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 popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”

All they need is a public-spirited, trustworthy place to work.

I came across an article a few days ago written by John Hockenberry, an award-winning journalist who once worked for NBC’s Dateline and is now a fellow at MIT’s Media Lab. Titled “You Don’t Understand Our Audience”: What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC, this article is a relentless, burning indictment of everything that’s wrong with the mainstream media today. In a future era, when historians look back on our time and ask how so many people could have been deceived into supporting the disastrous, nightmarish war in Iraq and ignoring so many other pressing issues, Hockenberry’s article will be Exhibit A.

Point by devastating point, Hockenberry shows us exactly what’s wrong with the media: their mindless pursuit of “balance” on even the most non-controversial issues of fact:

Our story [on America's "shock and awe" attacks at the beginning of the war] arranged pictures of people coping with the bombing into a slide show, accompanied by the voice of Melinda Liu, a Newsweek reporter describing, over the phone, the harrowing experience of remaining in Baghdad. The outcome of the invasion was still in doubt. There was fear in the reporter’s voice and on the faces of the people in the pictures.

…At the conclusion of the screening… an NBC/GE executive responsible for “standards” shook his head and wondered about the tone in the reporter’s voice. “Doesn’t it seem like she has a point of view here?” he asked.

The way they shove legitimate, critically important stories aside to make room for feel-good fluff, pandering to their viewers rather than risk upsetting them by telling them things they might not already know:

I had been in Corvo’s office to propose a series of stories about al-Qaeda, which was just emerging as a suspect in the attacks. While well known in security circles and among journalists who tried to cover international Islamist movements, al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization and a story line was still obscure in the early days after September 11. It had occurred to me and a number of other journalists that a core mission of NBC News would now be to explain, even belatedly, the origins and significance of these organizations. But Zucker insisted that Dateline stay focused on the firefighters. The story of firefighters trapped in the crumbling towers, Zucker said, was the emotional center of this whole event. Corvo enthusiastically agreed. “Maybe,” said Zucker, “we ought to do a series of specials on firehouses where we just ride along with our cameras. Like the show Cops, only with firefighters.” He told Corvo he could make room in the prime-time lineup for firefighters, but then smiled at me and said, in effect, that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine.

The way news organizations are literally forced by corporate executives to choose certain stories to air in order to better promote other programs on the same network (I hadn’t known about this, and it floored me to hear it):

Sometimes entertainment actually drove selection of news stories. Since Dateline was the lead-in to the hit series Law & Order on Friday nights, it was understood that on Fridays we did crime. Sunday was a little looser but still a hard sell for news that wasn’t obvious or close to the all-important emotional center. In 2003, I was told that a story on the emergence from prison of a former member of the Weather Underground, whose son had graduated from Yale University and won a Rhodes Scholarship, would not fly unless it dovetailed with a story line on a then-struggling, soon-to-be-cancelled, and now-forgotten Sunday-night drama called American Dreams, which was set in the 1960s. I was told that the Weather Underground story might be viable if American Dreams did an episode on “protesters or something.”

The way obvious conflicts of interest are steadfastly ignored:

At mandatory, hours-long “ethics training” meetings we would watch in-house videos that brought all the drama and depth of a driver’s-education film to stories of smiling, swaggering employees (bad) who bought cases of wine for business associates on their expense accounts, while the thoughtful, cautious employees (good) never picked up a check, but volunteered to stay at the Red Roof Inn in pursuit of “shareholder value.”

…I did, however, point out to the corporate-integrity people unhelpful details about how NBC News was covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that our GE parent company stood to benefit from as a major defense contractor. I wondered aloud, in the presence of an integrity “team leader,” how we were to reconcile this larger-scale conflict with the admonitions about free dinners. “You make an interesting point I had not thought of before,” he told me. “But I don’t know how GE being a defense contractor is really relevant to the way we do our jobs here at NBC news.”

And the way in which legitimate, serious issues are barred from the table because they’re not telegenic enough:

In 2003, one of our producers obtained from a trial lawyer in Connecticut video footage of guards subduing a mentally ill prisoner. Guards themselves took the footage as part of a safety program to ensure that deadly force was avoided and abuses were documented for official review. We saw guards haul the prisoner down a greenish corridor, then heard hysterical screaming as the guard shooting the video dispassionately announced, “The prisoner is resisting.” For 90 seconds several guards pressed the inmate into a bunk. All that could be seen of him was his feet. By the end of the video the inmate was motionless. Asphyxiation would be the official cause of death.

…Yet at the conclusion of the screening, the senior producer shook his head as though the story had missed the mark widely. “These inmates aren’t necessarily sympathetic to our audience,” he said. The fact that they had been diagnosed with schizophrenia was unimportant. Worse, he said that as he watched the video of the dying inmate, it didn’t seem as if anything was wrong.

“Except that the inmate died,” I offered.

“But that’s not what it looks like. All you can see is his feet.”

…”But,” I pleaded, “the man died. That’s just a fact. The prison guards shot this footage, and I don’t think their idea was to get it on Dateline.”

“Look,” the producer said sharply, “in an era when most of our audience has seen the Rodney King video, where you can clearly see someone being beaten, this just doesn’t hold up.”

“Rodney King wasn’t a prisoner,” I appealed. “He didn’t die, and this mentally ill inmate is not auditioning to be the next Rodney King. These are the actual pictures of his death.”

“You don’t understand our audience.”

There’s much, much more in the article, and I can’t recommend highly enough that you read the whole thing. I swore off network TV news long ago, as well as CNN and Fox, and I can’t be happier that I did. It’s now thoroughly clear, to any thinking person, that their sole reason for existing is to soothe us and pander to us so we’ll sit still long enough to watch the commercials. Any idea of informing the public, of telling us the facts we need to know to make informed judgments on important issues, is long, long gone.

For all that blogs are derided as uncouth and radical by the self-appointed guardians of the mainstream, many of them contain more original, relevant, insightful reporting and analysis than the major news networks can muster in days. These lumbering corporate behemoths have already begun to slide into irrelevance, but the sooner we can bring about their collapse, the better.

The media can’t deal with candidates that buck the system.  Glenn Greenwald discusses three dramatic cases, John Edwards, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee.  On Edwards, Greenwald writes:

It is very striking how little Edwards’ substantive critique of our political system has penetrated into the national discourse. That’s because the centerpiece of his campaign is a critique that is a full frontal assault on our political establishment. His argument is not merely that the political system needs reform, but that it is corrupt at its core — “rigged” in favor of large corporate interests and their lobbyists, who literally write our laws and control the Congress. Anyone paying even casual attention to the extraordinary bipartisan effort on behalf of telecom immunity, and so many other issues driven almost exclusively by lobbyists, cannot reasonably dispute this critique.

Yet because that argument indicts the same Beltway culture of which our political journalists are an integral part, and further attacks the system’s power brokers who are the friends, sources, and peers of those journalists, they instinctively react with confusion, scorn and hostility towards Edwards’ campaign. They condescendingly dismiss it as manipulative populist swill, or cynically assume that it’s just a ploy to distinguish himself by “moving left.” In the eyes of our Beltawy press, the idea that our political system is “rigged” or corrupt must be anything other than true or sincerely held.

If you read and listen to enough information and testimony by proponents of Intelligent Design, you’ll discover that the basic premise is: “If I don’t understand exactly how something happens, then it must have been done by a supernatural agent.”

This telling phrase is rarely used by Design Proponents, who evolved from Creationists via the missing link “CDesign proponentsists” that was excavated from a draft of their textbook during discovery for the Dover Trial (click to watch the Nova Documentary of the trial).

One Intelligent Design website has an article it calls Intelligent Design in a Nutshell. Anyone with an understanding of science or information theory will find the unsupported and largely disproved assertions laughable. However, by mis-stating the scientific method, and claiming as supporting proof scientific conclusions that have long been discarded, it makes a convincing case.

Former child actor, and aging teen heartthrob Kirk Cameron is a visible proponent of this odd IDea (sic). Here’s a short video of a Fox News report interviewing him after he taped a debate against Richard Dawkins. There are some annotations placed by the video editor, but the interview itself is untouched. Watch it and see that my initial assertion is correct. Kirk actually says to the unapologetically supportive Creationist (”unbiased”) interviewer, that if he doesn’t understand how it could have formed, then we must accept that it was obviously designed.

(more…)

On Bill Moyers’ Journal, Bill Moyers discussed this multifaceted issue with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. 

This video is well worth watching for many reasons.  The introduction includes a clip of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to Southern Baptist preachers to answer their opposition to a Catholic president.  Kennedy’s understanding and articulation of the wall between church and state is inspirational. 

Watching this video, I learned of the “You Choose” site within youtube.com, where you can watch the candidates speaking on issues, side by side.  For instance, here are the candidates’ positions on energy independence. (check out Barack Obama’s position on energy in a speech he gave in Detroit.  In my opinion, he is one of the few candidates that “gets it.”).

Jamieson and Moyers spend substantial time analyzing the “avalanche of misogyny” aimed at Hillary Clinton, some of these attacks Bible-based, many of them verging on pornographic (here’s another site documenting these attacks).  Here’s a sampling of the discussion between Moyers and Jamieson:

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON:  [U]nderlying many of these assertions is the assumption that any woman in power will, by necessity, entail emasculating men and, as a result, a statement of fundamental threat.

So, why shouldn’t you vote for Hillary Clinton? Well, first, she can’t be appropriately a woman and be in power. She must be a man. Hence, the site that says Hillary Clinton can’t be the first woman president; Hillary Clinton’s actually a man. But also explicit statements that suggest castrating, testicles in lockbox. She’s going to emasculate men. It’s a zero-sum game in which a woman in power necessarily means that men can’t be men.

BILL MOYERS: And you can’t use your uterus and your brain. That’s the old argument, right? You can’t be caring and tough. That’s the old argument against women, right?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Well, and at one time there was actually an argument that if women became educated, they would become infertile. There was also, for a long period of time, serious penalties for women who tried to speak in public. And the residue of this is a language that suggests that women in power cannot be women and be in power. And as a result, as Hillary Clinton certifies herself as being tough enough to be president, competent enough to be president, these attacks say then she can’t be president because she’s not actually a woman. And you can’t trust someone who is that inauthentic. So underlying this and underlying the vulgarity and underlying the assertions of raw sexual violence is deep fear about a woman holding power.

Salon.com has presented a must-read interview with do-gooder FCC Commissioner Michael Copps.  The audacity of the FCC chairman is simply unbelievable.  First of all, here is the intro to the article:

Michael Copps doesn’t want to be called a crusader. But as one of the two Democrats on the five-member Federal Communications Commission, he’s not shy about sounding biblical. He says he’s “blowing a loud trumpet” for a “call to battle” to stop the FCC from giving big media a generous Christmas present.

Copps is trying to defeat FCC chairman Kevin J. Martin’s last-minute proposal to loosen media ownership rules, which will be voted on by Dec. 18. As it stands now, a company can’t own both a daily newspaper and a broadcast outlet — a radio or TV station — in the same market without a waiver. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on Nov. 13, Martin wrote that media companies in the 20 largest markets should be allowed to own both in the same market to bolster journalism. “If we don’t act to improve the health of the … industry,” he wrote, “we will see newspapers wither and die … and have fewer outlets for the expression of independent thinking and diversity of viewpoints.”

What is the effect of too much consolidation?  This consolidation of the media does not enhance democracy.  Just the opposite.  Consolidated corporate media don’t respond to the needs of the community:

The owners, instead of being members of the community, are often people who live hundreds or thousands of miles away. Too many stations aren’t even inhabited by human beings. They’re run by computers or by mechanical means. That’s why nobody’s there. Localism means that you go out and talk to people locally about the kinds of issues and programming that they want. We don’t do that anymore.

Does the corporate media cover these important media issues?

I visited the editor of the editorial page of a major newspaper in this country not too many weeks ago, and we got talking about this issue. I think the person in his heart was on my side of the issue, but he said they can’t cover that issue. And I said, “Oh, why not?” He said, “The publisher wouldn’t let us do that. It would be against the interest of the company. I have a lot of freedom to cover what I want issue-wise on my editorial page, but I’m not going there.” It wasn’t almost chilling; it was downright chilling.

Though the media doesn’t cover the deep media issues, it still loves a fight.   Hence, this recent article in the LA Times regarding the tactics used by Martin (free registration required to view the entire article):

Two key House lawmakers announced Monday that they were investigating the Federal Communications Commission, accusing its chairman of “possible abuse of power” and a failure to operate fairly and openly in handling proposed cable TV and media ownership regulations.

“Given several events and proceedings over the past year, I am rapidly losing confidence that the commission has been conducting its affairs in an appropriate manner,” Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote to FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin.

Dingell said he was concerned that the FCC had not made the full text of proposed rules available to the public before it voted on them, and that Martin often had not given other commissioners details of proposals until it was too late for them to fully analyze them.

Epilogue:  Consider affixing this decal to every television set you find and consider supporting Free Press.

He can’t be, based on his own statements. A journalist is a person who reports - who scrutinizes what the powerful say for omissions or falsehoods, who informs readers what’s really going on, who sifts through the spin and digs beneath the surface to get at the real truth.

But Joe Klein doesn’t do any of that. By his own admission, that kind of work is just too hard for him. Instead, he’s settled for a more modest goal: whenever a powerful or influential person says something which they wish the public to believe, Joe Klein will dutifully copy down that statement and communicate it to us. If two such people make conflicting statements, Joe Klein will not attempt to mediate between them or decide which one is right. He’ll present them side-by-side, neither presenting nor examining any evidence that might support one over the other. He will, however, opine that gosh, all this stuff sure is confusing, isn’t it? Who really has the time or the knowledge to decide between these contradictory statements? Certainly not Joe Klein.

This is definitely not what a journalist does. The most accurate word I can think of to describe this role is “stenographer”. So, if Joe Klein wishes to call himself a stenographer, he can be my guest.

A little context might be helpful here. Joe Klein is a columnist for Time magazine, and the latest outrage he’s provoked has to do with a column he wrote recently about the RESTORE Act. This is a Democratic bill currently being debated by Congress which is intended to rein in some of the more egregious lawbreaking of the Bush administration, in particular its claim that it has the unilateral power to spy on American citizens without a warrant or court review. (This is a felony under the FISA bill passed by Congress in 1978 - but Bush claims that he is the “unitary executive” who can’t be bound by petty things like laws when he’s doing what he says is necessary to protect us.)

In his November 21 column, Klein wrote this about the RESTORE Act:

Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi… supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.

This sneering assertion was 100% false, and Klein would have known that if he’d read the bill before writing about it. Here’s what the proposed legislation actually says, in clear and unmistakable terms even for legal language:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, a court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is located within the United States.

Having made this amateurish error, Klein then compounded it by getting hostile and defensive when he was called on it. In his first alleged “correction,” he wrote, “I may have made a mistake in my column this week about the FISA legislation passed by the House, although it’s difficult to tell for sure given the technical nature of the bill’s language and fierce disagreements between even moderate Republicans and Democrats on the Committee about what the bill actually does contain.”

But wait - if Klein admits he doesn’t understand the bill now, then where did he get the arrogance to make such confident pronouncements about its “well beyond stupid” contents? Generally, when you unleash criticism that harsh, you want to be extra sure you know what you’re talking about. And why do “fierce disagreements” between politicians matter in any way? Why not just read the text of the bill? If it’s too hard for Klein to understand, then I suggest that he find a line of work other than writing about politics. Would you pay a car mechanic who said it was “difficult to tell for sure” why your car wasn’t working, due to the “technical nature” of engine components?

This limp correction drew yet more fire from the blogosphere. To date, Klein’s last word on the matter is a blog post with the truly astonishing title of FISA: More Than You Want to Know, in which he concludes, “I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who’s right”.

For the record, Mr. Klein, this is not “more than I want to know”. Klein is supposed to be a journalist. His job is supposed to be to inform the public. If he’s not qualified to do his job, or if he lacks interest in doing it, then he should immediately resign and hand the position over to someone who is qualified. A true journalist would not think, as Joe Klein apparently does, that the public can ever be too well informed.

Finally, in response to vociferous complaints, the editors of Time stepped in. Surely they’d want to repair this egregious error, wouldn’t they? Surely they’d want to defend their reputation and uphold some bare minimum of journalistic standards?

As it turns out… not so much.

In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.

This breathtaking statement was the entirety of their response to this matter. They later posted a correction to the correction (”The bill does not explicitly say that. Republicans believe it can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t”). This is not an improvement.

This “correction” is a total abandonment of Time’s journalistic responsibilities. It’s the ultimate example of the trend I noted last summer, in “The Illusion of Balance“. That trend is the tendency of a lazy, irresponsible media to assume it’s done its job as long as it presents “both sides” in he-said-she-said fashion, with no examination of the evidence necessary.

In reality, this is not how the media is supposed to do its job; it is an abdication of the media’s job. The media’s purpose is to keep the public informed, to be the gatekeepers between truth and falsehood. Presenting conflicting assertions without making any effort to decide between them actually works against that goal. It confuses and misinforms people; worse, it leaves them more poorly equipped to decide the truth of similar debates in the future, by fostering the myth that there is no objective truth of the matter and that every political debate can be reduced to an irresolvable conflict of opinion.

Time’s behavior in this matter is a perfect illustration of everything that’s gone wrong with American media in the past several years. The media’s ignorant and irresponsible attitude that it’s not their job to decide who’s telling the truth is exactly how we became involved in the Iraq debacle in the first place, not to mention other catastrophic blunders both domestic and foreign. I think this is more than sufficient reason for people of intelligence and sense to boycott Time henceforth, and instead seek out alternative sources of news that have not forgotten the duties of a journalist.

(Hat tip to Glenn Greenwald, who’s been aggressively covering this story from the beginning.)

Remember when you were a college student who had just decided to attend journalism school “to make a difference?”  You wanted to change the world in a big way back then and the reasons were many.  You wanted to become a proud member of the Fourth Estate.  You understood that The Media had the power to change the world.  You knew that the flow of accurate information was the pulsing blood of our democracy. Perhaps you were inspired by reading the platform Joseph Pulitzer wrote in 1907:

I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.

That was long ago, however, and you now realize you had those idealistic thoughts when you were young and naïve.  Now you realize that we all need to make compromises in order to get paid.  That’s why you are one of the proud creators of the various “Black Friday” articles in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Now that you are entrenched in a real job, you understand that working for The Media is all about printing the happy type of news that sells ads and that any hard critical news that gets printed in the process is an unexpected bonus.

Today, you are using your hard-earned journalism skills to tell people that it’s time to spend money on needless things in order to prop up the economy, in order to be patriotic. 

You are telling your readers that they should do their part to purchase trinkets and baubles And that they’ll need to do it again next year, and the year after that.  They’ll need to do this because we are a great country and that’s what great countries do. To help keep our country great, you reported this alert:

Some local malls report high volumes of shoppers, but an independent source says numbers are down from last year.

You reporters were extraordinarily busy with all the Black Friday news yesterday.  You wrote lots of stories, including this one, this one, this one and this one.

You wrote about all those folks who went shopping yesterday to buy Christmas gifts, “but also a little for themselves.”  (more…)

To start off my day today, I reviewed some of the inconvenient history about Thanksgiving. Then I moved on to anticipate the headline in tomorrow’s paper. In what way (it’s not a question of if) will the newspaper urge us to spend our precious time on the planet buying things we don’t need. 

Wishing everyone some enjoyable time off from your routine, and a chance to spend time with the people you love. 

But do stay away from the stores.  Why?  See this post and affiliated links.

I’ll close with Jon Stewart’s take on Thanksgiving:

I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.

Warning:  The site discussed in this post might be a scam.  Check the comments before doing business with this site. 

I visited The Art of Mental Warfare tonight.  It presents itself as a “clarion call to action for an apathetic nation.”  The site is based on a book of the same name, by David Vincent.   The site offers the following quote by that well known Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

The themes of the site?

Corporate media, for starters.  How many corporations dominate US mainstream media?  It’s dwindling:

1983 = 50
1993= 14
2007 = 5

How much do we pay for public broadcasting?

Germany $85
UK $83
US $1.54

Hence, the battlecry:

The mainstream media is an elaborate and sophisticated propaganda apparatus that is designed and utilized to deceive, manipulate, dumb down, distract and marginalize the American public. We realize that the mainstream media is not giving us the vital information that we need to develop informed opinions and participate in this so-called “democracy.”

However, the average US citizen still does not understand this. They are too busy working hard trying to make ends meet, trying to provide for their families, trying to pay off their homes, credit cards and debt. They don’t have the time to spend hours everyday researching issues that the mainstream media doesn’t even mention or discuss.

In fact, with hundreds of television channels, radio stations, magazines, newspapers and movies, the average citizen thinks the amount of viewpoints in the media are overwhelming and diverse. They don’t realize that the vast majority of media companies are controlled by a handful of the world’s most powerful interrelated corporate interests. They don’t realize that over the past 25 years we have experienced a scandalous concentration in media ownership and an all out attack on public TV and radio.

The news, reported by Jamison Foser of Media Matters, is depressing:

Through 17 debates this year, roughly 1,500 questions have been asked of the two parties’ presidential candidates. But only a small handful of questions have touched on the candidates’ views on executive power, the Constitution, torture, wiretapping, or other civil liberties concerns. (A description of those questions appears at the end of this column.)

Only one question about wiretapping. Not a single question about FISA.

There has, however, been a question about whether the Constitution should be changed to allow Arnold Schwarzenegger to be president.

Not one question about renditions. The words “habeas corpus” have not once been spoken by a debate moderator. Candidates have not been asked about telecom liability.

There are other ways to keep older minds active. These other activities involve contributing to society rather than hiding out with a word puzzle.

I am really getting tired of reading articles that advise “elderly” people to pass the hours doing crossword puzzles in order to keep their minds healthy and active.  It’s really hard to think of anything more self-centered or useless then sitting at home, alone, and filling in the little squares to pass the time. Maybe it’s the sort of thing you would do if stranded in a lifeboat, waiting to be rescued, but why spend your precious hours on Earth this way when there are so many valuable ways to spend your time?

Am I exaggerating when I suggest there is a lot of this misguided crossword puzzle advice directed to elderly people?  Not at all.  You can spend an entire day reading articles if you Google “elderly crossword puzzle mind.” Check out this story from NPR.  And take a look at this and this and this. 

Who are the “elderly” in the context of these articles?  Presumably everyone who’s elderly or becoming elderly.  Presumably, that includes everyone who’s not “young.”  The bottom line of these articles is that we must do crossword puzzles or else our minds will atrophy. These article argue that our brains won’t shrivel up as long as we contemplate “14 across” and “43 down” (at least until we give up and look up the answer).  Telling a person to play crossword puzzles has that same snake-oil ring that recently publicized “mind development technique,” Baby Einstein.

I am aware that by dissing crossword puzzles I risk incurring the wrath of the millions of people who love doing crossword puzzles.  And I realize that some crossword puzzles do require some quite a bit of work.  But those who excel at these puzzles are not necessarily well-rounded.  They merely have the skill of being able to seek out and retain inert facts–facts that don’t require one to have an integrated view of what it means to be alive. In this respect, crossword puzzles are akin to trivia contests.  Both activities are opportunities to feel as though one has accomplished something merely by flinging about inert facts.

I am not saying that all people should stop doing crossword puzzles.  If you like doing it, have at it.  All of us like to take breaks from the stress of the real world.   But we don’t usually honor the way we take those breaks.  For instance, I occasionally play Tetris to “escape.”  I would be flabbergasted, though, were someone to tell me that I need to keep my mind sharp by playing a video game.

To the extent we truly value our senior citizens, there are numerous meaningful and mind-exercising activities available to them.  Why do we keep insulting them as though they are half-brain-dead when most of them aren’t?  Certainly, there are some elderly folks who have serious conditions (Alzheimer’s) that limit their ability to stay connected with their communities and to contribute to their society.  Perhaps word puzzles give them relief and I am not criticizing them.  For those who are not limited in their abilities, though (and many elderly people never face any form of dementia), it is not necessary to do crossword puzzles to maintain an active mind.  There are hundreds of other activities that both challenge the mind but also contribute to society. (more…)

Over the past several weeks, people around the country have submitted questions to 10Questions.com. The 10 highest-rated posts will be answered by the presidential candidates.

Here are some of the questions:

To vote on these questions or many other questions, go here.

Marty Kaplan has described how the media covers political campaigns.  The media:

work for a big business, whose oxygen is attention. They live or die on grabbing and holding audiences. To stay in business, they need combat, conflict, heat, meat, flip-flops, gotchas, losers, boozers, hairpin turns, heroes with feet of clay, Rockys, Quixotes, cliffhangers, firewalkers, comebacks, kickbacks, zingers, ‘wingers.

And yet at the same time the media root for and egg on mudwrestling and foodfighting, what they say they want is a cathedral — bipartisanship, consensus, a Serious Debate on The Issues, Bringing America Together.

Boy, is that a sucker punch. The truth is, they think that stuff is really b-o-r-i-n-g. No combat = no attention.

The state of Missouri has never had an official poet laureate.  Like many people, I didn’t know that, although unlike many of those many people, I should have.  One of the hats I wear (besides the one in the cool profile photo above) is the president of the Missouri Center for the Book.

What, you may ask, is the Missouri Center for the Book and what, furthermore, does it have to do with state poets laureate?

I’m so glad you asked.  The Missouri Center for the Book (hereafter known as MCB) is the state affiliate to the Library of Congress Center for the Book.  All 50 states have such an institution now, and we are all as different in our structure and specific goals as those states.  The common thread is that we are all dedicated to promoting what we call the Culture of the Book.  This includes authors, certainly, but also publishers, editors, reviewers, literature teachers, schools.  We see all these things as inextricably part and parcel of that culture, though obviously authors are the most visible part.

We do not do remedial reading work.  There are other agencies that do that and do it far better than we could.  That’s not our mandate.

In our heyday, the first several years after our founding in 1993, we did all sorts of things to promote the idea of books and reading, mostly through the mechanism of conferences which addressed certain themes.  We had notable guests, lots of writers and publishers, an open forum.

And then, as happens in such things, funding slipped away and we did smaller and smaller programs.

Among the things we do is administer the state Letters About Literature contest, which is a very cool program for three levels of students, primary to secondary, in which a student writes a letter to the author of a book that has had a significant impact on that student.  We select the best, the winners go on to a national contest.  Some of these letters, even from very young students, are tremendous.  They give me hope for the future.  Quiet hope, a confidence that we have a chance, that the young are not dumber than their parents or grandparents, but are generally smarter.

As president for the past three years, I’ve been reorganizing and rebuilding the MCB.  We have plans to relaunch the conferences.  We intend to rebuild our website, which contains an author database which was, when it was instituted, the first of its kind in the nation.  We intend that it be made interactive.  That’s going to be a bit pricey, but once done it will be a great tool.

There are other programs we’d like to do.

But one thing we’ve been working at for the last eight years, doggedly and consistently, is the creation of a state poet laureate.  I won’t go into the details of that effort, they would bore you.  Mostly the work consisted of letter writing, long conversations with “influential” people, planning the structure of the post, often just being a pest.  MCB itself could not do this—for it to be “official” it must come from either the governor or the legislature.  Most states, it is an appointment of the governor.  It boils down to convincing the governor to do it.

Governor Blunt has decided to do it.  Last month we received word that the position would be created and the first poet laureate will be named in mid-December.  MCB has been named the agency which will administer the post and work on selection.

Warning:  what follows is an unapologetic promotional request for financial support.

I canvassed a number of states about their poet laureate programs.  There are about 8 or 9 states that do not have the position.  Among the others, the post is largely honorary, with no funding.  From the beginning, we thought the post should have some money behind.  It is incredibly difficult to make a living as a writer, triply so as a writer of poetry.  Besides, we intend for our laureates to travel the state, speaking on the matter of the literary arts.  That shouldn’t come out of the laureate’s own pocket.  But we’ve already learned that Missouri’s laureate post will also, as far as the state government is concerned, be honorary.

So I am asking for donations.  MCB’s future programming efforts will be built around the poet laureate–not specifically so much as thematically.  Missouri is stepping up to the plate, symbolically, to declare that literature, that reading, that authors are actually important.  In order to move forward and take advantage of the very public opportunity this is giving the Culture of the Book, we want to put some teeth behind it.

You can go to our website– books.missouri.org –and read a bit more about us.  Mind you, the site as it stands is going to be changed in a year or so, but there’s still worthwhile content.  If given the chance and the support, we intend doing a job of elevating the stature of the written word in Missouri.  So if you are so inclined, please send your tax deductible donations to:

Missouri Center for the Book
600 West Main,
P.O. Box 2075
Jefferson City, MO 65102-2075,

or call 573-751-1821

Before you ask, I cleared this with Erich.  MCB is a 501c3 nonprofit organization (which receives no money from state or federal sources).

As I said, I am unapologetically, unabashedly, unashamedly asking for money.  We want to pay our poets laureate a reasonable honorarium and we want to fund programs that will do for books what PBS does for documentary film or NPR does for radio broadcasting.  Granted, on a more modest scale, but still.

The governor has decided to announce this before Christmas.  Seems like a good time to give a present to the state and to make a stab at doing better for one of the things we all love and need so much—good books.

Thank you for your time and attention.