Scott Galindez, www.truthout.org: If CNN had been in Fayetteville, North Carolina, they would have seen what could be a major turning point in the anti-war movement. The largest Anti-war protest ever in this heavily military town took place.The march was led by two banners carried by family members of soldiers who died or served in Iraq. The first banner said "The World Still Says No to War" and the second banner was "Bring the Troops Home Now." A few feet behind was a banner carried by Veterans of the Iraq War. One of those veterans, Sergeant Camillo Mejia, recently served 9 months in jail for refusing to return to Iraq after leave. Mejia told the crowd: "After going to war and seeing its ugly face, I could no longer be a part of it."
Following the Iraq Veterans was Military Families Speak Out. "I can't remain silent on these issues, slap a yellow ribbon on my car and call it supporting our troops," said Kara Hollingsworth, the wife of a soldier serving his second tour of duty in Iraq. "I support our troops by making sure they are not put in harm's way unless absolutely necessary."
CNN missed the boat … perhaps a good thing for them, since they were only prepared for a ripple and not the giant wave that formed in Fayetteville.
Editors & Publishers: Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer fired over "Rathergate,” has inked a deal to tell her side of the scandal, reportedly for a high six-figure sum.
The publisher, St. Martin's Press, beat out a reported half a dozen others. It announced today that the book would come out in the fall with a tentative title of “The Other Side of the Story.”
St. Martin's said that Mapes "will chronicle what really happened at CBS and reveal the corporate, political and ideological agendas that threaten the integrity of journalists and the news."
Mapes was fired Jan. 10 after an independent panel found CBS rushed the "Bush memo" story on the air without proving that documents were real. Mapes insists the story was accurate, and that the documents were not forged.
Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D., MediaChannel.org: Sound the alarm! America, the land of the free, is now under attack, not by Al Qaeda, not by Iraqi "insurgents," not by an enemy confronted on foreign soil; not even by one that homeland security could ever stop. It is an insidious, invisible assailant, more hidden than a terrorist cell. It is one that invades virtually every American household on a daily basis without leaving a trace of its deceitful, dangerous nature. Its whores, draped in dignified apparel, sit in front of the American flag, speaking with an air of genuineness and concern for public welfare, while all along, their statements are empty rhetoric, politically motivated, aimed at distracting, misinforming, programming, and keeping Americans ignorant, all for the narrowest of self-interest based on pathological obsession with the bottom line.
The dangerous enemy of which I speak is a handful of colossal corporations that control the media -- such as General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Disney, and Time-Warner. The messengers of these monolithic media conglomerates are their model employees like Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Lou Dobbs, and Brit Hume, who have sold their journalistic souls to keep themselves on the air. General Electric wants a military contract to sell its jet engines to fight a war in Iraq. And it expects its corporate media division, NBC, and its front men like Chris Matthews, to help.
www.buzzflash.com: How could the Executive Editor of the New York Times be the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Week? I mean after all, the Times endorsed Kerry and, as BuzzFlash has noted, generally posts traditionally liberal editorials.
And, BuzzFlash links to New York Times articles almost everyday.
So, is BuzzFlash.com being disingenuous for naming the Executive Editor of the New York Times our GOP Hypocrite of the Week?
No, not at all. Because, Bill Keller is a prime example of a mainstream newspaper editor who doesn't appear to read his own paper's editorials or learn much from its occasional news stories that point out the daily failures and lies of the Bush Administration.
As we noted in a recent BuzzFlash editorial, the United States citizens need an investigative reporter to break open the untold story of the subservience of the mainstream press to the Bush Administration...
Former Ambassador Joe Wilson noted that the mainstream media seems to think that presenting a fact from a critic, you need to balance it with a lie from the White House. The media pretends that they can't make a judgment between two competing claims to "facts," even when one side (the Bush "spin of the day") can easily be shown to be a lie.
Furthermore, the New York Times news pages don't in anyway take into account the unprecedented totalitarian-state-like manipulation of the media that has been undertaken by the Bush administration. On a daily basis, the New York Times news section tacitly participates in this propaganda machine, the likes of which hasn't been around since Goebbels or the former Soviet Union.
Editorial, Madison Capital Times: James Madison warned more than two centuries ago, "A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives."
…American media have become a cesspool of political spin, product placement and celebrity gossip. Popular information that matters, and the means of acquiring it, is being choked off by the handful of corporations that have come to control the vast majority of American broadcast and print communications. And the consolidation of media ownership - about which the founder of this newspaper, William T. Evjue, began warning in 1917 - is growing dramatically more problematic...
If America had better media, we would have a better president. And we would not be stuck in the quagmire that is Iraq.
Complicity of the Corporatist News Media
Media Downplay Historic Day of Protests
By Scott Galindez
t r u t h o u t | Report
Sunday 20 March 2005
Fayetteville, NC -- The second anniversary of the war was the impetus for major demonstrations throughout the world. In the United States, over 800 communities held events calling for an end to the occupation.
CNN, however, reported that in the United States "barely a ripple was made while large protests took place in Europe." The New York Times reported that protests in the United States ranged from 350 people in Times Square to thousands in San Francisco. Later in the same story, the Times reported that several thousand marched from Harlem to Central Park. If thousands marched in New York, why did the Times highlight the 350 in Times Square?
CNN's report was worse … nothing about US protests. While they only saw a ripple, a huge wave passed them by. If CNN had been in Fayetteville, North Carolina, they would have seen what could be a major turning point in the anti-war movement. The largest Anti-war protest ever in this heavily military town took place.
The march was led by two banners carried by family members of soldiers who died or served in Iraq. The first banner said "The World Still Says No to War" and the second banner was "Bring the Troops Home Now." A few feet behind was a banner carried by Veterans of the Iraq War. One of those veterans, Sergeant Camillo Mejia, recently served 9 months in jail for refusing to return to Iraq after leave. Mejia told the crowd: "After going to war and seeing its ugly face, I could no longer be a part of it."
Following the Iraq Veterans was Military Families Speak Out. "I can't remain silent on these issues, slap a yellow ribbon on my car and call it supporting our troops," said Kara Hollingsworth, the wife of a soldier serving his second tour of duty in Iraq. "I support our troops by making sure they are not put in harm's way unless absolutely necessary."
Many veterans of past wars were also among the ranks. Sections of the march resembled army units marching in formation calling cadence.
Speaker after speaker told stories of loved ones they had lost during the war and the now 2-year-old occupation of Iraq. Flag-draped mock coffins were carried by many.
Congresswoman Lynn Woosley of California called on the crowd to lobby Congress in support of House Concurrent Resolution 35, calling on the President to bring U.S. troops home.
The March was part of a series of events aimed at breathing new life into the anti-war movement. The first-ever Iraq Veterans Against the War national conference is also taking place, along with a Conference of Military Families Speak Out. A third major conference of Southern anti-war organizers is also taking place in Fayetteville.
CNN missed the boat … perhaps a good thing for them, since they were only prepared for a ripple and not the giant wave that formed in Fayetteville.
________________________________________
Scott Galindez is the Managing Editor of truthout.org.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/032005A.shtml
Mary Mapes, CBS Producer in 'Rathergate,' Inks Big Book Deal
By E&P Staff
Published: March 22, 2005 5:00 PM ET
NEW YORK Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer fired over "Rathergate,” has inked a deal to tell her side of the scandal, reportedly for a high six-figure sum.
The publisher, St. Martin's Press, beat out a reported half a dozen others. It announced today that the book would come out in the fall with a tentative title of “The Other Side of the Story.”
St. Martin's said that Mapes "will chronicle what really happened at CBS and reveal the corporate, political and ideological agendas that threaten the integrity of journalists and the news."
Mapes was fired Jan. 10 after an independent panel found CBS rushed the "Bush memo" story on the air without proving that documents were real. Mapes insists the story was accurate, and that the documents were not forged.
________________________________________
E&P Staff (letters@editorandpublisher.com)
Back to Advanced Search
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000847743
Save Democracy, Shut Off Chris Matthews
By Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.
MediaChannel.org
NEW YORK, March 9, 2005 -- Sound the alarm! America, the land of the free, is now under attack, not by Al Qaeda, not by Iraqi "insurgents," not by an enemy confronted on foreign soil; not even by one that homeland security could ever stop. It is an insidious, invisible assailant, more hidden than a terrorist cell. It is one that invades virtually every American household on a daily basis without leaving a trace of its deceitful, dangerous nature. Its whores, draped in dignified apparel, sit in front of the American flag, speaking with an air of genuineness and concern for public welfare, while all along, their statements are empty rhetoric, politically motivated, aimed at distracting, misinforming, programming, and keeping Americans ignorant, all for the narrowest of self-interest based on pathological obsession with the bottom line.
The dangerous enemy of which I speak is a handful of colossal corporations that control the media -- such as General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Disney, and Time-Warner. The messengers of these monolithic media conglomerates are their model employees like Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Lou Dobbs, and Brit Hume, who have sold their journalistic souls to keep themselves on the air. General Electric wants a military contract to sell its jet engines to fight a war in Iraq. And it expects its corporate media division, NBC, and its front men like Chris Matthews, to help.
While the cardinal rule of media ethics has always been to avoid conflict of interest, the corporate media feeds on it. Their bottom line drives their "news." What passes as such is just what the highest bidder decrees, which is often the U.S. government. What Americans see and hear is therefore largely a paid political announcement. Lockstep journalism inside an intricate politico-corporate media web of quid pro quo, favor trading, and conflict of interest has turned our Fourth Estate into a docile lapdog of government.
You don't have to look at the blatant examples of "fake news" such as Armstrong Williams or Jeff Gannon (AKA Jim Guckert) or the contrived, infrequent press conferences the White House stages to see this. Even the New York Times has become an important trader in this media deception. After keeping up the pretense of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was no longer profitable, the New York Times printed an editorial note confessing its tendency to accept the word of official government sources about WMDs without carefully investigating them. Like a child caught with its hand in the cookie jar, it "came clean" -- a cheap, self-serving form of repentance buried in an editor's note instead of transparently plastered on its own front page. But what it didn't admit was its own corporate pressures to tread lightly on the government. The Times Corporation was, in fact, a major lobbyist before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), seeking further deregulation of media ownership. Far from being the watchful media eye on government, keeping the public up to speed on corruption in the Bush administration, it was trading favors with it.
And why did so many Americans believe there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden? Association psychology worked like a charm when Bush mentioned these names in the same breath. But the media did nothing to dispel the myth. Worse, it helped to propagate it by repeating official government sources -- like Cheney -- instead of doing its own investigative reporting. It was more "cost effective" to parrot official sources than to spend money to probe and investigate.
When CNN, "The most trusted name in news" presented the story of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, it reported that Bush was "concerned" about the abuses, not that he said he was concerned. If the abuses were ordered from the top, he would have surely been concerned, but primarily about protecting his own hide; but the press didn't look into that.
When Bush's back bulged with a cylindrical receiver-looking appearance, as caught in a photo taken by a Fox News photographer during the first presidential debate, the NY Times dismissed the story with a simple quotation from a Bush Campaign official denying any credibility. Again there was no follow up. Yet there was a vivid picture displaying the curious bulge along with an extended discussion on Salon.com. And, after the election, when a Berkeley study emerged with credible evidence that the exit polls could not have been so far off, the Times along with the rest of the mainstream media followed suit in dismissing the possibility of election fraud. In contrast, when the Ukraine, came up with such skewed election results, the election was declared invalid and a new one was conducted.
When Haiti's President Aristide phoned Maxine Waters and others and claimed that he did not resign but was instead kidnapped by the US and French forces, the media played it down. The New York Times buried the story on page 10 only to dismiss the allegations with an official White House rejection of the claim as "complete nonsense." Brit Hume on Fox, in his usual fashion, parroted back Colin Powell's comments, saying "he wasn't kidnapped… he went on the plane willingly, and that's the truth." And the rest is history.
Examples of media soft peddling government can be multiplied ad nauseam. There can be just one conclusion: the corporate media is succeeding in keeping Americans uninformed, and worse, misinformed. Censorship, government propaganda, parroting of official government sources, and media manipulation have replaced careful investigative reporting as the norm.
And things continue to worsen as the government finds ways (some more subtle than others) to relax media ownership rules to let fewer and fewer media giants control more and more markets. This trend toward government deregulation of corporate media ownership violates Constitutional safeguards on diversity, public interest and the capacity to self-govern. The popular rebuttal that we now have more stations so, therefore, more diversity, is a glaring fallacy. When these bountiful stations have but a few owners, a few very wealthy ones, it's not hard to see what side of the political divide they'll land on.
There is, of course, the Internet, the last bastion of free speech. When there is chatter on the Net, it's often hard for the mainstream media to ignore it. But corporate media presence on the Net is expanding and there is now a threat looming to the free access architecture of the Internet itself. Corporate media has increasingly been successful at controlling the cables that carry information. As more and more Americans switch from dial up modems to high-speed cable connections, they will inevitably be restricted to one ISP provider -- Comcast, Adelphia, or some other large corporation. The problem is that whoever controls the conduit can control the content. Unless corporate media is stopped, this last bastion of democracy will also topple.
So, the question is how to stop these dangerous, degenerative, media trends.
Currently, there is a burgeoning grass roots movement against media consolidation. Even the NRA has joined forces with NOW to oppose deregulation. Media activist organizations like the Free Press have organized grass roots campaigns resulting in literally millions of letters sent to Congress protesting deregulation, and over 700,000 letters were sent to the FCC.
Michael Powell has now resigned as chair of the FCC. He had been unwilling to listen to this growing public outcry against deregulation of the corporate media. As this movement builds there is a future opportunity for the FCC to heed the word, and stop this degenerative, media metastasis that is devouring free speech in the U.S.
So Americans need to fight back. The air waves are public property, not the private property of these corporate monsters. To slay these mighty dragons we need to stop patronizing them. Like Freddie Kruger, they can only exist as long as we stay tuned. They need us to survive, but we no longer need them.
The Internet is still a place to go to find out things about America and about the world. We can go on line to read the Guardian in London instead of the New York Times, and we can shut off CNN and go to Salon.com or MotherJones.com. We can shut off Chris Matthews and the other media whores and check out Znet or BuzzFlash. or Mediachannel.org. There is a "Media Reform Information Center" you can also visit to get a useful list of enlightened media outlets. BuzzFlash also publishes a list on their website. The corporate media is not transparent, but there are organizations like the Free Press and Common Cause that have taken on the cause of exposing the mainstream corporate media for the charlatans that they really are.
So long as the Internet remains a democratic forum, we need to avail ourselves of these resources. But our time is limited as corporate media in collusion with the most powerful, secretive government in U.S. history increases its control over information. This formidable enemy would like nothing better than to keep Americans ignorant and gullible. It is urgent that we arm ourselves with information. This is the proverbially stake through the heart of totalitarianism. Without a free press, that's just where we're heading! Unite, Americans, we have nothing to lose but our (corporate) chains!
-- Elliot D. Cohen is a media ethicist and author of many books and articles on the media and other areas of applied ethics. His most recent book on the dangers of corporate media is News Incorporated: Corporate Media Ownership and Its Threat to Democracy (Prometheus Books, March 2005).
http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/affalert335.shtml
http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/05/03/edi05035.html
BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Week: Bill Keller
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
Welcome back to the BuzzFlash.com GOP Hypocrite of the Week.
How could the Executive Editor of the New York Times be the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Week? I mean after all, the Times endorsed Kerry and, as BuzzFlash has noted, generally posts traditionally liberal editorials.
And, BuzzFlash links to New York Times articles almost everyday.
So, is BuzzFlash.com being disingenuous for naming the Executive Editor of the New York Times our GOP Hypocrite of the Week?
No, not at all. Because, Bill Keller is a prime example of a mainstream newspaper editor who doesn't appear to read his own paper's editorials or learn much from its occasional news stories that point out the daily failures and lies of the Bush Administration.
As we noted in a recent BuzzFlash editorial, the United States citizens need an investigative reporter to break open the untold story of the subservience of the mainstream press to the Bush Administration.
In that editorial, we lay out some of our case as to why Keller is a Republican White House lackey and note: "If the role of journalism is to challenge authority by seeking out the truth behind the official statements, the New York Times fails miserably, with a few exceptions here and there. It in no way conveys the radicalism of the people in the White House, nor runs longer investigative pieces on their chronic deceptions and dishonesty. It pretty much accepts their news handouts at face value."
Former Ambassador Joe Wilson noted that the mainstream media seems to think that presenting a fact from a critic, you need to balance it with a lie from the White House. The media pretends that they can't make a judgment between two competing claims to "facts," even when one side (the Bush "spin of the day") can easily be shown to be a lie.
Furthermore, the New York Times news pages don't in anyway take into account the unprecedented totalitarian-state-like manipulation of the media that has been undertaken by the Bush administration. On a daily basis, the New York Times news section tacitly participates in this propaganda machine, the likes of which hasn't been around since Goebbels or the former Soviet Union.
Recently, Laurie Garrett, a courageous reporter resigned from Newsday, owned by the Tribune Corporation, because, "The leaders of Times Mirror and Tribune have proven to be mirrors of a general trend in the media world: They serve their stockholders first, Wall St. second and somewhere far down the list comes service to newspaper readerships."
Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize winner, made it clear that she was also including the New York Times in her lacerating criticism: "This is not a uniquely Tribune or even newspaper industry problem: this is true from the Atlanta mixing rooms of CNN to Sulzberger's offices in Times Square. Profits: that's what it's all about now."
And profits will be impaired by Bush Cartel retaliation if the New York Times upsets the White House by exposing the charade of this presidency and the radical extremism of the Republican Party.
Bill Keller shares an important attribute with Bush. He is deemed likable and amiable by the Eastern Establishment and the political poobahs. He's a salesman at heart, a guy whose job is to diffuse criticism of the New York Times as it deftly maneuvers between being a straw horse representative of the "liberal press" to the right wingers --(who know it represents no real threat to their Potemkin rule) -- and the pro-democracy movement that sees its news coverage as inherently biased in what it doesn't cover.
Laurie Garret said, "This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche."
Bill Keller, you've done your job well, giving off the congenial appearance of fairness, while leaving the betrayal of democracy beneath the Oval Office rug unexposed. Light and truth would be a threat to the bottom line.
Until next week, just remember our motto at BuzzFlash.com: So many Republican hypocrites, so little time.
Catch up with you soon.
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/05/03/edi05034.html
Published on Saturday, March 5, 2005 by the Madison Capital Times / Wisconsin
Media and Democracy
Editorial
James Madison warned more than two centuries ago, "A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives."
Madison wrote those words in the first years of the 19th century, but they still ring true in the first years of the 21st.
American media have become a cesspool of political spin, product placement and celebrity gossip. Popular information that matters, and the means of acquiring it, is being choked off by the handful of corporations that have come to control the vast majority of American broadcast and print communications. And the consolidation of media ownership - about which the founder of this newspaper, William T. Evjue, began warning in 1917 - is growing dramatically more problematic.
In other words, Madison is being proven right as we watch and listen and read media that serve the interests of the powerful and wealthy while denying the vast majority of American citizens the power that knowledge gives. The tragedy is evident in a war that was sold as both easy and necessary but that continues to claim Iraqi and American lives and that it emptying the public treasury of the funds that should pay for schools, health care and other basic needs. The farce is evident in the Bush presidency, which continues despite the evidence of deceit, mismanagement and a worldview so warped that it has made America a more hated country than at any time in her history.
If America had better media, we would have a better president. And we would not be stuck in the quagmire that is Iraq.
A growing number of Americans realize this fact. And they are not waiting for communications corporations to create those better media. They are seeking it out themselves. Many have discovered Amy Goodman's national news program, "Democracy Now," which airs locally on WORT/FM and WYOU Community Television.
Goodman and her staff refer to themselves as the exception to the rulers, and they boldly challenge the official spin from the White House and the corporate public relations agencies that has come to define so much of the news. You won't hear a lot about Michael Jackson's trial on "Democracy Now." Rather, you will hear the inside story of the war profiteering in Iraq, the Bush administration's scheming to privatize Social Security, and trade policies that put Americans out of work and impoverish developing countries.
oodman offers serious news about issues that matter - the kind of information that citizens need to arm themselves with for the serious work of governing themselves. And the response to her program - which is now broadcast on more than 300 stations nationwide - proves that Americans want more than government spin and gossip from their media. But Goodman isn't done working to build better media.
She'll be in Madison tonight at a 7'oclock event at the Barrymore Theater, 2090 Atwood Ave., to help spread the word about Free Speech TV, the nation's progressive television network. The event will benefit the Madison Campaign for Free Speech on Cable TV, which is currently working to get Free Speech TV added to the menu of local cable television offerings through Charter Communications. (For more information and to join the campaign, visit cable.freespeech.org.)
We welcome Amy Goodman as an ally in the struggle not merely to build an alternative to corporate media but to put an end to the tragedy and farce of this dark passage and to build a democracy where citizens armed with the power that knowledge gives - rather than the feudal serfs of corporate power - will define the discourse.
Copyright © 2005, Capital Newspapers
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0305-27.htm