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March 19, 2010 in Feature, Middle East, War & Media by admin
On this week’s News Dissector Radio, Danny is joined by special guests Professor/Middle East expert Juan Cole and a representative from J Street, the Progressive Israel peace lobby.
If you like this podcast, please send it on to friends and colleagues.
For more information visit: http://www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com/
March 18, 2010 in Feature, Healthcare, Politics by admin
By Rory O’Connor
Cross-posted from Media is a Plural
American broadcasters, magazines, newspapers and other publishers take in more than four billion dollars a year in drug advertising. The drug money is a rare bright spot in an otherwise dismal downward revenue spiral for media of all types. Last year was a horrible year for advertising spending in this country, which fell 12.3 percent. Spending in seven of the top ten leading ad categories fell compared with 2008. The only exceptions were in the industry categories of telecommunications, food and candy, and pharmaceuticals, which showed the largest increase of all.
Wonder why? Perhaps it’s because the US is one of only two countries in the world — along with New Zealand — that permits direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs. Yes, your country is one of only two outliers when it comes to allowing those incredibly annoying and ubiquitous “ask-your-doctor” spots. But if you were hoping a modicum of media reform, aimed at reducing health care costs and delivering better services, might be packaged among all the other goodies and giveaways in the Obama Administration’s forthcoming health care reform bill, you can forget it. Lobbyists long ago succeeded in turning back all efforts to end the special interest business-tax deductions that Big Pharma drug makers can take for advertising.
In an early round of reform negotiations, the drug industry actively considered giving up the advertising deductibility as part of the $80 billion dollar deal they made with the Obama crowd to reduce pharmaceutical spending over ten years. But media lobbyists quickly swooped in and killed the idea, turning back nascent efforts in both the House and the Senate. “Advertising deductibility safe!” American Advertising Federation executive Clark Rector wrote in a press release late last year, when the deal went down. Ending the tax break for drug spots “would be a disastrous choice, both economically and politically.”
Supporters like Rector claim the commercials not only educate consumers but also save lives. But critics contend they simply drive up health care costs by encouraging you to take expensive and sometimes less effective drugs — often for newly invented diseases!
Prior to 1998, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prevented pharmaceutical companies from shopping prescription drugs to the public. A 2006 Government Accountability Office investigation found some of the newly permitted marketing efforts “false and misleading” and faulted the FDA—which is responsible for oversight—for failing to maintain standards of accuracy and to protect the public. Some of the products can cause liver or kidney damage, high blood pressure or other adverse effects that would have to be countered with still more drugs—each with its own side effects and risky interactions.
But as In These Times reported, “One undeniable side effect of DTCs is increased sales and profits for drug manufacturers.” Every dollar the industry spends on DTC advertising yields an additional four dollars in drug sales, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation – billions of dollars in total. A majority of doctors report that DTC ads caused patients to “confuse relative risks and benefits” or to believe the drugs “worked better than they do,” according to the FDA. Almost three out of four said patients were spurred by the ads to ask for unnecessary prescriptions and to expect a prescription for every condition. Nonetheless, despite their ambivalence about efficacy, safety and appropriateness, doctors turned down requests for a brand-name prescription only 2 percent of the time, the FDA found.
Spending on prescription drugs is America’s most rapidly increasing healthcare cost. One would think that a four billion dollar giveaway to Big Media and Big Pharma, which drives up health care costs that are already spiraling out of control, would be part of ‘health care reform’ aimed in part at cutting costs. Think again – when it comes to lobbies and politicians, apparently no price is too high to preserve their privilege and power…
March 16, 2010 in Economy, Feature by admin
By Danny Schechter
Author of The Crime of Our Time
Michael Lewis’s Delusion Thesis Vs. Senator Kaufman’s Case For Crime
It’s the number one book in the county. Every day, Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short” is getting B I G G E R, no doubt because he is so mediagenic, conversational and likes to laugh with the hosts who interview him about his findings.
On Sunday, he laughed with Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes when the two bantered on about how stupid it all was and why so many smart people drank the Kool Aid. The story he tells has no hard edges really… it’s about “delusion;” Wall Street deluding us all and then each other.
The idea of delusions feeds a psychological and cultural analysis of bankers cut off from the world, focused on their own pocket books and believing their own hype. It is, in this sense, Shakespearian—the stuff of drama, not calculation. “What a web we weave when first we practice to deceive,” to quote Sir Walter Scott.
At one point in the 60 Minutes two-part interview purporting to explain the collapse, Lewis drifts off message and calls it all, an “elegant theft.”
Theft is a word we associate with crime, not personal greed or human failings. But that point was left unexplored by 60 Minutes, of course, because if the story is about crime, than we have to move into the arena of facts, not just opinions, insights, hyperbole and personalities.
Ironically, many of the facts that Lewis himself cites comes from an undergraduate college thesis, according to the Deal Journal of the Wall Street Journal, which calls his book a “yarn.” They note that his book credited “A.K. Barnett-Hart, a Harvard undergraduate who had just written a thesis about the market for sub prime mortgage-backed CDOs that remains more interesting than any single piece of Wall Street research on the subject.”
Perhaps even more interesting than his book?
Earlier, Lewis told the Atlantic what his main sources of information are: “Actually, if you were to draw a pie chart of where I get news from, I bet I get a third from whatever people in Berkeley-specifically the parents’ at my kids’ school-are outraged about. I’m surrounded by people who are alive to what’s going on in the world and who are quick to be outraged by it.”
So there he goes again, with emotion and attitude, apparently meaning more to him than fact finding.
Lewis has criticized those who criticize Goldman Sachs, according to Bloomberg, writing earlier, “Bashing Goldman Sachs is Simply a Game for Fools.”
Which side is he on? I would guess, his side? On 60 Minutes, TV’s top newsmagazine, he was described as a former trader. Not according to Janet Takakoli who runs her own financial firm: “Imagine my surprise to see him billed as a trader on 60 Minutes, since he was actually a junior salesman,” she writes on Huffington Post, “Well-heeled male peacocks strutted the trading floor, and junior salesmen were girlie-men, mere eunuchs serving their pashas.”
She also notes that he was among the “experts” who downplayed the warnings about the very financial crisis that he has suddenly, thanks to validation from CBS and MSNBC, become THE expert on, charging, “he ridiculed their concern of a pending crisis due to the surge in derivatives demand and called it “this year’s case in point.” Then Michael showed how dangerous it is to be a brilliant writer with a poor command of facts and their true meaning.”
Financial analysis is not what the media is well equipped to communicate. As a media dissector and editor of MediaChannel, I have followed the reporting of this story closely with many detailed articles and in two books since, even before it became a story back to 2005, when I made my film, IN DEBT WE TRUST, only to be dismissed by some as a doom-and-gloomer for exposing the subprime mortgage fraud.
I was hoping that Rachel Maddow would challenge his mass delusion theory, but she bought right into it also, in her interview. At one point Lewis opined that there was DECEPTION (i.e., lying by the investment world) but that, too, was not examined as Lewis himself counterpoised two explanations for the disaster, asking, “was it mass delusion or crime?”
And then he “answered” his own question or appeared to, by asserting that when you ask the people involved, they say it was delusion.
Duh, Michael? What do you think they would say? Do you think they would cop to their own criminality? For them, it was all one big miscalculation, never mind who got hurt, which neither 60 Minutes nor Maddow explored.
Sorry to say, Jon Stewart did no better with his part of Lewis’ all star media mystery tour. He did introduce him as one of the people making big money on the crisis, but then jokingly let him ramble on, praising the sometimes weird people who made small fortunes betting against Wall Street. These Bond salesmen were his heroes. Again, no concern was expressed for the people they cheated – only the idiots who lost money in the “kingdom where the blind man was king.”
Lewis, like many non-fiction novelists, prefers character-based story telling or “yarns” to more objective analytical investigation. The reason: it makes for better narratives, and bigger best sellers. It also gets interviewers laughing instead of crying. Why? Because there are only smart men doing things that turn out to be stupid, it makes us all feel superior to them even if they had the last laugh on the way to the bank. If no one is to blame, then everyone is to blame, etc..
Sorry, “The Big Short” seems short—short of a serious consideration of what really drove the financial crisis and the reason that 82% of the American people recently said they want a crack down on Wall Street, not a chance to feel sorry for the “delusions” of its masters of the universe. They want a jail out—not a bailout.
On the very day of Rachel’s fawning, but well intentioned interview, United States Senator Ed Kaufman of Delaware, the state that provides a sanctuary for most US corporations and credit card companies, made a speech which got at the heart of the matter.
Senator Kaufman did not get lost in the vague clouds of “delusion.” He was more down to earth arguing:
“Fraud and potential criminal conduct were at the heart of the financial crisis.”
Let me repeat and capitalize this brave Senatorial assertion:
“FRAUD AND POTENTIAL CRIMINAL CONDUCT WERE AT THE HEART OF THE FINANICAL CRISIS.”
The Senator goes on: “Americans could draw at least three lessons from the (Lehman) report: that we must ‘undo the damage caused by decades of deregulation;’ that the United States must ‘concentrate law enforcement and regulatory resources on restoring the rule of law to Wall Street;’ and that Congress must help regulators and other gatekeepers ‘by providing clear, enforceable ‘rules of the road’ wherever possible.’”
Unfortunately, says Kaufman, “I’m concerned that the revelations about Lehman Brothers are just the tip of the iceberg. We have no reason to believe that the conduct detailed last week is somehow isolated or unique. Indeed, this sort of behavior is hardly novel.”
Now, it so happens that I have been making a similar argument in my own book, ‘THE CRIME OF OUR TIME,’ and a film, PLUNDER: THE CRIME OF OUR TIME.’ But I am not a former Wall Streeter or best selling author or a US Senator. So my work and the work of many other “outsiders” are still unknown.
The media prefers to seek the truth from the very people who either caused the crisis or who were in media perches that ignored it.
The point is that many people, many very qualified, who have been arguing the crime thesis — some in my film — have not so far had the benefit of the primetime exposure even though the American people believe it, even as the media downplays it.
Will that change? Only if the people don’t believe the hype and demand the truth!
– News Dissector Danny Schechter’s film and book will be released in April by Disinformation. For more information: PlunderTheCrimeOfOurTime.com.
Comments to: dissector@mediachannel.org
March 15, 2010 in Feature, Journalism, Media Analysis by admin
By the Project For Excellence In Journalism
Introduction
What now?
Inside news companies, the most immediate concern is how much revenue lost in recession the industry will regain as the economy improves.
Whatever the answers, the future of news ultimately rests on more long-term concerns: What are the prospects for alternative journalism organizations that are forming around the country? Will traditional media adapt and innovate amid continuing pressures to thin their ranks?
And with growing evidence that conventional advertising online will never sustain the industry, what progress is being made to find new revenue for financing the gathering and reporting of news?
The numbers for 2009 reveal just how urgent these questions are becoming. Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenue fall 26% during the year, which brings the total loss over the last three years to 43%.
Local television ad revenue fell 22% in 2009, triple the decline the year before. Radio also was off 22%. Magazine ad revenue dropped 17%, network TV 8% (and news alone probably more). Online ad revenue over all fell about 5%, and revenue to news sites most likely also fared much worse.
Only cable news among the commercial news sectors did not suffer declining revenue last year.
The estimates for what happens after the economy rebounds vary and even then are only guesses. The market research and investment banking firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson projects that by 2013, after the economic recovery, three elements of old media — newspapers, radio and magazines — will take in 41% less in ad revenues than they did in 2006.
For newspapers, which still provide the largest share of reportorial journalism in the United States, the metaphor that comes to mind is sand in an hourglass. The shrinking money left in print, which still provides 90% of the industry’s funds, is the amount of time left to invent new revenue models online. The industry must find a new model before that money runs out.
The losses are already enormous. To quantify the impact, with colleague Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute we estimate that the newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000, or roughly 30%. That leaves an estimated $4.4 billion remaining. Even if the economy improves we predict more cuts in 2010.
Network news division resources are likely down from their peak in the late 1980s by more than half — which amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars — and new rounds of cuts came in the last 12 months. Local television is harder to gauge, but one estimate puts the losses in the last two years at over 1,600 jobs, or roughly 6%. Staffing at the Time and Newsweek since 1983 is down by 47%.1
So what about the new media experiments growing around the country? There are certainly exciting things happening, from former journalists creating specialty news sites and community sites, to citizens covering neighborhoods, to local blogs and social media.
In 2009 Twitter and other social media emerged as powerful tools for disseminating information and mobilizing citizens such as evading the censors in Iran and communicating from the earthquake disaster zone in Haiti. The majority of Internet users (59%) now use some kind of social media, including Twitter, blogging and networking sites, according to a new PEJ/Pew Internet & American Life survey.
Citizen journalism at the local level is expanding rapidly and brimming with innovation. This year’s report includes a new study of 60 of the most highly regarded sites. The prospects for assembling sufficient economies of scale, audience and authority may be most promising at specialized national and international sites — efforts like ProPublica, Kaiser Health News and Global Post.
For all the invention and energy, however, the scale of these new efforts still amounts to a small fraction of what has been lost. While not all of the blogs and citizen efforts can be quantified, J-Lab, a project led by Jan Schaffer that studies new media, estimates that roughly $141 million of nonprofit money has flowed into new media efforts over the last four years (not including public broadcasting). That is less than one-tenth of the losses in newspaper resources alone.
Michael Schudson, the sociologist of journalism at Columbia University, sees the promise of “a better array of public informational resources emerging. ” This new ecosystem will include different “styles” of journalism, a mix of professional and amateur approaches and different economic models — commercial, nonprofit, public and “university-fueled.”
Clay Shirky of New York University has suggested that the loss of news people is a predictable and perhaps temporary gap in the process of creative destruction. “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place,” he has written.
There is something important in these notions. As Schudson notes, the news industry became more professional, skeptical and ethical beginning in the 1960s. Many journalists think that sense of public good has been overtaken by a focus on efficiency and profit since the 1990s. In the collapse of those ownership structures, there is some rebirth of community connection and public motive in news.
Yet the energy and promise here cannot escape the question of resources. Unless some system of financing the production of content is developed, it is difficult to see how reportorial journalism will not continue to shrink, regardless of the potential tools offered by technology.
And as we enter 2010 there is little evidence that journalism online has found a sustaining revenue model. A new survey on online economics, released in this report for the first time, finds that 79% of online news consumers say they rarely if ever have clicked on an online ad.
There was certainly more talk of alternative approaches to advertising in the last year. Entrepreneur Steve Brill and others launched JournalismOnline.com, which offers news sites a mechanism for charging, but at this point it is more a possibility than a business reality. Rupert Murdoch announced discussions with Microsoft about higher payments for searching his content and insisted that everything his company produces would go behind pay walls. Columbia University produced a report that explored nonprofit and public funding sourcing and assessed the state of startup new media. The New York Times announced it was giving itself a year to figure out a way to charge for content to “get it really really right.” And more new media startups were planned, a growing sign that as old media continues to shrink, the ecosystem is changing and some things are growing.
But if a new model is to be found it is hardly clear what it will be. Our survey, produced with the Pew Internet and American Life Project, finds that only about a third of Americans (35%) have a news destination online they would call a “favorite,” and even among these users only 19%2 said they would continue to visit if that site put up a pay wall.
In the meantime, perhaps one concept identifies most clearly what is going on in journalism: Most news organizations — new or old — are becoming niche operations, more specific in focus, brand and appeal and narrower, necessarily, in ambition.
Old media are trying to imagine the new smaller newsroom of the future in the relic of their old ones. New media are imagining the new newsroom from a blank slate.
Among the critical questions all this will pose: Is there some collaborative model that would allow citizens and journalists to have the best of both worlds and add more capacity here? What ethical values about news will settle in at these sites? Will legacy and new media continue to cooperate more, sharing stories and pooling resources, and if they do, how can one operation vouch for the fairness and accuracy of something they did not produce?
The year ahead will not settle any of these. But the urgency of these questions will become more pronounced. And ultimately the players may be quite different.
“I think the answer may come from places staffed by young people who understand the new technology and its potential and who have a passion for journalism,” said Larry Jinks, the highly regarded former editor and publisher who transformed the San Jose Mercury News a generation ago and who still sits on the board of the McClatchy Company.
March 12, 2010 in Economy, Feature, Uncategorized by admin
By Danny Schechter
Author, The Crime of Our Time
A Haitian Story: Loses Family Home in Earthquake, NY Home in “Bankquake”
Washington Post, March 12: Foreclosure wave threatens stability of housing market
“The housing market is facing swelling ranks of homeowners who are seriously delinquent but have yet to lose their homes, and this is threatening a new wave of foreclosures that could hit just as the real estate market has begun to stabilize.”
The financial crisis started as a housing bubble with the financial industry convinced that home values never fall. How wrong they were, even as they leveraged and securitized their investments to create a global crisis.
Now, brace yourself because not only isn’t it over until its over, but in some respects its just begun. There will be more foreclosures this year than last and as a result more suffering for American families.
Ed Harrison who monitors this industry for a website called Credit Write Downs sees a “second wave coming” — like a new tsunami in a industry that all of Obama’s horses and all of Obama’s men have not been able to do anything about. The idea of challenging fraud and deception with a debt relief plan goes a bit too far for these self-styled centrists. Writes Harrison:
“When the crisis first developed, in February of 2007, it was subprime where the worries were, with the lion’s share of writedowns coming from mark-to-market losses in the securitisation market. However, subprime was a relatively small part of the overall market, making up 14% of loans outstanding at that time. Alt-A loans were 27% and prime loans were 57% respectively of loans outstanding according to a Banc of America Securities report.
As the 2004-2007 co-horts of Alt-A option ARM mortgages have started to reset and prime borrowers have come under stress, we have started to see defaults in markets which are an order of magnitude larger than subprime.”
I love phrases like “order of magnitude” because they make problems seem too big to do anything about. As we aggregate the losses, we lose sight of the individuals whose lives are at risk even as financial websites carry more and more articles about how to profit from foreclosures.
Today, it’s not just that prime loans are about to go belly up, but more and more tenants living in private homes are at risk – with no one looking out for them because they don’t own anything and so are considered disposable.
Mounting foreclosures is an issue I have been writing and railing about. Protests against them are featured in my forthcoming film PLUNDER: The Crime Of Our Time.
There is a macro dimension to this crisis, it’s also about a far more personal micro one.
Here’s a story I was told about a middle class woman on Long Island, who happens to be Haitian. I am sure its not the worst case—and certainly not the best outcome. Read it and weep—but as you do remember this bell may toll for more of us.
At the same time, as a reporter, I find myself personally exposed to people experiencing these problems. One is a close friend of a close friend who found herself on the street last week.
I offered to help her write an op-ed about her situation based on what she told me. She really liked it, but then had second thoughts about having it appear under her name. It is intimidating if you are not used to challenging powerful institutions even after you have been terribly mistreated. There is always a hope that some deal might save you, or get your home back. I have to respect her right to anonymity, but I can vouch for the accuracy of this sad account implicating a predatory bank and their servicer, the County Sheriff, and a moving company that makes money off of people’s misery.
Here is her account.
• MY HAITIAN EARTHQUAKE (BANKQUAKE?) IN NASSAU COUNTY
Almost two months ago, the country I was born in suffered a natural calamity. Hundreds of thousands died in the Haitian earthquake, members of my own family among them. Our family home was destroyed. It was heartbreaking and traumatizing. I am still grieving. I was happy to know that so many people who live here on the Island responded with an outpouring of donations and concern. No homeowner would ever want to share the same experience of sudden forced homelessness.
Less than a week ago, I stood outside a home that I have lived in for 14 years and watched the Nassau County Sheriff’s office and a team of movers (from Network Moving & Trucking )that they hired, evict me, crudely packing up all my possessions, throwing precious belongings in boxes and somehow also stealing my grand daughter’s laptop in the process before physically pushing her into the street.
My family had just been dispossessed in Haiti, and now I was having a similar (but far less deadly) experience in Nassau County. Only this calamity was not due to a natural disaster, but to a well-proven chain of fraud and abuse by banks. The FBI has confirmed we have been living through a “fraud epidemic” since 2004.
No big name musicians are raising money for the victims of this disaster. So far, the government agencies that have promised to curb an out of control foreclosure crisis have been ineffectual. The big banks have paid lip service to helping their customers, but, as study after study documented, they make more money throwing people out of their homes and reselling them than modifying mortgages so residents can stay where they are. They are in the game for profits, not to help people.
In my case, I persistently reached out to the bank with emails and calls to try to negotiate. No one would take my calls or respond. There was no there there. I have been experiencing disdain and insensitivity at every turn.
I reached out to legal agencies which Nassau County itself advises people facing eviction to go to, What happened? They told me there was nothing they could do.
In my case, I wanted to buy the house I lived in with my grandchild—I am nearly 65—but the mortgage broker and the REMAC realty agency and the courts were less than helpful. No one would assist me. The Administration has stopped deportation orders for Haitians convicted of crimes, but seems uninterested in helping law abiding people like myself.
Was it my accent, my Haitian background? I am an American citizen and a former civil servant with a long history of public service and employment. Ethnicity may be a factor but they treat people of all races this way–with contempt!
Compounding the problem for me is that I wasn’t even the homeowner but a tenant whose landlord had disappeared leaving the home with all sorts of major structural problems and unpaid bills. I tried reaching him and the bank for months on end with no success.
The bank in this case was HSBC, one of the most notorious subprime lenders which has written off billions of dollars because of its irresponsible lending policies, and been subject to investigations and reprimand. Their servicer is part of the scheme. It is no wonder that the public calls these people banksters. That is who they are.
I went to Court and had my appeal to stay the eviction denied without any reasons given. The Sheriff told me the eviction could be stopped if I applied for bankruptcy. I did so, and when I tried to call him with the file number, as instructed, before his office carried out the eviction, no one would take my call. His secretary told he would not talk to me. A bankruptcy filing should have stopped the eviction. It didn’t. These are the bureaucratic games they play with people’s lives.
And then to add insult to injury, the moving company had the nerve to yell at me for trying to stop my own eviction claiming that I was trying to cheat them out a $2000 fee for doing the job during which my grandchild was pushed physically and “lost” her computer.
I am appealing to my Nassau neighbors to express concern about this outrage like they did for the victims of the quake.
Please help me call for an investigation and reversal of this rushed eviction without a fair hearing or recourse. Will someone look into the actions by the Sheriff of Nassau County who did the bank’s bidding, and Judge Scott Fairgreive who callously signed the order without an ounce of compassion.
I am now, as a senor citizen, homeless and personally at risk. I fainted on the day of the eviction and had to be hospitalized. I don’t know what will happen to me, and if something does, what will happen to my grandchild? For me, this calamity was like an earthquake destroying my life. Call ita bak quake if you will. I need help now.
Will someone stand up for me as I have for years for people all over the world?
If you live on Long Island and can help, write to me and I will pass on your message. Please circulate this appeal. Write dissector@mediachannel.org
– News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org and directed the forthcoming Plunder The Crime of Our Time. (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com)
March 12, 2010 in Feature, Hate Speech by admin
By Rory O’Connor
Cross-posted from Media is a Plural
Internet shock jock and F.B.I. confidential informant Hal Turner beat the rap again when his second federal “Death-Threat Trial,” ended in yet another mistrial.
Turner, charged with threatening the life of three federal judges who issued rulings supporting gun control, claims federal agents encouraged his seemingly dangerous rants over the years, and told him to “ratchet up the rhetoric” while asking for help in identifying a white supremacist killer. Government officials admit using him as an informant (beginning in 2004 and culminating in 2007) for intelligence on members of white supremacist groups, among whom he had a devoted following. Turner’s background as a paid F.B.I. informant has now become the main issue in the thus far unsuccessful prosecution.
As the New York Times reported, “Before, during and after his employ as an informant — sometimes to the chagrin of his handlers and sometimes at their request — Mr. Turner continued to use his radio show and Web site to spout racist and, at times, violent rhetoric aimed at elected officials, public personalities and judges.”
Suddenly last summer, however, Turner was arrested, accused of posting photos of the judges and saying they were “worthy of death.”
In his hours on the witness stand, Turner detailed his ascent as a shock jock, as well as his relationship with the F.B.I.. Michael A. Orozco, one of Turner’s lawyers, offered as a defense that his client is “nothing but a shock jock.” Turner’s “hand was guided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Orozco said. “He was providing a service. This is betrayal.”
Turner has long been notorious for making anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, white supremacist remarks and encouraging violence on his Internet radio show and companion Web site.
Last June, for example, he posted this message: “The government — especially these three judges — are cunning, ruthless, untrustworthy, disloyal, unpatriotic, deceitful scum.” The judges all testified at trial that they felt threatened. Turner later took the stand to say his rants were an F.B.I.-sanctioned ruse to ”flush out” dangerous members of his audience.
Were Turner’s comments a clear threat, as prosecutors alleged, or simply “the type of free speech that the F.B.I. had encouraged and condoned in the past,” as defense lawyers contended? Despite the fact that the government actually brought in the judges who were Turner’s targets to testify in the second trial, two sets of jurors have now failed to come to a consensus on that crucial question.
A new trial date has been set for April 12, and lead prosecutor William Hogan, says “it’s highly likely” the government will take another bite at the apple. Third times a charm?
Turner also faces state charges in Connecticut, for telling his followers to “take up arms” against state lawmakers who voted to give Catholic lay members more control over church finances.
March 11, 2010 in Feature, Media Bias, War & Media by admin
By Norman Solomon
The event on the House floor Wednesday afternoon was monumental — the first major congressional debate about U.S. military operations in Afghanistan since lawmakers authorized the invasion of that country in autumn 2001. But, as Rep. Patrick Kennedy noted with disgust on Wednesday, the House press gallery was nearly empty. He aptly concluded: “It’s despicable, the national press corps right now.”
Sure enough, the Thursday edition of the New York Times had no room for the historic debate on its front page, which did have room for a large Starbucks ad across the bottom.
Despite the news media and the lopsided pro-war tilt on Capitol Hill (reflected in the 356-65 vote Wednesday against invoking the War Powers Act), antiwar organizing has a lot of hospitable terrain at the grassroots. National polling shows widespread opposition to the Afghanistan war effort — a far cry from the dominant lockstep conformity in Congress.
“Apparently, as with many issues in Washington,” Congressman John Conyers said in a written statement hours before the vote, “those who are forced [to] bear the costs of war are the first to recognize a flawed policy, while those who profit from perpetual war do their best to blunt any change in course.”
Yet the three-hour debate was a step forward, offering a basic clash of assumptions. Cogent eloquence came from many who spoke in support of the antiwar resolution, introduced by Rep. Dennis Kucinich. The 65 votes for it should serve as a floor to build on.
But among the obstacles are snappy wooden constructs of language and attitude. Consider how a glib phrase now in vogue among Pentagon boosters and journalists — “government in a box” — mirrors the jaw-dropping arrogance of imperial power.
At the outset of its March 8 cover story “Taking on the Taliban,” Time magazine recounts that Gen. Stanley McChrystal developed a clever plan for the U.S.-led counterinsurgency forces taking Marjah: “He described how these troops would protect the town while a ‘government in a box’ — a corps of Afghan officials who had been training for this moment for months — would start administering the town.”
Three pages and 19 paragraphs later, the article gets around to a less uplifting fact: “It can hardly be reassuring to the residents of Marjah that their newly appointed mayor, Haji Zahir, has only recently returned from 15 years of living in Germany.”
That’s “government in a box” for you — akin to the illusion that war can be sequestered in some kind of container — the sort of feat that’s possible only in fantasies.
Martin Luther King Jr. aptly likened the Vietnam War to a “demonic suction tube.” And demonic suction tubes can’t be boxed. In the real world, war’s ripple effects lead to a kaleidoscope of terrible consequences, near and far. You can’t keep a war in a box any more than you can deliver a government in a box.
With enthusiasm for war thriving on abstraction, its facile backers are eager to cheer on activities that bring terror, anguish and death as a matter of course.
That’s what Congresswoman Barbara Lee was driving at when she spoke for a minute on the House floor just before the blank check for carnage in Afghanistan sailed through Congress with only her vote dissenting. “As we act,” she said, “let us not become the evil that we deplore.”
More than 100 months later, watching video of her prophetic statement may be enough to make you weep.
And it might strengthen your resolve to help end the military occupation that she tried to prevent.
– Norman Solomon is a journalist, historian, and progressive activist. His book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. His most recent book is “Made Love, Got War.” He is a national co-chair of the Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign.
March 10, 2010 in Feature, Journalism, Politics by admin
By Dan Rather, Dan Rather Reports
I must confess that until recently I had no idea what Twitter was. Even now, I’m not completely sure how it’s best used. When I want to post something, the younger, more tech-savvy people in my office help me out. But I do know this: if you searched Twitter for “Dan Rather” over the past few days, you probably could guess why I feel the need to write this column.
It started this past Sunday when I appeared on Chris Matthews’ syndicated talk show. I’ve known and respected Chris for many years and I enjoy doing his show. I take the train down from my home in New York to Washington D.C. and as I approach Union Station my thoughts often turn to the years I spent covering the Johnson and Nixon White Houses. It was a turbulent time for the country and a formative period for me as a reporter and a young father.
The Washington of that time was a far different place. In some ways it was better: less politically rancorous, more collegial. In many ways it, and the country it represented, was much worse. African Americans were still very much second-class citizens. Women held few positions of power. We smoked more, polluted our environment more, and accepted social mores that anyone who has seen Mad Men knows are embarrassingly outdated.
The news media was also different, so different in fact that I won’t even try to enumerate all the changes. Many who are far smarter and more perceptive than I have written volumes about it. As with the country itself, there were some elements of the press that were better then and some that are better now. There were many more newspapers and they were healthy, full of enterprising reporting. The networks were flush with cash that they spent on their news divisions, supporting large staffs of journalists and bureaus across the country and around the world. Most of the bureaus have closed and the staff has been laid off.
Meanwhile, new forms of journalism have emerged that were unimaginable when I lived in Washington. The online and cable world has allowed a freer exchange of ideas and more access to news. People can scour the New York Times (or the Times of India for that matter) in real time around the globe. If someone reads a fascinating article he or she can share it easily with friends. When news breaks, eyewitnesses have a forum for relaying their observations and insights.
All this is the backdrop for what I said on the Matthews show. I was talking about Obama and health care and I used the analogy of selling watermelons by the side of the road. It’s an expression that stretches to my boyhood roots in Southeast Texas, when country highways were lined with stands manned by sellers of all races. Now of course watermelons have become a stereotype for African Americans and so my analogy entered a charged environment. I’m sorry people took offense.
But anyone who knows me personally or knows my professional career would know that race was not on my mind. Reporting on the injustices of race was part of the reason I became a reporter. I grew up in segregated Texas on the same side of the tracks as the African American community. At the time, enlightened people called them Negros. Many people called them much worse. When I covered the Civil Rights movement, I saw sheer hatred in ways that still haunt and shock me. For doing my small part in reporting on the South in the 1960s, I was called a traitor to my roots and other names not fit for print. I was threatened with death by people who would have welcomed me to their church on Sunday on account of my white skin if they didn’t know what I was there to do. I do not take this issue lightly.
I can understand why someone who just happened upon my comments could take offense or want clarification. But what has caused this comment to “go viral” is the trumpeting of an online and cable echo chamber that claims the banner of news but trades in gossip, gotcha, and innuendo. Furthermore, even for those who brook no prejudice, when everything is condensed to 140 characters or a small YouTube clip, many people who got this “news” did so without any context, just a headline that popped up on their phone or inbox.
I know that there are many people who are reading this who have preconceived notions about me. I am sure that the comments section will be filled with a gamut of First Amendment expressions. That is our precious right as Americans. Politics has always been part sport, and if my choice of language falls into the bloody heavyweight bout that has become life in Washington today, so be it. Chris’ show is a fun, freewheeling political talk show and I enjoy coming to Washington to participate. Our republic has flourished because we as citizens can be provocative in our political discussions and challenge our leaders and our own assumptions. There is a time and place for this, but it can’t be allowed to dominate what we call news.
What saddens me is what this experience has made all too clear. Much of what we call news, isn’t. Much of what we Tweet, or post, or chat away at under the guise of news, are distractions.
While I appear on Matthews’ show from time to time, that is not my day job. Together with a dedicated and talented staff, and under the unbending support of Mark Cuban, I put out a weekly news program on HDNet called Dan Rather Reports. If you want to see what I consider to be news, check it out or download it on iTunes. We just did a report on the travails of Afghan women – not the hottest Twitter topic. We also profiled an army unit in Kandahar – our support for these brave young Americans is bipartisan. The show ended with the news of the death of a young soldier at a remote outpost along the Pakistan border. I met him on my last visit to the country at the end of last year. I wish his memory and brave actions were a trending topic on Twitter.
On our show we investigated a U.S. company mining in the Congo, trucking schools in Michigan, Iranian influence in western banks, and an epidemic of youth concussions in sports, among many others. These topics don’t lend themselves to a five minute segment on a cable talk show or a short blog post. But they shape the lives of real Americans and people around the world. Most of the topics we tackle don’t have a Republican angle or a Democratic angle. They can’t be put on the political scoreboard.
The optimist in me believes that we are not as polarized as the partisans on the left and right would want us to believe. They make money on division. I have gotten dozens of letters from viewers for my HDNet show saying that they thought I was a left-wing partisan hack until they sat down and watched our reports. This is not meant to be self-aggrandizing. It is just evidence that if we stopped worrying about political point-scoring and sat and listened to the issues that matter, we would be less distracted and more focused on the problems that we all face and must solve together.
March 9, 2010 in Feature, War & Media by admin
By Gareth Porter, IPS News
For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a “city of 80,000 people” as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marja was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centres in Helmand.
It turns out, however, that the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict.
Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers’ homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.
“It’s not urban at all,” an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marja a “rural community”.
“It’s a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds,” said the official, adding that the homes are reasonably prosperous by Afghan standards.
Richard B. Scott, who worked in Marja as an adviser on irrigation for the U.S. Agency for International Development as recently as 2005, agrees that Marja has nothing that could be mistaken as being urban. It is an “agricultural district” with a “scattered series of farmers’ markets,” Scott told IPS in a telephone interview.
The ISAF official said the only population numbering tens of thousands associated with Marja is spread across many villages and almost 200 square kilometres, or about 125 square miles.
Marja has never even been incorporated, according to the official, but there are now plans to formalise its status as an actual “district” of Helmand Province.
The official admitted that the confusion about Marja’s population was facilitated by the fact that the name has been used both for the relatively large agricultural area and for a specific location where farmers have gathered for markets.
However, the name Marja “was most closely associated” with the more specific location, where there are also a mosque and a few shops.
That very limited area was the apparent objective of “Operation Moshtarak”, to which 7,500 U.S., NATO and Afghan troops were committed amid the most intense publicity given any battle since the beginning of the war.
So how did the fiction that Marja is a city of 80,000 people get started?
The idea was passed on to the news media by the U.S. Marines in southern Helmand. The earliest references in news stories to Marja as a city with a large population have a common origin in a briefing given Feb. 2 by officials at Camp Leatherneck, the U.S. Marine base there.
The Associated Press published an article the same day quoting “Marine commanders” as saying that they expected 400 to 1,000 insurgents to be “holed up” in the “southern Afghan town of 80,000 people.” That language evoked an image of house to house urban street fighting.
The same story said Marja was “the biggest town under Taliban control” and called it the “linchpin of the militants’ logistical and opium-smuggling network”. It gave the figure of 125,000 for the population living in “the town and surrounding villages”. ABC news followed with a story the next day referring to the “city of Marja” and claiming that the city and the surrounding area “are more heavily populated, urban and dense than other places the Marines have so far been able to clear and hold.”
The rest of the news media fell into line with that image of the bustling, urbanised Marja in subsequent stories, often using “town” and “city” interchangeably. Time magazine wrote about the “town of 80,000″ Feb. 9, and the Washington Post did the same Feb. 11.
As “Operation Moshtarak” began, U.S. military spokesmen were portraying Marja as an urbanised population centre. On Feb. 14, on the second day of the offensive, Marine spokesman Lt. Josh Diddams said the Marines were “in the majority of the city at this point.”
He also used language that conjured images of urban fighting, referring to the insurgents holding some “neighbourhoods”.
A few days into the offensive, some reporters began to refer to a “region”, but only created confusion rather than clearing the matter up. CNN managed to refer to Marja twice as a “region” and once as “the city” in the same Feb. 15 article, without any explanation for the apparent contradiction.
The Associated Press further confused the issue in a Feb. 21 story, referring to “three markets in town – which covers 80 square miles….”
A “town” with an area of 80 square miles would be bigger than such U.S. cities as Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh and Cleveland. But AP failed to notice that something was seriously wrong with that reference.
Long after other media had stopped characterising Marja as a city, the New York Times was still referring to Marja as “a city of 80,000″, in a Feb. 26 dispatch with a Marja dateline.
The decision to hype up Marja as the objective of “Operation Moshtarak” by planting the false impression that it is a good-sized city would not have been made independently by the Marines at Camp Leatherneck.
A central task of “information operations” in counterinsurgency wars is “establishing the COIN [counterinsurgency] narrative”, according to the Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual as revised under Gen. David Petraeus in 2006.
That task is usually done by “higher headquarters” rather than in the field, as the manual notes.
The COIN manual asserts that news media “directly influence the attitude of key audiences toward counterinsurgents, their operations and the opposing insurgency.” The manual refers to “a war of perceptions…conducted continuously using the news media.”
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of ISAF, was clearly preparing to wage such a war in advance of the Marja operation. In remarks made just before the offensive began, McChrystal invoked the language of the counterinsurgency manual, saying, “This is all a war of perceptions.”
The Washington Post reported Feb. 22 that the decision to launch the offensive against Marja was intended largely to impress U.S. public opinion with the effectiveness of the U.S. military in Afghanistan by showing that it could achieve a “large and loud victory.”
The false impression that Marja was a significant city was an essential part of that message.
– Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.
March 8, 2010 in Economy, Feature by admin
By Danny Schechter
Author, The Crime Of Our Time
What Are They Waiting For? Whither Financial Reforms?
What will it take? What are they waiting for? What part of the reality of a systemic crisis that will get worse don’t they get?
How is it possible that after near three years of economic turmoil, with possibly hundreds of TRILLIONs down the rabbit hole—not that anyone is counting or apparently can count—that the geniuses who run our economy still don’t “get” that the sh*t has already hit the fan? How many more jobs and homes have to be lost?
Michael Moore is not the only one predicting a second crash. Paul Krugman is all out of words excoriating the Administration for its tepidness. Nouriel Roubini, who forecast the first meltdown, now says we are in serious danger of a “double-dip,” a lethal combo of rising inflation and deeper recession.
Woe to us if we can’t see the handwriting on so many walls.
The people in-the-know know that nothing has been fixed, that all the stimuli have barely stimulated, that the new jobs bill will never generate the number of jobs that are needed, and that the banks have obscenely been raking in oodles of money thanks to all the financing taxpayers pumped into their coffers.
Even as the Obamaites finally get around to proposing a measure to break up the big banks and erode the notion of financial institutions being too big to fail, we have the New York Times telling us that Congress does not have the “appetite”—that’s the word they use—to tackle even modest financial reforms.
The “appetite” is missing. In the real world of appetites, food companies are recalling unsafe products every day because the food we eat is subjected to federal inspections. Not so for financial products.
The reason? Politics of course, but also the jillions that the financial services industry has “invested” in bill-killing, compromise-making, and just plain corrupting the legislative process.
This past week, the Roosevelt Institute sponsored a conference over at the Time Warner Center called “Make Markets Be Markets” (Makemarketsbemarkets.org), published a book of essays and heard from a who’s who in the world of influential economists and analysts who gave high powered presentations, one after another, each more lucid than the next.
There was enough brainpower in the room to save the economy, but, alas, no one seems to be listening. Some business media were there collecting sound bites, but the urgency of the warnings did not transcend the limits of the bubble of financial journalism.
For a long time, I wined about being ignored in not getting heard on the economic collapse, which of course, I am, but here were people with Nobel Prizes and PhDs and track records of making millions also being dissed and pissed.
Setting the stage was Joe Stiglitz, who won a Nobel Prize for his work, and who left the World Bank with disgust over what they do. Stiglitz should be in Obama’s cabinet. Instead, he is one of its critics.
The presentations started off with Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the IMF, talking about the DOOM CYCLE—how we are just going around in cycles without really addressing the systemic nature of the crisis. He writes in the NY Times and on BaselineScenario.com, which you should read every day. He calls the cycle “unsustainable and crazy” and says that “the destructive power of the down-cycle will overwhelm the restorative ability of government like it did in 1929-31.”
Translation: Here we go again.
And then, there was the super-articulate Raj Date who says we have to get rid of Frannie Mae and Freddy Mac before they get rid of our housing market. His analysis was detailed and textured. His conclusion simple: “they must be eliminated.” What is the Obama Administration doing about this? Nada.
It got better when the only woman on the panel, Harvard’s Elizabeth Warren mesmerized the room. She has become a TV fixture because of how charming, honest and forthright she has been in defending consumers from the rip-offs that we are all menaced by. She is the chairperson of the House oversight committee on TARP and a leading advocate of an independent consumer protection agency. She is now watching as Senator Dodd and some of his GOP cronies try to bury it in the Federal Reserve Bank, a move that many of the conference criticized in light of the Fed’s history of doing so little to protect the rights of consumers.
After all the speakers presented their arguments, there were comments by George Soros, who also criticized the economics profession for missing the crisis, and businessman Jim Chanos who finally brought the discussion around to the presence of massive fraud and criminality in our financial markets. I spoke to that issue, which I have just written a book on and made a film about when I got a chance to ask a question.
All too quietly, Wall Street firms are being sued for their many transgressions. A study by Gary Null found that over $430 billion has been paid to victimized parties by Wall Street firms in over 1500 cases.
Some examples:
* Bank of America has spent $14.9 billion to settle 15 cases alleging various charges such as securities violations and mismanagement;
* Citigroup has spent over $13.9 billion to settle 12 cases alleging various charges including abusive lending practices and involvement in fraudulent activities;
* Merrill Lynch has spent $12.2 billion to settle cases involving various allegations including negligence and mismanagement of funds;
* Morgan Stanley has spent over $5 billion to settle 11 cases involving various allegations including failure to disclose material information to customers;
* Wachovia has spent over $9.5 billion to resolve allegations including misleading investors and conflicts of interest;
* UBS has spent $19.5 billion to settle 6 cases with various charges including misleading investors.
So much information is now out there, but to what effect? What more do we need to know?
There is a time for research and a time for advocacy, a time to try to lobby in the suites and a time for marching in the streets. Students on US campuses and workers in Greece have been battling the effects of the crisis.
It is now time to go after the causes.
The public is open to acting. The most recent Zogby poll reports:
# 32% of U.S. adults say they have ‘considered moving some or all of (their) banking from a large national bank to a community bank or credit union because (they) are unhappy with the policies or behavior of large national banks.’
# 14% have moved some of their banking in the past year from a large national bank to a community bank or credit union.
# 9% of all U.S. adults have moved some of their business from large national banks as a protest.
People are pissed, far angrier than the media lets on. The lines are being drawn. That hard rain is going to fall.
– News Dissector Danny Schechter is a blogger, author and filmmaker. His latest work is Plunder The Crime of Our Time on the financial crisis as a crime story (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com)
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