of ignorance. It actively works against our interests, which is precisely why the ideological system is critical to the elite, who essentially see the public as a threat.
The basic fact is that anyone who wants to understand the reality of Britain's past and current foreign policies cannot do so by relying on the mainstream. As the chapters on Kenya, Malaya, British Guiana, Iran and others have shown, the reality of British policy is systematically suppressed; whole episodes in Britain's history have become severely ideologically treated. Interpretations of history that accord with the preferences of elites are the dominant ones. Given the extent of this ideological treatment of the past, what has happened is akin to the destruction of history. The task of any independent historian is to reconstruct real-life history, to rescue it from a self-serving web of deceit.
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Beneath this overarching concept of basic benevolence stands a set of pillars - key strategies promoted by the elite that are assumed to contribute to Britain's benevolent role in the world and promotion of high principles. These strategies make up the single ideology on which there is consensus across the elite, as outlined in chapter 13 - such as strong support for the US, in the context of a special relationship, promotion of global economic "liberalisation", support for key elites, and a strong military intervention capability. Reporting and analysis that fall outside this construct - and certainly that directly challenge it - will tend to get excluded.
The ideological system gears into particular action during war, providing justification for the government's resort to force and backing its (always noble) aims. In war, the public is in effect actively mobilised by the various components of the elite in support of state policy. Television news functions even more extremely ideologically at these times, in practice usually abandoning any pretence of objectivity and acting simply as the mouthpiece of the state, though trying to preserve a facade of independence. Only rarely is real dissent possible in such crises in mainstream newspapers and never on television.
Salon.com Arts & Entertainment You're the best! No, YOU'RE the best!! How Tim Russert, Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews and their talking-head pals wet-kiss each other all the way to the bank. By Scott Lamb
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We in the news business think we're impartial seekers of truth, but most Americans think otherwise. They view us as sloppy, biased and self-serving. In 1985, 56 percent of the public felt news organizations usually got their facts straight, says the Pew Research Center. By 2002 that figure was 35 percent. In 1985 the public thought the media "moral" by 54 percent to 13 percent; by 2003 opinion was split 40 percent to 38 percent. Americans think the "media make news rather than just report it," says Pew's Andrew Kohut. The obsession with "scandal in high places" is seen as building audiences rather than advancing the public interest.
Still, the latest Pew survey confirms -- with lots of numbers -- an especially disturbing trend that we've all sensed: People are increasingly picking their media on the basis of partisanship. If you're Republican and conservative, you listen to talk radio and watch the Fox News Channel. If you're liberal and Democratic, you listen to National Public Radio and watch "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." It's like picking restaurants: Chinese for some, Italian for others. And everyone can punch up partisan blogs -- the fast food of the news business. What's disturbing is that, like restaurants, the news media may increasingly cater to their customers' (partisan) tastes. News slowly becomes more selective and slanted.
Rush Limbaugh has 14.5 million weekly listeners. According to Pew, 77 percent are conservative, 16 percent moderate and 7 percent liberal. Or take Fox's 1.3 million prime-time viewers: 52 percent are conservative, 30 percent are moderate and 13 percent liberal. By contrast, 36 percent of Americans are conservative, 38 percent moderate and 18 percent liberal. The liberals' media favorites are slightly less lopsided. The audience for "The NewsHour" is 22 percent conservative, 44 percent moderate and 27 percent liberal. NPR's audience is 31 percent conservative, 33 percent moderate and 30 percent liberal. Of course, many news outlets still have broad audiences. Daily newspapers are collectively close to national averages; so is CNN.
But the partisan drift may grow, because distrust is spreading. In 1988 Pew found that 58 percent of the public thought there was "no bias" in election coverage. Now that's 38 percent: 22 percent find a Democratic bias, 17 percent a Republican tilt. Almost all major media have suffered confidence declines. Among Republicans, only 12 percent say they believe "all or most" of Newsweek; for Democrats the figure is twice that, 26 percent. In 1985 the overall figure was higher (31 percent), with little partisan gap. Newsweek's numbers typify mainstream media. Only 14 percent of Republicans believe "all or most" of the New York Times, vs. 31 percent of Democrats.
What's going on? Why should we care?
Up to a point, conservative talk radio and Fox represent a desirable backlash against the perceived "liberal bias" of network news and mainstream media. I've worked in the mainstream press for 35 years. Editors and reporters reflexively deny a liberal bias, even though many ordinary people find it and mainstream newsrooms are politically skewed. Here are the latest Pew figures: 7 percent of national reporters and editors are conservative (a fifth the national rate), and 34 percent are liberal (almost twice the national rate). Most reporters I know believe fiercely in being fair and objective. Still, the debate over "what's news and significant?" is warped. Talk radio and Fox add other views.
But the sorting of audiences by politics also poses dangers -- for the media and the country. We journalists think we define news, and from day to day we do. Over the longer run that's less true. All news organizations must satisfy their audiences. If they don't, they go out of business. "Media bias is product differentiation," says James T. Hamilton of Duke University; his book "All the News That's Fit to Sell" shows how economic forces powerfully shape news judgments. If liberals and conservatives migrate to rival media camps, both camps may ultimately submit to the same narrow logic: like-minded editors and reporters increasingly feeding like-minded customers stories that reinforce their world view.
Economic interests and editorial biases will converge. The New York Times is now a national paper; 49 percent of its daily circulation is outside the New York area, up from 38 percent five years ago. There's home delivery in 275 markets, up from 171 five years ago. But if the Times sells largely to upscale readers (average household income is $90,381, almost twice the national average) with vaguely liberal views, it risks becoming hostage to their sensibilities. No less does Fox risk becoming hostage to its base.
The worthy, if unattainable, ideals of fairness and objectivity will silently erode. Many forces push that way: new technologies (cable, the Internet); the blending of news and entertainment; the breakdown between "hard news" and interpretation; intense competition; changing news habits of the young. The damage will not just be to good journalism. Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism notes that respected national media develop common facts and language that help hold society together and solve common problems. It will be a sad day when we trust only the media that voice our views.
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