Google, China, and hypocrisy

You've probably heard the stories in the news. A superpower has been shamed, a totalitarian state has been outed. A tyrannical government has been spying on the private communications of its citizens, including that of activists and journalists. What they plan to do with the fruits of their techno-espionage is not well understood, but given their history they can hardly be up to any good. What is clear is that this government is fanatical about crushing any challenge to their perceived supremacy, whether those challenges are internal or external. They even demand that private companies aid them in censoring unfavorable news (with a stunning degree of success), and these private companies (mostly based in the United States) may even have helped them spy on their citizenry. You could be forgiven for thinking that this was just another blog posting about Google and China. It's actually a post about hypocrisy. First, if you haven't heard, Google is re-evaluating their decision to do business in China, ostensibly as a result of some cyber-attacks directed at the Gmail accounts of some human-rights activists. The U.S. State Department is planning to lodge a formal protest on the alleged attacks. Plenty of others have already analyzed this story. As usual, the real story is behind the headlines. The San Francisco Chronicle reported last week:

The Google-China flap has already reignited the debate over global censorship, reinvigorating human rights groups drawing attention to abuses in the country and prompting U.S. politicians to take a hard look at trade relations. The Obama administration issued statements of support for Google, and members of Congress are pushing to revive a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens.
To prevent United States businesses from cooperating with repressive governments in transforming the Internet into a tool of censorship and surveillance, to fulfill the responsibility of the United States Government to promote freedom of expression on the Internet, to restore public confidence in the integrity of United States businesses...
So far, so good. Restoring public confidence in the integrity of U.S. businesses might be a tall order for any bill, but whatever. The rest are all noble goals: preventing repressive governments from using the internet as a tool of censorship and surveillance, promoting freedom of expression, and so on. Just one problem: none of these provisions apply to the U.S. Government. You see, the U.S. Government is the tyrannical superpower from the first paragraph of this blog post. You might have asked yourself why it is that the Chinese people put up with having their private communications read by their government. The real question is this: Why do you put up with it? [More . . . ]

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A proposed media shield law protects bloggers like Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine

The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved its version of a "media shield law," designed to protect the confidential sources of journalists. The law now moves to the full Senate, and it would need to be reconciled with a similar bill in the House before being presented to Barack Obama. The passage of a media shield bill is critically important, in that the threat of imprisonment for refusal to comply with subpoenas discourages journalists from covering numerous serious issues. According to Huffpo, the bill not only protects full time journalists, but "uses a broad definition of journalists by including bloggers, citizen journalists and freelancers." According to the Examiner,

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) endorsed the "carefully crafted" bill's inclusion of bloggers, and hailed Benjamin Franklin for his "anonymous blogs" that explained "the reasons why this country should exist." Pamphleteer Thomas Paine likewise got a few mentions as the senators debated whether to define a journalist as someone employed by a mainstream organization.
The protection allowed by this version of the bill are not absolute; they can be overridden:
With the exception of national security cases, the bill establishes a balancing test to determine whether a reporter must reveal their source. A federal judge would weigh the public's right to know versus national security claims made by the government.
The burden of proof depends on whether the case from which the subpoena is issued is a criminal case or a civil case. In criminal cases, the journalist would have to show that guarding the anonymity of sources is in the public interest. In non-criminal cases, the government bears the burden of showing that disclosure of a confidential source outweighs the public interest in news-gathering. I was elated to see that bloggers and citizen journalists are being considered for this protection, especially given the fact that so much important information being published these days is by people who are not full-time professional journalists. And see here for an illustration of the problem with mainstream" journalists." For a related post, see these three short videos featuring John Nichols and Robert McChesney, the founders of Free Press (from the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform), discussing the role of citizen journalists, among many other important media reform topics).

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Aggressive journalists desperately needed.

Glenn Greenwald asks why there aren't more journalists willing to conduct hardball interviews of politically powerful guests. What he has in mind is the kind of interrogation Rachel Maddow expertly conducted with an anti-gay blowhard. Greenwald sets forth the particular strategies that made Maddow's interview effective. For example, where the guests opinions are not entitled to respect and deference, don't give any. Key quote:

Just imagine how much better things could be if our political leaders were routinely subjected to the kind of surgically probing, lie-exposing interrogation which Rachel imposed on her homosexual-converter guest. But the reasons they almost never are speak volumes about our media stars and their true function.

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Ashleigh Banfield’s story of wartime censorship

Ashleigh Banfield has finally gotten hired back to work at a major network, after losing her job at MSNBC in 2003 for speaking out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Here's what she had to say back in 2003, which caused her to lose her job. She is speaking of what you are not shown by the news media when the nation is at war:

What didn't you see? You didn't see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you're getting the story, it just means you're getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that's what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn't journalism, because I'm not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid oaf horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn't see what it took to do that.
Banfield also has some critically important things to say about the "Fox News effect" (the patriotizing and glorification of war). Reading this Huffpo post about Banfield reminds me of this post featuring similar comments by Amy Goodman. It also reminds me how Phil Donahue also lost his job at MSNBC for being critical of the Iraq invasion (more about Donahue's views here). These sorts of firings are actually predictable. The documentary "War Made Easy" reminds us that hawks close ranks around Presidents who start wars and they also put tremendous pressure on networks to do the same. Banfield's story reminds us that we need to strive to keep dissenting voices prominent during times of war because something about war makes us insanely fearful and even less able to reason than in times of peace. It is during times of war that we become collectively willing to let ourselves run amok wrapped in the flag.

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Frank Rich on the media’s pursuit of balloon boy

In addition to blaming balloon boy's dad, Frank Rich blames the media:

Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.” This climate, he argued, “all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are — even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax — entitled to their 15 minutes.”

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