And so, with the bubbly behind us, and that tired old Times Square hoopla going off, happily, with out a security hitch, POTUS (The President of the Unied States) assures his subjects one and all that we will all have a great and prosperous year in 2002. I hope he knows something we don’t.

Alas, new years don’t mean the end of old problems or shoddy journalism, or the need to keep our eyes focused on ommissions of information and commissions of distorted interpretation. What a contrast to watch the Canadian Broadcast wrap up of the year, and the US television version. The former, a detailed catalogue of a world of issues and developments; the latter, a US centered take that seems to have begun only on September llth.

HOW A NEWSCAST MIGHT BE CONSTRUCTED

If you like your news served up with a twist and ironic edge, may I recommend Harpers.org, the web site of Harpers Magazine, which does a daily digest with the headlines that we’ve heard and those that seem to pass us by. Here’s an excerpt from New Year’s day: ” President George W. Bush held a news conference down at the ranch in Crawford, Texas, and again defended his plan to use military courts totry terrorism suspects: “One thing is for certain,” he said, “whatever the procedures are for the military tribunals, our system will be more fairthan the system of bin Laden and the Taliban.” A reporter asked the President whether the events of the last year changed him “Ask my wife,” he replied. “I don’t spend a lot of time looking in the mirror, except when I comb my hair.”

But then writer Rodger Hodge adds some news that you may have missed. I did: “Israel’s supreme court rejected Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s choice for antiterrorism adviser because the nominee, Ehud Yatom, a former Shin Bet agent, once used rocks to crush the skulls of two Palestinian prisoners who had hijacked a bus. Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia expanded his crackdown on vice by declaring war on karaoke: “If we know of any karaoke parlor still open,” he told the military, “go to close it immediately and take tanks to knock it down.” … Prime Minister Tony Blair of England witnessed the discovery of a mummy in Egypt and was cursed to be eaten by a crocodile, a lion, or a hippo. ” Now, that’s a newscast. When will we ever see a TV news program informed by a similar sensibility?

While we are citing Harpers, do have a read through their account this month on how the press is handled and massaged at the Pentagon which has mastered the art of deceptive and selective information management. It is not on their website. It offers some background on how to interpret military news. On Monday, for example, Reuter’s reported on the latest US airstrike that Afghan villagers said killed more than l00 civilians in Qalaye Niazi. Here’s how such incidents are reported: ” Major Pete Mitchell, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida, said: “We are aware of the incident and we are currently investigating.” Word of the killings came just three days after new Afghan Defence Minister Mohammad Fahim appealed for an end to U.S. bombing raids, which had already been blamed for hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilian deaths. ” Note the phrases “We are aware and are investigating” and Reuter’s use of “possibly thousands.” They must not have read the only indepndent study on civilian casulalties that I know about, and have reported on in this weblog. It puts the number above 3700.

WHAT ABOUT “TALIBAN” JOHN WALKER?

The first terrorist indicted for Spetember llth will be in Court today to plead on the charges against him which are likely to lead to a death sentence. On New Year’s eve, I spoke with a NY Supreme Court judge who told me that he thinks the case was brought in Virginia after a New York jury refused to recommend a death sentence for one of the men convicted for the embassy bombings in Africa. “Down there, they will have such restraints,” he said.

The big media fed debate remains on how to handle John Walker, the American discovered among the Taliban prisoners after the bloody prison revolt in Mazar-e Sharif. An American on trial would make for a much more engaging TV drama than some non english speaking and less sympathetic foreigners. Already, there has been a steady drum beat on the right and in much of the media to apply capital punishment, even before many of the facts have been established. Some columnists are challenging the view that seems so pervasive on the cable news channels.

WAS “LIBERAL PERMISSIVENESS” BEHIND WALKER’s CONVERSION?

Writing the conservative New York Press, Michelangelo Signorile says that conservatives are trashing Walker’s liberal upbringing as if it was somehow responsible for his fighting with the Taliban. He notes that the family lawyer, “James Brosnahan, who is said to be planning a Patty Hearst-style brainwashing defense?told the parents that they should now elude the media because their tolerant, Northern California background wasn’t playing well. Some conservatives in the media had blamed the liberalism that marked Walker’s Marin County upbringing for making him so free-thinking that he’d turned to religiousfanaticism. (The irony of this ridiculous argument?to which these conservatives seem profoundly blind?is that Walker actually rejected liberalism for a variation of the same fundamentalism that many of these conservatives and their Bible-thumping legions espouse.)

“Even the so-called liberal media has been pushing this simplistic and sleazy angle. On a recent CNN “People in the News”?a show the network produces in cooperation with its gossipy and sensational Time Warner told that Walker’s “liberal parents encouraged him to take his own path,” while words and terms like “permissive,” “free-expression” and “independent-thinking” were used in a pejorative manner. (The report even suggested “a path from hiphop to Islam,” I kid you not.”

COTTS CHARGES: CNN PLAYED PROSECUTOR

Cynthia Cotts, the Village Voice media critic takes off after CNN in this week’s Village Voice (villagevoice.com): “”Since it first aired on December 19, CNN’s hospital-bed interview with “American Taliban” John Walker has been heavily hyped, but no one has pointed out what it truly displays: the power of media to indict a man more efficiently than any prosecutor.

“Bush has yet to announce this man’s crime, but the world has already decided he’s guilty. He hasn’t talked to a lawyer, but he’s already a scapegoat who can be spit upon and molded into anything you want him to be. Welcome to the latest weapon in the war on terror: the media tribunal.

“Of course, a cable channel is not a court of law, but CNN seems to have leaped at the opportunity to prosecute a symbolic prisoner of war. Even though Walker was being pumped with morphine and did not consent to be interviewed, CNN edited and broadcast the footage as if it were a confession that would be admissible in court.

“Even after a Larry King guest criticized the tape as “inflammatory” and “prejudicial,” CNN kept playing snippets for days, inviting pundits to convict Walker hypothetically. At the same time, certain unsavory aspects of the story have been downplayed. For example, CNN shows from the night of December 19 offered many interesting details about the Walker tape. But on the Lexis-Nexis database, which carries CNN transcripts, the December 19 transcripts of Larry King Live and NewsNight With Aaron Brown are conspicuously missing. A fluke? ”

A CALL FOR MEDIA FAIRNESS.

Michael Kinsley, a former CNN analyst and editor of SLATE defended Walkter in the Washington Post, as reported in The WEEK. ‘”There’s no incication Walker was a member of al Qaeda, participated in terrorist attacksm or did the US any harm…now that the Taliban is defeated, even John Walker has the right of every American to forget about the Taliban.” This debate will continue no doubt, but media fairness for Walker should be observed no matter what your views.

The LA Weekly’s John Powers put the Walker tape in the same league as the Zapruder film in his wrap-up of some of the most comlelling televised images of the war; ” Of course, for those of us who feel entitled to see everything, the most serendipitous tape of all may have been the one from Mazar-e-Sharif, which brought together Taliban acolyte John Walker Lindh and Johnny Michael Spann, the CIA agent who would soon be killed in the bloody Qala Jangi prison uprising. …it’s no surprise that CBS and ABC paid 80 grand to broadcast it endlessly.Watching the longhaired Walker, hands bound behind him, being interrogated by Spann and an agent known only as “Dave” — Spann asks civil questions, while his Company sidekick says, “He can die here if he wants. Or he’s going to be fucking spending the rest of his fucking short life in prison” — you’re reminded that real-life CIA guys are not exactly Robert Redford and Brad Pitt. But they do run the good cop/bad cop routine they learned from a thousand cop shows. Walker plays his part, too. He just keeps kneeling there silently, all soulful and wounded like the hero of some thriller, which is probably what he thinks he is. In this, all three are just like the rest of us — shaped more than they know by the stories they’ve chosen to watch.”

THE BIN LADEN DEBATE IN SPAIN

There’s still a debate underway about the biB laden tapes, a topic of endless fascination no matter where you live. Jeanne tells us about how it is being played in Spain: “Let me just tell you what we’ve seen on the Spanish TVchannels these last 3 days regarding the new Bin Ladenvideo. Of course they haven’t shown the complete 33minutes of it, but they have shown excerpts withtranslations. Then they put four views of Ben Laden’sface together on the screen, the first being from theOct. 7th video at the beginning of the bombing, thesecond video, then the “smoking gun” video found inAfghanistan and finally this new one–in order to showhow Bin Laden has physically deteriorated, etc. etc. Incidentally, they actually took pains to try toexplain the supposed physical deterioration, linkingit to the end of Ramadan, what with fasting and so on,plus escaping from the Americans. My only comment onthis is that this just makes the “smoking gun video”,in my opinion, look even fishier, because his facereally is different in that one. (I actually had thatimpression the moment I saw it - the face is muchfuller and it really doesn’t match the others) Plus,why is it that only in the smoking gun video is thesound so inaudible???”

A German TV Show has done their own investigation of the “confession” tape and charges that it was mistranslated. George Snedeker posted this item on the Progressive Sociologists list. “A German TV show found that the White House’s translation of the “confession” video was not only inaccurate, but even “manipulative”. On 20 December 2001, German TV channel “Das Erste” broadcast its analysis of the White House’s translation of the OBL video that George Bush has called a “confession of guilt”. On the show “Monitor”, two independent translators and an expert on oriental studies found the White House’s translation not only to be inaccurate, but “manipulative”. Arabist Dr. Abdel El M. Husseini, one of the translators, states, “I have carefully examined the Pentagon’s translation. This translation is very problematic. At the most important places where it is held to prove the guilt of Bin Laden, it is not identical with the Arabic.”

“Whereas the White House would have us believe that OBL admits that ‘We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy.’ Dr. Murad Alami finds that: “‘In advance’ is not said. The translation is wrong. At least when we look at the original Arabic, and there are no misunderstandings to allow us to read it into the original.”

NOW THE RIGHT IS BASHING GERALDO

And who you watch also influences you. I am beginning to feel sympathetic to my old ABC colleague, the TV journalists so many of us love to hate: Geraldo River, now of Fox News. Nasty conservatives are now going after him, like snot nosed self-aggrandizing writers like the Taki who congratulated himself for criticizing Rivera. “Even if I say so myself, a tiny hooray to yours truly for having warned you one month ago that Geraldo Rivera, a fantasist at best, would make things up once in Afghanistan, ” he writes in New York Press this week.” (I had seen him at work during the Yom Kippur war, and believe you me, Rivera is no brave war correspondent. It does not take lots of guts to cover ferocious battles that are not taking place, except in his imagination, and transmit them.) A very big boo to the same Geraldo for reporting on the friendly fire that killed three of our soldiers on Dec. 5. The bits of uniforms and tattered clothing, as well as Rivera saying the Lord’s Prayer, were giveaways from day one. He should be ashamed of himself, and Fox should have fired him. Fox network executives said it was an honest mistake and, based on Rivera’s 30-year track record, they still had full confidence in him.” Taki, that “confidence” has been bolstered by Geraldo’s ratings which show the public likes his stagey if wild eyed coverage. You don’t want to cast dount on Mr. Murdoch’s claim to present “objective” news, do you?

KALI, GODDESS OF DESTRUCTION, MAY WANT HER DUE

While the US media is playing down the possibilities of war between India and Pakistan, Indian citizens I have spoken to are worried by the wave of militarism that is sweeping through that country. Columnist Justin Rainondo writes about this on his antiwar.com website:

“Are we standing on the brink of World War III? It all depends onjust how crazy are the Hindu nationalists who rule anincreasingly bizarre and militant India. Perhaps not all of themare particular devotees of Kali, goddess of destruction and all Iknow is that Kali holds a central place in the Hindu pantheon,and she no doubt has lots of fans. Here, for example, is anAssociated Press story detailing the mindset of the people ofJaisalmer, India, who live near the border with Pakistan, whoare “aching for war”:
http://www.ishipress.com/mohandas.htmhttp://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/may96/indian_elections_5-10.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38900-2001Dec29.html”
‘Bring on another war, we are ready,’ shouts Jagdish PrasadVasa, a craggy shopkeeper who has lived through the three warsbetween India and Pakistan since independence from Britain in1947. His war cries draw similar chants from the old turbanedmen drinking sweet tea at the foot of the sandcastle-like fort.”‘The Jaisalmeris are warriors by nature, always on alert andnever afraid to fight,’ says Vasa, spitting out juice from his’gutkha,’ a concoction of tobacco, betel nut and spices. ‘It’stime to put Pakistan down, for good.’” Them is fighting words, and one must always remember that rationality and reason is frequently overwhelmed by jingoism and ultra-nationalist fanaticism.

IT’S WHO YOU SEARCH FOR THAT MATTERS

War, shmore. What are web users interested in? YAHOO compiles an annual list of the subjects that interest folks who use its search engine. Here is their list of the top five subjects.

l. Playstation 2

2. Britney Spears

3. World Wrestling Federatioin

4. Dragon Ball Z

5. Napster

The World Trade Center comes in 6 and Osama bin Laden places at 15. Happily, Rudy Giuliani is not in the top twenty.

And sadly, we are not on the list either. So let’s spread the word about mediachannel.org this year. And forward this column to one and all.Your views are alway welcome as well. Write dissector@mediachannel.org