MEDIA BEAT

BY NORMAN SOLOMON

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF JANUARY 20-21, 2007

State of The Press -- And Press of The State

When I look at news coverage after a State of the Union address, I'm often left wondering why media outlets have such difficulty adhering to a central principle of our country's democratic aspirations -- the separation of press and state.

The idea may appear to be simple and clear cut: The press must remain independent of the government in order to serve as a watchdog that challenges state power. But the separation is routinely more apparent than real.

Thomas Jefferson could be derisive toward the press of his day. "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper," he wrote in a letter to John Norvell in 1807. That same year, President Jefferson declared: "The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them: inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors."

But whatever the merits of such scathing critiques, Jefferson was far more profound when he wrote in 1786: "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."

The limits on today's media are not flagrant. But they are insidious. The U.S. government has teamed up with unprecedented concentrations of capital to wield enormous power in tandem with the largest media outlets in the country.

Separation of press and state is far more than a quaint notion or a dusty concept to be read between the lines of the First Amendment. It is an essential space for oxygen in the democratic process. For the press to be deferential to government is akin to the Congress being deferential to the Executive Branch.

Many journalists are ambivalent about their profession's habitual reverence for state power -- reverence that is quite compatible with the usual media sniping at politicians and criticizing of partisan maneuvers.

Reporters and pundits may get tough on individual leaders, but the melding of press and state becomes painfully obvious -- especially when the flag goes up and the troops go into battle.

Days after Baghdad fell in the spring of 2003, Dan Rather -- then the top CBS News anchor -- went on CNN's "Larry King Live" and emphasized his professional allegiance. "Look, I'm an American," Rather said. "I never tried to kid anybody that I'm some internationalist or something. And when my country is at war, I want my country to win, whatever the definition of 'win' may be. Now, I can't and don't argue that that is coverage without a prejudice. About that I am prejudiced."

But on-the-job religious or patriotic faith is a hazard to the integrity of news media. At least in theory, journalists are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads -- thus helping the public to understand on the basis of facts and insights rather than myths and delusions. In practice, automatic faith badly skews the process.

Who can doubt that the failure to separate press and state led to the fawning, craven, opportunistic U.S. media coverage of top government policy-makers in Washington that smoothed the way for the invasion of Iraq? If we want to grasp the consequences of enmeshing the press and the state, we can gauge it in the carnage that continues to make Iraq a slaughterhouse for many Americans and many more Iraqis.

News analysis and commentaries have been as tough on President Bush in recent months as they were obsequious when he was riding high in the polls. But the ebb and flow of a president's political standing and media fortunes are not necessarily indicators of a vigorous press.

The cheers that echo through the House chamber during a State of the Union address may strike us as antiquated and excessive. But they're trivial compared to the concessions that media outlets constantly make toward the government's massive power to override humanistic values at home and abroad.

Our society should implement a permanent divorce between press and state. There should be no intimacy between those who wield state power and those who claim to engage in what Thomas Jefferson called the freedom upon which "our liberty depends."

Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," is now available in paperback. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

They Harass Journalists, Don't They?

We often hear that the Pentagon exists to defend our freedoms. So why is the Pentagon moving against press freedom?

Not long ago, journalist Sarah Olson received a subpoena to testify next month in the court-martial of U.S. Army Lt. Ehren Watada, who now faces prosecution for speaking against the Iraq war and refusing to participate in it. Apparently, the commanders at the Pentagon are so eager to punish Watada that they've decided to go after reporters who have informed the public about his statements.

People who run wars are notoriously hostile to a free press. They're quick to praise it -- unless the reporting goes beyond mere stenography for the war-makers and actually engages in journalism that makes the military command uncomfortable.

Evidently, that's why the Pentagon subpoenaed Olson. They want her to testify to authenticate her quotes from Watada -- which is to say, they want to force her into the prosecution of him. "Army lawyers are overreaching when they try to prosecute their case by drafting reporters," the Los Angeles Times noted in a Jan. 8 editorial.

The newspaper added: "No prosecutor should be able to conscript any reporter into being a deputy by compelling testimony about a statement made by a source -- or go fishing for information beyond what a reporter presents in a story -- unless it's absolutely vital to protect U.S. citizens from crime or attack. This principle should apply whether or not the source was speaking in confidence, or whether or not the reporter works for a media organization."

Olson is a freelancer whose reporting on Watada has appeared on the widely read Truthout.org website and has aired on the nationwide public radio program "Making Contact." (Full disclosure: I was a founder of that program and served as an advisor.) For a number of years, she has been doing the job of a journalist. Now, in its dealings with her, the Pentagon is despicably trying to trample on the First Amendment.

As the LA Times editorialized, "there is something especially chilling about the U.S. military reaching beyond its traditional authority to compel a non-military U.S. citizen engaged in news-gathering to testify in a military court, simply to bolster a court-martial case. ... Sustaining the military subpoena would set a troubling precedent. It's time for the Army to back off."

But the Army hasn't shown any sign of backing off -- despite an outcry from a widening range of eminent journalists, mainstream media institutions and First Amendment groups.

"Trying to force a reporter to testify at a court-martial sends the wrong signal to the media and the military," said the president of the Military Reporters and Editors organization, James W. Crawley. He commented: "One of the hallmarks of American journalism, as documented in the Bill of Rights and defended by our armed services, is a clear separation of the press and the government. Using journalists to help the military prosecute its case seems like a serious breach of that wall."

By sending subpoenas to Sarah Olson and to another journalist who has reported on Watada (Gregg Kakesako of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin), the Pentagon is trying to chip away at the proper role of news media.

Two officials of the PEN American Center, a venerable organization that works to protect freedom of expression, put the issue well in a recent letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates: "If Olson and Kakesako respond to these subpoenas by testifying, they will essentially be participating in the prosecution of their source. Reporters should not serve as the investigative arm of the government. Such a role compromises their objectivity and can have chilling effects on the press."

Writing for Editor & Publisher magazine, Sarah Olson summed up what is at stake: "A member of the press should never be placed in the position of aiding a government prosecution of political speech. This goes against the grain of even the most basic understanding of the First Amendment's free press guarantees and the expectation of a democracy that relies on a free flow of information and perspectives without fear of censor or retribution."

The Pentagon's attack on journalism in this matter is shameful.

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF JANUARY 13-14, 2007

The Presidency Gets Too Much Respect

The upcoming State of the Union address is sure to provide a marked contrast with the one a half-decade ago. Then -- only a few months after the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001 -- President George W. Bush was at a peak of popularity and power. The House chamber shook with cheers led by leaders of the Republican majority behind him, and the news media followed up with accolades that bordered on worship.

Famously, George Washington declined offers to become king of a new country. But regal aspects of the presidency are hard to miss. In modern times, journalists often cite "respect for the office" as reason enough to defer to its occupant rather than get tough with persistent questioning or no-holds-barred news analysis.

Ever since Watergate, the defense of a president who worked his way into a serious political corner has been that the press was in danger of overreaching. While some journalists took inspiration from the Watergate reportage led by The Washington Post during the last two years of Richard Nixon's presidency, a counterattack soon began to deflect media scrutiny and protect the occupant of the Oval Office.

More than halfway through the 1980s, famed Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee mixed pride in his newspaper with a rueful note. He told an interviewer: "You know, initially after Watergate, the public was saying about the press, 'OK, guys, now that's enough, that's enough.' The criticism was that we were going on too much, and trying to make a Watergate out of everything. And I think we were sensitive to that criticism much more than we should have been, and that we did ease off."

A beneficiary of the press easing off was President Ronald Reagan, who basically got let off the hook -- by leaders of the Democratic majority in Congress and by the news media. The Iran-Contra scandal involved secretly selling missiles to the Iranian government and then illegally funneling profits to Contra guerrillas as they tried to overthrow the elected leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Exposure of the scam in late 1986 created a huge uproar.

But the news media backed off -- often with the rationale that the nation could not afford to have another failed presidency. A typical comment came from longtime network anchor John Chancellor, then an "NBC Nightly News" commentator. "Nobody wants another Nixon," he said.

Today, with the scandalous and horrific war policies of the current president causing widespread political opposition in the United States, the news media are providing largely negative coverage of the man who lives in the White House. Some may interpret developments as indicators of a vigorous Washington press corps. But -- far from acting as a brake on the administration's runaway policies -- the news media did much to fuel them.

A lot of the problem can be traced to a journalistic default position of reverence for the presidency, which as a practical media matter adds up to undue reverence for the president. But if it's the job of presidential aides to try to make their boss look good, it should be the job of journalists to pursue truth wherever it might lead.

"Hail to the Chief" should not be a religious hymn. Nor should an incoming president of the United States be shrouded in a mist of hagiography by the time Inauguration Day comes around.

Outsized respect for the office held by the president is ultimately damaging to the First Amendment and democracy. The president is supposed to be working for the citizens of the United States, not the other way around. And journalists should not give the president the benefit of any doubts.

Reporters have a responsibility to pursue important stories, not bury them. Whether the issues revolve around war and peace or undue influence of large corporations in Washington, the press is a potential antidote to the poisons of secrecy and corruption in government. If journalism had been functioning vigorously in our country, the current state of the union would be much healthier than it is.

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF JANUARY 6-7, 2007

THE MEDIA CONTEMPT FOR HISTORYTwo recent deaths have generated huge quantities of news coverage and punditry. The execution of Saddam Hussein sparked numerous retrospectives on his truly evil deeds. And the passing of Gerald Ford led to widespread praise for his essential decency. But in both instances, U.S. journalism overwhelmingly showed a reflexive contempt for inconvenient history.

Hours before the hanging of Hussein, the front page of The Wall Street Journal summed up two sides of the spinning media coin. "Some wondered at the need for such haste," the newspaper reported -- while "others regretted that the narrow focus of his initial trial left unexplored the full range of the decades of Hussein misdeeds, foreign and domestic."

But a fundamentally different concern about Saddam Hussein's legal gauntlet has been widespread in much of the world. Top American officials -- functioning as his captors and orchestrators of the trial that condemned him to death -- were careful to rule out public testimony that would implicate the U.S. government in his crimes.

After all, the murders that led to the conviction and execution of Hussein occurred more than a year before Donald Rumsfeld -- representing the Reagan administration -- shook the dictator's hand in Baghdad. The Washington Post reported at the time, on Dec. 20, 1983, that Rumsfeld "visited Iraq in what U.S. officials said was an attempt to bolster the already improving U.S. relations with that country."

Those relations were indeed bolstered -- with U.S. aid that included sizeable agricultural-commodity credits, restoration of full diplomatic relations between Washington and Baghdad in late 1984, cooperation between intelligence agencies of the two governments, and sale of several dozen high-tech helicopters to Hussein's regime.

As this year began, it was notable that so many U.S. media outlets had no use for such facts as they looked back on the grisly career of Saddam Hussein. The Wall Street Journal was in sync with the constricted range of mainstream media outlets when it merely reported that his trial "left unexplored the full range of the decades of Hussein misdeeds." Key historical facts about U.S. assistance to those "misdeeds" were not only excluded from the American-supervised trial -- those facts were also excluded from the boilerplate American media coverage of the tyrant's demise.

While media outlets were reporting on the aftermath of Hussein's execution, the death of Gerald Ford drew enormous coverage. And soon a story was out that Ford had insisted on embargoing till after his death.

In July 2004, during an interview with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, the former president said that "I don't think I would have ordered the Iraq war." Ford said that he would have pursued other approaches, "through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever." Ford's statements remained secret for two and a half years, until he was no longer alive.

If his words had gone public when he spoke them, American support for the war would have taken a hit. But in recent days, the story of the embargoed interview hasn't dampened the media enthusiasm for the late president's hallowed decency.

Media eulogies lauded Ford as a good man, determined to do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may. But very few journalists probed the consequences of Ford's decision to keep his criticisms of the war under wraps.

In the days after his death, some commentators were so eager to praise Ford that they even tried to depict his moral cowardice with the Woodward interview as a further indication of his moral virtue.

"By speaking posthumously, Ford gave his words greater weight," Peggy Noonan wrote in her Wall Street Journal column (oddly positioned on the newspaper's "Leisure & Arts" page). "He did not insert himself into the current debate, and because he wasn't in the fight he had nothing to gain or lose, no position to defend or attack. And so he could tell the truth as he saw it."

It's best to avoid telling the truth before you die? That seems like a very strange concept -- but no stranger than the contempt for history that pervades news outlets priding themselves on coverage of history in the making.

Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," is now available in paperback.

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF DECEMBER 30-31, 2006

PAST YEAR’S MEDIA WORLD: PROLOGUE TO 2007

In an annual ritual, some editorial cartoonists draw the old year as a battered elder who’s limping off into the sunset while the new year arrives as an innocent newborn. The metaphor is compelling, but misleading.

For an individual, or a country, or the world, the past doesn’t expire. And rest assured—or, more precisely, unrest assured—the key negative dynamics that brought large-scale violence to 2006 will carry over into 2007.

History rarely turns on a dime, unlike real-time media coverage that can swivel and shift with remarkable speed. During the second week of November, in the aftermath of the midterm election, the news media briefly seemed to reach the plausible conclusion that the U.S. war effort in Iraq no longer had enough American public support to make it viable. Yet by the middle of December, the pro-war spin from inside the Beltway had prevailed; U.S. troop levels in Iraq were likely to rise, not fall, in the months ahead.

Comparable to open-field running, the effective twists and turns of media management are eluding challengers and reaching the goal—more war. In the dominant media, a level playing field does not exist. As a practical matter, despite electoral setbacks, the commander in chief retains the high ground of capacity to determine American military actions.

For more than five years, the continuity of U.S. warfare has been matched by the capacity of major media to function as a brake on anti-militarism in our society. The citizens of the United States—the most powerful military power in the history of the world—are entangled in a steely chain of attitudes and institutions. That twisted chain enables the president to prevail even when his zeal for war is opposed by the vast majority of the population at home.

A week before Christmas—while President Bush was signaling plans to increase U.S. troop totals in Iraq—CNN released the results of a new nationwide poll that showed the commander-in-chief was thumbing his nose at public opinion. “Only 11 percent of those polled backed calls to send more American troops to Iraq,” CNN reported.

In contrast, a majority of those polled said they wanted U.S. troops out of Iraq before the end of 2007. Twenty-one percent favored immediate withdrawal, and another 33 percent wanted U.S. troops to leave Iraq within a year.

The new year gets underway with an extreme disconnect between American public opinion and key institutions—most notably, big media outlets and the federal Executive Branch. Along with shattering the lives of combatants and civilians in Iraq, the war that started with the invasion has seriously fractured the democratic expectations of our society.

Among the most injurious factors are the failures of U.S. journalism to fulfill its responsibilities under the First Amendment. Rarely has so much weight been freighted with so few words; fundamental tenets of democracy flow from the constitutional prohibition against any law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” But today, legal restrictions are far less pivotal than the craven conformity that is rife in capital-intensive media industries. Overall, those industries are far more responsive to financial pressures than democratic imperatives.

News media remain central to the circulation of ideas and information. Meanwhile, the current huge gaps between public outlooks and presidential actions—dramatized by the apparently imminent step toward further U.S. military intervention in Iraq—strongly indicate that the American political system has slipped some fundamental gears. At such times, journalism should fearlessly step into the breach. Instead, what we’re getting is a media baseline that maintains a synthetic deference to a president who has forfeited any presumption of credibility.

Will the courage quotient of America’s mainline journalism be significantly higher in 2007 than in 2006? Will the most predominant media institutions rise to the occasion at a time when perpetual war shadows the horizon? Don’t hold your breath. Speak up. If oxygen is going to revive the First Amendment, it will have to come from us.

Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is now available in paperback.

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF DECMBER 23-24, 2006

ANNOUNCING THE P.U.-LITZER PRIZES FOR 2006

Competition has been fierce this year for the fifteenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes.

Many can plausibly lay claim to stinky media performances, but only a few can win a P.U.-litzer. As the judges for this un-coveted award, Jeff Cohen and I have deliberated with due care. (Jeff is the founder of the media watch group FAIR and author of the superb new book “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.”)

And now, the winners of the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2006:

“FACT-FREE TRADE” AWARD—New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

In a press corps prone to cheer on corporate-drafted trade agreements as the key to peace and plenty in the world, no cheerleader is more fervent than Tom Friedman. During a CNBC interview with Tim Russert in July, Friedman confessed: “I was speaking out in Minnesota—my hometown, in fact—and a guy stood up in the audience, [and] said, ‘Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you’d oppose?’ I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I said, ‘You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.’” (Friedman may not have read even the pact’s title; CAFTA actually stands for the Central America Free Trade Agreement.)

LOCK UP THE FIRST AMENDMENT PRIZE—CNN’s William Bennett

Soon after being hired as a CNN pundit, Bennett went on his radio talk show and offered his views on freedom of the press—and on reporters who broke stories about warrantless wiretapping and secret CIA detention sites “against the wishes of the president, against the request of the president and others.” Bennett fumed: “Are they embarrassed, are they arrested? No, they win Pulitzer Prizes. I don’t think what they did was worthy of an award—I think what they did was worthy of jail, and I think this investigation needs to go forward.”

BROKE-BRAIN MOUTHING AWARD—MSNBC’s Chris Matthews

As the movie “Brokeback Mountain” (about a relationship between two cowboys) was gaining attention and audience in January, Chris Matthews appeared on the Imus show to hail “the wonderful Michael Savage” and the talk-show host’s nickname for the movie: “Bareback Mounting.” Matthews and Savage had been MSNBC colleagues until “the wonderful” Savage was fired—after referring to an apparently gay caller as a “sodomite” and telling him to “get AIDS and die.” Now that’s hardball.

CASUAL ABOUT CASUALTIES AWARD—Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch

Echoing an Iraq war talking-point heard regularly on Fox News, owner Murdoch said on the eve of the November election: “The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute.” As FAIR noted, U.S. deaths in Iraq exceed those in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War, not to mention the combined U.S. deaths of all this country’s other military actions since Vietnam—including Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

FRONT-PAGE PUNDIT AWARD—Reporter Michael Gordon and The New York Times

With many voters telling pollsters that they want U.S. troops to leave Iraq, the Times front-paged a post-election analysis by Michael Gordon—headlined “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say”—quoting three hand-picked “experts” who decried the possibility of troop withdrawal. Gordon didn’t tell readers that one of his “experts,” former CIA analyst Ken Pollack, had relentlessly promoted an Iraq invasion based on wildly false claims about an Iraqi threat. Gordon took off his reporter’s hat that night on CNN to become an unabashed advocate for his view that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq would lead to “civil war” (as though civil war weren’t already underway).

“PROVE YOU’RE NOT A TRAITOR” PRIZE—CNN’s Glenn Beck

In November, Beck—an Islamophobic host on CNN Headline News—launched into his interview with Congressman-elect Keith Ellison, a Muslim American, this way: “I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’” Beck then added: “And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.” Is it possible that primetime bigots like CNN’s Beck have something to do with the prejudices “that a lot of Americans feel”?

So, there they are, the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2006. Hold your nose and prepare yourself for 2007.

Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is now available in paperback.

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF DECEMBER 16-17, 2006

THE MEDIA COLLAPSE OF THE IRAQ STUDY GROUP

What a difference seven days can make.

A week after the much-heralded release of the Iraq Study Group report, it was in tatters and sinking into media muck.

The document had arrived with great expectations. The media buildup was effusive and highly favorable. On newsstands, the cover of Time—the nation’s largest-circulation newsweekly—was predicting that the report shepherded by co-chairs James Baker and Lee Hamilton would take the White House by storm. “The Iraq Study Group says it’s time for an exit strategy,” the cover declared in big bold red letters. “Why Bush will listen.”

The actual story in Time was considerably more equivocal. But the cover’s tone captured the gist of the media mood that accompanied the unveiling of the Baker-Hamilton report.

While often depicted as a rebuff to President Bush’s Iraq policies, the report was hardly a prescription for abandoning the U.S. military project in Iraq—as James Baker was at pains to repeatedly point out during a whirlwind round of network interviews.

Hours after the report’s release, Baker told PBS “NewsHour” host Jim Lehrer that the blue-ribbon commission was calling for a long-term U.S. military presence: “So our commitment—when we say not open-ended, that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be substantial. And our report makes clear that we’re going to have substantial, very robust, residual troop levels in Iraq for a long, long time.”

Baker used very similar phrasing the next morning in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America”—saying that the report “makes clear we’re going to have a really robust American troop presence in Iraq and in the region for a long, long time.”

That was Thursday morning, 24 hours into the report’s release, when all the media spin by Baker and Hamilton and their allies seemed to be boosting the Iraq Study Group report—hardly a dovish document. It asserted a continual Pentagon prerogative to intervene in Iraq and elsewhere in the region. And, in a little-noted precept of the report, it said: “The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise.”

In short, the Baker-Hamilton report was a fallback position for U.S. military intervention—and for using American firepower on behalf of U.S.-based oil companies. But its call for tactical adjustments provoked fury among the most militaristic politicians and pundits. Their sustained media counterattack took hold in short order.

President Bush wriggled away from the panel’s key recommendations—gradual withdrawal of many U.S. troops from Iraq and willingness to hold diplomatic talks with Syria and Iran. War enthusiasts like Sen. John McCain denounced the report as a recipe for retreat and defeat. The New York Post dubbed Baker and Hamilton “surrender monkeys.” Rush Limbaugh called their report “stupid.”

By the time its one-week anniversary came around, the Baker-Hamilton report looked about ready for an ashcan of history. Bush had already postponed his announcement of a “new strategy for Iraq” until after the start of the new year—a delay that will help cushion the president from pressure to adopt its central recommendations.

On Wednesday, just seven days after the report’s release, Bush paid a high-profile visit to the Pentagon. “President Bush said today that he would not be ‘rushed’ into deciding on a new course of action in Iraq,” The New York Times reported, “and that United States troops would not leave the country ‘before the job is done’ and Iraq is free and stable.”

The Iraq Study Group report—a scenario for how to re-calibrate the U.S. war effort in Iraq—was very far from a principled statement about how to end American military intervention that from the outset has been based on deception. But even the limited punch of the report has been largely stymied by the most rabidly pro-war forces of American media and politics.

Far from the claim on Time’s cover, an insightful view came from the Dec. 10 edition of Britain’s Observer newspaper: “For the future, there is likely to be only more of the same from Iraq. U.S. forces will be committed there for years. The violence is likely to continue unabated. International diplomatic efforts will achieve little. Certainly while Bush is president there is likely to be no strong reversal of U.S. policy.”

Sad and true—no matter how many journalistic fantasies tell us otherwise.

MEDIA BEAT

BY NORMAN SOLOMON

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF DECEMBER 9-10, 2006

MEDIA HYPE EXCESSIVE FOR BAKER-HAMILTON PANEL

The media frenzy over the Iraq Study Group is the latest example of how fixations on official sources do serious damage to the quality of news coverage.

All fall we’ve been hearing a journalistic drumroll for the commission chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton. The media beat got louder and more intense after the midterm election as the panel’s report neared.

In a classic instance of self-fulfilling reportage, journalists kept telling us that the highly anticipated report was sure to make a huge splash. Thus, when the commission hurled its blue-ribbon document into the environs of the Potomac on Wednesday, it caused enormous ripples.

Countless journalists have hailed the report as a catalyst for wide-ranging national debate. But the media over-reliance on official sources and kindred spirits—in this case, members of a bipartisan commission and suitably conformist commentators on its findings—kept most of the coverage tethered to a tactical discourse about what the United States should do in the Middle East.

A longstanding critique is that members of the Washington press corps function less as journalists than stenographers—hanging on nearly every word from the most powerful players in the nation’s capital—while dutifully, and often breathlessly, conveying the significance of events to readers, listeners and viewers.

That critique still stands as valid—and never more so than now, with the Baker-Hamilton report largely anchoring the media discourse about Iraq. Today, an observer from another planet might suppose that the words in the report are holy writ.

The current media reverence for Baker and Hamilton is so outsized that it sometimes seems to approach worship. Yet their careers are much more redolent of hackery than divinity.

Standard-issue stenography from Washington-based journalists not only devotes way too much ink and airtime to official pronouncements. It also falls short of providing the public with relevant facts that undermine the carefully cultivated images of integrity and wisdom.

In the case of James Baker, many recent stories have burnished his credentials as a principled straight shooter—with scant reference to the ample evidence that he could be more accurately described as a hired gun.

Though the fact seems to have tumbled into an Orwellian memory hole, six years ago Baker led the successful effort to manipulate post-election events in Florida so that George W. Bush could gain the state’s electoral votes and become president. In the process, the blue-blooded Baker was the lynchpin for hyper-partisan machinery that desecrated democracy.

A few years earlier, Lee Hamilton distinguished himself as the chair of a congressional committee that managed to investigate and dissipate the Iran-contra scandal at the same time. Hamilton’s refusal to pursue key evidence of the Reagan administration’s grave deceptions was in sync with a widespread media theme that insisted the country did not want another “failed presidency” so soon after the Watergate scandal forced President Nixon to resign.

Despite all the current media focus on the Baker-Hamilton commission, the comparisons between the Iraq and Vietnam wars are routinely circumscribed. The news media have joined with top Washington officials to recycle lingo from the Vietnam War era such as “cut and run,” denigrating the option of a swift end to the U.S. war effort. But notably missing from the media’s recycling bin is the word “escalation.”

After years of escalating the war in Iraq, the U.S. government appears to be on a course to continue escalation from the air. In reality, while we may see a slow reduction of U.S. troop levels, the already-escalating U.S. air war on Iraq scarcely seems to be on the American media’s radar screen.

But then again, the favorite media sources for comment on the Baker-Hamilton report don’t want to talk about the future of Uncle Sam’s deadly air war in Iraq.

MEDIA BEAT

NORMAN SOLOMON IS ON VACATION THIS WEEK. HE WOULD LIKE TO OFFER THE FOLLOWING COLUMN, WHICH WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED FIVE YEARS AGO THIS WEEK. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION.—CREATORS SYNDICATE

MEDIA BEAT

BY NORMAN SOLOMON

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF DECEMBER 2-3, 2006

‘GEOGRAPHICAL CORRECTNESS’ COULD BE A JOLT

And now, a news dispatch from the Media Twilight Zone ...

WASHINGTON—There were unconfirmed reports yesterday that the United States is not the center of the world.

The White House had no immediate comment on the reports, which set off a firestorm of controversy in the nation’s capital.

Speaking on background, a high-ranking official at the State Department discounted the possibility that the reports would turn out to be true. “If that were the case,” he said, “don’t you think we would have known about it a long time ago?”

On Capitol Hill, leaders of both parties were quick to rebut the assertion. “That certain news organizations would run with such a poorly sourced and obviously slanted story tells us that the liberal media are still up to their old tricks, despite the current crisis,” a GOP lawmaker fumed. A prominent Democrat, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said that classified briefings to congressional intelligence panels had disproved such claims long ago.

Scholars at leading think tanks were more restrained, and some said there was a certain amount of literal truth to the essence of the reports. But they pointed out that while it included factual accuracy in a narrow sense, the assertion was out of context and had the potential to damage national unity at a time when the United States could ill afford such a disruption.

The claim evidently originated with a piece by a Lebanese journalist that appeared several days ago in a Beirut magazine. It was then picked up by a pair of left-leaning daily newspapers in London. From there, the story quickly made its way across the Atlantic via the Internet.

“It just goes to show how much we need seasoned, professional gatekeepers to separate the journalistic wheat from the chaff before it gains wide attention,” remarked the managing editor of one news program at a major U.S. television network. “This is the kind of stuff you see on ideologically driven Web sites, but that hardly means it belongs on the evening news.” A newsmagazine editor agreed, calling the reports “the worst kind of geographical correctness.”

None of the major cable networks devoted much air time to reporting the story. At one outlet, a news executive’s memo told staffers that any reference to the controversy should include mention of the fact that the United States continues to lead the globe in scientific discoveries. At a more conservative network, anchors and correspondents reminded viewers that English is widely acknowledged to be the international language—and more people speak English in the U.S. than in any other nation.

While government officials voiced acute skepticism about the notion that the United States is not the center of the world, they declined to speak for attribution. “If lightning strikes and it turns out this report has real substance to it,” explained one policymaker at the State Department, “we could look very bad, at least in the short run. Until it can be clearly refuted, no one wants to take the chance of leading with their chin and ending up with a hefty serving of Egg McMuffin on their face.”

An informal survey of intellectuals with ties to influential magazines of political opinion, running the gamut from The Weekly Standard to The New Republic, indicated that the report was likely to gain little currency in Washington’s elite media forums.

“The problem with this kind of shoddy impersonation of reporting is that it’s hard to knock down because there are grains of truth,” one editor commented. “Sure, who doesn’t know that our country includes only small percentages of the planet’s land mass and population? But to draw an inference from those isolated facts that somehow the United States of America is not central to the world and its future—well, that carries postmodernism to a nonsensical extreme.”

Another well-known American journalist speculated that the controversy will soon pass: “Moral relativism remains a pernicious force in our society, but overall it holds less appeal than ever, even on American campuses. It’s not just that we’re the only superpower—we happen to also be the light onto the nations and the key to the world’s fate. People who can’t accept that reality are not going to have much credibility.”

BY NORMAN SOLOMON

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF NOVEMBER 25-26, 2006

MEDIA WORSHIP AT THE ALTAR OF “FREE MARKETS”

The recent death of renowned economist Milton Friedman was yet another occasion for news media to celebrate the wondrous virtues of the “free market.” Nowhere were the accolades more profuse than on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, which triumphantly praised Friedman as “the man who made free markets popular again.”

So-called free markets have always been popular among those who oppose government limits on dog-eat-dog economic dynamics. The popularity is widespread among owners and major investors who profit most from big media enterprises—which are apt to depict progressive taxation as confiscatory, vibrant labor unions as obstructionist and “the business community” as the main engine of economic progress.

If Milton Friedman has been the patron saint of modern free marketeers, the economic philosopher Adam Smith has been routinely cited by conservative pundits and politicians as the free market’s original prophet.

It was par for the course of a business-backed politician when Arnold Schwarzenegger, making his first run for governor of California, went out of his way to praise the views of the 18th-century economist long revered as an icon by Republican politicians. “I am more comfortable with an Adam Smith philosophy than with Keynesian theory,” the actor told the Financial Times.

A facile media spin on Adam Smith’s work presents unfettered investment as the key to prosperity. But Smith openly contended that labor creates all wealth. He wrote: “It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased.”

Smith was no champion of workers, yet in “The Wealth of Nations,” he wrote with realism about manufacturers and merchants. He described them as “men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

In recent years, the erosion of public space has not been an act of economic nature. Nor is it the result of the superior wisdom imputed to Milton Friedman by editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal. The policies of de-funding services that used to be taken for granted—whether pre-school for 3-year-olds, community college educations for adults or public libraries for people of all ages—are the outgrowth of ideological warfare that has been waged relentlessly in recent decades.

News outlets have been key battlegrounds in this ideological struggle. A corporate media climate routinely depicts the public interest as an array of “special interests” (working people, environmentalists, women’s rights advocates) while depicting the business sector as embodying the national interest.

Distressing facts about free-market consequences do get reported, but any emphasis tends to be fleeting. Grim facts about widening economic inequality appear in prominent news stories, only to quickly disappear—almost without a trace.

“The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation,” The New York Times reported three months ago. “The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity—the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards—has risen steadily over the same period. As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960s.”

In the present corporate-friendly environment of deregulation, with media outlets and politicians fawning over the wealthy, Adam Smith would have understood why the captains of capitalism are making out like bandits.

Laudatory media coverage of the “free market” is integral to daily reporting on the stock market, big business deals, mergers, buyouts and quarterly profits. For those who have been losing substantive economic ground, or never had much to lose in the first place, all the news accounts of capitalist benchmarks are tangential. The voices of financial winners are booming from the nation’s mass media. But other voices need to be heard.

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF NOVEMBER 18-19, 2006

IRAQ AND VIETNAM: MEDIA GROUNDHOG DAY

These days, media coverage of U.S. policy in Iraq often seems to be little more than a remake of how news media portrayed Washington’s options for the war in Vietnam. Routine deference to inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom has turned many prominent journalists into co-producers of a “Groundhog Day” sequel that insists the U.S. war effort must go on.

During the years since the fall of Saddam, countless news stories and commentaries have compared the ongoing disaster in Iraq with the Vietnam War. But those comparisons have rarely illuminated the most troubling parallels between the U.S. media coverage of both wars.

Whether in 1968 or in 2006, most of the Washington press corps has been at pains to portray swift withdrawal of U.S. troops as impractical and unrealistic.

Contrary to myths about media coverage of the Vietnam War, the American press lagged way behind grassroots antiwar sentiment in seriously contemplating a U.S. pullout from Vietnam. The lag time amounted to several years—and meant the additional deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and perhaps 1 million more Vietnamese people.

I often think of a survey that the Boston Globe conducted in February 1968; out of 39 major daily newspapers in the USA, not one had editorialized for withdrawing American troops from Vietnam. Today—despite the antiwar tilt of national opinion polls and the recent election—advocacy of a U.S. pullout from Iraq seems almost as scarce among the modern-day media elite.

The media evasions amount to kicking the bloody can down the road. The careful statements about benchmarks and getting tough with the Baghdad government (as with the Saigon government) are markers for a national media discourse that dodges instead of enlivens debate.

Many journalists are retreading the notion that the pullout option is not a real option at all. And the Democrats who’ll soon be running Congress, we’re told, wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—dare to go that far if they know what’s good for them.

Implicit in such media coverage is the idea that the real legitimacy for U.S. war-making rests with the president, not the Congress. These days, every time I hear that view expressed, I think of 42-year-old footage of the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

The show’s host on that 1964 telecast was the widely esteemed journalist Peter Lisagor, who told his guest: “Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy.”

“Couldn’t be more wrong,” Sen. Wayne Morse broke in with his sandpapery voice. “You couldn’t make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States. That’s nonsense.”

Lisagor was almost taunting as he asked, “To whom does it belong then, Senator?”

Morse did not miss a beat. “It belongs to the American people,” he shot back—and “I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy.”

The journalist persisted: “You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.”

Morse’s response was indignant: “Why do you say that? ... I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you’ll give them. And my charge against my government is, we’re not giving the American people the facts.”

Morse, who was Oregon’s senior senator, could have easily avoided making waves in news media. But he was passionate about the U.S. Constitution as well as international law. And, while rejecting the widely held notion that foreign policy belongs to the president, Morse spoke in unflinching terms about the Vietnam War. At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Feb. 27, 1968, Morse said that he did not “intend to put the blood of this war on my hands.”

During the waning days of autumn 2006, the dominant messages from the U.S. mass media continue to insist that Congress cannot, should not and must not push for complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. We’ve seen this kind of dreadful real-life movie before. The longer it goes on, the bigger the tragedy.

MEDIA BEAT

BY NORMAN SOLOMON

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF NOVEMBER 4-5, 2006

REPORTERS FORGET THAT WINNING ISN’T EVERYTHING

Most op-ed columnists have clear partisan biases. So do the supposed journalists at Fox News Channel. But most reporters who cover election results are part of a more subtle tilt—in favor of winners.

The pattern of political coverage that begins on Election Night often includes a heavy preference for politicians who managed to win. The unspoken credo of news reporting often seems to be “winning is vindication.”

That credo, of course, is not the only predictable media slant. For instance, no matter what the vote totals show, you can count on many televised pundits to gravely explain that the Democratic Party can only hope to triumph by moving rightward (in a more militaristic and pro-corporate direction) under the rubric of becoming “centrist” and “moderate.”

But, ideology aside, the fashions of conventional media wisdom are cut to fit the winners.

The winners usually have big money behind them—as well as a proven record of effectively spinning the media. So, the journalistic postmortem often includes a double dose of adulation for the politicians who came out on top: They get plenty of media kudos for victory. And they get extra media plaudits for effectively spinning the media in order to make the victory possible.

Even though most elections—presidential and midterm—are fairly close in terms of overall ballots cast for either party, most Wednesday-morning quarterbacks in the press corps are fond of touting winners and denigrating losers. This approach got even more absurd than usual after the 2000 presidential election was finally resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court.

For years afterward, political journalists commonly asserted that George W. Bush’s campaign was able to gain more support from the American people than Al Gore’s campaign did. Routinely left unmentioned was the fact that Gore received over half a million votes more than Bush did in the 2000 general election.

As soon as the results come in, reporters on television and newspapers the next day begin a process of applauding the strategies and political resonance of the winners. This is not only an exercise in after-the-fact backseat driving. It’s also the kind of media cheerleading that encourages presidents and other elected officials to gain swelled heads and inordinate political momentum—on the way to driving off a cliff.

Undue media deference to President Richard Nixon during his first term—with inadequate scrutiny of his administration’s hostility toward civil liberties—encouraged Nixon to believe that he could get away with covering up key facts about the burglary of Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex.

Adulatory media coverage of President Ronald Reagan’s first term encouraged a range of high-ranking officials to believe that they could get away with trading arms for hostages while illegally funneling weapons to the murderous Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua. And weak media follow-up, after the Iran-Contra scandal broke, helped Reagan and his party to avoid paying a political price for deceiving the public and flouting the law.

The current president gained a steep surge in post-9/11 opinion polls largely on the strength of media treatment that hailed him as a great national leader akin to Franklin Roosevelt—on the strength of little more evidence than the fact that George W. Bush could make grandiose speeches about a “war on terrorism” and order the bombing of Afghanistan.

Presidents who bask in the glory of being journalism’s winners often turn out to be history’s losers. That appears to be the case with Bush, whose triumphs of propaganda during his first years in the White House have been overtaken by realities of Iraq.

It’s a safe bet that the days after the midterm elections of 2006 will be filled with media prattle about which candidates were the most skillful and which ones made the biggest miscalculations. But we don’t need journalists to fawn over winners and second-guess losers.

On the contrary: We need the press to be tough on politicians when they’re riding high with the intoxicants of power and prestige. In a democracy, that’s when leaders can do the most harm.

MEDIA BEAT

BY NORMAN SOLOMON

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF OCTOBER 21-22, 2006

CHANNELING THOMAS FRIEDMAN

Get ready for a special tour of a renowned perspective, conjured from the writings of syndicated New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. As the leading media advocate of “free trade” and “globalization,” he is expertly proficient at explaining the world to the world. If we could synthesize Friedman’s brain waves, the essential messages would go something like this:

Silicon chips are the holy wafers of opportunity. From Bangalore to Bob’s Big Boy Burgers, those who understand the Internet will leave behind those who do not.

I want to tell you about Rajiv/Mohammed/George, now doing awesome business in Madras/Amman/Durham. Only a few years ago, this visionary man started from scratch with just a vision—a vision that he, like me, has been wise enough to comprehend.

So, Rajiv/Mohammed/George built a business on the digital backbone of the new global economy. Now, the employees fill orders on a varying shift schedule, and time zones are always covered. Don’t ask what they’re selling—that hardly matters. They’re working in a high-tech industry, and the profits are auspicious. This is the Future. And it is good. Fabulous, actually.

Traveling the world as I do, I understand that the world is best understood by people who travel the world as I do.

The future is innovation across borders. The entrepreneur who finds a good Web designer on another continent really impresses me. Have I mentioned yet that the Internet really impresses me? It really does. Those who aren’t suitably impressed by IT will be left behind.

As a journalist who visits one country after another, I feel intoxicated by the Internet. And why shouldn’t I feel upbeat? I’m not one of the dead-end-job workers in Bangalore or Amman or Durham who can look forward to mind-glazing drudgery in front of computer screens as far as the eye can see.

For me, and for investors and managers who take me around, what’s not to like? Commerce is about selling things, providing services, expanding markets. All that is so good.

Let’s face it—at this point I’m a very affluent guy, and I work for a newspaper run by guys who are much richer than I am. They’re gaga about what we like to call globalization. So am I. We’re a perfect match.

As a matter of fact, just about any big media outlet in the USA is run by managers who work for owners who’re gaga for globalization. We don’t mention that there are significant limits on our enthusiasm. Of course we don’t want to globalize labor unions! We don’t want to globalize powerful movements for environmental protection! We don’t want to globalize movements against war!

Speaking of war: I reserve the right to change my mind after the results of the military actions I’ve supported are so horrible that I can no longer praise them. So, I cheered the invasion of Iraq and kept applauding for a long time afterward. I lauded the war effort as glorious and noble—and, on the last day of November 2003, I even likened the U.S. occupation of Iraq to the magnanimity of the Marshall Plan.

And if U.S. troops had been able to kill enough Iraqi troublemakers early enough to quell the resistance, I would have remained an avid booster of the war. There’s no business like war business—that’s why I recycled my clever slogan “Give war a chance” from the 1999 air war on Yugoslavia to the 2001 military assault on Afghanistan.

But I like winning. That’s why I kept praising Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he looked like a winner, and now I keep deploring him because he looks like a loser.

Overall, I get to boil down the world to metaphors of my own choosing. If I were one of the anti-corporate-globalization people and I used the same kind of simplistic metaphors, I’d be the object of derision and scorn. But I’m not—so get used to it!

Never let it be said that leading U.S. pundit Thomas Friedman has to live with the consequences of his punditry. I think great thoughts, and I’m seriously glib about them, and that should be more than enough if the world is smart enough to grasp the opportunities that are low-hanging fruit of the digital age. I can’t expect everyone to get it, but at the very least they should try.

MEDIA BEAT

BY NORMAN SOLOMON

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF OCTOBER 14-15, 2006

DEATH IS TOO EASY—FOR DISTANT PUNDITS

A few days ago, the news media reported an estimate that 601,000 Iraqi civilians have died from the war’s violence since the invasion of their country. The new study, from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, pegged the actual number in a range between 426,369 and 793,663 deaths. In wartime such figures can’t be precise, but the meaning is clear: The invasion of Iraq has led to ongoing carnage on a massive scale.

While we stare at numbers that do nothing to convey the suffering and anguish of the war in Iraq, one of the questions we should be asking is this: How could we correlate the horrific realities with the kind of discussions that proliferated in TV studios during the lead-up to the invasion?

In mid-November 2002 -- four months before the invasion began—a report surfaced from health professionals with the Medact organization and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. “The avowed U.S. aim of regime change means any new conflict will be much more intense and destructive than the (1991) Gulf War,” they warned, “and will involve more deadly weapons developed in the interim.”

At the time, journalists routinely gave short shrift to that report—treating it as alarmist and unworthy of much attention. The report found that “credible estimates of the total possible deaths on all sides during the conflict and the following three months range from 48,000 to over 260,000. Civil war within Iraq could add another 20,000 deaths. Additional later deaths from postwar adverse health effects would reach 200,000. ... In all scenarios the majority of casualties will be civilians.”

During a live TV debate on Dec. 3, 2002, I cited the report’s estimates of the bloodshed ahead and then asked: “What kind of message is that from the Bush administration against terrorism and against violence for political ends?”

Anchor Wolf Blitzer turned to the other CNN guest: “Jonah Goldberg, do you accept that assumption in that report on these huge casualties, including a lot of children, if there were an effort to go forward with so-called regime change in Baghdad?”

Goldberg, a pundit with National Review Online, replied: “Frankly, I don’t. I mean, I haven’t looked at the exact report, and I think that there are a lot of groups out there that inflate a lot of these numbers precisely because they’re against the war no matter what. We certainly heard a lot of that around on the table last time. Before the Gulf War, we were told there were going to be tens of thousands of casualties.”

He was playing off a common U.S. media pretense that the bombardment of Iraq in early 1991 had minimal negative effects. In fact, as a fleeting Associated Press story reported on March 22, 1991, the recently completed war had killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqi people—a figure that came from official U.S. military sources.

American news outlets tend to be rather cavalier about the suffering at the other end of the Pentagon’s missiles, bombs and bullets. And there’s a strong tendency to brand concerns as unfounded speculation—a media reflex that suits war-crazed presidents just fine.

In his major speech on March 17, 2003, just before the invasion, President Bush used some timeworn language: “Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them: If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you.”

The day after that speech, Christopher Hitchens came out with an essay providing similar niceties. He wrote that “the Defense Department has evolved highly selective and accurate munitions that can sharply reduce the need to take or receive casualties. The predictions of widespread mayhem turned out to be false last time—when the weapons (in the Gulf War) were nothing like so accurate.”

In fact, Hitchens asserted, “it can now be proposed as a practical matter that one is able to fight against a regime and not a people or a nation.”

As a practical matter, journalism like that ends up putting cosmetics on death.

BY NORMAN SOLOMON

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF OCTOBER 7-8, 2006

DO AMERICAN JOURNALISTS BELIEVE IN THE BILL OF RIGHTS?

At the end of last month, when Congress approved President Bush’s “detainee treatment bill,” a front-page news analysis in The New York Times provided a stunning example of media ambivalence toward the Bill of Rights.

You’d think that journalists might feel a special affinity. After all, the First Amendment forbids “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”—a few words that have provided much protection to reporters and commentators for more than two centuries. And as the Constitution’s first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights emerged to protect liberties at the outset of the grand experiment known as the United States of America.

When the first Congress convened in 1789, it quickly sent those amendments to the states for ratification. In the preamble of the resolution submitting the amendments, Congress declared that they were intended to improve the Constitution “in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers.”

Today, much of the Bill of Rights—including the First Amendment—might seem radical when compared to the claims that presidential authority over the “war on terror” must trump concerns about civil liberties.

There is, for instance, the Fourth Amendment’s declaration: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated ... “

But the Bush administration, bypassing the Fourth Amendment, has insisted on searching huge quantities of phone conversations and e-mail messages without a warrant.

The administration has also asserted that the president has the right to decide who should be locked up—without legal accountability. Under pressure from the White House, in late September the Congress voted into law a measure dispensing with the protection of habeas corpus that we learned about in civics classes.

So how did the most influential newspaper in America cover the news of this historic and momentous event?

Well, the New York Times printed what it called a “News Analysis” on its Sept. 30 front page, reporting that the previous day President Bush “achieved a signal victory, shoring up with legislation his determined conduct of the campaign against terrorism in the face of challenges from critics and the courts.”

Noting that “in effect” the new law “allows the president to identify enemies, imprison them indefinitely and interrogate them,” the article explained that the law permits this to be done “beyond the reach of the full court reviews traditionally afforded criminal defendants and ordinary prisoners.”

The Times article went on to paraphrase an assessment from Bruce Ackerman, a Yale University professor of law and political science, saying that the new law “allows the administration to declare even an American citizen an unlawful combatant subject to indefinite detention.”

How does belief in the Bill of Rights square with enabling the president to jail anyone he wants for as long as he wants—on his say-so?

Of course, some legal experts were able to fully wrap their minds around some rationales for the new law. And they were duly quoted in the prominent Times article. But most chilling in the piece were statements presented in the reportorial voice, without attribution.

Here’s a notable paragraph: “How the measure will look decades hence may depend not just on how it is used but on how the terrorist threat evolves. If a major terrorist plot in the United States is uncovered—and surely if one succeeds—it may vindicate the Congressional decision to give the government more leeway to seize and question those who might know about the next attack.”

On the other hand, the article went on, “If the attacks of 2001 recede as a devastating but unique tragedy, the decision to create a new legal framework may seem like overkill.”

Got that? The advisability of shredding basic civil liberties will hinge on whether terrorists are able to pull off a major attack on the United States in the future.

Proclaiming that terrorists have the power to “vindicate” a law that undercuts the Bill of Rights is the kind of approach we’ve learned to expect from President Bush. But the current situation is even more chilling when media outlets join in.

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF SEPTEMBER 28, 2006

IRAQ IS NOT A QUAGMIRE

Is Iraq a quagmire?

Like many other debates that flourish in American mass media, the standard answers on both sides are wrong—because the question bypasses human realities.

Most obviously, Iraq is not a swamp; it’s a place where real people live and die. They are not metaphors, and neither is their country. Iraqi people exist quite apart from the roles imputed to them by politicians and journalists in Washington.

But “quagmire” serves as a kind of mental framework for where most U.S. media coverage has remained.

Forget the American Century. This is the American Narcissism.

You see, no matter what happens in Iraq, it’s mostly about us—spelled U.S.; the United States. We’re encouraged to perceive that Iraq is most important, at least implicitly, because of what it means for the USA: its image in other countries, the deaths and wounds of its soldiers, the political strength of the president and, this fall, the likely effects on the midterm congressional elections.

During September, as the Nexis media database attests, the USA’s sizeable newspapers and wire services ran articles referring to Iraq as a “quagmire” several times a day. Readers of The New York Times have seen such references on an average of once a week this year. Overall, major U.S. media outlets have associated Iraq with the term “quagmire” thousands of times in 2006.

Some of those references are from war supporters eager to dispute the notion that “quagmire” is applicable to what’s going on in Iraq. They challenge the relevance of the word yet do not hesitate to recycle other cliches that were also used in public debate about the Vietnam War four decades ago—and so we hear that the United States must “stay the course” and must not “cut and run.”

But to focus arguments on whether the Iraq war should be called a “quagmire” is to flatten moral issues, transmuting them into matters of strategy and efficacy. That may sound like appropriate journalistic attention to practical politics. However, if a war is wrong, the wisdom of supporting it shouldn’t hinge on whether it’s a quagmire or a cakewalk.

Criticisms of the war that accuse it of being a “quagmire” can be disputed with lofty calls to persevere—doing the difficult right thing—until conditions on the ground change, the Iraqi government gets stronger and so forth. But opposition to the war that turns on morality cannot be so easily deflected in such ways.

The extreme American self-absorption of the “quagmire” debate lends itself to ostensible solutions that shift—but perpetuate—the U.S. government’s central role in the carnage. Reigning political manipulator Karl Rove, whose Machiavellian electoral calculations have had extraordinary leverage over the current administration’s foreign policy, is very likely to seek further U.S. reliance on air power that uses the latest Pentagon technologies as blunt and lethal instruments in Iraq.

A key goal will be to bring down U.S. casualty rates and reduce American troop levels in Iraq while the people of that country suffer further deaths and destruction.

If the Iraq war is primarily framed as a problem because of what it’s doing to Americans, the “solutions” could make the war seem like less of a quagmire even while more Iraqi people pay with their lives. Media arguments over whether Iraq is a quagmire turn the spotlight away from the human calamities that Iraqis are experiencing on a daily basis, while American taxpayers continue to subsidize Uncle Sam’s deadly machinations.

Sometimes the fancy words don’t provide the kind of clarity that we need. “Quagmire” may sound sophisticated and realpolitik; many journalists and pundits seem to think so. But that doesn’t really get to the essence of the war.

It’s not a quagmire.

It’s wrong.

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF SEPTEMBER 23-24, 2006

MEDIA TALL TALES FOR THE NEXT WAR

The Sept. 25 edition of Time magazine illustrates how the U.S. news media are gearing up for a military attack on Iran. The headline over the cover-story interview with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is “A Date With a Dangerous Mind.” The big-type subhead calls him “the man whose swagger is stirring fears of war with the U.S.,” and the second paragraph concludes: “Though pictures of the Iranian president often show him flashing a peace sign, his actions could well be leading the world closer to war.”

When the USA’s biggest newsweekly devotes five pages to scoping out a U.S. air war against Iran, as Time did in the same issue, it’s yet another sign that the wheels of our nation’s war-spin machine are turning faster toward yet another unprovoked attack on another country.

Ahmadinejad has risen to the top of Washington’s—and American media’s—enemies list. Within the last 20 years, that list has included Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, with each subjected to extensive vilification before the Pentagon launched a large-scale military attack.

Whenever the president of the United States decides to initiate or intensify a media blitz against a foreign leader, mainstream U.S. news outlets have dependably stepped up the decibels and hysteria. But the administration can also call off the dogs of war by going silent about the evils of some foreign tyrant.

Take Libya’s dictator, for instance. For more than a third of a century, Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi has been a despot whose overall record of repression makes Noriega or Milosevic seem relatively tolerant of domestic political foes. But ever since Qaddafi made a deal with the Bush administration in December 2003, the silence out of Washington about Qaddafi’s evilness has been notable.

When Qaddafi publicly celebrated the 37th anniversary of his dictatorship a few weeks ago, he declared in a speech on state television: “Our enemies have been crushed inside Libya, and you have to be ready to kill them if they emerge anew.” The New York Times noted that Qaddafi’s regime “criminalizes the creation of opposition parties.”

Today, while the human rights situation in Iran is reprehensible, the ongoing circumstances are far worse under many governments favored by Washington. Here at home, media outlets should be untangling double standards instead of contributing to them. But so many reporters and pundits have internalized Washington’s geopolitical agendas that the mainline institutions of journalism continue to rot from within. That the rot goes largely unnoticed is testimony to how Orwellian “doublethink” has been normalized.

These are not issues of professionalism any more than concerns about public health are issues of medicine. The news media should be early warning systems that inform us before current events become unchangeable history.

But when the media system undermines the free flow of information and prevents wide-ranging debate, what happens is a parody of democracy. That’s what occurred four years ago during the media buildup for the invasion of Iraq.

Now, warning signs are profuse: The Bush administration has Iran in the Pentagon’s sights. And the drive toward war, fueled by double standards about nuclear development and human rights, is getting a big boost from U.S. media coverage that portrays the president as reluctant to launch an attack on Iran.

Time magazine reports that “from the State Department to the White House to the highest reaches of the military command, there is a growing sense that a showdown with Iran ... may be impossible to avoid.”

The same kind of media spin—assuming a sincere Bush desire to avoid war—was profuse in the months before the invasion of Iraq. The more that news outlets tell such fairy tales, the more their credibility sinks.

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF SEPTEMBER 28, 2006

IRAQ IS NOT A QUAGMIRE

Is Iraq a quagmire?

Like many other debates that flourish in American mass media, the standard answers on both sides are wrong—because the question bypasses human realities.

But “quagmire” serves as a kind of mental framework for where most U.S. media coverage has remained.

Forget the American Century. This is the American Narcissism.

A key goal will be to bring down U.S. casualty rates and reduce American troop levels in Iraq while the people of that country suffer further deaths and destruction.

It’s not a quagmire.

It’s wrong.

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF SEPTEMBER 16-17, 2006

THE HOLLOW MEDIA PROMISE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

This is the time of year when media campaigns for the latest digital products are apt to go into overdrive. Schools are back in session, and the holiday sales blitz is getting underway. For the latest computerized gizmos, that means an escalating media drive—revving up news coverage, PR hype and advertisements. Often it’s hard to tell the difference between the three.

At the risk of sounding like a techno-scrooge, I take a dim view of media excitement about the very latest in digital gadgets. No doubt the new versions of laptops or handhelds offer many virtues. But none of them are human virtues. And no hard-drive product with umpteen gigabytes can ever make up for a media culture and a political environment largely out of touch with human empathy.

The new mega-gig innovations are marketed as awesome pluses without downsides. But one big problem is that we’re encouraged to believe in purchasing our way into solutions. Huge expectations for satisfaction from the multimedia Internet—and rampant enthusiasm for faster and more compact technologies with the latest dazzling bells and whistles—routinely get us into thinking like consumers with the speed of a broadband download.

Rarely mentioned is the economic stratification that the digital wonderland both reflects and exacerbates. While computer prices have come down in recent years, the overall costs of partaking in the online world are another matter.

“Dial up” is passe and mostly excludes access to the video and sound that have become routine on the Internet. In contrast, broadband means higher fees. The same can be said about cable television. And while such expenses are incidental to some, they are prohibitive to others.

Many news sites and databases have gone from being entirely free to requiring payment for anything beyond limited access. The idea of cyberspace as “the information superhighway” is now quaint and antique in a world where, more than anything else, the Internet is about commerce.

A lot of people are making creative and civic use of the Internet, enlivening democratic possibilities in the process. But the fact remains that overall, for Americans, the most widely trafficked sources of news and commentary on the Web are part of the same media conglomerates that own the biggest print, broadcast and cable outlets.

The quality of journalism and debate ultimately depends on content. And I’m not referring to “content” in the narrow sense of feeding words and images to the insatiable techno-media beast—with its superficially competitive Web sites and 24-hour cable news channels that simultaneously have no specific deadline and are always on deadline.

For more than 200 years, the arriving technologies have been hailed as wondrous new shortcuts to democracy. In the late 18th century, the first rudimentary telegraphs were supposed to usher in an egalitarian era of communications. During the last hundred years, outsized expectations for democratization and social change were projected onto radio—then broadcast television, cable TV, email and the Web—and now podcasts, online video and various other permutations of digital deliverance.

But the realities of economic class and the leverage of concentrated capital cannot be swept aside—or even seriously disrupted—by any technology. Every gee-whiz digital breakthrough happens in a social and political context. And the tremendous gaps of power among Americans, in large measure corresponding to financial resources, will not be closed by digital means.

Though usually expressed in indirect ways, idolatry of affluence has been a common theme in mass media, paralleled by the adulation heaped on pricey consumer goods—most flagrant in advertisements but also noticeable in quite a lot of news coverage. The great enthusiasm that’s expressed toward digital products often fits right into the common media reverence for what only money can buy.

Sometimes I get the feeling that the endless media chatter about the latest digital products—including the ponderous coverage of the market-share implications for media industries—is just another way of talking around the extreme imbalances of power that persist in the United States. Until we’re able to bring such inequities into some semblance of democratic balance, no amount of bandwidth or digital efficiency can be very useful in creating a society that lives up to our best ideals.

RELEASE: WEEKEND OF SEPTEMBER 9-10, 2006

AS OTHERS SEE US—THE “WAR ON TERROR”

The big U.S. media constantly tell us how Americans see the “war on terror.” But the same news outlets rarely tell us much about how the rest of the world sees it.

Five years after 9/11, the gap between perceptions is enormous. Countless polls confirm the overall chasm. Yet, day to day, the media messages that surround us in the United States simply recycle American views for American viewers, listeners and readers.

But there are exceptions. I heard one the other day, while listening to a national show—“PRI’s The World”—a co-production of Public Radio International, WGBH in Boston and the BBC World Service. “We decided to check in with people in different parts of the globe to get their perspectives on the White House’s war on terror,” the anchor said.

And for the next six minutes, the American audience got an earful -- from speakers who were not just expressing their own views. Crucially, they were summing up the dominant outlooks in huge regions of the planet.

Consider the assessment that aired on the radio program from Rohan Gunaratna, author of the widely praised book “Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror.” Based in Singapore, he was principal investigator for the United Nations’ Terrorism Prevention Branch.

In Asia, said Gunaratna, “the vast majority of the Muslims believe that President Bush’s campaign against terrorism has in fact increased the threat of terrorism and extremism very significantly after 9/11. With regard to Iraq, what they’re saying is that the terrorists have recruited more people, radicalized more people and raised funds from Muslims just by projecting U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq as an attack against Islam and as an attack against the Muslims.”

Then came the analysis from Frank Njenga, a psychiatrist in Nairobi, Kenya, who is president of the African Association of Psychiatrists and Allied Professionals. “The White House war on terrorism is generally viewed here in Kenya as a futile exercise that is exacerbating the insecurity across the world,” he said. “It is perceived from this end that the major perpetrators of terrorism in the world are the inequities that exist in the world—economic, social and political. Those people who believe that they are downtrodden will continue to perpetuate acts of terrorism.”

And, Dr. Njenga added, “It is generally perceived that America has a major role to play in this inequitable distribution of resources across the world. In fact, the general perception is that the average American has no understanding, has no intention, has no will to understand anything that happens outside of the United States—and for that reason their war on terrorism is a total misconception without any relevance to the real world where the majority of the people live.”

And what about the predominant view from the Middle East? Rami G. Khouri is director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut and editor-at-large at the Daily Star newspaper, which is published throughout the region. On the radio segment, he said: “The American war on terror is perceived in Lebanon and much of the Middle East as a sign of the combination of arrogance and confusion that is driving American policy, not only in the Middle East but I think in much of the world.”

What Khouri had to say, few American pundits seem to want to hear, much less comprehend: “While there’s agreement that terror is a problem that must be fought—and we have suffered from it much more than the United States has, we in this region in the Middle East—there’s also a sense that the United States has mis-diagnosed the nature of the terror problem, exaggerated its threat, confused hopelessly a whole range of different groups, some of which are terrorists, some of which are doing legitimate resistance to occupation—and basically tried to come up with a new formula that substitutes for the cold war.”

Five years after 9/11, such views are dominant in the world. But in the United States, our media insulation about the “war on terrorism” is extreme—and dangerously self-deluding.

Bodega Bay Navigator Online / --------- Media Beat by Norm Solomon

The syndicated colomnists that appear in the Navigator Online will not be updated after Jan. 20, 2007. They will reappear in March 2007 as part of Premium Content.

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