STATE OF THE MEDIA *FBI AND CNN* THE ARAFAT DEBATE

“Good morning, my fellow Americans. I am here to deliver my annual State of the Media, address, and that state is not good.”

Oh, how I long for someone of great stature to give such an address — and have it taken seriously. Today, we learn that Fox News Channel has eclipsed CNN in the ratings just two days after we learned that a new study shows that there is more punditry than journalism on the air, and after detailed analysis found that FOX and CNN are practically indistinguishable, except, believe it or not, there seem to be occasionally more dissenting voices on Mr. Murdock’s megaphone than Mr. AOL-Time/Warner.

The state of the media my, fellow Americans, was evident once again last night in the coverage of the State of the Union, which is always good speech by His Presidency. And as is usually the case, we had a parade of Democrats and Republicans on TV commenting afterwards, even though the address, hammered over by legions of speechwriters, was not about the State of the Congress.

I guess no one from the Union was available to comment, or from the unions or civic groups–much less the opposition movements who will be flexing their muscles and puppets this week outside the Waldorf-Astoria, where a privately run conference of the high and the mighty (and, to disclose all, the low and the powerless, since I will be there, too) is getting talked about as if it is a Summit of planetary importance.

As the media inflates its significance, as New York City prepares to absorb an $11 million security bill for police overtime, protest groups waver between the impulse to trash and the need to be cool if they are to have any chance of getting any substantive message across.

THE STATE OF THE MEDIA: THE WORLD ECONOMIC PRESS FORMULA

Your News Dissector’s ?State of the Media’ address, embargoed for delivery until you click on this page, begins with what’s going on a few blocks away where, as they say, in the insecurity business, the “zone has been frozen.”

Streets are closed around the Waldorf, but will the city’s ears be open to what they are trying say when police chiefs are not denigrating them on the media as “knuckleads?” At least one columnist, Clyde Haberman, gives the case for allowing dissent a hearing and a back-of-the-hand backing in the New York Times.

“New York Embraces Dissent,” he warns, “but it’s in no mood for trouble.” Hey we have had trouble in River City for months now. We can handle it, can’t we? I love Clyde’s shorthand for the diverse protest movement. To him, they are not communists or anarchists or even just activists. Those words are too unwieldy for him. They have now become simply, “ists.”

Many media outlets can barely conceal their hostility to the protest, reports a new survey by Fairness And Accuracy in Media (FAIR): “Mainstream New York City newspapers have tended to frame discussion of the demonstrations in terms of their status as a security problem. A search of the Lexis-Nexis database (12/1/01- 1/28/02) found that most articles in the New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Times and Newsday mentioning the WEF have focused on police preparations for the protests. As a result, the political debate over the WEF has been obscured, as have concerns about police brutality and civil liberties.

Though the New York Times and Newsday didn’t manage to overcome this skew toward security questions, it should be noted that both papers provided more substantive coverage that did the Post and the News. Commendably, Newsday steered clear of the vitriol that has characterized some of its competitors.

One recent Newsday article, “Activists: We Come in Peace” (1/25/02), focused on the protest organizers’ endorsement of non-violence and concerns about potential police brutality; another (1/27/02) attempted a serious overview of recent political controversies over globalization.

Contrast this approach to one particularly vicious editorial from the New York Daily News (1/13/02), which referred to anti-WEF activists as “legions of “agitators,” “crazies,” “parasites” and “kooks.” The paper threatened activists, saying “You have a right to free speech, but try to disrupt this town, and you’ll get your anti-globalization butts kicked. Capish?”

If you want to capish even more of FAIR’s critical analysis assessment, see www.fair.org. Capish?

THE STATE OF THE MEDIA: TRASH LIBERAL COLUMNISTS

USA Today’s Peter Johnson summed up the charges and countercharges surrounding disclosures that ENRON was shoveling some of the money it was not shoveling into the pockets of its executives into the pockets of journalists of various persuasions:

Friday, on Diane Rehm’s National Public Radio show, a caller asked if Kristol would follow some politicians’ lead and donate his “dirty money” from Enron to charity, to help laid-off Enron employees. He said he was donating it to a charity: his daughter’s college fund. Monday, Kristol said the whole issue “is not much of a ‘gate.’ I feel like my engagement was aboveboard. I’m a little unhappy to have had an association with people who turned out to be not entirely honorable in other dealings.”

In Friday’s Times, Krugman said “conservative newspapers and columnists” are painting him as “a major-league, white-collar criminal,” an effort “to sling Enron muck toward their left.” But Bill Allison of the Center for Public Integrity says it’s a “scandal of the punditry when you have people like Paul Krugman working for Enron and writing puff pieces. It shows money buys access and influence.
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20020129/3809354s.htm

STATE OF THE MEDIA: BEHIND THE ENRON BAITING

I happen to respect NY Times columnist Paul Krugman especially because of his critical columns on economic policy. So what of his charge that these leaks and exposes reflect a right-wing agenda? There seems to be some evidence of that in this week’s New York Press, one of those usually conservative outlets that features a critique by Michelangelo Signorile on the role played by neo-conservative liberal-basher, Andrew Sullivan, who writes for the New York Times magazine and other outlets including his own website.

Signorile is merciless: “Once again, Andrew Sullivan has whirled himself into a self-righteous little tizzy that even has some of the self-righteous scratching their heads?-and which, yet again, exposes a hypocrisy on his part that is more conspicuous than a bearded pundit on too much testosterone. He’s railing about how unethical it is for certain columnists and editors to have taken money from Enron in the past and appears to be saying that they need to disclose such facts each and every time they write critically about Enron, including the full dollar amounts they received.

Conveniently, the most notable among these columnists and editors happen to be a liberal and others of his sparring partners. Meanwhile, Sullivan himself has been taking money from a man who is a George W. Bush buddy, a brother of a major Bush fundraiser and a covert p.r. operative who has schemed and scammed for Philip Morris.

“Sullivan lives in a glass house within a glass house within a glass house, and as usual it is shattered by one of his own huge stones.” Meanwhile the coverage of Enron raises questions with medichannel.org editor Elinor Nauen who writes: “I was struck by an article in yesterday’s New York Times (January 28, 2002), [http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/28/business/28FORT.html] detailing a report–”Is Enron Overpriced?”– that ran in Fortune magazine 10 months ago. The Times piece contains these two sentences: “Three Enron executives flew to New York in an unsuccessful effort to convince [writer Bethany McLean?] editors that she was wrongheaded. Enron’s chairman, Kenneth L. Lay, called Fortune’s managing editor, Rik Kirkland, to complain that Fortune was relying on a source who stood to profit if the share price fell.”

While Fortune ran the piece anyway (whereupon it pretty much died), what is interesting is the blatant strong-arming by company execs. How much of what was published is in response to or in spite of similar moves by business leaders, both in regard to Enron and other companies as well?

Good question E, but just for the record, may I boast that I disclosed a more proactive intervention, a Ken Lay trip to the magazine to pressure Fortune a week before the Times “disclosed” this bit of attempted media massaging. My info came from the lips of a FORTUNE editor to my ears and, then your eyes. What a team! But you read it here first.

THE STATE OF THE MEDIA: IS THE PRESS “CHEATING US?”

Mark Jurkowitz of the Boston Globe published this report Monday, January 28, 2002 in the Boston Globe: “The Media: Pro-US Tendency is Seen in Survey”

In November, a survey by the Pew Research Center indicated that the public’s traditionally jaundiced view of the news media had warmed significantly. Compared with just a few months earlier, the proportion of people who felt journalists “stand up for America” grew from 43 percent to 69 percent while those inclined to believe the press “protects democracy” rose from 46 percent to 60 percent.

What’s surprising here is not that the coverage is pro-US, but that as citizens there is a lot of information we’re not getting because we’re getting such a limited range of points of view. The press may be cheating us.”

He then quotes liberal and conservative media critics. Former NBC correspondent Marvin Kalb, director of the Washington office of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, said, “I’ve always said that when the US goes off to war, so does the press.”

Since Sept. 11, S. Robert Lichter added, the question isn’t whether opposing views should get an equal hearing, “but whether the critics should get a hearing at all.”

THE STATE OF THE MEDIA: CNN AND THE FBI

An interesting case study in the way in which the media is going out of its way to please the government appears in Cynthia Cotts column in today’s Village Voice, in which she reveals that the FBI demanded that CNN turn over a transcript of its interview with U.S. Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, who, you may recall, gave an “exclusive” interview to CNN–even the though he asked not to be videotaped but was anyway.

Writes Cotts: “The Lindh interview may turn out to be a case study in how the government can put the squeeze on the media. Here are some of the facts known so far: Pelton, the author of several travel books, had no experience as a journalist until last fall, when he got an invitation to spend time with a warlord who was fighting with a team of Green Berets in Afghanistan. He called CNN, which immediately sent him a cameraman, after which he filed several stories. One of them was his Lindh interview, which he conducted in a hospital near Mazar-i-Sharif and which first aired on December 2 — around the same time Lindh was taken into military custody.

“When Pelton sent the two-minute segment by satellite, “It was a big deal for CNN,” he told the Voice. “CNN’s going through a lot of troubles financially, and they’re driven as much by viewers as by news judgment. So when this tape came over the transom, they were saying, ‘We’ve got a scoop!’

“Pelton returned from Afghanistan on December 17. About a week before that, he said, he heard that the FBI was talking to CNN, and a top CNN exec told the cameraman, “Don’t lose that tape!” However, it is standard for news organizations to resist turning over raw reporting material for use in a court of law. To avoid the subpoena, Pelton says, CNN worked out a deal whereby it broadcast an edited tape and posted an all-but complete version on the Internet.

“By placing the tape in the public domain, legal experts say, network execs pulled off a neat trick. They gave prosecutors the evidence they wanted — and avoided being served the subpoena. That way CNN could duck the bad publicity from either resisting or complying with the subpoena.”

Read this whole piece for CNN’s explanation and insight into the testy waters the media is in these days. Because the problem is not just the subpoena for an interview which the governent got without having to go to court and then used, in lieu of a real investigation, to charge Lindh, but how the interview was used on other CNN shows and by the rest of the media.

Cotts again: “But Pelton doesn’t just blame the government. He said the pundits (including certain guests on Larry King Live and myself) have twisted the facts of the case, using it for target practice, while Lindh has done nothing but tell the truth so far. Pelton said he shares Lindh’s devotion to the truth. “I’m not a journalist,” he said, “and I have no interest in sensationalized stories.” Well, guess what? This one has been sensationalized as they get.

THE BIRDS OF KHANDAHAR

The gay angle in this story is evidence of that. A San Francisco paper “outed” Walker Lind’s dad for driving his son into the hands of the Taliban after he left John’s mom for a man. Now Alexander Cockburn’s syndicated column offers some fresh insight this week on widespread homosexuality in Afghanistan. He relies on reports in the New Yorker and London Times for this sidebar:

“Further evidence of the bright era now dawning in Afghanistan: life is returning to normality in Kandahar after the grim supervision of the Taliban clerics. On accounts by Tim Reid in the London Times and more recently John Lee Anderson in The New Yorker, joyful sons of Sodom are to be seen driving along the boulevards of the ancient city, their catamites demurely installed in the passenger seat. Reid knowledgeably discloses that Kandahar has long been fabled as the San Francisco of South Asia. So delirious are the peculiar enthusiasms of the Pashtun that local wisdom has it that birds fly over the city using only one wing, the other covering their posteriors. It seems that the rape of young boys by warlords was one of the key factors in Mullah Omar mobilizing the Taliban, in yet another manifestation of that intolerance that has so aroused the indignation of many liberals, prompting them to cheer on the B-52s.”

THE STATE OF THE MEDIA: ARAB PRESS CONSPIRACIES

South Africa’s Mail and Guardian looks at certain conspiracy theories common in some Arab media outlets about 9/11: “Millions believe 4000 Jews stayed away from the World Trade Center on September 11.” Harmless conspiracy theory? Or sign of a virulent new antisemitism? LINDA GRANT on how the Arab world is exporting an old hatred to the West. http://www.mg.co.za/mg/za/archive/2002jan/features/30jan-hate.html

THE ARAFAT IS EVIL DEBATE

I sounded off in this column yesterday about the anti-Arafat frenzy that Israeli politicians have launched and how it has been disseminated in the media. I still haven’t heard from my editor Jeanette who has been filling my ears with tirades against Arafat’s complicity in terrorism after her recent trip to Israel. However I did hear from one of our more eloquent reader correspondents, Janet who weighs in from Washington DC: “I take Jeanne’s [[Jeanette’s] side! I just don’t hate Arafat. I hate his actions and what he has not been able to achieve. He is a man that I loathe but not for all the reasons most describe. I loathe him for betraying his people, inparticular helpless women and children. A leader who cannot protect his people has failed miserably.”

“You are correct that the media is missing the picture and maybe you too. The media has become an instrument for both sides, using weapons of war thatencourage the martyrdom of children for their cause. Each photo of a “martyred child” that is put on the front page or in the evening news promotes another death the next day. It could be said that “we got the picture” the first time. Stop feeding these children to the cause.

“The reports turn Arafat into the leader he is not, or Sharon into the monster he is not. Neither is moving the process towards peace. Sharon’swomen and children are being murdered. Arafat’s are committing suicide in order to murder Israelis. It is a very scary conflict because there willnever be a victory unless victory is redefined as PEACE.

It baffles me that world leaders tend to be shaped into a specific media-approved mold in order to be given credibility. That is what I see as theflaw in your viewpoint. You insist on giving a civilized description to a tyrant that not even his own people like. This is not about profits for gunsales. This is about robbing the Palestinians of their potential for Peace.

If he keeps them poor, destitute and angry, the role of leader of the lost people will always be his. If he dare move out of the desert, he would nothave a clue how to lead free people. Better to die a hero for a cause than to live in peace and lose his power.”

A note from the dissector’s emotional editor, jf:

I couldn’t agree with this reader more, even if I tried. She clearly states the precise problem, and it’s why I hate Arafat and what he has done to the Palestinians. He held out hope, squashed his people economically and has given them no future. His troops push little kids into the front lines to make newsworthy footage, and then pay off the families for making the sacrifice, but they don’t build decent infrastructure, waterworks or schools for them.

Where is all the money that was shoved into the PA? Who paid for the guns on the Karine A? And where were those arms going? It’s clear that Arafat has aligned himself with the bad guys instead of the good guys, and his own people have been hurt the most.

The worst part of this is that it will take generations to see some behavior modification–the cultural differences, the lack of democracy and knowledge of the west don’t help matters any at all–especially when Israel is right next door, filled with strip malls housing Toys R Us, Ace Hardware, Burger King and McDonald’s. To the Palestinians and others, Israel is seen as the 51st State and America is its Patron Satan. That’s the problem, and it has nothing to do with what the media tells me. It has to do with what I saw in the last few weeks in Israel, what was said in my conversations with Palestinians–cab drivers, shopkeepers, and laborers who did make it over the green line so they could make a few bucks. Not one of them likes Arafat (or so they say) but what is very clear is that they are all afraid of him. They tell me the moderates with brains are all hiding somewhere on the West Bank. Well, where ARE they? How do we make sure Arafat doesn’t kill them and how do we get them to talk to the Israelis? That’s the real question here.

The media doesn’t need to paint Arafat to suit its needs. Arafat painted his own self-portrait, and it isn’t a pretty one, at all, at all. jf

Back to the dissector now:

FOLLOWING THE POLITICS OF AIDS

Today on the Mediachanel.org front page, you will find my weekly Dissector column dealing AIDS coverage. Since I wrote it, there have been some controversies about the dispensation of AIDS money, a battle among researchers over which vaccine research is more promising, and now this complaint from Ivan Wolfers, a Dutch professor.

He complains that the Global fund administering the fund is not representative. Nothing these days is politics free, lest of all AIDS. He writes to an AIDS List-Serve; “I was completely flabbergasted when I saw the list of NGO representatives that are members of the board of the Global AIDS Fund and saw not one single representative from an Asian NGO. It looks as if the Global AIDS Fund is an American affair in which some African persons are allowed to be involved. As if there is no HIV/AIDS epidemic in Asian countries, as if the epidemic in Asia does not mean anything. However, we know that in numbers, the epidemic in Asia is the biggest.

India: 4 million people HIV-infected. Where is the representative from India?

China: an estimated 1 million infected people. No Chinese representative.

ASEAN countries: between one and two million HIV-infected people. Hello, any representatives from ASEAN countries in the board of the Global AIDS fund? No. Instead we have to follow the discussions in all the discussion lists on AIDS who will be the representative from the private sector. That is the important news apparently. Meanwhile, the insult to the Asian NGO world is impressive.”

So far the Asian NGO world has not weighed in on this issue to my knoweldge. They have problems of their own. It has been reported that 60,000 Vietnamese prostitutes are being evicted from neighboring Cambodia in a vice crackdown. How will the Vietnamese absorb this exodus, and what are the implications for the spread of AID? I don’t want to think about it right now.”

IN SUPPORT OF NOAM CHOMSKY

Earlier in the week, I reported on an upcoming trial in Turkey of a publisher who put out a book by Noam Chomsky. I appealed to Mediachanel readers to support the rights of free expression there. The poet Eliot Katz is among our respondents: “I am writing to add my voice to the chorus of MediaChannel readers offering support for Noam Chomsky and his Turkish publisher in their upcoming legal efforts. As an anthologized poet and literary editor, I have always found Noam Chomsky’s writings to be uniquely perceptive, highly enlightening, and meticulously argued–as well as an indispensable source of alternative information not easily available in America’s mainstream press. He has been a courageous and principled inspiration to generations of writers trying to envision a more just and democratic society. For these reasons and more, Noam Chomsky is internationally renowned as one of America’s foremost intellectuals. There can be no defensible justification for penalizing a publisher for distributing the work of one of our era’s most important social thinkers.” (To add your voice, write: dissector@mediachannel.org)

HOW OUR NEIGHBORS SEE US

This is from a letter to he editor from the Jamaica Daily Gleaner by by Bruce Golding who was a politician in the conservative (YES, CONSERVATIVE!) Jamaica Labor Party:

” THE IMAGES and media reports of the treatment of Afghan prisoners at Guantanamo Bay filled me with revulsion. America’s contempt for the Geneva Convention and its insistence on writing its own ‘international’ law have called into question its claim to leadership of the free world and its moral authority to prescribe human rights values to other countries?.

Even more disgusting is the behavior of the International Red Cross whose representatives inspected the detention facilities but insist that their concerns would be discussed privately with US officials. Is there a Third World country that would have been afforded the privilege of similar private consultations?

America is building the horns of its own dilemma. There is as yet no evidence that these prisoners or ‘illegal combatants’, as the US has chosen to define them, were directly involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11.

If their ‘crime’ is to have defended the Afghan state on Afghan soil, then however much the rulers of that state may be involved in terrorist attacks against the US, they are prisoners of war and should be treated as such by all who uphold the principles of international law.

What will America eventually do with them? Find them guilty of defending their country against an American attack, even one which is believed to have been justified? Then what? Place them before the firing squad?” http://www.jamaica-leaner.com/gleaner/20020124/letters/letters1.html

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND

Media News in Britain. Some items from this morning’s Media Guardian summary of what the UK press is reporting on media issues.

“A film about the possibility of bioterrorist attack, Smallpox 2002:Silent Weapon, could have the same impact as early 80s nuclear-scare films and will be shown next week on BBC2? (Murdoch’s) BSkyB chief executive Tony Ball gave his rivals a good tongue-lashingin front a Commons select committee, likening the BBC to a “amonster” and saying ITV “couldn’t run a bath”. ..Almost half of Britain is hooked up to the Internet at home, after a dramatic surge of new sign-ups in the last few months?.Posh Spice is to star in a new TV advert for Walkers Crisps.” (Those are potato chips to you, bud.)

And I am out of here, off to penetrate the cordon around the Waldorf. Can’t wait. Add your voice to this column. Write: dissector@mediachannel.org

I am off.