Cave Pantings
Remember how a few days ago, it was all evil-Newsweek vs the good and honorable Administration?
Well, as was to be expected in this day of managed news and spun journalism, it now comes out that the
International Red Cross warned the Pentagon about abuses of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, as far back as 2002 and 2003. As mentioned previously, the substance of these warnings were not the least bit out of character for those in charge of our military interrogation procedures. A simple recall of the abuses in Abu Ghraib should convince anyone of that.
Yet for days now, Newsweek has been vilified by wingnuts and average citizens alike for the implications that their story ignited riots and killings in Afghanistan last week. Newsweek, for their part, caved in to the government and the rest of the media who were ever so quick to march in lockstep with the Administration lest they be next on the hot seat.
Newsweek's reputation is now severely damaged. The news story itself was...until today...assumed to be false and the PR advantage went quickly to the Administration.
Newsweek deserves all the bad press it can get, not for this story, but for so quickly caving into the pressure of the anti-media crowd in and out of the White House.
We, the people, rely on information that outlets like Newsweek provide, even if the information has become less and less truly informative over the years. Still, if the shift to Fox News and the endless spew of right-wing hate radio increases while Time, Newsweek and the major newspapers continue to dumb down their journalistic standards, Americans will increasingly come to believe like an Administration officially so candidly observed, ""we are an empire .... we create reality and you react to it ...".
War of the Words
Newsweek retracts Koran desecration storyWhite House bashes Newsweek report on KoranWhite House to Newsweek: Do moreThe shite, as they say, has hit the fan.
And yet another PR coup for the White House is in the works.
Newsweek, like its sister publication, Time, are mainstream news magazines that generally walk a fine line between cutting edge journalism and true sycophantic hackistry. The fact is that as general interest publications, they never really hit either end of the spectrum. Instead, they are content on having the luxury of some hindsight...even if just a few hours...before their weekly deadline to digest the news stories that they feature. By that time, there is usually some kind of consensus in the land as to how the magazines should present the stories lest they not antagonize too many of their advertisers (and to a lesser extent, their readers).
It is primarily for this reason that Time, Newsweek and virtually every other mainstream medium helped the White House sell a war in Iraq that we came to find was cynically and deceptively conceived and executed.
At no time during this time did the corporate mainstream media ask hard questions of the President and his co-conspirators during the runup to the war. Instead, they timidly offered a constant barrage of palatable hawkish opinion and an endless supply of "experts" on neo-con foreign policy, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism that the media sucked up like an anteater attacking a termite mound.
This singular lack of journalistic duty offered a myriad of benefits for the media; most importantly, the promise of favorable rulings by government regulators towards the media's giant corporate parents. This tasty carrot, however, also came with the sharp little stick that held out the threat that all access to Administration sources would be withheld if the questions put forth were of sufficient strength to cause any kind of embarrassment or real injury to it.
And so for the past four and a half years, except for a brief period just before 9/11, the public has been spoon-fed bland White House pablum by the corporate news media, with the result that American public opinion has become blinded by the continuous din of White House propaganda.
So as with the CBS/Dan Rather fiasco last year, the White House now has another opportunity to demonize the "liberal press", a term that in and of itself would be ludicrously funny if it wasn't so pathetically untrue.
Perhaps the most incredible headline I found today was this one:
US image damaged: White HouseSince the United States, in the person of Colin Powell lied his ass of at the UN General Assembly in February, 2003, the image of the United States has been lower than a snake's belly in a wagon rut. The ignorance of this US President and the malevolence of his handlers has left the United States in a position where the rest of the world simply watches in amazement as a once-powerful and somewhat respected nation begins to devour itself from the inside in an orgy of religious hatred and intolerance, corporate cupidity and an almost prideful post-literate stupidity of its citizens.
US Image damaged?
Over 1500 US soldiers have died, thousands more have been wounded and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqi non-combatants have been killed because of the lies and treachery imposed by this Administration.
The information from the public reports that have recently demonstrated the lies that led to this war was available to the media before we proceeded to get ourselves entangled in the mess over there. Yet that information was not allowed to be heard before we began this slaughter.
The Abu Ghraib torture episode of a year ago seems to have been neatly and finally attributed primarily to a genetic halfwit woman-child and her horndog lover; even though our current Attorney General Gonzalez explicitly stated in a memo to the Justice Department only acts that were specifically intended to cause severe pain and suffering or organ failure would qualify as torture. Moreover, the President, as commander–in-chief, could essentially disregard international treaties and U.S. domestic law governing torture, so long as he was acting in what he thought was the defense of the country.
Coincidentally, the headlines of this week that stated that the Bush's approval ratings were heading for the cellar once again harkended another terror threat level readjustment, but as it turns out, this story is doing the same thing for the Administration that an Orange Alert would do. Put a positive spin on an Administration doing what it can against the contrivances and lies of an adversarial press.
Not only do we have the "false" revelations in Newsweek's story causing riots and death in Afghanistan, but, according to the wingnut media machine, the gross negligence of the Newsweek reporters has demonstrated their hatred of America and lack of respect for the honorable troops who have fought so valiantly against the scourge of Islamic terrorism.
Just how does Karl Rove do it every single time his boy-puppet is in trouble? It's remarkable. It's also tragic, because this will undoubtedly cause any reporters who still have a modicum of integrity to retrench farther into the silent background. And if not them, then certainly their editors will do so.
The ultimate question here is whether the report is true and (if you followed any of the reporting about Abu Ghraib this does have a definite ring of truth) when it is at last safe for the truth to be told, will any real journalists be around to report it?
REPUBLICAN BROADCASTING SERVICE
Not content on owning and controlling just the Mainstream Corporate Media, the wingnuts are now going after one of the last outlets for occasionally liberal programming.
If you've been educated and informed over the years by such quality programming as
Frontline and
NOW beware that the bad guys are out to bring these shows into line with such winning fare as
Tucker Carlson's Unfiltered and that granddaddy of all talking nobs shows,
The McLaughlin Group.
Other than
this ongoing development, it's good to know that PBS will probably maintain its commitment to on-air fundraising and highbrow entertainment. Still, has the
issue with that gay character on Teletubbies been straightened out?
Looks like the RePugs still have their work cut out for them over at PBS.
Bless the Beasts and the Bookies
An interesting contribution on the new celebrity-post, The Huffington Post, by Sportscaster Jim Lampley includes this recollection:
"At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.
People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.
And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil."
This,
The Greatest Story Never Told, has sealed forever the deal between the Republican government and the Corporate Mainstream Media. Each has betrayed any notion of a belief in the American democratic system by the cynical realization that the control of information is the same as control of power. In addition, we've seen many of the children of the 60's grow up to become a generation that has become the most selfish and least interested in a better future. In the inexorable push toward maximum wealth and immediate satisfaction, they have sold out their the futures of their children and of their children's' children.
Finally! A journalist with balls
Okay, the title is an easy joke, because this journalist is a woman. But what I want to emphasize is that photojournalist Molly Bingham asked questions recently that virtually no male reporter has had the balls to ask.
A little about her background shows that Ms Bingham has earned her professional creds.
"Bingham, a Louisville native, was detained in 2003 by Iraqi security forces and held in Abu Ghraib prison from March 25 to April 2, 2003. Eighteen days after her release, she returned to Iraq to pursue stories for The New York Times, The Guardian of London and others. Taking a short break during the summer of 2003, Bingham had the idea of working on a story to explore who was involved in the nascent resistance that was becoming apparent throughout Iraq. She scanned the papers that summer, looking for an article that would show some journalist had reported the story, had gone deeper to find out the source of the new violence. No one had. So in August 2003, Bingham returned with British journalist Steve Connors and spent the next 10 months reporting the story of the Iraqi resistance."
In an article from the Louisville Courier-Journal that was based on a speech given at Western Kentucky University, Bingham raised serious questions...and also gave her opinion on why the run-up and continuation of the War in Iraq has been waged with virtually no probing journalistic queries by the American media."If you look closely, you will notice there is very little, maybe even no direct reporting on the resistance in Iraq. We do, however, as journalists report what the Americans say about the resistance. Is this really anything more than stenography?"
After her many months in Iraq, Bingham related the 5 lessons learned by her and her team:
- Lesson One: Many journalists in Iraq could not, or would not, check their nationality or their own perspective at the door.
- Lesson Two: Our behavior as journalists has taught us very little. Just as in the lead up to the war in Iraq, questioning our government's decisions and claims and what it seeks to achieve is criticized as unpatriotic.
- Lesson Three: To seek to understand and represent to an American audience the reasons behind the Iraqi opposition is practically treasonous.
- Lesson Four: The gatekeepers -- by which I mean the editors, publishers and business sides of the media -- don't want their paper or their outlet to reveal that compelling narrative of why anyone would oppose the presence of American troops on their soil.
- Lesson Five: What it's like to be afraid of your own country.
This compelling article does what so few have done since this Iraqi insanity began. It attempts to dig beneath the rampant propagandizing that has become part and parcel of this Administration and all its public utterances, whether on issues domestic, defensive or offensive.
I'd urge anyone interested in getting beyond the barrage of lies to read this article. What's more, it should be required reading for all working journalists and more importantly, for all students of journalism who are just learning the craft.
Thomas Jefferson once said, "
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
Apparently, newspapers were quite a bit different in Jefferson's day than they are today. The shameful evidence is that it was incredibly easy for a government with evil intent to seduce and/or intimidate today's media into submission. And that cannot portend good for any democracy.
