Volunteers for a Better America

Roll Call Votes

One of the key functions of the media is to serve as a source of information to ordinary citizens about their representatives in Congress.  We cannot all spend time to ferret out details of representatives stances on particular issues or figure out exactly who voted for what in which situations. The media should help us to find out what issues are important and how our Senators and Congressperson vote on those issues.

Byron Calame, the ombudsperson for the New York Times (called the "public editor" now) has noted an increasing failure of one of our most cherished newspapers, the ones that serve as papers of record for millions of readers in the United States, to provide critical information on roll-call votes.  See The Case of the Missing Roll-Call Votes in Sunday's New York Times.  He notes that "[g]iven a newspaper's fundamental role in helping readers hold lawmakers accountable, providing lists of roll-call votes on majmor legislation should be an essential ingredient in The Times's Congressional coverage." 

Although the Times has long covered such information, recent trends have moved in the opposite direction, without even substituting readily accessible information on the Times's online site.  Examplesl include the two votes on Alito's (lamentable) confirmation to the Supreme Court--72-25 on cloture to end the filibuster, and 58-42 to confirm.  (Note that if the 42 "nay" voters had had the courage to vote to use the filibuster, they could have successfully blocked Alito's confirmation or forced the Republicans to use their so-called "nuclear option".)

The Times's explanation?  Space, it claims, is too tight.  One has to wonder about that assertion.  There are considerable filler items still in the paper, and there is almost always the possibility of cutting a few uninformative lines of text from a story in order to put a fine-print sidebox with the key information about votes next to the story.  One wonders if the reluctance to provide such information stems from space considerations or from a failure to understand the media's role in providing this sort of information for citizens.  As journalistic values decline, it follows that those running the paper, with their focus on the bottom line, might be more willing to make "space" decisions that compromise the integrity of the paper as a paper of record.

Kudos to Byron Calame for bringing this issue to the fore.  I read the Alito stories with an eye for the expected roll-call vote box and was amazed that it wasn't there.  Now we know that commercial considerations  are encroaching even more strongly on the role of journalism as a check on the power of government (after all, "space" is just shorthand for the number of ads that can replace informational text).

Surveillance and Disappearances: How Many Others?

When we first learned that Hamdi and Padilla were being held in military brigs inaccessible to their lawyers, most of us here in America were shocked.  These are U.S. citizens who were arrested and detained as "enemy combatants" and denied the ordinary due process rights that we had always thought we were entitled to under our Constitution.

Like many others, I wondered what would happen if there were some foul up of information in the White House and an innocent person was caught in their dragnet.  We have seen this White House's incompetence in handling so many other things-- information that was available to them before 9/11 that 9/11 would occur, the bungled invasion and occupation of Iraq, their mishandling of Afghanistan where the Taliban still roam freely, their awful failure in handling the rescue effort connected with Katrina, their inability even to set up a transition of their prescription drug program so that needy seniors would not be stuck without medicines.  About the only thing this group does well is create networks of cronies and crony companies that rip the government off and get waivers for not providing what they've been paid to provide.  (Halliburton, anyone?) 

What if they declared somebody an enemy combatant who is entirely innocent?  What if that person were shipped off to a prison in some country that looks the other way when torture takes place?  How often has that happened, in all those people imprisoned in Abu Ghraib and tortured, sometimes killed?  How often in Guantanamo, where people have been held for years?  How often in this country?  How many other U.S. citizens have been seized and carried off to a military prison on the say-so of Mr. Bush and Mr. Gonzales?  Do we know about all of them? 

Now we know of one more.  Read this story in the Washington Post.  It tells how U.S. citizen Shawqi Omar was arrested in his home in Baghdad on October 24, 2004.  He has been held, without charges and without seeing a lawyer, for 15 months in various military prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib.  When his American lawyers finally filed legal papers to contest the government's right to arrest and hold an American citizen, without acknowledgement that they were doing so, in military prisons in a country that we are occupying by miltiary force, the U.S. government announced that it had decided to transfer U.S. citizen Omar to the Iraqis to hold.  This decision was made even though we have been informed directly that the Iraqi-run prisons use torture.  The U.S. military informed Mr. Omar's attorneys that he would have a hearing in the Central Criminal Court of Iraq and that the attorneys would not be able to be informed any further about it.

In Argentina, such actions were called "disappearances."  We scorned the lack of constitutional protections for citizens or foreigners, and prided ourselves on our system, which could never allow something like that to happen.  Mr. Bush has changed that, with his imperialism and his "enemy combatants" categories of U.S. citizens.  This nationalistic fervor that claims hegemony by might shows little understanding of what it means to claim hegemony by right.

Luckily, there is at least one district court judge who still thinks the Constitution counts for U.S. citizens.  Judge Urbina stayed the transfer and asked both sides to brief the issues, including the Constitutional ones.   

I wonder that it has been so easy to get Americans to give up the precious writ of habeas corpus.  To have us allow an imperialistic executive to tell us that we no longer have privacy rights even within our homes, even to our children's information if the military wants it for their database, even to our telephone calls with friends, families, and random strangers.  We now know that Mr. Bush decided, on his say-so, to authorize domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens by the National Security Agency. 

Who else has been imprisoned?  Who is being spied on tonight? Whose conversations are they listening to?  Could it be me?  Could it be you? 

What are the media doing about these stories?  Not much.  Apparently ratings and dollars go up when they cover weeks and weeks of a sordid murder story, but they don't get much commercial value out of covering American liberty interests.   The story of Shawqi Omar didn't make the Cable News 12 times in 12 hours and consistently from day to day, not like Gary Condit or the bridegroom lost at sea from the cruise ship.  One has to wonder why not?  Surely when our own government is the culprit it is worth talking about  and pursuing the facts until we know and understand what is happening.  This stuff should be covered relentlessly.  After all, next time it could be you or me who is stowed away for years in a military brig.  With this gang of incompetent bunglers, why should we think they're getting this right?  That's why we have those Constitutional protections, checks and balances, and separation of powers.  The whole idea is to prevent a president from acting like a monarch. 

So where is the media on this stuff, anyway?

Medical Journal GhostWriting

We have come to expect spin from the Bush Administration.  We've had, after all, five years of distorted information, beginning with Bush and Cheney's assertions of certainty about Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction and the likelihood of mushroom clouds over Manhattan if the country did not go along with their desire for waging war on Iraq.  We learned about payments of tax money to Armstrong Williams to tout the Administration's "No Child Left Behind" Act and letting Jeff Gannon pose as a real journalist in the White House press room to loft easy questions Bush's way to extricate him from any real journalistic questioning that might (on very rare days) take place.  We learned about video news releases with paid PR performers distributing the White House's views of itself to local news channels and aired without attribution as though they were independent reporting.  We learned about an Iraqi press bought and paid for by the Pentagon, that likely quoted its own stories to show what great progress had been made. 

But did you know that medical journals were publishing pharmaceutical companies' paid propaganda under the guise of research?  Anna Mathews reported on these activities in a story entitled "At Medical Journals, Writers Paid by Industry Play Big Role: Articles Appear Under Name of Academic Researchers, But They Often Get Help," Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2005, A1.   She reports that articles that appear under the names of academic scientists may well have been written entirely by pharmaceutical hired hacks. The companies in some cases even have the articles already written and listed in their database, waiting with a blank for the yet-to-be-selected academic "author."   There's a handy graphic in the printed edition--a drug company at the top sends money to an academic research whose name appears on a medical journal article; the drug company also sends money to a communications firm to prepare an article, and the firm hires a medical writer to actually write the article.  The drug companies claim that authors "have to sign off on everything" and the result is just "a way to more efficiently make the transition from raw data to finished manuscript." 

Like the Bush administration propaganda, this medical propaganda often appears without proper attribution.  The Journal article indicates that only 10% of articles on studies sponsored by drug companies disclosed the help of a medical writer.  In some cases (perhaps a significant number), the supposed academic researcher has had very little to do with the actual scientific research. Even so, the Journal reporter notes, "[a]cademic scientists can more easily pile up high-profile publications, the main currency of [academic] advancement."

Why is this story only in the Journal?  Why isn't it on CNN and other news broadcasts?  How can CNN in particular spend hours on end interviewing lawyers in connection with the latest conspicuous crime or airplane crash but find not a minute to devote to exposing this crass misuse of ghostwriting? 

Et Tu, C-Span?

FAIR has conducted a study of C-Span's popular Washington Journal, available here.  The program format provides for a number of guests and call-in comments and questions from the audience.  The show has long claimed to be politically neutral in its selection of guests, so as to provide a format for useful dialogue that is informative and helpful.

FAIR's report shows that the claim of political neutrality is, alas, much like Fox News' claim of being "fair and balanced."  The study examined the party affiliations of government guests and others for whom affiliation is relevant, gender, ethnicity and occupation.  It found a consistent pattern of favoring dominant groups and conservative ideology. 

• Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one
• Whites outnumber minorities 85% to 15%
• Men outnumber women four to one
• Journalists and special interests outnumber citizen-based groups more than 10 to one

One more piece of evidence that concentrated corporate ownership of media in the country is limiting the perspectives offered and ensuring that conservative views are given dominance.  It has to change, but it is unclear how change can take place when the media is saturated with slanted commentary and information that misinforms Americans about the range of views on issues.

Pentagon Propaganda (2)

As more information comes out about the Pentagon's efforts to control the news in Iraq, it is leading Americans to question further the claims made about the war and the pre-war intelligence.  See this latest Chicago Tribune story on buying access to news in Iraq.

After the domestic propaganda episodes and the revelations of the White House attempts to manipulate the press in the Plame story, the information about the Pentagon's use of tax money to plant stories in the Iraq press creates even more difficulty in separating PR spin from truth.  These planted stories may well have been picked up in U.S. newspapers and broadcast media on the assumption that they reflect true Iraqi sentiment.   Has Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld or Bush relied on a planted story about Iraq to bolster their case for the "success" of the Iraqi war effort?  Can we trust anything that comes out of the White House or Pentagon now?

There is an old saying:  once bitten, twice shy.   

Pentagon Propaganda

There was a good bit of attention in the media when it first came out that the Bush Administration had been seeding local news programs across the country with "video news releases" that could be presented as though they were reported by independent journalists without attributing the stories (often praising the Bush White House programs) to the Bush White House.   Read this exhaustive report at the Center for Media Democracy.

Then we learned that the White House had been paying journalists to take the White House position on issues, without advising readers that the opinions and information they were receiving was covert propaganda. See this story in USA Today and here.

Next the sordid details of Judith Miller's long period of being embedded with the White House in the run up to the Iraq war came out in the aftermath of her serving time to avoid naming the Vice President's chief of staff as the source of her information on Valerie Plame, the CIA agent outed by Robert Novak.  It was clear that Miller's reporting was tainted by her closeness to her subject--she essentially ran with the story  her handlers were feeding her.  See, e.g.,  this article in Slate, this one in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and this one in The Nation.

Now we learn that Bob Woodward, having built a reputation as a dogged outside journalist willing to risk disfavor of the highest officials of the land, was so star struck by his access to power that he kept secret for two years the fact that a senior White House official had also informed him about Valerie Plame.  Worse, he participated in talk shows denigrating Peter Fitzgerald's investigation into the affair, without mentioning his own involvement.  He himself became the story, as noted in this Alternet article and this Village Voice one.  The Washington Post, see here,  covered that story fairly well, leading to a rebuke by the Post's ombudsperson, here. 

The latest revelation in the covert propaganda/embedded journalists story came in Iraq.  We learned that the Pentagon has been paying journalists in Iraq, essentially buying planted stories.  See (or hear) the stories on NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post.  The Times reported that one of the planted stories claimed that Iraq was moving steadfastly towards democracy.   It is worrisome that the lessons from the VNRs and undercover journalists in the US did not cause the Pentagon to think twice about duplicating the strategy in Iran.  Even assuming that the military is well intentioned and sees its propaganda as an effort to counter misinformation from insurgents and other sources, it should have realized that its own misinformation (using Pentagon stories without attribution) can only lead to further problems.  We cannot talk about press freedoms and the values of democracy if we do not demonstrate them in everyday life in Iraq.

This last story has been just a blip on the media screen, hardly appearing at all on the regular news programs and vanishing into the netherworld of media has-beens on even the national papers and news broadcasts.  Reporters should continue to dig into these stories.  In what other ways is the Pentagon attempting to control the information about Iraq?  How long has the covert propaganda gone on, and how many journalists in Iraq have been involved?  Does the Pentagon produce stories for other markets besides Iraq and, if so, where and at what cost and concerning what types of information? 

The mlitary in the United States is an extraordinarilyl powerful organization, with men, weapons and sophisticated electronic equipment.  We can use the military for good or we can misuse that power and ultimately create greater instabiliaty in the country.  It is important that we understand the extent of the military's covert propaganda effort.

The Bush Propaganda Machine

We thought we had already learned about this Administration's disregard for the role of a free press in society when we found that it had hired journalists to appear at White House press briefings and deflect any hardball questions, hired journalists to write positively about White House programs without revealing that the praise had been bought and paid for with taxpayer dollars, and hired PR firms to produce and distribute video news releases to be used by television stations around the country without attribution to the source.  This government, in short, has been busy using taxpayer dollars to support its own spin on the facts.  For a good overview of the many ways this Administration has "dissed" the press, see the entries at Free Press.

A particularly egregious example was a VNR on the "No Child Left Behind" Act that was strongly praiseworthy about the resultsof the program.  The Bush White House had created the perfect spin machine:  hire-a-video, and then quote-the-video to show that all America agrees with the White House spin.

Now, however, we learn even more about the extent to which this Administration goes to distort the news.  The Pentagon has hired propaganda stories for distribution in Iraq and paid Iraqi "journalists" stipends to report the news the way we want it reported.  The Pentagon's hired journalists talk about how dastardly it is of unpatriotic Americans to question the war.  The Pentagon can then, I suppose, quote its own hired writers to prove to Americans that the Iraqis have a much clearer and more positive view of the war than we may think they do! 

The practice teaches Iraqi journalists how not to be a good press in a democracy, and it leaves Iraqi citizens with no way to trust their own press and broadcast media, which have now been shown to be toadies to the American occupation.  This is the way we demonstrate our democratic values?

  The practice of creating government propaganda to shape the truth the way the Bush White House wants to see it must be stopped, and it is up to Congress to do it.  Congress should demand an immediate, public hearing into the use of taxpayer dollars to influence, buy, produce or subvert the free press, whether here at home or abroad in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.

More on Woodward's Embedding in the White House

In a sometimes scathing article prepared by Howard Kurtz without the benefit of an interview with Bob Woodward himself (he refused, choosing the softball setup of Larry King Live over the more probing questions of Post writer Howard Kurtz), today's Washington Post here examines the problem of journalists whose focus on profits (lucrative book deals for Woodward) and celebrity (access to the innermost offices of the White House, like an equal, for Woodward) can place forwarding their own career ahead of providing the public timely information on the workings of government.

Woodward, who in his youth won praise for his tenacious reporting on Watergate and the corruption in the Nixon administration, has lost his bearings in the midst of successful middle age.  His dependence on the powerful leads to rosy-glasses views of their thinking and their actions and a tendency to report it as they want it to be told rather than to peek under the carpet to find the hidden dirt.  Woodward claims that to get stories, he has to have the trust of the powerful.  Kurtz notes an inherent conflict as the bonds of trust with readers appear to be frayed and the consummate outsider reporter has become an insider protecting rather than exposing the current administration.  Granted "unfettered access" to the Bush administration, Woodward becomes subject of questions such as "Why does an administration not known for being fond of the press put so much effort into cooperating with Woodward?"  Id.

Why, indeed?  Kurtz notes that liberals consider Woodward a co-opted "enabler," a "court biographer."  Id. One wonders whether information that Woodward had squirreled away from interviews for his books might have better been used to inform the public in a more timely manner of the inner workings of the White House.  Sydney Schanberg's article in the Village Voice, All the Reporter's Men, notes that Woodward consistently grants confidentiality to his sources.

"[He] promises all his interviewees that he will make no immediate use of what they tell him and will publish it only much later, in the book, which means perhaps too late for the electorate or Congress to act upon it before the White House makes and carries out crucial decisions--such as sending troops into combat."  Id.

Schanberg gives an example on page 423 of Plan of Attack reporting on a long interview with Bush in December 2003.

"[Bush tells Woodward that he] wanted to make sure that his acknowledgment that no weapons of mass destruction had been found so far would not be published in The Washington Post until the book was released.  'In other words, I'm not going to read a headline, 'Bush Says No Weapons.'  'I promised he would not...'"  Id.

Woodward's pursuit of his own self interest thus appears to come at a hgh cost to the public right to know--his access denies others similar access, and his use of that access to write books and withhold information from press stories public restricts the public's knowledge.

What is clear from the Woodward affair is that we need journalists who are aggressive, tenacious, and interested in sharing with the public the information that they manage to ferret out from the secretive corners of government.  While the more detailed information that comes later from embedded journalists is historically interesting, we must always consider the source.  The tendency of hostages to become emotionally bound to their captors should serve as a warning against trusting too completely that a journalist embedded with his sources has been as forthcoming as required.

Maybe Woodward's loss of credibility and admission of wrongdoing will be a good lesson for other journalists.

CPB and Tomlinson, Times and Judith Miller, Post and Woodward

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is intended to be non-partisan--its purpose, in fact, is to shield PBS from political meddling.  In other words, it was to be a buffer between politicians and the broadcasters that would shield them from political interference. 

The inspector general of the Corporate for Public Broadcasting has now issued a report suggesting that Kenneth Tomlinson, former CPB Chairperson, violated both federal law and ethical guidelines by improperly using his position to interfere with PBS programming in an effort to turn it to the right.  One part of that effort was getting rid of Bill Moyers and cutting his highly regarded news documentary program to half the time.  Tomlinson funded a Wall Street Journal program to fill the freed-up half hour at an unusally high price tag of $4.1 million for the first season.  He also hired a "consultant" to investigate Bill Moyers' programming to determine how many of his guests were liberal or conservative.  Before the public release of the report and in connection with a preliminary presentation to the CPB board, Tomlinson resigned.  See the report in Media Matters here and the Washington Post here.

Even though the inspector general report also indicated that Tomlinson recruited Patricia Harrison, the current President of CPB, on a partisan basis, the board of CPB said it still supports her.  Harrison is a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee. And, according to the Post story,

"Despite his departure, the CPB remains firmly controlled by conservatives. Tomlinson's successor as chairman, Cheryl F. Halpern, is a longtime contributor to Republicans, including President Bush and Sen. Trent Lott (Miss.). Its vice chairman, Gay Hart Gaines, another Republican contributor, was a founder and former chairman of GOPAC, a powerful GOP fundraising group.  Tomlinson, a former editor of Reader's Digest, remains chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency unrelated to CPB that oversees the government's international broadcasting services."

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial Nov. 17 that was sharply critical of the CPB inspector general's report.  See PBS and Us, Wall St. J., Nov. 17, 2005, at A16.  The Journal claims that Tomlinson was merely carrying out the mandate of CPB to ensure there was balanced programming.  The Journal editorial implies that Tomlinson's view of a need of an injection of strong Republican viewpoints was necessary, calling Moyers' program at the top of the public-affairs programming a "satrapy." 

What isn't said in all this is just how skewed towards the right so much of the media is--even PBS.  On any Jim Lehrer News Hour program, guests from the right will tend to outnumber guests from the left.  Moyers' program was liberal in tone, but it was well-respected for its thoroughly investigated programs and its open and fair discussion of ideas.  Unlike the Journal's program laden with unreflective free market ideology, the Moyers' program engaged in open inquiry representing the best of what journalism should strive to be.

Remember that this episode takes place against a finding in late September by the Government Accountability Office, a non-partisan arm of Congress, that the Bush administration had illegally used goverment funds to support covert propaganda by hiring conservative pundits to promote its policies.  We also saw the disturbing pattern of government video news releases that have been provided to stations and broadcast as though they were independently produced without attribution to the government.  Propaganda in that fashion is what we associate with dictatorships and oligarchies like the USSR and China.  It has no place in a democracy.

The disturbing flip side of the propaganda coin is the increasing secrecy of this regime and related politicization of bureaucratic decisionmaking, from the FDA to the EPA, from FEMA to the FCC.  The December 1, 2005 issue of the New York Review of Books has an interesting article by Michael Massing entitled "The End of News?".  Massing notes some disturbing trends from a recent report on government secrecy by OpenTheGovernment.org, including an increase of 81 percent in the number of documents that are classified now compared with before 9/11, and a record 64 percent of federal advisory committee meetings in 2004 were closed to the public.  We all know that the Pentagon has banned television from photographing the return of bodies from Iraq.  Massing reports that even William Safire, a conservative pundit, has suggested "that 'the fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before."  Id. at 23. 

The pattern of behind-closed-door decisionmaking, without media attention and broad dispersal of information, has disastrous results for the public.  Take the example of the morning-after birth control pill, as described in the New York Times here and in the Chicago Tribute here.  A GAO report released November 14 indicates that the FDA rejection of the pill was problematic.  Top political appointees made the final decision, which is very rare.  In an unprecedented approach, the officials disregarded the recommendation of the independent advisory committee and the agency's own scientific review staff.  The rationale proffered contradicted past agency practice.  And the officials decided before the lower-level committees had even finished their review. 

This heightened government secrecy and control of perspectives is aided by the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, which--together with the increasing consolidation of media outlets in the hands of a few very wealthy corporations--has made possible a "disciplined and well-organized news and opinion campaign directed by conservatives and the Christian right."  Id.  Distorted perspectives can be spread easily through radios talk shows and websites, especially when targeted at audiences who are unlikely to read newspapers or keep themselves informed by reading widely across various media outlets.  The final blow is journalists who become insiders through close ties to particular staffers or officials, leading to reporting of White House perspectives with uncritical coverage.  Years after its reporting helped the White House make the case for its planned invasion of Iraq based on Saddam's (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction, the New York Times had to apologize for its inadquately sourced and researched stories.

The Valerie Plame outing is the perfect storm of hubris of the powerful, government secrecy, embedded reporting, disciplined conservative opinion creation, and smear campaigns reverberating through the talk shows of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and others.  While Tomlinson's departure clears the air somewhat at CPB and the GAO reports at least brought the Bush use of propaganda into the open and called attention to the politicized decision-making at the FDA, the ongoing saga of Judith Miller and the Joe Wilson smear campaign continues to get foggier.  We now have significant evidence that indicates Bush's chief of staff Karl Rove, vice president Dick Cheney and Cheney's now-indicted former chief of staff Scooter Libby were engaged in multiple discussions with multiple reporters about Wilson's wife Valerie Plame and her connection with the CIA. 

Adding to the intrigue, we now learn that Bob Woodward at the Washington Post had talked with some senior White House official even before Libby spoke with Miller about Pflame.  Woodward kept his conversation secret for seventeen months, even appearing on media shows and disparaging Fitzgerald's investigation.  See this New York Times story.   He apparently revealed his knowledge now only because of the need to testify. The Los Angeles Times offers a scathing indictment of Woodward, here, as a journalist who was seduced by his access to the powerful.  Not only did Woodward keep secret the fact that he had been approached by a senior White House official about Plame while he trashed the investigation into the Plame affair on national media, but he also failed to inform his reading public that his interviews on his latest book had been conducted in the manner of spineless journalism in dictatorships--he had submitted his questions to Dick Cheney ahead of time for approval.  Id.  The LA Times has this to say about this access-needy style of journalism.

"It's a journalistic strategy style dependent on the cultivation of access to well-placed officials greased by promises of "confidentiality." It's a way of doing journalism that still serves its practitioners' career interests, but less and less often their readers or viewers because it's a game the powerful and well-connected have learned to play to their own advantage.  Whatever its self-righteous pretensions, it's a style of journalism whose signature sound is less the blowing of whistles than it is the spinning of tops."

Until journalists start to do their job again, we can expect to have more "spin" and less whistle blowing. 

To help prevent spin, the use of anonymous sources should be more restricted, so that government officials cannot so easily co-opt the press.  How about a rule that anonymous sources are fine when they are speaking against interest--in other words, a government official who is blowing the whistle on a government activity can be offered confidentiality because that official could not speak without confidentiality and the information that official offers is important to the American people's understanding of their government.  The corollary would provide that a government official who is merely offering selected gossip that the official wants to have disseminated should not be offered confidentiality.   There's simply no justification.  Confidentiality in that case only furthers government misleading of the public about its activities. 

Two other rules are necessary to deal with Judith Miller and Bob Woodward's mistakes.  No journalist should be able to mis-identify a confidential source (Miller's agreement to the misleading description "Hill staffer" for Libby) and no journalist should be permitted to maintain exclusive information about sources--there should be a memo to the file, accessible by appropriate superiors in editorial offices, that outlines all relevant information about the source, the source's control of interview format, and the information actually provided in the interview.

With a government like this one, that sets its policy based on ideology without the benefit of transparency and the informed discussion that open, public meetings can engender, we cannot afford a guillible press that merely feeds us the line it was fed.  It is time for the press corps to wake up and make a dash for the nearest exit.  Dis-embed and get to work.

CIA Prisons

In a related post on Volunteers for a Better America here, we noted the Washington Post's revelation on November 2 that the CIA runs "black site" prisons in countries around the globe.  Those prisons hold secret prisoners that exist in a never-never world of interrogations and indefinite detention without redress.  They may also be subject to torture.

While the Post devoted a large space to the story, and small town newspapers picked the story up as a filler in later papers, media broadcasts have hardly mentioned it.  It appears that stories about military and intelligence prisons in countries that may torture and even sometimes kill detainees is just old hat.

FAIR points out another element of this story--the fact that the Post acceded to the U.S. government officials' requests not to name the countries in which the CIA secret prisons are located.  By so doing, the Post became complicit with the White House and those countries in the illegal detention of prisoners in violation of their laws.  You can read the FAIR story here.

Have You Seen This on Broadcast News? Wal-Mart Memo

Wal-Mart, faced with the imminent release of the Wal-Mart Movie by BraveNewFilms, is taking an aggressive stance to counterpunch before the film even arrives at house parties around the country on November 13.   There is a long write-up on the AOL news service, at this link,  about Wal-Mart's aggressive response to the movie, as well as an opportunity for readers to participate in several polls on related issues. 

The blogosphere has weighed in with comments on the Wal-Mart controversies.  See this link for an example.

But the most interesting piece of news is the report that the Labor Department signed an agreement with Wal-Mart that made major concessions to the giant company, such as giving the company 15 days' notice before an inspection for child labor violations, without any quid pro quo.  The government even let Wal-Mart's lawyers write substantial parts of the settlement, without permitting the department's own lawyers to review it.  See Steven Greenhouse, Labor Dept. Is Rebuked Over Pack With Wal-Mart, New York Times (Nov. 1, 2005).  California Democrat George Miller noted that "The sweetheard deal put Wal-Mart emp-loyees at risk, undermined government effectiveness, and further undermined public confidence that the government is acting on its behalf."  Id.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is busy trying to figure out what to do about the fact that the American public is learning about its extraordinarily poor labor practices, such as not providing decent health care options to its employees, with the result that many of their children have to use Medicaid to get health care.  See this internal Wal-Mart memo.  Under the barrage of criticism, the company plans to host a "self-study" conference to be attended by about 80 press and media people, to create at least a media/PR impression that it is addressing its many problems.  See this story. 

Will Wal-Mart convince the media to tell its story its way?  Let's hope that the media will be wiser than it has been in recent years when powerful people try to manipulate the information that Americans receive.

Jay Sekulow--More on the News that the News Doesn't Cover

Jay Sekulow is the right-hand man to Pat Robertson and an important figure in Bush's failed efforts to convince the ideological right-wing base that Harriet Miers would be a solid right vote on the Court because of her conservative religious leanings.  He is a busy man, making very good money doing the "good work."  There's a lengthy story on him at this post in the Legal Times.  One wonders why the broadcast media and national newspapers have not covered this story, rather than leaving it to more obscure law journals.

Here's an excerpt from the story that gives a sense of the kind of information it provides.

"It is the Jay Sekulow who, through the ACLJ and a string of interconnected nonprofit and for-profit entities, has built a financial empire that generates millions of dollars a year and supports a lavish lifestyle -- complete with multiple homes, chauffeur-driven cars, and a private jet that he once used to ferry Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia."

The broadcast media seems to find hours for weeks on end to spend exploring the fate of one missing teenager on Aruba, but it can't cover stories like these that would help inform the public about figures in the news who carry significant influence. 

One suspects the consolidation of the media under a few large corporate owners is a significant part of the problem.  It is a problem that should be addressed, because the American people deserve to know just what drives these people, from Sekulof, to Abramoff, to Norquist, who push particular ideological perspectives like anti-abortion agendas and tax reforms favoring flat taxes on labor to replace the income tax and similar benefits for the wealthy.

The Rove Story Has Legs?

The Plame Affair has now resulted in the indictment and resignation of Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff and right-hand man, who faces up to thirty years on charges of perjury, false statements and obstruction of Justice.   As Fitgerald stated at the press conference, "[I]f the charge is proven that the chief of staff of the vice president's office went before a grand jury and lied, that is a very, very serious matter."  Senior Cheney Aide Libby is Indicted for Obstruction, Perjury, Wall St. J. Oct 29, 2005, at A1, A4.  Although Libby claimed he learned about Plame from Tim Russert, a journalist, the indictment asserts that he held at least seven discussions with various government officials--including Vice President Cheney--about her identity before the conversation with Russert.

Conservative commentators have claimed in recent days that indictment for anything less than a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act would be a "mere" tecnicality that would be easily cast aside by the White House.  Fitzgerald made clear that his view was different.  "The truth is the engine of our judicial system.  If you compromise the truth, the whole system is lost."  Id. at A4. 

Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who heads political affairs and is an important player on Bush's national security, economic and domestic affairs policy councils, is not indicted, but not yet clear.  Furthermore, legal proceedings could require Cheney to testify or could reveal more damning evidence about his own role in the leak and in the planning for the war in Iraq as well as that of others in the White House.  Cheney was among the first people who informed Libby about Plame's role.  A trial could focus considerable attention on efforts in the Bush White House to manipulate intelligence to support its case for the Iraq war.

To their credit, most of the media have covered the story in considerable detail, even amid the coverage of Miers' withdrawal and speculation about the next Supreme Court nominee.  Even the Wall Street Journal included a special report on the close relationship between Libby and his boss Cheney and renewed attention to the rationales for the Iraq invasion and occupation.  Christopher Cooper & Jeanne Cummings, Case Deprives Vice President of Key Lieutenant, Renews Focus on War Rationale, Wall St. J., Oct. 29, 2005, at A1. 

It appears all too easy for figures in this government to be involved in shady affairs and continue business as usual--from DeLay, who still is included in leadership conferences even though indicted, to Frist, who continues in spite of the cloud of apparent conflicts of interest revealed about votes while he knew he owned considerable amounts of HCA stock.  The old idea that politicians should resign if their integrity was impugned, in order to ensure that the government's work would not be tainted has apparently vanished from the scene.  It's up to the media to keep on the story as it develops further, rather than letting it fade into obscurity. 

For the full story of Fitzgerald's investigation, see the special counsel's website here.  The indictment and press releases are available at the site.

Progress in Iraq?

Polls show that the majority of Americans now believe that the war in Iraq was a mistake.  There were, of course, no weapons of mass destruction.  Before our invasion, there were no Al Queda connections.  Saddam was no democratic leader, but he was not planning and coordinating terrorist attacks against the United States.  Iraq was not a training field for radical Islamic terrorists who planned to expand into Pakistan, Syria and other nations.There are still no weapons of mass destruction, but our invasion and occupation have made Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorism.  Toppling Saddam also changed a situation of relative stability among ethnic groups into an unstable situation of near civil war between the three factions.  Our continuing occupation engenders more ill will.

In this period of clear dissent from the Bush unilateral militarism, the Bush administration arranged a live telecast with U.S. soldiers in Iraq.  Not unsurprisingly, given this administration's history of using staged events where every member of the audience is preselected to be supportive of Mr. Bush and of attempting to manipulate media coverage by using "video news releases" of government propaganda presented deceptively as though it is independent journalism, the administration carefully prepared the soldiers for their "spontaneous" session with Mr. Bush.  Before the actual telecast, the questions were gone over, and specific soldiers picked to handle each subject area.  A description of the telecast preparations is available here.  The story of the prepping of the soldiers does not sit well in the context of an administration that consistently attempts to manipulate the news to provide good PR for itself and its partisan objectives. 

Others must have noticed, since the Defense Department even provided a news release, available on their web site, defending the rehearsing of the troops for their "conversation" with Mr. Bush.  You can read the release here.  The release claims that "U.S. soldiers are proud of their service in Iraq" and goes on to justify rehearsing the statements of the soldiers during the "live" telecast as follows:

No one intended to tell them what to think or how to express themselves; going through likely questions in advance was meant solely to help the troops feel at ease during an obviously unique experience.

This event, and the DOD release, suggest that this Administration and the Department of Defense  continue to adhere to the belief that if you repeat something often enough, it is just as good as true.  It is up to the mainstream media to enlighten the administration by exposing these attempts to control the information available to Americans--a telecast of a command performance before the Commander in Chief of handpicked soldiers who are rehearsed on their answers to questions about their tasks in Iraq is simply not a credible interview of soldiers at war.  America is no longer in the market for spin.

More about GAO Study

Last week, we noted the Government Accountability Office's study condemning the Bush Administration's use of taxpayer dollars to fund propaganda aimed to fortify the Republican Party's image.  The GAO study concluded that the video releases promulgated by the Education Department and the Armstrong Williams coverage both constituted illegal government propaganda.   The White House should have issued a clear apology, noting that the buck stops with the President, and a strong statement condemning the use of taxpayer money to fund propaganda.  It did not.  Instead, it rationalized the activity as mere dissemination of information.

Since that time, the GAO study has gotten very little press or broadcast media coverage.  Instead of pursuing the story, the commercial corporate-owned media have been content to let it die.  The online media, however, continues to call for justice on this issue, including urging citizens to write the Congress and the Justice Department to demand action be taken.  A good source of information on the inattention of the media to this issue is the Center for Media and Democracy, which can be reached at this link.   

Gore Speech to WeMedia Conference

Al Gore gave a stirring speech at the American Press Center's We Media conference. The introduction to the speech makes clear the depth of concern about the state of American dialogue about issues that matter.

"I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse ... I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions."

Gore goes on to ask a series of questions about the lack of engagement of the Congress and the American people in a deliberative discourse on issues such as war or peace, torture or Geneva Conventions, income disparity or working for equality.  He notes that our country's Founders had devised a government that permitted citizens to have a say in government policies through their representatives, but to work, both citizens and representatives must be informed and engaged through an open "marketplace of ideas."

" [The Founders'] faith in the viability of Representative Democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry. But they placed particular emphasis on insuring that the public could be well-informed. And they took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas in order to ensure the free-flow of knowledge."

The Founders counldn't forsee, however, the reign of television and the stranglehold that a few dominant corporations would be able to exercise over the information available to the American people. 

"Radio, the internet, movies, telephones, and other media all now vie for our attention - but it is television that still completely dominates the flow of information in modern America. In fact, according to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of four hours and 28 minutes every day - 90 minutes more than the world average."

With the rise of television as the dominant medium that has taken over the public forum that was meant to ensure the accountability of the government to the people , the discourse is changed immeasurably.  Gore notes several major changes between the newspaper medium available to the Founders and the pervasive short clips of television that pass for journalism today.

"Istead of the easy and free access individuals had to participate in the national conversation by means of the printed word, the world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation today."

"[Television] is accessible in only one direction; there is no true interactivity, and certainly no conversation."

"The production of programming has been centralized and has usually required a massive capital investment. So for these and other reasons, an ever-smaller number of large corporations control virtually all of the television programming in America."

"[U]nlike the marketplace of ideas that emerged in the wake of the printing press, there is virtually no exchange of ideas at all in television's domain."

"[T]he absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen."

Those changes carry a heavy price.  The cheap, passive entertainment and digested news leave We the People inadequately prepared to engage in weighty discussions about the state of the Union or the competence of the bureaucrats or the choices between taxing or borrowing, cutting or creating b benefits.  In short, as Gore notes,

"[The]  concentration of control over this powerful one-way medium carries with it the potential for damaging the operations of our democracy."

You can download the audio from the speech at this link.

Propaganda

The Bush administration and Republican Congress have a few problems on their hands right now.  They include, for a brief, incomplete list: (1) DeLay's Texas indictment last week on campaign financing violations and today on money laundering charges; (2) Bush's right hand man Rove and Cheney's right hand man Libby involved in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame--and White House statements that turn out not to have been entirely truthful about it; (3) Bush's incompetent crony managers at FEMA and Homeland Security bungling one of the most important government functions--coming to the aide of citizens in distress; (4) FEMA's spending $200 million to buy ice and pay truckers to drive it everywhere in the country imaginable except to New Orleans where it was needed to save lives and prevent misery; (5) Frist's investigation for insider trading in his decision to sell his HCA stock (which he claimed two years ago he didn't know he owned) just months before bad news caused the price to go down; (6) Republican Pombo's assault on the Endangered Species Act; (7) more information about military condoning of abuse at Guantanamo and the refusal of military brass even to investigate it; (8) Republican plans to go forward with more tax cuts for the wealthy and more benefit cuts for the poor even while Katrina and Rita will add hundreds of billions to the cost of the government and the Iraq war continues to cost $60 - $100 billion a year indefinitely into the future; (9) the disaster that is Iraq, where generals tell Congress things are not going very well but tell the public on the Sunday news programs that things are looking up; and the response of the American people in the form of an anti-war demonstration in DC that gathered a crowd of hundreds of thousands of protestors calling for Bush to bring the troops home now;  (10) a Republican Congress that thinks "free market" means a free-for-all for oil companies to get one subsidy after another even when they are making record profits; (11) a Republican Congress that sees Katrina as just another excuse to carry out its agenda on the American environment by letting oil rigs tear up the fragile offshore ocean shelves and the even more fragile Arctic tundra; and (12) a FEMA agency and military that think "free market" means giving away contracts to companies in no-bid processes and then letting the companies rip off the government with huge prices for doing a job that doesn't need to be done (like the private securities guards that are being paid to patrol the streets of New Orleans, even though there are soldiers and National Guardsmen there, or the private security outfits that are not even under the control of the military in Iraq, that the Iraqi people say have killed Iraqi civilians without provocation).

Whatever one's political leanings, these stories are each significant and deserve adequate informational coverage in the news media.  Yet many Americans could go through an entire week without hearing much about these stories, because they are not very well covered in the national media.   

As noted in an earlier post, the anti-war protest hardly made it into national newspapers, and garnered about 30 seconds on CNN's news for the weekend of the protests themselves. There was more coverage of the puny 400 pro-war protestors that showed on Monday a week ago than there was of the hundreds of thousands who came to put voice to the American people's majority-held views about this illegitimate war in which American troops' and Iraqis' blood continues to be shed.  A best, a few journalists are beginning to talk frankly about the quaqmire in Iraq.  One of them was Andy Rooney on Sunday's Sixty Minutes.  Why isn't there more of that kind of honest talk on television programs across the country?

The media have not done very well at following through on their aggressive reporting about the FEMA and Homeland Security bungling.  The New York Times did carry a story about ice on "Trips to Nowhere" Sunday that traced the routes of truck drivers hired by FEMA (and paid $200 million) to deliver ice to disaster areas.  The trouble is, of course, that FEMA couldn't even get its act together well enough to have the drivers actually deliver the ice where it was needed.  Refrigerator trucks were left standing on tarmac and running their freezers for days on end, using up precious energy and failing to deliver ice.  Most of it was apparently sent back into storage in some FEMA warehouse or other.  Precious little made it to the people that desperately needed it.   Why isn't there more of this kind of investigative journalism in papers and on television channels across the country?

If you watch CNN or Fox News, you also might be forgiven for concluding that the Plame story is just old news (or no news at all).  When Judith Miller was released from jail to testify about her conversations with Cheney's aide in the days before Novak's outing of Plame, there was a good bit of curiousity why Miller felt she needed a personal waiver, given the written waiver received long ago (although apparently with Libby's statement that signing the waiver was necessary to maintain employment in the White House), but little speculation about why Libby should have been talking with reporters about CIA personnel.  We now know that both Bush strategist Karl Rove and Cheney right hand man Libby spoke with reporters about Valerie Plame.  Ask yourself.  What reason would a White House have for raising an issue that seems damaging for a government official?  About the only reason that comes to mind for Rove and Libby to discuss Wilson and Plame is to get even.  Where are the investigative reporters pursuing that story and trying to find just how closely those tentacles are woven around the White House and even the man who occupies the seat of the President of the United States?

The Government Accountability Office also just came out with a scathing report condemning the Bush administration's use of taxpayer dollars for partisan purposes, as reported in the Times. 

"Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban." (emphasis added)

Specifically, the GAO noted that the Bush administration looked to see whether news coverage consistently gave the message that the administration and the GOP cared about education.  The finding comes with no penalty, other than the requirement to report the violation to Congress and to the White House.

The Bush administration's counsels defended the process of using paid reporters as within the law because taxpayer money was only used to disseminate factual information.  The GAO easily squelched that argument by noting that nothing is more important to factual accuracy than accurate attribution of statements.  Remember that in one of the video feeds on the education law, the hired actress gives the government an A for its education work.  Would the White House have us think that was a "fact" and so not propaganda?  The story about the GAO report, like most other hard-hitting stories that deserve to be focused on in every major news outlet, hardly caused a ripple across CNN and Fox News and other outlets. 

The media apparently think Americans will quickly forget as newsworthy items are drowned in the froth of the latest sensational rape or murder.   We have to hope they are wrong. 

Militarism (2)

This post is a brief addendum to yesterday's post warning of the need for strong, independent investigative journalism to keep a careful watch on the American military.  One journalist is doing just that.  He is William Arkin of the Washington Post, who has started a blog called "Early Warning."   You can see the postings on the blog here. 

Here's what he says in his posting about the mission of the Early Warning blog.

"My basic philosophy is that government is more incompetent than diabolical, that the military gets way too much of a free ride . . ., and that official secrecy is the greatest threat citizens actually face today." 

"[M]y larger objective is a more informed public and to demolish false authority, in government, in the special interests, and in the media."

If you look at his blog, you'll learn the fate of Able Danger and Global Harvest.  I doubt you will be comforted.  Here, too, is the introduction to another post, warning of the growing likelihood that military intelligence may spy on US citizens.

The post-Katrina agitation to repeal the Posse Comitatus Act comes in the wake of another assault on a venerable protection of the rights of Americans, namely the web of Executive Orders and regulations restricting military and civilian intelligence agencies from collecting information on U.S. citizens.

Kudos to Mr. Arkin, because this is the kind of reporting that is necessary if ordinary Americans are to have a chance to know what our military is up to.

The March on Washington--The Media Fail Again

When hundreds of thousands of Americans streamed into DC on Saturday to voice our dissent from the outrageous war and occupation of Iraq, we knew that we were legion.  Already, at rest stops and restaurants along the way, we'd encountered busload after busload of similar pilgrims making the journey to DC to tell the man in the White House and the mostly men in Congress that this arrogant cowboy war has got to end.  A restaurant waiter asked me what was going on--he said they were running out of food because so many people had stopped!  A woman in one of the lines told me proudly about 17 buses coming from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.  Another noted that seven buses were coming from a very small town in the middle of the Heartland--they'd come through our town of Champaign-Urbana, in fact, enroute to DC! 

We, too, were proud.  We'd started out expecting 35 or maybe 50 people to be able to go.  We ended up with two buses loaded with 98 people making the hard 13 hour trip down throughout the night Friday night, standing for hours at the rally and in line to march before the White House Saturday afternoon, and then loading up at 8pm for the hard and tiring ride back to Illinois.  But we were proud.  We represented scores more whose hearts were with us but who could not make the trip.  We sang folk songs and talked and felt the bonds of camaraderie that bring people from different walks of life together to give voice to America's distaste for a needless, preemptive war that denigrates all that is good about our country and wastes the billions of dollars that could be invested in the poor here and around the world.

When we got to DC, we could look around and see the numbers of us sitting, standing and talking.   We carried signs, saying "Bush lied; soldiers died", "Impeach Bush", "Support our troops--bring them home now". "Make peace, not war", and on and on.  We saw mimers dressed as Bush, Cheney, Rove and the rest of the war-hungry White House gang, going in chains and prison robe to their proper reward for violating international law.   

When we got to DC, we could see buses at one Metro stop after another.  We could see the line of marchers, starting out at the appropriate time, with the front line coming back when the end of the line still hadn't started.  We could see streams of marchers packed solid for blocks ahead of us and blocks behind us.  I mean solid--shoulder to shoulder, back to front, with very little room to move.  So many banners and signed held aloft that it looked like a veritable army of peace.  We could see, at the cross streets that looked across to the return route of the march, more marchers already hours ahead of us and marching solid, shoulder to shoulder back down to Constitution Avenue.  We knew the strength of voices chanting "What does the face of democracy look like? This is what democracy looks like!" and "Iraq No, Bush Must Go."  We knew how far ahead of many others we were when our contingent finally began to move forward, long after the march started.  We knew how long it took us to get to the White House and we saw the dour looks of the DC police with their hands on their gun holsters and their baseball-sized nightsticks ready to shoot or hit us if they thought we were a problem.  We knew that the march was still just getting underway at 2 when it had been expected to be over, back when the organizers thought that 100,000 people might come.

How many marchers were there?  Much more than the 100,000 that the organizers had originally anticipated.  Much more than the "estimate of 100,000" being provided on CNN and other networks, with only the most fleeting photographic glimpse from above of the streaming throng of angry Americans demanding a voice.  At least triple that number, 300,000, as even one of the news programs finally said tonight.  But probably even more--as many as 600,000 or more.  This was the voice of America speaking truth to power, and it was many hundreds of thousands strong.

There were helicopters throughout the day, taking aerial scans of the huge crowds.  There must be one that shows the snake of people, a full DC street wide (40-50 people across) packed tightly like sardines moving across the entire parade route without gaps!  Why isn't that picture being shown on the news?  Is it because they are afraid that more Americans back home will see the level of dissent, and understand that this regime has failed? 

But don't they know that each person who was there will return to their homes and share their stories, as I am doing, of the huge numbers of people that marched on Washington?  That we will all look to see our faces--the faces of American democracy--reflected in the television news?  That we all thought CNN and ABC and CBS and NBC and PBS would show picture after picture of the huge throng, noting the candor with which people spoke, the ardor with which they voiced their patriotism, their concern for the needless death of more Americans and Iraqis to preserve the Bush-Feife-Wolfowitz-Cheney cowboy dream of an American band of armed bases all across the Middle East oil region?  The media has tried to make us invisible, as it succeeded in making the underprivileged of New Orleans invisible over so many years.  But we will not let them, because we have pictures and we have stories to tell, and we will show and tell them to our friends and families and countrymen who stayed behind.

If you listened only to CNN or the Lehrer News Hour or ABC or CBS newscasts, you might think nothing momentous happened over the weekend.  On CNN, you hear a very brief (15 or 30 second) description of an anti-war protest, with quick flashes of pictures showing the streams of demonstrators and a narrative voice mentioning 100,000 people protesting the war.  No indication that the 100,000 estimate was the organizers' pre-event number (quoted also by the DC police who no longer make their own estimates of crowds). 

On the front pages of the Sunday New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Post, you'd find nothing at all about the enormous turnout and its message.  In small clippings in back on Monday, you'd see a description of the piddling, 400-person pro-war demonstration on Sunday, but nothing in depth about the gigantic anti-war demonstration.  On Monday night, Gwen Ifill interviewed three persons about both protests, as though they were equally meritorious of information.  A military mom spoke eloquently about the senselessness of losing more lives in a war that was wrong from the outset.  A Vietnam vet and proponent of the Iraqi war accused "those people" who protest the war of "causing" the insurgents to do more harm and putting troops in jeopardy.  A history professor quietly corrected the  pro-war speaker's statement that the anti-war demonstrators do not represent a majority of the American people, noting that dependable non-partisan surveys clearly show a majority of more than 60% opposing the continuance of the Iraq war. As in many previous interviews, Gwen Ifill interrupted the liberal (anti-war) speaker but did not interrupt the conservative (pro-war) speaker.  Little of substance was revealed--not once did the News Hour include snippets from speeches such as Ramsey Clark's call for Bush's impeachment for violation of international and US laws nor snippets from children who brought their families to the march because they wanted to take part in democracy now through civic activism against the war.  No pictures were shown of the huge numbers of anti-war protestors, with the News Hour repeating the pre-event estimate of 100,000, though at least the News Hour did indicate that the pro-war crowd to which it gave equal status in its discussion was a measly 400 or fewer.

What is this all about?  No less than the disenfranchisement of the American people by the corporate media that makes money out of war!

I know, for I was there.  America knows, because we who were there are back home again and telling everyone how it really is.

Bush's FDA Head Head Rolls--How the Media Fared

On Friday, Lester M. Crawford, Bush's embattled head of the Food and Drug Administration, resigned.  This resignation comes after a series of controversial situations at FDA.  One of the incidents involved the FDA's receipt of reports from drug makers on approved drugs.  These reports sometimes indicate problems (though perhaps not as conspicuously as one could wish) with approved drugs.  But the FDA, it turns out, does nothing with the information.   It defended its failure to use the report information on already approved drugs to monitor safety by saying that it simply didn't have the staffing to do it!  So America's drug safety agency was setting itself up for a fall, with no attempt to do more than whatever analysis was done on initial approvals. Other controversies during Crawford's tenure included "complaints from consumer advocates and scientists that scientific decisions were being warped by politics," that the FDA had "made a mocfkery of the process of evaluating scientific evidence," failed to "provide[] the public with enough information about the risks of drugs and devices," and, according to Republican Charles Grassley, developed a "too-cozy relationship with the pharmaceutical industry."  Robert Pear & Andrew Pollack, Leader of the F.D.A. Steps Down After a Short, Turbulent Tenure, New York Times, Sept. 24, 2005, at A1.  Crawford's appointment appears to be another instance of the Bush administration's success in placing incompentent people at the head of important positions. It seems entirely appropriate that the Head's head should roll.

Now remember that this is after Karl Rove, Bush's number one operator (in more ways than one), has been implicated in the Valerie Plame affair.  You haven't seen much about that on the news lately, but we learned that Karl Rove had discussed Valerie Plame with newsmen, and that the initial statements made by the White House about his involvement were inaccurate.  Cronyism, misleading statements, partisan ideology given importance above national security--these things are particularly noteworthy in a White House that has claimed that its attention for four plus years has been devoted to remedying the neglect of security issues that showed on 9/11, when it became clear that the Bush White House had not bothered to pay any attention at all to Osama Bin Laden and the intelligence at hand about a gathering storm.

And of course, it is after we have learned, in small dribbles, more about the horrible record of the U.S. military in condoning torture, for which neither Rumsfeld nor any other senior officer has been adequately chastised.  A story in the Times, 3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine, New York Times, Sept. 24, 2005, at A1, casts an ever more dismal view on the military that Rumsfeld heads.  It notes that members of the elite 82nd Airborne tried to report the allegations of torture to their superiors for 17 months, without success.  An Army spokesman claims the allegations first came to the Army's attention earlier this month.  The allegations "described systematic abuses, including beatings, exposure to extremes of hot and cold, stacking in human pyramids and sleep derpivation at Camp Mercury, a forward operating base near Falluja."  The report goes on to say that these abuses took place every day, justified in part by the desire to satisfy military intelligence personnel "to soften up detainees" and in part "to vent soldiers' frustrations."  The soldiers noted that the abuses continued after the Abu Ghraib scandal was made public.

And of course, it is after Bush's appointee to head FEMA had been revealed to be an incompetent, inexperienced horse show commissioner who had no emergency response training whatsoever.  Not only that, Bush's buddy "Brownie" had falsified his resume, padding it to make it look like he did have some expertise.  He claimed that he was an assistant city manager in charge of emergency preparedness staff, when, it turned out, he was only an "assistant to" clerical staff person with no such responsibility over other personnel.  There were other slips on the resume as well, including an inaccurate claim of professorial status.  Bush praised Brownie ("a heck of a job") even after the disastrous performance of FEMA had shown callous disregard for the lives and wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians.  Brownie's false resume was the last straw, and he said he was going home to walk his dogs, revealing even at the end an unconsciounable insensitivity to the poor people of New Orleans who no longer had home or dogs to go home to. 

(Or at least, that is what we thought until today. CBS News reported tonight--September 26, 2005--that Brownie has been rehired by FEMA as a consultant on the handling of the Katrina disaster!  How the Bush administration could give a sinecure position back to an incompetent bungler who knew nothing to start with about emergency preparedness and then botched what he did do is hard to fathom.  If the Bush administration is afraid they won't get his "expert" testimony without hiring him, then why didn't the administration support a truly independent inquiry into the Katrina bungling, with subpoena power held by both Republicans and Democrats to find out the truth of what went on?  The so-called investigative effort in Congress is a sham, a committee with 10 or so Republicans and only 2 Democrats, without subpoena power for the minority Democrats!  Brownie as a consultant now will have a vested interest, again, in FEMA's PR machine, as well as in making himself look like the fall guy and anybody else, from Governor Blanco of Louisiana to Michael Chertoff of Homeland Security, the real culprits.  As the New York Times said in its "Faking the Katrina Inquiry" editorial today, the "investigation" by the White House and Republican Congress remains a "self-serving, bogus" one.  It smacks of the ultimate corrupt cronyism.)

And of course, it is after more and more contractors say that contracts are going from FEMA to crony companies in a no-bid process rather than to the local and minority businesses that should get them in the Gulf zone disaster area.  See, for example, "Minorities Say Katrina Work Flows to Others," Wall Street Journal, Sept. 23, 2005, at B1, and "Many Contrqacts for Storm Work Raise Questions: Lack of Bidding is Cited," New York Times, Sept. 26, 2005, at A1.  The latter story notes that "[s]ome industry and government officials questioned the costs of the debris-removal contracts, saying the Army Corps of Engineers had allowed a rate that was too high.  And Congressional investigators are looking into the $568 million awarded to AshBritt, a Pompano Beach, Fla., company that was a client of the former lobbying firm of Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi."  Id. at A12.

And of course, it is after a very important official in the Bush White House budget office was arrested for misuse of his office.  Turns out that the White House Office of Management and Budget Chief of Staff David Safavian is accused of trying to help Republican high-priest-of-lobbyists Jack Abramoff acquire some prime government property for a client, among other things.  (Safavian's wife is chief counsel to the House committee with primary oversight for government procurement and other functions--in fact, the committee that will play a major role in the Republican "investigation" (if you can call such an affair an "investigation") of Katrina mistakes.) 

Paul Krugman noted the ever widening connection between Bush cronyism and corruption in office in today's New York Times OpEds ("Find the Brownie," New York Times, Sept. 26, 2005, at A21).  He quotes Time magazine in noting that

"Bush has gone further than most presidents to put political stalwarts in some of the most important government jobs you've never heard of ... [including] a Wall Street medical-industry newsletter editor who now holds a crucial position at the Food and Drug Administration."   

He goes on to point out that the regional administrator for the Northeast (including New York State) and Caribbean region of the General Services Administration (that oversees federal property and leases) is none other than the daughter of the chairman of the Conservative Party of New York State.  The Southwest's administrator, "appointed in 2002 after a failed bid for his father's Congressional seat, is Scott Armey, the son of Dick Armey, the former House majority leader."

Krugman's second "game" is "two degrees of Jack Abramoff."  He notes the following:

1) Grover Norquist, powerful anti-tax ally of the Bush White House, ran Mr. Abramoff's campaign for chair of the College Republican National Committee.  This group provided a similar stepping stone for Karl Rove and Lee Atwater.

2) Karl Rove's personal assistant--the one who determines access to the powerful man behind Bush--is Susan Ralston, formerly personal assistant to Mr. Abramoff.

3) Tony Rudy, who worked for Tom DeLay in several capacities, quit to work for Mr. Abramoff.

4) David Safavian worked for both Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Norquist.

One has to wonder why these positions haven't been reported on widely in the broadcast and print media, and why they continue to be disregarded even after examples of rampant cronyism have started to turn up.  The veil is being lifted, but too slowly and not very surely, on the corrupt cronyism that inevitably supports a politician who requires personal loyalty as the be-all and end-all test of political advancement. 

And after the FDA Head resigned, we learned today that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is under investigation by fedearl agents and SEC officials regarding Frist's June sale of his stake in HCA, his family's hospital company, "just as the share's hit a new peak and right before the company announced disappointing earnins that caused a sell-off."  See "Blind Trusts Get New Look After Sale by Frist, New York Times, Sept. 26, 2005, at A14.  See also "Frist Sale of Hospital Stock Spurs Inquiries Into Trusts," New York Times, Sept. 26, 2005, at A8. 

Each of these stories is important for something beyond adding to the list of what we know about incompetence and corruption in the Bush administration.  It reveals anew the problem of concentrated corporate ownership of national and local media.  What is particularly striking is the lack of media attention.  Brownie was gone but is now back again, and Rove and Rumsfeld are flying ever higher even though the one is implicated in a major breach of national security requirements and the other is implicated in a major breach of international law and human rights protection.  Incompetence in the Bush administration is as likely to be awarded the medal of freedom as to be kicked out on its a__.  The media note the story with the least attention possible, and then go on to cover hours and hours of some story that has nothing to do with the state of democracy in America.

So why doesn't the media go after these stories?  Can you imagine them letting a day go by without hounding Clinton, if they'd had even a glimmer of the kind of ill winds that blow around this administration? 

Look what the media should be dogging the Bush administration about.  A rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq that is recruiting terrorists worldwide and creating the image of the US as a military-corporate imperialistic power that imprisons (and sometimes shoots) first and asks questions later.  A human tragedy along the Gulf Coast that is being plastered over with unrequested tax goodies for already thriving national casinos and polluting oil industries.  (The government apparently is going to foot the bill for the terrible pollution attributable to refineries that operate with equipment that cannot meet the predictable devastation of the area in which they are located.  And of course we already gave them huge tax breaks--expensing 50% of the cost of building new refineries, and others--in the energy bill.)  The use of Katrina as an excuse to railroad through anti-worker, pro-big business rules that the Republicans have been wanting to do, but couldn't, for years, like shelving prevailing wage requirements and affirmative action requirements for federal contracts.  The same old crony corporations getting no-bid contracts, with almost no oversight--Halliburton is again making money out of Bush's promises to do good.

Meanwhile, the Democrat's proposal of an integrated work zone along the lines of the Work Products Administration, that could create many new and worthwhile jobs for the people most hurt by Katrina and most in need of help to get beyond the cycle of poverty, is hardly mentioned on the news.

How much time did CNN devote to the new evidence of Bush's incompetent administration?  Only long enough to say that the "embattled Head of the FDA" had resigned after being involved in various controversies.  That was it.  No information about the controversies.  No connecting the dots to other failed Bush appointees.  No analysis of the recurring problems in this administration of graft, corruption and uncaring officials who haven't a clue what the true function of their agency is.  No indication that the news company sees a need to ferret out information about Bush appointees to see if they are competent to do their jobs.  Once again, the media are falling into the same pattern that prevailed after 9/11 and after the beginning of the Iraq war and occupation.  Go for the exciting story; forget the details.  Don't make the administration look bad. 

Our word to the media--don't leave these stories behind.  Go back to Rove, back to Chertoff's inability to handle Homeland Security without a military escort, go back to Cheney's connections with Halliburton and Halliburton's continued ability to garner multi-million dollar contracts in no-bid situations.  Look at the network of political connections among Bush appointees to important government posts.  COVER THE NEWS THAT COUNTS!

White House Budget Official Arrested

by Linda Beale
A major scandal breaks in Washington.  A senior White House budget official is arrested on charges of lying to investigators and obstructing a federal inquiry.  The inquiry involves Jack Abramoff, Republican lobbyist and powerful friend of Tom DeLay and other high-placed Republicans.  Abramoff was indicted last month on federal fraud charges.

At least some major national media covered the story.  The New York Times ran it on the front page.  It was not as conspicuous as the story merited, but it was there.  However, in the endless cycles of CNN news and other broadcasts, it has hardly caused a ripple.  Unlike other stories that are repeated every hour on the hour, this story plummeted down and was lost after a brief outing.  In a few hours of scanning the news tonight, the story caused hardly a ripple.  Odds are that most Americans could have missed it entirely, because journalists are simply not paying much attention to the story.

Why not?  Could it be because Mr. Safavian, the White House budget official, was another corrupt appointment by the Bush administration?  He apparently lied about assistance that he gave his friend Abramoff when Safavian was chief of staff at the General Services Administration from 2002 to 2004.  According to the New York Times, Sept. 20, 2005, at A1, Safavian is charged with trying to help Abramoff acquire two pieces of government property around Washington, including the historic Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue.  (Abramoff was ultimately unsuccessful in acquiring the properties for his clients.) 

Safavian was also along on that expensive golfing trip to Scotland that has gotten attention off and on, but apparently lied to ethics officials by saying that Abramoff had no business before the agency at the time.  Abramoff's emails make clear that it was only because of business interests before the GSA that Safavian was invited on the trip.  The Times article quotes Abramoff as emailing a colleague that Safavian was invited because of the "Total business angle.  He is new COS of GSA."  Id.  Safavian's records make clear that he knew his lobbyist friend was funding the trip, though some of the Republican congressmen who went along have claimed they thought it was sponsored by the National Center.  See the discussion of this information here.

Could the lack of media attention to this issue relate to the many interconnections here?  Safavian had "recently been working on developing contracting policies for the multibilliondollar relief effort." New York Times, Sept. 20, 2001, A1.   How better to make sure that corporations get what they want than having someone like Safavian in the procurement office in charge of contracting procedures for the rapid dispersal of billions of dollars?   Could it be that Safavian has too many ties to Republicans on the Hill, so the corporate media are careful not to offend?  Again according to the Times, he is a former Congressional aide and has "extensive ties to prominent Republicans" as well as "throughout the executive branch and among the city's lobbying firms" and is "a close political allly of the Bush administration."  Id.   He even helped form a consulting firm with Bush buddy Grover Norquist, head of the right-wing "Americans for Tax Reform" group.  Id. Like so many Bush appointees, cronyism appears to be the basis for the high appointment.

No discussion of Safavian would be complete without mentioning his views of the role of government procurement offices.  The Times reports that he considered outsourcing government work to private contractors the "primary goal in his job at the Office of Management and Budget."  Id.

In his attempts to help Abramoff and his golfing payoffs, Safavian may have thought he had all bases covered.  His wife is chief counsel for oversight and investigation on the House Governmental Reform Committee that oversees government procurement.   That committee will also conduct the so-called "investigation" of Katrina bungling. 

(Aside:  Clearly this is an inappropriate group to investigate the Bush regime's mishandling of Katrina emergency responses.  The Katrina disaster demands an independent investigation with subpoena power and an adequate budget.  Unlike Clinton's picayune affair on which we spent $70 million of taxpayer money and years of a private investigator's time, this is a colossal mistake with monumental consequences for hundreds of thousands of citizens.  Nothing less than an independent investigation can satisfy the need to know what went wrong and who was responsible and how we can avoid similar mistakes after future disasters.)

The media should pursue the Safavian story and make sure that every American is aware of the cronyism it evidences in the halls of this government. 

New Orleans Before Katrina: A Media Failure

by Linda Beale
          Katrina is a natural disaster turned into a man-made one because of the failure of officials at all levels, but particularly because of the failure of the federal government to provide the essential coordinating and preparedness function.  The vengeful storm has done immeasurable harm to our society, as the failure of the federal government to marshall resources before the storm revealed how little this Congress and this President have learned about disaster preparedness needs after 9/11.

          The little bit of good that comes from this tragic storm may be its washing away the media's rosy glasses, provided in bulk by the Bush Administration and Republican Congress.  Embedded journalists allowed to see only what the military condoned tended to mimic the White House propaganda machine with barely concealed excitement about "smart" weapons and exulting America-First statements when Bush appeared against his "Mission Accomplished" banner at the start of the second, bloody stage of this war and occupation.  Media generally asked few tough questions about the uniformly scripted presidential appearances with "ordinary Americans" who are always--even in Mr. Bush's first visit to the Katrina-ravaged areas-- pre-selected and pre-trained to provide Mr. Bush with laudatory responses.  The media fell right in with making sure that the American people generally got no chance to see the depth of reasonable dissent from Mr. Bush's "I-say-so I'm Doing Good" policies of tax cuts for the wealthy and benefit cuts (or long term debt, amounting to the same) for the rest of us.

          On one issue in particular the media has generally given this regime a free ride--repeating its claims of attention to national security and emergency protection preparedness like a mantra without inspecting further.  Joe Albaugh, with no expertise other than being a crony and campaign manager for Mr. Bush, replaced James Witt, the head of FEMA who was acknowledged as an experienced and able manager.  Good ol' Joe brought in his college roommate Michael Brown, a commissioner for a horseowners association with absolutely no emergency preparedness qualifications, as his deputy.   When Joe Albaugh quit to turn his FEMA resume line into a lucrative consulting business, crony politics continued with the elevation of Michael Brown to head of FEMA.  Did the media do their work on either of these appointments?  Apparently not.  Now that Katrina has hit and the incompetence of Michael Brown's leadership has become apparent to all, the media finally delved into his resume.  That job as "assistant city manager" with responsibility for emergency preparedness?  Not quite--the city says it was really an "assistant to" position that was not much more than an internship, a job taken by recent college graduates as a line on their resume with no authority over any personnel.  That job as a faculty member at Central State?  Not quite--the college has no record of him as a faculty member, though it says it is possible he may have taught some kind of course as an adjunct.   Brown has been taken off the Katrina disaster, but he has not been removed from his lucrative sinecure as head of FEMA.  False resume, incompetence, focus on PR rather than rescue--Mr. Bush clearly doesn't think these flaws are sufficient to remove a buddy from office.  And Mr. Brown doesn't appear to have any ethical qualms about remaining on the federal payroll without having to do the job that is the most important one that the payroll position exists to accomplish!  He should resign immediately, with a full apology to the American people for the lives lost on his watch.  Instead, he claims "I'm not the story" and says he is going home to walk his dog.  The irony of that comment seems also to have escaped him.  The Katrina victims have no home to go to, and most of them don't have their dogs any more either, as the rescue effort's inadequate preparedness required them to abandon beloved companions to the mercy of the streets, which has turned out to be the guns of the military.  So the question remains--WHY did the media give Bush appointees like Brown a pass when it really counted two years ago when he was appointed to the position?

          And WHY hasn't the media done a better job of looking behind the neat PR covers of this regime's most favored person status for resource extractive industries and their owners and related groups, from Exxon to Halliburton?  We give the oil and gas extracive industries tax incentives galore, and we open precious national wildlands to their environmental degradation--even, if this Congress has its wayward way, the pristine Artic National Wildlife Refuge.  One of the Bush White House's first moves after Katrina was to waive an environmental regulation intended to prevent use of especially harmful oil products--even though this release has nothing to do with getting products through the refinery system, which is the bottleneck on distribution.  (Of course, the White House also waived federal prevailing wage requirements for companies like Halliburty and Shaw, both linked to Bush cronies, that got no-bid contracts in the rush for corporate spoils of the disaster in the Gulf.)  The media should have been critically assessing those energy policies of depending on carbon products, and giving huge breaks at enormous federal cost to energy companies, rather than developing sustainable energy resources and conservationist energy policies.  Just think what it would have meant if we had developed superior public transit in New Orleans so that rich and poor primarily depended on an interlocking city, county, and state network of fast rail lines.  With appropriate planning, those rail lines could have been built to ensure the greatest ability to evacuate residents from New Orleans when flooding threatened.

          Katrina has been "the perfect storm" in other ways, washing away the layers obscuring much about America's seamy underside.   It has revealed the result of the decades of neglect and artificial focus on "free markets" as the solution to all ills--the mostly black, mostly poor, inadequately educated, inadequately jobbed and inadequately cared for ordinary Americans living in New Orleans without the safety nets that many Americans take for granted.  To this, too, the angy journalists witnessing the American tragedy on the Gulf Coast are finally awakening.  News reports actually reported, although sparingly, on the underlying racism of rescue and evacuation decisions, such as the priority given evacuating mostly white, mostly wealthy tourists from the Hyatt Hotel over evacuating the mostly black, mostly poor (and already worse off from the ravages of the storm) residents of the Convention Center in New Orleans.  And in the September 11, 2005 edition of The New York Times, the public editor, Byron Calame, finally says it plainly in his op ed:  in spite of the importance of poverty and the link of poverty to race in New Orleans, The Times simply didn't cover that story.

"As a national newspaper with high aspirations, the New York Times assumes a responsibility to alert its readers to significant problems as they emerge in major cities such as New Orleans.  Poverty so pervasive that it hampered evacuation would seem to have been worthy of The Time's attention before it emerged as a pivotal challenge two weeks ago.  ...[Yet] A search of substantive Times new articles about New Orleans since September 1994 ... found none that focused on the city's poor and the racial dimension of poverty.  And there were only two articles about the city--both feature stories--that contained a few paragraphs on poverty and race."

          Similarly, studies of the levees have long shown that they were inadequate to withstand a category 4 hurricane and that even less powerful hurricanes might well cause a breach because of long term neglect of needed maintenance.  Scientists have been warning FEMA and all of the relevant federal agencies for years that the flood control projects on the Mississippi have been short-sighted and that costly but doable projects could release silt-laden waters to help restore the life-giving, hurricane protecting marshes in the lower Mississippi delta.  The Bush White House has been cutting back on the few projects actually protecting the delta when it should have been calling for necessary construction as well as sustained discussion and action on the polycentric question of a city's survival in the midst of dying wetlands. That project should have included a national discussion about regulating development of homes on valuable wetlands and coastal beaches, leading to predictable need for federal assistance when storms' winds and waters wipe them out.  But The Times, along with most other media in the country, didn't cover that story well at all.

"What had The Times's news columns provided over the past decade to help its readers understand the New Orleans levee system?  One major article that focused on levees.  The 2,100 word article on the front of the Science section in 2002 made clear that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane would send water over the top of the levees. ... neither the news article nor the editorial commentary prepared readers for the possibility of breaches in the levees or canal walls."

          The Times's public observer offers a notewothy admission of inadequate media coverage of these important national problems.

"Given the dimensions of poverty in New Orleans and the city's dependence on a levee system, the Times's news coverage of these problems over the past decade falls far short of what its readers have a right to expect of a national newspaper."

          It's important that this lesson not be lost.  The anger journalists feel now at city, state and federal governmental betrayal of the basic responsibility to protect citizens from harm should be turned into a renewed commitment to fair coverage of news events and long term problems of importance to the country.  That commitment won't make up for the past neglect, but it will mean that in the future America will be better prepared to make policy decisions that have direct bearing on the lives of individual citizens in this vast country.  A democracy cannot work when its citizens are not informed about the ugly truths of their society and the predictable future harms that have been swept under the rug.  Tax cuts for the wealthy, at the expense of benefits for the poor, would be harder to pass (one hopes) without an outcry of outrage, when people realize that it means that those without any means to help themselves will receive no help from the government either.

The Case for Media Reform

By Kathleen Robbins
Media reform; you may have heard something about it lately, living close to the University of Illinois, Prof. Robert McChesney and all the local efforts that have been made to address this issue. But what does it really mean to most of us?

To answer that question, it is necessary to remember the role the free press has played in crafting the democracy that we enjoy today. The very first article in the Bill of Rights, those first ten amendments to our Constitution, guarantees freedom of the press. A concept we take for granted today, but which was radically different from the prevailing model in Europe at that time the Constitution was written.

Today, that same freedom of the press, which has helped preserve our democracy for over 200 years is being challenged as never before. Fewer than 10 massive, multinational conglomerates dominate our access to and/or produce our television, movies, music, radio, cable, publishing and Internet. This consolidation has happened over the past two decades with the consent and support of the federal government at the urging of these mega-corporations and their lobbyists, creating huge profits for a few stockholders while eliminating most local control and competition.

The result has been that we now have a virtually homogenous news media that gives us thousands of hours of coverage of Michael Jackson and the love life of Brad and Jen while providing scant coverage on local and international events that have potentially huge impact on our daily lives. We are told the media is giving the people what they want, but when ownership is consolidated in the hands of few people who answer only to their stockholders, the result is a media that takes the easy way out, doesn’t challenge the status quo and conforms to the corporate hierarchy for fear of dismissal.

We only have to look at organizations such as Enron and MCI WorldCom to see the results of unchecked corporate greed without some reasonable governmental constraint. More information on media consolidation can be found at www.freepress.net/content/ownership and to join a local organization that is addressing these issues at a grass roots level, contact Volunteers for a Better America here in Champaign/Urbana at admin@volunteersforabetteramerica.org.