March 13, 2009
| Follow pastpeak On Twitter | Media |
Miss me? I've been busy. But multiple times per day I read or think something that I'd post if I had the time.
So I'm going to try something new. We'll see how it goes. I've taken the name pastpeak on Twitter, and I'll try to "tweet" when I come across something interesting that can be stuffed into 140 characters or less. Links to interesting pages, but other things, too, hopefully.
I hope to get back to some real blogging, too, in the relatively near future. But in the meantime, sign up to follow me on Twitter. Let's see if anybody's still out there.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:31 PM
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| Jon Stewart Plays Hardball | Economy Media |
You've probably seen this wonderful, wonderful bit from The Daily Show a little over a week ago:
Just excellent.
CNBC's Jim Cramer took exception, and last night Stewart had him on the show. Stewart starts out funny, but then he plays some real hardball, in parts 2 and 3 especially. Unedited, uncensored version. Watch:
Yes!
Why does it take a fake news show to ask real questions? (He asked rhetorically...)
Posted by Jonathan at 02:16 PM
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May 29, 2008
| CNN Correspondent Blurts Out Some Truth | Media |
CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin, discussing Scott McClellan's new book on Anderson Cooper's show:
JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings.And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives -- and I was not at this network at the time [she was at MSNBC] -- but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president.
I think, over time...
(CROSSTALK)
COOPER: You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president?
YELLIN: Not in that exact -- they wouldn't say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces. They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive, yes. That was my experience.
I'm shocked. Shocked.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:54 PM
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April 10, 2008
| The Power Of An Image | Media |
A picture worth a thousand words, and then some:
By Margaret Bourke-White.
Simply superb.
[Thanks, Maurice]
Posted by Jonathan at 05:37 PM
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February 27, 2008
| How Embarrassing | Media Politics |
Until last night, I hadn't watched any of the presidential candidates' "debates." Partly because I don't watch tv, but mostly because I just don't have the stomach for it: politics as an episode of "American Idol" (not that I've ever watched "American Idol," either.) But last night I did watch online, and I have to say: what's the deal with Tim Russert and his gotcha questions? That's the state of American journalism and politics? (Rhetorical question.)
Gawd, it's embarrassing. (Digby agrees.)
Posted by Jonathan at 03:51 PM
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December 24, 2007
| AOL, You Suck | Media |
This is just despicable. Gawd.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:45 PM
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November 19, 2007
| It's Hard To Be This Breathtakingly, Jaw-Droppingly Dumb | Media Politics |
Unless you're Tom Friedman. Gawd.
Posted by Jonathan at 09:49 PM
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October 03, 2007
| The Emptiest Of Suits | Media |
There's a good chance you've already seen this, but if not:
Like a thousand fingernails on a thousand blackboards. But huge props to Jon Stewart.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:04 PM
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August 28, 2007
| Dolphin Fighting | Media |
Posted by Jonathan at 09:26 AM
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August 22, 2007
| Poisoning Our Own Well | Corporations, Globalization Media |
This story's a couple of weeks old, but it's too important to let slide. AP:
Anything made by McDonald's tastes better, preschoolers said in a study that powerfully demonstrates how advertising can trick the taste buds of young children.Even carrots, milk and apple juice tasted better to the kids when they were wrapped in the familiar packaging of the Golden Arches.
The study had youngsters sample identical McDonald's foods in name-brand and unmarked wrappers. The unmarked foods always lost the taste test.
"You see a McDonald's label and kids start salivating," said Diane Levin, a childhood development specialist who campaigns against advertising to kids. She had no role in the research.
Levin said it was "the first study I know of that has shown so simply and clearly what's going on with (marketing to) young children."
Study author Dr. Tom Robinson said the kids' perception of taste was "physically altered by the branding." The Stanford University researcher said it was remarkable how children so young were already so influenced by advertising. [...]
The study included three McDonald's menu items -- hamburgers, chicken nuggets and french fries -- and store-bought milk or juice and carrots. Children got two identical samples of each food on a tray, one in McDonald's wrappers or cups and the other in plain, unmarked packaging. The kids were asked whether they tasted the same or whether one was better. (Some children didn't taste all the foods.)
McDonald's-labeled samples were the clear favorites. French fries were the biggest winner; almost 77 percent said the labeled fries tasted best while only 13 percent preferred the others.
Fifty-four percent preferred McDonald's-wrapped carrots versus 23 percent who liked the plain-wrapped sample. [...]
Fewer than one-fourth of the children said both samples of all foods tasted the same.
Imagine you're a visitor from Mars, suddenly plunked down in the middle of American society. How crazy would this look: everywhere you turn, you see corporations directing powerful mind-control tools at our own population — every one of us, cradle to grave — with all the skill, sophistication, and guile they can muster. Programming us with insatiable desire for that which will leave us sick and empty and drowning in garbage. Treating our psyches like things to be plundered. Consequences be damned.
And we wonder why we're collectively going crazy. A system that brainwashes its own children to make a buck is one that has clearly lost its way. But we're so immersed in it we scarcely even notice.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:35 PM
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August 20, 2007
| Petraeus Report To Be Written By White House | Iraq Media Politics |
We're supposed to all be waiting to hear what General Petraeus will say in his September "progress" report. But buried deep in an LA Times story about the upcoming report, we find this:
Administration and military officials acknowledge that the September report will not show any significant progress on the political benchmarks laid out by Congress. How to deal in the report with the lack of national reconciliation between Iraq's warring sects has created some tension within the White House.Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.
And though Petraeus and Crocker will present their recommendations on Capitol Hill, legislation passed by Congress leaves it to the president to decide how to interpret the report's data.
The senior administration official said the process had created "uncomfortable positions" for the White House because of debates over what constitutes "satisfactory progress."
During internal White House discussion of a July interim report, some officials urged the administration to claim progress in policy areas such as legislation to divvy up Iraq's oil revenue, even though no final agreement had been reached. Others argued that such assertions would be disingenuous.
"There were some in the drafting of the report that said, 'Well, we can claim progress,'" the administration official said. "There were others who said: 'Wait a second. Sure we can claim progress, but it's not credible to...just neglect the fact that it's had no effect on the ground.'"
The Defense official skeptical of the troop buildup said he expected Petraeus to emphasize military accomplishments, including improving security in Baghdad neighborhoods and a slight reduction in the number of suicide bomb attacks. But the official said he did not believe such security improvements would translate into political progress or improvements in the daily lives of most Iraqis.
"Who cares how many neighborhoods of Baghdad are secured?" the official said. "Let's talk about the rest of the country: How come they have electricity twice a day, how come there is no running water?" [Emphasis added]
Everybody pretends the report will be from Petraeus, but it's being cooked up by political hacks in the White House. Which is to say, it will be completely useless as a basis for deciding anything. Watch, though, as the mainstream media play along and portray it as a serious evaluation originating from Petraeus himself. Pardon me while I retch.
Posted by Jonathan at 12:45 PM
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July 24, 2007
| Unfair, Unbalanced, Unhinged | Environment Media |
This really ticks me off:
Millions of people get their version of reality from Fox News. Not a trivial matter. Garbage in, garbage out.
Time to make their advertisers pay.
Petition (and more videos) here.
Posted by Jonathan at 03:46 PM
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July 22, 2007
| NYT: Harry Potter Not A Best Seller | Media |
I read the first Harry Potter and stopped there. But I know plenty of bookish adults who are avid fans of the series. Some have read each book multiple times.
But apparently the grinches at the New York Times, pressured by publishers whose own books were blown out of the water by J. K. Rowling's, decided to categorize the Potter books as children's books to keep them off the influential NYT Bestseller list. In fact, they're not even on the main children's list; they're relegated to the Series Books subsection of the Children's List.
So the publishing phenomenon of all time is officially not a NYT Bestseller. Not earth-shaking, obviously, but not very sporting, either. Kind of dumb, really.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:38 PM
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July 16, 2007
| How The News Works | Humor & Fun Iran Iraq Media |
This is excellent.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:53 PM
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June 14, 2007
| 3400, 3500 | Iraq Media |
The carnage continues in Iraq.
While I was gone from the blog, US troops deaths in Iraq passed the 3400 mark. Then 3500. US troops killed in Iraq as of today: 3513.
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And hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. For what?
230 US troops were killed in April and May, the worst two-month total of the entire war, a fact worthy of some public discussion, one might think.
The situation is deteriorating. Fox News responds by cutting its Iraq coverage, a policy Bill O'Reilly likes just fine. Yes, let's all shut our eyes, stick our fingers in our ears, and go "La la la la." As if this isn't all happening in a real place, to real people. Unspeakable.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:45 AM
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May 01, 2007
| Narrowcasting Ads Via Focussed Audio | Corporations, Globalization Media Science/Technology |
Hearing voices? Maybe this is why. Boston Globe (via Cryptogon):
Advertisers have a new way to get into your head.Marketers around the world are using innovative audio technology that sends sound in a narrow beam, just like light, making it possible to direct messages right into consumers' ears while they shop or sit in waiting rooms.
The audio spotlight device, created by Watertown firm Holosonic Research Labs Inc., has been used to hawk everything from cereals in supermarket aisles to glasses at doctor's offices. The messages are often quick and targeted -- and a little creepy to the uninitiated.
Court TV recently installed the audio spotlight in ceilings of bookstores to promote the network's new murder-mystery show. A voice, whispering, "Hey, you, can you hear me? Do you ever think about murder?" was beamed toward customers as they browsed the mystery section in several independent bookstores in New York.
For advertisers, the audio spotlight is a way of marketing to consumers, sending tailored messages without disturbing an entire store with loudspeaker announcements such as Kmart's iconic "Blue Light Special." The flat disk speakers with precision targeting have made sound possible in unlikely places -- from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to the New York Public Library -- and are increasingly attractive to merchants trying to improve the shopping experience with a peaceful environment. [...]
Unlike traditional speakers, which broadcast sound in every direction, sound from an audio spotlight speaker can be focused directly at one spot, so no one else can hear it, or projected against a surface so that sound appears to come from the surface itself.
For example, a box of Fruity Pebbles can advertise its nutritional content, heard by shoppers only as they walk by boxes in the cereal aisle. The audio spotlight uses ultrasound to stimulate the air into making sound, which is emitted in focused, laser-like beams. [Emphasis added]
What an awful idea. First time I encounter one of these things in a store, I'm going to boycott that store for life.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:25 PM
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April 28, 2007
| Blind Spot | Extremism Media |
When is a terrorist attack on US soil not a terrorist attack — in fact, not even worthy of mention on the evening news?
When the target is a women's clinic.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:59 PM
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| D-E-S-P-I-C-A-B-L-E | Media |
Despicable "satire" from Rush Limbaugh. How does he stay on the air?
Posted by Jonathan at 04:44 PM
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April 16, 2007
| The Edge | Culture Future Media Science/Technology |
Just wanted to make a plug for an extraordinary website called The Edge. It brings together world-class thinkers from a variety of fields and has them talk or write about what's on their minds: what's interesting and important to them right now, with an emphasis on leading edge ideas.
People like Lee Smolin, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, Lisa Randall, Stuart Kauffman, Daniel Dennett, Freeman Dyson, Richard Dawkins, Marvin Minsky, Ernst Mayr, Brian Greene, Susan Blackmore, John Barrow, Ray Kurzweil, E. O. Wilson, Esther Dyson, and an old professor of mine, John Allen Paulos. And many more.
Check out the page of videos, lots of goodies there.
Most addicting, though, is the World Question Center. Each year, a hundred or so luminaries are invited to submit a short answer to a question like "What's your dangerous idea?" or "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The variety of viewpoints and ideas is astounding and endlessly fascinating. Mind-expanding in the best sense of the word.
Well worth a bookmark.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:06 PM
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April 09, 2007
| Get Me Rewrite! | Iran Iraq Media |
A couple of months ago, the government line was that resurgents' use of EFPs was proof of high-level Iranian involvement. Remember this? CBS:
U.S. military officials charged on Sunday that the highest levels of the Iranian leadership ordered Shiite militants in Iraq to be armed with sophisticated armor-piercing roadside bombs that have killed more than 170 American forces. [...]The deadly and highly sophisticated weapons the U.S. military said were coming into Iraq from Iran are known as "explosively formed penetrators," or EFPs.
But now Reuters says different:
"Iraqi army soldiers swept into the city of Diwaniya early this morning to disrupt militia activity and return security and stability of the volatile city back to the government of Iraq,” the US military said in a statement.[Lieutenant-Colonel Scott] Bleichwehl said troops, facing scattered resistance, discovered a factory that produced "explosively formed penetrators" (EFPs), a particularly deadly type of explosive that can destroy a main battle tank and several weapons caches. [Emphasis added]
So the devices that couldn't possibly have come from anywhere but Iranian government sources are actually manufactured by insurgents in Iraq. Not surprising in itself: what don't they lie about? But the story doesn't end there. As Atrios noticed, the Washington Post online picked up the Reuters story, as captured by Google News:
Then almost immediately, the original version was down The Memory Hole, becoming instead:
The U.S. military said two U.S. soldiers died in separate roadside bombings in the east and west of Baghdad on Friday.One of the bombs was an explosively formed projectile, a particularly deadly type of device which Washington accuses Iran of supplying Iraqi militants. [Emphasis added]
Like it was written by the Pentagon itself. Either it was, or the WaPo thinks it's their job to do the Pentagon's work without being asked. Either way, disgraceful.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:48 PM
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March 01, 2007
| Goring Gore | Media Politics |
Two things.
First, the world would be a very different place today if Al Gore had been elected (or selected) President in 2000. No war in Iraq, for starters. No attack on Iran, should it come to that. Nothing like the worldwide antipathy towards the United States we see today. One could go on.
Second, Al Gore would have been elected President — probably with relative ease — if the mainstream media had given him a fair shake. All that nonsense about Gore being stiff, unlikable, a serial exaggerator — inventor of the Internet, the subject of Love Story — while George Bush was the likable, straight-talking guy everybody'd want to have a beer with. It was unrelenting, and it made all the difference.
Which is to say, the US media have a lot of blood on their hands. But don't hold your breath waiting for them to acknowledge, let alone apologize for, the great wrong they did to Gore and the great harm they did to the country and the world.
Which brings us to Bob Somerby. He chronicled many of the media outrages at the time, and he hasn't forgotten who said and did what. And is still saying and doing what. In yesterday's Daily Howler, Somerby looks at how little things have changed, and he's pissed. It's a good read, and an important one, as the media prepare once again to sanctify the likes of McCain and Giuliani, while covering Hillary and Obama — and Gore — with snide innuendo. Go read it.
This isn't a game. The media's consensus narrative shapes people's perceptions and changes history. Millions of lives have been shattered by Bush's presidency. While the pundits feed their egos, ordinary people pay the price. You'd think the pundits would look around at what they have wrought, at the rising tide of wreckage and ruin that surrounds us, and feel chastened. But you'd be wrong.
Now watch, as they get ready to do it all again.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:31 PM
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| This American Life | Culture Media |
Best possible news for fans of NPR's "This American Life": starting on March 22, a new video version will premiere on Showtime. Here's the trailer:
Wow. This could turn out to be about the best tv show ever. Three weeks from today.
[Thanks, Ali]
Posted by Jonathan at 11:26 AM
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January 04, 2007
| Olbermann On "Sacrifice" And The "White Noise" Of Endless War | Iraq Media Politics |
As Bush prepares to sell a troop surge escalation in Iraq in terms of "sacrifice", Keith Olbermann provides blistering commentary:
One of Olbermann's best. Just outstanding.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:18 PM
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December 30, 2006
| Your Liberal Media | Media |
Scroll down here and find the interview with John Edwards. Imagine CNN hounding a Republican in the same way. John McCain, say. Never happen.
[Via Atrios]
Posted by Jonathan at 11:25 AM
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December 23, 2006
| Stompin' | Media |
This is a lot of fun. Sound required.
I love the different ways they leave at the end.
Posted by Jonathan at 03:57 PM
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December 12, 2006
| Teeing Off | Media |
Suburban Guerrilla has a blistering clip of Henry Rollins teeing off in favor of net neutrality. Strong stuff, and rightly so.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:44 PM
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November 15, 2006
| Fair And Balanced | Media |
FOX News internal memo posted at HuffPo:
The elections and Rumsfeld's resignation were a major event, but not the end of the world. The war on terror goes on without interruption...And let's be on the lookout for any statements from the Iraqi insurgents, who must be thrilled at the prospect of a Dem-controlled congress. [...]Just because the Dems won, the war on terror isn't over.
Shorter version: the election/Rumsfeld was a bummer, but cheer up, people: we still got our war!
Pardon me while I retch.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:25 PM
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November 02, 2006
| Katie Couric Gets Shrill | Iraq Media |
From the NBC Nightly News CBS Evening News (via Atrios):
Whoa. Things really must be unravelling over there if mainstream network news is this dark.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:14 AM
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October 31, 2006
| Blacklisting Air America | Media |
Media Matters has obtained an internal ABC Radio Networks memo that lists nearly 100 advertisers who demand, according to the memo, that "NONE of their commercials air during AIR AMERICA programming."
Among the advertisers blacklisting Air America are Bank of America, Exxon Mobil, Federal Express, General Electric, McDonald's, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and the U.S. Navy.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:26 PM
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October 29, 2006
| Letterman v. O'Reilly — Round Two | Media |
This is awesome. Bill O'Reilly gets pummelled by Dave Letterman. Video at Crooks and Liars. The usual blowhard condescension from O'Reilly, but Dave's having none of it. Not to be missed.
Sample Letterman lines:
I didn't say we're a bad country, I didn't say Bush is an evil liar. You’re putting words in my mouth. Just the way you put artificial facts in your head.
And:
You raise some points, but the truth of it is, a reasonable person can't believe what you're saying.
Go watch. It'll brighten your day.
[Thanks, Paul]
Posted by Jonathan at 02:25 PM
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October 01, 2006
| 25 Most Censored Stories | Media |
Project Censored has published its list of the 25 most important news stories that went largely uncovered for the year. Here they are:
- Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
- Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
- Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
- Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
- High-Tech Genocide in Congo
- Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
- US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
- Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
- The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
- Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
- Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed
- Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines
- New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup
- Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US
- Chemical Industry is EPA's Primary Research Partner
- Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court
- Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda
- Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story
- Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever
- Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem
- Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers
- Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
- US Oil Industry Targets Kyoto in Europe
- Cheney's Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year
- US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region
No matter how much of a news junkie you are, many, if not most, of these stories will be news to you. Which is exactly the point. They're important stories, but media self-censorship keeps us from hearing about them.
Project Censored publishes extensive details on all of these stories. Check them out.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:17 PM
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September 20, 2006
| Olbermann Demands An Apology | 9/11, "War On Terror" Media Politics |
[Thanks, Kevin]
Posted by Jonathan at 01:25 PM
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August 31, 2006
| Olbermann's Murrow Moment | Media Politics |
Great stuff from Keith Olbermann:
The last three minutes, especially.
[Thanks, Ken]
Update: [5:08 PM] - Text is here.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:17 PM
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August 22, 2006
| Garbage In, Garbage Out | Media Palestine/Middle East War and Peace |
Take a look at this shamelessly propagandistic slide show from The Jerusalem Post. Stunningly one-sided.
The problem with turning propaganda against your own population, whether in Israel, here in the US, or anywhere else, is that the short-term gains turn into long-term disaster: a population whose heads have been stuffed with phony nonsense is incapable of choosing well.
Accurate information has survival value. Garbage in, garbage out.
[Thanks, Miles]
Posted by Jonathan at 04:53 PM
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August 20, 2006
| Chauncey Gardiners | Media Politics |
Following a trail of links, I happened to arrive at Robert Parry's 1999 review of Edmund Morris's Reagan biography, Dutch. In a remarkable passage, Morris provides a rather shocking list of examples of Reagan's utter cluelessness. Parry:
[T]he Reagan in Dutch comes across as a shallow human being — a man so self-absorbed that he failed to recognize his own son, Michael, at his high school graduation.Morris also judges Reagan as a one-dimensional leader who himself mixed fantasy with fact in the service of his ideological goals, a man who possessed an "encyclopedic ignorance."
In one sardonic passage, Morris wrote that "the world that rotates inside [Reagan's] cerebellum is, if not beautiful, encouragingly rich and self-renewing. It is washed by seas whose natural 'ozone' produces a healthful brown smog over coastal highways, and rinsed by rivers that purify themselves whenever they flow over gravel. ...
"Reagan's world is not entirely without environmental problems. It glows with the 'radioactivity' of coal burners (much more dangerous than nuclear plants), and is plagued by 'deadly diseases spread by insects, because pesticides such as DDT have been prematurely outlawed.' Acid rain, caused by an excess of trees, threatens much of the industrial northeast.
"Geopolitically, the globe presents many challenges. ... North and South Vietnam should never have been permitted to join, having been 'separate nations for centuries.' The Soviet Union [is] bent on invading the United States via Mexico (a strategem of 'Nikolai' Lenin). ... The economy of South America is a mess, particularly in Portuguese-speaking Bolivia."
See also Helen Caldicott's account of a meeting she had with Reagan, one of my very first posts here at Past Peak.
Morris calls Reagan an ideologue with a "Daliesque ability to bend reality to his purposes." He was aided immeasurably in this by his "encyclopedic ignorance." This was one of the secrets of Reagan's success as the Great Communicator. He could utter all manner of nonsense and lies with completely convincing sincerity because his inner world was unencumbered by facts. He believed what he was saying, and that made him believable.
The appearance of sincerity is one of the factors that made Reagan the perfect front man for the television age. It didn't hurt, too, that he was an "amiable dunce" (all the more so after his shooting by Bush family friend John Hinckley, from which Reagan never fully recovered). He seemed well-meaning and was so obviously clueless that to criticise him too sharply violated Americans' sense of fair play. Sure he was muddled, but he seemed such a sweet old guy. Picking on him was like picking on the mentally handicapped. This consequence of Reagan's cluelessness, together with his amiable sincerity, was the source of his famous Teflon coating.
Reagan's backers may not have anticipated in advance how spectacularly well Reagan's ideologically-driven cluelessness would play on tv, but the lesson surely was not lost on them as it played out. Bush, Sr. and Clinton, in contrast, were obviously not dunces, so they lacked the ignorance defense, and it cost them.
As the Republicans searched for someone to cast in the role of President in 2000, it seems clear that they looked for a telegenic figure with the same kind of ideological sincerity unencumbered by facts. Dubya doesn't have Reagan's doddering amiability, but he's got the encyclopedic ignorance and the reliance on "gut instinct" over analysis. And he's got something Reagan didn't have: a well-crafted image as a born-again, evangelical Christian. So, once again, we're in the position where pointed attacks on Bush's ignorance seem like picking on a dummy — rude and off-putting. Bush plays the front man, and behind him Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, et al, run the country.
Democrats look back on Clinton with nostalgia because he was so bright, so knowledgable, so nuanced, so talented. Republicans look back on Reagan with nostalgia because he was so uncomplicated, appealing to simplistic ideological belief, not analytical thought. You really didn't have to think or to know anything, you just had to believe in the man.
Look again at Morris's small peek into Reagan's bizarre inner world and consider that this man was leader of the free world for eight years. And now we've got Dubya. A political formula is being perfected. If we don't demand knowledgable, capable leaders, we are going to be subjected to a succession of dunces whose job is to go on tv, while the real power is exercised elsewhere.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:50 PM
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August 09, 2006
| Lying Liar | Media |
Ann Coulter's a serial liar, but Republicans treat her like a rock star.
The GOP rewards people who reduce public discourse to a fact-free shouting match. Not hard to see why: the facts aren't on their side. But who needs facts when you can just make stuff up?
Meanwhile, mainstream media will continue to give Coulter a pass. It's like they think that everybody already knows Republicans are liars (and plagiarists), so Republican lies aren't news.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:04 AM
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July 29, 2006
| Summer Rerun | Iraq Media |
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Boy, are they ever. E&P:
An analysis released today by Frank Newport, director of The Gallup Poll, shows that current public wishes for U.S. policy in the Iraq war eerily echo attitudes about the Vietnam war in 1970.The most recent Gallup poll this month found that 52% of adult Americans want to see all U.S. troops out of Iraq within a year, with 19% advocating immediate withdrawal. In the summer of 1970, Gallup found that 48% wanted a pullout within a year, with 23% embracing the "immediate" option. Just 7% want to send more troops now, vs. 10% then.
At present, 56% call the decision to invade Iraq a "mistake," with 41% disagreeing. Again this echoes the view of the Vietnam war in 1970, when that exact same number, 56%, in May 1970 called [Vietnam] a mistake in a Gallup poll.
While the U.S. involvement in the Korean war is often labeled unpopular, the highest number calling it a mistake in a Gallup poll was 51% in early 1952. That number actually declined to 43% by the end of that year. [Emphasis added]
So, the Iraq war is now tied for most unpopular American war ever.
There's one essential difference between now and 1970, though. Back then, opposition to the war had become a somewhat respectable position, openly advocated by the likes of Walter Cronkite and Bobby Kennedy. Today, if all you did was watch tv, you'd think it's only fringe elements who want the US to pull out of Iraq. Instead, it's a majority of Americans. Liberal media.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:29 PM
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July 22, 2006
| Awesome Video | Activism Media |
(For links, see the comments)
Posted by Jonathan at 09:12 PM
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July 14, 2006
| The Few And The Many | Media Palestine/Middle East |
You can read blogging from Lebanon, here. A recent post concludes with these words:
Lebanon is a hostage and all the Lebanese people are a pawn in the hands of the few.
One of the striking things about the Lebanon coverage here in the US is the extent to which it suggests that Hezbollah is somehow on a par with the IDF. CNN has even gone so far as to constantly mention the few Israeli casualties while largely ignoring the scores of Lebanese civilian casualties. (The US version of CNN, that is. The International version is more balanced, which should tell you something: CNN knows the facts but is tailoring the message to the audience.)
Hezbollah is not Lebanon, but it is the people of Lebanon who are being made to pay. Never mind that collective punishment is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention. (But of course collective punishment is what the Palestinians have been facing for years.)
Hezbollah is no match for the IDF, but it's also not clear how Israel can defeat them. This is the conundrum of fourth generation war: how do you defeat a loosely-knit non-state enemy that is swimming in a sea of non-combatant civilians. It's what's defeating the US in Iraq. Billmon:
Hezbollah may have found the sweet spot in Fourth Generation War: It isn't a state and doesn't carry the political or defensive burdens of one, but it controls enough territory, commands enough popular loyalty and has enough allies to mount some fairly sophisticated military operations, using both conventional and nonconventional weapons. It's powerful enough to be successful — and be seen as successful — but not so powerful that state actors like Israel can fight it on equal terms. We may be looking at the New Model Army of the 21st century.
Israel, like the US in Iraq, may have started something it cannot finish — except by withdrawing.
Posted by Jonathan at 09:52 PM
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July 12, 2006
| Bush At Stanford | Media Politics |
Did you know this? I sure didn't. Paul Craig Roberts:
Gentle reader, did you know that, in April, President Bush went to Stanford University to speak to the Hoover Institution fellows at the invitation of former Secretary of State George Shultz but was not allowed on campus? The Stanford students got wind of it and blocked Bush's access to the campus. The Hoover fellows had to go to Shultz's home to hear Bush's pitch for war and more war.A person might think that it would be national news that Stanford University students would not allow the President of the US on campus. It happened to be a day when hundreds of prospective freshmen were on campus with their parents, many of whom joined the demonstration against Bush. I did not hear or read a word about it. Did you? I learned of it from faculty friends in June when I attended Stanford's graduation to witness a relative receive her degree. The June 16 edition of The Stanford Daily reprinted its April 24 report of the episode. [Emphasis added]
How could this not have been news? Stanford's not just any university. Weird. And pretty unnerving. Where's our free press, now when we need it most?
Posted by Jonathan at 05:43 PM
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July 10, 2006
| One Red Paper Clip | Humor & Fun Media |
This is a fun story.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:22 PM
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July 09, 2006
| Delusional Nonsense From Time | Media |
Gawd, this is stupid. Time:
Even more surprising than the [North Korean missile] test...was Bush's response. Long gone were the zero-tolerance warnings, "Axis of Evil" rhetoric and talk of pre-emptive action.Instead, Bush pledged to "make sure we work with our friends and allies ... to continue to send a unified message" to Pyongyang. In a news conference after the missile test, he referred to diplomacy a half dozen times.
The shift under way in Bush's foreign policy is bigger and more seismic than a change of wardrobe or a modulation of tone.
Bush came to office pledging to focus on domestic issues and pursue a "humble" foreign policy that would avoid the entanglements of the Bill Clinton years.
After September 11, however, the Bush team embarked on a different path, outlining a muscular, idealistic, and unilateralist vision of American power and how to use it.
They aimed to lay the foundation for a grand strategy to fight Islamic terrorists and rogue states, by spreading democracy around the world and pre-empting gathering threats before they materialize. And the U.S. wasn't willing to wait for others to help.
The approach fit with Bush's personal style, his self-professed proclivity to dispense with the nuances of geopolitics and go with his gut. "The Bush Doctrine is actually being defined by action, as opposed to by words," Bush told Tom Brokaw aboard Air Force One in 2003.
But in the span of four years, the administration has been forced to rethink the doctrine by which it hoped to remake the world. Bush's response to the North Korean missile test was revealing: Under the old Bush Doctrine, defiance by a dictator like Kim Jong Il would have merited threats of punitive U.S. action. Instead, the administration has mainly been talking up multilateralism and downplaying Pyongyang's provocation.
What an utter crock. From start to finish.
What's the difference between North Korea and Iraq? One has enormous oil reserves, lies at the very heart of the world's richest oil-producing region, offers a site for bases to replace the US bases in Saudi Arabia, and was defenseless against US attack. The other, not.
The rest is delusion.
Posted by Jonathan at 03:44 PM
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June 14, 2006
| Robert Newman's History Of Oil | Activism Humor & Fun Media War and Peace |
This is absolutely, bar none, the most brilliant piece of political video ever. Also the funniest. No contest.
Learn the real cause of the First World War. Learn what Salvador Dali's checkbook has to do with the Axis of Evil and the current invasion of Iraq. And many more things besides.
It's genius.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:29 PM
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June 11, 2006
| Al At The Movies | Activism Environment Media |
Who wants to see an Al Gore documentary about global warming? Lots of people, apparently. Weekend box office (via Atrios), per screen:
Movie Per Screen
AverageCars $15,759 An Inconvenient Truth $12,073 The Break-Up $6,669 A Prairie Home Companion $6,146 The Omen $5,673 X-Men: The Last Stand $4,225 The Da Vinci Code $3,103 Over the Hedge $2,920 Keeping Up with the Steins $2,037 Mission: Impossible III $1,592 RV $1,233 Poseidon $1,067
Not too shabby.
122 screens this weekend, 400 next. Opens here in Madison Friday. Be there or be square.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:43 PM
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June 10, 2006
| Information | Media |
This is amazing.
Posted by Jonathan at 09:13 AM
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June 05, 2006
| Global Warming "Journalism" | Environment Media |
In her recent interview of Al Gore, NPR's Terry Gross pointed out the following jaw-dropping facts:
Let me mention a study that you cite in your documentary and your book, An Inconvenient Truth. This is a study from the University of California at San Diego. A scientist there named Dr. Naomi Oreskes published in Science magazine a study of every peer-reviewed journal article on global warming from the previous 10 years, and then in her random sample of 928 articles, she found that no articles disagreed with the scientific consensus on global warming. Then another study on articles on global warming that were published in the previous 14 years in the press, specifically published in The New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and Wall Street Journal found that more than half of those stories gave equal weight to the scientific consensus and to the view that human beings played no role in global warming.So just to sum up: the scientific journals, the scientists agreed about global warming, but in these four, you know, major American newspapers, equal weight was given in half the articles to the opposing view that human beings are not causing global warming.
Staggering — yet, in a sad way, unsurprising. This is what it has come to. Scientists publishing in peer-reviewed journals are 100% unanimous, have been for years, but readers of the newspapers of record would have no way of knowing that. No wonder people are confused. Journalists who insist on reporting the world-is-flat "side" of the "argument" have a lot to answer for.
The Daily Show (as usual) perfectly captured the essence of this kind of "journalism" back in August, 2004:
JON STEWART: Here's what puzzles me most, Rob. John Kerry's record in Vietnam is pretty much right there in the official records of the US military, and haven't been disputed for 35 years?ROB CORDDRY: That's right, Jon, and that's certainly the spin you'll be hearing coming from the Kerry campaign over the next few days.
STEWART: Th-that's not a spin thing, that's a fact. That's established.
CORDDRY: Exactly, Jon, and that established, incontrovertible fact is one side of the story.
STEWART: But that should be — isn't that the end of the story? I mean, you've seen the records, haven't you? What's your opinion?
CORDDRY: I'm sorry, my opinion? No, I don't have 'o-pin-i-ons'. I'm a reporter, Jon, and my job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called 'objectivity' — might wanna look it up some day.
STEWART: Doesn't objectivity mean objectively weighing the evidence, and calling out what's credible and what isn't?
CORDDRY: Whoa-ho! Well, well, well — sounds like someone wants the media to act as a filter! [high-pitched, effeminate] 'Ooh, this allegation is spurious! Upon investigation this claim lacks any basis in reality! Mmm, mmm, mmm.' Listen buddy: not my job to stand between the people talking to me and the people listening to me.
It just makes you want to scream. Global warming is an issue where many millions of lives hang in the balance. Everlasting shame on all the big-shot reporters who comfort themselves with self-interested rationalizations about "objectivity". Their brand of "objectivity" is going to get a lot of people killed.
Posted by Jonathan at 07:57 PM
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May 28, 2006
| Liberal Media | Media |
This is excellent.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:45 AM
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May 16, 2006
| What's So Great About Blogs | Media Quotes |
From Dave Winer (via Big Gav):
99 percent of blogs are about what someone has to say. 99 percent of traditional media is about making money. — Mark Cuban
Can I get that as a tattoo?
Posted by Jonathan at 10:29 PM
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May 14, 2006
| An Inconvenient Truth | Activism Environment Media |
I know what I'll be doing June 16.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:14 PM
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May 02, 2006
| NYT On Net Neutrality | Corporations, Globalization Media Politics |
From today's NYT editorial on Net neutrality:
"Net neutrality" is a concept that is still unfamiliar to most Americans, but it keeps the Internet democratic. Cable and telephone companies that provide Internet service are talking about creating a two-tiered Internet, in which Web sites that pay them large fees would get priority over everything else. Opponents of these plans are supporting Net-neutrality legislation, which would require all Web sites to be treated equally. Net neutrality recently suffered a setback in the House, but there is growing hope that the Senate will take up the cause.One of the Internet's great strengths is that a single blogger or a small political group can inexpensively create a Web page that is just as accessible to the world as Microsoft's home page. But this democratic Internet would be in danger if the companies that deliver Internet service changed the rules so that Web sites that pay them money would be easily accessible, while little-guy sites would be harder to access, and slower to navigate. Providers could also block access to sites they do not like. [Emphasis added]
Make sure your Senators understand what's at stake. The Internet is the great intellectual commons of today's world. Ceding control to a few giant corporations, by government fiat, would be an enormous step backward.
Posted by Jonathan at 03:06 PM
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April 25, 2006
| A Great Way To Spend $50 | Activism Iraq Media |
Documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, who made Outfoxed, Uncovered, and Wal-Mart, is starting production on a new documentary, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers.
This is from an email from Brave New Films:
Hello friends and brave new supporters,Some exciting news at Brave New Films. We're ready to start production on Robert's new documentary: "Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers." Over the last few months we've recruited a core team, and with the help of our volunteer field producers, have uncovered some devastating and powerful material that hasn't been seen before. We need your help to make it, more about that in a minute.
We can't tell you anything more specific about the film yet, but I can assure you it will have an enormous impact when it comes out shortly before the elections this November.
War time is about sacrificing for the common good. So many soldiers and families have paid unimaginable sacrifices, and for some to profit OBSCENELY from that sacrifice is one of the worst crimes possible. It's a crime against all of us, not just as Americans, but as human beings.
IRAQ FOR SALE: The War Profiteers will hold these corporations accountable for crimes against humanity. Watch the teaser trailer and a message from Robert here:
To start shooting, we need money. Overall, the film will cost about $750,000. We can expect about $450,000 of it to be offset by DVD sales, selling foreign rights, and an advance from our retail store distributor, but we still need $300,000.
A generous donor just stepped up and will contribute $100,000 if we can match it with $200,000 from someone else.
That someone else is you! 4000 people giving $50 each. We'll put everyone's name in the credits. You can give these donations as gifts in someone's name or in memory of a loved one if you'd like.
http://iraqforsale.org/donate.php
Imagine that. 4000 names scrolling by at the end of the film. Almost as many people as in the Lord of the Rings credits!
More importantly, this is people standing up to corporations. It's a clear message... a beautiful thing and exactly what the film is about. Every newspaper article written will talk about how IRAQ FOR SALE was funded by YOU.
This is 50 bucks well spent. I would love to see this film come out before the elections, and I'd love to know I helped make it possible. So I gave my $50, and I urge you to do the same.
This is extremely important material. So long as people in high places make a killing off of war, they'll continue to see war as a good idea. The best way to stop them is to expose them.
50 bucks. That's not even a tank of gas anymore. And how cool will it be to see your name in the credits (and on their web site). Go chip in.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:53 PM
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April 24, 2006
| Highway Robbery | Corporations, Globalization Media Politics |
Congress is getting ready to hand control of the information superhighway over to the giant telecom carriers like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. Carriers heretofore have adhered to the principle of net neutrality, which says that all data on the Internet is to be treated equally; carriers don't discriminate based on content. My lowly blog has as much right to a fair share of Internet bandwidth as any giant commercial site.
The big carriers want to do away with net neutrality, however, so they can create a two-tiered Internet. Commercial sites that can pay the freight will get to use the "fast lane." Everybody else will be relegated to the "slow lane." Congress is getting ready to grant their wish via a bill with the Orwellian name of COPE: Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006. Read more about it here, here, and here.
Funny how these huge giveaways to corporate America always go unmentioned in the mainstream media until it's already too late.
Voting is scheduled for Wednesday. Contact your House members and tell them to vote NO. The Internet is not the private property of a handful of corporations, no matter how big their campaign contributions.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:47 PM
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March 26, 2006
| Reporting For The CIA | Media Politics |
Americans are naive. We're brought up to believe that we've got a free news media, we've got real representative politics, and so on. The game may be rigged in other countries, but not here. So, we know that the NSA listens to every scrap of electronic communications overseas, but we take it on faith that they don't listen to communications here in the US. But then it turns out they do.
We know also that the CIA is skilled in manipulating the news media overseas. We know they manipulate other countries' political processes, funding this candidate, smearing that one, bolstering a regime here, creating chaos there. But we take it on faith that they don't apply those skills internally. Why? If they believe the national security is at stake, why wouldn't they conclude it is their duty to bring to bear every tool at their disposal?
Actually, we don't have to guess. In 1977, Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote an article for Rolling Stone that exposed the fact that hundreds of American journalists, including some of the biggest names in news, had secretly carried out assignments on behalf of the CIA. Bernstein:
[M]ore than 400 American journalists...in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. [...]The Agency's relationship with the [New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. [It was] general Times policy...to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.
...[T]he Agency's working relationship with the Times was closer and more extensive than with any other paper...
CBS was unquestionably the CIA's most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS president William Paley and [CIA Director] Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship...[CBS] allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA. Once a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, CBS correspondents joined the CIA hierarchy for private dinners and briefings. [Emphasis added]
200 reporters, Bernstein said, had gone so far as to sign secrecy agreements with the CIA. That was in 1977. But CIA infiltration of the American news media isn't exactly something a CIA-infiltrated news media is going to report on, so, in the 30 years since Bernstein's article, we haven't heard much more about it.
But SusanG at DailyKos (link via Xymphora) has posted an interview she did with Daniel Ellsberg, who speculates on the current state of affairs as seen through the prism of the Judith Miller affair. Excerpt below the fold.
Excerpt:
Over 200 reporters, according to Bernstein, had signed secrecy agreements with the CIA. There were a number of individuals who did really work to put stories in that they wanted, to publish stuff they wanted. I believe that's what they were saying about Joe Alsop and Stewart Alsop, that they were essentially assets of the CIA, which means they would put out CIA line. Not because they were literal employees, but because they were friends with people in the CIA.Q: But that's a thin line isn't it? I'm not sure that anybody said specifically, write a story that's very positive about X so that we look good. I think a lot of it is just an understanding of being a part of that establishment back then and they saw it as patriotism, from what Bernstein said.
Certainly that is a major aspect to the whole thing. They're not under the impression that they're working for and with the city machine or the mafia or something. This is the U.S. government, this is the CIA, this is the establishment.
But let me put a slightly different spin on it: Remember Sy Sulzberger was mentioned as one person who had a clearance. He had a column, and he denied it, but several people from the CIA said that on one occasion he called up for information, they gave him the briefing paper and he simply put the briefing in under his byline. He literally reproduced the whole briefing paper.
Now how often is that done? Remember, a lot of these people were putting out mainly opinion columns, not reporting news...like Joe Alsop and Stewart Alsop. How often did they call up their friend at the CIA who simply told them, here's what's going on. And they then go on to print, here's what's going on. They don't say, I was told by a high official. See, they say, this is the reality. This is what's really happening, here's the real news. Sometimes they would say, yes, I got this from some official, but other times they would just say, this is a result of my observations or this is they way I see it. How often was the way they saw it in their highly read column simply what Allen Dulles or Richard Helms told them and they believed it? It wasn't that they were just being servile, they're just presenting a crafted CIA line which has been given to them.
Here's the point I was really coming to: I was most struck in that by the idea of a secrecy clearance, as somebody who had had a dozen simultaneous clearances.
The relationship that that implies has a number of dimensions to it. One of them - it's just one, but it's an important one - is that you are led to believe (quite misleadingly actually) that if you violate that agreement, you will be prosecuted. You are violating a law. And even if you're not prosecuted, you will know you are violating a law if you break the terms of that agreement. They mention to you 18 USC 793 (d) and (e) and so forth - what I was charged with. And indeed, I was prosecuted.
Now the catch is, I was the first person ever prosecuted for it. No one had ever been prosecuted, but I didn't know that, and they don't know that, and most people don't know it to this day. Not one reporter in a hundred have I ever met - and I've talked to audiences of journalists - knows that I was the first person ever to be prosecuted.
However, every time you sign that agreement, you are confronted with these laws that say you are subject to prosecution, so they think they're violating a law if they put that out, that they will get prosecuted having agreed to this. A reporter who is just slipped something under the cover on one particular day or who was told something over lunch, a reporter who hasn't signed an agreement, I think, is unlikely to believe that he or she is in trouble if he puts it out. He's more likely to believe that the source will get in trouble.
A reporter who has signed that agreement is definitely led to believe that he or she is subject to prosecution if he breaks that agreement. That's the number one point.
Number two point is... Judith Miller said, I had a security clearance. Now I think she was telling the truth. They said, no, it was just a simple non-disclosure agreement or some misunderstanding, I think that's the cover story. She had a clearance. What would that mean?
It means that she's trusted by these people as one of the team. They're not giving it to her under threat, they're giving it to her because they trust her to carry this out. Wonderful self-esteem there and the feeling of being an insider, and your fellows don't have that. It means you will now get information that people who don't have that clearance will not get. You'll get it in part because you're trusted and because you have something to lose, they'll take it away. If you violate it, you won't get that stuff anymore. You infer from that that you will get information that others don't get because you'll be trusted not to print it unless they tell you it's all right.
My guess is very strongly that Judith Miller did have such a clearance and did have a background check and it meant that she was entitled to get information authoritatively that others were not entitled to get on the understanding that she has a lot to lose - namely a clearance - and not just the one source, but from a lot of sources. It gives her entrée. [...]
If she has a clearance, he could take her to a meeting, to a place, to anybody, and say, "This woman is okay, she's cleared."
I thought right away: Judith Miller, Judith Miller. She's one of Bernstein's people here. And remember, he says it was one of their most carefully guarded secrets that they had, that they kept the Church Committee from putting out. They gave them stuff on assassination instead; that was less scary.
In every case, Bernstein said, where a journalist had such an agreement, it was known to their boss - to their editor or publisher or both. So I infer from that that probably Bill Keller - possibly not - or Howell Raines, but certainly the publisher, Sulzberger, did know. Now let's go one step further. Bernstein quotes somebody at the CIA as saying, "Our greatest asset is the New York Times." All right. [...]
...I'm sorry, I would not be happy to have it proved that the New York Times, which is the first thing I read every morning is, after all, a government newspaper. And obviously there are limitations to that because there's no question that they do put out from time to time things that the government does not want out. I can say that I know that better than most.
But keep in mind that Nixon was not in fact unhappy to see the Pentagon Papers out, and he wanted to put more stuff out.
Q: And in order to be an effective instrument of the government, it has to sometimes challenge the government.
It should show a certain amount of independence from time to time, yes.
But the stuff that was coming out during the first Gulf War was exactly like what was coming out in the invasion of Iraq this time. If the coverage had been coming right out of a shop in the Pentagon, controlling every aspect of the television coverage of the first Gulf War, how different would it have been? I didn't see how it could have been different.
It's still going on.
Q: So how did they do it?
...The control of the war coverage was very, very effective. And these PR guys know what they're doing. They did it in Grenada. I believe they didn't allow any reporters in when the actual operation was going on. And in Panama, there was hardly any coverage and to this day there's never been any investigation of how many Panamanians had been killed in that attack on Noriega's headquarters.
Just from the outside, you look at that and you say: You know, they're acting as though it's a controlled press. So let me put into the pot just the hypothesis that to a greater extent than we are really aware, it is a controlled press. And it's not 100 percent and some of the exposes occasionally - not that many - even go beyond what is necessary to establish an appearance of independence and constitutes a real degree of independence. But I think it's just possible that when you look a flagship like the New York Times from which other papers take their cues as to what is news and what isn't, there may be a critical element of top-level people being actually on the team. It's clear that Judith Miller was on the team. I'm suggesting that that goes beyond a mere groupie-type enthusiasm for the policy. She was on the team, period. She was one of us. She's an insider, not an outsider, let's say.
The Bush family has intelligence ties going back several generations. George H. W. Bush was CIA Director. The name of CIA headquarters is the George Bush Center for Intelligence, for pete's sake. Think back to the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Do they pass the smell test? Or did the Bush forces manipulate them the way the CIA has long since learned to manipulate elections abroad?
Posted by Jonathan at 06:21 PM
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March 22, 2006
| Feingold On Daily Show Tonight | Media Politics |
Senator Russ Feingold is scheduled to appear on "The Daily Show" tonight. Should be good.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:11 AM
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March 20, 2006
| Spanish-English Vocabulary Drill | Media |
No regular post tonight. Instead, here's something a little different. I've been studying Spanish for a while, and to help myself study, I wrote a little vocabulary drill program that runs on my PC.
A few days ago, it occurred to me that I could easily convert the program to run on the web so other people could use it, too. Besides, I wanted a reason to learn a little of the PHP programming language since it's hosted on so many web servers. So I set about converting the program to PHP, and the result is available here: http://www.pastpeak.com/spanish/vocab.php.
If you're interested in learning Spanish (or if you're a Spanish speaker learning English), go check it out. You create a "study set" of randomly selected words, then you can step through the set as many times as you need. When you've learned those words, create a new study set. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
At the moment the vocabulary consists of just 250 words, but I'll be adding more words all the time. I like the simplicity of it, but at some point I'll probabably add the ability to pick a specialized vocabulary (words related to shopping, say, or sports) and the ability to say you don't want to see a particular word anymore (because you're sure you know it).
Feedback is welcomed. Have fun, and I hope some of you find it useful.
Posted by Jonathan at 09:52 PM
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March 17, 2006
| V | Media |
Went to see V for Vendetta tonight. Not bad, but not great, and certainly not the high-voltage cultural lightning flash I was hoping for. Not for me, anyway. That movie still waits to be made.
Part of the problem, I think, is that having one of the leads perform his role from behind a rigid plastic mask robs the action of a lot of its drama and humanity. Natalie Portman holds up her end, but it's like she's playing opposite a manikin. We want to see an actor's face.
It also needed to be darker, more menacing, more chaotic, more filled with danger and dread. It's not enough to tell us things are bad — you've got to make us feel it for ourselves. You've got to make us take it seriously. Compare anything in V with that scene in Syriana where George Clooney gets tortured, and you'll see what I mean. The stakes being what they are, this is no time for a political movie to play it safe.
Still, the movie does get in its share of political barbs, and it's got some memorable images. Plus, the music over the closing credits is a hoot.
Bottom line: worth seeing if you like this kind of movie, but not the electrifying experience suggested by the trailers. That's how I saw it anyway. If you go and see it, let's hear your reactions in the comments.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:17 PM
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March 15, 2006
| Media Bias | Media |
[E]ven now the debate over Bush's slow motion demise is being framed very narrowly, as in, What do Republicans think of Bush's unpopularity? On Sunday, the New York Times published two articles addressing Bush's lack of support. Combined, the two articles quoted 16 sources, all 16 were Republicans. Not one Democrat or even one neutral political observer, such as a poli-sci prof or think tank guru, was quoted. On Monday, the Washington Post published a page 1 piece that gently asked the question, Why are senior White House strategists suddenly so ineffective? (Answer: They're tired.) The article quoted six people; all of them Republicans. And this week's Time magazine addresses Bush's obvious political woes. The article quotes five sources; all of them Republicans. So between the Times, the Post and Time articles, 27 sources were quoted and not one Democrat or independent was ever asked to voice their opinion about Bush's sagging performance.P.S. Yes, that's the same Time magazine that just last month, busy pushing a Bush-is-back narrative, announced the president had "found his voice" and that relieved White House aides "were smiling again" after a turbulent 2005. Oops.
27-zip. Damned liberal media.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:51 PM
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March 10, 2006
| Mel & Floyd On The Web | Humor & Fun Media |
If you live here in Madison, you probably know about the "Mel & Floyd Show" on WORT radio. It's the funniest political commentary this side of The Daily Show.
If you're not from Madison, you don't know what you've been missing, but now WORT's streaming on the Internet, so you can listen in from anywhere in the world.
Fridays, 1 to 2 PM Central Time. Mark your calendars. Five stars.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:47 PM
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March 04, 2006
| Koufax Awards Voting | Media |
Nominations for the 2005 Koufax Awards have been announced, and voting is open.
The Koufax Awards are named for Sandy Koufax, one of the greatest left-handed baseball pitchers of all time. They are intended to honor the best of the left-wing blogs, in a variety of categories.
PastPeak was nominated in two categories, Best Writing and Most Deserving of Wider Recognition. The page with links to all categories is here.
The way it works is you cast your votes in the comments section of the page for the category (scroll down to the bottom of the page). When the comments list for a page gets too long, they may open a new one.
Check out the lists of nominated blogs; it's a great way to expand your horizons. And if you're so inclined, you might vote for PastPeak in the categories mentioned above. Gumpa and I would be grateful.
Thanks!
Posted by Jonathan at 06:19 PM
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March 03, 2006
| Jon Stewart On Larry King | Media |
Crooks and Liars has video of Jon Stewart's appearance Monday on Larry King Live. The smartest guy on tv interviewed by one of the dumbest. Still, lots of good stuff.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:28 PM
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March 01, 2006
| Desperation | Iraq Media |
From ThinkProgress:
Flailing in desperation.
Posted by Jonathan at 07:59 PM
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February 27, 2006
| It's Coming... | Media |
 | V for Vendetta — March 17. Go watch the trailers. |
I've got to agree with John Robb: "This movie is going to be a social event."
World-wide.
James Wolcott: "[What] gives the movie its rebel power is the moral seriousness that drives the action, emotion, and allegory. That's what I didn't expect from the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix), this angry, summoning Tom Paine moral dispatch that puts our pundits, politicians, and cable news hosts to shame. V for Vendetta instills force into the very essence of four-letter words like hate, love, and (especially) fear, and releases that force like a fist. Off come the masks, and the faces are revealed."
People know something's been going very wrong, but they've needed a shared language and shared symbols to help them articulate their deep unease.
I thought Eminem's "Mosh" video would have a catalyzing effect. That didn't happen, partly because the video couldn't get air time. V for Vendetta, however, is a whole different animal. It will be a much more intense experience, first of all, and it will be seen by hundreds of millions of people over a very short period of time.
This could be it, the much-needed cultural lightning flash.
Posted by Jonathan at 08:24 PM
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February 20, 2006
| Dominique | Media |
And now for something completely different. Go here. Run your cursor over her face.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:28 PM
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February 09, 2006
| William Bennett's Hate Speech | Media |
William Bennett's always been a pompous, bigoted gasbag, but these comments of his in his new gig at CNN are appalling, even by his standards. Worse still, they are gasoline thrown on the fire of Islamic outrage. CNN's an international network. What are they thinking?
Posted by Jonathan at 06:53 PM
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February 03, 2006
| What Happened To Journalism | Media |
Eric Alterman (via Atrios) relates a very interesting point about big-time journalism in the age of Google:
At a recent conference on the Clinton Administration at Hofstra University, ex-press secretary Jake Siewart made a point that had previously eluded me: It was during the early days of Clinton's presidency that the democratization of instant information made the insider press corps obsolete. To retain their importance and self-regard, these journalists had to invent a new function for themselves, and they did: interpreting, not reporting, the news. But instead of doing the hard work of researching the historical, economic, sociological and political contexts of a given story and then finding a way to explain these in lay terms, they preferred to rely on what came most easily to them: cocktail party gossip, green room small talk, semiofficial leaks and unconfirmed rumor, almost always offered up as if the source had no interest in pushing a point of view. [Emphasis added]
Most of the big-time journalists have decided their métier is to get the juicy insider quote, so it's small wonder they curry favor so assiduously. If access is the only thing that matters, you gotta do whatever it takes to preserve access. Like never pointing out the constant stream of lies issuing out of Washington.
It's as if they're all doing celebrity coverage for People magazine. If they stop getting invited to the big, fashionable parties, they're finished.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:09 PM
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January 12, 2006
| Editorializing? | Media |
C-SPAN's website has carried the headline "Judicial Activism vs. Judicial Restraint" for the Alito hearings, throughout. What's up with that?
Posted by Jonathan at 11:39 AM
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January 10, 2006
| A Million Little Lies | Media |
If you are one of the millions of fans of Oprah Book Club selection A Million Little Pieces, you might want to go read this. In fact, even if you've never heard of the book, The Smoking Gun's investigation makes a fascinating story.
Great reporting. From a blog, no less.
Update: [Jan 11, 1:31PM] Random House apparently is offering to refund the money of anyone who bought the book directly from them.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:45 PM
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January 09, 2006
| Just Breathtaking | Future Media Science/Technology |
Google has a product called Google Earth that you can download for free.
Thanks to WorldChanging, I'm discovering an absolutely breathtaking feature of Google Earth that I cannot recommend to you highly enough. Google has layered on top of the African continent hundreds of links to aerial photographs, National Geographic stories, videos, and interactive map features. Go explore.
Start by downloading and installing Google Earth. When you have it running, navigate to Africa, and zoom in until you see the yellow rectangles (links to National Geographic photos and stories) and red airplanes (links to aerial photographs). You have to zoom in quite a bit to see them all — i.e., keep zooming after you start to see them, and you'll see more.
Don't miss the links to the various videos and multimedia features. For instance, each of the aerial photo links (the little red airplanes) has a link to "Sights and Sounds of Africa Megaflyover". Take that link, and check out the videos. Don't miss the "Aerial Footage" videos. Stunning.
All-in-all, an astonishingly rich and beautiful resource — and these are no doubt just the very first baby steps. What's going to be available to us five years from now? Ten years? Twenty?
Posted by Jonathan at 07:44 PM
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January 05, 2006
| O'Reilly On Letterman | Media |
Night before last, I linked to a short excerpt from Bill O'Reilly's appearance on Letterman. Letterman's site actually has the whole interview, which is well worth watching. Go here and click the link for "Dave and Bill O'Reilly 1/3/06".
The first anecdote O'Reilly tells, about Ridgewood Elementary School in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, is a fraud that was exposed as a fraud weeks ago. O'Reilly knows this, but he trots the story out again anyway. What a blowhard. What a liar. Just makes my skin crawl.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:39 AM
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January 04, 2006
| Liberal Media | Media Politics |
A partial list of newspapers who editorialized that Bill Clinton should resign for lying about sex:
NATIONAL:
USA TodayALABAMA:
The Mobile Register
Montgomery AdvertiserARIZONA:
Tucson CitizenCALIFORNIA:
San Jose Mercury News
The Orange County Register
The North (San Diego) County Times
The Record, StocktonCOLORADO:
The Denver PostCONNECTICUT:
The Day of New London
Norwich BulletinDISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
The Washington TimesFLORIDA:
The Orlando Sentinel
The Tampa TribuneGEORGIA:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Augusta ChronicleILLINOIS:
Chicago TribuneINDIANA:
The Indianapolis Star
Chronicle-Tribune of Marion
South Bend Tribune
The Times of Northwest IndianaIOWA:
The Des Moines RegisterKANSAS:
The Topeka Capital-JournalLOUISIANA:
The Times-Picayune of New Orleans
The News-Star, MonroeMICHIGAN:
The Grand Rapids Press
Detroit Free PressMINNESOTA:
Post-Bulletin of RochesterMISSISSIPPI:
Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, TupeloMISSOURI:
Jefferson City News-TribuneNEBRASKA:
Lincoln Journal StarNEVADA:
Reno Gazette-JournalNEW JERSEY
The Trentonian, TrentonNEW MEXICO:
Albuquerque Journal
The Santa Fe New MexicanNEW YORK:
Sunday Freeman of Kingston
Utica Observer-DispatchNORTH CAROLINA:
The Herald-Sun of Durham
Winston-Salem JournalOHIO:
The Repository, Canton
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The Cincinnati PostOKLAHOMA:
The Daily Oklahoman, Oklahoma City
Tulsa WorldOREGON:
Statesman Journal, SalemPENNSYLVANIA:
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Pittsburgh Post-GazetteSOUTH CAROLINA:
The State, ColumbiaSOUTH DAKOTA:
Argus Leader, Sioux FallsTEXAS:
San Antonio Express-News
El Paso TimesUTAH:
Standard-Examiner, Ogden
The Spectrum, St. George
The Salt Lake Tribune, Salt Lake City
Deseret News, Salt Lake CityVIRGINIA:
Daily Press of Newport NewsWASHINGTON:
The Seattle TimesWISCONSIN:
The Post-Crescent, Appleton
The Journal Times, Racine
Clinton's mistake: he should have lied the country into war. Lied about weapons of mass destruction. Lied about torture. Lied about illegal surveillance of American citizens. Lied about leaks to smear his opponents. Anything. Just not about sex.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:13 AM
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| Bipartisan, My Ass | Media Politics |
Much of the mainstream media's tying itself in knots trying to portray the Abramoff scandal as bipartisan. It's nonsense. They are caving in to what is doubtless crushing pressure from the Republicans, but Abramoff's operation was at the very core of the Republican political machine. Everybody in Washington knows it.
Go read Digby.
Posted by Jonathan at 12:31 AM
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| Letterman: "60% Of What You Say Is Crap" | Media |
Dave Letterman takes on Bill O'Reilly. Video (via Atrios).
Letterman: "I'm very concerned about people like yourself who don't have nothing but endless sympathy for a woman like Cindy Sheehan. Honest to Christ. Honest to Christ."
Letterman: "I'm not smart enough to debate you point for point on this, but I have the feeling — I have the feeling — I have the feeling about 60% of what you say is crap."
(Oh, and O'Reilly — it's not "M16", you pompous ass. It's "MI6". MI, as in Military Intelligence.)
Posted by Jonathan at 12:09 AM
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December 29, 2005
| Show Biz | Media Politics |
Via Digby, some interesting thoughts on show biz and contemporary American politics. The people who create America's movies, comedy, music, and tv are overwhelmingly liberal, but somehow the Democrats fail to put all that talent to good use. Digby:
In the final days of the presidential campaign as John Kerry was being introduced by Bruce Springsteen on the stump with a moody, soulful solo rendition of "No Surrender" (which I loved) George W. Bush was landing in stadiums at sunset on the Marine one helicopter to fireworks and the theme to "Top Gun" screaming from the speakers. Which one do you suppose felt more like a rally?
The White House never misses an opportunity to turn every Bush appearance into a spectacle. They've got pros on their payroll. NYT:
Officials of past Democratic and Republican administrations marvel at how the White House does not seem to miss an opportunity to showcase Mr. Bush in dramatic and perfectly lighted settings. It is all by design: the White House has stocked its communications operation with people from network television who have expertise in lighting, camera angles and the importance of backdrops. [...]The White House efforts have been ambitious — and costly. For the prime-time television address that Mr. Bush delivered to the nation on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House rented three barges of giant Musco lights, the kind used to illuminate sports stadiums and rock concerts, sent them across New York Harbor, tethered them in the water around the base of the Statue of Liberty and then blasted them upward to illuminate all 305 feet of America's symbol of freedom. It was the ultimate patriotic backdrop for Mr. Bush, who spoke from Ellis Island.
For a speech that Mr. Bush delivered last summer at Mount Rushmore, the White House positioned the best platform for television crews off to one side, not head on as other White Houses have done, so that the cameras caught Mr. Bush in profile, his face perfectly aligned with the four presidents carved in stone.[...]
"We pay particular attention to not only what the president says but what the American people see," [White House communications director Dan] Bartlett said. "Americans are leading busy lives, and sometimes they don't have the opportunity to read a story or listen to an entire broadcast. But if they can have an instant understanding of what the president is talking about by seeing 60 seconds of television, you accomplish your goals as communicators. So we take it seriously."
Liberals tend to view Republican night-rally stagecraft as distasteful, unethical, gauche — but it works. Digby quotes Nick Stoller, screewriter for "Fun With Dick and Jane":
Why didn't Michael Bay direct an awesome action adventure ad where John Kerry singlehandedly blows up the terrorist insurgency with a solemn nod of his granite-chiseled chin? Why weren't the writers of SNL and the Daily Show brought in to create hilarious, ruthless anti-Bush spots that would have been forwarded all around the internet? Why wasn't James Brooks hired to create a touching, pull-the-heartstrings Kerry-Edwards-cares-about-the-voter commercial? This schlock works — remember that 9/11 Bush ad where he's holding the crying girl? With the Hollywood talent the Democratic party has at its disposal, we could have blown that spot out of the water, made it look like a mediocre episode of Touched by an Angel next to our sinking of the Titanic. I don't care if you think "I am king of the world" is a cheesy line — it made people cry. Nothing Kerry said made people cry. Except perhaps accidentally, out of boredom or pain.
Don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of the Republican Lite faction of the Democratic Party. Nor do I want to see liberals adopt a style based on disinformation and Republican-style up-is-down, black-is-white propaganda. But there is such a thing as making an honest point in a way that moves people, that uses imagery or satire to cut through the media fog in fresh and unforgettable ways. Comedy, especially, seems like an untapped resource. Funny clips spread on the web like viral wildfire. No airtime buy required.
Posted by Jonathan at 06:03 PM
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December 28, 2005
| Swift-Boating The War | Iraq Media Politics |
Even President Bush admits the White House's prewar characterization of the threat posed by Iraq was mistaken, but that doesn't stop Move America Forward from airing tv ads claiming that Saddam Hussein did indeed have WMD and "extensive ties" to al Qaeda. WSJ:
The television commercials are attention-grabbing: Newly found Iraqi documents show that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, including anthrax and mustard gas, and had "extensive ties" to al Qaeda. The discoveries are being covered up by those "willing to undermine support for the war on terrorism to selfishly advance their shameless political ambitions."The hard-hitting spots are part of a recent public-relations barrage aimed at reversing a decline in public support for President Bush's handling of Iraq. But these advertisements aren't paid for by the Republican National Committee or other established White House allies. Instead, they are sponsored by Move America Forward, a media-savvy outside advocacy group that has become one of the loudest — and most controversial — voices in the Iraq debate.
While even Mr. Bush now publicly acknowledges the mistakes his administration made in judging the threat posed by Mr. Hussein, the organization is taking to the airwaves to insist that the White House was right all along.
Similar to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — the advocacy group that helped derail John Kerry's presidential campaign — Move America Forward has magnified its reach by making small television and radio ad buys and then relying on cable- and local-television news outlets to give the commercials heavy coverage. Move America Forward has no discernible formal ties to the White House or the Republican National Committee, and the group says it operates independently from the Republican Party establishment. Still, the organization provides a clear benefit to the administration by spreading a pro-war message that goes beyond what administration officials can say publicly. [...]
Liberals question how the group has maintained its status as a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, which requires strict nonpartisanship, given the anti-Democratic tone of its campaigns. The group's Web site, www.moveamericaforward.org1, for example, attacks the current chairman of the Democratic National Committee, referring to "Howard Dean types who only see a future of failure for this country."
"When you have people participating in partisan activities with nonprofit dollars, that's really something the IRS needs to look at," says Tom Matzzie, the Washington director of the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org, another frequent target for Move America Forward's rhetoric. "An organization with a shady tax status participating in partisan activities and saying things that aren't true is a rogue element in American politics." [...]
MoveOn is a "political action committee," meaning its donations aren't tax-deductible and must be disclosed. [Emphasis added]
If an equivalent tax-exempt group existed on the left, does anyone doubt for an instant that the IRS would be all over them?
Posted by Jonathan at 04:47 PM
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December 27, 2005
| Organized Crime | Economy Media Politics |
From Jerome-a-Paris.
Once upon a time, a rising tide did lift all boats:
Then came the Reagan Revolution:
The after-tax picture is even worse:
How corrupt is American political/media culture? Ask yourself: how often do you see graphs like these in the mainstream.
Posted by Jonathan at 06:10 PM
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| Link to this
| Corrupted Language | Media Palestine/Middle East |
Robert Fisk in today's LA Times (excerpt):
I first realized the enormous pressures on American journalists in the Middle East when I went some years ago to say goodbye to a colleague from the Boston Globe. I expressed my sorrow that he was leaving a region where he had obviously enjoyed reporting. I could save my sorrows for someone else, he said. One of the joys of leaving was that he would no longer have to alter the truth to suit his paper's more vociferous readers."I used to call the Israeli Likud Party 'right wing,' " he said. "But recently, my editors have been telling me not to use the phrase. A lot of our readers objected." And so now, I asked? "We just don't call it 'right wing' anymore." [...]
This is only the tip of the semantic iceberg that has crashed into American journalism in the Middle East. Illegal Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land are clearly "colonies," and we used to call them that. I cannot trace the moment when we started using the word "settlements." But I can remember the moment around two years ago when the word "settlements" was replaced by "Jewish neighborhoods" — or even, in some cases, "outposts."
Similarly, "occupied" Palestinian land was softened in many American media reports into "disputed" Palestinian land — just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, in 2001, instructed U.S. embassies in the Middle East to refer to the West Bank as "disputed" rather than "occupied" territory.
Then there is the "wall," the massive concrete obstruction whose purpose, according to the Israeli authorities, is to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from killing innocent Israelis. In this, it seems to have had some success. But it does not follow the line of Israel's 1967 border and cuts deeply into Arab land. And all too often these days, journalists call it a "fence" rather than a "wall." Or a "security barrier," which is what Israel prefers them to say. For some of its length, we are told, it is not a wall at all — so we cannot call it a "wall," even though the vast snake of concrete and steel that runs east of Jerusalem is higher than the old Berlin Wall.
The semantic effect of this journalistic obfuscation is clear. If Palestinian land is not occupied but merely part of a legal dispute that might be resolved in law courts or discussions over tea, then a Palestinian child who throws a stone at an Israeli soldier in this territory is clearly acting insanely. [Emphasis added]
Euphemism is the enemy of thought.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:37 PM
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December 22, 2005
| Blog Readers: Young Or Old? | Media |
Are blog readers young, old, or somewhere in between? Go here, take the poll, see the results. You may be surprised.
Posted by Jonathan at 09:18 PM
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| Link to this
| Darling Of The Right | Media Politics |
Ann Coulter, yesterday:
I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.
Lovely.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:44 PM
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December 21, 2005
| 2005 Koufax Awards Nominations Are Open | Media |
Nominations for the 2005 Koufax Awards are open. Anyone can nominate.
The Koufax Awards are named for Sandy Koufax, one of the greatest left-handed baseball pitchers of all time. They are intended to honor the best of the left-wing blogs, in a variety of categories.
The way it works is you make your nominations in the comments section of Koufax Awards nominations posts at Wampum. When the comments list for one nominations post gets too long, they open a new post. The original post, which describes the categories, is here. They've since opened additional ones, here and, most recently, here.
Reading other people's nominations is a great way to learn what blogs are out there. And, if you're so inclined, you might nominate Past Peak. Last year, we made it to the semi-finals for Best New Blog. Past Peak's not a new blog anymore, but there is a category for Most Deserving Wider Recognition, as well as various others. Getting nominated helps us increase readership. And it makes us feel good. :-)
Thanks!
Posted by Jonathan at 10:47 AM
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December 19, 2005
| Big Fat Idiot | Media |
Rush Limbaugh (via MediaMatters):
Global warming relies on the theory that we are destroying ecosystems. There is no evidence that we could destroy ecosystems. [Emphasis added]
Takes your breath away.
MediaMatters has the audio.
Posted by Jonathan at 03:27 PM
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December 16, 2005
| Cafferty | 9/11, "War On Terror" Media Politics |
This is good.
Posted by Jonathan at 06:04 PM
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December 14, 2005
| They Do It On Purpose (Of Course) | Media |
From Charlie Reina, formerly a producer at Fox News Channel (PoynterOnline, via Atrios):
As with many conflicts, particularly the manufactured kind, dishonesty, greed and ignorance are the culprits behind Fox News Channel's so-called "War on Christmas." [...]It's no surprise, of course, that this phony call to arms, this "Christmas (ergo, Christians) Under Attack" hysteria, emanates from the bowels of Fox News Channel. The network is, after all, ground zero in the culture wars that polarize so much of America these days. Make no mistake about it: Fox is on a mission. Its slogans say, "Fair and Balanced" and "We Report, You Decide." But in the six years that I worked there, what I heard most from Fox management were mission statements — about turning things around, taking news back from the liberals, and giving "middle America" a voice long denied it by the "east coast media elite." In other words, using its news report to bring about change — in the media and, ultimately, in the direction of American culture.
As FNC's man at the top, Roger Ailes, knows well from his years as a political operative, there is no more effective wartime strategy than to divide and conquer. That's why so much of his network's programming is confrontational. [...]
But what really separates Fox from the competition is its unabashed use of religion as a divisive weapon. Common sense — and common courtesy — have long dictated that personal religious beliefs be kept out of news reporting unless the story at hand involves religion. But on Fox, it's not uncommon for an anchor to raise the issue of a guest's religion, or lack thereof, apropos of nothing. The most glaring example I can recall is a 2002 interview with a guest who had been cited for his charitable acts. At the end of the discussion the anchor said (paraphrasing here), "So I understand you're an atheist." The guest acknowledged that this was so. "Well," said he anchor, "we're out of time now, but I’d be glad to debate you anytime on the existence of God," and, with that, ended the segment.
This past July, during FNC's hurricane coverage, another anchor asked a guest: "Do you think God was looking over the people of the Gulf Coast," by sparing them from a new storm on the heels of Hurricane Ivan? [...]
Fox anchors will tell you that no one in management dictates that they bring up religion. But my experience at FNC is that, once management makes its views known, the anchors have a clear blueprint of what's expected of them. In this case, the point man is network vice president John Moody. A scholar and biographer of Pope John Paul II, John is a devout Catholic who seldom holds back on matters of the church, or in framing his views in "good guy, bad guy" terms. For example, during the 2001 Senate hearings on John Ashcroft's appointment as Attorney General, Moody's daily memos to the staff repeatedly touted Ashcroft as "deeply religious" and the victim of Democrats' intolerance. [...]
Then there’s Fox management’s view on the separation of church and state, and on those who support it. One not-so-subtle hint came in March, 2004, after a Baghdad bombing gave reporters at a hotel in the Iraqi capital a scare. Moody's memo that day advised FNC staffers to "offer a prayer of thanks for their safety to whatever God you revere (and let the ACLU stick it where the sun don't shine)."
So, again, it's no wonder this "War on Christmas" (now in its second successful year) is a production of Fox News Channel — the very network that has made accusation, recrimination and confrontation the gold standards of cable "news," and whose personalities have fashioned a self-serving "war" out of whole cloth, thanks to a scattered handful of p/c dupes and a shameless management willing to use even Christmas for its own political ends. [Emphasis added]
Obvious, but it's nice to get confirmation from an insider.
Posted by Jonathan at 03:58 PM
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| Link to this
| Communing With Satan | Media |
Here in Madison, Wisconsin, we have lots of reasons to love our city. Here's one more.
Bill O'Reilly, on his tv show yesterday, ranting about an editorial in the Richmond Times-Dispatch decrying O'Reilly's ridiculous "war on Christmas" campaign (MediaMatters):
Now, this is a conservative city, Richmond. I mean, this is not Madison, Wisconsin, where you expect those people to be communing with Satan...
Ah, the voice of reason.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:54 PM
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December 12, 2005
| Pat Robertson: Criticism Is Treason | Iraq Media Politics |
In Pat Robertson's world, the Iraq war has already been won, and wartime criticism of the president is treason. Here's Robertson last week (via MediaMatters):
We've won the war already, and for the Democrats to say we can't win it — what kind of a statement is that? And furthermore, one of the fundamental principles we have in America is that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces and attempts to undermine the commander in chief during time of war amounts to treason. I know we have an opportunity to express our points of view, but there is a time when we're engaged in a combat situation that carping criticism against the commander in chief just doesn't cut it. And I think that yes, we have freedom of speech — of course we do — but this has gone over the top and I think the Republicans are — well, they've taken advantage. [Emphasis added]
The war's already been won — but it's also ongoing, so criticism is treason. We've got freedom of speech — but you can't use it to criticize the president, cuz he's commander in chief. Which, of course, is a "fundamental principle" of our democracy.
Poor Pat.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:48 PM
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December 09, 2005
| Pass The Popcorn | Media |
Off to see Syriana tonight. Should be interesting...
Posted by Jonathan at 05:49 PM
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December 08, 2005
| Jon Stewart's Kwanzaa Gift To Bill O'Reilly | Humor & Fun Media Politics |
A follow-up on yesterday's Bill O'Reilly and the fake war against Christmas item: Jon Stewart did a funny bit on it last night. Go here, and click "Secular Central".
And Atrios makes a good point: as silly as all this is, it's annoying that the wingnuts are managing to politicize what most people think of as a nice, loving holiday season that brings people together. Wedge Issues R Us.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:49 AM
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December 07, 2005
| Shame | 9/11, "War On Terror" Media Rights, Law |
Eric Boehlert on the acquittal yesterday of Florida professor Sami Al-Arian on terrorism charges:
Courtroom defeats for prosecutors don't come much more embarrassing than the one suffered Tuesday in the Florida terror trial of Sami Al-Arian, who was acquitted on key charges of abetting terrorists. Along with three other defendants, Al-Arian, a former University of South Florida professor, was charged with helping to lead a Palestinian terrorist group from his home near Tampa.Feds, who'd been eying A-Arian for nearly a decade, finally got their chance to indict him following 9/11 when the Patriot Act allowed all sorts of evidence to be suddenly permissible in court. Al-Arian's case never had anything to do with bin Laden or Saddam, but Bush's Justice Dept., which indicted Al-Arian just one month before the invasion of Iraq, made sure to leave the impression that the crucial terror case would keep America safe.
Anyway, the case turned out to be colossal flop, with the feds presenting a confusing mish-mash of jumbled transcripts and a mountain of circumstantial evidence that, according to press accounts, bored the jury to tears. The prosecution took nearly five months to present its case, which included testimony from nearly 80 witnesses. Finally given a chance to respond, here's what Al-Arian's attorney told the judge:
"On behalf of Dr. Al-Arian, the defense rests."
Al-Arian didn't call a single witness on his behalf. That might have been because prosecutors, who had tapped Al-Arian's phone for years and collected 20,000 hours of conversations, failed to present a single phone call in which violent terrorist acts were plotted. As has become something of a post-9/11 custom, the terror indictments were a lot more convincing than the actual terror trial. (See the Lackawanna Six.) And has also become customary, the network news teams looked the other way.
When then-Attorney General John Ashcroft personally announced the Al-Arian indictment on Feb. 20, 2003, in a press conference carried live on CNN (Ashcroft tagged Al-Arian the North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad), the story garnered a wave of excited media attention. ABC's "World News Tonight" led that night's newscast with the Al Arian arrest. Both NBC and CBS also gave the story prominent play that evening. But last night, in the wake of Al-Arian's acquittal, it was a different story. Neither ABC, CBS nor NBC led with the terror case on their evening newscasts. None of them slotted it second or third either. In fact, according to TVEyes, the 24-hour monitor system, none of [the] networks reported the acquittal at all. Raise your hand if you think the nets would have covered the trial's conclusion if the jury had returned with a guilty verdict in what the government had hyped as a centerpiece to its War on Terror. [Emphasis added]
Sickening and infuriating. Shame on the networks. Shame.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:06 PM
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| Link to this
| Christmas Spirit | Media |
Fox's Bill O'Reilly enters into the true spirit of Christmas:
I am not going to let oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces in this country diminish and denigrate the holiday and the celebration. I am not going to let it happen. I'm gonna use all the power that I have on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people who are trying to do that. And we have succeeded. You know we've succeeded. They are on the run in corporations, in the media, everywhere. They are on the run, because I will put their face and their name on television, and I will talk about them on the radio if they do it. There is no reason on this earth that all of us cannot celebrate a public holiday devoted to generosity, peace, and love together. There is no reason on the earth that we can't do that. So we are going to do it. And anyone who tries to stop us from doing it is gonna face me. [Emphasis added]
Hilarious. What a pinhead.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:48 PM
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December 02, 2005
| "Two Words: Cheney's Guilty." | Media Politics |
Crooks and Liars has the video of Dave Letterman's quite good interview of Maureen Dowd, here. I haven't watched Letterman in years, but I remember him as always playing dumb when it comes to politics. Not this time, though. Worth watching, but here are a few high points.
On Judy Miller and WMD:
Dowd: Well, basically the problem with Judy [Miller] was the same problem as Bob Woodward. They just needed a little more adult supervision.Letterman: So, so she was printing stories about the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And she was getting – her source was who, for those stories?
Dowd: Well, she was very close to Chalabi and the neocons in the administration. And then when she wrote her own account of it in the New York Times, she said that, um, she had gotten it totally wrong on weapons of mass destruction, but that she was only as good as her sources. So, then I wrote a column, I just said that’s not good enough because investigative reporting is not stenography, you can’t just put it in the paper and then let the administration use it to help make the phony case for war.
On Plamegate:
Dowd: "You don't have to pay attention to anything that's happening and you only need to remember two words"Letterman: "Uh-huh."
Dowd: "Cheney's guilty."
On Bush:
Dowd: "He has Harriet Miers and Condi and Karen Hughes, and he's surrounded by sort of nanny governesses, like a little boy."
I'd transcribe more, but I gotta run. Watch it in full here.
Posted by Jonathan at 06:31 PM
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| Laughing At Bombastic Bill | Humor & Fun Media |
Courtesy of Atrios, a listener's reaction (audio - mp3) to Bill O'Reilly. Priceless.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:34 PM
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November 14, 2005
| Lefties Won't Watch? | Media |
At "the annual media gathering wrangled by former Hearst Entertainment President Ray Joslin at Trinity College in New York, NBC Universal President Bob Wright and the person interviewing him — MSNBC host Tucker Carlson — veered into some interesting territory," Broadcasting & Cable says."Waxing nostalgic for the days when networks played current events 'down the middle,' Wright lamented the over-the-top tone that cable-news channels are increasingly embracing. And, of course, he laid responsibility for it all at the feet of Fox News Channel."
Carlson suggested the creation of a cable channel that caters to liberals. But "going after a lefty audience would be futile, Wright said. 'For some strange, probably genetic, reasons' — we're pretty sure that was a joke — 'they don't listen to a lot of radio and they don't watch a lot of television.'" [My emphasis]
That's the CEO of NBC. Dumbass. As Atrios points out, lefties don't watch cable news because it's wall-to-wall Republican spin.
You'd have to tie me down and prop my eyelids open, a la A Clockwork Orange, to get me to watch Fox News or any of its imitators, but I go out of my way to catch The Daily Show — I see it a couple of times a week, on average, and I don't even have cable.
Don't give me a loudmouthed, mirror-image of Fox; give me a smart, honest, literate, and funny liberal network, and I'll tune in.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:55 PM
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November 03, 2005
| China And The Internet | Media Science/Technology |
Ethan Zuckerman had an interesting post recently at WorldChanging on China and the Internet. Excerpt:
China's become truly huge on the internet in recent years - while only 8% of Chinese citizens are online, that's 103m people, making China the world's second largest Internet userbase. They're the largest mobile phone market, with 385m users. And they're creating content - there are 50 blog hosting services in China, and 5m blogs.The Chinese government doesn't censor everything - they're trying to make sure that political leaders and political movements don't get built online the same way that pop stars do. Talk about an issue like Taishi and your site or service will get shut down. Talk about your sex life, and no one will make trouble for you.
...the Great Firewall of China - the Chinese firewall makes it impossible to search for certain terms on Google. On Chinese blogging sites - from Blogbus to MSN Spaces - certain terms (like "democracy" or "freedom of speech") will simply be blocked by the server. The server administrator protects you, the user, from getting into trouble with authorities by talking about forbidden topics. You're free to talk about what you're free to talk about, and protected from touching the third rail of politics. [...]
The Chinese are moving ahead of the US in a number of internet spaces - podcasting, blogging via mobile phones, video blogging. But these new technologies have censorship baked in. Censorship isn't slowing down the growth of these companies - they're growing in ways that assume that certain speech will be censored.
If China's the largest internet userbase in the future, what does this mean for the Internet? Are the tools we use going to prevent us from engaging in certain types of speech? Are other countries going to want to adopt a Chinese-style internet rather than a US style one? Are there things we can do to ensure we don't get censorship baked into the code and the business model? [Emphasis added]
Fascinating on many levels. China is already leading the world in mobile phone users, podcasting, video blogging. Amazing. They're leapfrogging themselves right into the future. The pace of worldwide change just keeps accelerating.
Zuckerman's final questions are important ones. Will China set a precedent that leads to widespread censorship on the Internet? The network effect of the Internet is an enormously important development in human history, connecting the people of the world, creating a new kind of group mind that harnesses the power of millions of brains and that opens millions of eyes. It is a positive boon to humanity. We would be fools to cripple it. We must not let the Few determine what the Many can think and say.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:47 PM
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November 01, 2005
| How The News Works Now | Humor & Fun Media Politics |
Tom Tomorrow sums it up.
Posted by Jonathan at 06:43 PM
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October 27, 2005
| Your Liberal Media | Media |
If there's anybody out there still who believes we've got a liberal media, I suggest you go read this.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:47 PM
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October 21, 2005
| Glories Of A Free Press | Media |
From the Institute of Southern Studies (via Atrios): What does this editorial have in common with this, this, this, this, this, and this?
Busted.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:46 PM
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September 16, 2005
| Hugo Chavez On Democracy Now | Media |
On Monday, Amy Goodman's Democracy Now will feature a rare hour-long interview with Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. It should be a remarkable hour. If you can't catch it on the air, it will be archived on Democracy Now's website for streaming. You won't want to miss it.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:31 PM
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September 13, 2005
| Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot | Media |
Rush Limbaugh says a lot of dumb stuff, but this has to be one of the dumbest. In the midst of one of his usual tirades that humans don't cause global warming, he said this:
Nobody can prove it. Nobody can prove that man's causing [global warming]. To me, the proof that man is not causing this is that there's nothing we can do to stop it.
By this logic, one could similarly assert that since a single person cannot stop a forest fire, a single person could not possibly cause a forest fire.
Dumbass.
Posted by Jonathan at 09:21 AM
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September 02, 2005
| Media Gets Wakeup Call? | Disasters Media |
It's just possible that reporters who've been covering the ongoing disaster in New Orleans have, by this experience, been shaken out of their complacent slumbering acceptance of whatever bullshit is streaming out of Washington on any given day. For when was the last time you heard a news anchor say something like this? Via Atrios:
Cafferty: Wolf, the war in Iraq is part of the problem in New Orleans. The Boston Globe reporting today that National Guard units across the country have about half their usual equipment. Everything from helicopters, trucks, humvees, weapons available to them. All the rest of the stuff has been sent off to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are 78000 National Guard troops who are now deployed in those overseas war zones. Even the hardest hit states have 40% of their National Guard troops in Iraq right now. What happens if there's a terrorist attack tomorrow or a massive eearthquake in southern California? How would the nation respond? It's a frightening thought. The question is this — if we're to stay the course in Iraq should we bring the national guard troops home and institute a draft?Wolf: ...
Cafferty: Do you suppose, Wolf, that the arrival of the relief convoys and the political photo ops on the Gulf Coast happening at the same time were a coincidence today?
Wolf: ...
Cafferty: It's embarrassing. [My emphasis]
Or when was the last time you saw an article like this one on a major news site? CNN compares the official characterization of events coming from Chertoff and Brown to the reports they were getting from people on the ground. Go read it.
For many of the reporters who covered Vietnam on the ground, the experience innoculated them against ever meekly accepting the government line. Maybe Katrina will have the same effect today for some of the reporters covering it. One can hope.
Posted by Jonathan at 03:41 PM
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September 01, 2005
| Empathy From The Right | Disasters Media Politics |
Here's conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of National Review Online:
ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS [Jonah Goldberg]I think it's time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It's never too soon to be prepared.
Goldberg wrote that before the horror unfolding in New Orleans was fully evident, but still...
And then he added this:
NOT THAT I WANT TO OFFEND ANYBODY [Jonah Goldberg]But it would be pretty cool if Fox played to caricature and repeatedly referred to the hurricane as Katrina vanden Heuvel [editor of The Nation].
"The destruction from Katrina vanden Heuvel is expected to be massive."
"...the poor and disabled are particularly likely to suffer from the effects of Katrina vanden Heuvel ...."
"Coming up: how to explain Katrina vanden Heuvel to your children."
Etc.
Right-wing humor. Juvenile twit.
Posted by Jonathan at 12:52 AM
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August 31, 2005
| Looting And Not-Looting | Disasters Media |
A tale of two captions, here.
Posted by Jonathan at 08:56 AM
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August 27, 2005
| Say Cheese | Activism Media Science/Technology |
As personal computers, the Internet, cell phones, and wireless networks have taught us, technologies that facilitate the capture, processing, and sharing of information can have enormous, profound global impact, impact that emerges in often unexpected ways from the uncoordinated actions of millions or billions of individuals.
These kinds of effects are becoming ever more rapid and profound as the world becomes ever more networked. It may well be that the wired (or more appropriately, the wireless) world that is emerging is some unfathomable global entity that we can scarcely comprehend, just as the body is unfathomable to the cells that comprise it.
Jamais Cascio of WorldChanging has written a fascinating — and more than a little unsettling — vision of a phenomenon that is only now getting underway. He calls it the Participatory Panopticon. It's a long piece, but I've tried to edit it down. It's worth reading and pondering. Excerpts:
Soon — probably within the next decade, certainly within the next two — we'll be living in a world where what we see, what we hear, what we experience will be recorded wherever we go. There will be few statements or scenes that will go unnoticed, or unremembered. Our day to day lives will be archived and saved. What's more, these archives will be available over the net for recollection, analysis, even sharing.And we will be doing it to ourselves.
This won't simply be a world of a single, governmental Big Brother watching over your shoulder, nor will it be a world of a handful of corporate siblings training their ever-vigilant security cameras and tags on you. Such monitoring may well exist, probably will, in fact, but it will be overwhelmed by the millions of cameras and recorders in the hands of millions of Little Brothers and Little Sisters. We will carry with us the tools of our own transparency, and many, perhaps most, will do so willingly, even happily. [...]
This day is coming not because of some distant breakthrough or revolution. The breakthroughs are already happening. The revolution has already taken place. [...]
You may not be aware of it, but the cameraphone in your pocket is the harbinger of a massive social transformation, one already underway.
This transformation could be at least as big as the ones triggered by television and by computers... [...]
Thousands of so-called "moblog" sites have sprung up, dedicated to cameraphone shots of whatever captures the photographer's eye at that moment. And increasingly, cameraphones can do more than just take still images. A growing number of cameraphones can record — and send — video clips. With so-called 3G networks, bandwidth is sufficient to send live webcam-style video from a mobile phone. [...]
[E]arlier this year, the medical journal Archives of Dermatology ran a paper by the University Hospital of Geneva comparing the ability of dermatologists to diagnose skin ulcers by examining the patient in person with their ability to do so via cameraphone images. In the study, the diagnoses were identical in nearly every case, supporting the idea that cameraphones can be another tool for telemedicine in remote areas.
A few universities and activist groups are experimenting with applications allowing cameraphones to read bar codes, functioning like mobile networked bar code scanners. Users can snap a photo of a bar code on a product and get back information from a variety of websites on whether the product was produced sustainably, whether the company making it behaved ethically, even whether there's a better price to be had at a different store.
But the panopticon aspect is really most visible in the world of politics and activism. In the US, in last November's national election, a group calling itself "video vote vigil" asked citizens to keep a watch for polling place abuses and problems, recording them if possible with digital cameras or camera phones. In the UK, the delightfully-named "Blair Watch Project" was an effort, coordinated by the newspaper The Guardian, to keep tabs on Prime Minister Tony Blair as he campaigns around the country. The project was prompted by the Labour party's decision to limit Blair's media exposure on the trail; instead he was covered by more cameras than ever.
Efforts such as these make it clear that every citizen with a cameraphone can be a reporter. Citizens can capture a politician's inadvertent gesture, quick glance or private frown, and make sure those images are seen around the world. The lack of traditional cameras snapping away can no longer be an opportunity for public figures to relax. All those running for office have to assume that their actions and words are being recorded, even if no cameras are evident, as long as citizens are present.
This notion of individual citizens keeping a technological eye on the people in charge is referred to as "sousveillance", a recent neologism meaning "watching from below" — in comparison to "surveillance," meaning "watching from above." Proponents of the notion see it as an equalizer, making it possible for individual citizens to keep tabs on those in charge. For the sousveillance movement, if the question is "who watches the watchmen?" the answer is "all of us." [...]
Things change when you can send your exposé over the Internet. Speed and breadth of access are the best ally for transparency, and the Internet has both in abundance. Once damning photos or video have been released onto the web, there's no bringing them back — efforts to do so are more likely to draw attention to them, in fact.
These days, sousveillance can be summed up with just one image:
[A]nyone, anywhere, with a digital camera and a network connection has enormous power, perhaps enough to alter the course of a war or to shake the policies of the most powerful nation on Earth. [...]
Digital devices and network connections can allow individuals to bypass chains of command and control. [...]
New York City police arrested nearly two thousand people during last year's Republican National Convention. Protestors were condemned by authorities for "rioting," "resisting arrest," and the like. The city provided video tapes to the press and to the courts taken by police officers that seemed to show protestors out of control. [...]
But it turned out that the police weren't the only ones armed with video cameras. Citizen video efforts show people swept up without cause and without resistance. It's become increasingly clear that police officers misrepresented the events at trial, and that prosecutors selectively edited the official video record to prove their cases. According to the New York Times, of the nearly 1,700 cases processed by early April, 91 percent ended with charges dropped or a verdict of not guilty. A startlingly large number of them have involved citizen video showing clearly that the police and prosecutors were lying. [...]
Video phones and higher-bandwidth networks will transform activism. The next time around, we'll see the transmission of dozens, hundreds, thousands of different views from marches and protests live over the web. [...]
It's easy to alter images from a single camera. Somewhat less simple, but still quite possible, is the alteration of images from a few cameras, owned by different photographers or media outlets.
But when you have images from dozens or hundreds or thousands of digital cameras and cameraphones, in the hands of citizen witnesses? At that point, I start siding with the pictures being real.
Now it's all well and good to think about the value of always-networked personal cameras as a tool for sousveillance, for "watching the watchmen," but really: how often do we attend political rallies or visit military prisons? Cameraphones as tools of political action, while certainly important, will not in and of themselves lead to the participatory panopticon.
Your spouse will.
It's inevitable. You'll want to recall a casual mention of his favorite movie, or the name and year of the wine she loved so much, or what he *really* said in that argument. You'll want to be able to share the amazing flock of birds you saw on the way home from work, or the enthralling street musician you passed while shopping. In the past, all you could rely upon was imperfect memory and whatever descriptive skills you possess. Now, and increasingly as the technology progresses, these tools will make it possible to retain and share those moments with perfect clarity. [...]
As we become more accustomed to using cameraphones to capture the fleeing and unexpected, the more they will become integrated into our social discourse and personal relationships.
But the problem with the fleeting and unexpected is that, well, it's fleeting and it's unexpected. If you don't have your cameraphone out and at the ready, it's hard to capture those moments in full. [...]
What' the answer?
Get rid of the mobile phone. [...]
It's likely that rather than carrying around your networked camera as a hand-held phone, you'll wear it, probably built into glasses. The phone would be built in, as well, perhaps evolved into a networked computer. Everything you say, whether to someone in front of you or over the phone, and everything you see, can be captured. The display can be shown on the inside of the glasses' lenses. [...]
In their respective labs, HP, Microsoft and Nokia are all working on variations of this idea. [...]
A bigger step comes from a company called DejaView.
DejaView is now selling a hat or glasses-mounted camera and microphone system connected to a small portable PC. It constantly buffers the last 30 seconds of whatever you're looking at, and can save the buffer to permanent storage at the press of a button. In the few seconds it takes you to realize you're looking at bigfoot or may have just passed an old friend from high school, the moment may have passed irrevocably. But as long as it hasn't been more than 30 seconds, the DejaView device can save it to a hard drive, holding onto it for good. [...]
These are the progenitors of what will amount to Tivos for your everyday life. You can think of them as personal memory assistants. [...]
Wearable personal memory assistants will be linked to wireless networks, and for good reasons: to let others see what you're seeing (so that they can help you); to access greater computing power for image-recognition (including, eventually, facial-recognition routines so that you never forget a face); and for off-site storage of what you're recording, giving you far greater capacity than what you could have on-camera. [...]
A company called Colossal Storage claims that they'll have 10 petabyte drives on the market before the decade is out. 10 petabytes is ten million gigabytes. You could store more than a year's worth of high quality digital video, plus high fidelity audio, plus assorted other data, in space like that.
Nobody has put them all together yet. How long do you think it will take?
Now if you're in the intellectual property business, you're probably squirming in your seat right now. If everyone (or near enough) wears some kind of video and audio capture device connected to the net, doesn't that mean that everyone will be making copies of the movies they see, songs they hear, articles they read?
Yep.
Now the obvious immediate response is "well, stop it!" ...and we'll undoubtedly see, initially at least, regulations demanding that people shut off their memory assistants while in movie theaters and such...[but] the more that people feel like these tools are extensions of themselves, the less they’ll want to have them restricted. [...]
There are some deeply difficult user interface issues involved here. Recording everything is not the same as recalling something specific. It's a big question how you’ll be able to find the interesting stuff in your terabytes or petabytes of life archives. [...]
We're constantly checking with each other for useful insights. You stumble across a new restaurant, and want to know if any of your friends or any of their friends have been there before. You learn about a new politician, and want to know if anyone you know has heard her speak. You meet a new guy, and want to know if someone in your circle has dated him before...[W]as it *that* restaurant that had the bug in the soup? Was it *that* politician saying something about prayer in schools? Was it *that* guy my sister dated and dumped for cheating?
In a world of personal memory assistants and a participatory panopticon, those questions are answered.
Tools for social networks will be the killer app of the participatory panopticon. Imagine layering a friendster or epinions on top of this, where comments can be given instantly, observations compared automatically. Or imagine layering a "collaborative filtering" setup, like the comment filters on Slashdot, or the product suggestions on Amazon.
These tools will form the basis of a reputation network, a social networking system backed up by unimaginable amounts of recorded evidence and opinion. You look at the person across the subway car and the system recognizes her face, revealing to you that she just completed a business deal with a friend of yours. Or that she just met your cousin. Or that she's known to be a good kisser or a brilliant writer.
Clearly, the world of the participatory panopticon is not one of strong privacy and personal secrecy. Paris Hilton is not going to be happy here. It's going to be hard to escape past mistakes. It's going to be easy to find unflattering pictures or insulting observations. [...]
But the world of the participatory panopticon is not as interested in privacy, or even secrecy, as it is in lies. A police officer lying about hitting a protestor, a politician lying about human rights abuses, a potential new partner lying about past indiscretions — all of these are harder in a world where everything might be on the record. The participatory panopticon is a world where accusations can easily be documented, where corporations will become more transparent to stakeholders as a matter of course, where officials may even be required to wear a recorder while on duty, simply to avoid situations where they are discovered to have been lying. It's a world where we can all be witnesses with perfect recall. Ironically, it's a world where trust is easy, because lying is hard.
But ask yourself: what would it really be like to have perfect memory? Relationships — business, casual or personal — are very often built on the consensual misrememberings of slights. Memories fade. Emotional wounds heal. The insult that seemed so important one day is soon gone. But personal memory assistants will allow people to play back what you really said, time and again, allow people to obsess over a momentary sneer or distracted gaze. Reputation networks will allow people to share those recordings, showing their friends (and their friends' friends, and so on) just how much of a cad you really are.
In the world of the Participatory Panopticon, it's not just politicians concerned about inadvertent gestures, quick glances or private frowns. [...]
[We cannot] avoid it by simply deciding not to take this particular technological path. This is not a world we can decide simply to adopt or to reject. As I've shown, many of the pieces are already here or will soon be in place; more will come about as a side-effect of otherwise attractive innovations. It's unlikely that someone will set out to build the participatory panopticon, but it's very likely it will emerge nonetheless. It will be the troubling and fascinating result of the combination of a multitude of useful tools and compelling utilities.
Personal memory assistants, always on life recorders, reputation networks and so on — the pieces of the participatory panopticon — will thrust us into a world that is both painful and seductive. It will be a world of knowing that someone may always be recording your actions. It will be a world where official misbehavior will be ever more difficult to hide. It will be a world where your relationships are tested by relentless honesty. It will be a world where you will never worry about forgetting a name, or a number, or a face. It will be a world in which it is difficult or even impossible to hide. It will be a world where you'll never again lose a fleeting moment of unexpected beauty. [My emphasis]
If everybody's watching, and recording, and sharing what they've recorded, we all may have no choice but to finally learn that honesty truly is the best policy. Lying will become increasingly impossible to sustain. And we'll have to learn humility as well. Nobody's perfect — and now everybody's going to have proof. No point pretending.
In twelve-step recovery programs they talk about taking a fearless personal inventory, a clear-eyed look at the ways one has deceived others and oneself. In Cascio's world, our personal inventory will all be out there on the network. Denial's going to be tough.
What will be the impact on our collective psyche as truthfulness becomes a necessary virtue? The typical politician's tactic of making nothing but plain vanilla utterances may well come to be rejected as a form of disguised lying, as an all-to-obvious attempt to escape the pervasive scrutiny that the rest of us are all having to live with. People may just have to start coming clean. One can hope.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:14 PM
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August 20, 2005
| Bob Costas Shows How It's Done | Media |
Sports broadcaster Bob Costas Thursday gave his fellow television journalists a little lesson in integrity. LA Times:
Veteran sports broadcaster Bob Costas declined to fill in as host on CNN's "Larry King Live" Thursday night because of the program's focus that night on the missing Alabama teenager and on Dennis Rader, the BTK serial killer.Costas — who has been serving as an occasional substitute for King since June — bowed out of the Thursday show after he could not persuade producers to change the program's lineup, which included an interview with Beth Holloway Twitty, the mother of the high school senior who disappeared in Aruba in late May.
"I didn't think the subject matter of Thursday's show was the kind of broadcast that I should be doing," Costas said in a statement, adding that he "respectfully declined to participate." [...]
Costas' refusal to participate in a show about the Holloway case comes during a summer in which images of the teenager have become a staple of cable news programs, despite a lack of developments in the case. Fox News, in particular, has devoted a substantial amount of time to the story, dispatching "On the Record" host Greta Van Susteren to Aruba for the better part of two months.
Coverage of the Holloway case has yielded strong ratings, but some people have decried the time cable news has spent reporting the disappearance of yet another young white woman, arguing that the media do not put equal resources into Latinos' or blacks' disappearances.
On Thursday's "Larry King Live," substitute anchor Chris Pixley conducted a lengthy live interview with Twitty, who remains in Aruba looking for her daughter. The show came 81 days after Holloway disappeared. [My emphasis]
Now, that wasn't so hard, was it?
As Digby points out, it's often sports journos who are the ones who decline to go along with network BS. Digby:
I've noted before that the sports writers are often the ones who call bullshit. I don't know why this is so. Perhaps it's because they aren't dependent on the political media establishment for their daily bread. Or maybe it's just a different occupational culture. Whatever it is, it's clear to me that the political reporting fraternity would do well to take a lesson from their sports bretheren. Just say no.
It's a measure of how callow the media establishment has become that Costas's action seems so noteworthy and refreshing. Still, kudos to Costas.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:58 PM
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August 16, 2005
| The Future Of News, Today | Media |
This is an absolutely electrifying (and hugely entertaining and very funny) talk by Rob Curley, who runs the interactive, online, multimedia presence (websites is way too tepid a word for what they're doing) of the Lawrence Journal-World of Lawrence, KS.
You really need to go listen. It's a stunning (and I do mean stunning) glimpse of the true promise of the World Wide Web and all the other converging technologies that can connect people together. If you know somebody who works for a local newspaper, make them sit down and listen. What Rob Curley's team is doing is pure genius.
I cannot recommend it highly enough. Go listen. Go.
Update: [6:29 PM] Let me say a little more now that I've got a few minutes. Curley's talk is about an hour long, but a lot of the best stuff's in the second half. So if you just listen to the first few minutes and think you've got the gist, you really don't.
I think the talk will reward multiple listenings for people with an interest in how we can push the envelope with convergent communications technologies. Curley touches on a whole lot of things very quickly (so you've got to pay attention), and some of them are really quite unique. His talk's a lot like his work: it's got what he calls "overkill" — i.e., way more depth, richness, interactivity, and cross-linking of content than you're used to expecting. It's all playful, irreverent, exuberantly creative fun. If something's possible, then go for it.
To use one of his own expressions, Curley's a guy who's driving with his brights on. And it sounds like he's having an absolute blast doing it.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:56 PM
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August 13, 2005
| News Flash: Vacaville's In California! | Media |
Cindy Sheehan is a PR nightmare for the right, so the usual suspects have been doing their best to smear her. Somerby has what may the ultimate example:
Our favorite case of inane Sheehan-sliming occurred on Thursday’s O'Reilly Factor. Guest host John Gibson was speaking with the New York Sun's Ira Stoll. How inane will a cable hack be? Try to believe that he said it:GIBSON (8/11/05): I can't help but notice that Cindy Sheehan is from Vacaville, California, very close to U.C. Davis, very close to U.C. Berkeley, reasonably close to U.C. Santa Cruz, where I believe that a lot of those WTO protesters came from. What do the university anti-war protesters have to do with her?
Unbelievably dumb, even by the "Fair and Balanced" standards of Fox News.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:23 PM
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July 31, 2005
| Questions Of Power | Media Politics |
In August's Harper's, Lewis Lapham quotes Theodor Adorno:
Things have come to pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying....The confounding of truth and lies, making it almost impossible to maintain a distinction, and a labour of Sisyphus to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge...[marks] the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power. [My emphasis]
Adorno, writing in 1945, had in mind the propaganda machine of Nazi Germany, but his statement applies all the more forcefully to our age of infotainment media and privatized propaganda, in which the media ocean submerges all and leaves no dry land on which to stand. Lapham:
The infotainment to which we've become accustomed..., for the most part made with the machinery of the electronic media, replaces narrative with montage, substitutes for history the telling of fairy tales, grants authority to the actor, not the act. The country swarms with whistleblowers willing to provide particulars about any number of high government crimes and misdemeanors — whistles blowing every hour on the hour somewhere in the blogosphere, secrets revealed on every week's best-seller list — but who among the truth-tellers can compete for attention against the rumors of Brad Pitt's once and future marriages......What President Bush says or does matters as little as how well or poorly J. Lo sings; it is the weight of the publicity — face time in front of a camera, column inches in the magazines — that moves the tide of emotion and alters the geography of nations. In Washington hearing rooms and Hollywood restaurants, names take precedence over things (the who, not the what)...
...News broadcasts come and go as abruptly as the advertisements winking on and off in Tokyo and Times Square, the messages equivalent in their weightlessness, demanding nothing of the audience except the duty of ritual observance. Who knows or cares to know whether Rush Limbaugh's truths are truer than Toyota's?...
...[Joseph Goebbels] understood that arguments must be crude and emotional, instinctual rather than intellectual, endlessly repeated. The electronic media do the work on their own strategic initiative, and without the guidance and supervision once provided by the Gestapo...
Our collective media-drenced mind is like a society-wide drug trip — images come and go, only the present moment exists, the psychological distance between image and observer is erased. Logic, intellect, rational discernment fade from consciousness. It's just a trip.
Whenever anybody points to government conspiracies (the stealing of the 2004 presidential election, say), the usual rejoinder is: how could any large-scale conspiracy remain secret in the age of 24-hour cable news channels? The answer is simple: secrecy hardly matters anymore. All kinds of evidence can make its way into the public domain, but in a blink of the collective eye it disappears from view, crowded out by images with greater commercial appeal and staying power. Media exist to attract viewers, so the only political scandals with staying power are ones that attract viewers. So far, that seems to mean only ones that involve illicit sex (Bill Clinton, Gary Condit).
The conspirators don't have to worry about secrecy. They just have to wait us out. We'll click the tv remote and move on.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:54 PM
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July 30, 2005
| New Media | Media |
According to August's Harper's Index, it is projected that this year's combined US ad revenue for Google and Yahoo! will equal the combined primetime ad revenue of NBC, CBS, and ABC.
Yahoo! was founded 11 years ago, Google just 7. The world-wide web itself is only about a dozen years old. It's easy to forget just how rapid its growth has been.
Posted by Jonathan at 06:21 PM
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July 29, 2005
| A Super Straight Guy | Humor & Fun Media |
If you're a fan of The Daily Show (and if you're not, you should be), I think you'll get a kick out of this interview with Stephen Colbert. Excerpt:
Q: When you were developing your 'super straight guy' look and sound, which actual media personalities did you model yourself after?COLBERT: First of all, I am a super straight guy. I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and I am perfectly comfortable in blue blazers, khaki pants, Brooks Brothers suits and regimental striped ties. It's just genetic. I love a cocktail party with completely vacuous conversation, because I grew up in it.
But in terms of who I channel, my natural inclination was Stone Phillips, who has the greatest neck in journalism. And he's got the most amazingly severe head tilt at the end of tragic statements, like "there were no...survivors." He just tilts his head a bit on that "survivors" as if to say "It's true. It's sad. There were none."
Q: Plus, his name has that sort of Republican porn star vibe to it.
COLBERT: Exactly, if it were Stone Fill-Up then it would really be a porn star name.
Read the rest here.
(Thanks, Maurice)
Posted by Jonathan at 03:53 PM
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| Fuehrer Worship | Media Politics |
This one's making the rounds, but in case you haven't seen it here's what Time's 2004 Blog of the Year had to say on the subject of Our Leader (via Kos):
It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.
They're not joking, and it's not funny. It's idiotic, it's ridiculous, but it's also, to me anyway, frightening. Nazi comparisons tend to be counter-productive, but really — what does this kind of rhetoric call to mind if not the swooning adulation accorded to Der Fuehrer?
Posted by Jonathan at 03:32 PM
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July 15, 2005
| Gays Teaching Evolution | Humor & Fun Media |
Matt Taibbi explains modern American news media, here.
Posted by Jonathan at 12:06 PM
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| Reformers And Hardliners | Media |
Some world leaders are referred to as "moderates" or "reformers." Others are labeled "hardliners." Why? Neil Clark explains, in yesterday's Guardian:
Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is one. So are Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. These men, we are repeatedly told by CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, are "hardliners". But what exactly is a hardliner — and why are some world leaders hardliners and others not?In a dictionary you will find hardline defined as "definite and unyielding". But if so, why is hardliner used so selectively to describe world leaders?
As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad celebrated his landslide victory, another election was taking place in Bulgaria. For the past four years the prime minister, Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, has presided over a privatisation programme that the Iron Lady [Margaret Thatcher] herself would have drooled over. His neo-liberal agenda has left half of Bulgaria's 8 million people surviving on less than two euros a day. Yet unlike Ahmadinejad, Lukashenko or Chavez, the Bulgarian premier has not been labelled a hardliner — for his "definite and unyielding" policies — but instead is referred to as a reformer and a moderniser.
It's a similar story across eastern and central Europe. The Hungarian prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, whose government is following the most aggressively neoliberal policies in the EU, recently announced plans to privatise healthcare. Hungary has no more money for hospitals — but did find £7.7m to buy air-to-air missiles from the US and £34.5m to "adapt" its armed forces to the demands of Nato and EU membership. To many, a policy of putting guns before health would be considered hardline. But not the western media, who laud Gyurcsany as a "centrist reformer".
Look further and it is clear; if you run your country for the benefit of international capital and orientate your foreign policy towards the US, you will be a "reformer", "moderate" or "moderniser" - regardless of how extreme your polices are. The rule applies even if you served in an SS unit (like the neoconservatives' favourite Islamist, the late Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic) or, like the shah of Iran, had one of the most feared secret police forces in the world.
If, on the other hand, you run your country for the benefit of your people and refuse to pay Danegeld to the most powerful empire the world has seen, you will be called a hardliner. Ahmadinejad is "hardline", not for the social and religious conservatism he shares with the non-"hardline" leaders of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, but for his policy of empowering Iranian working class people and defending his country's right to develop nuclear power. Lukashenko is "hardline", not for his authoritarianism, but because he wishes to maintain the last planned, socially owned economy in Europe: an alternative economic agenda that has seen his country climb from 68th to 49th in the UN human development index. And Hugo Chavez is "hardline", not because he once led a failed military coup, but because he wishes to use his nation's vast oil wealth to benefit Venezuela and not US oil corporations.
It is for standing up for the interests of their own people that these three men are labelled "hardliners". For those genuinely concerned with social justice, derailing the US behemoth and creating a world in which people come before profits, the more "hardliners" — and the less "moderates" and "reformers" — that are elected to power, the better. [My emphasis]
The reformers are called "hardliners", and the hardliners are called "reformers". Life imitates Orwell.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:26 AM
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July 12, 2005
| Selling Out Africa | Activism Corporations, Globalization Media |
The Live8 concerts were to music-based activism what embedded journalism is to war reporting: corporate/government PR disguised as the real thing. When anything is as warmly embraced by big media, big government, and big multinational corporate players as Live8 was, well, you can be sure it's toothless, non-threatening, thoroughly housebroken. Just another reality tv show, with the usual reality tv subtext that says that phony, dumbed-down, product-placement "reality" is better than reality itself.
George Monbiot, writing from the English perspective, says it best:
I began to realise how much trouble we were in when Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State for International Development, announced that he would be joining the Make Poverty History march on Saturday. What would he be chanting?, I wondered. "Down with me and all I stand for"?Benn is the man in charge of using British aid to persuade African countries to privatise their public services: wasn’t the march supposed to be a protest against policies like his? But its aims were either expressed or interpreted so loosely that anyone could join. This was its strength and its weakness. The Daily Mail ran pictures of Gordon Brown and Bob Geldof on its front page, with the headline "Let's Roll", showing that nothing either Live8 or Make Poverty History has done so far represents a threat to power. The G8 leaders and the business interests their summit promotes can absorb our demands for aid, debt, even slightly fairer terms of trade, and lose nothing. They can wear our colours, speak our language, claim to support our aims, and discover in our agitation not new constraints, but new opportunities for manufacturing consent. Justice, this consensus says, can be achieved without confronting power.
They invite our representatives to share their stage, we invite theirs to share ours. [...]
The G8 leaders have seized this opportunity with both hands. Multinational corporations, they argue, are not the cause of Africa's problems, but the solution. From now on, they will be responsible for the relief of poverty.
In the United States, they have already been given control of the primary instrument of US policy towards Africa, the African Growth and Opportunity Act. The act is a fascinating compound of professed philanthropy and raw self-interest. To become eligible for help, African countries must bring about "a market-based economy that protects private property rights”", "the elimination of barriers to United States trade and investment" and a conducive environment for US "foreign policy interests". In return they will be allowed "preferential treatment" for some of their products in US markets.
The important word is "some". Clothing factories in Africa will be allowed to sell their products to the US as long as they use "fabrics wholly formed and cut in the United States" or if they avoid direct competition with US products...Even so, African countries' preferential treatment will be terminated if it results in "a surge in imports".
It goes without saying that all this is classified as foreign aid. The act instructs the US Agency for International Development to develop "a receptive environment for trade and investment". What is more interesting is that its implementation has been outsourced to another agency, the Corporate Council on Africa.
The CCA is the lobby group representing the big US corporations with interests in Africa: Halliburton, Exxon Mobil, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Starbucks, Raytheon, Microsoft, Boeing, Cargill, Citigroup and others. For the CCA, what is good for General Motors is good for Africa: "until African countries are able to earn greater income," it says, "their ability to buy U.S. products will be limited." The US State Department has put it in charge of training African governments and businesses. [...]
Now something very similar is being rolled out in the United Kingdom. Today the Business Action for Africa summit will open in London with a message from Tony Blair. It is chaired by Sir Mark Moody Stuart, the head of Anglo American, and its speakers include executives from Shell, British American Tobacco, Standard Chartered Bank, De Beers and the Corporate Council on Africa. [...]
Few would deny that one of the things Africa needs is investment. But investment by many of our multinationals has not enriched its people but impoverished them. The history of corporate involvement in Africa is a history of forced labour, evictions, murder, wars, the under-costing of resources, tax evasion and collusion with dictators. Nothing in either the Investment Climate Facility or the Growth and Opportunity Act imposes mandatory constraints on corporations. While their power and profits in Africa will be enhanced with the help of our foreign aid budgets, they will be bound only by voluntary commitments: of the kind that have been in place since 1976 and have proved useless.
Just as Gordon Brown's "moral crusade" encourages us to forget the armed crusade he financed, so the state-sponsored rebranding of the companies working in Africa prompts us to forget what Shell has been doing in Nigeria, what Barclays and Anglo American and De Beers have done in South Africa, and what British American Tobacco has done just about everywhere. From now on, the G8 would like us to believe, these companies will be Africa's best friends. In the name of making poverty history, the G8 has given a new, multi-headed East India Company a mandate to govern the continent.
Without a critique of power, our campaign, so marvellously and so disastrously inclusive, will merely enhance this effort. Debt, unfair terms of trade and poverty are not causes of Africa's problems but symptoms. The cause is power: the ability of the G8 nations and their corporations to run other people's lives. Where, on the Live8 stages and at the rally in Edinburgh, was the campaign against the G8's control of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations? Where was the demand for binding global laws for multinational companies?
At the Make Poverty History march, the speakers insisted that we are dragging the G8 leaders kicking and screaming towards our demands. It seems to me that the G8 leaders are dragging us dancing and cheering towards theirs. [My emphasis]
Superstars embedded with the multinational corporate music business, performing on a world-wide media hookup, are not to be confused with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane playing free concerts from a flatbed truck in Golden Gate Park. It's natural that people make that kind of connection (or its more contemporary equivalent). After all, the music once stood for something.
But we only have to stop and think. Western governments and multinational corporations hold all the cards; Africa holds none. There is zero chance that any deal with Africa will fail to reflect that power imbalance. Anyone who thinks otherwise knows no history. The notion that one day's worth of Live8 concerts exerted any sort of meaningful pressure on Western power centers, thereby altering the power equation, is a cruel joke. Sir Bob Geldorf, Sir Paul McCartney, Bono, Madonna, and the rest may even have believed they were doing some good. Who knows. There were probably embedded journalists in Iraq who thought they were doing real reporting.
But as Gil Scott-Heron sang all those years ago, the revolution will not be televised. And it certainly won't be a worldwide media spectacle bankrolled by multinational corporate sponsors, featuring a parade of multi-millionaire pop stars.
Posted by Jonathan at 03:20 PM
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July 11, 2005
| Prior Self-Restraint | Media Politics Rights, Law |
Editor & Publisher reports that the Cleveland Plain Dealer is suppressing two investigative stories because they're afraid of joining Judith Miller in jail. Excerpt:
Plain Dealer Editor Doug Clifton says the Cleveland daily is not reporting two major investigative stories of "profound importance" because they are based on illegally leaked documents — and the paper fears the consequences faced now by jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller.Lawyers for the Newhouse Newspapers-owned PD have concluded that the newspaper would almost certainly be found culpable if the leaks were investigated by authorities.
"They've said, this is a super, super high-risk endeavor, and you would, you know, you'd lose," Clifton said in an interview Friday afternoon.
"The reporters say, 'Well, we're willing to go to jail, and I'm willing to go to jail if it gets laid on me,'" Clifton added, "but the newspaper isn't willing to go to jail. That's what the lawyers have told us.
Clifton declined to characterize the two stories, saying only they were based on material that was illegally leaked. [...]
"As I write this, two stories of profound importance languish in our hands," Clifton wrote. "The public would be well served to know them, but both are based on documents leaked to us by people who would face deep trouble for having leaked them. Publishing the stories would almost certainly lead to a leak investigation and the ultimate choice: talk or go to jail. Because talking isn't an option and jail is too high a price to pay, these two stories will go untold for now. How many more are out there?" [...]
"Some people might argue that you're being chicken-shit," Clifton said. "Well, I, I can respect that," he said, his voice trailing off. [My emphasis]
If journalists, editors, and publishers cave without a fight, what good is the First Amendment?
Posted by Jonathan at 06:06 PM
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July 10, 2005
| Paymasters Of Carnage | Activism Iraq Media |
This piece by John Pilger (via ICH) is an absolute must-read.
It is the necessary antidote to the G8 coverage, to Bono and the other rock-star embeds, and to much else besides. Go read it, and clear your head. Go!
Posted by Jonathan at 07:36 PM
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July 02, 2005
| GOP Senators Blame Media For Recruiting Shortfalls | Iraq Media Politics |
It's the media's fault that nobody wants to enlist, say several Republican Senators. Reuters:
Several Senate Republicans denounced other lawmakers and the news media on Thursday for unfavorable depictions of the Iraq war and the Pentagon urged members of Congress to talk up military service to help ease a recruiting shortfall.Families are discouraging young men and women from enlisting "because of all the negative media that's out there," Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said at a U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
Inhofe also said that other senators' criticism of the war contributed to the propaganda of U.S. enemies. He did not name the senators. [...]
The Army on Wednesday said it was 14 percent, or about 7,800 recruits, behind its year-to-date recruitment target even though it exceeded its monthly target in June. With extended deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, recruiting also is down for the National Guard and the Reserves.
"With the deluge of negative news that we get daily, it's just amazing to me that anybody would want to sign up," said Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican.
I agree. It's just amazing to me, too. And of course it's all the media's fault. As Jon Stewart said, they never tell us about the cars in Iraq that don't blow up.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:37 AM
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June 25, 2005
| Ed Klein Gets Shredded On Air America | Media Politics |
Check this out. It's the audio of Al Franken and Joe Conason's interview of Ed Klein, the author of the smear book on Hillary Clinton. He must have felt like he fell into a woodchipper. Too good to miss.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:58 AM
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June 23, 2005
| Stephen King On "News" | Media |
Greg at The Talent Show quotes a piece by novelist Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly (of all places):
It's sickening that it takes a columnist in an entertainment magazine to point out that more than 2,000 newspeople covered the [Michael] Jackson trial — which is only a few hundred more than the number of American servicemen and women who have died in Iraq. On the same day that crowds gathered in Times Square (and around the world) to learn the fate of the Pale Peculiarity, another four suicide bombings took place in that tortured, bleeding country. And if you tell me that news doesn't belong in Entertainment Weekly, I respond by saying Michael Jackson under a black umbrella doesn't belong on the front page of the New York Times. [...]The media first turned the trial into a freak-show by emphasizing Jackson's peculiarities rather than his humanity, and stoked the ratings with constant, trivializing coverage while other, far more important stories went under-reported or completely ignored in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, and Washington, D.C.
The press might respond by saying, "We gave the people what they wanted."
My response would be, "My job is to give them what they want. When he steps into a recording studio, it's Michael Jackson's job to give them what they want. Your job is to give the people what they need." [My emphasis]
As Greg points out, when you've got to turn to comedians (Jon Stewart and Al Franken) and novelists (Stephen King) for your news and analysis, something is seriously wrong.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:34 PM
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June 22, 2005
| Rush's Idea Of Humor | Media |
Rush Limbaugh's selling "Club G'itmo" t-shirts that read as follows:
- Club G'itmo — Your Tropical Retreat from the Stress of Jihad
- I Got My Free Koran and Prayer Rug at G'itmo
- My Mullah went to Club G'itmo and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
- What Happens in G'itmo Stays in G'itmo
Har-dee-frickin-har. Meanwhile, you still can't get in to see President Bush if your t-shirt says something about peace.
[Via Digby]
Posted by Jonathan at 10:28 AM
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June 21, 2005
| What They Cover | Media |
Arianna Huffington compiled some interesting stats on the number of news segments that mentioned particular stories in the period May1 - June 20:
- ABC News: "Downing Street Memo": 0 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 42 segments; "Michael Jackson": 121 segments.
- CBS News: "Downing Street Memo": 0 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 70 segments; "Michael Jackson": 235 segments.
- NBC News: "Downing Street Memo": 6 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 62 segments; "Michael Jackson": 109 segments.
- CNN: "Downing Street Memo": 30 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 294 segments; "Michael Jackson": 633 segments.
- Fox News: "Downing Street Memo": 10 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 148 segments; Michael Jackson": 286 segments.
- MSNBC: "Downing Street Memo": 10 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 30 segments; "Michael Jackson": 106 segments.
Any wonder we're going to hell in a handbasket?
Posted by Jonathan at 12:02 PM
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June 20, 2005
| Help Save NPR and PBS | Media Politics |
House Republicans are threatening to cut funding for public broadcasting by half.
Help MoveOn amass 1 million signatures on a petition to save NPR and PBS. They're 85% of the way there; help put them over the top, here.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:11 PM
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June 18, 2005
| On Stealing Music | Culture Media |
Here's a deftly written, thought-provoking and nuanced meditation, in the form of an open letter to the Music Industry, on the ethics of stealing music by downloading. Music industry dinosaurs should read it and take it to heart — but they probably won't. Even if you don't buy or download music, you still may find it a rewarding read. Recommended.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:36 PM
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June 17, 2005
| Media Tipping Point? | Media Politics |
Bush's approval ratings are in free fall. See, for example, these graphs from today's NYT.
The Rude Pundit's got a theory: at some point, ratings-conscious media execs will wake up, realize which way the wind's blowing, stop kissing White House butt and start doing their jobs. It's that, or lose most of their audience.
One can hope.
Posted by Jonathan at 03:28 PM
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June 07, 2005
| Key Point Buried In Kerry Story | Media Politics |
You may have seen this morning's story that John Kerry's grades at Yale were "on par" with Bush's. As Media Matters points out, however, what should have been the key element of the story was buried. Excerpt:
The Boston Globe used its front page on June 7 to highlight an article — based on Sen. John Kerry's newly released military and education records — that emphasized Kerry's mediocre college grades. But the Globe buried a second article, which used the records to further discredit attacks on Kerry's military service that occurred during the 2004 presidential campaign, on an inside page. While attacks on Kerry's service had already been largely discredited, the revelation that his full military records provide no new information about his service definitively proved the baselessness of smears by the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (now Swift Vets and POWs for Truth). [...]The report that Kerry's decision to sign Standard Form 180, and thereby fully release his military records, provided a "lack of any substantive new material about Kerry's military career," ran on Page A7. The demand that Kerry sign the form, even though many of these military records were posted on Kerry's campaign website, was a point of attack by right-wing pundits who besmirched his service during the 2004 campaign. [My emphasis]
Which is the more important story, a candidate's grades from 40 years ago, or the fact that smears against the candidate, which the media harped on for months and which had a significant impact on the election, have been shown to be lies?
The "liberal media" at work.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:18 PM
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May 24, 2005
| Sponsors Call The Shots | Media |
It's obvious that corporate sponsors influence news and editorial content. The influence is mostly implicit — editors and journalists don't need to be told who's paying the bills. Sometimes, however, the influence is very explicit indeed. Like now. Ad Age [link via Atrios]:
Days after financial services giant Morgan Stanley informed print publications that its ads must be automatically pulled from any edition containing "objectionable editorial coverage," global energy giant BP has adopted a similar press strategy.According to a copy of a memo on the letterhead of BP's media-buying agency, WPP Group's MindShare, the global marketer has adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward negative editorial coverage. The memo cites a new BP policy document entitled "2005 BP Corporate-RFP" that demands that ad-accepting publications inform BP in advance of any news text or visuals they plan to publish that directly mention the company, a competitor or the oil-and-energy industry. [...]
One former publisher and longtime magazine industry executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that "magazines are not in the financial position today to buck rules from advertisers" and predicted that such moves will continue.
The MindShare memo lays out five directives ad-accepting publishers must follow in order to comply with the policy. It also requests that publishers confirm their ability to meet BP's demands and to explain the procedures they have instituted in their newsrooms and ad sales departments to ensure such adherence.
Both broad and quite specific, the directives range from notifying the media agency prior to running any editorial that contains fuel, oil or energy news text or visuals to providing the agency the option to pull any advertising from the issue without penalty. If the ad cannot be pulled, then the agency "must receive notification immediately of the situation in order to alert BP and to manage the situation proactively," the memo said. It also states that if MindShare is not notified of the mentions prior to the issue's on-sale date, immediate advertising schedule suspension will "likely result."
What was that about a "free press"?
Posted by Jonathan at 09:02 PM
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April 08, 2005
| Amy Goodman On Hardball Tonight | Media |
Democracy Now's Amy Goodman is scheduled to appear on MSNBC's Hardball tonight at 7 and 11 Eastern time. If you have cable and can stomach Chris Matthews, it should be worth a look.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:05 PM
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April 02, 2005
| Emoting For The Camera | Culture Media |
With Terri Schiavo, and now with the Pope, we see what's long since become a central ingredient of all such stories: crowds of people self-consciously emoting for the camera while the rest of the media-connected world watches them — and watches themselves watching them, and watches people like Larry King watching them, and so on.
The whole sentimental spectacle turns emotion and grief into self-conscious performance. Whatever the people whom we see may be feeling, we can safely bet that they are never, not for a moment, unaware that the camera's eye rests on them, and that they are actors in a self-referential global media pageant.
In an absolutely first-rate new book, Mediated, Thomas de Zengotita writes in passing about this phenomenon as it surfaced in the public spectacle of grieving upon the death of Princess Di:
[I watched the] mourners, assembled in their millions on the streets of London. Princess Diana's mourners, so many of them, so obviously exhibiting their grief, not even pretending that they weren't exhibiting it, understanding that this was their role, in both the sociological and theatrical sense, understanding that they were there for this purpose in service of the Global Show that their very presence was inciting, producing, and promoting in real time — a show about them "being in the moment" [like all good method actors] in what amounted to a worldwide improv. Celebrities all, celebrities at last. [...]I detect traces of that element, more elusively embedded, whenever I watch the bereaved on TV, the relatives and victims of every sort of mishap and disaster — I suppose I've seen, how many thousands over the years? Tens? Hundreds? But I always wonder, as I watch them in the glow — some for a passing moment, others turning grief into a worthy cause, taking up residence, launching a second life — I always wonder: what is this doing to you? [...]
What it comes down to is this: Di's mourners were truly grieving and they were performing. Immersed in a world continuously represented from very angle, they understood Di's death as an opportunity to play a significant role in it, to represent themselves at levels of prominence usually reserved for the celebrated.
The effect of this is as insidious as it is deep. Everyone's on stage, everyone's a performer, always, consciously or not, looking out for the camera. As de Zengotita puts it:
We are all method actors now.
Which is part of what makes this photo from outside Terri Schiavo's hospice so funny and refreshing:
Everyone in the picture is acutely aware that he/she is on camera — and that theatrical convention demands that they pretend otherwise. It is only the guy holding the "We Are Idiots" sign who breaks the fourth wall. While everyone else is busy staying in character, he's just having a ball. Revolution for the hell of it. The "Ramones" t-shirt is the perfect icing on the cake.
Meanwhile, in between the public grief spectacles and the celebrity murder and molestation trials, everyone's watching "American Idol", "Apprentice", and "Survivor". Where once we had reality, we now have just one big reality show.
Posted by Jonathan at 06:06 PM
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March 31, 2005
| AAR On HBO | Media |
Today's the one-year anniversary of the launch of Air America Radio, and HBO marked the occasion by premiering their documentary on AAR's rocky beginnings. Back home, I don't have cable — let alone HBO — but here in a hotel room in Seattle I was able to catch the show, and it's a hoot. If you have access to HBO, watch for it.
The whole AAR cast is there, but the guy I got the biggest kick out of was Marc Maron. As James Wolcott says, Maron comes across on-camera with an "ability to air out his anxieties until he seems to have squiggly lines radiating from his head like an R. Crumb character." I don't often hear Maron's show; that's going to change, now.
Posted by Jonathan at 11:53 PM
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March 27, 2005
| Sunday Gumpagraph | Media |
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| © Kent Tenney |
Posted by Jonathan at 01:56 PM
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March 23, 2005
| How To Lie With Statistics | Media |
From Media Matters, a chart CNN used to represent the difference between Democrats and Republicans on the Terri Schiavo case:
Pretty dramatic — until you read the scale on the left.
As Mark Twain said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Posted by Jonathan at 08:49 AM
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March 22, 2005
| "Nobel Nominee" On Scarborough Country | Media |
From Bob Somerby, an item that will blow your mind.
Last night, on his cable show Scarborough Country, Joe Scarborough introduced:
a neurologist William Hammesfahr — a man whom Scarborough twice described as a "nominee for the Nobel Prize." And Hammesfahr, the brilliant Nobel nominee, completely contradicted [published reports about Terri Schiavo's medical condition]. (Hammesfahr has provided expert testimony on behalf of Terri Schiavo's parents.) Terri Schiavo did not have a heart attack, he said. She never had an eating disorder. And she isn't in a persistent vegetative state. In fact, according to Hammesfahr, Terri Schiavo can "stand up or sit up and can sort of moan and make sounds that get [her] wishes known." Indeed, "she follows a lot of commands," the brilliant Nobel nominee said.
It gets worse.
SCARBOROUGH: Well, how did she get in this bad of a situation if she didn't have a heart attack?HAMMESFAHR: Well, we don't really know. What we do know is that she was — she apparently told her family she was going to leave [her husband] Michael. And they asked that she not return to him that night. And the next morning, she is found face down on the floor unresponsive.
This guy's been watching way too much Court TV.
And what about his being a "nominee for the Nobel Prize"? Somerby:
Three years ago, David Sommer of the St. Petersburg Times reported that Hammesfahr "advertises himself as a nominee for a Nobel Prize based on a letter his congressman wrote to the Nobel committee." Yes, Hammesfahr was "nominated" for the Nobel Prize by his Republican congressman, Peter Bilirakis, back in 1999!
Republican former-Congressman Joe Scarborough thinks this guy is somebody he should put on his show and introduce as a "nominee for the Nobel Prize" so he can claim that Terry Schiavo can "stand up or sit up" and that her husband somehow put her in the condition's she's in today.
"Disgusting" doesn't even begin to cover it.
Posted by Jonathan at 06:22 PM
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March 21, 2005
| Sun Hudson, Terri Schiavo | Media Politics Rights, Law |
Six days ago, a 6-month-old baby boy named Sun Hudson died when Texas Children's Hospital disconnected his life support, against the wishes of his mother, because they decided that further treatment was "futile" and Wanda Hudson, the boy's mother, had no medical insurance. The Houston Chronicle reported:
Sun's death marks the first time a hospital has been allowed by a U.S. judge to discontinue an infant's life-sustaining care against a parent's wishes, according to bioethical experts. [...]Texas law allows hospitals can discontinue life sustaining care, even if patient family members disagree.
A far more important case, one would think, than the Terri Schiavo case. In the Hudson case, for the first time ever, a hospital bureacracy terminates the life of a child (who was not in a vegetative state), against his family's wishes, when the family can't pay their bills. If that's not an important case, what is?
As it happens, the Texas Futile Care Law that empowered the hospital to pull the plug was signed into law by then-Governor George W. Bush. A number of left-wing blogs have pointed to the law as proof of Bush's — and the Republicans' — hypocrisy. Austin lawyer Jerri Lynn Ward says, however:
[T]he legislation was passed to prevent hospitals from withdrawing life-prolonging treatments from patients and the fear [was] that the hospitals were creating and implementing such protocols because of money.
According to Ward, the use to which the hospital put the law in the Hudson case was unanticipated and unintended by the law's authors. Be that as it may, it seems clear that money motivated the hospital's decision: surely, if the mother had money, the hospital would have acceded to her wishes. Attorney Ward again:
I do know that, as an attorney representing health providers — including hospice — I have given presentations to providers about the legal aspects of treatment options under Texas Law for children with terminal diseases. One thing that I taught was that the Courts would always defer to the treatment decisions of the parents.I was wrong. I will have to revise my powerpoint presentation because of the judge in this case — and this bothers me.
It is certain that this baby was funded by Medicaid. Had the parents — or an insurance company been paying the bills — I do not believe that the hospital would have gone to the courts to pull the respirator. It is probable, in my mind, that this respirator was pulled because of the issue of money. That should bother everyone.
So where's the Republican outrage in the Sun Hudson case? Where's the maudlin, wall-to-wall "Save Terri" type of media coverage? There's no interest in the Sun Hudson case because there's no political advantage to be gained there. And the Hudsons aren't the Republicans' — or the media's — kind of folks. They're poor, and they're Black.
Is it fair to ascribe cynical political motives to Senate Republicans in this case? Actually, yes. We don't have to guess. ABC News obtained a memo of talking points prepared for Senate Republicans regarding the Terri Schiavo case. It's on ABC's website. A few choice items from the memo:
- This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue.
- This is a great political issue, because Senator Nelson of Florida has already refused to become a cosponsor and this is a tough issue for Democrats.
- This legislation ensures that individuals like Terri Schiavo are guaranteed the same legal protections as convicted murderers like Ted Bundy.
So the Republicans see the Schiavo case as a way to defeat Bill Nelson in 2006 and a way to "excite" their "pro-life base". Evidently, though, pro-life is one thing and pro-poor-Black-life is another. Meanwhile, the disgusting media circus continues.
Posted by Jonathan at 09:24 PM
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March 20, 2005
| Web Radio | Media |
The bad news is that I had to go into work today. The good news is that this morning one of my coworkers turned me on to Seattle's KEXP, online here.
A felicitous bit of fallout from the development of the Intenet is that local radio stations now can reach a worldwide audience, and they can archive material to let you listen when it suits you.
KEXP, for example, streams (commercial-free) what's currently on and archives all shows of the past two weeks. They've got some other great features as well, like a collection of oral history reminiscences from colleagues, friends, and fans of Bob Dylan, here. Great stuff.
Check out KEXP — then use the comments section to share your own favorite web radio stations.
[Thanks, Kevin]
Posted by Jonathan at 04:52 PM
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March 17, 2005
| Newz Biz | Media |
Oliver at LiquidList captured this image from CNN's website this morning.
The top stories of the day.
What a list. I feel dumber just looking at it.
Posted by Jonathan at 12:35 PM
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March 16, 2005
| White House Rejects GAO Opinion On Fake News | Media Politics |
The GAO says that the Bush administration's canned "news" stories are illegal propaganda. The administration, however, is advising executive branch agencies to ignore the GAO. WaPo:
The Bush administration, rejecting an opinion from the Government Accountability Office, said last week that it is legal for federal agencies to feed TV stations prepackaged news stories that do not disclose the government's role in producing them.That message, in memos sent Friday to federal agency heads and general counsels, contradicts a Feb. 17 memo from Comptroller General David M. Walker. Walker wrote that such stories — designed to resemble independently reported broadcast news stories so that TV stations can run them without editing — violate provisions in annual appropriations laws that ban covert propaganda.
But Joshua B. Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Steven G. Bradbury, principal deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, said in memos last week that the administration disagrees with the GAO's ruling. And, in any case, they wrote, the department's Office of Legal Counsel, not the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, provides binding legal interpretations for federal agencies to follow.
The legal counsel's office "does not agree with GAO that the covert propaganda prohibition applies simply because an agency's role in producing and disseminating information is undisclosed or 'covert,' regardless of whether the content of the message is 'propaganda,' " Bradbury wrote. "Our view is that the prohibition does not apply where there is no advocacy of a particular viewpoint, and therefore it does not apply to the legitimate provision of information concerning the programs administered by an agency." [My emphasis]
The obvious question, of course, is: if the videos are so innocent, so free of advocacy, if their purpose is not to deceive or persuade, why conceal their source and try to pawn them off as news?
Posted by Jonathan at 05:33 PM
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| Stop Fake News | Media Politics |
A variety of organizations are endorsing a petition that calls for an end to the kind of taxpayer-funded covert propaganda that at least 20 federal agencies have produced and distributed under the Bush administration. The goal is to get at least 250,000 signatures.
Go here to read and sign the petition.
Pass it on.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:00 PM
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March 13, 2005
| Manufactured "News" | Media Politics |
The New York Times has a lengthy article today on the Bush administration's practice of producing and distributing government-produced propaganda segments designed to look like ordinary news reports. The practice has been more widespread than previously reported. Excerpt:
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.
This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source. [...]
The practice, which also occurred in the Clinton administration, is continuing despite President Bush's recent call for a clearer demarcation between journalism and government publicity efforts. "There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press," Mr. Bush told reporters in January, explaining why his administration would no longer pay pundits to support his policies.
In interviews, though, press officers for several federal agencies said the president's prohibition did not apply to government-made television news segments, also known as video news releases. They described the segments as factual, politically neutral and useful to viewers. They insisted that there was no similarity to the case of Armstrong Williams, a conservative columnist who promoted the administration's chief education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, without disclosing $240,000 in payments from the Education Department.
What is more, these officials argued, it is the responsibility of television news directors to inform viewers that a segment about the government was in fact written by the government. "Talk to the television stations that ran it without attribution," said William A. Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. "This is not our problem. We can't be held responsible for their actions."
Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials."
It is not certain, though, whether the office's pronouncements will have much practical effect. Although a few federal agencies have stopped making television news segments, others continue. And on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and "purely informational" news segments made by the government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency's role in producing them is disclosed to viewers. [My emphasis]
Whenever the subject of blogs comes up, mainstream media flacks generally wring their hands, knit their brows, and ask in shocked horror, "How can you trust the blogs? Who knows who their sources are? Blah, blah, blah."
But good blogs always link to their sources, so you know exactly where the material's coming from. No "some people say" or "anonymous sources say". And no government-produced propaganda pawned off as real news. If a blog doesn't link to its sources, or if the sources it links to aren't trustworthy, then you know to give it a wide berth. If only the mainstream media were equally transparent.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:11 PM
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March 11, 2005
| Friday Gumpagraph | Media |
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| © Kent Tenney |
Posted by Jonathan at 11:27 AM
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March 09, 2005
| 73 And Counting | Iraq Media War and Peace |
When does Eason Jordan get his job back?
Antonia Zerbisias in the Toronto Star:
You have to wonder what Eason Jordan thinks about last Friday's attack on the car that took Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena from her kidnapping ordeal to her close call at the Baghdad airport.Jordan is the CNN news chief who in January made controversial remarks about U.S. troops targeting journalists, comments which led to his resigning "to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq."
Alarming indeed: at least 73 and counting. [...]
In the rush to hang Jordan, the right — and their willing news twinkies in the media — seem totally unperturbed that the only place reporters feel halfway safe in Iraq is either embedded in the belly of the U.S. military beast or on a Baghdad hotel roof, shielded by satellite dishes.
And who can blame the reporters in Iraq for feeling that way?
Consider that Sgrena's car, reportedly 700 metres from the airport, had already cleared other U.S. military checkpoints. Still, it was drilled by bullets.
Although exactly how many bullets remains a mystery since, at last report, when the Associated Press asked to see the car — in which Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari was killed and another official injured — the U.S. military said it didn't know where the thing was.
Which doesn't inspire confidence in the investigation into this murky affair that the U.S. has promised to conduct.
Recall the last couple of so-called investigations into the deaths of journalists by U.S. fire.
After the April 2003 attack on Baghdad's Palestine Hotel, a place where hundreds of journalists were known to be holed up, the U.S. Army refused to release the details of its investigation. Of course, its finding cleared the U.S. of killing two cameramen: Jose Couso of Spain's Telecinco and Ukraine's Taras Protsyuk, who was working for Reuters.
A few months later, Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana — a Palestinian who had survived beatings by West Bank settlers and the Israeli army — filmed his own death by U.S. tank. That happened just moments after he had checked in with the troops, providing his coordinates.
Again, a U.S. military investigation cleared the shooters, saying they had mistaken his video camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
And so it goes. [...]
What I find really disturbing is how few American journalists are protesting what appears to be the Pentagon's callous disregard for getting out the truth, either by making it safer for journalists to do their jobs or by its own full disclosure of the facts of these killings. [My emphasis]
Why would the US target Sgrena? GNN reports:
At the time of her [earlier] abduction, Giuliana [Sgrena] was heading to an area of Baghdad where witnesses from Fallujah are staying to interview Fallujah refugees about the US assault on their city last year. Says [a source close to Sgrena]:"She had some information about the use of illegal weapons by US forces in Fallujah that was very sensitive. A very hot topic. There were rumors of some use of chemicals and a number of weapons that are not legal — like [napalm] and phosphorus." [My emphasis]
One of the strange realities of modern warfare is that everyone — combatants (ours and theirs) and citizens (ours and theirs) — are all plugged into media 24/7, watching the war, or a highly filtered version of it, in real time. The incentive for US forces to try to control the news by intimidating or killing independent journalists is enormous. It hardly seems likely, considering what's at stake, that the military would shrink from classifying certain journalists as the enemy and acting accordingly.
Maybe Sgrena's ambush was, as one of Zerbisias' readers called it, just another "Baghdad speeding ticket," but the US version of events doesn't add up. In any case, 73 is a very large number. According to Inter Press Service, more journalists were killed in 14 months in Iraq than were killed during the entire Vietnam War, a far bloodier war that lasted more than a decade. Eason Jordan was merely saying aloud what many journalists already believe to be true.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:26 PM
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March 03, 2005
| Moron Of The Year | Humor & Fun Media |
Go check out this post at Time Magazine's Blog of the Year. Commenting on the Academy Awards show:
One "Chris Rock," the host, whom I've never otherwise heard of, led off with an idiotic anti-Bush tirade. $70 trillion? Interesting statistic. What was noteworthy was not the host, who obviously knows nothing, but the crowd — every single person there laughed and applauded.
Dude, could you possibly be any more clueless? Any more pompous? Any more white?
Chris Rock, whom you've never heard of, but who — obviously — is way smarter than you, is, um, a comedian? As in, teller of jokes? And "$70 trillion" was, you know, comedy?
[Link via The Talent Show, who also has Chris Rock's monologue here.]
Posted by Jonathan at 06:30 PM
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March 02, 2005
| E&P Looks At The Blogs' Role In The "Gannon" Story | Media Politics |
Editor and Publisher's Greg Mitchell examines how the "Jeff Gannon" story was developed by the left-wing blogs.
Mitchell comes to the (somewhat obvious) conclusion that — especially when it comes to stories, like the "Gannon" story, that can be investigated using Internet-based resources and tools — blogs with large readerships can eat the lunch of mainstream media outlets, since the big blogs get input from many, many readers, effectively giving them a very sizable investigative staff with considerable expertise when a story catches fire. Like "open source" software development, it demonstrates the power of large numbers of talented and conscientious volunteers connected via the Internet.
Mitchell also says that the lefty blogs got the facts right, leaving him "impressed with blog research." Cool.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:36 PM
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February 23, 2005
| Gannongate: It's Worse Than You Think | Media Politics |
"Gannongate: It's Worse Than You Think," writes Eric Boehlert today in Salon (excerpt):
White House press secretary Scott McClellan originally told reporters that Guckert was properly allowed into press briefings because he worked for an outlet that "published regularly." But that's when the questions were about Talon. More recently McClellan offered up a new rationale. Asked by Editor and Publisher magazine how the decision was made to allow a GOPUSA correspondent in, McClellan said, "The staff assistant went to verify that the news organization existed." (Emphasis added.)That, apparently, was the lone criterion the press office used when Guckert (aka Jeff Gannon) approached it in February 2003 seeking a pass for White House briefings. Not yet working for Republican-friendly Talon News, which came into existence in April 2003, Guckert, using an alias and with no journalism experience whatsoever, was writing on a voluntary basis for a Web site dedicated to promoting Republican issues. To determine whether Guckert would gain entrance to the press room, normally reserved for professional journalists working for legitimate, recognized and independent news organizations, the press office simply logged on to the Internet and confirmed that GOPUSA "existed," and then quickly approved Guckert's access. In a White House obsessed, at least publicly, with security and where journalists cannot even move between the White House and the nearby Old Executive Building without a personal escort, Guckert's lenient treatment was likely unprecedented.
Yet, if there's one other person who did manage to receive the same type of kid-glove treatment from the White House press office, it was Guckert's boss at GOPUSA and later at Talon News, Bobby Eberle. A Texas-based Republican activist and a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2000, Eberle founded Talon News after he became concerned that the name GOPUSA might appear to have a "built-in bias." With no journalism background, he too was able to secure a White House press pass, in early 2003, on the strength of representing GOPUSA, dedicated to "spreading the conservative message throughout America." [...]
[P]roviding some insight into how [Talon News] operates, Eberle told the New York Times last week that he rarely monitored Guckert's White House work. "Jeff did his thing. I did my thing," Eberle said. In other words, it appears that Guckert, who often cut and pasted White House press releases and posted them on Talon as "news," did not even have an editor. As Media Matters for America noted, Talon "apparently consists of little more than Eberle, Gannon, and a few volunteers." [...]
So the mystery remains: How did Guckert, with absolutely no journalism background and working for a phony news organization, manage to adopt the day-pass system as his own while sidestepping a thorough background check that might have detected his sordid past? That's the central question the White House refuses to address. And like its initial explanation that Guckert received his press pass the same way other journalists do, the notion first put out by White House officials that they knew little or nothing about GOPUSA/Talon News, its correspondent Guckert or its founder Eberle has also melted away. Instead, we now know, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer personally spoke with Eberle about GOPUSA, so concerned was Fleischer that it was not an independent organization. (Eberle convinced Fleischer that it was.) Additionally, Guckert attended the invitation-only White House press Christmas parties in 2003 and 2004, and last holiday season, in a personal posting on GOPUSA, Eberle thanked Karl Rove for his "assistance, guidance, and friendship." [My emphasis]
It's really not much of a mystery at all. This White House has a completely Orwellian relationship to the news and the truth: the news and the truth are whatever they can get away with saying they are. If they could get away with replacing every reporter in the room with a Jeff Gannon, they'd do it. Other administrations may have fantasized about turning the news into fake news, but these guys are actually trying to make it happen. That's the real story here.
The only mystery is how they can be so incredibly ham-handed — and just plain stupid — as to pick a hooker to be their guy. Maybe they were set up. Or maybe, as John DiIulio said when he quit the White House, it really is "the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." Somehow, Rove has managed to convince everyone he's a genius, but maybe his "genius" is little more than just a total lack of scruples. And the media let him get away with it.
Posted by Jonathan at 07:28 PM
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February 20, 2005
| Must-See TV: Bill Maher On "Jeff Gannon" | Humor & Fun Media Politics |
Go here and watch Bill Maher and his guests Lesley Stahl, Robin Williams, and Joe Biden discuss "Jeff Gannon".
Great stuff. Don't miss it.
[Thanks, Jeanne]
Posted by Jonathan at 01:38 PM
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February 19, 2005
| Another View On "Jeff Gannon" | Media Politics |
The Canadian author of Xymphora, a very interesting and useful blog that examines current affairs from a conspiracy theory perspective, a blog I don't always agree with but I do always read, today has this to say about the "Jeff Gannon" scandal (excerpt):
Gannon is just a hustler and figured the hustling in the White House press corps was more lucrative, if far more degrading, than what he did at night. The sad fact is that Gannon wasn't noticed for months because his questions were no different than those asked by the likes of hustler Wolf Blitzer (and everyone else except for Helen Thomas). It's quite true that if this had happened in the Clinton White House, CNN would be covering it 24/7, and would have commissioned special theme music for it. So we have more proof that there is hypocrisy in the Republican Party, and the networks are terribly biased. So what? More proof of these things won't change anyone's mind about anything. This scandal is just a reflection of frustration amongst those who live in a country with an immense number of real scandals — Gitmo, illegal wars, killing civilians, torturing people to death, class warfare, environmental degradation — not one of which seems to cause even the slightest ripple in the consciousness, or conscience, of the nation. [My emphasis]Although there is a long history of sexual blackmail in Washington, there is not one piece of evidence that Gannon was connected to any of that, and hints of such things, or comments about the legality of what Gannon was doing in his other job, just smack of homophobia. If there is more to this than we have already seen — and the diggers should, of course, keep digging — I know one thing: Gannon is a dead man walking.
In defense of the people who have been working to further the "Gannon" story, websites like Media Matters were digging into Guckert/Gannon's background long before anyone knew about his career as a hooker. The issue was that "Gannon" was a fake reporter working for a fake news organization shilling for the White House, one more indication of how the White House is turning "news" into state propaganda even more than it already is.
I agree, though, that the attention to the "Gannon" story is in part a reflection of people's frustration that nothing else seems to stick to this White House. And yes, this White House has many far worse things to answer for. But, as Rude Pundit pointed out, Al Capone didn't go to jail for bootlegging, prostitution, extortion, or murder — he went to jail for tax evasion. Sometimes, you just have to take what you can get.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:14 PM
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February 17, 2005
| "Gannon" Got Press Pass Before Talon News Even Existed | Media Politics |
The White House's story has always been that Guckert/Gannon's press credentials were justified because he worked for Talon News. But, as Eric Boehlert writes in Salon today, "Gannon" actually started attending White House press briefings before Talon News even existed. Excerpt:
James Guckert's mysterious career as a White House correspondent for Talon News just took another strange twist. And once again, the newest revelation raises the central question: Who broke the rules on Guckert's behalf to give him access to the White House? Despite administration claims that Guckert simply followed established protocol in order to routinely slip inside the White House briefing room, it now appears clear that Guckert, who just months before his 2003 debut as a cub reporter was offering himself up online as a $200 an hour male escort, benefited from extraordinarily preferential treatment, likely granted by someone inside the White House press office.Thanks to the continued digging by online sleuths, there's now documented evidence that Guckert attended White House briefings as early as February 2003. Guckert, using his alias "Jeff Gannon," once boasted online about asking then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer a question at the Feb. 28, 2003, briefing. The date is significant because in order to receive a White House press pass, Guckert would have needed to prove that he worked for a news organization that, in the words of White House press secretary Scott McClellan, "published regularly," in itself an extraordinarily low threshold. Critics have charged that while Talon News may publish regularly, it boasts a nearly all-volunteer news team that includes not a single person with actual journalism experience. (The team does, though, have quite a bit of experience working on Republican campaigns.) In other words, the outfit is not legitimate or independent, two criteria often used in Washington to receive press credentials.
But what's significant about the February 2003 date is that Talon did not even exist then. The organization was created in late March 2003, and began publishing online in early April 2003. [...] [Gannon] wasn't working for any other news outlet in February 2003 when he was spotted by C-Span cameras inside the White House briefing room. And that means Guckert was ushered into the White House press room in February 2003 for a briefing despite the fact he was not a journalist.
Who gave "Jeff Gannon" his press pass? Who waived his background check? Who granted him access to the White House under an alias? Who decided to use this fake reporter to ask fake questions in White House press briefings and a presidential press conference? Who gave him an internal CIA memo in the Valerie Plame affair?
These people make Bill Clinton's behavior seem positively quaint.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:12 PM
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| Mainstreaming Guckert/Gannon | Media Politics |
The "Jeff Gannon" story is getting some mainstream coverage. Here are some excerpts...
Maureen Dowd reminds us how unlikely it is that Guckert/Gannon got his press pass without an extraordinary intervention by the White House:
I'm still mystified by this story. I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the "Barberini Faun" is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed, even though I'd been covering presidents and first ladies since 1986, no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer, he said he'd renew the pass — after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months.
In an era when security concerns are paramount, what kind of Secret Service background check did James Guckert get so he could saunter into the West Wing every day under an assumed name while he was doing full-frontal advertising for stud services for $1,200 a weekend? He used a driver's license that said James Guckert to get into the White House, then, once inside, switched to his alter ego, asking questions as Jeff Gannon.
Mr. McClellan shrugged this off to Editor & Publisher magazine, oddly noting, "People use aliases all the time in life, from journalists to actors."
I know the F.B.I. computers don't work, but this is ridiculous. After getting gobsmacked by the louche sagas of Mr. Guckert and Bernard Kerik, the White House vetters should consider adding someone with some blogging experience.
Frank Rich puts the Guckert/Gannon story in the larger perspective of the White House's propaganda operation:
By my count, "Jeff Gannon" is now at least the sixth "journalist" (four of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news. Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration's "marriage" initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Mr. Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They starred in bogus reports ("In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting," went the script) pretending to "sort through the details" of the administration's Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such "reports," some of which found their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts around the country and have now been deemed illegal "covert propaganda" by the Government Accountability Office.The money that paid for both the Ryan-Garcia news packages and the Armstrong Williams contract was siphoned through the same huge public relations firm, Ketchum Communications, which itself filtered the funds through subcontractors. A new report by Congressional Democrats finds that Ketchum has received $97 million of the administration's total $250 million P.R. kitty, of which the Williams and Ryan-Garcia scams would account for only a fraction. We have yet to learn precisely where the rest of it ended up.
Even now, we know that the fake news generated by the six known shills is only a small piece of the administration's overall propaganda effort. President Bush wasn't entirely joking when he called the notoriously meek March 6, 2003, White House press conference on the eve of the Iraq invasion "scripted" while it was still going on. (And "Jeff Gannon" apparently wasn't even at that one). Everything is scripted.
The pre-fab "Ask President Bush" town hall-style meetings held during last year's campaign (typical question: "Mr. President, as a child, how can I help you get votes?") were carefully designed for television so that, as Kenneth R. Bazinet wrote last summer in New York's Daily News, "unsuspecting viewers" tuning in their local news might get the false impression they were "watching a completely open forum." A Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence, intended to provide propagandistic news items, some of them possibly false, to foreign news media was shut down in 2002 when it became an embarrassing political liability. But much more quietly, another Pentagon propaganda arm, the Pentagon Channel, has recently been added as a free channel for American viewers of the Dish Network. Can a Social Security Channel be far behind?
It is a brilliant strategy. When the Bush administration isn't using taxpayers' money to buy its own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans what is happening in what is, at least in theory, their own government.
Sidney Blumenthal sums it up:
Thus a phony journalist, planted by a Republican organisation, used by the White House press secretary to interrupt questions from the press corps, protected from FBI vetting by the press office, disseminating smears about its critics and opponents, some of them gay-baiting, was unmasked not only as a hireling and fraud but as a gay prostitute, with enormous potential for blackmail.The Bush White House is the most opaque — allowing the least access for reporters — in living memory. Every news organisation has been intimidated, and reporters who have done stories the administration finds discomfiting have received threats about their careers. The administration has its own quasi-official state TV network in Fox News; hundreds of rightwing radio shows, conservative newspapers and journals and internet sites coordinate with the Republican apparatus.
Inserting an agent directly into the White House press corps was a daring operation. Until his exposure, he proved useful for the White House. But the longer-term implication is the Republican effort to sideline an independent press and undermine its legitimacy. "Spin" seems quaint. "In this day and age," said press secretary McClellan, waxing philosophical about the Gannon affair, "when you have a changing media, it's not an easy issue to decide or try to pick and choose who is a journalist." It is not that the White House press secretary cannot distinguish who is or is not a journalist; it is that there are no journalists, just the gaming of the system for the concentration of power.
It's not about Guckert/Gannon being gay. It's about the White House's unprecedented propaganda efforts, its hypocrisy, its lying, and its belief that it is above the law.
The whole episode is so very nutso that one has to conclude the White House is careening along out of control. Whether out of arrogance or stupidity or sheer self-destructive recklessness, they've jumped the rails. If there's any justice, they'll crash and burn.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:37 PM
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