CounterSpin
LINKS: --Iranaffairs.com --"Nukes Aren't the Answer," by Robert Alvarez (Commondreams.org, 2/15/10) read less
Thu February 25 2010
LINKS: --Iranaffairs.com --"Nukes Aren't the Answer," by Robert Alvarez (Commondreams.org, 2/15/10) read less
Thu February 18 2010
This week on CounterSpin: Paid-for pundits. If you've ever wondered who the so-called experts pontificating on cable news channels really are, a new investigation published in the Nation magazine gives you some answers. Reporter Sebastian Jones will join us to talk about the secret corporate PR spinners and lobbyists who pose as pundit—without viewers knowing who they're actually working for. Also on CounterSpin today: Did a local Nashville TV newscast, which featured extremist anti-Muslim propaganda and warnings about the terrorist among us, spark a vandalism attack on an area mosque? Many Nashvillians, including many in the city's Muslim community think so. We'll talk with CAIR's Ibrahim Cooper about anti-Muslim attacks and media responsibility. read less
Thu February 11 2010
This week on bCounterSpin/b: Journalists are lining up to tout the Tea Party movement's relevance and strength, but show little interest in probing its deep contradictions or finding out what actually makes the activists tick. That's why they can describe as populist a movement closely, if fitfully, allied with the corporate-dominated GOP. In her report Mainstream Media's Tea Party Tryst, Sikivu Hutchinson digs a little deeper. Hutchinson, the editor of BlackFemLens.org and a contributor to bBlack Agenda Report/b, will join us to talk about the Tea Party movement. Also on bCounterSpin/b today, before the recent snow storms hit Washington DC the talk was of a different sort of freeze#8212;a spending freeze. The Obama White House announced that it was time to do something to rein in government spending; but military spending was conspicuously exempt from the belt-tightening. Carl Conetta from the Project on Defense Alternatives will join us to talk about the facts about Obama's military budget, and why this conversation doesn't have much of a place in the corporate media. All that's coming up, but first we'll take a look back at the week's press. #8212;bUSA Today/b offered the latest example of Social Security scaremongering, greeting readers February 8 with the headline: Social Security Races to 'Negative': Rash of Retirements Push Fund to Brink. The piece led with the warning, Social Security's annual surplus nearly evaporated in 2009 for the first time in 25 years, though later, readers were told that the program has been accumulating a $2.5 trillion trust fund, and that by a nearly evaporated surplus, the paper means the program took in only $3 billion more in taxes last year than it paid out in benefits. The crisis, though, is on its way and here's why: because the government uses the trust fund to pay for other programs, tax increases, spending cuts or new borrowing will be required to make up the difference between taxes collected and benefits owed. Actually, that Social Security would begin paying out more in benefits is not alarming. In the 1980s, Social Security taxes were raised and benefits were cut in the name of covering the retirement of the Baby Boomers#8212;and, not incidentally, so that the system could loan its surplus to the Treasury Department to cover for Ronald Reagan's income tax slashing. What articles like this leave out is that if Social Security fails to collect the money that it is owed by the Treasury, that would amount to a massive fraud and transfer of wealth, as trillions of dollars specifically collected to pay for workers' retirement benefits would never be used for that purpose. Social Security is projected to have an actual deficit by the year 2037, when the money borrowed from the program is scheduled to be paid back, but many economists argue that this could be addressed with minor measures. Benefits to be Paid as Expected isn't an exciting headline, but it would have been more accurate than anything about Social Security being on the brink. #8212;The bNew York Times/b has been going out of its way lately to give a fair shake to those who believe that global warming is a hoax engineered by a global conspiracy of climate scientists. On February 9, the paper ran a front-page story headlined UN Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege, which reported that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its head, Rajendra Pachauri, are under intense scrutiny, facing accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest from climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists. A few paragraphs down we're told that the most common criticisms have proved to be half-truths, and that the general consensus among mainstream scientists is that the errors are in any case minor and do not undermine the report's conclusions. And so these charges are on the front page of the bNew York Times/b because ... why, again? It's worth noting that the only mainstream scientist quoted in the piece as being critical of the IPCC is Roger Pielke, a political scientist who says he's not skeptical that climate change is happening#8212;but is regularly cited by leading global warming deniers, like Sen. James Inhofe, because of his skepticism about efforts to do anything about global warming. Speaking of Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican was prominently featured#8212;along with Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh#8212;in another bNew York Times/b front-pager on global warming headlined, believe it or not, Climate Fight Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze. This February 11 piece was balanced, in fine bNew York Times/b style, between, on the one hand, those who argued that heavy snowfalls on the East Coast of the United States are evidence that global warming is not happening, and on the other hand, by those who think that's nonsense. #8212;On February 5, the bWashington Post/b's Dana Milbank made a confession: I miss John McCain. Milbank proudly calls himself an original McCainiac#8212;by which he means that he, like so many others in the corporate media, adored the so-called maverick John McCain of the 2000 presidential campaign, the McCain who Milbank saw as a refreshing antidote to partisanship in Washington. But recently, Milbank laments, McCain's been shedding his idiosyncrasies and become a conventional conservative. He's not the only one professing surprise at McCain's conservatism. On February 9, the bNew York Times/b front page broke the shocking news that in the face of a challenge in this year's primary election, McCain has been changing some of his political positions. Jennifer Steinhauer reported that McCain finds himself jammed, moving starkly#8212;and often awkwardly#8212;to the right. But as we've pointed out plenty of times before, moving to the right is hardly awkward for McCain, as his Senate record has been staunchly conservative throughout his career#8212;except for those anomalous years, just before and after his unsuccessful bid for the 2000 presidential nomination, when the press mostly fell in love with him. Wishing for that John McCain to return, as Milbank does, is akin to wishing that a politician would just lie to you one more time. #8212;A few weeks ago we talked about the lack of mainstream media pick-up for an explosive report in bHarper's/b magazine. In the piece, Scott Horton reveals evidence to suggest that three prisoner suicides at Guantánamo were not suicides at all, but may have been murdered by U.S. officials. Well that story has finally been reported in the bNew York Times/b. Sort of. The paper ran a February 1 piece about editorial changes at bHarper's/b magazine, and quoted publisher Rick MacArthur saying that the mainstream media was ignoring his publication. In a letter to the editor a few days later, MacArthur clarified the record; he was speaking specifically about the media ignoring the Guantánamo suicides story. So, just to be clear: The bTimes/b heard MacArthur complain that the Guantánamo exposé was being ignored by the media#8212;a fact that they then proceeded to ignore in their story about bHarper's/b. MacArthur's point about the corporate media blackout was more correct than he thought. #8212;And finally, 173 Toyota dealers in the Southeast have found one way to strike a blow against journalism#8212;they've pulled their ads from local bABC/b stations as punishment for reporting on Toyota safety problems by bABC/b network correspondent Brian Ross The ad agency representing the Toyota dealers says they switched their ads to non-bABC/b stations because of the network's excessive stories about Toyota's safety and recall issues. You can bet the stations benefiting from this change will think twice before reporting too much on Toyota. It would be hard to find a more brilliant demonstration of the structural vulnerability of our corporate-owned, advertiser-driven information system#8212;except for another recent case where the Ford Motor Company paid local Los Angeles station KTLA to run exclusive upbeat reports about Ford in the middle of the station's 10 o'clock news program. According to bLos Angeles Times/b reporter James Rainey, the ads-masquerading-as-news segments exposed KTLA viewers to three nights in a row of shameless puffery about the 'dramatic turnaround' at Ford Motor Co. Payment for the stories, which ran under the segment title, The View From the Driver's Seat, was disclosed at the end of the hour-long news program. When Rainey raised questions about the wall between editorial and advertising with station officials, he was told there was no foul, and given a hustle about how the disclaimers at the end of the news programs were really about a self-produced Ford documentary KTLA was to air the day after the stealth ads concluded. Needless to say, when it comes to corporate advertisers versus journalistic standards#8212;and this goes double when auto makers and dealers are paying for the ads#8212;the corporate paymasters are, as KTLA put it, in the driver's seat. span class=sub_headlineSIKIVU HUTCHINSON/span bCounterSpin:/b Scott Brown's election to the Senate in January and a Nashville Tea Party gathering in early February, have provided big opportunities for journalists seeking to tout and rationalize the right-wing populist Tea Party movement. For instance: On February 11, the bWashington Post/b ran a David Ignatius column calling for a European Tea Party movement; and a David Broder column praising Nashville Tea Party keynoter Sarah Palin's pitch perfect populism. Palin's speech, said Broder, offered the full repertoire she possesses, touching on national security, economics, fiscal and social policy. To try to rationalize a movement that detests government spending and opposes Medicare cuts, that despises the TARP bailouts but makes heroes of one-time TARP supporters Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, is a tough job. The same goes for portraying a movement that is strongly, if fitfully, allied with the GOP, as a populist phenomenon. But how do you make sense of a movement that often makes no sense at all? Sikivu Hutchinson has found a way, and she writes about it in Mainstream Media's Tea Party Trist, a column you can find on BlackFemLens.org. Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of BlackFemLens and a contributor to bBlack Agenda Report/b, she joins us now from Southern California. Welcome to bCounterSpin/b! Sikivu Hutchinson. bSikivu Hutchinson:/b Hi, Steve. bCS:/b Hi. Well, writing about the Tea Party movement, bNew York Times/b editor Sam Tanenhaus cited a Town Hall activist who confronted a politician exclaiming Keep your government hands off my Medicare. [bSH/b laughs] It sounds incredibly ignorant, but to Tanenhaus it showed a deeper wisdom on the part of the activist. We won't get into that mess, but it raises questions about how journalists tell us that Tea Party activists' views#8212;like opposition to government spending#8212;are serious, philosophical positions demanding serious discussion. But is this the most useful or accurate way to understand what drives tea party activists, in your view? bSH:/b Absolutely not, and I think that the media has really abdicated its responsibility to unpack the deep historical legacy that's informing these uprisings, grassroots uprisings as they've been dubbed. You know this is nothing new. I mean, we've seen this before whenever there is the perception that underclass, particularly urban, people of color, women, gays, the disenfranchised are going to be given a place at the table in American society. We've seen these backlashes. I mean certainly during the late 1940s and early 1950s with the emergence of the Dixiecrats that broke off from the mainstream Democratic Party in opposition to civil rights legislation, and that party was helmed by Strom Thurmond. We saw this in the 1960s with the deployment of the Southern strategy by Richard Nixon to try and curry favor with disaffected, independent Democrats and bring them into the Republican fold on the plank of states' rights and law enforcement. And of course we saw this in the 1990s with the election of Bill Clinton and obviously his and Hilary Clinton's derailed efforts to try and bring about healthcare reform. So this is again a very persistent and inveterate strain within a white working class, white middle class sensibility that views the federal government as an entity that is going to, quote unquote, basically take away all of the rights and privileges that they enjoy as white people in the United States. bCS:/b And you're suggesting that the election of Barack Obama, a black Democrat or biracial Democrat, is the trigger here. bSH:/b Absolutely. I mean let's look at the symbolism that was most trumpeted when the Tea Party broke onto the scene. I mean the birther symbolism, the terrorist symbolism, the xenophobic critique and propaganda that surrounded Barack Obama's election and his platform. So we can't disassociate that kind of iconography from this critique of government spending, critique of healthcare, critique of, again this whole dynamic of social welfare. I mean, they're all interrelated and again mainstream and to a certain extent, yes, liberal media have not delved into the deep, institutionalized, racist roots of this particular uprising. bCS:/b Well, Scott Brown's election, we are unceasingly told, signifies the strength of the Tea Party movement, and its positions#8212;opposition to big government, return to constitutional principles, opposition to the healthcare plan, etc.#8212;is that the way you see Brown's election? bSH:/b Yes and no. I mean, obviously the Massachusetts Democratic candidate was very weak and very, I think, inept with regard to trying to galvanize the traditional Democrat electorate in Massachusetts. But there are also a lot of outside forces that descended upon Massachusetts to try and make that victory happen. So I think again these are smoke screen issues, this whole idea of big government being the bogeyman is really just a metaphor for this deep, in my view, white supremacist reclamation. bCS:/b Well, speaking of Brown's election and some of the media wisdom it has prompted, there's another message that has occasionally gotten through, that gets to a point that you've already made. On bMSNBC/b on January 19 pundit Donnie Deutsch described Brown's election as a white male, as getting back to basics, to which columnist Peggy Noonan added, he looks like an American. There was also cheering of Tom Tancredo's endorsement of poll taxes at the Nashville Tea Party event. Do these sentiments better get at what you think represent, what really animates the Tea Party activists? bSH:/b Well, okay, let's look at the demographics of these Tea Party gatherings. How many disenfranchised, working class, unemployed people of color do we see at these rallies and these conventions and these confabs? It's 99.9 percent white. Again it's harkening back to this historical legacy to attempt to recuperate all of the privileges and entitlements that, frankly, European Americans enjoyed as a result of the institutionalization of New Deal social welfare entitlements. I mean, that's the egregious irony in all of this. So if we look at who's really suffering from the recession, from corporate welfare being granted to bailing out banks, if we look at the real victims of this debacle, it's depressed urban people of color, African Americans who are at 15 percent or more of the unemployed, Latinos who are at 12 percent or more of the unemployed. Where are they in the Tea Party discourse and the Tea Party demographics? bCS:/b We've been speaking with Sikivu Hutchinson, the editor of BlackFemLens.org, and a contributor to bBlack Agenda Report/b. Thanks again for joining us today on bCounterSpin/b!, Sikivu Hutchinson. bSH:/b Thank you, Steve. span class=sub_headlineCARL CONETTA/span bCounterSpin:/b In a move that was interpreted by many as an attempt to mollify some right-wing critics, the White House recently announced that they were ready to get federal spending under control, starting with a freeze on certain domestic programs. The details were somewhat scarce, but the exceptions to the freeze were clear. The most prominent#8212;and perhaps the most puzzling#8212;exception was military spending. The fact that the country's military budget would be apparently off the table when it came time to cut costs led to some complaints from editorial boards and a few columnists. But it's hard to have a serious conversation about federal spending without putting military costs front and center. Joining us to do just that is Carl Conetta, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives. His group has released two new reports about military spending and the federal budget. Carl Conetta, welcome to bCounterSpin/b! bCarl Conetta:/b My pleasure to be here. bCS:/b Now, the first order of business might be to get a handle on the level of current military spending, and where we're likely headed in the near-future. I read an op-ed in the bNew York Times/b recently that referred to the likelihood of austere Pentagon budgets in the coming years. That doesn't seem to be what I'm getting from your reports. bCC:/b No, if you take a historical look at it and ignore the current rise, we're looking at a $708 billion budget at the beginning of fiscal year 2011. By the end of the year, it will probably be higher. But if you don't even take that into account and just take a look at future spending planned by the administration, all of it is above the level of the highest years of Ronald Reagan's administration, corrected for inflation, and it's above the highest years of the Vietnam War period. In fact, the president is planning to spend in eight years more than any administration has since the Second World War. And it significantly outdistances his predecessor, George Bush. So when they talk about austerity, you can only be thinking that what they mean is that it's not going to go as high as the Pentagon would like it to go. But in no sense is this austere. This is an unprecedentedly high budget. bCS:/b Now when you drill down into the numbers, which you did in one of these reports in particular, do you find anything that's unusual or something that might explain what's going on here? bCC:/b Well, we identified a number of things that have been driving up the Pentagon's statements of requirements, and I put requirements in quotation marks#8212;we have to do that#8212;because there's actually a lot of room to move here if people so decided. There is the war, of course, the wars. Interestingly they only account for about 20 percent of the current DOD budget. And of all the money added since the low point in the 1990s, with the post-Cold War reduction#8212;and it bottomed out in 1998#8212;since then they've added $2.5 trillion above 1998 levels. About half, just slightly less than half of that, has gone to the wars. The other half has gone to regular peacetime activities. That's an enormous amount. Part of what's been driving it is that the, there's been sort of a, the Pentagon has had a blank check since 9/11. They've spent a lot of money on modernization, buying new equipment, but that has moved in all sorts of directions without much effort to prioritize. Interestingly, there's a huge investment in Cold War programs, programs that have their origin back when the Soviet Union was the principal threat. Those programs came into the post-Cold War period with a lot of momentum, a lot of#8212;they had their own offices, they had a lot of industry investment in them, a lot of political clout, and so they gobbled up a lot of that money. Along come these new wars, and we discover well we don't have what it takes to fight these particular types of wars, so you have to modernize all over again. So you have this layering of modernization programs, one atop the other, without sufficient prioritization, and that comes directly from the Pentagon essentially having a blank check. There is a lapse of accountability here that is as serious as any in the financial realm, but it's not something that draws the same type of attention. bCS:/b It certainly doesn't, and you know, one thing that I have always wondered about and found at least part of the answer in one of the reports was about the use of private contractors in the military. It's something that is only rarely talked about especially in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan, but it does drive up costs. bCC:/b Well, that's right. Well, it's an interesting thing. Contractors can be cheaper than having military personnel or having DOD civilians. The idea here is to save money by essentially hiring people who are not going to have the same type of lifetime benefits. Some contractors make a great deal of money, but a large portion of the contracting labor pool is either foreign or locally, they're at the lower end of the wage spectrum. So this is supposedly an economizing move, but where the big money comes in is this: we've reduced the size of the military and we've filled in behind with all of these contractors. So we've reinflated the budget back toward the Cold War. The workforce today is about as big as it was when we were facing the Soviet Union. The difference is that it's been restructured; a lot more of the workforce is private contractors. And this is really in response to trying to have the military do so many different things. A lot of us think about the military as being smaller, and it is. There's 30 percent fewer DOD civilian personnel directly employed by the Pentagon. There's 30 percent fewer military personnel, but there's 40 percent more contractors. bCS:/b Now, every media outlet, every major media outlet, has a Pentagon correspondent. Is this issue just too big to kind of tackle for a reporter who's doing day-to-day journalism about the military? It seems like it gets, it suffers from a severe lack of attention. bCC:/b Yeah, well I think there's a couple of things going on. You know I think everybody looks for a hot story; everybody looks for the fight that's going on. Republicans vs. Democrats, that's the heavyweight bout. And as it turns out, when you turn to the two parties, really with regard to defense spending overall, Congress divides into three sections. First there are those people who have never seen a budget, never seen a defense budget that couldn't use some extra billions of dollars. The second group don't want to talk about the defense budget. That's most Democrats, principally because they see that it puts them in a politically disadvantageous position. And then the third group is Barney Frank. bCS:/b And what group is Barney Frank in? bCC:/b Barney Frank is the one person who is making a career out of pointing to the need and the possibility for significant reduction in the defense budget. But he's the only one. Because he's coming from a solid district that supports that perspective. I think that narrows coverage. The other thing I think is that it's hard to get, it's hard to get the public discussion out of the schoolyard, out of a way of framing this that is really overly simplistic. And the best example is the current controversy over the freeze. Many discretionary items are now frozen. Supposedly most of the discretionary budget is frozen, except for the Pentagon. And this has been quite controversial. Well, it's a good place to start a discussion, but to tell you the truth, it doesn't go very far. I think you can make a case that defense is privileged and should be privileged. We need security. I don't think there's any question about that. The real question is do we need the amount of money we're spending? It's not whether its frozen or not frozen. It's, do we need this amount of money? And we never get to that discussion, so it sort of stays in a schoolyard level. Things should be even-Steven. And really the conservative response would be, we're at war, how can you say things should be even-Steven? Well, what we show in the reports is that even if you take the war into account, there's an extraordinary rise in spending. The rise since 1998 is equivalent to the Reagan surge plus the Kennedy/Johnson Vietnam War-era surge together. bCS:/b We've been speaking with Carl Conetta; he's co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives. You can find their reports on Pentagon spending at COMW.org/pda. Carl Conetta, thanks for joining us this week on bCounterSpin/b! bCC:/b My pleasure. span class=sub_headlineLINKS:/span --Mainstream Media's Tea Party Tryst, by Sikivu Hutchinson (a target=_blank href=http://www.blackfemlens.org/comm51.html title=BlackFemLens.org/a) --a target=_blank href=http://www.comw.org/pda/index.html title=Project on Defense Alternatives/a read less
Thu February 04 2010
This week on bCounterSpin/b: a special look at the state of the media in America. Every week on bCounterSpin/b we talk mostly about what the media are getting wrong. But the big story inside the news industry is the collapse of the business itself. What are the implications for citizens? What can we do about it? And how concerned should we be about the failures of corporate owners that have done so little to promote good journalism in the first place? We'll talk about all that and more with our guests Robert McChesney and John Nichols, co-authors of the new book iThe Death and Life of American Journalism: the Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again/i. That's coming up, but first we'll take a look back at the week's press. #8212;Barack Obama pledged to do something about the military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy in his State of the Union address, and it looks like that might be happening. It's interesting to watch, then, the way some media outlets talk about gays and lesbians serving openly in the armed forces. Some reports refer to repealing the law as a controversial move; but according to whom? Opinion polls on the question show that, by a wide margin, the public supports allowing gays and lesbians to serve. A Gallup poll from May of last year found 69 percent in favor of the idea. So be on the lookout for reporting that tries to tell you differently. Or take the case of bABC/b's bGood Morning America/b, where on January 31 anchor Bill Weir announced that this issue was very controversial from both sides of the political spectrum. The ensuing interview featured only one guest: an opponent of gays in the military. Though viewers did see a graphic on the screen reminding them that the views they were airing unchallenged were those of a distinct minority of the public. #8212;At the end of January, Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a cable news show, I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. In reporting on Duncan's remark the January 30 bWashington Post/b failed to quote anyone who might challenge the idea that Katrina was a good thing. bCNN/b aired a segment the same day featuring guests Roland Martin, a bCNN/b regular, and the host of Washington Watch, the TV One program where Duncan made the remarks in question; and bCNN/b education contributor Steve Perry, a magnet school founder, champion of vouchers, and all-around public school critic. Martin applauded the progress in New Orleans public schools, citing improving test scores. But Perry, who said he agreed with Duncan, went much further, sounding unhinged as he actually lamented that there could not be more Katrinas for the sake of U.S. education: I'm saying that we can't have a Katrina in all of the 50 states. Nowhere in the bCNN/b segment or the bWashington Post/b report was there anyone to challenge Duncan's remarks or to explain that the reason New Orleans test scores have increased is that post-Katrina rebuilding has largely driven out the poor and black populations who had been so poorly served by the city's schools pre-Katrina. All in all, it was education coverage designed to make you dumber. #8212;There are still some people who think that it's a stretch to talk about class bias in the media. But even when corporate outlets aren't openly endorsing anti-worker policy or calling for tax breaks for the rich, they show just that sort of bias in their taken-for-granted assumptions about how most Americans live. The latest example came from bCNN/b's bAmerican Morning/b on February 1, when anchor Kiran Chetry was interviewing White House OMB director Peter Orszag. Noted Chetry: You also talk about letting tax cuts expire for families that make over $250,000. Some would argue that in some parts of the country that is middle class. Anyone who argued that would be wildly misleading, of course, unless they acknowledged they were talking about some teeny, tiny parts of the country, perhaps a few blocks across. Households that make $250,000 or more a year make up 1.5 percent of the U.S. public. But it shows whose view Chetry and bCNN/b think are worth speaking up for. (To his credit, Orszag replied Well, I guess it's not the parts of the country where I've been.) #8212;David Brooks is a conservative bNew York Times/b columnist who likes to speak for the little people in the red states ignored by the urban media elite. He once criticized Barack Obama for not seeming to be the kind of guy who can go into an Applebee's salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there#8212;which is typical of the type of populist sociology that Brooks regularly offers#8212;in the sense that Applebee's don't actually have salad bars. It's worth asking, though, what Brooks' populism actually consists of besides vague suggestions that people in the more rural, whiter parts of America are somehow more authentically American. In a column published by the bTimes/b on July 29, he laid out a political program of sorts: Calling deficit reduction the issue that unlocks everything else, he urged Obama to force the country to accept common sacrifice. Brooks explained what he meant specifically: Establish your credibility and offer to raise taxes on the lower 98 percent. Now, when you hear people talking about common sacrifice, it's important to remember what's been going on in this country for the last four decades or so: The total output of the U.S. almost doubled, but the typical U.S. family's income rose only about 13 percent. Where did the rest of the economic growth go? Mostly to the wealthiest families#8212;whose average income over the past 45 years has multiplied by a spectacular 27 times. After a long period where the economic gains of the country have flowed almost entirely to a tiny elite, at a time when workers are suffering from 10 percent unemployment, Brooks thinks regular people aren't sacrificing enough. He should go to the nearest Applebee's and see what the folks at the salad bar think of that. #8212;And finally, when progressive historian Howard Zinn died on January 27, bNPR/b's bAll Things Considered/b marked his passing the next day with something you don't often hear in an obituary: a rebuttal. After quoting Noam Chomsky and Julian Bond, bNPR/b's Allison Keyes turned to far-right activist David Horowitz to symbolically spit on Zinn's grave: blockquoteThere is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn's intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect.... Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse./blockquote Horowitz's attack contributed nothing to an understanding of Zinn's life or work, other than conveying that he's disliked by cranky right-wingers. He seems to have been included merely to demonstrate that bNPR/b will not allow praise for a leftist to go unaccompanied by conservative contempt. It's a principle that doesn't seem to go both ways. Take the February 2008 death of William F. Buckley, a figure arguably as admired by the right as Zinn was on the left. There was much to criticize about Buckley, who was a supporter of, among other things, white supremacism in the U.S. South and in South Africa, McCarthyism and the tattooing of AIDS patients' buttocks. But of their six segments bNPR/b aired commemorating Buckley, none included a non-admiring guest. The celebration culminated on February 29 with the words of bWeekend Edition/b host Scott Simon: Emphysema, such an unseemly thing for a man who was so often a breath of fresh air. Howard Zinn will be remembered as much more than that, of course#8212;just maybe not on bNational Public Radio/b. span class=sub_headlineROBERT MCCHESNEY / JOHN NICHOLS/span bCounterSpin:/b With grim economic news all around, the fate of one industry in particular has received more media attention than some others: the media itself. Corporate revenues have tanked; advertising revenue has dropped sharply. Subscriptions are down. Journalists are laid off by the dozens at major national outlets, while some communities have seen their local paper all but vanish or vanish literally. Those that haven't are a shell of their former selves. Solutions for the crisis in American journalism are easy to come by, offered by reporters who are still employed, and those recently terminated. But in an era of rapid technological change, with free journalism available at the click of a mouse, it's hard to imagine a scenario where advertiser-driven media survive#8212;or one where citizens feel like journalism is something you need to buy. Our next guests survey the sorry state of American media in their new book, and somehow remain optimistic about it#8212;and our#8212;future. Robert McChesney is a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the host of the weekly radio program bMedia Matters/b. John Nichols is the Washington D.C. correspondent for the bNation/b magazine. Between them they have written more books than you could possibly imagine; they joined forces to help co-found the policy group Free Press, and they are here to talk about their new book, iThe Death and Life of American Journalism: the Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again/i. It's available now from Nation Books. Bob and John, welcome to bCounterSpin/b. bRobert McChesney:/b Our pleasure to be here. bJohn Nichols:/b Thank you. bCS:/b Bob, let's start with some of the history here. The collapse of the media business can be measured any kind of number of ways#8212;there's probably no need to go over the sorry numbers. But part of the argument you're making in this book is that the causes of the collapse can be obscured or just misunderstood in these conversations. If I had a dollar for every journalist who blamed it all on Google, I'd retire today. You point out that, in the case of job cuts though, big media outlets were slashing staff in the 1990s, and that's when things were good from a profit perspective. So what is the right way of thinking about what got us to where we are today? bRM:/b Well, the right way to think about it is that in the end, journalism's a public good, much like national defense or public education, and that that was obscured for the last century because advertising supported so much of journalism. It emerged out of the blue in the late 19th century and it provided 60100 percent of the revenues of journalism. And what happened in the last third of the 20th Century was that the private firms that produced journalism or news media became increasingly concentrated, they became part of conglomerates, and they were largely monopolistic and uncompetitive markets. And what they were able to do is make more money by slashing back journalists and bureaus#8212;and consumers, readers, audiences, communities had fewer recourse to go elsewhere. And in that context what you saw the rational thing for capitalists, for firms, these big companies, was to keep slashing journalism, make more money in the near term, not worry about the long term, and finally it caught up with them. And then the Internet came along, and all it did really was accelerate the process, and sort of push over the tottering giant and make it irreversible, leaving us in the situation we're in now, where for the first time in a very long time, really in American history, we don't have the resources to provide even a small percentage of the journalism that's required for self-government to work. bCS:/b Now the book is about solutions, obviously, at least part of it, and the options vary. But fundamental to your argument is the idea that government has to intervene in some fashion. And you note that the discussion of subsidies or assistance from the government is usually cut off before it begins, often by journalists. This isn't a big surprise to anyone, given the pro-corporate ideology of the mass media, but what's your response to that to, keep the government out of my newsroom mentality? bJN:/b Sure. Look I've been a journalist since I was eleven years old. I literally started on my weekly paper in rural Wisconsin, and so I was raised in a certain way of thinking that the government's the enemy, you are in this game to go out and speak truth to power. Now what we know, in large part thanks to the incredible work of FAIR and groups like FAIR, is that, for an awfully long time, corporate media hasn't been speaking truth to power; in fact it's actually been stenographic to power. You've exposed that and done terrific work on it. And so then we step back and say okay, well if corporate media isn't doing the job, if the market isn't providing us with a civic and democratic media that sustains our citizenship, how do we get that and how have we gotten it historically? Well, that's why the book is so important, because it really reveals a hidden history of the First Amendment and a hidden history, a stolen history if you will, of the freedom of the press protection. The founders of the Republic, very imperfect men, were thinking about how to shape some sort of democratic experiment. What they understood was people needed information, and so when they wrote that freedom of the press protection into the First Amendment, they understood freedom of the press as a two-fold reality. First, no censorship: you had the freedom to create a journalism that did speak truth to power, that did dissent, that did challenge. But it had to be real. I mean, it isn't just a promise. You don't say, oh you're going to have an uncensored free media; they have to have a reality of it. So that understanding led them to develop massive press subsidies in the form of postal and some printing subsidies that fostered the most vibrant, diverse media this country has seen. In the founding years of this republic, our founders created a media that condemned and attacked them, and it was done with taxpayer dollars, with subsidies. And so what I say to journalists who scream about this is A) corporate media's not doing the job, it's not speaking truth to power, and B) if we go back to our roots, if we go back to our traditions, what we understand is there are ways to have an uncensored free press, but also a press that has the resources and the authority to go after power and challenge it. bCS:/b Now the book points out in several ways#8212;and the comparisons are not always perfect but they're interesting#8212;that you have countries that have more generous public subsidies for their media, and their citizens tend to be better informed. Again, the comparisons are what they are but it's striking to see that government intervention doesn't seem to lead to a propaganda state. That said, people who aren't paying attention to this, who are just listening to some of the argument will say government getting involved that sounds like a bailout, haven't we bailed out ten different industries, didn't we just bail out Wall Street#8212;are we going to walk around to the Chicago Tribute Company with a checkbook and say how much do you need? Is that the idea? bRM:/b Absolutely not. In fact, if you frame the question as do you want to have your taxes raised or take federal money to give money to the big media corporations that have run journalism to the ground, people say no, and we agree. Any public subsidies should go to non-profit and non-commercial media, first and foremost. It's a public good and it should be regarded as such. Commercial media, we wish them the best of luck, we want no interference with them, they should be able to do what they want. But they should absolutely not be getting public money without strings attached or even possibly with strings attached#8212;just stay clear of that. You know, I think the point you raised, Peter, about international comparisons are extraordinarily important. Most Americans are unaware of them. When we think of government supporting media, oftentimes people say, oh that's Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia and Pol Pot's Cambodia and Idi Amin's Uganda. They pick these horror stories of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes that have no civil liberties, no elections, no free political parties, no free media, and the relevant comparisons to us aren't those countries. The relevant comparisons are other democracies, other constitutional republics with legal political parties and civil liberties. If you look at virtually every other major democracy in the world in Asia, in Europe, and in the Third World in some countries, you find extraordinarily large public subsidies of public media, community media journalism relative to the United States. And the numbers, I'll give them to you quickly because they're really astonishing. If you compute on a per capita basis what these other countries spend#8212;countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Britain, Japan, Singapore#8212;if you compute their numbers and put them per capita in the United States, we'd have to spend at the federal level supporting journalism and public and community media between 20 and 35 billion dollars a year to equal them. And we spend currently just around 400 million on all of public and community broadcasts on the federal level. Let me put an exclamation point on that because this is where it gets interesting. Well people said, well then those countries clearly aren't as democratic as us because the government's meddling with their media, that's really a dangerous thing, they'll say. And you know what we realized, we looked at the bEconomist/b magazine, and they rank every country in the world on how democratic it is and how open its governance is, how little corruption there is, how free people are, their civil liberties#8212;the bEconomist/b magazine, mind you#8212;and the top six countries they ranked as the freest, most democratic countries were just about the six heaviest press-subsidizing nations in the world. The United States ranks well below them. Then we looked at Freedom House, a conservative group whose whole mission is to monitor government censorship and harassment of private commercial media, that's its whole reason for existence, and it ranks every country in the world on how free the private press are in each of these countries every year. And it always fits all communist countries go in the Not Free zone, all dictatorships go in the Not Free zone, and in fact, what it does, it puts even countries like Venezuela, which has a free press and an opposition press#8212;but just because the Chávez government criticizes the commercial media, it goes in the unfree press because of the chilling effect. So these people have the sharpest antennae in the world for any sensitive harassment of private media. Well you go down their list of the six freest private presses in the world and they're pretty much in the six most heavy press-subsidizing nations that have those vibrant freest press systems. The United States is tied for 21st. bCS:/b You know you were saying, you were talking about comparing the U.S. to other countries in terms of subsidies, but in your book you also talk about how in the early days of the U.S. that it was in the tens of billions of dollars if you translate the situation. Before the rise of the advertising model, was that all the monies that these newspapers had? Where did they get their other revenue? bJN:/b It was a substantial portion of it. I mean one of the things to understand is that in the early days of the Republic we had a really thriving local media in this country. And the newspaper in Philadelphia, the newspaper in Charlotte, the newspaper in Boston circulated not just locally but sometimes well beyond its turf. And it was all through the mails. Do you know that 95 percent of the mail was newspapers in the early years of the Republic? The postal system was the largest employer, and it was really the circulation department, if you will, the business side of newspapers. It got the newspapers to the people. They had some advertising, it's true. And they also had legals, you know, where the government would buy ads, which we still have to this day, sustaining local weekly newspapers. One of the things we outline in the book is that the driving force for expanding subsidies, postal subsidies and even printing subsidies, was the abolitionist movement. These are the people who said the Congress of the United States will not debate the original sin of the American experiment: slavery. The presidential candidates won't talk about it. We will force this into the dialogue. And it was such a rebel, radical movement that the debates over these subsidies caused riots. Post offices were burned because this was what was in play. And the reason we bring this up is because our vision of subsidies, our vision of some way of getting out and creating the next media system, the media system of the 21st Century is really about saying to the next abolitionists movements, to the next dissenters, the people who really are#8212;be they left or right#8212;but the ones who are really challenging authority: you know, we'll give you the resources to go out and get your ideas in play, the ideas that power and elites won't debate. If we don't do that we're not going to have those new abolitionist movements; we're not going to have reforms and real change. And frankly, we are heading toward a propaganda state. bCS:/b The kind of techno-utopian response to these arguments, I guess is that the technology exists, it's called the Internet. We're at the very beginning of it, and subsidies to old media, or dying media, or dinosaur media is beside the point because you and I can jump online and create a website, get our message out, the tea party movement seems to be organized largely through Internet organizing. How do you respond to people who say it's there and we're just getting our feet wet? bRM:/b It's a very important point, and I think that is the standard response. First people say the Internet killed journalism, then they say its going to solve it for us#8212;it's an interesting argument. The problem with that argument#8212;and we actually spend a whole chapter reviewing what's going on online with journalism, seeing what's working, what isn't, what the problems are#8212;the problem with it is very simple: there's no business model that works, there's no, you know, the number of working journalists who are actually supporting themselves online today in 2010, who aren't affiliated with old medias paying the bills for the working journalist online, could probably fit in this studio, or two rooms this size. So we're talking about hundreds of people at most, if that, who are actually getting full pay for doing journalism online, and it's not changing much. There's no business model. Incredible journalism requires paid labor, and that's the problem. We talked to all these wonderful ventures online, and some of them might employ five, ten, fifteen people, like bTalking Points Memo/b, and there are others like that. But most of them, especially at the local level, are all going dry. They're doing it on volunteer labor. And the truth of the matter is, it's a public good. We can't expect the market to generate it. Advertising is fleeing; they no longer need to support journalism. That era is over. They can go online and find many other options for reaching their commercial ends than supporting journalism. And indeed to the extent bloggers have to turn to advertising, the strong pressure that, because advertisers have all the leverage now, compromises their editorial integrity to the extent that we don't even want advertising to support journalism if we really want credible journalism. We really have to find another way to do it and it's just not happening online. The bottom line is that no one can look at the evidence and say, yeah, we can realistically forecast somehow in the next 20 years we'll have a hundred thousand paid journalists in competing independent newsrooms doing the news online. The current path will have dozens, not thousands or tens of thousands. bCS:/b Well, the book imagines what you guys call a post-corporate newsroom, and it's a fascinating package of subsidies and initiatives that folks will have to read the book if they want to get into. I want to ask you finally, both of you, the question that sort of nags at the back of any media critic's mind, which is we've watched these institutions so fundamentally misinform and disinform the public, they're getting their just desserts now as people flee in droves because the newspaper doesn't offer you anything. How do you deal with the response, which I suspect you probably are hearing quite often, which is if these dinosaurs leave and something new eventually comes in its place, isn't that just a fine development? Didn't we want these corporate media outlets to disappear in the first place? bJN:/b Well, yes, in fact we know your work and love what FAIR's done all these years. You know our work, most of our books have been condemnations of corporate media and what the consolidation of media's done to journalism and so there's simply no question that there's a lot to celebrate in this transition moment. And as we say, if you had a ship that was owned by a really lousy, rotten shipping company, and it was going down, you might say, fine let's let the ship sink. But let's send the Coast Guard out to save the passengers, let's go rescue journalism or at least some concept of a journalism that will serve democracy. The Coast Guard being, by the way, a governmental agency. And, but let's also understand this, and perhaps the most vital thing in this whole dialogue, which is that nothing that we're writing or talking about is saying save old media, save the media that gave us a stolen election in 2000, save the media that gave us a war in Iraq in 2003, save the media that gave us a financial collapse in 2008 with a bank bailout#8212;no, this is ridiculous; of course we don't want to say that. What we want to do is say to Americans, and we've been blown away on this tour#8212;the response to this#8212;what we want to say is that for an incredibly minimal investment of your tax dollars, roughly when we talk about this billions of dollars sounds like a lot but we're talking about three or four percent of the bank bailout; we're talking about twelve weeks in Iraq. For that sort of investment, up front, paying for journalism, getting it out in a diverse, dissenting, uncensored, challenging way, we can avoid the next war in Iraq; we can avoid the next bank bailout, because if we have a civic and democratic journalism that speaks truth to power there will still be journalism that does stenography#8212;we know that#8212;and it's going to exist. Media critics are going to have plenty of work in the future. But we think a little bit of truth has so much more power than a lot of lies. The fear we have, though, is if we don't intervene now, the 21st Century will be defined by such overwhelming power on the side of the lies, that the little bit of truth won't be heard. That's the struggle we're about, and it really is a struggle that grassroots folks get and buy into. The people that don't get it, the only people who don't get it are the elites in politics and media. And so we're going to have to do what we've always done: go out and build a movement, bang on the doors, and make this happen. bCS:/b I hate to ask somebody to follow up on that, but do you have anything else, Bob? bRM:/b Well, absolutely, I do. I think that there's a lot that's actually happening. We're in this free fall collapse. It truly is disintegrating journalism, and we're at the pace now where there will barely be any newsrooms at all except for those going to elite audiences within two or three years. But it will be so small it will be meaningless for the most part. And it's a moment in which political choices are going to have to be made. And since the conventional wisdom is collapsing too#8212;the idea that the Internet will solve our problems, or that corporate media can just direct electronic barbed wire in the Internet and that will solve our problems#8212;those are fanciful ideas that don't add up at all. People are going to be looking around for something that actually will work, and we think this is the only thing that has shown to work historically and internationally. And already in Washington right now the Federal Communications Commission is beginning a notice of inquiry on the collapse of journalism. There are going to be opportunities. People have to go to FreePress.net and FAIR.org as well because there are going to be opportunities for people to participate, say this is what we want from journalism in our society and really begin the groundswell of popular organizing, demand the resources and institutions to give us real journalism, not just corporate propaganda. bCS:/b We've been speaking with Robert McChesney and John Nichols, co-authors of the new book iThe Death and Life of American Journalism: the Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again/i, out now from Nation Books. Thank you both very much for joining us on bCounterSpin/b! bRM:/b Our pleasure. bJN:/b Thank you. Thanks for FAIR. span class=sub_headlineLINKS:/span #8212;a target=_blank href=http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100125/nichols_mcchesney title=How to Save Journalism/a, by Robert McChesney and John Nichols (book excerpt, bNation/b, 1/7/10) read less
Thu January 28 2010
This week on bCounterSpin/b: The Supreme Court ruled 5-to-4 that corporations may not be limited in their spending to influence elections, because they have the same free speech rights as people. Among the many questions raised are not just what this means for elections, but what it means for free speech. We'll hear from Charlie Cray of the Center for Corporate Policy on that story. Also on the program: Amidst the misery, there are a many feel-good stories being reported in the U.S. press about the American role in attempting to bring relief to Haiti. But not all American activities are helping Haitian according to our guest Mark Weisbrot, whose column Haiti Needs Water, Not Occupation appeared in the January 20 bGuardian/b. CounterSpin: Much of the latest reporting on Haiti disaster relief portrays the U.S. as doing its best under near-impossible circumstances, to bring food, water and medical aid to earthquake stricken Haitians. And indeed, many American efforts are giving aid and comfort to Haitians, but our guest, Mark Weisbrot, says the U.S. is in many ways hindering relief. Mark Weisbrot is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Mark's latest piece, Haiti Needs Water, Not Occupation, ran in London's Guardian newspaper, on January 20#8212;he joins us now by phone from Washington D.C. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Mark Weisbrot! Mark Weisbrot: Thanks, Steve, it's always great to be here. CS: Well, Americans including many U.S. journalists have been showing their compassion for Haitians in this latest hour of need, and you come along in this feel good moment#8212;at least for the U.S.#8212;saying the U.S. is in some way hurting the relief effort. Are you some kind of ghoul? MW: No, I mean I'm not the only one. There were public complaints from Doctors Without Borders, from the French government, from Italian government officials, from a number of governments in South America that all said the same thing: that, and especially this was the worst during the first ten days or so, the U.S. military controlled the airport, and they had the overemphasis on security and so they're bringing#8212;we don't know how many they've already brought in#8212;but their goal was 20,000 troops and all the military equipment that goes with that. And at various points there were people, for example from the UN World Food Program, saying that most of the flights were being taken up by the U.S. military. Doctors Without Borders put out a press release#8212;this was the Sunday following the earthquake#8212;saying that they lost three days when they could have been saving people's lives, because their planes with 85 tons of medical supplies were rerouted through the Dominican Republic. So clearly this was mishandled in a big way and it did cost a lot of unnecessary suffering and death as well. CS: So you're saying, just to be clear, that half of the airplanes coming into the Haitian Airport in Port-au-Prince were U.S. military planes for U.S. military purposes, not for aid purposes. MW: That's right. You know, the U.S., I mean some of this is just kind of incompetence, some of it is a view of Haitians that, you know, one of the doctors from Partners in Health described as racist: that somehow the entire country is going to descend into complete chaos and people killing each other if they don't have U.S. troops occupying the country. So they had this idea that first you secure as much as you can, or maybe the whole country, who knows what they were trying to do. And then you establish supply chains and distribution centers, and then you get the stuff in the country. And really the most urgent need in the first few days is just to get the medical supplies and the water where they're need, and if you lose some of it along the way, that's not so terrible. There was some looting, some food was lost through looting, but that's not really that big of a deal as compared to people not getting the lifesaving material. CS: As you mentioned, security concerns go hand in hand with reports of rising crime and violence. A January 17 New York Times headline read Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises. We saw many similar reports of rampant violence, later debunked, in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster. What can you tell us about the stories of violence raging in Haiti that we're seeing now. MW: Well, I don't know how much there is. You know it's very hard to tell. I mean you did have fairly early on General Keen from the Southern Command, who's in charge of the operation saying that there was less violence in Haiti since the earthquake than there was before, and the reports from Partners in Health and doctors on the ground were quite similar to that. So I'm sure there's some, but again, you know, it's not enough#8212;it isn't anything drastically different from what was in Haiti before the earthquake, I don't see any evidence for that. CS: Well, you raise concerns about#8212;among Haitians and other concerned people#8212;about the U.S. military occupying Haiti. We talked about some of those concerns and about the history that might suggest that those concerns are bona fide with Bill Fletcher a few weeks ago. But there's a related storyline that's coming out of Haiti, and that is that the disaster could be a blessing in disguise, and perhaps provide the opportunity for Haiti to remake itself. How does that view fit with the sort of disaster capitalism model? I mean, you wouldn't think Haiti could be rebuilt without poor people, but they've done it in New Orleans, haven't they? MW: Well, I don't know what they're plans are going to be, I've seen some of course but you know, I think the main thing right now, obviously the most urgent thing, is to make sure that this obsession with security#8212;and part of that, of course, is trying to make sure that people don't leave the country and end up here. And part of it is also political in the sense that the government is of questionable legitimacy, and they were supposed to have elections in February, which were rightfully postponed, but they weren't going to allow the largest political party to run in the election, and 15 other parties. So the United States is also concerned with political control any time there could be a rebellion, because so many of the people don't consider the government to be legitimate, and for valid reasons. They mostly boycotted#8212;89 percent according to the official count#8212;boycotted the last election in April because again they excluded the largest political party, which is of course the party of the overthrown elected president that the United States helped overthrow in 2004. So, you have these political matters too, I think, that are most important. But in terms of the reconstruction of the country. It really is related to the question of just even the most basic electoral democracy. In other words, are you going to reconstruct the country without a state, without a government? I mean almost no#8212;a tiny, tiny percentage of any of the aid that's coming in now goes to the government. And there are reasons, of course, that NGOs want to distribute the aid, and there's obviously a lot of corruption in the government. But this has been a policy for a long time of the U.S. government to not help build a functioning state in Haiti. Their total government revenues are about 10 percent of GDP, that's 50 percent less than any number of countries in Africa that are way poorer than Haiti. So the U.S. program for decades now has been#8212;besides having overthrown the government twice#8212;their idea of reconstruction somehow doesn't involve government, and that's going to be a big problem because they're going to need a functioning government. They wouldn't have as many casualties right now if they had any kind of a functioning government. CS: We've been speaking with Mark Weisbrot, co director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and author of the January 20 Guardian column, Haiti Needs Water, Not Occupation. Mark Weisbrot, thanks again for joining us today on CounterSpin! MW: Sure, thank you. read less
Just Plain Bill Show - Attorney, Marine, Patriot, Citizen... | Blog Talk Radio Feed
Just Plain Bill Show - Attorney, Marine, Patriot, Citizen... | Blog Talk Radio Feed