POLITICAL HUMOR*PEARL AND THE JOURNAL* PALAST ON VOTER PURGE

Cartoonists of the world attention: you have more power than you think. According to the New York Times front page, the Secretary of Defense, Donald (”rummy”) Rumsfield has closed down the planned Office of Strategic Influence in part because “editorial cartoons about the office’s proposed activities made it impossible to do its job.” You oh so clever wiseguys with brush and pen have “damged” a key asset in the free world’s war on terrorism, and it has been shut down.

SAY GOOD BYE TO THE OSI

You want here something really funny, that is if the office itself was not a joke to begin with, Rumsfeld ran the gamut and emotions and positions in one statement. Here are the three sentences on his response to a question about whether or not the Pentagon’s “integrity” has been compromised.

First, he said, “I doubt it.”

Then he followed with: “I hope not.”

And finally, retracking somewhat and covering all bases, “If it has, we’ll rebuild it.”

This increasingly sounds more we are watching a morality play at the theater of the absurd. The only question is if it is a comedy of a tragedy.

MONITORING POLITICAL HUMOR

Lets start with the first possibility. For some time, conservative media monitors have been tracking the comedy explosion on American TV, noting that the jokes on late night television offer more insights into what Americans a are thinking, or even the information they are getting than than the news programs. You may recall a study during the 2000 election that showed that 25% of younger voters relied on late night comediens for ALL their political information. At that time, Time Magazine referred to political coverage as “electotainment.” And Eric Efron of the dear departed Brills noted, “there is nothing new about comedians milking the news. What’s new is the extent to which the news has been milking the comedians.

And now news analysts are monitoring all the yuks all the time. Here’s the latest from Robert Lichter’s Center for Media and Public Affairs which says that last year it monitored 13,007 news stories on all the evening news shows. You would expect that, even if it sounds less like a life and more like a life sentence. But would you guess that they “logged 3, 480 jokes about public affairs and public figures from the monologues of late night comedians”?

“* Jokes Up: Prior to September 11th in 2001, 6.8 political jokes were told per night on the three shows combined. That number dropped 54 percent to just over three jokes per night in the month following the terrorist attacks. Since then, political humor has gradually returned to late night television — with the most recent month showing a rise to over 9 jokes a night, exceeding pre-attack levels by 38 percent.

“* How Far They’ve Come: Letterman’s current level of political joking is 10 times higher than the first month after the attacks and above his pre 9/11 average by 65 percent. On Leno, the number of political jokes is 58 percent above initial post-attack totals and 27 percent above his pre-9/11 average. Conan O’Brien — though less reliant on political humor — is averaging 6 times as many political jokes since the immediate aftermath and 32 percent higher than prior levels.

“oNot So Star-Studded: Guests of a more serious bent (e.g., Dan Rather, Madelaine Albright, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman) were featured twice as frequently in the 15 weeks after the attacks as in the 15 weeks prior to them (10 percent of all guests compared to 5 percent).

THAT VOTER PURGE IN FLORIDA

Not as funny about US politics is BBC reporter Greg Palasts latest report on the voter purge in Florida that targeted thousands and thousands of people thought to be felons or dead people, and turned out, surprise, surprise, not to be. For those of you who have not forgotten Florida, as I have not since I am back to directing a new investigative film called COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY, you will want to pick up the March issue of Harpers. Palast shows what the purge documents in Florida looked like and tells some stories of eligible voters who lost their votes. His reporting wll be out soon in a new book, THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY. He has been working hard on this story and writes to say: ” Harper’s, Salon, Nation all paid me record sums for my stories … and went over each fact with a fine tooth comb (the Washington Post too, don’t forget). An article he wrote for Mediachannel.org also appears in the book which will be kicked off with a national book tour.

Here’s part of his piece in Harpers’s: “In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President Bush. But however one reads the ballots, Bush’s win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both proteges of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 “ex-felons,” who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) A portion of the list, which was compiled for Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here; DBT, a company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service. If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude more voters, then the state appears to have spent its money wisely.” See Gregpalast.com for more.

THE DANIEL PEARL INVESTIGATION

The NY Times is reporting that Pakistan will turn over to the US the main suspect in the kidnapping of the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl-, “but only after it concluded its investigation.”CNN reports, “Slain American journalist Daniel Pearl made propaganda statements, underapparent duress, on a roughly produced videotape that also contained violentfootage of his death.The tape included a direct threat to target otherAmericans if the demands of Pearl’s kidnappers were not met.”

WHAT WAS THE WALL STEET JOURNAL’S RLE

Veteran media critic and columnist Alexander Cockburn praised Pearl’s journalism while suggesting that it was the editorial policies of his won news paper that may have doomed him. (Cockburn used to have a column in the Journal.) He writes this week in New York press and elswhere: “….So if that WSJ editorial writer who invoked “evil” had been honest, he might have written, “It may well be that Danny Pearl was killed because his murderers held him responsible for positions on the Middle East conflict and on Islam oft expressed in these editorial pages. If so, then he died for principles that we honor and will always uphold.” Or something of that sort, while simultaneously emphasizing that reporters are not editorial writers and that Pearl bore no responsibility for the editorials.

Might it not have occurred to Pearl’s editors, those who assigned him to South Asia, that the fact that he was an Israeli citizen might have put him in extra peril, given the fact that he was seeking to contact an extremely dangerous crowd of Muslim terrorists in Karachi? The fact of his citizenship only emerged after his death, in a report on Feb. 24 in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, by Yossi Melman: “Professor Yehuda Pearl, father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, has told Ha’aretz that he fears that making public his son’s Israeli citizenship could adversely affect investigative efforts by Pakistani police to apprehend the killers and track down the murdered reporter’s body. In a telephone conversation from his Los Angeles residence, Professor Pearl expressed regret and anger over the revelation by the Israeli media of his family’s ‘Israeli connection.’ The U.S. media, which was aware of the information, complied with the family’s request not to make it public.” Then Melman concluded with this minor bombshell: “The American media was asked to comply with this request after information was obtained that confirmed reports that the 38-year-old reporter was dead.”

It seems to me almost certain that those Pakistani terrorists would have killed any reporter for a U.S. news organization who had the ill fortune to be seeking an interview at that particular time. Robert Fisk, of the London Independent, has probably written more pieces sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than almost any other mainstream reporter. Yet that didn’t prevent him from nearly being beaten to death by Afghans in a frontier town a few weeks ago. ”

THE VIEW FROM “OUT THERE”

Writing from Turkey, Adam McConnell asks:” if the US government can demand that the perpetrators of Mr. Pearl’s gruesome murder be handed over into their custody, can Afghan citizens demand that various members of the US government be deported to Afghanistan for trial over the thousands of civilian deaths in the bombing campaign?” (From Afghanistan today, the Times reports that US soldiers who killed 16 people in a raid on two compounds in Hazam Qadam January 24 may have been “duped” according to local witnesses who put he death toll at 21, insisting that US soldiers fired first. The Pentagon says they fired in self-defense.”)

McConnel also sends along A Reuters story that shows the renormous gap between what people who rely on western news sources believe and those living in the Arab world.

“Despite news reports that 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis, only 18 percent of those polled in six countries said they believed that Arabs carried out the attacks, USA Today quoted the Gallup poll as showing.

“Many blamed Israel or the United States, the paper said, buttressing anecdotal evidence of a huge gulf between the West and Islamic countries over the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“Just nine percent said U.S. military action in Afghanistan was morally justified, while 77 percent said it was morally unjustified. The United States targeted Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network, which it accuses of masterminding the attacks, and the Taliban militia, their erstwhile Afghan hosts….

UPDATE ON BUSH’S SPEECH IN CHINA: TRNSCRIPT CENSORED

The Chicago Tribune reports: ” The Chinese government responded to President Bush’s call for religious tolerance Friday by promptly editing out his remarks on freedom and faith in its transcript of a speech that Bush delivered on live national television.

“Before the president had boarded Air Force One to return to the U.S., China’s state-controlled media put out their version of the address he had given Friday morning at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

“Almost half the speech was simply hacked out in the transcript released by the official Xinhua news agency…”

AOL TIME WARNER KNOCKED IN AN AOL TIME WARNER MAG

Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star whose TV Barn is a mediachannel.org affiliate senda long a story about AOL Time Warner. It knocks the company’s law suit in coinnection with Netwsape and has been published in an AOLTimeWarner Magazine: Fortune. Here are some excerpts from Stuart Alsop’s column:. (Check out the full column in the mag’s website, Fortune.com:

“A few weeks ago, AOL Time Warner’s Netscape division sued Microsoft “to seek redress for Microsoft’s anticompetitive conduct against Netscape.” The whole Microsoft-AOL thing is intriguing and slightly terrifying to me, since my venture firm backs companies that want to do business with both. But what motivates me to write about it is that the suit has convinced me that a hunch I’ve had for the past few months is right: AOL Time Warner is no longer the company I once admired and invested in…

“Such is the nonsense of a big media company trying to be technologically smart. I have had trouble with FORTUNE’s Website for years, and for that I blame FORTUNE. For the Netscape bar, I blame some nameless corporate executive, who must have decreed that it would be synergistic between the Time Inc. brands (FORTUNE, Time, Sports Illustrated, etc.) and Netscape. Every Time Inc. publication has the same irrelevant bar atop its Website. Let me tell you, there is not one iota of synergy here. What there is, instead, is a complete ignorance of the basic rule of serving customers on the Web–give users their information fast…

“Couldn’t these AOL Time Warner execs just bury Netscape and get on with their lives? Couldn’t they focus on the future and on competing aggressively in today’s landscape, rather than trying to extract a pound of flesh from Microsoft through the court system? Instead of fighting back with great products and technological genius, this company is choosing to fight in the courts. And that bodes ill for the future of AOL Time Warner…”

MURDOCH GOES TO THE BARBIE

Free Press , the Journal of the Campaign for Press and Broadcast Freedom in Britain shows how Murdoch newspapers pander to their audiences. It shows two mostly identical front pages of the SUN on the same day, both featuring the Page 3 Girl of The Year.” The one targeted at Britain knocks the Euro. The one aimed for Ireland praises it. Meanwhile here in New York, Cynthia Cotts writes in this week’s Village Voice about the New York Post, now led by editors from the Murdoch stable in Britain and Australia: ” “Everyone knows the New York Post can be a great read, and we hear it’s a fun place to work these days, especially if you’re from Australia or the U.K. But staffers at the titillating tabloid also know that anyone can be fired for any reason at any time.

In early February, the Voice can now reveal, Post editor in chief Col Allan abruptly fired Sunday editor and longtime Post veteran Marilyn Matlick, apparently because she was too feisty and butted heads with the boss. The acting Sunday editor is now Geoff Stead, who hails from the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, Australia, where Allan previously ran the show. Indeed, the Aussie mentality is now so entrenched at the Post that the standard newsroom greeting is “G’day, mate!”

ALERT FROM IRAN: FREE SIAMACK POURZAND

The latest reports regarding Siamack Pourzand state the detained Iranian journalist has meet his sister in the government administrative office on the 22nd of February for last time. Mr. Pourzand has requested that his sister disconnect all ties with Persian radio programs overseas and discontinue all telephone ties. Mr. Pourzand revealed that these communication lines are being strictly monitored, thus endangering his survival. Furthermore, Mr. Pourzand also notified his sister that is no more hope of meeting one another.

Siamack Pourzand was detained on the 24th of November by plainclothes men affiliated with the Islamic regime under unknown conditions. The International Alliance of Iranian Students condemns the Islamic Republic in their violation of human rights. We call on all human rights organizations worldwide for their immediate and unconditional attention to the conditions of Mr. Pourzand.”

MEDIACHANNEL BACKED CIVIL LIBERTIES FORUM TONIGHT

As we express concern about the lack of freedom elswhee, we here in New York have an opprtunity tonight to attend a panel on Civil Liberties after 9/11 co-sponsored by Mediachannel.org at the Ethical Culture Society 2 W 64 at 7PM. See the Mediachannel.org from page for more info,

Please continue to share your ideas and items with me. Write dissector@mediachannel.org