On this last morning of the last day of a year many of us could have done without, I remote controlled my TV for a breakfast news fix. CNN was clucking about the heartbreaks in the markets and fortunes lost, while CBS radio featured a story about a stockbroker who was CHARGING $100 bucks to guests at her annual New Year’s eve party. A sign of the times.

Over on MSNBC, there was another one of those endless tributes to “America’s Mayor,” Rudy Giuliani, in all the smugness that his dedication and moments of compassion almost overcame. Later, I saw the headline in Harlem’s weekly Amsterdam News celebrating from another point of view: “RUDY: YOU ARE THROUGH.” Somehow I doubt we have seen the last of Rudy G. As the public viewing platforms fill up to accommodate the crowds at Ground Zero, no doubt one will soon face an earnest image of “America’s Mayor” or his wagging finger in the same way that a photo of Mao stares out over Tiananman Square.

YUKING IT UP IN MURDOCHVILLE

I could only stand about thirty seconds of the Fox News Channel after watching another of their “war updates. ” Today, the duo on camera were bantering over footage of exhausted Taliban prisoners squeezed miserably into a cell in Khanda-hell. They have the eyes of defeated men awaiting their fate.

The perky blonde behind the desk jokes at the image of the men dividing a piece of flat bread among themselves.

“Look, they’re like pancakes,” she muses.

“Oh, they are having pancakes,” her biff looking anchormate agrees, then one-ups her on the scale of calculated cleverness with a reference to a chain of popular breakfast restaurants:” Its’s like an -IHOP over there.”

Ha! Ha!

She quips, ( chuckle, chuckle,) “and I’ll bet they are dreaming of all those virgins,” a reference to the fruits of paradise that Holy War martyrs are allegedly told to expect in the next world after they have given themselves for Allah.

“Don’t we all?” he responds, as this Afghan terror nightmare war is reduced to a locker room fantasy.

“Dont we all?” Enough! Click.

Sure, we all have fantasies, but I am sure he doesn’t share one of mine: a news system that can do better than this.

THE TREK TO TIMES SQUARE

More punishment awaited as my laptop freaked with connection problems, and I had to trek to the office, located in the center of tonight’s Ground Zero, Times Square, where the cold and the cops and Dick Clark and the ball are ready to their annual thing so we can bid adieu to one series of nightmares and stare into an abyss of what awaits in 2002.

GRATITUDE

I will say this. I am grateful to have an office to go to in a year which has seen more than 100,000 layoffs in the media sector alone, and to have this outlet when as many internet ventures are now but distant memories. I am also blessed to have a team of colleagues like the ones here at Globalvision, now in its fifteenth year, and Globalvision New Media, now approaching its third, who have launched the Globalvision News Network (Tim, Susan, Rick, Craig, DJ, Kimberly) to help plug in key holes in the media system we write about on Mediachannel.org.

And, a tip of the dissector’s keyboard, to the team at Globalvsion, what an amazing, talented and dedicated group. My Partner Rory and O’Connor and I are grateful for your hard work, loyalty, competence and commitment. And that means you: John, Pat, Kelly, Kozo, Catherine, Brian,Gil R, Dan, April, Joel, Carol, Kebba, Nduka, Frank and the list goes on and on until the break of dawn. Raise your hands in the air, and wave em like you care.

Many of you who know me by these daily ravings don’t know all the people who labor in our digital vineyards who make it all possible, and who, happily, take pride in what we have achieved, together, and , what, with your help, we may yet achieve.

So here’s a New Year’s eve toast to the many Mediachannels, Catherine, Liza, Doug, Andrew, Murad, Anand, and ENauen who make it happen every week and to Bob Z and Eliana G who are hunting for the resources to keep it all happening. Appreciation also to Susan and Gouri and who reached out on our behalf in the year gone by. And, if course, to all of our interns, past and present, here and abroad.

And to our extended family of contributors, and advisors, including partner sites in gestation and online like Polarity 1 of Pop Cult, Jake in the UK with Reporting The World, Roland and Media Tenor in Germany, Seeta with Media Policy, Tate and the Don at Alternet.org in San Francisco. Love to Anuradha, Peter, Bill and all at OneWorld.net in London. Saludos tambien a Pablo Miguel and all our media companeros in Mexico City. Appreciation to Jeanette for editing help on this weblog.

ALL PRAISES TO THE FUNDERS

It takes financial support to keep Mediachannel alive and we have been fortunate to find funding and support, first from our backers at Globalvision New Media (Thank you, Leonardo, Marialina, Leticia, and Jim Rosenfield); from the ABB company in Zurich (Thank you Bjorn for continuing support); to our foundation backers at Ford, Rockefeller, Soros (OSI), Reebok, Arca, Streisand and List, with more, hopefully, to come. We acknowledge, with special thanks, contributions from DaimlerChrysler, Alianz Insurance, and the many Media Channel readers who sent in checks as expressions of support and solidarity.

We are pursuing a financial sustainability strategy and need all the help we can get. Contributions to support Mediachannel.org can be sent to the Global Center at 1600 Broadway, #700 NY . NY 10019, and are tax deductible to the extent permitted under US law.

And forgive me if I forgot you, or your good wishes and hard work, but it is early in the morning and my eyes haven’t found focus

THE WAR ON THE BIRDS

As for the war, what does one say. I don’t have a black and white view. I can celebrate the ouster of the terrible Taliban, just as I can be weary of the poppy growing gangsters that have replaced them. I can support the fight against the maniacs of Al Qaeda without supporting the maniacal threats to civil liberties at home. I can oppose terrorism without surrendering a critical take or opposition to foolhardy US policies and the regimes we often make common cause with. It is not a Bush OR Bin-Laden world folks. There are other choices and it remains for a free independent media to tell us what they are.

And I can lament what’s become of the birds.

Yes, the birds. Jill McGivering of the BBC reports from South Asia:

“Ornithologists in Pakistan fear that populations of birds whose migration route takes them over Afghanistan may have been devastated by the weeks of bombing there.

“On the shores of Rawal Lake, a key conservation area only about 10 minutes drive from the centre of Islamabad, there is a sound that cannot be heard this year - a whole bird population which has suddenly gone missing.

“For the birds, the timing of the bombing could not have been worse

“Dr Masoud Anwar, a bio-diversity specialist who monitors wildlife here, usually he sees several thousand ducks and other wildfowl migrating here from Central Asia via Afghanistan.

“So far this year, not one has arrived. It is a conservation disaster.

“”We are trying to conserve bio-diversity here, and we need the bird for that. If there’s no birds, we cannot go for the conservation,” he says.

KILLED OR DEROUTED

“The same reports are coming from all over Pakistan: tens of thousands of ducks, cranes and other birds depend on Pakistan as a winter habitat, and Afghanistan is a key migration route.

“Oumed Haneed, an ornithologist with Pakistan’s National Council for Conservation of Wildlife, says it is unclear why the birds have not appeared.

“One impact may be directly the killing of birds through bombing, poisoning of the wetlands or the sites which these birds are using.”

A GOOD WORD FOR AMERICA

Even as I some times bash corporate media practices that distort, or criticize government policies that shame us in the larger world, there is still a spirit here in the USA that needs celebrating (also: nurturing, course-correcting, refining, and reinforcing) a spirit of liberty and tolerance that is ill-served all too often by the media, but is there in the spirit of many of its people.. Jim Sleeper of the New York Post, a working class supporting progressive journalists who has soured in recent years cites a poem about the America that needs reviving in a dark time. He does so to criticize this country’s “harshest” critics, but I borrow his words from him to encourage even more more dissent and debate, and love of the America that is, in the words of my pal Little Steven a work in progress, and with the memory of the words of M.L. King Jr. fresh in mind: “Somewhere I read, “King said, “that the glory of America is the right to protest for what’s right.”

THE NEW COLOSSUS

Writes Jim Sleeper, “The terrorists didn’t know that. Nor did they reckon with a tribute to our civic faith far more eloquent than mine, the lamp-bearing lady whose base bears part of a poem written for her unveiling in 1866. You probably know the closing lines of Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus;” but here’s the whole poem, which answers, with eerie foresight, those who’ve indicted this country for its strains of militarism and materialism. Lazarus summons deeper strains, in lines that didn’t become hackneyed even during the age of irony and cynicism before September 11. Gently, she reproved this country’s harsher critics:”

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridg’d harbor which twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tos’d to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

MY PLEA

Mother of Exiles, take us in, those of us, too, who feel exiled in our own land, alienated by the simplicities and manipulations of its media and the coarseness of too much of its culture.

Mother of Exiles, bring us all home and make it a home of all in a new year, a renewed year, where the right distinctions can be made, and the wrong policies opposed, where equality and global justice are more than words, and a free press acts like one.

I will be back on Wednesday, granting you all the right to party, wishing you all my special thanks for responding so generously and favorably to this Weblog adventure for so many weeks and months.

May I have the strength to continue it.

Adelante. Onward.

2002 is coming. Bring it on.

We Are Family.

Danny Schechter

News Dissector

Dissector@mediachannel.org