*MEDIA MERGERS MAY BE HISTORY*

*WHO IS WRITING BUSH SPEECHES*

*AIDS UNCHECKED*

Poor Martha Stuart.

Accused of insider dealing, the lifetyle legend seems to becoming the fallguy/ celebrity for the corporate scandal that continues to deepen today. She cancelled her regularly scheduled style/cooking segment on the CBS network morning show because the hosts told her they planned to ask her about her troubles. Her lawyers and PR counselors have told her to keep her lips sealed for fear of unintentional self-incrimination.

That didn’t stop the tabloids from having a field day at her expense. DAILY NEWS: “MARTHA CAN’T TAKE THE HEAT.” The NY Post runs a horrific photo of her on its cover trying to stir class resentments and turn her into the evil witch of this far more serious and widespread affair.

DISTRACTING US FROM THE REAL PROBLEM

The focus on Martha’s misery just obscures and distracts us away from focusing on the missing BILLIONS in corporate coffers and the institutionalized travails of other companies, like Vivendi which saw its stock value go DOWN when it should have gone UP following the resignation of mogul in chief Jean-Marie Messier. The New York Times quotes an independent media analyst Harold Vogel on its front page to the effect that “The heyday for media mergers is over.”

MEDIA MERGERS: “OVER”?

So those of us who have been railing ineffectively at all the consolidation and concentration in the media industry are being taught a lesson. Namely, that the system is filled with its own contradictions and that these mega cartels are bringing themselves down. It is the lesson of Sysyphus.

“The media conglomerates are now loaded with debt,” writes Steve Lohr in the paper of record. “The high tech dreams of easy money…have faded.” Vivendi Universal is expected to put parts of the company up for sale. They are coming down, folks, and the rubble is likely to be messier than the fate of the World Trade Center.

I watched a World Com exec humpher on C-Span yesterday as business journalists asked some tough questions for which he didn’t have all that many answers. For years, CEOs were lionized on TV with shows like CNN’s Pinnacle and others. Today, they are defensive and trying to stay out of jail. There’s an excellent discussion of the role of the media — good and bad –in covering (and covering up) these scandals in the new issue of NIEMAN REPORTS, the mag published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. As a Nieman alumnus, I read it reguarly.

A “BROAD FAILURE” BY MEDIA

Jeffrey Madrick,, the editor of an economics journal starts off by noting that “Enron was merely the manifestation of a broad failure on the part of the financial media…The financial media were like fatted calves and Wall Street analysts and corporate public relations teams pounced almost at will.”

He explains how the media built up ENRON, but also notes that investigative reporting did finally blow the whistle. I will return to other pieces in this issue in the days to come.

Other media outlets are puzzling over the decline of the markets. Jen Muehlbauerwrites in Medi Unspun, the successor online newsletter to Media Grok, from the old Industry Standard:

“On Monday, the Nasdaq fell to its lowest point since June 1997, “a time when Amazon.com had just gone public, Monica Lewinsky was an unknown Washington intern, and Enron was still a five-letter word,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. It was also a time when you could look forward to July 4 in a major city without worrying about terrorist attacks. Say, we could get used to this 1997 thing.

“A few factors conspired to burn the indexes like hot dogs thatfell into the charcoal. Filed under “general jitters” was the American preoccupation with a vague FBI warning about possible July 4 attacks. On a more mundane note, WorldCom said it might have even more accounting problems lurking, and investors panicked about what else corporate America may be hiding.WorldCom dropped 93% to 6 cents a share, became the first U.S. stock to trade more than a billion shares in one session, and will get delisted on Friday. These weren’t the fireworks we had in mind.

“Beaten-down pundits seemed to agree that we might still get our fingers blown off. This week’s cover story in Barron’s predicted “a losing decade ahead.” TheStreet.com’s Aaron Task cited that article and wondered why many investors ignore the possibility that the next few years might hurt.

MSN’s Jim Jubak agreed, saying, “I think we’re still a quarter or two, or more, away from seeing the kind of concrete improvement in reported corporate profits that this market needs for a lasting turn … Longer run, I’m worried that we have one more wash-out to come.”

THE ROLE OF THE DUBYA

Some media analysts are beginning to look back at role of the President and his family in various corporate scams in the past. Alexander Cockburn writes about some new disclosures as does the Media Whores Online website. Here is a taste:”In a shocking new development in the mounting corporate corruption scandals, it has been revealed that George W. Bush violated securities regulations at least four times in the 1980’s and 1990’s — including one violation that occurred while Bush was completing precisely the sort of stock-dump swindle which his Enron executive buddies allegedly pulled off last year.

“The Securities and Exchange Commission discovered aspects of Bush’s rip-off at the time. An internal SEC report dated April 9, 1991 and later obtained and released by the Center for Public Integrity, noted that Dubya had established a pattern of violating SEC reporting regulations. The report also announced that SEC investigators had opened an investigation into Bush’s insider stock dumping the year before.

“But suddenly, under then-President George H.W. Bush’s hand-picked SEC chairman, the agency halted its probe of Dubya, brought no charges, and deep-sixed the case.

“Now, in light of George W. Bush’s denunciation of exactly the sort of practices that he himself used to build his fortune, the Bush Administration is in deep crisis.

WHAT FREEDOM OF INFORMATION

Some of this information has surfaced thanks to Freedom of Information inquiries. Now that spigot of information is being plugged says Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity

“Asking the tough questions required of “watchdog journalism” is especially difficult in a national crisis atmosphere of fear, paranoia and patriotism. In the months since the September 11 terrorist attacks, we have been painfully reminded of Senator Hiram Johnson’s famous 1917 observation that “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” Trauma from the worst civilian loss of life on American soil and the resultant “war on terrorism” without borders have all contributed to an historic assault on openness and the public’s access to information by government officials at all levels.

“We are talking about a tectonic shift from past decades in how our Freedom of Information laws and commonly held principles of openness and government accountability are administered and adhered to by those in power. And the long-time, much-abused preclusion to the public’s right to know, national security, now has been broadened with a new political euphemism, ‘homeland security.’ “Emblematic of this shift is the situation in which the Bush White House, after creating the Office of Homeland Security and appointing former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge as its first director, for months forbade him to testify before Congress or talk extensively with the news media. More broadly, within six months of the September 11 attacks, in no fewer than 300 separate instances, federal, state and local officials have restricted access to government records by executive order or proposed new laws to sharply curtail their availability, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“Unfortunately, in the context of actual information and candor from the U.S. government about its armed conflicts, for decades now we have come to expect very little.” AFGHAN WOESThe official death toll from that “errant US bomb” dropped on a wedding party in Aghanistan is climbing. It was 30. It is now 40 with l00 wounded. Nic Robertson of CNN says survivors at the Khandahar hospital say it was over l00…President Bush has apologized…There is an internal flap in the government there which has made as its claim to fame, a commitment the kind of rights for women that were denied by the Taliban. Get this — from the Independent:

“The new Afghan government of Hamid Karzai is trying to resolve a dispute after the head of the country’s broadcasting service defied a request to step down for imposing a ban on women singing on television and radio.

“The impasse has highlighted women’s rights, an important issue in the post-Taliban administration, with increasing signs of a male backlash. Abdul Hafiz Mansoor, president of Kabul TV and radio, tore up the order of the Information Minister, Sayed MakhdoomRaheen, to leave his post and refused to move out of his office.

“Mr Mansoor, who was, briefly, information minister after the fall of the Taliban, is said to have unilaterally taken the decision to bar women from singing on Kabul broadcasting, though they are allowed to do so even in more conservative areas such as Kandahar in the south.”

The other day I reported on a joke that suggested that President Bush had delayed his speech on the Middle East because he was waiting for it be translated from the Hebrew. The implication of course is that the Israelis wrote it. That may not be so far off the mark, according to a Dana Milbank report in the Washington Post. She asks:

“Is Natan Sharansky working in the White House speechwriting office?

“Sharansky, Israel’s housing minister and deputy prime minister, is the former Soviet dissident and head of a right-wing Russian-immigrant party. But by coincidence — or something more — the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan Sharansky published in the Jerusalem Post on May 3 sounds a lot like the peace proposal Bush delivered in the Rose Garden on June 24.

“The time has come for new leadership” for the Palestinians, Sharansky wrote. “The Palestinians must be encouraged to form an open and free society that is not burdened by the fear, hatred, and terror that have been sown in recent years by Arafat and his leadership.”

Here’s Bush’s version: “Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership so that a Palestinian state can be born. I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror.”

Sharansky wrote that his seven-point plan “cannot happen overnight” and called for a “three-year transition period.”

Bush, in turn, said a final agreement “could be reached within three years from now.” ETC. ETC.

PEACEMAKERS DENIED ACCESS

Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace group says the media is being denied access to what it calls “the reconquest” of the West Bank. It also reports:

“Michael Tarazi, member of the PLO PeaceNegotiations team was refused entry at Ben-Gurion Airport upon his return from a visit to the United States. We spoke with him on his mobile phone, while he was in the police station of the Ben-Gurion Airport — but it was interrupted in the middle, and afterwards the phone was disconnected. Tarazi, who has US citizenship, lives in Ramallah and works as the legal adviser for the PLO negotiating team. Many Israelis have heard him speak, in house meetings, but also in public halls, where he gave his vision why the negotiations went wrong, inspiring Israeli peace activists with hope.Preventing this man from entering Israel is part of a war - not against terrorism, but against those peace seeking Palestinians who can prove that”there is a partner” and thereby constitute a danger for the Israeli propaganda machine.”

Israel claims to want alternative leaders to challengeYasser Arafat, but Ha’retz reports that one such leader says that he cannot withdraw support from Arafat now. Former Palestinian Authority security chief in the Gaza Strip Mohammed Dahlan said Tuesday that as long as Israel calls for replacing Yasser Arafat, he will stand by the PA Chairman.”

ISRAELI STRATEGY?

How should we understand Israeli strategy on the West bank. Media coverage focuses on daily incidents, not trends or underlying strategies. Tanya Reinhart assesses this in the Israeli outlet Yediot Aharonot:

“The Gaza strip is a perfect realization of the Israeli vision of “separation”. Surrounded with electric fences and army posts, completely sealed off the outside world, Gaza has become a huge prison. About one third of its land was confiscated for the 7,000 Israeli settlers living there (and their defense array), while over a million Palestinians are crowded in the remaining areas of the prison. With no work or sources of income, about 80% of its residents depend, for their living, on UNRWA, or contributions from Arab states and charity organizations. Now Israel is considering the imprisonment there of families of suicide bombers from the West Bank

“This is the future that Sharon and the Israeli army designate for the West Bank as well. While the external fence is presently being built, Israel’s current military operation is set to be the final step in the implementation the IDF plans for reestablishing full military rule (which was abolished in large parts of the West Bank during the Oslo process). Though Israel describes everything it does as a spontaneous reaction to terror, the plan was fully spelled out in the Israeli media already back in March 2001, soon after Sharon entered office.

“Alex Fishman, military and strategic analyst of Yediot Aharonot, explained at the time that since Oslo, “the IDF regarded the occupied territories as if they were one territorial cell”, and this placed some constraints on the IDF and enabled a certain amount of freedom for the PA and the Palestinian population. The new plan is a return to the concept of the military administration during the pre-Oslo years: the occupied territories will !be divided into tens of isolated “territorial cells”, each of which will be assigned a special military force, “and the local commander will have freedom to use his discretion” as to when and who to shoot.

“The first stage of this plan the destruction of the institutions of the Palestinian Authority was completed in the previous ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ in April of this year. In practice, from that time on, the towns and villages of the West Bank have been completely sealed….” More on this to come. AIDS: MORE SERIOUS THAN WE THOUGHTJordan Lite writs in Wired.com “The new United Nations report on AIDS is a sobering collection of facts, estimates and projections of the current and future epidemic.

“Among the report’s findings:

“Without expanded treatment and prevention, 68 million people will die of AIDS between 2000 and 2020 in the 45 countries most affected by the disease. That’s five times the number of people who died in those countries over the first two decades of the epidemic.”

MY QUESTION: Is the media coverage of this crisis anywhere near commensurate with the scale of the problem?

JUNK NEWSThe folks who run Project Censored have for years monitored what they call JUNK NEWS. Here’s their explanation:

“For several years Project Censored at Sonoma State University has been releasing a list of the most frivolous over-reported news stories of the year. We call this list Junk Food News because it fills up the American airways and news stands with celebrity gossip and meaningless coverage of the unimportant. Junk Food News is the cotton candy headlines and the soda pop stories that make up the basis for what has unfortunately become known as news in this country. Famous lives provide us with an entertainment rush and a false reality that radiates in comparison to the darkness that shrouds more important world issues. Genocide, war, big business machinations, and the manipulation of third-world countries cannot compare to what Gwenyth Paltrow chooses to wear on Oscar night.

“This year’s selections were voted on by the 200 students, faculty and media researchers who work with Project Censored and hundreds of other people world-wide who are members of our weekly independent news listserv atwww.projectcensored.org.The number one junk food news story of the year by an overwhelming majority of the votes, was the Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman saga. While the West Bank found itself in the throes of a bloody civil war, our nation took sides in this tawdry battle. There was the Nicole camp -”Tom must have strayed with that tramp Penelope Cruz,” his costar in Vanilla Sky. And there was the Tom camp - “Nicole obviously cheated with Ewan McGregor,” her costar in Moulin Rouge. Both camps knew in their hearts that their beloved stars might have done wrong. So what!”As it turns out Tom Cruse may be reflecting on this in an outburst now getting attention: “I think the U.S. is terrifying and it saddens me,” he told the British paper the Daily Express. “You only have to look at the state of affairs in America.”

“MEDIA CONFERENCE ON WALES

“Finally, an announcement of interest: “The University of Wales in the UK will mark the first anniversary of 9/11 by hosting an international conference about TV news and transnational audiences. According to conference organizers, “The news media are central arenas of political conflict and public debate. The proliferation of satellite news channels brings new transnational configurations of audiences into being that may have unpredictable consequences for states, governance and citizenship.This conference will bring together academics, journalists and policy-makers to analyse and evaluate the role played by television news in mediating the events of September 11 and ensuing conflicts.”

WAVE YOUR FLAGS HIGH

So that’s my pre July 4th rap up. Tomorrow’s the big day for hot dogs and perhaps a hot incident of the vague warnings about threatened terrorist attacks have any truth to them. Be Vigilant. Have Fun. Drop a lime (and some tequila) to: dissector@mediachannel.org