The difference is that Bill O’Reilly really did explode on the set. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

In my most recent post on Dangerous Intersection, as well as others previously, I’ve written about the many ways in which the traditional media has willfully discarded its obligation to inform the public. And so far, as the 2008 presidential election gets into full swing, there are no signs of improvement. If anything, the traditional media has sunk lower than ever before, thrusting legitimate stories aside to pursue trivial distractions and shallow and meaningless issues of “character”.

So, are we as a nation doomed to become more and more ill-informed? Is our standing in the world only going to get worse while the populace is lulled into distraction by the TV screen? Is there no reason for hope?

Well, actually, there is. But it’s not the media is improving. Rather, it’s that Americans are increasingly recognizing its failings and abandoning it in huge numbers (HT, as always, to Glenn Greenwald).

Those trend lines tell an alarming story. The combined average audience for the big-three evening newscasts in 1980 was about 53 million viewers. By the fall of 2006, when Couric was getting ready to make the jump from NBC’s “Today” show, the three national evening newscasts had a combined audience of about 27 million viewers.

How’s that for a trend line? The evening newscasts lost about half of their audience over 26 years. They lost viewers at a rate of 1 million a year, and they’re still losing them. Last week, according to numbers Nielsen released Tuesday, the combined audience was 21.5 million.

The rise of blogs and the Internet has undoubtedly accelerated the decline, but it is not the sole cause. As the article says, this downturn began as long ago as the 1980s. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, people’s declining opinions of the news industry are partly the cause:

As we have noted in other reports,since the early 1980s, the public has come to view the news media as less professional, less accurate, less caring, less moral and more inclined to cover up rather than correct mistakes.

…The number of Americans with a favorable view of the press, for instance, dropped markedly in 2006, from 59% in February, to 48% in July. The metric can be volatile, but that was still one of the lower marks over the course of a decade.

And in one of the most basic yardsticks of public attitudes, the number of Americans who believe most or all of what news organizations tell them, there were continued declines. Virtually every news outlet saw its number fall in 2006.

With continuing stories like the revelation that the news channels hired bought-and-paid for Pentagon agents to spread favorable propaganda about the Iraq war in the guise of an “independent voice” - and those same channels’ ongoing and shocking blackout of this story - it’s not hard to understand why the American public is increasingly abandoning them and turning to other sources, such as the Internet, for news. And the sooner the better, I say.

Granted, on the Internet, it’s easy to find sources of information that are more fiercely partisan and agenda-driven than even Fox News, and whose disinterest in the facts is even worse than the traditional media’s. But the great virtue of the Internet, as former Vice President Al Gore said in The Assault on Reason, is that it’s a medium where the barriers to entry are low. Anyone can participate, and this makes it very easy to find a broad spectrum of differing views. Thus, in a key sense, the news from the Internet is balanced in a way that news from traditional sources can never be. (Of course, I’m preaching to the choir here, aren’t I?)

This productive cacophony of views is a far better analogue to the marketplace of ideas than the traditional media, where a few unaccountable individuals have enormous power to shape the focus, tone and direction of coverage that informs (or fails to inform) millions of people. In the increasingly diverse media landscape of the future, it will be far more difficult for meddling politicians and wealthy corporations to manipulate public opinion to their advantage.

Reminder for anyone interested: The National Conference for Media Reform - Minneapolis — will occur June 6 - 8, 2008.  Here’s a short video created by the conference organizers.

Here’s an audio clip promoting the NCMR - 2008: ncmr-2008_30sec

If you’d like to know more about the conference sessions or if you’d like to register, click the icon below:

According to this article, essentially copied from the AP, Adnan Oktar, who writes as Harun Yahya, has been convicted of fraud. His extensive organization has the goal to persuade the world (or at least the schools therein) of the Truth of Young Earth Creationism, as revealed in the Bible. In his case, he began by defending Islam against that Christian Evolution Conspiracy. But he also publishes books for the YEC Christian market in which he substitutes the return of Jesus for the coming of Mahdi.

I’ve read that he does produce beautiful books in support of his ideas. I expect him to get out on appeal of his apparently politically motivated incarceration. Then he and his followers around the world will continue to produce high class anti-science textbooks the like of which the Discovery Institute only wishes they could produce.

Summary: An eviscerating critique of how the Republican party has won elections by obscuring actual issues with phony controversies, aided and abetted by a shallow and insipid media. At times Greenwald’s denunciations are repetitive, but he provides more than enough infuriating examples to amply justify his evident anger.

Glenn Greenwald’s third book, Great American Hypocrites, is an expose of the invented controversies and character-based myths that Republicans use to win elections. Even though public opinion polls show that Americans consistently favor the Democratic party’s position on all or nearly all issues, the Republicans have been winning elections for the past twenty years through ad hominem attacks and the creation of a political mythology - portraying themselves as strong, rugged, manly, salt-of-the-earth regular joes, while their Democratic opponents are demonized as weirdos, elitists and effete freaks. In this endeavor, they have been assisted by the media, which has largely abandoned its duty to inform the public in favor of obsessing over phony, invented non-stories and irrelevant trivialities. (Does Michael Dukakis look silly in a helmet? Did Al Gore claim to have invented the Internet? Does John Kerry like windsurfing? Is Barack Obama a secret Muslim who refuses to wear a flag pin?) As Greenwald shows, not only do these character myths obscure the real issues that matter to Americans’ lives, in most cases they are the polar opposite of the truth.

Greenwald’s paradigmatic example of a Great American Hypocrite is John Wayne. Famed as the all-American actor, the swaggering cowboy whose steel and grit is often invoked by Republican politicians, Wayne’s personal life tells a different story. When his fellow Hollywood stars such as Clark Gable and Henry Fonda volunteered to fight in World War II, Wayne squirmed out of the draft and stayed home (and largely built his career on the movies he made in the absence of competition). To make up for that cowardice, he spent the rest of his life advocating jingoistic right-wing politics - supporting McCarthyite policies, championing the Vietnam War, and loudly attacking anyone who opposed these things as cowards and subversives. He also adopted the stance of a right-wing moralizer, denouncing films that he thought undermined traditional values. Meanwhile, Wayne himself had three marriages, all of which were plagued by adultery and allegations of spousal violence; in both of his two subsequent marriages, he married his mistress almost immediately after divorcing his then-wife.

The second chapter of the book targets the press, which Greenwald labels “vapid [and] easily manipulated”. He outlines the tactics by which right wing character assassination is amplified by the media: sleazy right-wing tabloids, most notably the Drudge Report, publish rumor and innuendo which is then loyally picked up and regurgitated by more mainstream press outlets. Most media outlets, of course, proclaim themselves as above this sort of thing, but they claim they have to report on it, because that’s what “the public” (by which they mean themselves) wants to know about. The press has become obsessed with these petty manufactured scandals to the extent of almost completely pushing out coverage of actual issues - to the extent that, in 2006, more people knew about John Edwards’ haircut than knew Saddam Hussein was not responsible for 9/11.

The next three chapters concern the media narratives pushed by the Great American Hypocrites. First and foremost is the way Republicans depict themselves as tough, resolute warriors, while casting aspersions on the courage and patriotism of their opponents. If you’re like me, you’ll find this chapter the most infuriating of the book - because, as Greenwald chronicles again and again, conservatives who pulled out all the stops to avoid military service when they had the chance spent much of their subsequent political careers dragging their Democratic opponents - who often did serve honorably - through the mud.

As but one example, conservatives cheered when the U.S. military named an aircraft carrier after Ronald Reagan, but mocked and taunted when a submarine was named after Jimmy Carter. This, despite the fact that Reagan was a Hollywood actor who never served in the military in his life, while Carter is an actual veteran who served with distinction on a real nuclear submarine. Similar examples are easy to come by: the vicious demonization of Senator George McGovern, an Air Force veteran who flew 35 combat missions and won the Distinguished Flying Cross, as weak and lacking in courage. Another is the smears against John Kerry, who volunteered for some of the most dangerous duty in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, a truly incredible array of right-wing idols and conservative pundits - such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Lieberman, Bill Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and many more - all avoided military service when they had the opportunity. Today, these right-wing warriors sit comfortably at home in cushy jobs and proclaim their own courage because they are willing to send other people into combat. They view war as an exciting spectacle, like a video game, one that gives them opportunity to brag about their masculinity. As Greenwald notes, it’s the ability to playact as a tough guy, rather than actual evidence of toughness, that the Republicans and the media are obsessed with.

Next up is the Republicans’ depiction of themselves as wholesome, moral Christian family men. This is an especially laughable claim in light of the adulterous relationships, broken marriages, drug-abuse and prostitution allegations, and other scandals that typify the leaders of the conservative movement: Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Rudy Giuliani, Dan Burton, Henry Hyde, Mark Foley, David Vitter, Ted Haggard, and others. As one example, Greenwald quotes former House Speaker Newt Gingrich blasting current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “San Francisco left-wing values”. By way of illustration, Pelosi has been married to her husband Paul since 1962, and have raised five children. Gingrich, meanwhile, famously dumped his first wife while she was in the hospital for cancer treatment, refused to pay child support after the divorce, then later divorced his second wife Marianne after having an affair with one of his congressional aides.

Finally, Greenwald deals with the supposed conservative position of favoring limited government. Many conservatives said this during Bill Clinton’s presidency, but when their own side got into office, that principled stance vanished in a flash. It was replaced with enthusiastic support for all the radical claims of unlimited executive power advanced by the Bush administration - secret wiretapping without warrants, torture of detainees, arbitrary and indefinite detention at the executive’s discretion, the claimed power to violate laws passed by Congress, and more. John Ashcroft, for example, during the Clinton years strongly opposed government eavesdropping powers far less expansive than the ones he would actually go on to implement as Bush’s Attorney General.

The book closes with a discussion of John McCain. Other than his atypically honorable military service, Greenwald argues that McCain is the very image of the Republican party: his support for unchecked presidential power, his open advocacy of preemptive war as a tool of American imperialism, his support from a fawning and uncritical media, and last but not least, his personal life - in which he divorced his first wife, who raised their children while he was captive in Vietnam, to marry a young, wealthy heiress whose fortune he used to launch his political career.

I have only two complaints about this book. First is that, while Greenwald’s targets are fully deserving of the scathing condemnation he heaps on them, the language does get repetitive at times. There are places where I think it could have been edited down without in any way detracting from the point. If anything, the behavior of these Republican hypocrites is so self-evidently outrageous as to require little in the way of additional condemnation to drive the point home.

Secondly, and more seriously: This book has no footnotes! Although there are copious quotes from blogs, newspapers and TV shows, there’s nothing to indicate where any of this source material was drawn from. I don’t understand the reason for this omission. I have no reason to believe any of his quotes are inaccurate, but it would be better to verify that for myself. Their omission weakens an otherwise superb book, but does not undercut the righteous anger of Greenwald’s argument.

Arianna Huffington has just released her new book, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. Huffington has reviewed the main themes of her book at Huffpo.

In the book, Huffington concludes that there are three main areas to consider in order to understand “how we got in the mess we’re in”:

A) the media;
B)  the role of fear in our politics; and
C) the failure of political leadership.

Huffington is a passionate and eloquent spokesperson for these critically important themes:

These three factors have combined to allow the lunatic fringe that has taken over the Right to hijack our country, our democracy, and our Constitution. So that 28 percent of the population that continues to support George W. Bush no matter how many bodies pile up in Iraq, how many jobs disappear overseas, how many For Sale signs go up on their block, or how high gas prices get, continues to dominate our politics.

What are we to make of this latest flap over a teen icon revealing herself as a potentially sexual being?

I was only dimly aware of Hannah Montana till the Vanity Fair scandal (if scandal is the word). Now it seems I can’t get away from her, which is, of course, the goal of marketing—to make something inescapable for the general public. There are elements of the incident that require less froth and more examination. The accusations of “whose idea was it in the first place and how was Mylie Cyrus manipulated?” are loud and in many ways naive.

First off, Hannah Montana is a Disney product. I don’t think we’re yet quite comfortable with the idea of a person—even a fictional one—being a “product” like a box of soap or a car, but this is indeed what the character is. Designed, engineered, and road tested, Hannah Montana is a money-making machine for Disney and the various participants in the show and franchise.

Pause for a moment and consider: Disney.

It is difficult to imagine a marketing machine that is better at what it does. Which means the chances of something being done with one of its properties that it (a) doesn’t know about and (b) doesn’t approve are next to zero. Especially when you add to that:

Vanity Fair.

Big magazine, famous magazine, a magazine people in show business lust to get into. In the vernacular, Lot A Bank there.

So we’re talking about two major corporate entities, huge public presence, who are involved—without a doubt contractually—in a presentation of a property. Again, the oddness of talking about a person as property is unsettling, but this is a show business idiom quite common. Agencies discuss “properties” all the time and they’re talking about musicians, actors, artists.

Throw into the mix Annie Liebowitz, who is arguably iconic herself. From the early days at Rolling Stone up through the present, Annie is a public figure. Meaning that, especially “in the business”, everyone knows what she does. She would also have been involved in the arrangements between Disney and Vanity Fair.

So far so good. Everyone knew what was going on.

Now, the photoshoot was crowded. Lots of people there. Including Mylie Cyrus’s parents. Not sure who mom is, but dad—Billie Ray—is an entertainment industry insider. He’s been around a long time. He has survived quite well. He knows the ropes. He is not a “stage dad” in the sense of not knowing what’s going on.

I’ve laid this out at some length to show how utterly unlikely it is that the photographs of 15-year-old Mylie in a pose more appropriate to a 20-something were an accident. That no one knew what was happening. It’s not like this was done in a basement studio, digitally, and the shots immediately posted to the web. Disney would have had to clear the shots. I cannot imagine it wasn’t in the contract that someone at Disney would get to look at them and say, one way or the other, whether they could be published. Of the two, Disney is by far the bigger gorilla—Vanity Fair was not likely to hold them over a barrel.

So what then is the Big Deal? And, if this is so inappropriate, why was it allowed?

Control over a teen-age superstar is doable. Look at Leann Rimes. Her burgeoning sexuality, while certain present and eminently marketable, was not “unleashed” till she was over 18. Her parents kept a handle on it. We can doubtless find other examples. Reese Witherspoon. Jody Foster. Helen Hunt. Even earlier, Annette Funicello.

(Though Annette is a curiosity—she never really stopped being a Mousketeer. Her emergent sexuality—blatant and impossible to get around—somehow failed to take her into “adult” consideration. Management may have been too tight and she remained—popularly—the girl on the beach who never went past the first kiss. This happens—actresses who have the audacity to “grow up” and find themselves trapped in an adolescent image. Sally Fields is a case in point. She went from Gidget to The Flying Nun, completely bypassing a mature sexual phase, and nearly remained stuck with it. She made a minor film—I forget the title—in which she appeared nude. In an interview, she admitted that the decision to do so was calculated to shatter the Gidget/Flying Nun image so she could then be taken seriously as an adult actress. The tactic might be questionable to some, but the result was a critically-successful career.)

Managing the property is the whole game here. And Hollywood (and Nashville, etc) have a problem with starlets like Mylie. Once they establish them as an icon for preteens to teens—what is called “tweens”—what do you do when they grow up and start acting like women?

Age here isn’t the issue. Let’s face it, sexuality strikes in the teen years, some sooner than others, and the limelight of a successful career seems somehow to advance the timetable. We are all-too-familiar with the meltdowns in instances where the transition is, well, bungled—Lindsey Lohan and Britney Speers are the poster girls of crash and burn. (more…)

Arianna Huffington recently wrote a post that summarizes enough hypocrisy to throw the happiest concerned citizen into a long-term funk. The deep theme that all of these recent events have in common is that prominent American sources of information are demonstrably untrustworthy. How else can you explain the Administration’s military propaganda being spewed out by the networks as though it’s journalism? Huffington cites David Bromwich:

The cavalier attitude of the networks is astonishing. No system but despotism can survive when so many high up do such things without embarrassment.

Unfortunately, that about captures the high level hypocrisy that has become an everyday occurrence.

I have been anticipating the FCC switch from analog to digital for several years. The original plan was to have the final demise of NTSC (”analog”) broadcast in 2006. Now, it will really happen. The change that they averted when they went to color is finally here. Everyone needs a new TV.

Unless you have cable or satellite. Then you can wait until your old box dies. But I use rabbit ears in my multipath hell of a location in the city. On good days, I can get 7 channels of regular interest, plus 4 explicitly Christian channels (24, 26, 49, 51. The 700 Club shares 11). Sometimes I cannot get ABC-30 or CW-11 clear enough to record or avoid watering eyes. Other times Fox-2 and My-46 are too bad to watch, too. So I really only have 3 reliable channels in analog.

Enter digital clarity. Yesterday I got my gummint subsidized converter box and hooked it up. Now I get perfectly clear (in numerical order) Fox-2.1, CBS-4.1, NBC-5.1, local weather 5.2, and PBS 9.1-9.4. That’s it.

(more…)

Television Leads Us.
Angel Boligan, Cagle Cartoons, El Universal, Mexico City

Who’s Bitter?
Wolverton, Cagle Cartoons

TV or not TV
Angel Boligan, Cagle Cartoons, El Universal, Mexico City

Interior televisivo
Alen Lauzan Falcon, Caglecartoons.com

Olle Johansson, Sweden

TV
Osmani Simanca, A Tarde, Brazil

Here’s what it would be like:

For commentary on this video, go here.

Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional law attorney, is now a contributing writer at Salon.com. He is the author of a number of books. His most recent book is titled Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.

Greenwald, a severe critic of the American media, discussed the state of the media with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow.org. One focus of the discussion was the recent presidential debate sponsored by ABC. Based on the lack of substance of most of the questions by the ABC moderators, Greenwald alleges that the media now specializes in insipid substance-free personality-based attacks. The ABC debate was only one example of what is done constantly. Progressives are portrayed as weak, ineffectual and not patriotic, whereas conservatives are portrayed as stable, strong and moral. The evidence is irrelevant to these portrayals.

[Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News]

The media reporters claim that the people want to hear these sorts of questions that amount to character sniping, but (according to Greenwald), the politicians don’t hear these sorts of shallow questions back home from their constituents. Instead, constituents want to hear about solutions to the many serious problems now facing America.

In sum, Greenwald argues that the mainstream media is “rendering our political process toxic.”

The interview (available through video or audio) is about 20 minutes long. I highly recommend this discussion by two of the media professionals I trust the most, Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald.

BTW, Jon Stewart has also ridiculed the ABC debate. You can see his five-minute segment here.

One last thing. Here is a great illustration of the mindset of the American media. Just listen to the neocon talking points spewed out by this FOX reporter:

Contrast the shallow questions of the reporter to the thoughtful responses by this priest (his name is Michael Pfleger and he is, indeed, an impressive and patient man). BradBlog has more background on this captivating discussion involving FOX and Pleger.  BradBlog also describes the personal crusade by Bill O’Reilly against Pleger.

[Note from Erich: DI publishes cartoons, including the cartoon posted above, pursuant to a license from Cagle Cartoons. We are proud to support the work of these cartoonists. ]

Here are excerpts from Robbins’ controversial keynote address at the National Association of Broadcasters show.

Charlie Rose is having such a difficult time listening to his guests, because he has so obviously bought into the standard mainstream media view on the Iraq conflict (which is essentially the view developed by the Bush Administration).   He appears simultaneously ignorant yet preachy as two men with genuine familiarity with the people of Iraq repeatedly burst his bubble. 

This segment is well worth watching to hear the guests (Ali Fadhil and Sinan Antoon) uttering such an impressive stream of simple truths about Iraq.  Lesson number one:  what we call “Iraq” has little resemblance to the country the U.S. purportedly attempted to ”liberate.”  We’ve made a shambles of Iraq.

In some of my previous posts both here on Dangerous Intersection and on Daylight Atheism, I’ve done my best to call attention to the corrupt, degraded state of most of today’s major news-gathering organizations. But a story I read today is truly the most astonishing example yet - both in the way the mainstream media has totally abandoned basic principles of journalistic ethics and integrity, and in the way they brazenly flaunt that behavior.

Last weekend, U.S. presidential candidate John McCain invited reporters to his vacation home in Arizona for a barbecue. McCain’s aides and staffers explained that the weekend was intended as a “social event” - i.e., no questions about McCain’s campaign strategy, voting record, or political positions - and was therefore off the record. When some reporters objected, McCain’s staff agreed that the weekend would be on the record after all, but only on the condition that reporters brought no audio or video recording equipment. The reporters meekly acceded to this, and that was the extent of our brave press corps’ journalistic heroism.

As I said, since the weekend was a “social event”, no questions were asked that would tell the American public anything of substance about McCain the candidate. Instead, the press corps was wined, dined and schmoozed by McCain’s campaign all weekend. Evidently, none of them saw anything improper either in accepting these gifts or in telling us all about it. I’ll let our brave, intrepid reporters describe their weekend retreat with Mr. Straight Talk in their own words.

Holly Bailey of Newsweek has the scoop on the accommodations:

The campaign booked the senator’s aides and reporters into one of the only big hotels in town: the Enchantment Resort, a five-star hotel nestled so far back in the picturesque red rock canyons of Sedona that most in the group found that their cell phones were out of range. To cope with the stress of being incommunicado, people booked massages at the hotel spa and went on hikes, including one on which an instructor sought to help participants unblock their “inner chi.” “Let me tell you, I’ve got a lot of chi today,” joked Steve Duprey, a close friend of McCain’s from New Hampshire who has been traveling with the campaign. Others played golf, went swimming or simply explored the hotel compound.

Michael D. Shear of the Washington Post tells us more about the five-star hotel he and his colleagues enjoyed:

The idea, McCain said, was to allow reporters to get to know him and his staff under less stressful circumstances. (The fact that the press spent the weekend at a resort called Enchantment where many sipped wine and enjoyed lengthy deep-tissue massages probably contributed to that feeling.)

Several reporters from CNN blew the lid off of McCain’s barbecued ribs recipe:

McCain revealed that barbecuing for guests is one of the few ways he relaxes, especially during the grueling campaign, and was eager to share his carefully honed recipe on the gas grill: baby back ribs (bought at Costco), cooked bones down with a dry rub that’s a third garlic powder, a third salt and a third pepper.

The trick to not letting it dry out? Keep putting lemon juice on, the senator said.

…Dinner was served on tables by Oak Creek, which runs through the property. The menu included ribs, grilled chicken, hot dogs, bratwurst, hamburgers, beef tamales, couscous and pasta salad.

CBS News’ Dante Higgins offers these penetrating bits of journalistic insight about McCain’s wardrobe and interior decorator:

McCain wore a white sweatshirt with a silk-screened family photo on it, sunglasses, a green baseball cap and blue jeans. As grillmaster, he looked like the all-American dad, with a story for every spot in the house.

…The décor of McCain’s house had a southwest flavor. Navajo rugs don the walls and floors. Well worn couches and chairs furnish the lower level of his home, which has exposed brick, wooden door frames, and paneling. In one room, political cartoons of McCain from the 2000 election cover the walls.

And finally, showing the dispassionate analysis that’s made the mainstream media so well-respected, Jeff Mason of Reuters renders his wholly objective verdict on the barbecued spare ribs:

So how did they taste?

Objectivity prohibits a good reporter from passing judgement, but let’s put it this way: everyone wants to come back.

What I find most astonishing is that, of all the reporters who were invited to McCain’s house, not a one of them that I’ve read had the slightest qualm. It’s unbelievably inappropriate that any reporter would agree to this, let alone the dozens who evidently did. I don’t believe this even needs to be said, but apparently our press corps needs to be reminded: reporters should not be accepting expensive gifts and lavish weekend retreats from the candidates they’re supposed to be covering! Do they really expect us to believe they can report on McCain critically and objectively after this? Will they be dissuaded from reporting negative news about him if he threatens not to invite them back?

The purpose of this retreat should be obvious to everyone except our deaf, blind and dumb press corps, who apparently thought McCain was doing it purely out of the goodness of his heart. In reality, even a child could see that he did it because he wanted to bribe the press into giving him favorable coverage. And they obliged him, apparently without even a tremor of conscience, accepting his blatant bribe and then filing multiple positive stories about the nice time they had at McCain’s beautiful desert ranch and the five-star hotel he booked for them. They gave him exactly what he wanted, and they never even seemed to glimpse the truth of how they’re being used.

But perhaps I’m unfairly impugning the press. Perhaps they realized full well what McCain was doing. But if so, that makes this even worse, because they went along with it anyway. It’s a sad commentary on the state of the media in our nation. Once they saw their function as “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”. Now they count themselves among the ranks of the comfortable, and their sympathies lie, not with the public whom they’re supposed to be informing, but with their wealthy and famous friends in the glittery upper circles of society. The media nowadays seems to see its primary role as congratulating itself on how influential it is, and they view the flattery of the powerful as their just desserts.

Any real reporter would have flatly turned down McCain’s obvious and shameless attempt at a bribe. Any real reporter would have walked out the moment he heard that there would be no interviews or probing question sessions that weekend. It speaks volumes that none of them apparently did. And the fact that their editors and superiors also evidently saw nothing wrong with this is evidence that the corruption of the media is not isolated, but pervasive and systemic. The media, in its present state, has become the enemy of democracy, rather than its guardian. We need to encourage people to get their information from alternative sources that do real reporting and that are not beholden to the wealthy and powerful.

According to Reuters:  Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch, and nearly half are turning to the Internet to get their news, according to a new survey.

Was it Comcast?  Whoever it was, this tactic is disgusting.

There was huge turnout at [the Feb 25] public hearing in Boston on the future of the Internet. Hundreds of concerned citizens arrived to speak out on the importance of an open Internet. Many took the day off from work — standing outside in the Boston cold — to see the FCC Commissioners. But when they reach the door, they’re told they couldn’t come in.

Earlier this week, the AP reporter Nedra Pickler published an odious story that questioned Barack Obama’s patriotism through insinuation. The entire focus of the story was to imply that Sen. Obama may not be sufficiently patriotic to be president because he doesn’t wear an American flag pin, and because he supposedly didn’t put his hand over his heart during a recent singing of the National Anthem. (No, really.)

The article used what are now standard tricks in the playbook of a hollow and degraded media: using the “some say” technique to pass on right-wing innuendo as if it were serious news, making sure to give “equal time” to rumors and facts, and focusing obsessively on utterly irrelevant trivialities to the exclusion of legitimate and important issues. (Haircuts, anyone?) Until recently, Obama hadn’t been the presumptive nominee, and the media-abetted right-wing attacks had focused mainly on Hillary Clinton. But as he increasingly takes on frontrunner status, it was inevitable that some of this slime would start coming his way.

I’ve written before about why I didn’t intend to vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary (and I didn’t), but I was equivocal about Obama. His voting record is all-around solid progressive; what I was more concerned about was the way he’d handle himself in the general election. Any Democratic presidential candidate is sure to face a barrage of vicious personal attacks. Unlike Clinton - whose voting record I’ve expressed my discontent with, but whose willingness to defend herself was not an issue - Obama seemed more of an unknown quantity to me. Too many Democrats have lost elections by being timid in the face of Republican attacks, running away from their own positions or failing to defend themselves when criticized - or, worse, trying to deflect criticism by aping Republican positions. (A tip to Democratic politicians: When given a choice between real Republican and Republican-lite, conservatives vote for the real thing, and liberals don’t vote.) This incident was one of the first tests of how Obama would handle himself under pressure.

Today Obama responded, and I was extremely pleased to see that he seems to understand very well the game being played here:

“A party that presided over a war in which our troops did not get the body armor they needed, or were sending troops over who were untrained because of poor planning, or are not fulfilling the veterans’ benefits that these troops need when they come home, or are undermining our Constitution with warrantless wiretaps that are unnecessary?

“That is a debate I am very happy to have. We’ll see what the American people think is the true definition of patriotism.”

Yes, yes, yes! This is the kind of response I’ve been waiting for so long to hear from a progressive politician - one that doesn’t tacitly concede the principle behind the Republican attack, that doesn’t try to deflect it by acting more like them, but one that exposes their hypocrisy and takes the fight to them on their own turf. I’ve always firmly believed that Democrats could win elections in a landslide if they stopped running away from the mere whiff of criticism and started boldly and fearlessly standing up for what they’re supposed to believe in. There’s ample ground to take the fight to the enemy, as Obama’s response shows.

Given the outrageous injustices that have ensued when the Republicans are in power, the blatant and shameless way they sought and still seek to frighten the public and violate the Constitution for their own political benefit, they’ve given us more than enough rope to hang them with. They are defenseless on weak ground, which is why they attack constantly. But we need a candidate who will point this out, who will make the case with fervor and passion, and who will not be cowed by pathetic attacks from the right-wing rumor mill. After today, I’m far more hopeful that Obama could be that candidate.

At the supermarket last week, I picked up a copy of the Sun.  Actually, I think the full title of the newspaper is Sun: God Bless America, based upon the front cover. I was intrigued by the front page headline: “Seven Miracle Prophecies That Will Come True on Easter Sunday.”  I wondered what those prophecies were, and now I’m going to share them with you so you don’t have to spend your hard earned money on the Sun: God Bless America.

It’s going to be quite a day this Easter Sunday, that’s for sure.  Based on reading the lead article in the Sun: God Bless America, I now know that the following things will be happening on March 23, 2008:

• 1.  George W. Bush will announce that all of our troops will be coming home from Iraq, and that the Iraq government will take over full responsibility for Iraq’s security. 
• 2.  There will be numerous miraculous healings all over the world, including people with cancer, heart disease and arthritis.  People will rejoice and no one will have to live in despair any longer.
• 3.  Pollution will miraculously reverse itself.  In fact, according to the article, the levels of pollution will all return to where they were before the Industrial Revolution.  The authority for the statement is “Professor Jonas Peake, an authority on Biblical prophecy at Britain’s famed Cambridge University.”
• 4.  Congress and the White House will pour lots of that money that was destined for Iraq into the Social Security fund, resulting in a doubling of benefits for every American.
• 5.  Delegates from all the nuclear powers will meet at the United Nations and agree to destroy all of their nuclear weapons.
• 6.  The rapture will begin.  A few people will actually be raptured on Easter Sunday, which will be “the beginning of a worldwide miracle of salvation.”
• 7.  Jesus Christ will appear in a blinding blaze of light.  He will come to deliver a simple message that we should admit our sins and beg for His forgiveness.

As I was reading this paper, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of people actually read this crap (other than me, of course-and I’m an armchair anthropologist).  As bizarre as the lead article was, the “Sun: God Bless America” is filled with other curious claims.  (more…)

Marty Kaplan, a research professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, repeatedly raises important points relating to our dysfunctional news media. He posted today on his ambivalence with the recently announced candidacy of Ralph Nader.

Nader, who skipped the primaries, says that his third-party race will inject into the fall campaign issues like single-payer health insurance, labor law reform, Pentagon waste, corporate crime, “the illegal occupation of Palestine,” and impeachment — issues he says Clinton, Obama, and McCain have taken off the table…

It’s a shame that to get five minutes of the nation’s civic attention, a person has to either be a billionaire, or to raise and spend a billion of other people’s dollars, or to do something as potentially lethal the country’s ultimate well-being as to mount a quixotic run for president. Maybe we already possess the communications technology for a modern-day Tom Paine to reframe the national political debate without at the same time landing another George W. Bush in the White House. The irony is that the candidate most likely to focus on the barriers to success standing in the way of that technology — the concentrated, corporate control of the media — is the same Ralph Nader whose presence in the race may turn out to cast the darkest shadow on its outcome.

Here are the major differences, set forth by Harvey Wasserman of Free Press:

As we stumble toward another presidential election, it’s never been more clear that our political process is being warped by a corporate stranglehold on the free flow of information. Amidst a virtual blackout of coverage of a horrific war, a global ecological crisis and an advancing economic collapse, what passes for the mass media is itself in collapse. What’s left of our democracy teeters on the brink. The culprit, in the parlance of the day, has been the “Mainstream Media,” or MSM.

But that’s wrong name for it. Today’s mass media is Corporate, not Mainstream, and the distinction is critical. Calling the Corporate Media (CM) “mainstream” implies that it speaks for mid-road opinion, and it absolutely does not.

There was a tragedy in Kirkwood Missouri last night.  A madman opened fire on a City Council meeting in Kirkwood Missouri, killing five people. That was last night. 

I was riding my bike through Kirkwood today, and I happened to travel past the Kirkwood City Hall.  It was about 1:00 pm and the media were out there, forcused on the City Hall as though there were hostages being held in the City Hall.  As if they were photographing something interesting.

But there was nothing happening at City Hall, at least nothing visible.  The crime was quickly committed last night and the criminal was shot at the scene.  But this striking scene of the media doing it’s thing gives us an idea of what it is to report “news” these days.   There were dozens of cameras, lots of hustle and bustle and at least three news babes –they were quite busy primping before going on the air (you need to have your hair perfectly in place to tell the complicated story of a deranged man shooting 5 people the day before). 

They were taking pictures of the Kirkwood City Hall–using it as a backdrop for the sensational stories they were writing. 

Here’s a headline for them:  Kirkwood City Hall still exists!    

Too bad the meda doesn’t spend 10% of this effort on the hundreds of lies told by the Bush Administration and the thousands of resulting deaths in Iraq.

Apparently, the media prefer simple stories like this one:  a crazy man kills some people in front of a bunch of witnesses.  Yep, that’s an easy story.  Bring in dozens of cameras and lots of reporters so we can get to the bottom of this.

A few months ago the English alternative rock band Radiohead released their long awaited album “In Rainbows” as a free download, leaving it up to the fans to decide what they would pay, if anything at all.

As someone who has had the difficult and expensive experience of distributing physical copies of my documentaries on DVD I can tell you that it was with great anticipation that I viewed this experiment. I was surprised and a little disappointed to find that only 40% of those downloading actually paid for it.

I recall as a young man buying vinyl records for about $5 a piece and watching as the price slowly went up and up, hitting about $12 before giving way to CDs which eventually topped out at around $16 to $18 a pop. These days, with iTunes selling individual songs for $.99 and most albums for about $9.99, I feel like I am getting a bargain. Of course, I still have the expense of having to burn my own CDs to play them in my car, not being hip enough to own an MP3 player.

Still, I find myself wondering what I would pay for some of my favorite music if given the opportunity to decide on my own. The temptation to take it for free would be strong but I am smart enough to know that if enough people do that the ability to place our own value on music would disappear, as it has done with Radiohead. The band has since retracted its “free or whatever” offer, prompting some to accuse the band of chickening out as they saw potential revenue slip through their fingers.

In the band’s defense, Radiohead’s leader Thom Yorke contends that it was always an experiment, not a business model for themselves or anyone else, and that it had run its course. (As of December 31st “In Rainbows” has become available on iTunes and the CD can be purchased through the usual outlets.)

However, a nagging question still remains. Now that music is being freed from the cost of being physically reproduced on disk, how much should we pay for it?

What is music worth to you?

The death of investigative journalism is not the title of this paper, but it is the context.  Here’s the title:  “The Growing Importance of Nonprofit Journalism,” by Charles Lewis (April, 2007).  The statistics will shock and depress you. That the lack of investigative journalism in the corporate media world is a worldwide phenomenon makes it all the more depressing. What is the long-term consequence?

James Madison warned that, “A people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”7 If that is true, it would seem that we have an extraordinary number of unarmed Americans, less and less knowledgeable about public affairs or news. To what extent can a democracy ostensibly “of the people, by the people and for the people” exist without an informed citizenry?

Luckily, this paper does not end on a pessimistic note:

The often unnoticed irony is that amidst the current, deteriorating state of original, investigative and otherwise independent journalism in America, right now there are new, very energizing forces at play – talented and highly motivated journalists, mindful of the stakes involved; entrepreneurial leaders with vision, a commitment to community and financial wherewithal; new media platforms and technologies revolutionizing the means and cost of production; and every day, more and more signs of what is possible journalistically, particularly with the new social networking connectivity of the Web and related, constantly improving technologies.

Joseph Pulitzer once said, “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which