Fool’s Day Is A Day Away
March 31st, 2002 - by: danny
*MIDDLE EAST MISCOVERAGE*
*IS ARAFAT EVIL?*
*ISRAELI CRITICS CRITIQUE*
I wish we could just say April Fool, on this Easter Sunday, and LAST day of the third month of the second year of a century that has so far been consumed by terrorism and conflict. We might then pretend that the horror is not happening. There was another suicide bombing this morning, 16 dead, in a café in Haifa. And I have been watching three cable networks report it, all the same way, by LOOPING the same footage from the scene of the bedlam, over and over again. The viewer is not told that this BREAKING NEWS is not breaking, is not live, but rather edited material from an event that occurred hours earlier. The footage is used as what we used to call “wallpaper” or B-roll for commentary, and voice over “reporting.” All you see are the same dreadful pictures over and over again, an assault of imagery that drills itself into the mind. 96% of the commentary just repeats the Israel government perspective, although the viewer emails on CNN remain far more critical and interesting than the questions posed by the anchors, who include the weatherman this morning. Fox News has a person on insisting that the Palestinians must recognize Israel’s right to exist. No one at the network seems to remember that they did that as far back as l988. Maybe, that is because Fox didn’t exist back then.
MSNBC does offer an interview with a legal advisor to the PLO who keeps being interrupted with barrage of argumentative questions and hectoring. She is asked when Arafat will condemn terrorism. She insists that he did that on December 16, 2001 and that there were no attacks on Israel for a month afterwards. The resistance movement revived only after January 14, she claims, when Israel assassinated an activist on the West Bank. The MSNBC reporter says he doubts this can be true and leaves it at that. The PLO woman keeps trying to talk about the siege of the towns on the West Bank, and the total repression. She keeps getting cut off.
Back to looped footage.
PORN ON TV?
And what of what is happening on the ground. I saw few reports on TV that capture what the wires like AP are detailing:
“Yasir Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian minister of information, said late tonight that Israeli troops had announced over loudspeakers that they were preparing to storm the office itself in pursuit of wanted men. Israeli officials have repeatedly said that Mr. Arafat harbored fugitives in his compound.
“Troops and tanks also surrounded the hilltop headquarters of Jibril Rajoub, the chief of security in the West Bank for the governing Palestinian Authority. Palestinian officials said that the army was also demanding that Mr. Rajoub hand over any militants imprisoned or hiding there.
“Armored vehicles rolled through Ramallah’s emptied streets, broadcasting calls over loudspeakers for men and boys between the ages of 15 and 45 to turn themselves in for interrogation. Gunfire sounded throughout the day, and among numerous indignities Palestinians accused Israeli forces of capturing a television station and using it to broadcast pornography.
“A United States consulate employee who was in Ramallah confirmed that the programs were on the air. The Israeli Army said soldiers interrupted the station’s broadcasting but had not substituted pornography for the usual programming.”
“SHOT THROUGH THE HEAD?”
“The English press is carrying reports this morning of executions of Palestinian policeman. This is from the OBSERVER: “What happened on the third floor of the Cairo-Amman bank at midnight on Friday during Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian city of Ramallah can only be surmised. But in the few minutes after Israeli soldiers stormed the Palestinian position, five men were wounded and five men were put to death by the Israelis, each with a single coup de grace to the head or throat.
“Maher Shalabi, bureau chief of Abu Dhabi television in Ramallah, was in his office in the same building when he heard several bursts of heavy shooting on the floors below. ‘I heard heavy shooting; maybe it was an exchange of fire. But I believe this was an execution. This is what I understand.’
“Hassan Asfour, a senior Palestinian negotiator, added: ‘They were executed in cold blood. This is a clear example of the collective execution policy adopted by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people.’
“According to local residents, the dead men were part of a large group of Palestinian policemen who had taken shelter in the building, which also houses the offices of the British Council, when the Israeli army entered their area of Ramallah.”
HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS MENACED
The Israeli Army also invaded the offices of El Haq, the Palestinian human rights organization that frequently works with its Israeli counterpart to credibly report on human rights abuses by all parties. Human rights groups are sending out chilling reports with information like this, that may or may not be overstated:
“The house-to-house searches and indiscriminate detaining of civilians present an imminent threat to the lives of many Palestinians. It is also becoming obvious that Israel intends to re-occupy the whole of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Furthermore it appears Sharon is preparing to execute Mr. Arafat, a move which will cause an explosion in the whole region.
MISSING CONTEXT: ROOTS OF THE CRISIS
“How did it come to this, asks an analyst in the Observer:
“…how did it come to this? One partial answer is a prediction from the years before the Oslo peace process collapsed. Both sides expected the greatest danger to arise when the leaders sat down to discuss the most difficult issues that had been put carefully to one side: a final settlement that would resolve once and for all whether (and how many) Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return, the status of Jerusalem and its holy sites, and how much of the territories still under Israeli occupation would be returned.
“This was made explicit to me in the first few weeks of the intifada. In autumn 2000 I ran into the Tanzim militia leader, Marwan Bargouti, at a funeral in the main cemetery in Ramallah.
“I found him standing beneath a tree to one side of a group of mourners, a little way from a line of a dozen open graves, dug in anticipation of the dead to come. He told me then, with what I regarded as a strange optimism, that violence ‘could stop tomorrow’. He was not alone. Leaders of the uprising told me the same story. So too did Israeli army officers and political advisers, though with a different slant. The message was that the violence and the rioting were part of a negotiating process for a final settlement that stalled at Camp David. No one wanted, or expected a wider war. But it has come.”
FISK: “TERROR, TERROR, TERROR”
And why is it continuing? Here is veteran Middle East observer Robert Fisk in London’s Independent yesterday. I quote all these analysts to make a larger media point about the analytical frame that is missing from most of the American coverage which bipolarizing the reporting between the Israeli position on the one side, and the Palestininan on the other. This simplistic formulation serves certain interests but it distorts a more complicated many-sided truth.
“How much longer can Ariel Sharon pretend that he’s fighting in the ‘war against terror’? How much longer are we supposed to believe this nonsense? How much longer can the Americans remain so gutlessly silent in the face of a vicious conflict which is coming close to obscuring the crimes against humanity of 11 September? Terror, terror, terror. Like a punctuation mark, the word infects every Israeli speech, every American speech, almost every newspaper article. When will someone admit the truth: that the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a dirty colonial war which will leave both sides shamed and humiliated?
“Just listen to what Sharon has been saying in the past 24 hours. “Arafat is an enemy. He decided on a strategy of terror and formed a coalition of terror.” That’s pretty much what President Bush said about Osama bin Laden. But what on earth does it mean? That Arafat is actually sending off the suicide bombers, choosing the target, the amount of explosives? If he was, then surely Sharon would have sent his death squads after the Palestinian leader months ago. After all, his killers have managed to murder dozens of Palestinian gunmen already, including occasional women and children who get in the way.
“The real problem with Arafat is that he has a lot in common with Sharon: old, ruthless and cynical; both men have come to despise each other. Sharon believes that the Palestinians can be broken by military power. He doesn’t realise what the rest of the world learned during Sharon’s own 1982 siege of Beirut: that the Arabs are no longer afraid. Once a people lose their fear, they cannot be re-inoculated with fear. Once the suicide bomber is loose, the war cannot be won. And Arafat knows this.”
BLAMING YASSIR
I was shocked to find my colleague Greg Palast of the Observer in London dismissing many of his own colleagues in the British press as antisemitic* and biased towards the Palestinians. But I kept pressing him and others about evidence. Is Arafat the evil mastermind behind the suicide bombers, the man calling the shots, who can simply turn off the violence with a statement in Arabic as many in the US government and media keep saying? President Bush says he believes this. New York Times headline: “As Israeli Troops Tighten Grip, Bush Says Arafat Must Do More.” The essence of the story: “The Bush administration indicated qualified approval of the Israeli invasion. Before dawn, it backed a resolution by the United Nations Security Council calling on Israel to withdraw. But later, President Bush placed the blame for Mr. Arafat’s predicament squarely on the Palestinian leader.”(*anti-Jewish anti-Semitism is spelled sans hyphen according to Prof. Yehuda Bauer, and that’s the way I do it, jf.)
BUT WAIT A MINUTE, DANNY
“Our friend Janet in Washington is convinced that this is the case and writes to say so: “Arafat has put it in his own words now Danny. Via cell phone in an interviewto al Jazeera, “We have chosen the path, we will either be a martyr or oursons and daughters will raise the flag of Palestine over the churches andmosques of Jerusalem. We are all potential martyrs, the whole Palestinianpeople.” When referring to the Netanya suicide bomber, he said, “Oh Godgive me martyrdom like this.” He was also quoted as saying, “I want to be amartyr, martyr, martyr, martyr.” All of this reported in today’s WashingtonPost. Are these cease fire words??? Are these the words of a man who seekspeace? Is he listening to the offers at the Arab summit? Are these thewords of a man who seeks solutions – just solutions??? Does a real man, aleader of his people, offer his children to step up to the sacrificialaltar???? He can no longer be defended. Look what he is doing to hispeople.
“Are we to interpret this as Arafat’s final leadership solution? He isoffering his people to the sacrificial altar of suicide solutions for hiscause, rather than meet anyone or anything half way. He is not a victim, heis a perpetrator of an inhumane war tactics, using his own people as pawns.The victims are the Palestinians and the Israeli’s. No one talks about thegizzilions of aid dollars he has absconded with rather than build his peoplea country. No one puts the textbooks of his schools on the front pages ofthe newspapers to show the hatred that is being taught to these innocentchildren. He leads with futility and is now asking someone to destroy themall.
“The Arafat statements leave little doubt that he wants his allies to knowthey are welcome to take them all out if necessary if it means a finalvictory over Israel. At all costs…martyrdom… if it means victory.Have we ever heard him scream STOP!!!!!??????????”
OTHER VOICES FROM ISRAEL ARE NOT HEARD
On the face of it, judging by the media coverage, you would think that this is a one side good, the other side bad situation with Jews supporting Israel and all Palestinians waiting for the word from Mount Arafat. Not true. Listen to Yossi Beilin, who was in Barak’s cabinet and helped negotiate the Oslo agreement, writing yesterday in the New York Times. He, incidentally, supports the interpretation of the PLO legal advisor quoted above:
“Each escalation of violence has fueled the next. Mr. Arafat’s periodic instructions for a cease-fire were not unequivocal. But Mr. Sharon did not accept Mr. Arafat’s cease-fire declaration of Dec. 16, 2001, which was largely implemented. He has rejected the Saudi initiative that promises normal relations with Israel in exchange for the withdrawal of Israel from the territories it occupied in 1967. And he seems to interpret the low American profile on the crisis so far as a green light for making war, just as he did in Lebanon 20 years ago.
“The only way out of this crisis is for the two sides to agree to a cease-fire to be supervised by the United States; build on the Saudi initiative; and use the assistance of the American mediator, Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, to ensure that the Palestinian Authority’s security forces are restored. Implementation of existing agreements and resumption of peace talks are essential.
“The Israeli war against the terrorist infrastructure will give birth to more terrorists because the terrorist infrastructure lies within people’s hearts. It can be uprooted only if there is hope for a different kind of life in the Middle East. I believe a different life is still possible, but each day that passes without some gesture by both sides toward that future makes peace ever more elusive.”
ISRAELI WAR CRIMES?
Other views not in the Times from Israel are much stronger and go unreported in mainstream media. Meet Lev Grinberg, director of the Humphrey Institute for Social Research at Ben Gurion University, who indicts his own government for war crimes:
“….responsibility for Israeli war crimesis being completely ignored. Who should be arrested for the targetedkilling of almost 100 Palestinians? Who will be sent to jail for thekilling of more than 120 Palestinian paramedics? Who will be sentencedfor the killing of more than 1,200 Palestinians and for the collectivepunishment of more than 3,000,000 civilians during the last 18 months?And who will face the International Tribunal for the illegalsettlement of occupied Palestinian Lands, and the disobedience of UNdecisions for more than 35 years?
“Suicide bombs killing innocent citizens must be unequivocallycondemned; they are immoral acts, and their perpetrators should be sent to jail. But they cannot be compared to State terrorism carriedout by the Israeli Government. The former are individual acts of despair of a people that sees no future, vastly ignored by an unfairand distorted international public opinion. The latter are cold and “rational” decisions of a State and a military apparatus of occupation, well equipped, financed and backed by the only superpowerin the world.”
HOW PR AND MEDIA SPIN INFLUENCES EVERYTHING
Why do we get one point of view far more pervasively than others? There are various conspiracy theories around that argue that the Jews run the people and therefore…I don’t think so. We live in the age of sophisticated media campaigns that run alongside wars…and the truth is that the Israelis are much better at that than they even seem to be on the battlefield where their ‘over-reactions’ always fuel the cycle of violence. Here is an AP report that makes the critical point we at the Mediachannel are always focused on:
Interviews with Israelis, Palestinians and diplomats here and in Washington provide a picture of a sophisticated Israeli government campaign to influence General Zinni to view the conflict through their eyes.
“They were very clever, very persuasive,” said a senior diplomat here involved in the talks. By all accounts, Palestinian officials were ineffectual, even ham-handed at presenting their case, and anything they had to say was loudly overridden by the bombings and attacks by their followers. That violence set the agenda for everyone almost every day.
What the Palestinians were trying to say was that a cease-fire was not enough.Any cease-fire without some movement toward a political solution, the Palestinians and others said, was bound to fail. The cycle of violence would start again.
“At this point it is more difficult than ever to achieve a cease-fire without political underpinnings,” said Terje Roed-Larsen, the United Nations envoy here.”
Please read this paragraph again because it speaks to the cycles of spin and disinformation that are influencing all of us.
WASHINGTON’S COMPLICITY
And what about US policy? That, too, goes is not examined in the TV coverage I have been watching. (I keep coming back to TV because that is where most news consumers get their information and have their opinions shaped.) Two stories in the Washington Post are as scathing of the Bush Administration policy as any I have seen and show how inaction on Washington’s role has resulted in an abandonment of all even handedness, and contributed to the carnage:
Story l: A Grudging U.S. Policy
Reluctance Has Resulted in Sporadic, Superficial Engagement
By Alan Sipress
“President Bush’s national security team decided in the days after inauguration not to send an American envoy to Taba, Egypt, for last-ditch peace talks before the election of hard-liner Ariel Sharon as Israeli prime minister. And as violence mounted — though those early months of the Palestinian uprising were mild compared with today’s relentless bloodletting — the White House tarried in announcing whether it would assemble a new Middle East peace team.
“In the following weeks, the administration pulled the plug on the CIA’s high-profile role as a broker between Israeli and Palestinian security services, setting a pattern of sporadic and superficial American engagement.
“Now in its second year, the policy of leaving the Middle East conflict largely to the two sides has failed to stem the dizzying descent of the peace process and, with it, American standing in the region.
Story 2: The Catastrophe of U.S. Inaction .
By Jackson Diehl
“It now looks as if the Israeli-Palestinian fighting will be remembered as the Yugoslavia of this Bush administration — a dangerous situation that, through timidity and willful inaction, the United States allowed to become a catastrophe….Now, as Israelis and Palestinians slaughter each other with a ferocity unimaginable only 15 months ago, this Bush administration looks to be haunted by a similar failure in the Middle East. Though Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon brought on their war, so did the administration’s irrational insistence on retreating to the sidelines in a region where the United States has been an indispensable broker for decades…
“…There, two months before Sept. 11, the administration committed itself to an unworkable strategy. Rightly, it had isolated Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and mobilized considerable international pressure on him to rein in the violence. But it failed to take the two harder steps that might have made that tactic work. First, it refused to offer any vision of a serious political process — like the Madrid peace conference organized by the first Bush administration — that might have given the Palestinian peace camp leverage over Arafat. Even more important, President Bush refused to pressure Sharon, ignoring and sometimes even blessing his increasingly destructive tactics….
“Sharon proceeded to make a mockery of the pressure-Arafat plan. Each period of Palestinian restraint was greeted with Israeli assassinations, home demolitions or incursions into Palestinian territory; each terrorist attack launched by Arafat’s extremist rivals was answered by devastating Israeli assaults on Arafat’s own security forces. State Department spokesmen sometimes protested, but the White House did and said nothing.
WHY ISN’T THE TV MEDIA PICKING THIS UP?
Ok, so there you have it, centrist US analysts saying the same thing as the Israeli critics and even many of the Palestinians. But who is listening? Why is the TV media NOT picking up on this when so many voices are critical of the Israeli and US policy? It goes back to the larger reluctance on the part of the Democrats and the media to challenge Bush’s foreign policy agenda, as long as the word “terrorism” is invoked to defend it.
Ironically, this is occurring despite the fact that American public opinion has not fully embraced President Bush, but Bush has managed to position himself above politics with foreign policy debate all but muzzled. William Schneider, who is on CNN all the time, is a leading expert on public opinion. He writes about this in the LA Times today, but doesn’t deal with the ways media management has factored in to the image positioning that has gone on. He writes today in the LA Times:
“WASHINGTON — Politically speaking, it’s still Nov. 7, 2000. The two parties remain deadlocked. The red state/blue state division of America persists, with the red (Bush) states like Texas getting redder and the blue (Gore) states like California getting bluer.
“That’s because the division enshrined in the 2000 election map wasn’t a division over policy. It was a division over values: liberal America and conservative America. Nothing has happened in the last year and a half to heal that division. No, not even Sept. 11, which was widely expected to break the stalemate in U.S. politics.
“Yes, there is widespread agreement on the war. And broad support for President Bush. But those things are above politics. Even Bush is above politics.” Above politics!
Perhaps we should be anticipating the end of politics as we have known it. That is a thought for another day.
AND NOW “MILI-TAINMENT”
The Pentagon is working hard to keep it this way according to the New York Times report on how the military is working with entertainment producers to sell its policies through show biz. My partner Rory O Connor calls this “mili-tainment.”
Sorry, I can’t just jump a day ahead and say April Fool to turn this all into a joke. If I could, I’d be on Politically Incorrect and have a bestseller. Ironically, if I was funnier about all these developments, I would be taken more seriously by many media outlets. Weird, but true. What does that say?
If you are in New York City, come meet Greg Palast and myself at the Walker Stage Theater at 64 Walker Street (south of Canal) tomorrow at 7 PM for a book discussion and film preview. Share your views with me at dissector@mediachannel.org. Happy Easter Sunday.
See the whole Post / →
Rage In Ramallah
March 30th, 2002 - by: danny
ANNOUNCEMENT:
WHO:
Investigative Reporter, Mediachannel.org advisor Greg Palast & Danny Schechter, the News Dissector
WHAT:
BOOK TALK: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast
FILM PREVIEW:
COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY by Danny Schechter
WHEN: MONDAY, APRIL FIRST 7 P.M.
WHERE: WALKER STAGE THEATRE
56 WALKER STREET bet. B’WAY & CHURCH If you live in the New York City area, come next Monday to hear investigative reporter and Mediachannel.org advisor Greg Palast discuss his new book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and also see a preview of your News Dissector’s new film COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY, the story of what happened to l75,000 uncounted votes in the Presidential Election of 2000.
DIRECTIONS:
Take the N, R to Canal St, enter from Broadway side. Take the A, C to Canal St., enter from Church St. side.
ON THE CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Perhaps because I am a journalist, the defining moment in the carnage reporting from Ramallah last night was a in a minute of so of tape, shot by a Carlos Handel, a cameraman for Egypt’s Nile TV who was cruising in a car clearly marked as a press vehicle with the letters TV plastered over it ( I have been in similar vehicles in other conflicts.) The camera on the car itself came under Israeli fire. Carlos had been hit in the mouth in this unprovoked attack, since condemned by the Paris-based Reporters Without Frontiers. The camera kept rolling as his colleague, the driver, screaming to himself and all in the range of his voice, to stop, stop as he carried his comrade away. He ended up in the local hospital condition unknown. Other journalists reported being told not to shoot certain operations by Israeli forces involved in the surrounding and trashing of the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority.
ARAFAT TO CNN: “SHUT UP”
You probably have seen the TV reports. CNN, to its credit did an hour live from Jerusalem last night in which the footage I have described was shown, and reports details of the invasion and its effects. Christianne Amanpour tried to challenge an Israeli government spokesperson who kept denouncing Arafat in the same way that our leaders used to personalize the “terror war” as all Osama’s doing. Having someone to demonize is always the best way to sell a policy. His was a practiced performance, and CNN did not offer any reporting that cast doubt on the thesis that Arafat is the source of all evil, and responsible for the suicide bombings. That issue was debated again the next morning with General Wesley Clark (who has never served in the area to my knowledge) defending Israel while admitting that there were doubts about his command and control capacities.
What a joke. What command and control? The man has been reduced to clutching a cell phone as bulldozers nibble what is left of his supposedly sovereign terrritory. How is he supposed to do anything but beg for outside help? Amanpour did get an enraged Arafat on the phone, and as she hectored him with questions, he screamed at her to shut up, then paused to let her hear the sounds of machine guns fire hitting his headquarters building and hung up — a measured response in my view in light of the circumstances. In Washington, Colin Powell was unwilling to publicly demand that the Israel withdraw, although the US did vote for such a UN resolution, later calling for them to do so, a bit late in the day. Down on the ranch, President Bush was equally quiet, criticizing terrorists and trading Easter presents with his dad.Activists are sending me accounts like this on what is happening on the ground, much of it not visible in any of the TV reports I was watching: ”
ON THE GROUND BUT RARELY ON THE AIR
“Two Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances carrying a doctor and two foreign international volunteers American citizen Adam Shapiro and Irish national Caoimhe Butterly have been held up for over 3 hours trying to reach the injured in the compound.Adam reported the ambulances being stopped and completely searched and everybody was being forced out of the ambulances.
- At the time of this writing one ambulance carrying the doctor and the two foreign civilian volunteers have been let in. One ambulance was turned back. Two injured are being removed from the compound now.
- Al-Jazeera satellite channel was showing people bleeding and lying dead on the floor of the compound as the ambulances were held at the gate and the volunteers waiting to be let in to assist the injured could see smoke rising from the compound
- Electricity throughout Ramallah has been cut in all neighborhoods and water tanks have been shot up causing them to leak precious water. Israeli forces have been shooting at anything moving in the streets as their tanks are positioned throughout Palestinian neighborhoods.”
THE SAD HISTORY OF SCUTTLED PEACE PLANS?
This predictable long-planned well executed intervention was an event looking for a pretext and defensible provocation. It was also Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s response to the Arab League’s peace proposal. Many Palestinians have been killed, wounded and rounded-up. There were pictures of men being marched with their hands up, a scene that was eerily familiar to images we all know from the days of World War ll. Media amnesia and lack of contextualization was in full bloom once again as no analysts I saw echoed the views of Uri Avnery, the Israeli journalist, who explained that scuttling peace initiatives is often what Israel has done over the years, often in league with the commandos and crazies who provide the convenient pretext for their pre-planned overreactions. This does not minimize the horror of atrocities like the Passover terror attack in Natanya, but rather argues that Israel uses them to implement well planned “counter measures.” Read this analysis from a former member of the Israeli Knesset to see what I am talking about, and to discover a point of view you are not hearing:
AN ISRAELI VIEW
“If, in May 1967, an Arab prince had proposed that the whole Arab world would recognize Israel and establish normal relations with it, in return for Israel’s recognition of the Green Line border, we would have believed that the days of the Messiah had arrived. Masses of people would have run into the street, singing and dancing, as they did on November 29, 1947, when the United Nations called for the establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine.
” But then disaster struck: we conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Labor and Likud governments filled them up with settlements, and today this offer sounds to many like a malicious anti-Semitic plot.
The leaders of Israel tell us: Don’t worry. Just as we survived Pharaoh, so we shall survive Emir Abdallah.*
————
? This is an allusion to a famous Israeli song.
————-
So what will happen?
In Israel, every international initiative designed to put an end to theconflict passes through three stages: (a) denial, (b) misrepresentation, (c)liquidation. That’s how the Sharon-Peres government will deal with this one,too. It can draw on 53 years of experience, during which both Labor and Likudgovernments have succeeded in scuttling every peace plan put forward.
(We must nor suspect, God forbid, that the successive Israeligovernments were opposed to peace. Not at all. Every one of them wantedpeace. They all longed for peace. “Provided peace gives us the whole country,at least up to the Jordan river, and lets us cover all of it with Jewishsettlements.” Until now, all peace plans have fallen short of that.)
WHAT ABOUT THE RECENT SAUDI LAND FOR PEACE DEAL?
And about today. Avnery almost forecast how the Saudi proposal would be half embraced in public by Israel and then undermined by new assaults that would outrage the Arab World and, thus ensure that it would lose its enthusiasm for peace because of the hostile reaction in their own streets. Avnery comments on this in a way that no pundits on the air have. (Would someone send CNN’s bookers his phone number?)
“Can the Saudi initiative be scuttled in the same way? If the Saudis stay their course, it will not be easy to intercept it. This time the target is not a small frigate, not even a destroyer, but a mighty aircraft carrier. A great effort will be needed to torpedo it.
“But Shimon Peres and his foreign office are experts at this kind of job; they have been at it for decades. Ariel Sharon will push them. The pitiful Labor party, under the leadership of a small-time copy of Sharon, will join the chorus. Faced with the terrible threat of having to end the occupation, the Israeli media will rally behind the government.
“Nobody revolts, nobody cries out. In Israel, real public discourse has died long ago. The national instinct of survival has become blunted. Thirty five years of occupation and settlement have eroded the nation’s abilty to reason, leaving instead a mixture of arrogance and folly.
A great, perhaps unique opportunity may be missed. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands may pay for it with their lives”
SOLDIERS ARE REVOLTING– BUT THE RESPONSE IS REVOLTING TOO
Yesterday, in this column, I cited Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine’s call for peace. I mentioned that he has to take out newspaper ads to get his views across in newspapers. I didn’t know that his ad supporting Israeli soldiers who are refusing to fight Sharon’s war has provoked a major split within the organization itself. I learned that from a letter from one of the “refuseniks,” Assaf Alon writing from Israel. Again, these are voices that rarely percolate into the media coverage just as American soldiers opposing US wars get little coverage. He wrote:
“I was informed of an interesting phenomenon: apeace-supporting Jewish organization called Tikkun published an ad in favor of us, the Israeli reservist refuseniks, and was immediatelybombarded with hate mails and phones from other American Jews. What̳ more interesting is that even other Jews considering themselves supporters of peace have denounced the Tikkun ad, to the extent that some of the Tikkun Advisory Board members are resigning in order to minimize the personal damage to themselves. This has so saddened, alarmed and angered me, that I find myself setting aside a half-day at the eve of Passover, and writing this open letter to you all?.
“Most of the ‘civilized’ attacks, so I understand, were seeminglyaimed at this or that detail of the Tikkun ad. This is nothing new to me. Over the past two months since we came out with our own ad, I̶e heard and read so many specific arguments about specific aspects of our act. They range from petty nit-picking to plain ludicrous, and each and every one of them can be refuted to dust in a matter of minutes. But the moment you refute them, new specific arguments sprout up like mushrooms. ?.
THE “TRIBAL THEME”
“The general theme is the tribal theme. A very very loud voice (and in Israel nowadays, it is the only voice that is allowed to be fullyheard) keeps shouting that we are in the midst of a war between twotribes: a tribe of human beings, of pure good ? the Israelis’ anda tribe of sub-human beings, of pure evil ?the Palestinians.’ This voice is so loud, that it has found its way even to the op-ed pages of the New York Times (William Safire, March 24 or 25). To those whofind this black-and-white picture a bit hard to believe, the samevoice shouts that this is a war of life and death. Only one tribe will survive, and so even if we are not purely good, we must laymorality and conscience to sleep, shut up and fight to kill–orelse, the Palestinians will throw us into the sea.
“Does this ring a bell to you? It does to me. As a little child growing up in Israel under Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, all I heard was that the Arabs are inhuman monsters who want to throw us intothe sea, they understand only force, and since our wonderful IDF has won the Six Day War they know not to mess with us anymore –orelse. And of course, we must keep the Liberated Territories toourselves, because there̳ no one to talk with. Then came the Yom Kippur war, and for a child of 7 it was the perfect proof that indeed the Arabs want to throw us into the sea, and what a great opportunity it was for our glorious IDF to teach them a lesson. I prayed for the war to continue to its natural and final end –the complete surrender of all Arab armies. I was too small to evaluate, then, how the war really ended; all these cease-firesand talks were too complicated and boring, much more boring than a war. And it seemed humiliating that WE should withdraw in thesecease-fires; I remember that the re-opening of the Suez Canalwas portrayed in our mass media as a kind of defeat?..
WILL THE ISRAELI PUBLIC WAKE UP?
“In truth, I have little hope that the Israeli public will wake up. The Israeli public, in its fear and confusion, has made a decision (aided by the politicians and mass media) to go to sleep and wake up only after it is all over. But it won’t be over, because while our mind sleeps our muscles tighten the death grip, instead of doing the only sensible thing (which requires an open mind) which is to let go. Will you guys join the hypocrite mobs who sing lullabies to Israel and pounce upon the refuseniks, upon Tikkun,to shut us up? Or will you finally take responsibility and be thetrue friends that Israel needs now Ã’Â even if it means not being “nice”to Israel for a while?
“As you sit tonight at the Seder table, please remember the dozen orso refuseniks that spend this Seder in a military jail. Moreimportantly, please remember the thousand or so people, three quarters Palestinians and one quarter Israelis, who were here with us a year ago and have been murdered. Most of them could have been here with us, if you and we had acted sooner. We have nowacted, done what little we can do. Please think of the many thousands that may be doomed soon, if you continue sitting onthe fence.”
WHO IS WINNING..AND LOSING?
From the TV coverage, you would think Israel is winning this war because of its superior military might. You would be wrong because this is, at its base, a political conflict. A longer view is needed argues James O. Goldsborough writing in the San Diego Union Tribune yesterday
“The measure of the failure of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is this: The Palestinians are stronger today than they ever have been. It is strange to think that these bedraggled people, living in squalid refugee camps under the gun muzzles of Israeli tanks, could be gaining in strength, but it is a fact. The dynamic of this awful conflict has changed dramatically in a single year. The Palestinian strength grows from evidence that an entire generation is ready to die for the cause. And another generation is ready to follow, for the Palestinian birth rate and population under 5 years old are twice that of Israel.
“Warfare by collective immolation is not something that can be defeated by a conventional army. When Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon’s critic on the right, calls for “complete military victory,” he can only be thinking of re-occupation of all the West Bank and Gaza, the bankrupt policy Israel abandoned a decade ago. The Bush administration has much to answer for in the Middle East collapse. Bush blamed Clinton for being too involved in the Middle East, and so decided to do nothing. Sept. 11 is no excuse for the failure, for Bush did little before that date to deal with the Palestinian powder keg.
“Carte blanche was given to Sharon to “fight terrorism,” with the results we see today. Obsessed with Iraq, Bush failed to see that the real threat to U.S. security lay in the festering Palestinian problem and its potential to radicalize the entire Middle East.
“The most perverse result of Bush fecklessness and Sharon’s intransigence has been the creation of a generation of Palestinian martyrs. Israelis, like most people, don’t want to die. Dealing with people who want to die, who regard dying as better than living, is not easy??
“Sharon’s failure can be seen in what his year in office has brought. For Israelis, there is no security anywhere, not on streets or buses, in cafes or malls. Death is everywhere. A generation of Palestinians without hope is robbing Israelis of their hope. Only through creation of a viable Palestinian state, where young Arabs can learn that living is better than dying, will the killing stop.”
AND WHEN WILL JOURNALISTS SPEAK UP?
In sharing these comments, and there are many others rocketing around the Internet, I am trying to suggest that the coverage itself must be broadened. We need to hear more voices from the region, and more analysts who are not retired American Generals or mainstream media reporters who are well trained to tell us what is happening, but rarely why or what might be done about the situation. What is hopeful is that some US journalists, a very few to be sure, but, a few nonetheless, may be willing to reexamine their own assumptions and biases to offer opinions outside the acceptable consensus.
In this respect, my respect this morning goes out to my old colleague Geraldo Rivera, who I had blasted in my book The More You Watch The Less You Know for making an inflamatory one-sided anti-Palestinian report back in 1982 which felt like it had produced by Israel’s Mossad. In his view back then, Israel could do no wrong, which is perhaps why he wore a star of David tattoo. Now, his tune has changed according to these quotes which sound Geraldo-ish but which, admittedly, I haven’t verified:
“I have been a Zionist my entire life. I would die for Israel. Butwatching the suffering of the Palestinian people, I’m also becoming aPalestinian.”–Geraldo
“You can’t round up Palestinian young menand put numbers on their arms to make it easier to identify them,” hesaid. “That reminds the world, that reminds Jews, of what Hitler and theNazi pigs inflicted on the Jewish race during the Second World War.”—Geraldo
NOW EUROPE HATES US TOO!
Funny isn’t it, that Americans find out how much US policy is outraging the rest of the world only when one of the top Washington based journalists gets his but out of the beltway. Here’s David Broder of the Washington Post writing from Rome, as carried in the International Herald Tribune:
“ROME The United States has been fighting a war in Afghanistan. It has troops in the field in the Philippines and in Colombia. It is trying to mediate the bloody Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. The last thing it needs is a quarrel with Europe.
” But that is exactly what has developed, as I was repeatedly reminded during a brief stay here for an international conference.
“The immediate irritant is steel. The looming and larger point of conflict is Iraq. And the underlying complaint is that the Bush administration, whose leader had gained significantly in standing since my last trans-Atlantic trip 11 months ago, has reverted to an earlier and unsettling pattern of behavior. From the European perspective, Washington looks unpredictable, erratic and impulsive – all the things that jar the allies’ nerves.
” It would be easy to dismiss European mutterings as the nattering of nervous Nellies. But when questioning comes not only from chronic critics such as the French but also from such friends as Germany and even Britain, it may behoove Washington to take heed.
The Europeans are not without power?..”
AND LET’S NOT FORGET THE NARCO WARS
And so, this is how we Americans discover, from time to time, that there is a world that has not be made over in our image or marching to the Bush doctrine. Covering that world on this website is incomplete too, I must admit.. My absence for a few days over the last weeks led me to miss some top notch reporting on Al Giordano’s Narco News Network from the conflicts in Colombia and other conflict zones in Latin America. Al sent me two such pieces that I happily call to your attention. One deals with “”Where is the Press in the Colombian War?”
http://www.narconews.com/whereisthepress.html
and the other is “Uribe vs. the Press”
://www.narconews.com/uribevsthepress.html
In the latter case, a courageous Colombian journalist might well get killed in the coming days because of the lack of attention to his case. His name is Fernando Garavito.” Thanks Al for the gentle and supportive way you called this to our attention. We will try to get these or similar stories on the front page soon. Mediachannel is growing rapidly with more than 940 affiliates, all chock full of great content. We are working on better ways to highlight more great material.
Ok, that’s the extent of my columnizing energy this morning. New Yorkers, please come to the event mentioned above next Monday. The rest of you may now take the weekend off. Or if you so chose, share your thoughts with us by writing dissector@mediachannel.org.
See the whole Post / →
Good Friday?
March 29th, 2002 - by: danny
ANNOUNCEMENT:
WHO: Investigative Reporter, Mediachannel.org advisor Greg Palast & Danny Schechter, the News Dissector
WHAT: BOOK TALK – The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast
FILM PREVIEW: – COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY by Danny Schechter
WHEN: MONDAY, APRIL FIRST 7 P.M.
WHERE: WALKER STAGE THEATRE
56 WALKER STREET bet. B’WAY & CHURCHIf you live in the New York City area, come next Monday to hear investigative reporter and Mediachannel.org advisor Greg Palast discuss his new book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and also see a preview of your News Dissector’s new film COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY, the story of what happened to l75,000 uncounted votes in the Presidential Election of 2000.
DIRECTIONS:
Take the N, R to Canal St, enter from Broadway side. Take the A, C to Canal St., enter from Church St. side.
GOOD FRIDAY
GAS ATTACKS
RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY
Before I begin dissecting on this holy day, let me invoke the words of the late and not missed Julius Caesar, as an Easter message to the military powers of our embattled world:
“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order towhip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotismis indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood,just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war havereached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and themind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizingthe rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infusedwith fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all oftheir rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know?For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.”– Julius Caesar
Good Friday. Or should we attach a question mark to that affirmation this holiday morning in a New York of empty streets and a great stillness. The news on this day of days, ironically, leads with stories from the Holy Land–another 17 dead in a suicide bombing in an Israeli supermarket. Ariel Sharon has sent his tanks back into Ramallah surrounding Arafat’s Headquarters, which is actually, as many of the media forgets, the offices of a duly elected leader. Ariel has now formally branded Yasser an “enemy” in an increasingly personalized duel. Say good-bye to President Bush’s half-hearted peace initiative–although, according to press accounts–the Israelis are characterizing the Saudi land for peace deal unveiled formally at the Beirut summit of the Arab nations as “interesting.” And Arafat says he will unconditionally accept the Tennet Cease Fire proposal. While rather late in the day, this may be a sign that there are many back room maneuvers underway, although the media remains focused on the military drama and the guerilla terror attacks.
Unreported this morning , once again, are the peace efforts on the ground, and whether Sharon’s calling on 20,000 reservists will lead to new protests within the military, many of whose members of vocally opposed his heavy-handed retaliatory practices. Have you seen much news in the US about peace activists from overseas who are in Ramallah at this moment? Here’s one account: “(Late Thursday), some 600 pro-Palestinian foreigners, including the French farmers’ union leader, José ‚ov鬠arrived in Ramallah to offer themselves as human shields for Palestinians.
“We are going to stay here in Ramallah in particular to provide the Palestinians with protection,” Mr. Bové ³aid.”That may be too ambitious a mission as the fighting erupts, and as an Israeli bulldozer crashes into Arafat’s compound.”
ISRAELI FEARS: HE WANTS US DEAD
Analysts believe that Palestinian activists were encouraged by the stands adapted by the Arab Summit even though Arafat was not there. Supporters of Israel in the US are echoing the Israeli government position that Arafat cannot be trusted, and will never make peace. Here’s one of our regular correspondents, Janet, writing from Washington with a widely shared view in these circles.
“G.W. Bush is off raising money for November elections while his 2-tier emissaries, Cheney and Zinni, continue to fail in making Arafat do what Arafat has never intended to do–make peace with Israel. He wants Israel. He wants the Israelis all dead and he wants to create a Palestinian state out of Israel. His bottom line will go to his grave with him no matter how many lives he takes with him. He has created suicide bombers to be his personal weapons of mass destruction by creating a hopeless situation for his people. He feeds them idealism, anti-Semitism and FUTILITY. He has never intended to build hope for his people. The destruction is the world’s destruction. The entire Arab world is as paralyzed as is the western world.
“They are faced with a decision similar to the beginnings of World War II.When is it politically appropriate to intervene in a genocide-motivated war? Hindsight will highlight the heroes one day, but today’s leaders are cowering under the circumstances and the weight of action. The ?woosies’ are in the lead.”
PALESTINIAN EXPRESSES REMORSE
I can understand why she feels this way, but it is also a function of the information that is out there or here and the way it is framed. Here is another view from a Palestinian. It may surprise you, in part because this perspective is conspicuously absent in many media accounts. It is called “A Frank Commentary: On Suicide Bombing and the Arab Summit by Issa Sarras, written yesterday.
It was carried by Infopal, The Independent Palestinian Information Network. Read it and ask yourself why you have never seen this source quoted much. That’s why I am quoting this at length:
“I wish first to express my great personal sorrow following thelatest suicide bombing in Netanya, which has killed and wounded alarge number of Israeli citizens. Even though it comes after along list of Israeli crimes that are difficult to count, andoften hidden from the eyes of the world, I categorically standagainst such actions, and publicly call for stopping suicidebombing immediately and for good. I also encourage Palestiniansto speak up publicly against them.
I will try to be as frank as possible here. We are in a crisisthat has reached an advanced stage. Things did not have to be theway they are, but sadly we have reached a very low point.
“It is really depressing to look at the media. Innocent peoplearound the world are forced to swallow plenty of nonsense andhype that says little, distorts facts and explains nothing. Andgovernments which are aware of many facts are abdicating theirmoral duties and abstaining from informing the public.
“Yet regardless of it all, mistaken are those who even imaginethat they can triumph against reality. Somebody can be smartenough to convince countless people that the donkey in Mr. X’sfarm is a horse. Yet the donkey remains a donkey, even ifmillions declare otherwise. The best men throughout history haveadvised us to seek the truth, and to cherish it. Now the truth ismost crucial for saving civilization on this earth.
“I want to go back to the grave issue of suicide bombings. I haveread plenty of explanations, some of them good and revealing,some of them useless and misleading, especially when all ourpeople are condemned as terrorists. Yet even the goodexplanations are incomplete. This is because important factorsthat characterize the current Palestinian reality are missing.
“Islamic and national forces have reached the conclusion thatsince we are abandoned by the world, and our repeated calls tothe international community to send international observers havebeen rebuffed, suicide bombings are the only weapon left whenfacing one of the strongest armies in the world, in order tocreate a balance of terror and stop Israeli atrocities. Themagnitude of suffering and Israeli crimes have placed manyPalestinians at the edge of despair. And the world’sinsensitivity to our blood is acutely felt, and it’s direimplications are yet to fully unravel.
“Yet this was/is not the only possible course of events.
“What we are witnessing is the resounding failure of our civilsociety to provide adequate support systems to the Palestinianyouth and the community at large, and to influence their thinkingand channel their activities and energies in more positivedirections….”
“Sadly, very few people dare to say this.”
IRAQ ATTACK: “SHAKY”
The mounting Washington-backed campaign for a strike against SaddamHussein’s Iraq suffered a set back yesterday when Arab leaders lined up to back Iraq in exchange for some concessions. Reuters is reporting that a US strike in these circumstances would be illegal: “?. legal experts say that, without a new United Nations SecurityCouncil resolution explicitly backing the use of force, the justification for strikes against Baghdad is at best shaky.”
There was little talk about legalities at the Pentagon — just reaffirmations of strength, according to the Washington Post ”
“WASHINGTON? America’s top military leaders said Thursday that despite the war on terrorism and other pressures on U.S. forces around the world, the Pentagon will be able to take on any additional mission that President Bush orders.
“‘You can be absolutely certain that to the extent that the United Statesof America decides to undertake an activity, that we will be capable ofdoing it,’ said Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.”
REMEMBER THE GASSING OF KURDS
One of the pretexts for an invasion is Iraq’s horrific human rights It is hard to hear any argument that does not make reference to Baghdad’s 1988 gassing and killing of Kurds, a well-documented and horrible act. At the same time, in a commentary for Z Net, Anthony Arnove notes: “While the massacre is now a convenient one that serves U.S. propaganda purposes, when it happened in 1988, the Reagan-Bush administration and much of the media found it not that convenient at all.
“The issue is extremely sensitive because the Reagan Administration has moved closer to Iraq in recent years,” the New York Times explained on September 8, 1988. The U.S. government backed Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war and had strong economic ties. “Iraq, which has the second-largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia, is an important American trading partner. The United States buys an average of 447,000 barrels of Iraqi oil a day, amounting to about $2 billion a year. Last year, the United States exported $1 billion in agricultural products, including rice, wheat and meat to Iraq,” the Times noted just six weeks before Iraqà©nvasion of Kuwait.
When news of what had happened at Halabja broke, the State Department issued a rote condemnation, but Washington continued its courtship with Iraq. As Jim Hoagland rightly predicted on March 26, 1988, “Washington’s friendship for Baghdad is likely to survive one night of poison gas and sickening television film. TV moves on, shock succeeds shock, the day’s horror becomes distant memory. The Kurds will stay on history’s margins, and policy will have continuity” (Washington Post).
NEW CARE POLL: AMERICANS DO SUPPORT AID
While Americans are often easily mobilized behind military operations, Lurma Rackley from CARE tells me that a recent public opinion survey conducted by that fine humanitarian group found that US public opinion backs expanded humanitarian aid to fight global poverty. Here are the results of a new survey by Peter Hart and Associates. Let’s see if it gets the same play as poll results that favor military action.
“Voters express strong support for President George W. Bush’s recent proposal to increase U.S. financial aid to developing countries around the world by $10 billion over the next three years. Eight in ten (79%, including 40% strongly support) registered voters support the President’s proposal to increase our foreign aid allocation to improve education, help businesses find new markets for their goods, develop new ways to grow more food, and fight the epidemic of AIDS, while only 19% oppose the idea.
“Support for the President’s proposal to increase foreign assistance is strongly correlated with whether one thinks that the United States has a national security interest in reducing poverty and suffering around the world. Thirty-two percent of voters who believe that the United States has a large national security interest in reducing poverty also strongly support the Bush proposal. Likewise, those who believe that the U.S. has only a small interest or no national security interest at all in reducing poverty are much less likely to support the Bush plan (20%). A majority of voters (52%) who link reducing poverty with a large U.S. national security interest strongly support the plan to increase foreign aid, 38% of those who say we have a moderate security interest in lowering world poverty strongly support the plan, and only 24% who believe that the United States has only a small interest or no national security interest at all in reducing poverty strongly support President Bush’s proposal?.”
AL IS BACK: WILL HE BE TREATED MORE FAIRLY?
On the home front, Al Gore is back in public view, with a strong environmentalist attack on Bush energy policies. Meanwhile Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is out with a new report on how Gore’s earlier stands were distorted unfairly in the media. Peter Hart and Jim Naureckas write: “Throughout the presidential elections, mainstream media outlets were quick to charge Democratic candidate Al Gore with exaggerations: Whether he was talking about inventing the Internet, inspiring Love Story or discovering Love Canal, you just couldn’t trust what Gore was saying.
“If you looked into these incidents, you found that in each case the media’s exaggerations were worse than Gore’s: It’s largely true that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet” while in Congress, as he said (he never said he “invented” it); according to Love Story author Erich Segal, he did help inspire the book’s male hero; and the claim to have discovered Love Canal was a misquotation that was later retracted by the outlets that made it. (See Washington Monthly, 4/00.)
“Still, the theme that Gore was a liar was a constant in his media coverage. Each of the above factoids appears in the Nexis database hundreds of times; the story about Gore and the Internet shows up more than 3,000 times. A study by Columbia University’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (7/27/00) found that lying was the second most common theme in Gore stories, just behind “scandal-tainted.” (The top Bush theme found, by contrast, was that he was a “different kind of Republican.”) See Fair.org for more.
CONASON TO MEDIA: APOLOGIZE
As for media attacks against the Clinton Administration, Joe Conason, who was often pilloried by Clinton-bashers for refuting their claims. His latest is on Salon.com: “Anyone who paid the slightest attention to the moldy allegations subsumed under the heading of “Whitewater” has known for years what the independent counsel grudgingly conceded in the final report released last week ? that the prime targets of the investigation of that little old Arkansas land development, Bill and Hillary Clinton, had done nothing that could be prosecuted as a crime. There was nothing remarkable about that conclusion, nor about the independent counsel’s strenuous literary effort to justify a breathtaking expenditure of time, not to mention $73 million, in the pursuit of partisan goals.
“What may have surprised the naive reader was the concluding commentary in the nation’s leading newspapers, whose editorial pages, opinion columns and news accounts had encouraged noxious speculation about Whitewater and the Clintons from the very beginning of the ?scandal.’ Rather than acknowledge the hollowness of the accusations they did so much to publicize, America’s most prominent editorialists substituted “spin” for accountability?
KRUGMAN: THERE IS A RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY
Also on this theme, and even more provocative, is Paul Klugman’s op-ed in the New York Times, which indicts what he calls a “smoke machine” and a right-wing conspiracy, which many liberals are afraid to take on:
“In a way, it’s a shame that so much of David Brock’s Blinded by the Right: The conscience of an ex-conservative, is about the private lives of our self-appointed moral guardians. Those tales will sell books, but they may obscure the important message: that the “vast right-wing conspiracy” is not an overheated metaphor but a straightforward reality, and that it works a lot like a special-interest lobby.
“Modern political economy teaches us that small, well-organized groups often prevail over the broader public interest. The steel industry got the tariff it wanted, even though the losses to consumers will greatly exceed the gains of producers, because the typical steel consumer doesn’t understand what’s happening.
“Blinded by the Right” shows that the same logic applies to non-economic issues. The scandal machine that employed Mr. Brock was, in effect, a special-interest group financed by a handful of wealthy fanatics — men like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose cult-like Unification Church owns The Washington Times, and Richard Mellon Scaife, who bankrolled the scandal-mongering American Spectator and many other right-wing enterprises. It was effective because the typical news consumer didn’t realize what was going on. ”
WHAT IS GOING ON?
Now that’s a theme, worthy of a whole internet channel, telling “the typical news consumer just what is going on. That’s what we are trying to do on Mediachannel.org. And, what I try to do in this space daily. Now sometimes I do it too fast and sloppily for the many readers who write in to wag fingers at me for my typos and other insults against the English language. I do have a volunteer editor, Jeanette Friedman who tries to keep up with my offenses and correct them before you see them but since I work very early in the AM, sometimes it takes a while for her to crank up to speed. She suggests I include this disclaimer or should I call it mea-culpa:
This is written by an extremely busy person and edited by an extremely busy person, both of them doing this as volunteers. They apologize in advance for any grammatical or spelling errors and appreciate the difficulty you may have in reading the material sometimes. You can send your corrections to friedmanj@aol.com, who is completely to blame for any grammatical and spelling errors.
Help us do this better. Your emails and items continue to make the column what it is. What is it? You tell me. Happy Easter to those that celebrate it. And you can always find me at dissector@mediachannel.org. In the mean time, I hope to spend the weekend with two new worthy books about which I will have more to say, “THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY” (Pluto) by London-based investigative reporter Greg Palast (See Announcement above), and “The Silent Takeover” (Free Press) about the death of democracy by a brilliant English academic Noreena Hertz. And so it goes.
And I am now?.. gone.
See the whole Post / →
The Radio Show
 | New show every Friday at 1PM ET from NYC on the internet at the Progressive Radio Network. |
Click here for the latest podcast.
About Danny Schechter
Danny Schechter is an Emmy award winning journalist, television producer and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs and speaks about media issues.
His latest film is PLUNDER The Crime Of Our Time.
Mr. Schechter is NOT the Godfather of Soul.
read more about The News Dissector →