Thursday, September 04, 2008

Our priceless, priceless media, yet again

Photo was linked in a Daily Kos comment, and the person who posted it has articles (like stickers) for sale with this image at this website.

Scott Horton interviewed investigative journalist Joe Lauria:

“Centrism is the philosophy of the American media - and that essentially backs the status quo, when you're a centrist, and this game of objectivity that they play is really limited by parameters that you're allowed to ask questions and to investigate and in a sense then you're transmitting these assumptions, and reinforcing every day that the US is really a functioning democracy, not even a representative democracy. And as we know of course there are oligarchic interests that buy off Congress, that puts the person in the Whitehouse that they need - and this gets me into the book of Gravel - that gets the defense contracts necessary to pump the American people with fear, so that we allow our taxpayers money to go and pay for defense outlays that are absolutely unnecessary and then fight wars that enhance our power and wealth.”

Original interview here, transcript posted at this blog.

In other words, we have a media that is strictly a corporate media – for the corporations, and of the corporations. And the “news” they choose to show on our TVs, or print, is all done to serve their customers – the ones who advertise on their station or magazine or newspaper. The “product” is American eyeballs that look at all this – and they entice the product by their titillating nonsense about missing white women, stupid sex scandals, family tragedies and celebrity crime. And in between, they present a load of nonsense to inspire the under-informed and misinformed Americans to support whatever idiocy the corporations are promoting.

Here’s a story from last July on how Knight Ridder got it right, while the rest of the media overwhelming got it wrong on the reality of WMDs in Iraq:

“It is now well-known that Walcott and two especially tenacious reporters operating as a formidable, closely-knit trio, were the only journalists out of hundreds of American reporters and editors across the nation working on pre-invasion stories who "got it right." That is, producing solid stories – starting a year before the invasion began – reporting that the administration was manipulating intelligence to conceal dire forecasts that the Iraq invasion was headed into a morass to rival the Vietnam war disaster.

How did these exclusive reports pass unnoticed in Washington, New York, and other major print and broadcast news centers? Because while there were 32 Knight Ridder newspapers across the nation, none were in New York or Washington.

………What the American print and broadcast press has yet to grasp is exactly what the Knight Ridder trio of John Walcott, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel did in order to run circles around everyone else.

It was not legerdemain; but it was the opposite of prevailing journalism practice, which starts with the illusion that the smartest journalism requires finding the highest ranking official as your prime source. He/she supposedly would be your personal version of the Hollywood-inflated myth of a "deep throat" who will tell you everything you need to become a star reporter rivaling Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in "All The President’s Men."

……. How did the Knight Ridder journalists avoid retaliation from the Bush White House for being the only news syndicate to challenge core elements of its Iraq war strategy? Walcott uses two metaphors to describe the Knight Ridder style of working "below the radar" with mid-level expert sources who drafted the war plans and knew its pitfalls.

In addition, the Walcott team readily accepted the role of the skunk at the garden party, so they had nothing to ask for, and nothing to hide. As one of the group explained, "We don't have the access that the big shots from the Times or the Post have. We're not on the first-call list. We're not invited to some of the inner-circle type of things."

Walcott has said that as he sees it, two key institutions "fell down on the job" on the road to war in Iraq—“the Congress and the press." Speaking to a foreign policy group last February when the presidential primaries were under way, he said, "What we hear from some Democratic presidential candidates and others is, 'if I had known then what I know today I would never have gone to war."

His blunt reply, Walcott said, was, "If you had done your homework you would have known that the real experts in the government, in the CIA, the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), the State Department, the uniformed military, the Energy Department, and so on, had grave doubts of this part or that part of the administration's case for war."

"How do I know that?" asked Walcott “Very simple...We knew that in what was then the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, and we wrote stories about it over and over again..." (The Knight Ridder chain was sold to the McClatchy Company in 2006. Walcott is now its Washington bureau chief, with many of the same reporters.)

Walcott has saved his roughest criticism of the leap into the Iraq war for his own profession. "Too many members of the Fourth Estate in Washington," he has said caustically, "are trying to move up the social ladder an estate or two...Being an outsider, a naysayer isn't as much fun as being an insider, and it can't get you on TV where the money is, or on the lecture circuit when you know the right people..."

"But there were much bigger problems with the media after 9/11" he continued, "than just too-cozy relationships with the wrong sources and timidity about challenging a popular president in the wake of an attack on all of us. There was simple laziness...Much of what the administration said, especially about Iraq and al Qaeda simply made no sense. Yet very few reporters bothered to check it out: they were stenographers; they were not reporters."

And there was finally the fact, Walcott said, "that most of the elite news organizations in the country, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post were seriously, overwhelmingly wrong about Iraq, and that too many others simply followed them, like lemmings, over the cliff..."

I read a lot on the internet during the run-up to this war – INCLUDING everything Knight Ridder put out there. They are among the best, and when I make fun of, or complain about, the CORPORATE media, I am not including them (although, technically, they are a corporation also – but they serve the interests of the public, not the interests of the corporation or the bottom line).

But here is how I very simply figured out that the likelihood of finding NO WMDs in Iraq was very high indeed:

1. Bush administration officials claimed they knew Saddam had WMDs and that they knew where they were. Rumsfeld made this claim several times. (In early 2001, Powell and Rice both made the claim that Saddam did not have WMDs and was ‘contained’. Everyone ignored that recent history.)

2. UN weapons inspectors were in the country, and had been there for months. They report that they are allowed access by the Saddam government. They report that the Bush government was not giving them helpful information. They are not finding any evidence of a WMD program.

So, someone was lying…. And you have to ask yourself, what would each group gain by lying? The UN weapons inspectors would have made themselves look like incompetent fools. The Bush administration would have gotten the war they wanted to control the oil and the area. So, it was pretty clear that the Bush administration, including Rumsfeld, were lying.

It was also very clear that they did not give a rat’s ass about the wellbeing of the Iraqi people, or their culture and their heritage. They say the cultural wrecking of Iraq is second only the invasion of the Mongols several centuries back.

Of course, we now have author Ron Suskind claiming that Bush order the forgery of a letter (in late 2003) linking Saddam with al Qaeda, and that he knew that there were no WMDs in Iraq.

The claim that Saddam would have worked with al Qaeda also flies in the face of common sense and fails the critical thinking test. It is the US that supported and trained bin Laden and the al Qaeda people in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. It is Saudi Arabia that funded them (and likely still is). And it is currently Pakistan that has bin Laden and al Qaeda within it’s borders…. But we seem to be able to do nothing about that, except bomb innocent people….. which results in more people joining up with the al Qaeda people. So, considering that we are out-killing the ‘terrorists’ by about 500 to 1 – who exactly is the real terrorists here?

And anyone who claimed in 2002 or 2003 that Iraq had WMDs is either a TOOL or a FOOL. Email from Aaron Brown, formerly of CNN, states that he believes himself to fall into the FOOL category – he was just too dumb to figure it out.

I hope someday all these criminals have a trial and go to jail. And I hope the corporate media TOOLS or FOOLS who got it wrong finally develop some shame and realize that they need to drop out of journalism and take up a profession more appropriate for them. That would be one that does not involve a lot of critical thinking skills or ability to analyze data. Prostitution and garbage collection both come to mind as suitable career choices.

Now, here is some commentary from a real journalist, who was imprisoned in Guantanamo for 6 and a half years by our evil government:

Sami El Haj : For me, there is no question - I will continue my work as a journalist. I must continue carrying a message of peace, no matter what. For my part, I have spent six years and six months in prison, far from my family, but for others it was so much worse. I lost a very dear friend, a journalist with Al Jazeera: he died in Baghdad, killed when the hotel where he was staying was bombed. I also lost a colleague who was working with me at Al Jazeera, whom I consider a sister: she too died in Baghdad.

Many people have lost their lives because of this war. You must know that the Bush administration wanted to prevent coverage by the free media, like Al Jazeera, in the Middle East. The Al Jazeera offices in Kabul and Baghdad were bombed.

In 2001, when I left my son and my wife to film the war initiated by the USA against Afghanistan, I had to expect finding death during a bombing raid. I went there fully aware of the risks. Every journalist knows that he is carrying out a mission and must be ready to sacrifice himself in order to bear witness to what is happening, through his films and writing. And to help people understand that war brings nothing but the death of the innocent, destruction and suffering. It is on the basis of this conviction that my colleagues and I went to countries at war.

Now, after all these years in captivity, I can once again do something to help bring about peace. I am going to commit myself to this goal, until it is achieved. I am sure that one day, even if I do not personally reap the fruits, we will succeed in achieving peace and the respect of human rights, as well as the protection of journalists throughout the world. I am sure that we will see the day when journalists are no longer tortured or injured doing their job, defending people’s rights to information and highlighting human rights abuses.

No comments: