so how are you? wally wrote the nicest e-mail saying thanks for the thing i did here over coffee this morning. truth? i had no idea what i'd linked to until i read wally's e-mail. i am not a morning person. i am an evening person, a late night person, an all night person. i am just not a morning person.
i have to wake up slowly and ease into the morning. even before i get out of bed i'm doing some modified yoga stretches. and i may very well then go back to sleep after. the snooze button wears out on my alarm clocks. they'll start to stick and i'll have to go out and get another clock all the time.
this morning i was doing 1 of my stretches when i groaned 'oh shit!' braeden looks over at me and asks what but i'm already scrambling out of the bed. i hit the on button on the computer and hop to the kitchen to start the coffee. run back here while it's booting up. pull up the net and braeden was kind of enough to bring me coffee.
so i'm glad that the links gave enjoyment to wally and shirley and lisa and jobi and the other 15 who wrote to say thanks for having a post up because they'd checked sunday and figured it would be monday evening until something went up here.
i want to note a few things.
1st off if you didn't see it at the common ills, bill moyers full speech from this weekend was broadcast today on democracy now and here's a part of it:
Jonathan Mermin writes about this in a recent essay in World Policy Journal. You'll also want to read his book Debating War and Peace: Media Coverage of US Intervention in the Post-Vietnam Era. Mermin quotes David Ignatius of The Washington Post on why the deep interests of the American public are so poorly served by Beltway journalism. "The rules of the game," says Ignatius, "make it hard for us to tee up on an issue without a news peg." He offers a case in point: the debacle of America’s occupation of Iraq. "If Senator So-and-so hasn't criticized postwar planning for Iraq," says Ignatius, "it's hard for a reporter to write a story about that."
Mermin also quotes public television's Jim Lehrer, whom I greatly respect, acknowledging that unless an official says something is so, it isn't news. Why were journalists not discussing the occupation of Iraq? "Because," says Jim Lehrer, "the word 'occupation' was never mentioned in the run up to the war. Washington talked about the war as a war of liberation, not a war of occupation. So as a consequence, those of us in journalism," says Lehrer, "never even looked at the issue of occupation." "In other words," says Jonathan Mermin, "if the government isn't talking about it, we don't report it." He concludes, "Lehrer's somewhat jarring declaration, one of many recent admissions by journalists that their reporting failed to prepare the public for the calamitous occupation that has followed the liberation of Iraq, reveals just how far the actual practice of American journalism has deviated from the First Amendment idea of a press that is independent of government."
Take the example, also cited by Mermin, of Charles Hanley. Hanley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Associated Press whose 2003 story of the torture of Iraqis in American prisons before a U.S. Army report and photographs documenting the abuse surfaced, was ignored by major American newspapers. Hanley attributes this lack of interest to the fact, (quote), "it was not an officially-sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source. Furthermore, Iraqis recounting their own personal experience of Abu Ghraib simply did not have the credibility with Beltway journalists of American officials denying that such things happened."
Judith Miller of The New York Times, among others, relied on that credibility, relied on that credibility of official but unnamed sources when she served essentially as the government stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. So the rules of the game permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.
I decided long ago that this wasn’t healthy for democracy. I came to see that news is what people want to keep hidden, and everything else is publicity. In my documentaries, whether on the Watergate scandal thirty years ago, or the Iran-Contra conspiracy twenty years ago, or Bill Clinton's fundraising scandals ten years ago, or five years ago the chemical industry’s long and despicable cover up of its cynical and unspeakable withholding of critical data about its toxic products, I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity was not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference. I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies, as well as the big lie of people in power.
In no way – in no way does this permit journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead, making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to the post with confirming evidence.
This is always hard to do, but it's never been harder. Without a trace of irony, the powers that be have appropriated the Newspeak vernacular of George Orwell's 1984. They give us a program vowing no child will be left behind, while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged children; they give us legislation cheerily calling for clear skies and healthy forests that give us neither, while turning over our public lands to the energy industry. In Orwell's 1984 the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society’s dictionary, explains to the protagonist, Winston, "Don't you see? Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050 at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we're having right now. The whole climate of thought," he said, "will be different. In fact, there will be no thought as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking, not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
Hear me: an unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.
now i want to steer you to bob somerby and his daily howler. he is talking about how the right lied about the guests who stayed over at the white house back when we had a real president, bill clinton. and he notes that your brave 'liberals' refused to stand up. he quotes one particular "liberal" publication:
Baldly false. But in this, as in so many matters, Washington's "press corps" did what it does best; it omitted the relevant facts, replacing them with fake "facts" it found pleasing. Meanwhile, did your "liberal" magazines challenge this clowning? Here was the New Republic's first comment:
NEW REPUBLIC, UNSIGNED (3/17/97): FINANCIAL ARTS:
The just-released list of 831 Clinton friends who slept at the White House in the president's first term offered more than an inside look at how the administration peddled influence. It also provided an inadvertent picture of the sorry state of America's cultural life. The Clintons divided their guests into five categories. Some in the "Arkansas friends" group, we regret to inform, were rather crass characters. But the real shocker came in the fifth, and most highbrow, category, the exalted "Arts and Letters," which sounds like a new section in the Times. Only sixty- seven qualified for this prestigious designation. Among their number, such artistic and literary giants as Ted Danson, Judy Collins, Jane Fonda, Tom Hanks, Ted Turner and Chevy Chase. Thank goodness Clinton didn't have to raise the money necessary to win a close race in 1996. He might have opened up the Lincoln Bedroom to mere commercial entertainers.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Perhaps you'd forgotten the sheer inanity of this magazine in the days of the late Michael Kelly.
michael kelly? one of those cons playing at being centerist. a writer who never had much to offer but turned himself into a complete carny barker during the lead up to the war in iraq.
the new republic is not liberal. when stephanie goes on air america to do those commericals she'll claim they are liberal. al franken will claim the same thing. they are not a liberal magazine. they are joe lieberman in print. if lack of truth in advertising were punishable by prison terms, a lot of the so called 'liberals' at the new republic would be serving life sentences.
