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Can We “Fix” the Oil and Financial Crisis Before It’s Too Late?

June 21, 2010 in Economy, Environment, Feature, Politics by admin

By Danny Schechter
Director, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time

What’s the Link Between the Two?

It seems clear that BP can’t seem to fix the catastrophic gusher the press calls a “leak,” and that President Obama can’t fix the economy because its problems are structural and won’t respond to soaring rhetoric emanating from his bully pulpit.

Meanwhile, most of the world’s people really don’t get the fix we are all in. I take that back; the million Americans who have just lost their benefits probably do. The deficit hawks voted that down without doing anything about the growing deficit of jobs.

43 members of the Congress and the Senate are tinkering with an increasingly diluted financial “reform bill.” Lobbies like the powerful Business Roundtable have pushed the White House to weaken proposed curbs on executive compensation while former Fedhead Tim Geithner is maneuvering behind the scenes to save dangerous derivative trading from too much regulation.

It is for this reason that financial writer Ilan Moscovitz worries about a coming financial meltdown, writing, “one of the biggest contentions remains what to do about the mind-boggling, vast, and opaque derivatives market owned by the nation’s too-big-to-fail megabanks. The problem is getting worse. National amounts of derivatives held by federally insured banks have risen to more than $200 trillion.”

Hmm…..

And on the corporate crime front, the FBI has busted no less than one thousand plus mortgage fraudsters last week, but has yet to go after the firms that securitized these mortgages and pedaled them with inflated values, or then overleveraged their deals and insured themselves against expected defaults. Most of Wall Street’s financial criminals are still at large.

Gonzalo Lira, writing from Chile, sees a link between BP’s crime against the environment and Wall Street’s crimes against investors, homeowners and workers:’’

“The BP oil spill is part of the same problem as the financial crisis: The BP oil spill and the banking crisis are two examples of the era we are living in, the era of corporate anarchy.

In a nutshell, in this era of corporate anarchy, corporations do not have to abide by any rules—none at all. Legal, moral, ethical, even financial rules are irrelevant. They have all been rescinded in the pursuit of profit—literally nothing else matters.

As a result, corporations currently exist in a state of almost pure anarchy—but an anarchy directly related to their size: The larger the corporation, the greater its absolute freedom to do and act as it pleases.”

In many ways, we have been here before in our one nation under the dollar sign. Economist Gary Gorton of Yale and the National Bureau of Economic Research explains the dark side of a capitalist system that has failed repeatedly:

“Yes, we have been through this before, tragically many times.

U.S. financial history is replete with banking crises and the predictable political responses. Most people are unaware of this history, which we are repeating…..

So, the panic in 2007 was not like the previous panics in American history (like the Panic of 1907, … or that of 1837, 1857, 1873 and so on) in that it was not a mass run on banks by individual depositors, but instead was a run by firms and institutional investors on financial firms. The fact that the run was not observed by regulators, politicians, the media, or ordinary Americans has made the events particularly hard to understand. It has opened the door to spurious, superficial, and politically expedient “explanations” and demagoguery.”

Today’s well-endowed financial institutions use advertising, PR and media influence to downplay their own responsibility. They spin the news to tell us recovery is just around the corner. Former Bank Regulator Bill Black debunks this view in an interview with Yahoo’s Finance program:

“It’s in the interest of the financial community to send this propaganda out,” Black says. “It’s remarkable not that they do it but that it still works.”

In other words, this isn’t the first time we’ve been told “the crisis is over” and that “banks are well capitalized” – and probably won’t be the last.

The professor and former financial regulator foresees another wave of foreclosures and future bank losses of more than $2.5 trillion vs. the government’s $599 billion estimate.”

Eric Von Berg, a California Mortgage Banker, worries that no new regulations are yet in place. Contrary to many media accounts, he challenges the idea Wall Street is too complicated to be regulated.

”Nuclear power is complicated – We regulate that. Why? Because it can blow up in OUR FACES! But finance is not that complicated. Ask a kindergartner: What is a loan? If you lend a classmate a dollar, you expect him to pay it back. What is loan underwriting? If that classmate is unlikely to pay it back, do not lend him the dollar.

Explain a credit default swap to a kindergartner? You offer a quarter to the friend of the kid to whom you lent the dollar, if he guarantees his friend will pay you back. A derivatives market? You go to your fellow kindergartners and take bets on whether the borrower-classmate will or won’t pay his debt. It is not that complicated. It should not be that hard to regulate.”

The failure to regulate is not just a political failure; it’s a sign of the unchecked power by an economic oligarchy that’s bought up our Congress. They dominate the economy through a process called “financialization.”

The President, who is clearly a corporate booster – and recipient of their largess, is now being spanked by major business media for daring to criticize BP. The usually constrained Economist labels Obama “Vladimir “ (After Putin, not Lenin) for attacking economic oligarchs even though BP’s stock price went up after it agreed to set up a $20 billion dollar fund to compensate victims.

I have often felt alone in suggesting there is major criminality behind the financial crisis. Now, several academics like Brown University’s Ross Levine seem to toying with the idea. He writes, “the evidence indicates that regulatory agencies were aware of the growing fragility of the financial system due to their policies and yet chose not to modify those policies, suggesting that “negligent homicide” contributed to the financial system’s collapse.” Negligent homicide is a capital crime!

He adds, “Thus, the evidence is inconsistent with testimonies before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission by Robert Rubin (former Treasury secretary and former director of Citigroup), Charles O. Prince III (former CEO of Citigroup), and Alan Greenspan (former Chairman of the Fed), who claim that the crisis was an unprecedented and unpredictable accident. The crisis did not just happen. Policymakers and regulators, along with private sector coconspirators, helped cause it. …

The evidence indicates that financial sector policies during the period from 1996 through 2006 precipitated the crisis. Either by becoming willfully blind to excessive risk taking or by maintaining policies that encouraged destabilizing behaviors, policymakers and regulatory agencies contributed to the financial system’s collapse. As noted by Senator Carl Levin, “The recent financial crisis was not a natural disaster; it was a manmade economic assault. It will happen again unless we change the rules.”

To their frequent full-page ads, BP has now added a vague phrase of contrition.

“We may not always be perfect, but we will make this right.” Really?
And who will make our economy right?

– News Dissector Danny Schechter directed the film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and wrote a companion nook on the crisis as a crime story. For copies, see Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

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Message from Danny Schechter: A Last Chance, But A Necessary Choice

June 21, 2010 in Feature, Funding Appeal by admin

MediaChannel is down… but not yet out.

No one is missing the vitality of MediaChannel.org more than us.

Yes, times are tough, so we have taken steps to cut our costs. We just closed our midtown Manhattan office, for example, as Rory O’Connor and I have begun working ‘virtually’ as we explore further options and possible partnerships to keep MediaChannel alive in a new form.

We have never been quitters and believe in our mission more than ever.

Just look at how manipulated most of our media coverage is, and how hard it is to get the truth when we need it most. The reasons for our launch a decade ago have never been more urgent as at present.

We appreciate all the wonderful letters we have received from so many readers who relied on MediaChannel for the news not in the news, and diverse global perspectives.

Many have asked us to try again to find a way to keep going.

We are willing to try — but we obviously cannot do this alone. We need your help to keep our work alive and online long enough to find a new solution.

We are out of money but not out of energy OR commitment!

Can we come back? There are no guarantees, but we are willing to try if you are willing to help, if you will make another tax-deductible donation.

You can give online here, or you can just send a check made out to The Global Center, at our new address:

P.O. Box 677
New York, NY 10035
On the memo line of your check please write: “For Mediachannel.”

If we want a say, we will have to pay, to support OUR media in the same way that moguls like Rupert Murdoch have no compunctions about supporting THEIRS.

As Brent Budowsky summed it up: “Beginning with Ronald Reagan in the 1970s, conservatives found large media investors with a movement commitment to issues and marketing savvy that turned masses of movement voters into mass audiences for television, radio and publishing. High-level progressives from Washington to Hollywood have untapped potential to create media power. Liberal investors, Hollywood stars and media moguls can do what conservatives do.”

They could, but they aren’t, in part because we are not pushing them or even supporting the outlets and network we say we respect and rely on.

Think of it as an investment in democracy and in progressive media. Think of it as way to encourage more thinking — and activism.

Think about it,

Help us fight back in these terrible times.

Danny Schechter
Rory O’Connor
David DeGraw
Cherie Welch

4 Comments »

War, Politics and the Economic Crisis: Why We Barely Know What’s Going On

June 11, 2010 in Economy, Feature, War & Media by admin

By Danny Schechter
Director, Plunder: The Crime Of Our Time

In war as in Politics and finance, the real “action” is now covert hidden from the public — deceptive and dishonest.

Defending America covertly has become an ongoing theme for one more TV series. Salute the flag and praise NBC (GE) for its latest effort to persuade the population to accept the kind of secret operations that now drive the war in Afghanistan. Their latest show is called “Covert Affairs” and airs on the patriotically named USA Network.

This fiction is based on faction, glamorizing the work of our unaccountable CIA at home and at war with Piper Perabo who has been promoted from dancing barmaid in Coyote Ugly into a CIA trainee “who is suddenly thrust into the inner sanctum of the agency after being promoted to field operative.”

The dumbed down formula is tried and true , showcasing what TV pros call “the three S’s:” Sex, Spies, and Sensationalism.

It’s a “world of bureaucracy, excitement and intrigue,” the network tells us, on the frontlines of protecting our declining way of life. Doug Limon, an old friend who directed the first Bourne blockbuster is exec producing this propaganda exercise. And if that’s not bad enough, the series about covertly defending America is being overtly filmed in Canada. Toronto gets the jobs, one more reason, no doubt, why we have had a “jobless recovery” here at home.

So much of politics and economics today is a covert affair where public knowledge is blatantly manipulated. For weeks, we were told that political incumbents were toast until they weren’t in the recent election, but few media outlets let the facts get in the way of their Tea Party reinforced and endlessly repeated narrative.

On another big story, 49% of the American public is said to have been convinced by one-sided pro-Israeli coverage of the Gaza Flotilla interception perhaps because it built on long embedded perceptions in which alternative information—make that factual information– is excluded.

Netanyahu’s publicity army got out its video version of the events first even as his military army screwed up while keeping their victims from getting out theirs. The US media dutifully used it as a perception management exercise of demonizing Israel’s critics and boostering the heroism of the IDF’s pirates at sea while keeping the humanitarian aid workers from the media and seizing/surpressing their videos—which are just getting out—a bit late, perhaps too late to change the media frame.

The outsourcing of jobs for actors on TV shows mirrors the wider outsourcing in the economy as a whole. So many jobs are gone and not coming back.

There is a growing number of war jobs while civilian employment sinks. Pro-business propaganda has successfully convinced the Congress that deficit reductions must come before job creation. The National Employment Law Project (NELP) reports:

“The Department of Labor has reported that more than 300,000 workers will run out of benefits by June 12th, the end of the first week Congress returns from recess.”

Economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich attacks what he calls the “Deficit hawks” by arguing that consumer spending is 70 percent of the American economy, so if consumers can’t or won’t spend we’re back in the soup.

He writes, “Yet the government just reported that consumer spending stalled in April – the first month consumers didn’t up their spending since last September. Instead, consumers boosted their savings, probably because they’re worried about the slow pace of job growth ….

So what’s Congress doing to stoke the economy as consumers pull back? In a word, nothing.”

Congress may not be passing new job creation bills but there is something insidious underway as these deficit hawks are said to be beginning to target Medicare and Social Security.

As for financial reform, many media outlets are not sure where that is going either. Example, an editorial in the Milwaukee Journal:

“As Congress works to put the finishing touches on a massive bill to reform the nation’s financial system, it’s a fair question to ask whether the proposed legislation will do what its sponsors claim: reduce the odds of another crisis, protect consumers and ensure that taxpayers won’t be on the hook for a future bailout.

At the same time Heather Booth of Citizens for Financial Reform is mildly optimistic, and chides my pessimism, writing:

“Do think you are not recognizing what was accomplished–while it is important to say that the struggle goes on and the nature of the crisis demands more.

We achieved so much more than anyone thought we could at the start of this fight.

First time there was real fight back against Wall Street. And the bill has gotten stronger, not weaker. We probably will win: consumer protection–still need no carve outs in the future fight to greater enforcement

….There is MUCH more to do: ban naked credit default swaps (the weapons of mass financial destruction), foreclosure (!!!) and community reinvestment, executive compensation, and more. But quite a start and should not be discounted.”

I hope she’s right but, even as no changes have yet been made, there has been a wave of unjustified media optimism as satirized by the Onion which asks, “Could the economy be on the rebound? Here are some other favorable indicators:”

Sufficient supplies of toilet paper in all rest stops between Tomah, WI and Gary, IN Jim Cramer no longer wildly waving a gun around during his telecast

Phrase “Fucking Goldman Sachs” has been dropped almost completely in favor of “Fucking BP.” Alas, this is nothing to joke about as an article on the Naked Capitalism website makes clear:

“It is not a sign of intelligence to repeat a course of action and expect different results. Yet our officialdom is doing pretty much just that on the economic front. Treasury and the Fed in particular seem quite pleased with their success in patching up the financial system with duct tape and baling wire and prodding it into a semblance of operation via massive support, most notably via super low interest rates…

The failure to change the structure, operation, or leadership of major financial firms means they are just about certain to repeat the same behavior that led to mind-numbing bonuses in 2007 and 2009.”

In the meantime, even as an investigation of Goldman Sachs is being broadened, there is still no clamor in Congress or big media to go after financial crime, the story I tell in my film Plunder The Crime of Our Time. (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com)

The sad truth is that the banjsters who have gotten away with the massive theft of our economy are still getting away with it and profiting while so many of us continue to sink.

– News Dissector Danny Schechter offers his “crime narrative” in his book The Crime of Our Time and in the film, Plunder: The Crime Of Our Time. (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.) Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

3 Comments »

Moving & Moving On: It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

May 28, 2010 in Feature, Journalism, Media Freedom by admin

By Rory O’Connor
Cross-posted from Media is a Plural

“You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast…” — Bob Dylan

Go ahead, call me a Sixties retread – others have – but in times of stress or especially when seeking inspiration, I often find myself turn, turn, turning to the music and lyrics of that earlier era… Now more than ever (speaking of Sixties retreads!) I find myself stressed, seeking, and finding the inspiration I need from the songs of my youth.

“The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence…”

Coincidentally, it’s moving day here at Globalvision and the MediaChannel – and moving on day as well, we hope, as the dust and detritus of decades of exhausting, joyous, and, one hopes, meaningful work is carted out along with lots of memories, most of them good. I don’t need to detail again the many crises – from the disruptive effects of the Internet to the media industry’s “lost revenue model” to the recent near-collapse of capitalism to funders’ near-abandonment of the so-called “independent” media sector – that have combined to leave us waiting for the Moving Man to take us to cyberspace. After all, my friend, close colleague and longtime business partner Danny Schechter has already amply dissected the situation on his companion News Dissector blog.

Instead, I’d rather look forward while looking back — back to those halcyon days years ago when Danny and I started Globalvision, out of our mutual desire to employ the skills and techniques we had learned in the commercial media world in service of something beyond the ever-thinner media gruel the bosses there commanded us to serve. Their goal was to gain “eyeballs” for advertisers in order to maximize profit; the oft-stated corporate goals at our newly formed company were instead to “marry meaning with money” and – here’s a blast from the past as well — to “do well while doing good.” If along the way we proved to be a lot better at doing good than doing well, it shouldn’t be too surprising; perhaps it was because, like many creative people turned “entrepreneurs,” we actually had very little idea of what turning those aspirations into reality really involved. If we had, we probably never would have embarked on this magical mystery tour – we’ve been going in and out of style ever since – but we stumbled forward as best we could, trying to learn from whatever mistakes we made in the daily swirl of funding, producing, publicizing and generally engineering an impact for our work while still paying the many financial and psychic bills associated with running a company – even a small one – in the Belly of the Beast that is Manhattan.

“Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun…”

Although we began the company with the idea of making the world’s first global television series –the name Globalvision was but a contraction of “global television” – we soon realized how ambitious such an effort would be. At the same time, we were approached by a handful of South African journalists upset that their stories and images of the liberation struggle being waged by that country’s disenfranchised black majority weren’t making it onto television screens in “the developed world.” The major Western broadcast networks, it seemed, had cut a deal of complicity with the racist regime then in power in South Africa, trading continued access for ongoing silence. It was a mainstream media pattern we would see repeated time and again in the coming years…

In response, we produced a couple of television specials that soon morphed into South Africa Now, a news magazine that appeared weekly for three years on more than 150 public television stations (NOT, however, on PBS, which found our anti-apartheid stance too controversial) and was also broadcast in sixteen other countries. South Africa Now wasn’t “the world’s first global television program,” but it was a start… Explaining why major broadcasters turned away from one of the great journalistic – and moral – stories of the twentieth century is another, longer tale, but embracing it put our fledgling company on the global communications map.

“The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets”

Next, we decided to ramp it up and cover human rights issues worldwide, instead of just in southern Africa. The result was the award winning series Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television, which appeared weekly between 1992-1996 on broadcast systems in sixty-two countries. Once again, despite our best efforts, PBS refused to have anything to do with Globalvision or the series, its’ chief executive infamously declaring human rights to be “an insufficient organizing principle for a television series” — unlike, as I pointed out repeatedly, “cooking, stock tips and purple dinosaurs.” Maybe she was right – more than a decade after going off the air, Rights & Wrongs remains to my knowledge the only television program in the history of the world to be dedicated solely to coverage of global human rights issues…

The antipathy our efforts were consistently met with at PBS surprised us at first. After all, both Danny and I had gotten our starts in television as on-air reporters and producers on the Ten O’clock News at WGBH, public broadcasting’s flagship station in Boston. We had both gone into media work hoping to do something about the world’s problems. But we soon realized that the state of the media itself was one of the world’s problems — that whatever the story was, the other story is always the media story.

“Look out, the saints are comin’ through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.”

So our focus shifted again, this time away from the Master Control-oriented television industry and its fearful gatekeepers, intent on keeping us away from our potential audience. Instead, we moved on to a newly emerging century and a newly emerging media ecology, with the Internet and its lower barrier to entry offering easier, direct access to audiences. We also began to pay more focused attention to the subject of the media system itself, with a newly created Internet “supersite” and media news aggregator, which we dubbed the MediaChannel.

Internet years being much like dog years, the ten-year old MediaChannel is now a septuagenarian, with newer, brasher, more partisan, polarized and “hipper” celebrity-and-gossip-oriented competitors suddenly elbowing for space in the newly popular field of media reporting and criticism. Along the way, we participated in and helped push forward a much-needed media reform movement.

We also caught and got caught up in the tail end of the dot-com boom, formed a “new media” subsidiary with the visionary Italian publisher Leonardo Mondadori, attracted investment, doubled in size and then watched our efforts go up in smoke as, in short order, the bubble burst, our partner passed away, and the Twin Towers came tumbling down just a few short and smoky miles from our offices in Times Square…

“The carpet, too, is moving under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue”

Flash forward to 2003 and Kabul, where I was working on a film about the plight of Afghan women and trying to convince the same mainstream media that had ignored South Africa to let me cover the country George Bush had just invaded and occupied. The media executives had, however, seemingly lost interest in the country that had harbored the masterminds of 9/11; instead they were intent on cheerleading Bush’s coming war in Iraq – a story of complicity and cowardice that Globalvision told the following year in the aptly named documentary film WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, and then amplified two years later in the film 911: Press for Truth.

“Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you”

Meanwhile, a rich young real estate magnate Danny met at the Nantucket Film Festival began to tell us horrors of the housing market, and suggested it might be fertile territory for investigation. By virtue of his backing, and Danny’s indomitability, we managed to produce two films about the American way of debt, and the impending collapse of the financial system: the 2006 In Debt We Trust (with its prescient subtitle America Before the Bubble Bursts) and this year’s Plunder, about the “Crime of Our Time.”

Meanwhile, however, back at the ranch times were tough and getting tougher. Grant money had largely dried up; investors were running for the hills, and the rent kept rising inexorably… Although we had gotten a lot more business-savvy over the years, and had squeezed every last bit of fat (and then some) out of our business operations, it became increasingly difficult to sustain the level of quality and integrity that had become associated with the Globalvision “brand” over the years. The not-for-profit MediaChannel was struggling as well, kept alive only by a dedicated community who sent us contributions every time we asked — thank you all once again! – in much-appreciated ten, twenty and fifty dollar increments that nonetheless never added up to even one previous grant from the likes of the Ford Foundation, which had stopped even returning our calls.

“The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore”

So in the end, to paraphrase the late great Senator George Aiken –another Sixties retread, you could look it up – we’ve decided it’s best now “to declare victory and leave.” The Moving Finger has now writ, and like it, we are moving on. See you in cyberspace!

“Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue…”

10 Comments »

Obama Talks Left To Move Right, As Wall Street Criminals Are Given A Free Pass And Reforms Are Watered Down

May 28, 2010 in Economy, Feature, Politics by admin

By Danny Schechter
Author of The Crime Of Our Time

Is The President The Kind of Leader Chairman Mao Warned Us About?

We now know that it was the Obama Administration, led by the President himself, who used techniques well understood and denounced decades earlier by none other than Mao TseTung.

He talked left, to move right.

In several high profile speeches, he lashed out at Wall Street for its greed and mendacity, proposing financial reforms that appeared to be hard hitting, if only because of the way the lobbyists for the financial services industry squealed about them.

But even as he was feigning left, he and his main economic operative, Tim Geithner, were moving right, to kill off amendments that the bankers hated, like Senator Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a deep audit of the Federal Reserve Bank and the Brown-Kaufman Amendment that would have broken up the six biggest banks in America.

As John Heilman explained in New York Magazine, “Geithner’s team spent much of its time during the debate over the Senate bill helping Senate Banking Committee chair Chris Dodd kill off or modify amendments being offered by more-progressive Democrats.”

He used an old trick: embracing reform publicly while modifying its toughest provisions privately.

No wonder bank stocks went up when the bill passed.

James Kwak praised the Obamacrats skill at political manipulation on BaselineScenario.com:

“The administration is happy with the financial reform bill roughly as it turned out, and it got there by taking up an anti-Wall Street tone (e.g., the Volcker Rule), riding a wave of populist anger to the point where the bill was sure of passing, and then quietly pruning back its most far-reaching components. If anything, that’s a testament to the political skill of the White House and, yes, Tim Geithner as well.”

But guess what, the banksters didn’t really get the flim-flam that was going on. Reports Heilman:

“Today, it’s hard to find anyone on Wall Street who doesn’t speak of Obama as if he were an unholy hybrid of Bernie Sanders and Eldridge Cleaver. One night not long ago, over dinner with ten executives in the finance industry, I heard the president described as ‘hostile to business,’ ‘anti-wealth,’ and ‘anti-capitalism’; as a ‘redistributionist,’ a ‘vilifier,’ and a ‘thug.’ A few days later, I recounted this experience to the same Wall Street CEO who’d called the Volcker Rule a testicular blow, and mentioned I’d been told that one of the most prominent megabank chiefs, who once boasted to friends of voting for Obama, now refers to him privately as a ‘Chicago mob guy.’ Do all your brethren feel this way? I asked. ‘Oh, not everybody—just most of them,’ he replied. ‘Jamie [Dimon]? Lloyd [Blankfein]? They might not say Obama’s a socialist, but they come pretty close.’”

Do any of these “smartest guys in the room” remember that in his last incarnation, Cleaver became a raving right-wing lunatic? In fact, Kwak believes that that lunacy is pervasive on Wall Street, and at the highest levels.

“Forget the whole issue of whether they should be grateful to Obama for first saving their banks from collapse and then toning down the reform bill so it (a) doesn’t break up their banks, (b) doesn’t meaningfully prevent them from engaging in proprietary trading, (c) says nothing of substance about compensation, (d) doesn’t set any hard capital requirements, (e) . . . The fact that they can see the policies this administration is pursuing and somehow think they are “anti-wealth” or “anti-capitalist” is as close to proof as you will find that they are deeply stupid, blinded by their self-interest, or both.”

Stupid or not, there was one Obama policy they liked: The decision not to punish any of them by prosecuting their crimes. Not only will they go scot free, but the structural changes so badly needed to prevent a reoccurrence of this crash were ignored. Thus, there will be new rules, not real reforms or a transformation.

In the world of finance, there is almost a universal insistence that only mistakes were made, mistakes that do not rise to the level of crime. This past week, AIG, the giant insurer, now owned by the government, was told it would not be prosecuted criminally.

At the same time, the Administration is still feigning left — appointing a new financial crimes task force and considering criminal action against Goldman Sachs. Authorities in Britain have gone further, setting up a tough new agency that makes combating pervasive financial crime a priority.

What a scandal inside this scandal. The Financial Services industry spent a fortune buying political influence for deregulating and decriminalizing their industry before the housing bubbled so they could later claim their chicanery and scams were legal.

Then, the investment banks and hedge funds worked with the real estate and insurance industries to commit a massive fraud against the American people while “extracting” trillions for themselves. They then had the chutzpah to criticize homeowners as irresponsible.

Sadly, many of our journalists bought this hype and looked the other way by only focusing on laws that protect investors. We need a full investigation and the use of our RICO anti-conspiracy laws.

Were crimes committed? You know they were.

The FBI found an “epidemic of mortgage fraud.” (These mortgages were later bundled by Wall Street and sold worldwide with misrepresented values provided by crooked ratings agencies.) These subcrime mortgages were insured to protect the investors who knew they were unaffordable. Wall Street profited while 14 million families lost their homes.

The American people are clamoring for justice, but our voices are still being ignored. The President says he is on our side.

Is he?

– News Dissector Danny Schechter directed the film PLUNDER: THE CRIME OF OUR Time (plunderthecrimeofourtime.com) and wrote the companion book The Crime Of Our Time.

Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

17 Comments »

5 Ways to Monetize the Future of News Media

May 27, 2010 in Feature, Journalism by admin

By Lauren Indvik, Mashable

This series is supported by The Poynter Institute’s Mobile Media blog – your guide to the intersection of mobile and media. Sign up to receive the blog in newsletter format and be entered into a drawing to win an iPad at Poynter.org/ipadgiveaway.

online news News () media — including newspapers, news weeklies and TV news programs — was struggling long before the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession.

It was a struggle, however, that many investors in 2006 and 2007 perceived as merely a temporary setback — a setback they attempted to capitalize on by snatching up seemingly undervalued media companies. In 2006, newspaper publisher McClatchy acquired what was then the second largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., Knight Ridder, for $4.5 billion in cash and also financed $2 billion of the company’s debt. In 2007, Rupert Murdoch purchased Dow Jones for $5.6 billion and Sam Zell bought the Tribune Co. for $13 billion — a move he quickly regretted when the company filed for bankruptcy one year later. Following that consolidation, more than 100 newspapers shut down in 2009.

The recession has forced news organizations to face what they have long suspected: Their business models are broken. The advent of the 24-hour TV and web news cycles and the convenience of digital distribution mean that many consumers no longer need or want newspapers and news weeklies. Combined with mounting print and distribution costs and the loss of classified advertising revenue — previously the bread and butter of newspapers — to websites like eBay (), Craiglist and Google (), news media has a serious crisis on its hands.

The numbers are ugly. Newspaper revenue fell 28% in the first three quarters of 2009, after declines of 17.7% in 2008 and 9.4% in 2007. Rounds of pay and staff cuts followed each bad quarter; nearly 15,000 employees were laid off in 2009 alone. Declining circulation also accelerated, dipping below pre-World War II levels — impressive, given that the U.S.’s population then was roughly half of what it is today. As the number of subscribers dwindled, so did the value of print ads on a per-ad basis. Weekly news magazines suffered to a lesser extent; between 2002 and 2009, Newsweek lost 25% and Time lost 18% of its subscribers, while U.S. News & World Report shuttered its print edition and moved its operations fully to the web. What’s more, evening TV news audiences also slid in 2008, even though it was an election year.

As a result, content quality and quantity have suffered, while subscription rates have gone up. Traditional media outfits have been less able to support costly investigative and foreign news items. By and large, newspapers have reduced news pages, eliminated entire sections and closed their Washington and foreign bureaus in favor of outsourcing.

Another problem, of course, is that when newspapers began to put their content online in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they allowed readers to access it for free. That decision has created a major dilemma, because consumers now feel that they have a right to free news content, yet online advertising does not currently generate enough revenue to support the free content model.

These are just some of the many challenges that news media companies are facing. And while this story strikes many as devastating, others find it inspiring. New technologies and business realities are forcing traditional companies to innovate, and new ones — from online news aggregators to Facebook () news groups and dozens in between — are constantly emerging.

Since we’ve already profiled several sites experimenting with creative new business models, let’s take a look at five experiments traditional U.S. newspaper companies have recently developed to innovate and improve revenue.

1. Erect a Paywall

In October 2009, Newsday, a Long Island daily owned by Cablevision, became one of the first non-business papers to erect an impermeable paywall around its website, newsday.com. Charging readers for access to content has been one of the most obvious solutions to declining print circulation and ad revenue, and the move attracted significant media attention as a result.

Newsday.com charged $5 a week, or $260 a year for individual access to its site — expensive when compared to business papers like The Wall Street Journal, which charges $149 per year for full online access. Parts of the site, like the homepage, classifieds, weather, obituaries and stocks, remained free. In addition, all print and Cablevision subscribers — which already made up roughly 75% of Long Island residents (Newsday’s target audience) — continued to have free access to the site. The paywall was accompanied by a site redesign and launch that cost $4 million.

How many paid subscribers did the paper attract during the first three months? A mere 35, netting the paper a whopping $9,000 — which may or may not have made up for the accompanying decline in traffic and thus online ad revenue.

Arguably, the paywall was designed to enhance the value of Cablevision’s existing services. But it also suggests that users do not take kindly to paywalls after having become used to years of free Internet () content — or at least they don’t take kindly to paywalls at Newsday’s price point.

In the next four weeks, The Times’s network of news sites will also go behind impermeable paywalls. Unlike Newsday.com, however, none of the articles will be available for free, and they will not be indexed by search engines. The latter decision might prove damaging, since search engines account for over 20% of upstream traffic to news sites. The Times is making it more difficult for subscribers to find the articles they are looking for — since they will now be dependent on the search engines available at each respective site — and these companies will be losing out on valuable exposure to non-subscribers.

2. Put Up a Semi-Permeable Paywall

Although Newsday has not fared well with the tried-and-true “freemium” model, whereby a percentage of articles are available for free in order to entice a small fraction of visitors to become paying customers, The Wall Street Journal has fared significantly better with it; it currently has the highest number of paid subscribers of all U.S. newspapers and has witnessed steady year-over-year growth even through the economic downturn.

The WSJ’s current model is not perfect, however. Most of the news outlet’s content is still accessible for free via Google, and thus many regular readers do not feel compelled to pay for unlimited access to the site when they can easily slip in the back door.

More dangerously, other sites have avoided linking to the WSJ’s articles because it’s highly likely that their readers won’t be able to access those stories. In fact, a study published earlier this week showed that although the WSJ had more than double the number of print subscribers as The New York Times in 2009, it was not one of the most-linked-to news outlets on blogs, Twitter () or YouTube (). Thus the company has lost, and continues to lose out on, both potential subscriber and page view-generated ad revenue.

The WSJ’s overseer, Rupert Murdoch, has promised that the WSJ’s current set-up will not last.

3. Implement a Metered System

In January 2011, The New York Times will go behind a paywall that is slightly different than the ones set up at Newsday.com and WSJ.com. Instead, the NYT will emulate the Financial Times’s “metered system” model, whereby visitors can read a set number of articles per day (at the Financial Times’s website, the limit is five) before being prompted to pay for further access. The subscription rate for full access to NYTimes.com has not yet been disclosed.

Like the news sites mentioned previously, The New York Times believes it will be more profitable to target the 19% of readers who say they will pay for online news content than to extract revenues from increased page views and/or higher online ad revenues. One thing’s for sure: It’s unlikely that The New York Times will remain one of the most-linked-to news sources on blogs or other social media platforms in 2011 if a paywall is in place.

4. Remain Free

Not everyone is going the premium route. A number of traditional news sites are going after more page views and thus more ad impressions; undoubtedly, many are hoping for a boost in traffic once the WSJ fills the holes in its paywall and the NYT implements its metered system.

The trick for these sites is to generate more page views more cheaply, and the best way to do that is by creating a lot of inexpensive content. The New York Times, in a way, pursued this same strategy when it launched its network of blogs (and when it acquired About.com in 2005). Blog () posts on the NYT’s website do not undergo the same extensive editing process that articles do, and thus more pages are published more quickly and less expensively by the newspaper’s editorial staff and network of paid contributors.

The Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post are both pursuing a more aggressive strategy than the one pursued by the NYT.

As fellow Mashable () writer Samuel Axon detailed recently, The Chicago Tribune has launched a site called ChicagoNow, a site “created by Chicagoans for Chicagoans.” It focuses on local events and culture, as well as national news with a local twist. What’s great from a business perspective is that the site’s 100 daily posts are generated entirely by a network of volunteer bloggers and overseen by a handful of community managers and web developers; undoubtedly, ChicagoNow is much cheaper to produce on a page-by-page basis than The Chicago Tribune’s main site, chicagotribune.com.

The Washington Post is pursuing a very similar strategy, where a small number of curators oversee a network of unpaid writers, but with a political emphasis that is much broader, geographically-speaking.

Both companies are essentially lending their curatorial skills — as well as their brand names — to fuel this additional subset of content. While these strategies will generate more pageviews to monetize, both companies risk damaging their brands if the quality of the content is poor.

5. Create Better Value for Advertisers

Instead of creating more pages to place display ads on, some traditional news companies are seeking more creative solutions to the problems of online ad revenue.

Historically, newspapers were able to demand a premium for advertising because there were limited opportunities for advertisers to run display ads in front of a high-quality audience. Now that the web offers nearly infinite ad space, display advertising has become a commodity and newspapers find it difficult to compete with ad networks that specialize in more efficient, targeted advertising packages across multiple platforms. As Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 recently pointed out, news sites need to work on coming up with premium ad solutions — something no one else on the web can offer. These companies need “to create REAL consumer value,” Karp argues, “the kind of value that complements and even enhances the value of high quality editorial content; the kind of value that high-end brand publishers specialize in creating.” Microsites and front page takeovers are simply not going to cut it.

Recently, I spoke with Chadi Irani, the online manager of The Palm Beach Post. Like many other traditional news organizations, The Palm Beach Post has suffered from declining print circulation and advertising revenue. Local advertisers are no longer interested in what Irani describes as “the old-fashioned, standard [ad] packages we used to throw out.”

What local businesses need, Irani has discovered, are not advertising solutions in the form of display advertising packages, but advertising partners. These businesses don’t understand how to advertise online and they want advice.

A few years ago, Irani and his team began blogging and holding free seminars in an attempt to educate local businesses about online advertising. They cover topics ranging from how to claim your business on Google to the basics of search engine and social media marketing, yet do not try to sell ad space on palmbeachpost.com during these meetings. Instead, they have positioned themselves as a go-to resource for questions about online advertising. After the seminars, Irani’s team offers free one-on-one website evaluations and a media buy assessment if a business asks for one. “The key thing is to establish ourselves at The Palm Beach Post as the online experts,” Irani explained. “If [local businesses] have online questions, they come to The Palm Beach Post first. We begin with conversations, which leads to a meeting, which leads to further appointments [and] eventually leads to a campaign with us.”

“We’ve opened up a mini-advertising agency here,” Irani said. “We learn about local businesses, have brainstorming sessions and bring them back ideas. They tell us what they like and then we produce solutions based on the goals they select. We didn’t use to listen as much. Now we work hand-in-hand. It’s more about selling the idea than the product.”

The Palm Beach Post has also begun to offer creative advertising opportunities beyond simple banner ads. For instance, realtors can now stream their tweets on palmbeachpost.com to showcase their listings, and nearby restaurants can buy space on the website during lunch hours to tweet their lunch specials. The news site is launching a “What’s For Lunch?” hub soon, where users can browse lunch specials from a large number of local venues via a Twitter aggregator.

Not only has ad revenue picked up, but The Palm Beach Post’s audience has also grown in the last several years, Irani says. Although print circulation continues to decline, the site’s traffic has grown to roughly 40 million page views per month, while its mobile site garners another 600,000.

Irani acknowledged that this model would not scale to large, national or multi-national news organizations. “This is more of a local approach. Most newspapers thrive on their local business, their local partners. Most of the national papers deal with large brands that have agencies dedicated to them. Local companies don’t have ad agencies, so we need to provide those services for them.”

Conclusion

Traditional news organizations have had a lot of issues to tackle in the last several decades, including a decline in readership, loss of ad revenue, the climbing cost of print production and new (digital) models of distribution, among other things previously mentioned.

I spoke with Jay Rosen, a member of the faculty at Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University and author of PressThink, about potential solutions to monetize news media. Because “the business model crisis is actually five or six things overlapping,” Rosen contends, “there isn’t going to be one thing that works. There isn’t going to be one model that replaces the old model.”

“Therefore what news organizations have to do is experiment with lots of different ways of raising revenues and cutting costs. Creative combinations of revenues from advertising, membership events, direct commerce, selling the services, selling the brand in different ways, some unknown combination of things will be successful — but as to what that combination is, I don’t pretend to know,” Rosen confessed. “Instead of placing your hopes on one thing, it’s better to try them all.”

News organizations should continue to cut costs where possible and seek out new, creative streams of revenue to leverage what has always been their greatest assets: the quality of their content and readership.

Do you agree or disagree? How do you think traditional news media can monetize itself?

Special thanks to Vadim Lavrusik for his help with this post.

Series supported by Poynter Institute’s Mobile Media blog

This post is part of a Mashable series providing analysis of how mobile use impacts journalism. The series is supported by The Poynter Institute’s Mobile Media blog – your guide to the intersection of mobile and media. Sign up to receive our blog in newsletter format and be entered into a drawing to win an iPad. Learn more at Poynter.org/ipadgiveaway.

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The Tea Party: At Last a Citizen Movement the Corporate Media Can Love

May 26, 2010 in Activism, Feature, Media Bias by admin

By Peter Hart & Steve Rendall, FAIR via AlterNet

In the first year of the Obama administration, the corporate media suddenly overcame their general aversion to citizen movements that criticize government policies, granting the staunchly conservative Tea Party activists enormous coverage—a decision that seems likely to impact politics for the foreseeable future.

Citizen movements are hardly ever front-page news, even when they have clearly identifiable political agendas and broad public support. But the Tea Party movement—an amorphous, politically incoherent umbrella designation for various strands of opposition to Obama, much of it beset with racism and backed by less-than-grassroots deep-pocket Beltway lobbying groups—has managed to buck that trend, getting the fervent support of conservative media and wide, often uncritical coverage in the corporate media.

The Tea Party name derives from a rant by CNBC’s Rick Santelli (2/19/09), who was furious about the White House’s home loan modification programs. “How many people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgages that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” Santelli barked, making his case with the kind of logic that would later make Glenn Beck such a success: “You know, Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective. Now they’re driving ’54 Chevys. It’s time for another tea party.”

That clip became an Internet sensation, and—so we’re told—a movement was born. Anti-tax protests were organized in numerous cities in mid-April; conservatives complained about the lack of coverage, but the events were in fact well-documented (FAIR Blog, 4/16/09).

The contentious town hall meetings of the summer of 2009 were seen as another manifestation of budding domestic unrest. Lawmakers conducting routine sessions in their legislative districts were faced by dozens of angry, sometimes threatening citizens, goaded by talk radio and Internet organizers into denouncing the White House healthcare proposals as a socialist menace. Most of the protests were rather small, but nonetheless were covered across the cable news channels, reframing the debate over healthcare and putting Democrats on the defensive.

The pinnacle of Tea Party power, as media told it, was Republican Scott Brown’s unlikely triumph in the special election for Edward Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat. A Christian Science Monitor headline (1/19/10) declared Brown “The Tea Party’s First Electoral Victory.” The New York Times reported (1/21/10) that Brown’s win was “the coming of age of the Tea Party movement, which won its first major electoral success with a new pragmatism.” Though it’s not entirely clear what role Tea Party voters played in the election—Kevin Drum argues it was very little (Mother Jones.com, 1/23/10)—journalists seem to have attached an importance and power to the Tea Party movement that is out of proportion with its actual numbers.

Journalists routinely label the Tea Party movement as “populist,” but researchers Chip Berlet (Progressive, 2/10) and David Barstow (New York Times, 2/16/10) point out that, at least at the grassroots level, the movement harbors activists of a variety of stripes, from Ron Paul supporters to Republican Party officials, from longtime militia movement organizers to newly minted political activists troubled by the economic downturn.

It can be hard to discern a consistent Tea Party philosophy, and the contradictions can be glaring. Even some of the movement’s supposedly cherished positions seem up for grabs: Tea Partiers can oppose government spending and Medicare cuts; they can denounce TARP bailouts and make heroes of the likes of Palin, Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich, all of whom supported Bush’s bank-rescue program.

But while journalists have often ignored or downplayed the contradictions, there’s one consistency they ignore in painting Tea Partiers as wholesome adherents to small government, constitutional principles and so on: the movement’s singular and often racialized loathing of Barack Obama.

Indeed, anti-immigrant leader Tom Tancredo, a former Colorado congressmember, was cheered at a Nashville “Tea Party Nation” convention (2/4/10) for declaring that Jim Crow–era voting restrictions would have prevented Obama’s election:

Something really odd happened, mostly because we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country. People who could not even spell the word “vote” or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama.

Coupled with the tolerance of racist signs (e.g., “Obama’s Plan: White Slavery”) and symbols such as Confederate flags at movement events, it makes one wonder why journalists largely avoid the conclusion that racism is a factor in the movement. After all, this would not be the first American movement to channel genuine economic insecurity into racial resentment.

Antipathy toward Obama as a black Democratic president goes some way in explaining why, if the Tea Partiers are really motivated by opposition to government spending, the movement didn’t launch years earlier in response to George W. Bush’s skyrocketing budget deficits.

After months of coverage, one striking fact began to emerge from media’s public opinion polling: Most people seemed to have almost no idea what the Tea Party movement was. But there have been efforts to improve their public standing, as when NBC tried to give them a leg up in a December 2009 poll.

The December 17 headline on MSNBC’s website (echoed in some on-air reporting) read, “Tea Party More Popular Than Dems, GOP.” But the poll found that 48 percent of respondents knew “very little” or “nothing at all” about the populist uprising; how could such an obscure movement be more popular than the two major parties? Well, the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll gave the group a rather upbeat description in their question to the public: “In this movement, citizens, most of whom are conservatives, participated in demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and other cities, protesting government spending, the economic stimulus package and any type of tax increases.”

That a “no tax hike, responsible spending” party you’ve never heard of is more popular than political parties that have earned public mistrust over several decades is not much of a surprise. But that framing was common. After noting that most people it polled had heard little or nothing about the Tea Party movement, the New York Times nonetheless identified their potential base of support (2/12/10): “The level of dissatisfaction with both political parties—and the fact that 56 percent of Americans in the poll want a smaller government—suggests that the Tea Party movement has an opportunity to draw more support.”

The Washington Post reported (2/11/10) that its own poll found that “nearly two-thirds of those polled say they know just some, very little or nothing about what the Tea Party movement stands for.” The Post still added that “the lack of information does not erase the appeal: About 45 percent of all Americans say they agree at least somewhat with tea partiers on issues, including majorities of Republicans and independents.”

So how does a movement of somewhat murky origins and political goals come to command so much media attention? The idea that right-wing agitators could actually elevate the national discourse—despite much evidence to the contrary—was one strand of media thought. In “How the Tea Party Could Help All of Us” (2/15/10), Newsweek editor Jon Meacham explained that the movement was, in part, about getting back to constitutional principles and “the recovery of the spirit of the American Founding.”

The political message of the Nashville Tea Party convention (2/4-5/10) was appealing to many in the press; Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’ “Europe Could Use Its Own Tea Party” (2/11/10) gave token mention to troubling aspects of the movement he was recommending to Europe for its populist “fiscal conservatism.”

The Nashville gathering was heavily covered by the corporate media—an unusual decision given its size (about 600 attendees) and the fact that it was disowned by many Tea Party activists. CNN, nonetheless, reportedly sent a crew of 11 to report on the festivities (Politico, 2/12/10), apparently because Sarah Palin would be making an appearance as keynote speaker.

Palin’s support seems to have cemented corporate media’s interest in the Tea Party. While right-wingers complain of an anti-Palin media bias, Politico’s Jim VandeHei and Jonathan Martin wrote: “The reality is exactly the opposite: We love Palin. For the media, Palin is great at the box office.”

But there seems to be more to it than that; many in the press seem to think that Palin’s supposed popularity is emblematic of a conservative movement that the media aren’t granting enough time. The New York Times’ David Carr wrote (4/5/10) that if the press doesn’t appreciate Palin’s allegedly wide appeal, “maybe we deserve the ‘lamestream media’ label she likes to give us.” David Broder (Washington Post, 2/11/10) applauded Palin’s Nashville speech for its “pitch-perfect populism.”

And that may be the real point: The Tea Party’s right-wing populism is the perfect kind for corporate news outlets at a time when the wealthy elites who own and support them feel threatened by more authentic populist impulses. And for that reason, with or without Palin’s supposed star power, the Tea Party movement is likely to remain a focus of media attention.

On March 12, Politico media reporter Michael Calderone (3/12/10) noted that the Washington Post would assign a reporter to “make sure the movement’s covered fully in its pages.” That’s a level of attention few progressive citizen groups will ever receive from the corporate press.

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Gushing Oil and Voter Anger Top the News (PEJ)

May 25, 2010 in Environment, Feature, Media Analysis, Politics by admin

By Jon Morgan, PEJ

Two stories—one environmental, one political—dominated the news agenda last week, accounting for more than one-third of the mainstream media coverage.

An almost daily series of developments kept the worsening oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in the headlines. It accounted for 18% of the newshole from May 17-23, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

For the fifth week in a row, the Gulf spill registered among the top three stories as oil continued to gush from the disabled undersea well, resulting in vivid images of soiled beaches and dead wildlife. Congressional hearings again provided a venue for lawmakers to question the response of oil company BP and the federal government

Right behind that environmental disaster (also at 18%) were a handful of May 18 elections that provided a glimpse of the electorate’s mood heading into this fall’s mid-term contests—at least as far as the pundits were concerned.

Election coverage was driven in good measure by one sector—cable news—where it accounted for 33% of the airtime studied. The results—which included a defeat for veteran Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter and a victory for Kentucky tea party favorite Rand Paul—provided fodder for commentators on the politically oriented cable talk shows. The result was coverage largely driven by analysis, rather than breaking news.

An additional election-related story also broke during the week. Allegations, reported in the New York Times, that Connecticut Attorney General and U.S. Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal falsely claimed a combat record in Vietnam accounted for another 3% of the newshole.

The economy came in at No. 3 for the third week in a row, at 11% of the newshole. The topic has been losing ground to other stories since it hit a 13-month high of 27% the week of April 19-25. Last week’s coverage was dominated by Senate progress on a bill to reform the regulation of Wall Street.

The fourth story, at 5%, was Iran. Much of the coverage was triggered by that country’s announcement of a deal to ship uranium to Turkey and U.S. efforts to press for sanctions. Another foreign policy related story, a state visit to Washington by the President of Mexico, was No. 5 at 3% of the newshole. Felipe Calderone took the opportunity to speak out forcefully against the controversial immigration law recently enacted by Arizona.

Oil Continues to Gush

Coverage of the gulf oil spill took a number of dramatic turns during the week, marking the second week in a row that the story has been No. 1. In two other weeks since the April 20 oil rig explosion that caused the spill, the subject finished as the No. 2 story.

Last week, the majority of coverage, about two-thirds, concerned the cleanup, containment efforts, and the impact of the spill on the environment or businesses. In a sign that the media narrative had not yet taken on much of a partisan or politicized slant, only about one-fifth of last week’s spill coverage involved the disaster’s political impact.

Last week’s coverage began with some signs of hope. Energy company BP plc announced it had succeeded in inserting a feeder pipe into the leaking wellhead, and was siphoning off some of the spill to a ship on the surface. A May 17 Associated Press account on AOL News reported that more progress was in the offing: “The first chance to choke off the flow for good should come in about a week. Engineers plan to shoot heavy mud into the crippled blowout preventer on top of the well, then permanently entomb the leak in concrete.”

By the end of the week, however, that optimism had faded as news emerged that the amount of oil being collected was not as great as anticipated and efforts to permanently choke off the flow were going more slowly. Meanwhile, scientists reported that official estimates had vastly undercounted the magnitude of the spill and that the crude might have entered a current that would take it up eastern seaboard. <!–[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]–> <!–[endif]–>

The network news shows devoted the most coverage to the subject—25% of their airtime last week. One reason was the strong visual elements that emerged as the oil moved from the open ocean to the white-sand beaches, where it killed turtles, pelicans and other creatures. On ABC’s Good Morning America May 17, an interview with a BP executive was preceded by a story in which a correspondent on location reached into water and pulled out a handful of the sticky crude.

November Comes Early: Voters Show Anger

Coverage of the early primaries and one special election last Tuesday was especially heavy on the cable news programs, which tend to focus on political topics.

Cable devoted 33% to the topic, more than any of the other sectors, while devoting 18% of its airtime to the oil spill. In contrast, the network news shows apportioned their time in almost the reverse pattern: 13% to the political developments of the week and 25% to the oil spill.

The biggest news came from elections held in Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Kentucky. Coverage began well before the first ballots were cast. Jonathan Karl, senior ABC congressional correspondent, told viewers of the May 17 World News that, “This super Tuesday features four big races and a healthy dose of voter anger that could turn Washington upside down.”

The results did shake up the political world. Five-term Senator Arlen Specter, who last year switched parties, lost to a more liberal opponent in the Democratic primary. A senate candidate heavily backed by the Republican establishment in Kentucky lost that party’s primary to Rand Paul, a political neophyte backed by tea party activists. And Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln beat Bill Halter, a labor-backed opponent in the Democratic primary, won but failed to get enough votes to avoid a runoff with him. And despite heavy campaign spending by Republicans, voters in a special election chose another Democrat to fill the seat held for many years by the late John Murtha in Pennsylvania.

The results eluded easy summation, but the Wall Street Journal, in a May 19 story headlined “Primary Voters Rebuke Parties,” concluded that both Democrats and Republicans were swept up in an anti-incumbent tide. The voters, the paper reported, “showed they were ready to sever ties with candidates too closely identified with Washington and its political leaders.”

On the cable talk shows, the analysis varied according to the political inclinations of the hosts. Bill O’Reilly, conservative host of Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” told his viewers that, “The importance of the vote yesterday is that president Obama is no longer a force in electoral politics. He’s pretty much on the sideline.”

“It’s clear that Americans are angry and want change in Washington. It’s also clear that Republicans have an opportunity in November if they can put forth solutions to complicated problems. As for the Democrats, right now, it’s midnight at the oasis,” O’Reilly added.

On the left, MSNBC host Ed Shultz saw a vindication of liberalism.

“Every progressive in this country should be fired up about this now,” he said. “You see, Mr. President, It’s OK and it is time to go left. The seasoned political experts are spinning last night’s results as a win for the tea party and a big loss for the president. Hold the phone. Listen up everyone. The most liberal candidates in Pennsylvania won. Halter and Blanche Lincoln are headed for a run off.”

The Rest of the Week’s News

Coverage of the economy continued to be overtaken by other stories, but still came in at No. 3, at 11% of the newshole. Much of the coverage concerned progress on a Senate bill to overhaul regulation of Wall Street. In all, stories about federal oversight of the economy represented about 40% of the economic coverage.

Two stories related to Iran pushed that country back into the news, with 5% of the newshole. That is the most coverage of Iran since February 8-14 (also 5%) when protests marked the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution and the nation announced it was escalating its uranium enrichment program.

Last week, Iran made news when it announced a deal to ship some of its uranium to Turkey for processing, a compromise that was immediately rejected by the U.S. and its allies who announced an agreement for stricter sanctions against Iran. Most of the rest of the coverage related to three American hikers who were arrested in July after crossed the border from Iraq into Iran. The country permitted a visit by their mothers last week. <!–[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]–> <!–[endif]–>

A visit to Washington by Mexican President Felipe Calderon and his condemnation of a law recently enacted in Arizona to clamp down on illegal immigrants was the fifth- biggest story of the week, filling 3% of the newshole.

Newsmakers of the Week

From May 17-23 the two leading newsmakers, after President Obama, were key players in the May 18 elections.

The President was a lead newsmaker in 5% of the week’s stories. (To be a lead newsmaker, a person must be referred to in at least 50% of the story) Next came Rand Paul, (4%) who not only won the GOP senatorial primary in Kentucky but made news by expressing some reservations about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (He later said he supported the law). Arlen Specter, who lost his primary race as a Democrat most likely ending a long political career, was No. 3, at 3%.

Next on the list of newsmakers came visiting Mexican President Felipe Calderon, also at 3%. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, who Obama fired last week, was fifth at 2%.

About the NCI

PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index examines the news agenda of 52 different outlets from five sectors of the media: print, online, network TV, cable and radio. (See List of Outlets.) The weekly study, which includes some 1,100 stories, is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics the media are covering, the trajectories of that media narrative and differences among news platforms. The percentages are based on “newshole,” or the space devoted to each subject in print and online and time on radio and TV. (See Our Methodology.) In addition, these reports also include a rundown of the week’s leading newsmakers, a designation given to people or institutions who account for at least 50% of a given story.

Jon Morgan of PEJ

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Financial Reform Is Here, But So Is The Problem

May 24, 2010 in Economy, Feature, Politics by admin

By Danny Schechter
Author of The Crime Of Our Time

Banks Are Still Too Big To Jail

I was among those raving about the passage of the financial reform bill. And now I am just raving.

“Unbelievable,” said one advocate who hoped for the best, but expected the worst. He was amazed it even passed. The wise men in the media immediately began making comparisons with the New Deal. The pundits praised the President and the fact that a handful of Republicans did not just say no this time.

Somehow, even the most hard-headed among us realized that something had to be done to bring Wall Street in line, if only because the mood in the country on this issue is practically insurrectionary.

You would think as this big 1500 page “reform” went through — any one want to bet if its strongest provisions will survive the reconciliation process? — the banks would be quaking in their boots. After all, they funded what President Obama called “swarms” of lobbyists to kill it at birth. They denounced it with doomsday language with their rhetoric helping to drive the market down. Oh the fear! Oh, the consequences!

But then, what happened? Were bankers jumping out of windows like their predecessors had when the market crashed in ’29? No way.

WSNS reported what happened:

“Bank stocks soared on Friday, with the share price of JP Morgan Chase, one of the biggest finance houses, surging 5.9 percent and helping drive the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 125 points. Other bank stocks rose sharply: Bank of America up 4.7 percent, Goldman Sachs up 3.3 percent, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Citigroup. The S&P financial sector index was up 3.6 percent overall.

The Wall Street Journal reported the rise in prices under the headline, ‘Financial Stocks Turn Higher After Senate Passes Reform Bill.’

Sounds bad right? HaHaHa! So much for Harry Reid’s boast, “When this bill becomes law, the joyride on Wall Street will come to a screeching halt.” In fact, there is still plenty of joy in Mudville because Mighty Goldman has not yet struck out.

The bankers were encouraged by something else as well: a vow by President Obama “not to punish the banks.” A day later it was reported that AIG will not be prosecuted criminally.

Writes Daniel Gross in Newsweek: “Given what the financial sector put the nation through in the past three years, the case for punitive action was—and is—very compelling. But while there’s stuff in there that the financial sector doesn’t like, the legislation that is now headed to a House-Senate conference is, in fact, relatively tame.”

Gross’s article is headlined “reform without punishment.” The bill’s passage came two days after The Tory dominated government in Britain announced plans for a new agency to fight financial crime. Sorry to say, the United States, under the “progressive” Obamacrats, is moving in the opposite direction. The press is even reporting that the Treasury Department (i.e.) Tim Geithner, is, along with the big banks, against the provision in the bill calling for regulation of derivatives. Watch for that to go in some new compromise.

Two other parts of the “reform,” one that survived the politicking and one that didn’t, should also concern us. First there was the provision that transferred what was first conceived as an independent consumer protection agency into The Federal Reserve Bank, which has shown no concern with protecting consumers. One Financial blogger argued that big financial power vetoed any independent role. His conclusion: “The Giant Banks, Federal Reserve and Treasury Have All Blackmailed America.” Elizabeth Warren must be furious.

Baseline Scenario’s Simon Johnson tells us about what else went terribly wrong:

“After 9 months of hard fighting, financial reform came down to this: an amendment, proposed by Senators Jeff Merkley and Carl Levin that would have forced big banks to get rid of their speculative proprietary trading activities (i.e., a relatively strong version of the Volcker Rule.)

The amendment had picked up a great deal of support in recent weeks, partly because of unflagging support from Paul Volcker and partly because of the broader debate around the Brown-Kaufman amendment (which would have forced the biggest 6 banks to become smaller). Brown-Kaufman failed, 33-61, but it demonstrated that a growing number of senators were willing to confront the power of our biggest and worst banks. Yet, at the end of the day, the Merkley-Levin amendment did not even get a vote.”

The NY Times noted that the lobbyists have not given up in using money to fight restraints on money, “Executives and political action committees from Wall Street banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and related financial sectors have showered Congressional candidates with more than $1.7 billion in the last decade, with much of it going to the financial committees that oversee the industry’s operations.”

Leave it to former Bank regulator Bill Black to get to the heart of the problem:

“In essence, what we have here folks is a characterization of the banks and the government that has assumed the risk profile of these banks as some sort of 1,000 pound men, unable to move without assistance. They have suckered everyone else into the idea that if anything is done to move these overweight, unhealthy ‘persons’ to health they will have a heart attack and kill us all since they sit upon the crossroads of commerce and have sold most folks the idea that they are the heart of the nation and indeed the world.

Given these ‘objective’ circumstance the government is not only beholden to the 1,000 pound persons, but is one of them itself, will do everything to make the rest of us carry them so as to save them the indignity of actually addressing their morbid obesity and the cycle of codependency that enables them all to remain so fat. Anyway you look at it, the too big to fails are not needed and they are dragging our economy into a black hole.”

That black hole is here. The sovereign debt crisis is sweeping the world with another credit crunch on the way. Many economists fear a rise in inflation, and the dreaded “double dip” recession that will sink us even more. Paul Krugman anticipates a ten year decline ala Japan.

The “let’s show the conservatives we love them pragmatists” in Obamaville are floating schemes to privatize public housing while 32 states are in, or are fast approaching bankruptcy.

The plunder goes on, but I fear with the bill’s passage the Democratic Party apparatchiks and the activists they orchestrate, will pat themselves on the back, and move on to the next issue, praising a “reform” that is less than half done. There are few structural changes for what is a systemic problem. The big banks are still deemed too big to jail. Another Times headline sums it up in two words: “BANKS RULE.”

Why is that? A letter writer named Shaun took a guess in a comment on an earlier piece I wrote:

“Why hasn’t anyone been successfully prosecuted for committing the crime Schechter speaks of? Because it’s too big. It’s too big of a problem for those culpable and those currently in charge (Wall Street and Washington) to deal with. Officials would much rather make the crisis a blip in our economic history…

Perhaps, more than the economic crimes Schechter speaks of, the moral failure to prosecute those guilty of monumental crimes because it’s too tough, too big, is the real crime of the century.”

– MediaChannel.org’s News Dissector Danny Schechter directed PLUNDER: THE CRIME OF OUR TIME, a film on the financial crisis as a crime story (plunderthecrimeofourtime.com)

Comments to: Dissector@mediachannel.org

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Has Obama Created a Social Security ‘Death Panel’?

May 21, 2010 in Economy, Feature, Politics by admin

By Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson, Nieman Watchdog

If the press doesn’t ask tough questions and stand up for the little guy, the powerful interests stacking President Obama’s deficit commission will use it to cut the social programs that most help the middle class and the vulnerable.

President Obama and the leadership in Congress have delegated enormous, unaccountable authority to 18 unrepresentative, inordinately wealthy individuals. The 18 individuals are meeting regularly, in secret, behind closed doors, until safely beyond this year’s mid-term election. If they reach agreement, their proposal will be voted on in December by a lame duck Congress, without the benefit of open hearings and deliberations in the pertinent committees and without the opportunity for open debate and amendment on the floors of the House and Senate. Despite the speed and lack of accountability, the legislation will affect, in substantial ways, every man, woman, and child in this nation.

Who are these powerful people and what are their views?

They are the members of President Obama’s newly-formed National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. They lack racial and gender diversity, and more importantly, they lack diversity of opinion. Their mantra is that “everything is on the table,” but their one member who has any expertise with respect to defense spending, for instance, is the CEO of a major defense contractor that devotes millions of dollars each year to lobby Congress for more defense spending.

“Everything is on the table,” they say, but the members appointed by the minority leaders in the House and Senate have made clear that they do not believe that the problems in this country stem from under-taxing, rather from overspending. The one area that they seem to be in agreement on — and which they are in fact, focusing on like a laser — involves programs that help the middle class and those Americans who are the most vulnerable. Even liberal Senator Richard Durbin has stated, “the bleeding-heart liberals… have to…make real sacrifices to strengthen our nation.”

The co-chairs, in particular, seem to have a clear agenda. Even before the commission held its first meeting, Erskine Bowles went on record before the North Carolina Bankers’ Association saying that if the Commission doesn’t “mess with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security … America is going to be a second-rate power” in his lifetime. (And he is already 64!) Alan Simpson, known for giving ugly voice to harsh, ageist stereotypes, described the future of the fiscal commission: “It’ll be a bloodbath. Let me tell you, everything that Bush and Clinton or Obama have suggested with regard to Social Security doesn’t affect anyone over 60, and who are the people howling and bitching the most? The people over 60. This makes no sense. You’ve got to scrub out [of] the equation the AARP, the Committee for the Preservation of Social Security and Medicare, the Gray Panthers, the Pink Panther, the whatever. Those people are lying… [They] don’t care a whit about their grandchildren…not a whit.” (For more about Alan Simpson, see Trudy Lieberman in CRJ: More Words of Wisdom from Alan Simpson.)

We write to raise questions and encourage press inquiry now, before the commission reports, at which point its recommendations could be on track and moving fast. Here are a few angles to explore:

Q. Have the members of the Commission made up their minds, at least with respect to the broad outlines, making the whole exercise simply an effort by elected officials to escape political accountability?

Q. Why is the Commission apparently working so closely with billionaire Peter G. Peterson, who served in the Nixon administration and who has a clear ideological agenda?

Q. Mr. Peterson has been on a decades-long crusade against Social Security. The day after the first meeting of the commission, which focused heavily on the need to cut Social Security, the co-chairs and two other members of the commission participated in a Peterson event that reinforced the same message. A Peterson-funded foundation is supplying commission staff. And Peterson’s foundation is funding America Speaks to develop a series of high-profile town halls across the country to host “a national discussion to find common ground on tough choices about our federal budget.” (For more background about Mr. Peterson, see William Greider in the Nation on Looting Social Security — Part 2.)

Q. Why the urgent focus on Social Security? In the past, Social Security has always been considered under the normal legislative process, with the opportunity for full amendments. According to the program’s actuaries, it is able to pay all benefits in full and on time for over a quarter of a century. Even its most diehard critics, who try mightily to convince the rest of us that the program is in crisis, can’t mount an argument that there is a problem for another five years or so. So what is the rush? What is the need for such an unaccountable, fast-tracked process when one has never been needed before? Why, in spite of the evidence that Social Security is working as intended and that there is growing need for the kind of broad and reliable protection provided under the program, is it being singled out by Bowles and Simpson and seemingly by the White House for a major trimming?

Q. The American public has stated in a number of polls that they prefer to increase the program’s revenue, even if it means them paying more, rather than reducing the benefits that are so vital to almost all its beneficiaries. (See, for example, this May 2005 Gallup Poll.) So why does the commission seem so determined to ignore the views of the American people, and insist that there must be benefit cuts?

Q. The members of the commission wrap themselves in the mantle of their children and grandchildren. Alan Simpson routinely says that he is a stalking horse for his grandchildren. This is good, but what about everyone else’s grandchildren? Especially those lacking privileged backgrounds; those more likely to need strong retirement, disability and survivorship protections as they grow and raise their own families and hopefully eventually reach retirement age? If these commissioners’ focus is on all grandchildren, shouldn’t they be more focused on investments today to ensure that their parents have good-paying jobs and that they can receive a first rate education? Why do they seem so intent on cutting the benefits of that future generation? As Simpson himself has made clear, he intends to spare today’s elderly, which means it is the benefits of the next generation which will be cut.

Q. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, are there efforts to buy off the press? Just in time for this commission, Mr. Peterson, not content to buy access, has now used his fortune to establish his own news service, so the story gets reported his way. The Fiscal Times is likely to be active in reporting about the commission. Given that Mr. Peterson’s son, Michael, has the power to hire and fire the two top editors, will its reporting be objective? Its first effort did not inspire confidence. (See Trudy Leiberman’s Dust up at the Washington Post and Richard Perez-Pena’s Sourcing of Article Awkward for Paper.)

At a time when the nation has near double-digit unemployment, when many responsible economists believe we could, without additional federal spending, experience a deeper recession, it is imperative for the press to ask the hard questions. Our elected officials should not be given a pass on an austerity approach that could have serious, long-ranging implications for all Americans, and particularly those most vulnerable. They have no one to protect them but an open, inquiring press.

– Nancy Altman is author of The Battle for Social Security and co-director of Social Security Works.
E-mail: njalt@aol.com

Eric Kingson is a professor of social work at Syracuse University and co-director of Social Security Works.
E-mail: erkingso@syr.edu