National Conference for Media Reform – The Press at War and the War on the Press

I’m still reporting from the National Conference for Media Reform, from Memphis.  The conference is sponsored by Free Press.  

This afternoon I attended a panel discussion exploring the issues set forth in the title of this post. The moderator, Geneva Overholser (of the University of Missouri School of Journalism), warned that when we criticize the press, we should not be too general.  There are, after all, many good people doing honorable work in the profession.

The first speaker was Sonali Kolhatkar, who is a host and producer of a popular morning drive time program called Uprising she is also the co-director of a nonprofit organization, Afghan Women’s Mission. 

Kolhatkar noted that the media goes where the violence goes, then moves on.  At the present time, Afghanistan “is blowing up.”  There are suicide bombs, as well as no liberation of Afghanistan women (a prime selling point for the war).  Nonetheless, the media (and thus, the American public) no longer cares. She criticized the term “war on terror.”  You can’t have a war “on an abstract noun.”

The second speaker was Paul Rieckhoff, who is the Executive Director and founder of the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans of America.  Rieckhoff was an infantry officer in Iraq from 2003-2004 . He was one of the first Iraq veterans to publicly criticize the war.  We’ve written about Paul before. 

Rieckhoff described the war in Iraq as a “war of disconnect.”  For instance, “you never see a dead American soldier on TV.”  In fact, …

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Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control Media – Day 2 of the National Conference for Media Reform

I’m reporting again from Memphis, where I am attending the National Conference for Media Reform sponsored by Free Press. 

This morning, I attended a panel discussion entitled “Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media.  The panel was headed by Eric Klinenberg, who teaches sociology at New York University.  He is also the author of Fighting for Air: the Battle to Control America’s Media (2007).

Klinenberg indicated that we have been experiencing decades of deregulation in the media industry and we’re now paying for it.  To those who attended this conference, however, he asked whether they remembered the moment when they figured out that they did not have to accept the toxic misleading filtered version of the media that they had been getting.  He asked them if they remembered that moment when they realized that they could do something about this problem, about this media that has become “a war-mongering media.”

Large corporations are striving to finish the job of taking over the media.  They are trying to take over the entire media system and to “plunder” it for their own profits.  How bad have things gotten?  Klinenberg states that he can’t find a single person who is more pleased with the media today than he or she was 10 years ago.  No one he asks tells him that “after that newspaper chain took over, I learned so much more about my community.” 

Pete Tridish of Prometheus radio was the first speaker. Prometheus is handing out flyers containing …

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Eight ways to allow 3,000 people to die: a lesson in moral clarity

President Bush is going to send more than 20,000 more troops into Iraq and spend billions of more dollars to carry on a hideous war. Why?  To protect Americans from terrorists, he tells us.  Bush convinced Americans to invade Iraq by accusing Iraq of being responsible for the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 Americans.  This argument suggests that the deaths of 3,000 people is a horrible thing.

Whenever 3,000 people die, it is a horrible thing.  It might justify hundreds of billions of dollars, though certainly not the diversion of money from programs that save equal numbers of lives. 3,000 deaths justifies the deaths of more than 3,000 soldiers, we are told.  I don’t agree with this. The political party that argues that there are clear moral rules (the Republicans) isn’t convincing me.

Does it make a difference that 3,000 innocent Americans die on the same day rather than over the course of a year?  I wouldn’t think so.  A death is a death, in my opinion.  And 3,000 deaths are 3,000 deaths.

Therefore, shouldn’t the 16,000 murders that occur every year in the US require a response five times bigger than the invasion of Iraq?   That’s 3,000 every ten weeks.  Shouldn’t it require focused efforts to protect these victims?  Shouldn’t it require a revamping of our entire criminal justice system, especially our prison system, which so often trains criminals to be even more vicious, rather than preparing them for ready for release? Where is our war on criminal violence? …

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Top Secret: The identities of people with easy access to the President

According to ABC News, the White House and the Secret Service "quietly signed an agreement last spring in the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal declaring that records identifying visitors to the White House are not open to the public."  The agreement is in the form of a five-page…

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Laying out a new agenda? For which America?

Lewis Lapham served as editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until his retirement in from those duties in 2006.  But he has continued on in his writing.  In the January 2007 "Notebook" he bristles at the suggestions of Nancy Pelosi and others that impeachment hearings are "off the table."  Lapham…

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