The countdown to the New Year has begun. Judging from President Bush’s ranch side declaration, the US is not leaving Afghanistan anytime soon. When the US creaates a base it usally stays there unless and until it is forced out or the lease expires. That is what happened in the Phillipines. That, you will recall, is what did not happen when US troops moved into Saudi Arabia in l990 to defend the Kingdom of oil against what was then being described as (a probably inflated) Iraqi invasion threat. US troops are sill there, but now apparently spending more time defending themselves against terrorist threats of local origin. In fact, it was their presence that ignited bin Laden’s war against America in the first place.

BASES OF FREEDOM

And now irony, of ironies, the prisoners of the Afghan campaign are on their way to another US base that goes back to another temporary incursion a century ago. I am referring of course to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Here’s how Florida’s Sun Sentinenal described its origins in the very last line of a story about why the base is being used. “The oldest U.S. overseas outpost has repelled enemies and welcomed refugees since 1898, when U.S. Marines fighting the Spanish-American War established camp at the natural harbor on Cuba’s southeast coast.” “Welcomed refugees”? I don’t think the Haitians fleeing despotism who ended up being incarcerated there thought the base as very “welcoming.” For that matter, who among us remembers that famous ship, packed Jews fleeing Nazi Germany who were turned away from Havana and never welcomed into Guantanamo during WW 2. They sailed back to Germany to perish.

The same story continues: “There’s really been nothing like this ever before it’s a first,” says an expert on al-Qaida at the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. ” I‚ am surprised they are bringing them so close to the United States, but that might be necessary.

“The move isn’t likely to worsen relations between the United States and Cuba, said an expert on Cuba, but it also seems unnecessary.

“It’s wrong, really” said Wayne Smith, a former top U.S. diplomat in Cuba, now a scholar at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C. ‚”It’s a good, secure place for prisoners, but they‚ are going to be isolated from everyone, which brings up human rights concerns.” Ah human rights concerns. We don’t hear those words too much in the media these days, although CNN did report this Sunday morning that the Red Cross is in Khandahar with hopes of inspecting the US detention center there.

OSAMA BECOMES ELVIS

And what of Mr. Evil on this Sunday morning at year’s end? The New York Times has put a mythic spin on the hunt for bin Laden that seemed to be at the heart of the mission in the first chapter or the terror war. Listen to Jim Dwyer wax poetically in the Week in Review: “Osama bin Laden may be dead and undiscovered, like the thousands whose killings he is believed to have organized. (”…he is believed to”…. ?????) Or he may be undead (”UNDEAD”?) and on the run along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.” (Note how reports placing him in Iran are being ignored.) “His fate may be sealed today — or never, and he might linger in some evil nether light, a ghostly Mengele haunting South Asia rather than South America, a diabolical Elvis who would pop up in intelligence reports rather than in the National Enquirer.”

And so there you have it, in what William Safire is calling the “Bouceback Year” signaling Dubya’s ressurection to legitimation, Osama has been rechristened as a modern day Elvis by the newspaper of record. Just wait until they start hearing from the Presley fans! Meanwhile, we have Simon Marks to thank for his story in the Quill, the publication of the Society for Professional Journalists which I was pleased to have been honored by this year, pointing to journalism’s failure to track Osama over the years. (The Sunday Times carries a long overdue investigative feature on the government’s failure in this regard today). Here is an excerpt from Mark’s piece.

“ASLEEP AT THE SWITCH.”

“It has become fashionable in the weeks since Sept. 11 (”Nine-Eleven” in the clipped cadences of cable news-speak) to discuss the monstrous failure of U.S. intelligence that led, in part, to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The phrase “asleep at the switch” has become a mantra used to describe the inability of the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Defense to catch Osama bin Laden before his Al Qaeda organization perpetrated their deadly deeds.

“But consider this: On June 23, the Reuters news agency distributed a report headlined “Bin Laden Fighters Plan anti-US attack.” The lead: “Followers of exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden are planning a major attack on U.S. and Israeli interests.”

“Two days later, it was United Press International’s turn to spread the alarming news. In a dispatch dated June 25, the agency informed its subscribers that “Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden is planning a terrorist attack against the United States.” The following day, another UPI report (”Bin Laden Forms New Jihadi Group”) described the formalization of ties between bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and the Egyptian branch of Islamic Jihad.

“Unless you’re a maven of the Reuters and UPI wire feeds, the chances are that you didn’t see any of those reports. A search of the country’s major newspaper and broadcast network Web sites reveals that barely any considered the stories worthy of publication.” http://www.spj.org/quill_issue.asp?ref=233

GLORIA S ON LIBERATING AFGHAN WOMEN

Images of Afghan women taking off their Burquas as been presented as a major achievement of the Afghan campaign, and it was, in some areas like Kabul, the capital whose cosmopolitanism was assaulted by the Taliban who were thought of there as country bumpkins and hicks by the urbanites. The sad truth is that the heavy hand of tradition still rules in much of the country where most women go on with their circumscribed lives. A New York Times report from the village of Afghanistan’s new President showed how little “progress has been made.”

What to do about this? CNN had Gloria Steinem in for a website chat, not a proper interview. Here is her view on an issue whose symbolism has been shamelessly used to sell the war.

“STEINEM: Again, remember that we are talking about restoring women’s rights that existed before this society was militarized. If the U.S. stops selling arms, closes the borders of Afghanistan to arms, and disarms the warlords, then the peace-loving women and many men of Afghanistan have a chance to rebuild and to establish a democracy. It greatly depends on what we press our own politicians to do. The U.S. is the biggest arms dealer in the world. We have to take power over our own acts, and that will encourage others to act in a more responsible, peaceful way, too. Having met a lot of the Afghan women leaders, I have great faith in them. I’m less sure about our own political decision-makers.

“CNN: Do you have any closing comments for us today?

“STEINEM: Whenever we ask, “What will happen?” we’ve given up our power. We have to ask “what am I going to make happen?” That gives us back our power. The focus on Afghanistan has made us realize that women need a foreign policy, that gender apartheid is as serious as racial apartheid, and that the shared characteristic of violent societies is a polarization of the gender roles. So, we need to remember that when we look around us, and women need to take ourselves seriously. We need to speak up as much for women as we would for a racial or religious group that also includes men. That means in our own homes, where we work, and where we study. I don’t mean to make this sound super serious, because creating this kind of change is fun and exciting, and gives us a community. So, I hope we remember the physicist who said that the flap of a butterfly’s wing could change the weather hundreds of miles away. We each have a lot of power. Together, just those of us having this conversation right now make one hell of a butterfly.”

THOSE MISSING “BUTTERFLIES”

CNN is not into promoting many butterflies. I saw a very moving report on a march by Israelis and Palestinians and Europaen activists on the web but not on any broadcast because efforts to resolve conflicts or promote peace just don’t rate the same media attention as acts of war. Here’s another story I knew nothing about. Did you”

75 Million People Commit to Work for Peace

In 1999, UNESCO and several Nobel Peace Laureates launched the Manifesto 2000 signature campaign. The Manifesto 2000 is not a petition; rather, it’s a commitment by each person who signs it to follow the six principles of a culture of peace in his or her daily life, family, work and community:

1) respect all life

2) reject violence

3) share with others

4) listen to understand

5) preserve the planet

6) rediscover solidarity

The Manifesto 2000 has been signed by a staggering 75 million people worldwide, with more people signing every day.UNESCO’s Director-General Matsuura stated that: “It is a sign of hope that decision-makers, gathered at the Millennium Summit, and civil society, represented by the millions of signatories of the Manifesto 2000, share the same commitment. For peace cannot be brought about by decre

You can sign the Manifesto here:

And there is this initiative by POOR magazine, avoice of the poor in the San Fancisco Bay Area,an effort to refocus media attention: “The Poverty Heroes Project is the culmination of an ongoing series ofworkshops that POOR has been conducting in collaboration with CommunityDefense Inc., a non-profit legal defense organization, in group homes,shelters, schools community organizations, jails and on the street with thegoal of furnishing society with a new way of “seeing” and understandingpeople in poverty - while also addressing and confronting the issues andstruggles folks in poverty face everyday and finally to empower the povertyhero themselves with a new feeling of pride rather than shame for theresistance of survival itself. The series will culminate with an anthologyand an interactive on-line edition.”

MISSING STORIES

All of these stories are missing in much of the media, and their omission is as bad as many of the commissions of error or bias that I have been documenting all year. I was pleased when one of Germany’s leading newspapers (note, not America’s) invited me to have a say on the news not in the news. Here’s the piece that I submitted that I am told is running today or soon in Frankfurt’s FA in German:

MISSING IN THE MEDIA

By Danny Schechter

One of the first casualties in crises is the sense of humor, especially political satire; although you do hear jokes about how if we don’t laugh (or shop), “the terrorists have won.”

Humor, of course, targets the nerve concealing what we really think as effectively as those “smart” bombs we keep reading about. The Onion, a satirical publication which calls itself “America’s Finest News Source ” because it openly makes it up while real news sources take themselves so seriously, even when they are wrong or miss key stories, ran this news brief over the holidays: “Report: US Must Reduce Dependence on Foreign Turmoil: The US has become overly dependent on foreign turmoil for its conversations and media coverage. ‘The American people consume as much as 60 million barrels of crude speculation every day using it for everything from driving discussions to heating up political debates, the report stated.”

I laughed, but what isn’t funny is that this “joke” is half-right when it comes to mainstream media coverage. Speculation, alarmism, rumors, conspiracy theories, jingoism, agenda-driven punditry, and endless spores of government managed half-information contaminate the news agenda just as dangerously as the anthrax we lived in dread of.

After September llth, the media mantraed “the world has changed forever.” But, media changed the least. There was more news of course but much of it stuck, like a needle on a record, in the “A’s” (Airplane attacks, Anthrax and Afghanistan), never reaching the rest of the alphabet, except for a few O’s (Osama, Omar). At year’s end, The New York Times devoted a major story to “Headlines From The Cutting Room Floor” referring to “key stories that were overlooked, of that might have played out differently had the world’s gaze not been fixed on terrorism.” (The Times, of course, helps fix the gaze.)

The news not in the news included the Florida Presidential election, a watershed moment in American democracy. That story disappeared as “the debate shifted from ‘Who won’ to ‘Who cares,’” acknowledged the ‘newspaper of record,’ a part of the consortium behind a mysteriously delayed recount. Imagine: the most disputed election in US history became a footnote, rating just a few headlines as a key question about democracy was swept under the rug.

There were many more under-reported stories that weren’t pursued at all in the non-stop 24/7 newsflow. Some rocketed around the Internet without finding airtime or ink. I don’t have space to elaborate, but I have been pointing to them daily in my weblog on mediachannel.org. Here are ten:

l. Intelligence failures: What did government agencies know before September llth, and when did they stop knowing it?

2. Was the attack on Afghanistan planned before September ll?

3. What role, if any, does oil play in US strategy?

4. Why was Afghanistan bombed when most of the hijackers came from Saudia Arabia?

5. Why have the Saudi’s received so little media focus while Iraq, with no link to the terrorists, receives so much?

6. What is the full tally of civilian casualties –from all sources including our allies and those dead from war related food delays?

7. Has “terrorism” replaced communism as Washington’s needed, “enemy” to justify a permanent war economy?

8. What economic interests are behind Star Wars?

9. What construction failures contributed to the collapse of the World Trade Center?

10. Why has so much of the media fallen in uncritical lockstep with government policies?

Getting at the reality of hidden truths takes journalistic enterprise and investigative reporting, not hyped up formats and stenography. The former is in short supply; the latter is not. End of Story.”

ABSOLUTION

I will still have one more shot this year when I return tomorrow. I just want to note my pleasure in reading that some transgressions are still forgiven by a sometimes bullying media. On the “left,” Pacifica Radio’s board has voted to return Amy Goodman’s show Democracy Now to the airwaves, if and when the question of back pay can be cleared up. On the right, the International Herald Tribune reports that Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel has forgiven and “absolved” Geraldo Rivera’s mistakes in his coverage of the war. The larger mistake may have been to have sent him there, but in much of the TV world ‘there are no mistakes.” You never see clarifications of errors like you do in the printed press” But then again as my New Age friends believe, there are no coincidences either. Perhaps we can take these two stories as evidence that there is still a heart in a heartless world. Please absolve me as well with a note or comment. Write: dissector@mediachannel.org