Print News, R.I.P.

Idaho Statesman parent company tanking?

McClatchy Newspapers Bonds Rated as Junk

By Jill Kuraitis, 4-30-07

If you sometimes search to find something compelling to read in the Idaho Statesman, you won’t be surprised by the news that its parent The McClatchy Co. is in trouble. Its first-quarter profits were down by a whopping 67 percent, and last Thursday, April 26, Standard & Poor’s slashed McClatchy bonds down to a BB-plus rating, which is considered to be junk.

By last Friday morning shares of McClatchy were traded at prices between $28.80 and $29.63, closing at $29.29 after a day of heavy trading. $28.80 is the lowest price for McClatchy since Feb. 1999.

A Standard & Poor’s analyst told Thomson’s Financial in London, “The lower ratings follow our review of operating conditions in the newspaper sector, and consider McClatchy’s ability to improve credit measures over the next few years through management’s focus on debt reduction. It is unlikely that credit measures will return to levels consistent with an investment-grade rating over the intermediate term.” Ouch.

McClatchy owns and publishes 30 daily and weekly newspapers, including state capital papers the Sacramento Bee and the Idaho Statesman. The Statesman was acquired in 2006 when McClatchy bought Knight Ridder.

Are McClatchy bonds tanking because of poor products? The newspaper industry is struggling nationwide, and it’s not that simple. But it’s a basic of running a business to produce something people want to buy. Considering the population growth in Ada County, the Statesman’s circulation should have increased proportionally. The Audit Bureau of Circulations reports 85,000 subscribers currently, which is down from 86,500 in 2001.

The Statesman’s bland stories from wire services and out-of-state copy mills sometimes miss a glaring mark. For example, a recent story about Spanish-language and bilingual preschools was written by an out of state service, and used examples of schools in other states. There are two new schools of this type in Boise to which no connection was made.

Anyone who wants a serious Sunday read – on paper – long enough to last through a bagel and coffee has to scramble around town for a rare New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, both of which are expensive.

That the Statesman can be a difficult place to work is an open secret among journalists and public relations professionals in Idaho. The frequent changes in ownership have bred an underlying tension about job security and a high stress level. The salaries for junior staff are lower than what I made as a secretary more than 30 years ago! - in some cases below the poverty line. Complaints about inept and sexist middle managers are common, but never on the record, of course. But chief among complaints was summed up by a Statesman reporter who asked, “Why can’t someone just take the place in hand and make a NEWSPAPER out of it?”

That’s a sad thing for a reporter to say. Reporters tend to care very much about their communities and their newspaper, and they are naturally competitive. They compete with other news outlets to get a story first and to write it best. They compete within the newsroom for plum assignments and more ink. They compete with each other for awards and citations, and they compete with themselves to write better, tighter, and more clearly than their last draft. They are poised and ready to produce the best possible edition, day after day – if management gives them the tools, column inches and inspired leadership that might get them there.

Heck, Statesman reporters don’t even have laptops, and many of their in-house computers are turn-of-the-century.

The Statesman does a good job covering the state legislature with some excellent and experienced writers like Greg Hahn, Kevin Richert and Shawna Gamache. Longtime political columnist Dan Popkey’s institutional memory and big-picture understanding of Idaho’s character add another layer of worthwhile content. Community and civic news is very well done - well enough to make the paper hard to do without.

But the paper’s regional coverage is poor. There is an occasional article about eastern and northern Idaho; sometimes a blurb about something in eastern Oregon – but rarely an original, analytical story about issues common to western states. (Popkey often provides that missing link, but his column hasn’t appeared in ages, the rumor being that he’s working on something big.) The Statesman often projects a sense of isolation and little material to connect Idahoans to a larger world. That sounds a lot like the Idaho legislature, and lack of those connections are an alarming problem there, too. The ancient attitude of cowboy invincibility and the antiquated idea that our state doesn’t need connections – we’re doing just fine on our own, thank you and by the way do NOT dictate to us – does not deserve support from its de facto state newspaper. The Idaho Statesman is really the Boise Statesman. But it could, and I believe should, assume more responsibility for a broader mission. Each time it changes ownership there is hope it will happen, but it’s always disappointing.

Media types have been asking the question of whether internet news and the blogosphere are becoming the mainstream, and print newspapers the marginalized “papersphere” - for several years now.

Has it already happened?

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By Jill Kuraitis, 4-30-07 | comments (11)

Tricky Dicky Transfer

Related
Hasbara - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia(written by Zionists)
Welcome to Hasbara - Israel Reaction Center(Zionist)
hasbara+propaganda
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A reader responds to, "A Case Against Cheney".
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Tricky Dicky Transfer

You can tell Richard Cohen is educated in hasbara techniques.

One is called "transfer", this is where you take prestige and authority from one concept and apply it to another.

In this case, Cohen knows that if he comes out guns blazing in opposition, he'll damage his credibility. Instead, he takes the idea of impeachment and transfers it to "unforgivable".

Another very telling sign, is how he saves the "transfer" for the very end of his propaganda, so it's the last thought the reader is left with, knowing that that is the one that counts, along with the beginning.

Again, in the beginning, Cohen sets us up, another tactic found in the hasbara handbook, where capturing the readers attention is most important. He does this by trying to minimize the alledged crimes of Cheney by comparing them to simple "lies". He reveals why he suggests this in the first paragraph by, "transferring" his argument to Clinton rhetoric in the second.

Cohen is pretty good, looks like we have more then one tricky dicky in the neocon house of Cheney.

In a similar fashion, two can play this game, because we have now transferred Richard's propaganda, to the tactics used by militant zionist propagandists.

The only difference, unlike Richard Cohen, I am being honest about the technique I'm using and telling you the truth. May 2, 2007 8:51:00 AM MDT
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Related
The Hasbara Playbook

Inhofe: Media invented WMD excuse for Iraq invasion

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) on Friday:

Inhofe, speaking to the press before Cheney’s arrival, lambasted Democrats for Thursday’s Senate vote to begin withdrawal from Iraq by Oct. 1 and the press for “mischaracterizing” the reasons for U.S. involvement.

“The whole idea of weapons of mass destruction was never the issue, yet they keep trying to bring this up,” Inhofe said. […]

Pressed for an explanation, Inhofe said weapons of mass destruction were “incidental” to the decision to invade Iraq.

“The media made that the issue because they knew Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction.”

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) in August 2002:

Our intelligence system has said that we know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction — I believe including nuclear. There’s not one person on this panel who would tell you unequivocally that he doesn’t have the missile means now, or is nearly getting the missile means to deliver a weapon of mass destruction. And I for one am not willing to wait for that to happen.

April 30, 2007 9:11 pm | Comment (218)

All the President’s Press: FRANK RICH - The Press’s Failures

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS
THE NEW YORK TIMES

OP-ED COLUMNIST

All the President’s Press

By FRANK RICH

Published: April 29, 2007

The White House correspondents’ dinner has become a crystallization of the press’s failures in the post-9/11 era.

SOMEHOW it’s hard to imagine David Halberstam yukking it up with Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz and two discarded “American Idol” contestants at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Before there was a Woodward and Bernstein, there was Halberstam, still not yet 30 in the early 1960s, calling those in power to account for lying about our “progress” in Vietnam. He did so even though J.F.K. told the publisher of The Times, “I wish like hell that you’d get Halberstam out of there.” He did so despite public ridicule from the dean of that era’s Georgetown punditocracy, the now forgotten columnist (and Vietnam War cheerleader) Joseph Alsop.

It was Alsop’s spirit, not Halberstam’s, that could be seen in C-Span’s live broadcast of the correspondents’ dinner last Saturday, two days before Halberstam’s death in a car crash in California. This fete is a crystallization of the press’s failures in the post-9/11 era: it illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows. Such is literally the case at the annual dinner, where journalists serve as a supporting cast, but it has been figuratively true year-round. The press has enabled stunts from the manufactured threat of imminent “mushroom clouds” to “Saving Private Lynch” to “Mission Accomplished,” whose fourth anniversary arrives on Tuesday. For all the recrimination, self-flagellation and reforms that followed these journalistic failures, it’s far from clear that the entire profession yet understands why it has lost the public’s faith.

That state of denial was center stage at the correspondents’ dinner last year, when the invited entertainer, Stephen Colbert, “fell flat,” as The Washington Post summed up the local consensus. To the astonishment of those in attendance, a funny thing happened outside the Beltway the morning after: the video of Mr. Colbert’s performance became a national sensation. (Last week it was still No. 2 among audiobook downloads on iTunes.) Washington wisdom had it that Mr. Colbert bombed because he was rude to the president. His real sin was to be rude to the capital press corps, whom he caricatured as stenographers. Though most of the Washington audience failed to find the joke funny, Americans elsewhere, having paid a heavy price for the press’s failure to challenge White House propaganda about Iraq, laughed until it hurt.

You’d think that l’affaire Colbert would have led to a little circumspection, but last Saturday’s dinner was another humiliation. And not just because this year’s entertainer, an apolitical nightclub has-been (Rich Little), was a ludicrously tone-deaf flop. More appalling — and symptomatic of the larger sycophancy — was the press’s insidious role in President Bush’s star turn at the event.

It’s the practice on these occasions that the president do his own comic shtick, but this year Mr. Bush made a grand show of abstaining, saying that the killings at Virginia Tech precluded his being a “funny guy.” Any civilian watching on TV could formulate the question left hanging by this pronouncement: Why did the killings in Iraq not preclude his being a “funny guy” at other press banquets we’ve watched on C-Span? At the equivalent Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association gala three years ago, the president contributed an elaborate (and tasteless) comic sketch about his failed search for Saddam’s W.M.D.

But the revelers in the ballroom last Saturday could not raise that discrepancy and challenge Mr. Bush’s hypocrisy; they could only clap. And so they served as captive dress extras in a propaganda stunt, lending their credibility to the president’s sanctimonious exploitation of the Virginia Tech tragedy for his own political self-aggrandizement on national television. Meanwhile the war was kept as tightly under wraps as the troops’ coffins.

By coincidence, this year’s dinner occurred just before a Congressional hearing filled in some new blanks in the still incomplete story of a more egregious White House propaganda extravaganza: the Pat Tillman hoax. As it turns out, the correspondents’ dinner played an embarrassing cameo role in it, too.

What the hearing underscored was the likelihood that the White House also knew very early on what the Army knew and covered up: the football star’s supposed death in battle in Afghanistan, vividly described in a Pentagon press release awarding him a Silver Star, was a complete fabrication, told to the world (and Tillman’s parents) even though top officers already suspected he had died by friendly fire. The White House apparently decided to join the Pentagon in maintaining that lie so that it could be milked for P.R. purposes on two television shows, the correspondents’ dinner on May 1, 2004, and a memorial service for Tillman two days later.

The timeline of events in the week or so leading up to that dinner is startling. Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004. By the next day top officers knew he had not been killed by enemy fire. On April 29, a top special operations commander sent a memo to John Abizaid, among other generals, suggesting that the White House be warned off making specific public claims about how Tillman died. Simultaneously, according to an e-mail that surfaced last week, a White House speechwriter contacted the Pentagon to gather information about Tillman for use at the correspondents’ dinner.

When President Bush spoke at the dinner at week’s end, he followed his jokes with a eulogy about Tillman’s sacrifice. But he kept the circumstances of Tillman’s death vague, no doubt because the White House did indeed get the message that the Pentagon’s press release about Tillman’s losing his life in battle was fiction. Yet it would be four more weeks before Pat Tillman’s own family was let in on the truth.

To see why the administration wanted to keep the myth going, just look at other events happening in the week before that correspondents’ dinner. On April 28, 2004, CBS broadcast the first photographs from Abu Ghraib; on April 29 a poll on The Times’s front page found the president’s approval rating on the war was plummeting; on April 30 Ted Koppel challenged the administration’s efforts to keep the war dead hidden by reading the names of the fallen on “Nightline.” Tillman could be useful to help drown out all this bad news, and to an extent he was. The Washington press corps that applauded the president at the correspondents’ dinner is the same press corps that was slow to recognize the importance of Abu Ghraib that weekend and, as documented by a new study, “When the Press Fails” (University of Chicago Press), even slower to label the crimes as torture.

In his PBS report last week about the journalism breakdown before the war, Bill Moyers said that “the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush administration to go to war on false pretenses.” That’s not universally true; a number of news organizations have owned up to their disasters and tried to learn from them. Yet old habits die hard: for too long the full weight of the scandal in the Gonzales Justice Department eluded some of the Washington media pack, just as Abu Ghraib and the C.I.A. leak case did.

After last weekend’s correspondents’ dinner, The Times decided to end its participation in such events. But even were the dinner to vanish altogether, it remains but a yearly televised snapshot of the overall syndrome. The current White House, weakened as it is, can still establish story lines as fake as “Mission Accomplished” and get a free pass.

--MORE--

Big media's assault on democracy

Ryan Blethen / Times editorial columnist

"Enough" is a word that means little to corporate media. The few bloated companies that remain atop the media food-chain have crossed the line from growing profits to actively pushing rule and law changes that will wound our nation.

These mega-companies move from one industry to the next in the name of consolidation, driven by a Wall Street appetite that demands more every quarter. Companies once devoted to a particular sector are now behemoths that have control over almost everything read, watched or listened to.

Time Warner is a prime example. A magazine publisher and a movie studio is now a leviathan made up of Time Inc., AOL, HBO, Time Warner Cable, New Line Cinema, Turner Broadcasting Systems and Warner Bros. Entertainment. Each part comprises a number of other companies. Time Inc. consists of 130 magazines.

Information

www.freepress.net/

www.savenetradio.org/

www.savetheinternet.com/

www.stopbigmedia.com/

www.fcc.gov/

It is Time Warner that is responsible for the latest assault on a mechanism set up to promote democracy and innovation. I am not talking about the Internet, but the U.S. Postal Service. That's right, old snail mail.

Our postal system is written into the Constitution and was set up in a way that all publications, regardless of size or influence, could reach the public. James Madison even said that publications should be sent free.

"It is really one of the great build-outs of democracy in our country," said Bob McChesney, professor of communication at the University of Illinois and president of Free Press.

The mail system faces new challenges in an electronic world, but it is still vital, and democracy will suffer if the new rates instituted by the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) are allowed to stand.

The Postal Service sought a modest increase that was acceptable for magazines and periodicals. Then Time Warner got the ear of the PRC, which thrust an incredibly convoluted pay metric written by Time Warner on the Postal Service. The new rates are good for Time Warner because it will be cheaper for them to send out their 130 titles, while smaller and independent publications will be paying crippling rates.

McChesney believes this change, scheduled to go into effect July 15, is dangerous for the nation because it will silence voices that are the bedrock of original reporting.

"The crucial point here is that most of the original material online and most of the articles that bloggers are blogging about come from ink on paper," said McChesney, who is fighting the PRC's decision.

Time Warner is hardly the only Biggie to cozy up to a regulatory agency. The consolidation of the press has been going strong for nearly three decades. Radio contracted like an imploding sun after the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The act allowed companies to own an obscene number of stations in the same market, while the Federal Communications Commission did little.

This push to collect and condense has now infringed on the Internet. Cable and telecommunications companies such as Comcast and Verizon are fighting the network-neutrality effort. There are currently no permanent rules stopping these companies that supply the pipes through which the Internet flows from tinkering with different pay scales. Without a neutrality law and strict oversight by the FCC, companies and Web sites would have to pay additional fees to the network provider so Web pages could load at the speed they should. The American consumer — who already pays more than consumers in other countries for broadband service — would pay an even larger bill.

Progress has been made on the net-neutrality front. Late last year, AT&T accepted a net-neutrality rule so its merger with BellSouth would be approved by the FCC. Problem is, AT&T is only held to the rule for two years. Net neutrality has not seemed to hurt AT&T. The company posted a first-quarter profit of $2.8 billion, up from $1.4 billion.

Radio on the Internet is now also under attack. If a recent ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board stands, small and independent Internet radio stations will have to pay royalty fees so onerous that many might not survive.

The aggression directed at democratizing systems that have long served — and should continue to serve — our nation is worrisome. The institutions charged to protect the public have failed.

Americans have had enough. Now is the time to get active.

Ryan Blethen's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is rblethen@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company

The Next Sam Zell? Howard Milstein Buys Into the Times

NYT's sales keep dropping, but the Israel Lobby holds on to the paper. The rah-rah for the destruction of Iraq, the devastation of Somalia, and the smearing of Iran will continue.
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Apr 19 2007 2:58PM EDT

As the New York Times Company braces for a shareholder revolt at its annual meeting scheduled for April 24, Chairman Arthur Sulzberger may have found a potential lifeline: billionaire Howard Milstein.

Milstein, the C.E.O. of Emigrant Bancorp--the privately held New York bank with a history stretching back to 1850 and assets of $15 billion--bought 6 million shares of the New York Times Company in December, according to S.E.C. filings. He is now the sixth largest institutional shareholder with a 4.3 percent stake in the Times Company worth $150 million.

A person with knowledge of Milstein's investment said Milstein is an ally of Sulzberger. Before making the investment, Milstein called Sulzberger and said he was making a friendly investment in the Times, this person said. Another source said that while Milstein's investment is friendly, he is putting money into the Times Company as a long-term value play.

Milstein is the latest shareholder to emerge as a player in the proxy fight championed by Hassan Elmasry of Morgan Stanley Investment Management that is seeking to unseat Arthur Sulzberger's control of the paper.

The appearance of Milstein comes as the New York Times Company reported first quarter earnings results today, and a 9.9 percent decline in operating profit.

Milstein declined to comment. John R. Hart, vice chairman and treasurer of Emigrant Bancorp, declined to comment on the investment.

Times Company spokesperson Catherine Mathis, said: "We're delighted Mr. Milstein sees potential in the shares of the New York Times Company."

Still, Milstein's presence as the Times Company's sixth largest institutional shareholder is the latest twist in a deepening feud between Sulzberger and hostile shareholders, including Elmasry of Morgan Stanley, and Private Capital Management's Bruce Sherman.

In April, Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis both issued reports recommending that New York Times Company stockholders withhold their votes for the board of director nominees at this month's annual meeting.

Recently, Sherman placed a call to Milstein seeking comment on his intentions but the call went unreturned.

With Milstein's support of the Sulzberger family, one theory is that with access to Emigrant Bancorp's financing, the Sulzbergers, perhaps teaming up with private equity investor Steven Rattner, could take the Times private.

If so, this wouldn't be the first flamboyant investment for Milstein. The 56-year-old Bronx-bred billionaire is the heir to one of New York's largest family real-estate fortunes that was ripped apart by an internecine struggle.

A media play for the New York Times would parallel other high-profile ventures Milstein has made over the years. In the 1990s, he owned the New York Islanders hockey team (he sold the franchise for $190 million in 2000), and in 1998, he made an unsuccessful $800 million bid for the Washington Redskins football team, then a record price offered for an NFL team.

by Gabriel Sherman

Moyers and Me: Before Baghdad Fell

Related
The Bill Moyers documentary on our failed and barren press
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When Bill Moyers returned to PBS on Wednesday, I tried to recall this week what I'd said when I appeared on his show in early April 2003 -- as U.S. troops were about to topple Saddam. Did I make a fool myself? A transcript soon told all. By Greg Mitchell (April 25, 2007) -- Bill Moyers Journal returned to PBS on Wednesday night with a powerful indictment of the media for its failures in the run-up to the Iraq war. Last week, in previewing "Buying the War," I tried to recall exactly when I was a guest on Moyers' previous PBS series, NOW. It was right around the time our invasion of Iraq in late-March 2003, but was it just before or after the war started? And what did we mainly talk about? I guessed it had to do with the mixed editorial views of newspapers. Did I say anything I'd now regret, such as predicting that we'd surely be hailed as liberators by the Iraqis? How time flies when you're tearing another country, and your own, apart. Curiosity finally got the best of me, and I managed to find a transcript of the chat on the Web. Turns out it took place on April 4, 2003, just a few days before the American forces took Baghdad. By then, it was clear the U.S. was headed for a quick (apparent) victory. Indeed, the interview concluded with Moyers asking, "Do you have a sense that when the battle is over, this story's only begun?" Apparently I replied: "I don't think most Americans understand that this is going to be something that's with us for years and decades, and I'm not sure we get a sense of that from the coverage which seems to be oriented towards next week or next month, when the battle will be over. The boys will start to come home, and it will be a glorious episode in our past rather than something that's just the beginning of this story. "We're really at the beginning of the story of the US and Iraq and the 21st century." Whew. Here are a few other comments on still-relevant war and press issues from back then. * MOYERS: Do you think the public knows that the reporters who are embedded had to sign a contract with the Pentagon in order to be accepted for this role? That they had to agree to play by the rules? MITCHELL: Well, it's a good question whether they know but also whether they care. I think, as we found in polls over the years, that the American people... believe that there should be all sorts of restrictions. And, of course, everyone agrees that in war time there should be more restrictions. But the question is, to what degree? And we've seen in our interviews with editors in the past couple weeks, many cases of editors getting a lot of mail from readers who are upset about their coverage. And it shows that the people have a really different view about what the rights and the responsibilities of the press are. MOYERS: I saw your story about USA TODAY the other day... the editor of USA TODAY got in trouble for this photograph, didn't he? MITCHELL: Well, they ran a photograph of some dead Iraqi soldiers on the front page. And a large number of readers, they told us, complained because on the same day they ran a photo inside of a U.S. soldier surrounded by happy Iraqi children. And so these people were saying, "Why wasn't that photo on the front page instead of the dead Iraqi soldiers?" And the executive editor of USA TODAY told us that, yeah, the reason was simple. It was a day of great bloodshed. One of those days of great pessimism. And he thought it would have been inappropriate and misleading to show this happy photo on the front page. So he went with the more grim photo. Another example I'll give you, the DALLAS MORNING NEWS editor told us that they've gotten a lot of complaints for showing dead civilians or damaged civilians of Iraqis on the on the front page. And he says that it's viewed by the readers as an anti-war statement... showing the casualties on the other side is an anti-war statement. And that really goes against all the principles of press coverage that we believe in which is, you know, showing what is happening. And letting the people deal with it as they can. MOYERS: Do you think that journalists can be objective about what they're reporting when they are alongside the troops who are protecting them as they move forward? MITCHELL: Well, I think that's one of the problems. These reporters have been living with these troops. Reporting with them, getting to know them. And, of course, that's all terrific. You know, no one could really be against that. But in practice it could modify or adjust what they report about the actions....One of the problems in this whole campaign has been that originally we were told that the embedded reporters would only make up maybe half of the reporters who would be covering the conflict. The rest would be independent. But what's happened is because of the dangers over there-- almost all the reporters are the embedded reporters. So there's very few free-roaming reporters who can report without any restrictions whatsoever. But the problem is that the commentators on TV have almost from the beginning adopted a "we" attitude. They now are reporting, "We are advancing. We are taking fire. We are taking prisoners." So all objectivity has been dropped. And, as human beings, I think we could agree it's understandable in this situation. But, as journalists, it's not the best situation where commentators, anchormen-- reporters in the field -- are talking about this as a "we" rather than a U.S. mission or the U.S. soldiers. MOYERS: Fox News has become the cheerleader for the government. What does it do to other news organizations when Fox proves that jingoism is more popular than journalism? MITCHELL: I think the problem with that is that a lot of the other-- particularly the cable news networks have-- felt that they have to keep up with that. I think there's a certain competition to show that they're not soft on the war, that they don't have any less patriotism than Fox. And we've seen it just this morning. I saw an interview on CNN with an Australian woman who had been in Baghdad and had just left. And the woman kept saying that, you know, she was amazed how much the Iraqi people, although they may not like Saddam Hussein, were very angry about the bombings. Many of their children had been injured or killed....And the person who was the interviewer back in the U.S. asked her one aggressive question after another. After he finished talking to her, he then sort of editorialized on the air, saying-- "Well, we've talked to countless people who say that the Iraqi civilians will welcome with open arms the American soldiers." Now that may or may not be true. But the point is that even after one of the rare kind of dissenting or contrary opinions was expressed, the anchor felt he had to then jump in and editorialize, saying, "You can disregard what this woman said. You know, we have other information." The press should report straight down the line. You know, let the people see all sides. Let the people get all the information as quickly as they can. And let the chips fall where they may.... MOYERS: What concerns you about what's not being covered? MITCHELL: My complaint is with the cable news networks that are on 24/7 and yet have found virtually no time to interview psychologists and theologians and other observers who could talk about what this is doing to us what this is doing to us as a country. MOYERS: Do you see as much cheerleading in the print press as you do on television? MITCHELL: No, I think the print press has played it more straight down the line. They've had a more variety of stories. They have had reports from Baghdad itself. More reports on what people are saying around the world. More reports on protests pro and con about the war. More range of editorial opinions. So I think the print press and newspapers have done a much better job, a more reflective job. MOYERS: What do you think is stake for democracy and how we journalists cover this war? MITCHELL: Edward R. Murrow had a quote on his wall in his office from Thoreau in which he said something like, "To speak the truth, you need two people. One to speak it and one to hear it." And I think that sums up the relationship not only between the military and the press but the press and the American people. You know, the press often is reporting factual matters. And the public sometimes turns away from it. We entered this war, with upwards of half the people in the country believing that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack. Now, how did that happen? Was that the media's fault? Was it the government's fault for putting out the stories? Or is the public sometimes not receptive, and the public wants to believe what the public wants to believe? MOYERS: Last question. Do you have a sense that when the battle is over, this story's only begun? MITCHELL: "I don't think most Americans understand that this is going to be something that's with us for years and decades, and I'm not sure we get a sense of that from the coverage which seems to be oriented towards next week or next month, when the battle will be over. The boys will start to come home, and it will be a glorious episode in our past rather than something that's just the beginning of this story. "We're really at the beginning of the story of the US and Iraq and the 21st century." Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor.

When Journalism Became Transcription and Reporting Disappeared

Related
BUYING THE WAR: Watch the Show
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Bill Moyers’ PBS special last night on the media’s complicity in pushing America to war was so powerfully upsetting that I am forced to resort to using mid-1990s NBA metaphors to describe it, if only because describing it without a metaphoric buffer is just too depressing. This production was the documentary equivalent of Tom Chambers famously jumping over a screaming Mark Jackson and hammering down one of the greatest, most in-your-face slam dunks in history.

To call the media’s complicity in the Iraq War a conspiracy is an insult to conspiracies, because it wasn’t hidden - as Moyers shows, it was all out there for everyone to see. The problem was, Beltway reporters didn’t want to see it. As New York Times White House correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller admitted, in the lead up to war most self-respecting Washington journalists who wanted to stay on the White House Christmas card list refused to ask tough questions because “no one wanted to get into an argument with the president.”

What’s really disturbing, however, is not even what this documentary says about the past - but what it says about the state of journalism today. In interview after interview after interview, we hear top journalists and opinionmakers declare that they believe journalism is no longer about basic, hard-scrabble reporting or getting scoops. As the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus says, most reporters today actually try to avoid getting scoops because they “worry about sort of getting out ahead of something” and - gasp! - making their friends inside Official Washington mad at them. So rather than, say, do the real work of reporting news, journalism has become a profession that is almost entirely about PR, transcription and packaging Establishment spin for news copy. This is why, for example, many of the highest-profile political “journalists” like Joe Klein and David Broder never bother to actually report anything anymore - but instead spend most of their time pontificating on horse race polls and campaign gossip, expecting us to believe that’s real “news.”

This kind of attitude, as Moyers shows, goes straight to the top. Take, for instance, NBC’s Tim Russert - the Washington Bureau Chief of NBC NEWS. I stress the word “news” because, remember, “news” is supposed to be reported in the trenches, not transcribed in a television studio. Russert loves to brag about coming from Buffalo (often ending his shows with some irritating quip about the Buffalo Bills) because he believes it gives him some sort of working-class cred and more importantly distracts viewer attention from the fact that he is a longtime Washington insider and multi-million-dollar journalist. And at one point, he brags to Moyers that “I’m a blue-collar guy from Buffalo - I know who my sources are [and] I work ‘em very hard.” But then when Moyers asks him why he gave Vice President Cheney such a free pass to come on Meet the Press and spew blatant lies about Iraq’s WMD - lies that news organizations like Knight Ridder were exposing but people like Russert were ignoring - we get this gem from Russert:

“There were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them.”

Moyers quickly noted that at least some reporters “didn’t wait for the phone to ring,” and that CBS’s Bob Simon said that sources debunking the WMD case “would have been available to any reporter who called.” And that makes Russert’s entire sob story fall apart like a house of cards. Russert wants us to believe that he’s just “a blue-collar guy from Buffalo” who works sources very hard. Yet, apparently, “working sources very hard” means not even picking up the phone to make a call, but instead sitting in a comfortable Washington office waiting for people to call him, and in the meantime giving Cheney as much airtime as he wanted to spew lies.

Then there is the interchange with The New Republic’s Peter Beinart, who since cheerleading for the war and berating war critics, has been rewarded with a Time Magazine column and a post as a foreign policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. Moyers asks Beinart “what made you present yourself as a Middle East expert” in the lead up to war? Beinart admits that despite his preening around as an expert, he’d never actually been to Iraq, but nonetheless insists that he is “a political journalist.” So Moyers naturally asks that as a “political journalist” what kind of reporting did he do to make sure his prewar cheerleading was substantively sound. Here’s Beinart’s answer:

“Well, I was doing mostly, for a large part it was reading, reading the statements and the things that people said. I was not a beat reporter. I was editing a magazine and writing a column. So I was not doing a lot of primary reporting. But what I was doing was a lot of reading of other people’s reporting and reading of what officials were saying.”

So here we have one of the Iraq War’s leading cheerleaders actually telling us that his entire method of backing up his case was all about amplifying official Washington through brazen transcription. He actually sits there and tells Moyers that as a self-described “political journalist” his primary method of reporting on the issues he presented himself as an expert on was by not reporting at all.

This is what journalism has become today - and the worst part of it is that people who follow this Russert-Beinart method of sitting in comfortable Washington offices not picking up the phone or doing primary research is actually being rewarded as we speak. Moyers, channeling a fantastic piece by Jebediah Reed in Radar Magazine, notes that most of the people who regurgitated the Washington Establishment’s debunked case for war have actually been rewarded with even more prominent positions in the media. And while these desperate-for-attention media icons like Bill Kristol and Tom Friedman are happy to throw themselves in front of cameras for almost any opportunity to promote themselves, they categorically refused to talk to Moyers for his PBS special.

I went to journalism school because I thought journalism was about sifting through the B.S. in order to challenge power and hold the Establishment accountable. Bill Moyers and the folks I’ve gotten to know at McClatchy Newspapers who Moyers highlights show that that long tradition still exists. But the fact that they are such rare exceptions to the rule also show that the incentive system in journalism today is to reward not the people who challenge power, but the people who worship it. And though Tim Russert and Peter Beinart and Bill Kristol and Tom Friedman can kick back in Washington with their six figure salaries and tell themselves that they are really Important People, what we have seen is that they are part of a new journalistic culture that is threatening to destroy what once was a truly noble profession and undermine our democracy.

COMMENTS: Go to Sirota's Working Assets site to comment on this entry

posted 4/26/2007 by David Sirota @ 8:55 am | Permalink

A Media Role in Selling the War? No Question.

By Tom Shales

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 25, 2007; C01

Perhaps the truth shall eventually set you free, but first it might make you very, very depressed. Tonight's edition of "Bill Moyers Journal" on PBS is one of the most gripping and important pieces of broadcast journalism so far this year, but it's as disheartening as it is compelling.

It's always depressing to learn that you've been had, but incalculably more so when the deception has resulted in thousands of Americans dying in the Iraq war effort.

In this 90-minute report, called "Buying the War," Moyers and producer Kathleen Hughes use alarming evidence and an array of respected journalists to make the case that, in the rage that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the media abandoned their role as watchdog and became a lapdog instead.

Exhibit A -- the first event recalled in this report -- is a news conference by President Bush on March 6, 2003, which Moyers says is two weeks before Bush "will order America to war." The press conference was a sham, with Bush calling only on "friendly" reporters who'd ask friendly questions. The corker was this scorching investigative query: "Mr. President, how is your faith guiding you?"

"At least a dozen times during this press conference," Moyers says, Bush would "invoke 9/11 and al-Qaeda to justify a preemptive attack on a country that has not attacked America." The link between al-Qaeda and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was never proved and had to be taken on faith, Moyers recalls, as did the administration claim that Hussein had developed, was developing, or might soon develop weapons of mass destruction.

Moyers does not set out to attack anyone himself; instead he tries to find out why journalists -- electronic and print -- behaved in ways that are supposed to be anathema to a free press in a free nation. The show asks: Did the Bush administration benefit from having an effective collection of accomplished dupers -- a contingent that Washington Post investigative reporter Walter Pincus calls "the marketing group" -- or did the outrage of 9/11 made the press more vulnerable to being duped?

Pressures subtle and blatant were brought to bear. Phil Donahue's nightly MSNBC talk show was virtually the only program of its type that gave antiwar voices a chance to be heard. Donahue was canceled 22 days before the invasion of Iraq, Moyers says. The reason was supposedly low ratings, but the New York Times intercepted an in-house memo in which a network executive complained: "Donahue represents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. At the same time, our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

Dissent was deemed not only unpatriotic, Donahue recalls, but -- perhaps even worse -- "not good for business." Most of Moyers's report involves serious, respected journalists who let themselves be swept up in war fever and who were manipulated by the administration sources who had cozied up to them. Instead of investigating administration claims about al-Qaeda and WMDs and such, cable news offered up hours and hours of talking-head television.

Former CNN president Walter Isaacson tells Moyers: "One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is, it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb-suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters."

Dan Rather -- who has left his CBS anchor chair but continues with solid and superior reports on the high-definition cable and satellite channel HDNet -- tells Moyers: "The substitute for reporting far too often has become 'Let's just ring up an expert.' . . . This is journalism on the cheap, if it's journalism at all."

Rather is among a select group of working journalists who agreed to be interviewed for the Moyers report. Others include media critic and Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz, Bob Simon of "60 Minutes" and, formerly from Knight Ridder Newspapers, John Walcott, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel.

Moyers credits them with breaking from the pack and printing stories that looked deeply into administration claims. Because the Knight Ridder chain had no paper in Washington or New York, however, its stories didn't get the national exposure they deserved, and networks were skittish about following up on them.

Tim Russert, of NBC's "Meet the Press," looks intimidated by Moyers and somewhat unnerved by his questions, but at least he agreed to be interviewed. Among those who declined -- and thus became a part of the story more than they already were -- are Judith Miller of the New York Times, a reporter who became a relentless drumbeater for war; Times pundit William Safire, who'd predicted that Iraqis would welcome Americans as liberators when they marched into Baghdad; columnist Charles Krauthammer, another hawkish columnist who's usually anything but camera-shy; and Fox boss Roger Ailes.

William Kristol, a conservative columnist who, Moyers says, "led the march to Baghdad behind a battery of Washington microphones . . . has not responded to any of our requests for an interview, but he still shows up on TV as an expert, most often on Fox News."

Even if this Moyers report tells you some things you already knew, it puts the whole story of the media's role in the war into one convenient package -- a story of historical value that is also frighteningly rife with portents for the future and for what will pass as journalism in months and years to come.

Moyers's last words on the broadcast, at least according to a preliminary script, will be: "The country is in chaos," but the syntax is such that one can't be sure if by "the country" Moyers means Iraq or the United States. Maybe he meant both.

Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War airs tonight at 9 on Channels 22 and 26.

Record of Iraq War Lies to Air Tonight, April 25, on PBS

Bill Moyers Returns To PBS, Examining Role Of Press In Buildup To War


The Spokesman Review

Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War | Excerpt

Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War | Excerpt | PBS

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Buying the war

Is Mainstream Corporate Media subverting the AIPAC Spy Trial?

4/21/2007 Opinion Essay

Graymail and Freedom of the Press

by Grant F. Smith

The Associated Press reported a major victory for defendants in the AIPAC espionage trial on April 17^th, 2007. "Prosecutors suffered a setback yesterday in their case against two former pro-Israel lobbyists accused of violating the 1917 Espionage Act when a federal judge rejected the government's proposal for conducting much of the trial in secret." The presiding judge, T. S. Ellis III underscored the gravity of the situation. "If the prosecution decline[s] to submit any substitutions [for classified evidence] that you would ever make public, then maybe ... I have to decide whether to dismiss the indictment, if that's the case."

As various elements of the Israel lobby trumpet the ruling as a victory for free speech, it is useful to review not only the involvement of mainstream corporate media in trafficking classified information in the AIPAC espionage case, but also their past record on secret evidence in other high profile criminal cases.

Mainstream media's formal legal foray into the AIPAC case was triggered by a government motion. On February 16, 2007 federal prosecutors filed a "Classified Intelligence Procedures Act" (CIPA) motion with the contents sealed from public view. CIPA is an established process under which courts operate when classified information is expected to be used at trial. In response, defendants Rosen and Weissman filed a sealed motion to strike the CIPA requests and the government's motion to close the trial.

On March 13, 2007 attorney Jay Ward Brown filed a motion to intervene (PDF) and argue against the DOJ prosecutors' proposal to "limit public access to classified portions of the trial proceedings." Brown filed the motion on behalf of elite media clients including the Newspaper Guild, Communications Workers of America, Radio-Television News Directors Association, Reuters America LLC, Society of Professional Journalists, Time, Inc., The Washington Post, Hearst Corp., Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, ABC, Inc., American Society of Newspaper Editors, The Associated Press, Dow Jones & Company, Inc., and the Newspaper Association of America, Inc. The collective pressure and threat brought to bear on Judge T.S. Ellis was implicit in the motion: Any attempt to introduce classified evidence or protect sources and methods with closed proceedings would be widely reported on as Soviet era secrecy in a kangaroo court.

Titled an "Emergency Motion for Leave to Intervene", the filing sought to keep the trial completely open, ostensibly in the interest of press coverage. The motion also subtly expresses mainstream media preconceptions about the trial, stating in the filing the case is worth coverage because of the "unusual factual circumstances that gave rise to their (Rosen and Weissman) indictment" and that the case involves an "unprecedented application of the Espionage Act". The court docket (PDF) reveals this is only the latest skirmish in a legal battle that has been raging for well over a year and a half, though the trial is scheduled to begin on June 4, 2007.

On the surface this seems to be a triumph of a free press over government secrecy. However, the involvement of the elite media in the AIPAC espionage trial goes far beyond the motion or what they routinely report. A few of the same corporate news outlets filing the motion were willingly used by Weissman and Rosen to disseminate classified information to further AIPAC's policy objectives. On July 21, 2004, Weissman and Rosen called Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler to pass information that they said was from "an American intelligence source". That source is now known to be Col. Lawrence Franklin, a DoD employee sentenced to 12 years in prison. The Israel lobbyists were hoping to influence US policy on Iran. In 2003 Rosen relayed classified information to Reuters correspondent Carol Giacomo and Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs about the contents of confidential drafts of a US presidential directive advocating a more aggressive US posture toward Iran. Dobbs included the classified information in a story two weeks later.

Another AIPAC motion to intervene filer, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, clarified the mainstream corporate media's collective desire to continue serving as a willing conduit for selectively released classified information, According to Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, "Journalists who cover national security and defense receive classified information all the time, It's virtually routine. If that were the standard for bringing an espionage case, we'd be locking up a lot of people in this town and there would be fewer sources of information."

Notwithstanding the press's apparent willingness to be used to further AIPAC or any other lobbies' policy objectives by selective disclosure of classified information, secrecy in trials raises questions. Does the elite media's own reporting record reveal a consistent industrywide commitment calling for disclosure of secret evidence in all high profile criminal trials? It does not.

The New York Times chided the Iran Contra trial defense of Oliver North in an article titled "North's Lawyers Trying to Derail Prosecutor's Plan" published in 1989. Reporter Michael Wines reported, "The Federal judge in the Iran-contra case today rejected the bulk of Oliver L. North's demand to use 30,000 pages of secret documents as evidence in his defense, accusing Mr. North of making the request in a calculated effort to 'frustrate the prosecution.''' Another AIPAC espionage motion filer, Time Inc., also had a different take on classified evidence in an earlier era. Time reporter George J. Church wrote in a piece called Top-Secret Strategy that the North defense appeals for public access to classified information was despicable "graymail". Church elaborated that, "North's strategy, it seems, is to threaten to disclose embarrassing secrets if the Government will not drop the trial. In the bitter words of Robin Ross, chief aide to Attorney General Thornburgh, 'This great American hero is graymailing the Government. This is the guy who stood up in his Marine Corps uniform and all his medals, and now he is sticking it to the Government with an advantage (knowledge of secrets) he got through service to his country.'"

What about spies for foreign countries like Russia? According to the case docket of FBI spy for Russia Robert Hanssen, the mainstream corporate press did not at any time file urgent briefs, even though the bulk of the evidence trafficked by Hanssen to be used against him in court would have been highly classified.

In the rarified world of elite mainstream corporate media, if a defendant like Oliver North attempts to introduce classified information as evidence, it is "graymail." If defendants Weissman and Rosen attempt to similarly force the revelation of classified information, possibly "outing" sources and methods used to protect the US against Israeli espionage, well that's simply freedom of the press. This double standard is unfortunate.

The stakes in the AIPAC espionage case could not be higher. The AIPAC espionage case, if it comes to trial, could redefine the role of lobbies, the mainstream press and think tanks operating in Washington, DC. It is not yet clear whether average Americans approve of Washington's hidden world of selective third party disclosure and trafficking in classified information. It is also not known whether selectively disclosed and leveraged classified information fed to the "free press" has played a wider, unknown role in promoting misguided war, wasteful military spending, and perpetuating the influence of the Israel lobby. The Washington Post's own Walter Pincus, who has been rather sloppy in bringing facts about the case to his readership, now gloats that the prosecution now has only two weeks to find effective substitutes for reams of classified transcripts. We must ask whether, thanks to the legal intervention of the elite mainstream corporate media, we will ever obtain the answers to dire and burning questions of public interest.

101 WAYS TO MASSACRE STUDENTS

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Reading First officials profited off materials toward which federal government steered states.
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April 19, 2007

By Carolyn Baker

Once again, a horrific eruption of violence in the United States has been turned into a National Enquirer “blood and circuses” spectacle on every television network in the nation. Curiously, grotesque and ghastly as the carnage is, it seems that Americans are not impacted by bloodbaths until they occur in their own back yards. Juan Cole said it best yesterday when he stated, “the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech should give us a baseline for what the Iraqis are actually living through. They have two Virginia Tech-style attacks every single day”.

We seem incapable of coming to terms with violence: Either we distance ourselves from it as “something happening over there” or we voyeuristically wallow in it 24/7 with grisly images of a massacre or the incessant repetition of a video tape made by a perpetrator exuding psychotic rage from every pore. In neither case does America appear to be capable of asking the deeper, disturbing questions in relation to such incidents, but obsessively leaps to “the healing” which Gary Corseri so brilliantly slammed in his piece earlier this week, “Blacksburg: Let The Healing Not Begin.”

As I watched some of the coverage of the Virginia Tech incident this past week, I could not help but be reminded of another massacre that occurred thirty-seven years ago next month at Kent State University. On that day I was being pepper gassed as I marched in solidarity at Michigan State with my fallen comrades at Kent State who were massacred by a government which at that very moment was murdering thousands of Cambodians, dropping bombs it swore it wasn’t dropping and lying through its teeth to the American people in the throes of the Vietnam War. Today I teach with a colleague who on May 4, 1970 took a stray bullet at Kent State and became permanently disabled as a result.

But while Kent State and Virginia Tech are venues of physical assault on students, almost no one is aware of the myriad levels on which, in other venues and without the spilling of blood, students are being massacred. Another article this past week which escaped the notice of many but riveted my attention was Danny Schechter’s “A Student Crisis”. Writing, Schechter says, in the spirit of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly”, he reminds us of “the way student loans have become a noose around the necks of a whole generation of students making our colleges and universities likely sets for the next edition of one of those crime scene shows.” Furthermore, in recent weeks the corruption around student loans involving kickbacks, gifts, trips, and other perks to college and university officials involved in the lending process has been exposed and appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. California Congressman, George Miller, compares the corruption and abuse in the student loan industry to that of Halliburton. Moreover, Miller’s investigations have also revealed that as well as being deeply mired in corruption, the industry is also involved in datamining of students’ personal records, ostensibly to determine their eligibility for loans.

Meanwhile says Schecter:

Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student loan company, announced yesterday that it would be bought by a group of private investors in a $25 billion deal that could reduce public scrutiny of the lender at a time when the student loan industry is under siege.

The enormous deal underscores the potential for profit that Wall Street sees in the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry, even as Congress considers slashing billions of dollars in federal loan subsidies and an expanding nationwide probe reveals fresh conflicts of interest in the student lending world.”

Schechter knows about these things as a result of his splendid documentary “In Debt We Trust” which illumines not only the student loan debacle but the seduction of financially unsophisticated college freshmen into the black hole of credit card debt—an average of $20,000 per college graduate.

To fully comprehend the economic plight of today’s college student/graduate, I strongly recommend Anya Kamenetz’s superb book Generation Debt and her article “Greed Aid” which was part of her 2004 “Generation Debt” series of articles in Village Voice. Kamenetz analyzes the student loan/debt issue and reveals the lifelong misery that it is inflicting on millions of students. Tragically, and God forbid, the seeds sown in this present economic assault on students could eventually produce the harvest of another literal massacre on some college or university campus somewhere in the future by some troubled graduate, buried in mid-life under a crushing mountain of debt.

But the economic warfare being waged on students is only one aspect of the massacre. Even more brutal, yet silent and seemingly benign, is the massacre of minds. Supposedly, students attend college and universities to get an education, and supposedly, even if they attend a community college, they are required to show up with basic skills. Yet anyone who has been teaching college students for the past twenty years knows that only a tiny segment of incoming freshmen are capable of writing an English sentence, and even more frightening is the reality that non-English speakers from other countries are often capable of doing so while students educated in the U.S. aren’t. Sadly, I’ve discovered that overall, college students do not like to read and have trouble concentrating on textbook or other reading assignments. It is not uncommon for them to purchase $150 textbooks and almost never open them. Faculty frequently report that they are only able to lecture 15 or 20 minutes and then must incorporate a Power Point presentation or utilize video or DVD material in order not to lose the attention of their students. In other words, the present generation of high school graduates often finds concepts without the dazzle of special effects, elusive and monotonous.

Increasingly, children in public schools are experiencing horrific levels of violence on a daily basis as they are forced to deal with physical or verbal bullying from other students and ineffectual school administrations with no funds to put bullies and their parents in programs that would adequately address the issue. Periodically, protracted bullying erupts in a Columbine or a Virginia Tech incident, perpetrated either by the bully or one of his victims. Then everyone rushes to “heal and move on”, never willing to explore the deeper roots of the violence.

Overwhelmingly, as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which Greg Palast has so appropriately named “No Child’s Behind Left”, students coming to college from a public school seem to excel in test-taking, but have virtually no critical thinking skills. In my experience, I find that students enjoy critically thinking once they have learned the skill, but they require training for it because it is a foreign concept.

NCLB is a gargantuan assault not only on the minds of public school and college students, but on the entire society. It is, in my opinion, the principal reason, besides skillfully-cultivated fear, that Americans could be lied into the Iraq War. When Colin Powell made his bogus case for war in front of the United Nations in 2003, a society of critical thinkers would have raised their eyebrows and asked more probing questions. As it was, a British news channel exposed his plagiarism of a graduate student’s essay as a fundamental piece of his presentation. (Students serve many purposes for the ruling elite, do they not?) When during that presentation Powell held up a vial of white powder, touting it as anthrax, critically thinking Americans should not have turned as white as the powder with fear, but rather demanded proof that the vial was not filled with baking soda. When Condoleeza Rice threatened that if we did not invade Iraq, a mushroom cloud would hang over America because Iraq was purportedly in the process of manufacturing a nuclear bomb, a country of critical thinkers would have unambiguously and boisterously insisted on proof beyond the whining, photo-op assertions of the former Chevron board member. But as one of my students naively asked later, “If it wasn’t true, why did they have it on CNN?”

My answer: Because CNN is corporate media whose job it is to act as stenographers for the regime and “sell” its agenda to a nation of citizens who are incapable of thinking analytically, and in 2003, the scam was successful beyond the wildest dreams of the necons who devised it.

Naturally, in my field I am constantly reminded of how trivial and irrelevant America’s public education system has rendered the study of history. Most college students have no sense of it and report enduring the mind-numbing boredom of high school history classes either by ditching, text-messaging, or falling asleep. Increasingly, as with art and music programs, funding for history is being slashed both in high schools and colleges and increased for engineering and computer technology programs.

Some years ago I heard John Judge remark that “a people who have no knowledge of their history are easily manipulated and dominated.” Deny students the ability to read, write, critically think, and study history, and you have a nation of sycophants who ask no questions and comply with virtually any directive in the name of patriotism or national security as they are almost certain to do when they are sold the regime’s propaganda regarding the National I.D. Act and the U.S. government’s plan to incorporate its provisions in 2009. After all, who among them is willing to have the privilege of obtaining or renewing a drivers license, opening a bank account, or boarding a plane denied?

So what is the destiny of this generation of students? Where will they end up besides unfathomably in debt? Sadly, they are facing a future hammered by global warming, global energy depletion, and global economic meltdown. They will go forth from the halls of academia, and if they are not well-connected, they will take the jobs they can get. They will graduate into a world of outsourced American jobs which will force them to accept mind and soul-numbing positions with insufficient pay, often with few or no benefits. Those in tech fields may fare better than those in other professions, I wouldn’t be willing to bet that in another decade they will be delirious with a sense of job satisfaction.

Many, wide-eyed with idealism, will enter the teaching profession, determined to teach differently than they were taught, but according to statistics from 2005, half of the teachers surveyed plan to be out of the profession by 2010. These hopeful education majors will vow to give students a genuine education, not just prepare pupils for NCLB tests, but unless they are teaching in private schools where NCLB is not incorporated and which also pay less than public schools, they will be discouraged and demoralized within less than a decade. In public schools they will soon discover that whether they like NCLB or not, their salaries will be tied to the test scores they produce, in which case, why not “teach to the test” instead of giving students an education? They may learn to live with a system that makes authentic teaching virtually impossible, in which case, they will become robotic moving parts in a nationwide dumbing-down mechanism, or choosing not to live with it, they will abandon the career for which they have trained in favor of remaining true to their calling as educators.

Increasingly, trade and tech schools will be the choice of many high school graduates, and a college education will ultimately become untenable financially for the middle-class student and impractical in terms of its value in securing lucrative employment. As the current housing bubble worsens and impacts the credit industry and interest rates, and as the Bush administration endeavors to eliminate the Mortgage Tax Credit, owning one’s home will not be in the future of many college graduates. And given the new bankruptcy laws of 2005, declaring bankruptcy in the face of grinding debt will not be an option, and this generation of graduates will never, ever get ahead financially.

So on the one hand, the carnage at Virginia Tech is equivalent to what innocent Iraqis and most U.S. combat troops experience at least twice a week, and therefore, brings home to our own soil the horrors of mass violence. But at the same time if we are among those critically thinking Americans to whom I alluded above, then we must also consider the full spectrum of assault being waged on today’s students which encompasses high schools, colleges, and universities across America, and we must consider the consequences of those assaults in terms of the misery, despair, and even violence that they are certain to evoke in the coming years.

In recent months I have been pleased to hear of a resurgence of chapters of SDS (Students For A Democratic Society) at U.S. colleges and universities. As well as protesting the Iraq War, some have been instrumental in organizing for wage increases and benefits for campus workers. Hopefully, they will also begin or have already begun to organize against the economic warfare being waged on students by the debt industry.

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'Devastating' Bill Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming

'Devastating' Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming

By Greg Mitchell

Published: April 19, 2007 9:00 PM ET

NEW YORK (Commentary) The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear next Wednesday, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called "Buying the War," which marks the return of "Bill Moyers Journal." E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week.

While much of the evidence of the media's role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.

The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans and Iraqis rising again -- yet Moyers points out, "the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses."

Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, "The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should've all been doing that."

At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.

But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, "I don't think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war&hellipWe didn't dig enough. And we shouldn't have been fooled in this way." Bob Simon, who had strong doubts about evidence for war, was asked by Moyers if he pushed any of the top brass at CBS to "dig deeper," and he replies, "No, in all honesty, with a thousand mea culpas&hellip.nope, I don't think we followed up on this."

Instead he covered the marketing of the war in a "softer" way, explaining to Moyers: "I think we all felt from the beginning that to deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it, in a way, almost light – if that doesn't seem ridiculous."

Moyers replies: "Going to war, almost light."

Walter Isaacson is pushed hard by Moyers and finally admits, "We didn't question our sources enough." But why? Isaacson notes there was "almost a patriotism police" after 9/11 and when the network showed civilian casualties it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and "big people in corporations were calling up and saying, 'You're being anti-American here.'"

Moyers then mentions that Isaacson had sent a memo to staff, leaked to the Washington Post, in which he declared, "It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan" and ordered them to balance any such images with reminders of 9/11. Moyers also asserts that editors at the Panama City (Fla.) News-Herald received an order from above, "Do not use photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties. Our sister paper has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening emails."

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post explains that even at his paper reporters "do worry about sort of getting out ahead of something." But Moyers gives credit to Charles J. Hanley of The Associated Press for trying, in vain, to draw more attention to United Nations inspectors failing to find WMD in early 2003.

The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student's thesis, downloaded from the Web -- with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with "plagiarism."

Phil Donahue recalls that he was told he could not feature war dissenters alone on his MSNBC talk show and always had to have "two conservatives for every liberal." Moyers resurrects a leaked NBC memo about Donahue's firing that claimed he "presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. At the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

Moyers also throws some stats around: In the year before the invasion William Safire (who predicted a "quick war" with Iraqis cheering their liberators) wrote "a total of 27 opinion pieces fanning the sparks of war." The Washington Post carried at least 140 front-page stories in that same period making the administration's case for attack. In the six months leading to the invasion the Post would "editorialize in favor of the war at least 27 times."

Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news in the six months before the war, almost all could be traced back to sources solely in the White House, Pentagon or State Dept., Moyers tells Russert, who offers no coherent reply.

The program closes on a sad note, with Moyers pointing out that "so many of the advocates and apologists for the war are still flourishing in the media." He then runs a pre-war clip of President Bush declaring, "We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Then he explains: "The man who came up with it was Michael Gerson, President Bush's top speechwriter.

"He has left the White House and has been hired by the Washington Post as a columnist."

***
Greg Mitchell's most recent column on Iraq: "Sorry We Shot Your Kid, But Here's $500"

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Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor and author of seven books on politics and history, including two for Random House, "The Campaign of the Century" and "Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady."

Video: Cho Seung-Hui Manifesto

Sometime after he killed two people in a Virginia university dormitory but before he slaughtered 30 more in a classroom building Monday morning, Cho Seung-Hui mailed NBC News a large package, including photographs and videos, lamenting that “I didn’t have to do this.”

Cho, 23, a senior English major at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, killed 32 people in two attacks before taking his own life.

CLIP 2


Gunman was teased and picked on, former schoolmates say.

Don't forget about Iraq

Thursday, April 19, 2007

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As expected -- because it is always so -- a media event has become a media orgy. I'm talking, of course, about the Virginia Tech shootings, but that hardly matters. In search of sensationalism, the media have no shame. Any story will do, pretty much -- but the media play particularly well off stories like this one. Everything about it, after all, seems so juicy. The media do so well with death and destruction, but they also like a human side to the mayhem. Hence the mainstreamization -- if I may coin a term -- of weather news. (Hurricanes are sexy.) But there's more. There is also pain and suffering. And it's all happening right at home, in English, with so much mystery to unravel -- who was he? why did he do it? -- and with so many hot-button issues lingering on the periphery -- gun control, immigration, education.

Why the media do this is beyond the scope of this post, but there are a few points to make: Obviously, the media need to fill up the empty space that follows the reporting of the facts. That was done -- the facts are known, more or less, and so all that's left is repetition and speculation. There is a fine line between journalism and exploitation, and that line has been crossed. Just turn on your media outlet of choice. You'll see what I mean.

On this, see Taylor Marsh, who asks the right questions: "Have we lost all sense of dignity? When did our pain become something we're so proud of we need to broadcast it... never mind. We are a therapy nation now, televising our grief for all to see. It's what we now do best. But did the community of Virginia Tech need our prying eyes? It likely never occurred to anyone to ask." Taylor compares this to the media's coverage of the Iraq War, which has been abysmal. But, then, an Iraqi life is hardly worth an American one, we are left to conclude from this imbalance, and Iraq is way over there, and we don't want to think too much about it, lost cause that it is, and it's not nearly as sensational as what happened in Virginia. (More on Iraq below.)

Americans -- media and media consumers alike -- need answers. They cannot imagine that what happened in Virginia was just some senseless act of violence. There must have been more to it. And so the media orgy revolves around trying to answer the existential questions as well as the factual ones -- not just the who but the why -- that is, to unravel the seeming mystery of it all. Americans do not seem to want such answers to similar questions about the Iraq War -- it is far too remote, it would seem, for there to be needed any such effort -- but we are Virginia Tech and Virginia Tech is us. Even here in Canada, the media have focused disproportionately on the one Canadian who was killed, as if that death is somehow more significant than the others, but so it goes. This isn't about them, the victims, it's about us. We need to soothe ourselves, to have our existential upsurge pacified. We cannot and will not accept meaninglessness. To stare into the abyss is one thing. To accept that the abyss is all there is would shatter our fragile shells of civilized self-understanding. There must be a God.

And so we search for answers -- through the media, which are more than happy -- for ratings, to bolster their self-importance -- to oblige with all the investigation and speculation that can fill up the empty space. In this case, for this story, this leads us to such banal topics as mental illness, alienation, antidepressant medication. Are the answers to be found in there, anywhere? Or are they to be found in the world of politics -- gun control is the hot topic. In its more extreme and repugnant form, this search demands scapegoats, an evil Other upon which our indignant blame can be heaped. This is the world of Michelle Malkin and her ilk -- a world which upon which I discoursed to much fanfare last night.

On this, see also Steven Taylor: "[W]hy do we have to find blame in places other than the fact that a truly disturbed individual simply did an unthinkable act and cracked. There is only so much that can be done in a free society to prevent such situations. This attempt to blame a general 'liberal' attitude at universities and that this somehow has led to a culture of 'conflict avoidance' that somehow, by inference, led to people not defending themselves on Monday -- that is utterly ridiculous." Our own Capt. Fogg also put it well in a comment to a post by Creature: "This guy didn't go nuts because of television or rap music or gay marriage or any of the other shibboleths -- he went nuts because he was human and going nuts is a human affliction. It's an affliction that won't go away despite lectures on personal responsibility or despite bans or laws or wiretaps appeals to family values or protests or rubber bands worn on wrists."

But the truth -- rather than the truthiness presented to willing consumers by sensation-seeking news outlets and deranged commentators -- does not go down so easily. If the truth about Iraq is being largely ignored, or avoided, the truth about the Virginia Tech shootings continues to be overwhelmed by a media orgy that, as of right now, shows no signs of letting up.

**********

And this brings us to Iraq, forgotten Iraq, where today was just another day, as we say, of life and death:

Four car bombs killed 131 people and wounded 164 others across Baghdad Wednesday, the U.S. military said, as bloodshed spiked two months into a U.S.-led crackdown meant to pacify the Iraqi capital.

It was one of the deadliest days of the four-year-old Iraq war, and some news agencies suggested the death toll may be higher. Reuters, quoting local officials, said almost 200 people were killed Wednesday. The Associated Press put the number at 183.

The carnage underscored the profound insecurity that continues to plague the nation, where additional American soldiers are being deployed in an attempt to curb sectarian violence.

Bloodshed. Carnage. Insecurity.

Is it right to compare Iraq and Virginia Tech? Perhaps not. But the juxtaposition -- and specifically the juxtaposition of media coverage -- is nonetheless deeply troubling. (This is Taylor's point.) There has been so much concentrated coverage of what happened in Virginia (and, to an extent, rightly so), but there has been, overall, gross indifference to what is happening in Iraq each and every day. It takes a massive death toll for Iraqi violence to register -- like today's, but, even then, nothing like there should be. And not just Iraqi violence. Stuck in perpetual therapy, Americans don't want to know much about anywhere else, either.

"But this happened in our own backyard," a critic cries. Yes, yes, I know -- and I understand. That, too, was my reaction to the news. The shooting did happen close to home -- closer to home than the violence in Iraq, closer to home in terms of our ability to relate to it, to see ourselves in those we see on television. We are them, they are us. We are all Hokies now.

Fair enough.

All I am saying -- well, perhaps not all -- is that some perspective is in order. Becoming one with Virginia while detaching from Iraq is the easy way out. It allows us to cleanse our souls in yet another media-driven orgy of existential therapy even as more and more blood is spilled in some faraway place that is just too horrible even to attempt to comprehend.

And yet the media will soon move on, as they always do, to the next source of sensationalism, the next object of exploitation. The pain and suffering in Virginia will go on, but we won't care, because it was never really about them -- and because we will once again have managed to lie the ultimate lie to ourselves, to have persuaded ourselves that our questions were answered, that our fears were all dreams, that there was a point to the madness, or at least a reasonable explanation that put everything right again.

And we will follow the media, wherever they may go, from one sensation to the next.

And, media coverage or not, the blood will continue to flow... over there.

American and Iraqi alike, and others too. Whether we pay attention or not.