*CORPORATE “REFORM”*

*MINISTRY OF TRUTH*

*THE BOSS IS BACK*

Ok. Ok. I blew the date again. Not a few of you wrote to remind me that July has 31 days and that August is not upon us until tomorrow. But sometimes time stands still and feels as if it repeats itself, as last summer’s rounds of shark attacks gives way to this summer’s whale beachings. Days blend into one another. Maybe it is the heat. Every day also seems to bring another big name company into disrepute.

Today, it is our old friends at AOL/TimeWarner who wake up to find the Justice Department sniffing around their accounting protocols. On CNN, anchors speak with a combination of disdain and fear of “their parent company.” If they be parents, why don’t you do what kids do to their elders? Rebel.

Ah, that would be asking too much. (For more on AOL/TimeWarner see See Patrick Phillip’s new blog on Iwantmedia.com, a great source: http://www.iwantmedia.com/aoltimewarner

“NO MORE EASY MONEY”

In the news was el Presidente’s signing the bill aimed at ending fraud by what he called “corporate criminals.” The legislation contained key provisions that he opposed just a few weeks back. Will his call for “no easy money” but “hard time” for white-collar crooks make much of a dif? Not according to Virginia Rasmussen of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, who says:

“The legislation signed by Mr. Bush today is a quickly-devised effort to send a message that the people are ‘winning,’ when, in fact, nothing of the sort has happened… A law establishing oversight and imposing a few penalties, we are told, will set things right and get corporations in line, but will in fact leave the giant corporations and their complicit governments to proceed with business as usual. Such speedy acting is intended to divert us from the fundamental question of who governs in this country… We need to be rewriting corporate law in all 50 states and engaging in the struggle to build democratic institutions that put the people in charge.”

Hear! Hear!

(And one more comment uncommented upon,. Jeff Chester (of democracticmedia.org) told the Institute of Public Accuracy:

“Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC, testified before the Senate on Tuesday. Chester is executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy and co-author of the recent article “A 12-Step Program for Media Democracy.” Chester said today: “The FCC’s recently released five-year plan does not even mention the ‘public interest’ — something that should be central to its role.”)

THE FOXES GUARD THE CHICKEN COOP

It was a quiet morning on Fox News until word of the latest bombing in Israel came through to give the happy talk trio over there something new to yak about. The signs on the highway call this rightwing rant squad “Younger and Warmer.” E.D, the blonde blabberer, was just commenting on a report that Senator Daschle wants prescription drug reform before the passage of the Homeland Security bill, which she said was nuts because we won’t need prescription drugs if the terrorists strike.

Huh? When I watched this morning, they were back to Clinton bashing, always a sign that there isn’t much new news despite the endless speculation over whether or not OBL, as the Pentagon calls Mr. Evil, is dead or alive. (Speaking of the latest in Israel, please note that this is incident 74. According to the AP, 251 Israelis and two foreigners have been dead. Sorry, but I must have missed the AP story on the number of Palestinians who perished since the current violence erupted in September 2000.) Jesse Jackson’s trip to the region has dropped out of the news. He is selling peace, but no one is buying.

REGIME CHANGE

The Senate takes up Iraq today, with CNN reporting that many of the faces viewers to the news net know well — that coterie of war hungry “experts” — are due to testify. Will critics of the coming war be heard? The focus of course is on whether or not there are Weapons of Mass Destruction threatening us. According to globalsecurity.org, over in Europe, some think that such weapons become a threat only AFTER the US attacks:

“For Iraq, weapons of mass destruction are a last resort,” according to a European diplomat. “Saddam is not a madman. He didn’t use WMD in the Gulf War. But I’m afraid that if the U.S. tries to liquidate him or change his regime, he might have nothing to lose and then resort to their use.

“Saddam now needs weapons of mass destruction more than ever,” An Iraqi opposition leader in London said. “They are his card, the only thing he can use as a threat against the U.S.”

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld says these WMD’s — I just love all the acronyms in Pentagon speak — are now mobile and will not be easily taken out with a mere air war.

NEW YORK TIMES IN THE LEAD

And what of the role of the Press in all this. Writing in SLATE, Jack Shafer asks, but does not fully answer some key questions about the NY Times coverage:

“Three times in the last month, the New York Times has excerpted secret Pentagon plans to invade Iraq and crush Saddam Hussein on Page One. All of these stories have given rise to charges of reckless reporting and treason from the conservative press and military analysts. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld himself fulminated against the leaks in a July 12 memorandum to the Pentagon’s top brass, insisting that they stop blabbing…

“The first question to ask about these stories is whether Rumsfeld is right: Are the leaks — and their publication by the Times and other papers — endangering American lives? But beyond that issue, readers must be wondering why these conflicting plans — which would appear to tip our hand to the enemy — keep showing up in the damn newspaper. Do these stories simply reflect the conflicting preferences of different military officials? Or is the Pentagon using the Times to confuse the Iraqis about the impending attack as part of an “information operation” (formerly “disinformation”) campaign? More sinisterly, is the Times partnering with the Pentagon to bamboozle the Iraqis?”

CIA TO DO “WHAT IT TAKES”

While Shafer minimizes any damage to US policy from these stories, the CIA is freaking out about them and the leaks they are based on, according to Jim Ridgeway in this week’s Village Voice:

“The CIA, which devoted long hours in the 1960s to reading outgoing foreign mail, wants to jump in and stop journalists from publishing embarrassing leaks. ‘We’ve got to do whatever it takes — if it takes sending SWAT teams into journalists’ homes — to stop these leaks,’ James B. Bruce, vice chairman of the CIA’s Foreign Denial and Deception Committee, told the Institute of World Politics last week, according to NewsMax.com. ‘Somehow there has evolved a presumptive right of the press to leak classified information. I hope we get a test case, soon, that will pit the government’s need to prosecute those who leak its classified documents against the guarantees of free speech. I’m betting the government will win.’

Previously Bruce worked for the CIA as deputy national intelligence officer for science and technology in the National Intelligence Council. ”

COCKBURN ON THE TIMES

To Alexander Cockburn, in his column this week in New York Press, the problem goes deeper. Why, he asks, is the Times such a bad paper? His answer in part:

“The news pages are clogged with prose that is either pedestrian or arch, the latter being the besetting vice of journalists trying to turn in quality writing. And even the editorial pages are dimmer than they were when Gail Collins was writing during Election 2000. Collins was a delight, and so they moved her onto the editorial board, and now she’s writing much less. My own suspicion is that someone figured out that Collins was showing up Maureen Dowd as the commentator equivalent of Bud Light, and shielded Dowd from further embarrassment by shutting down Collins, via editorial promotion, a familiar stratagem.

“The Times spent so many years through the 1990s printing stupid stories about the triumph of neo-liberalism and of the free market that even if its foreign and economic correspondents had suspicions that all might be well, they prudently suppressed their doubts. So the Times missed what was actually happening in the former Soviet Union, or in Argentina, Brazil and the other kleptocracies of Latin America. The only reason more isn’t made of the stupidity of the Times’ editorial pages is that The Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages are so violently demented that almost any other editorial voice sounds sane by comparison.”

THE MEMORY HOLE

One journalist is trying to do something about the gaps in news reporting with a new website. Keith Lampe sent his item around: The Memory Hole keeps scarce knowledge alive

“In George Orwell’s novel 1984, news articles containing inconvenient facts were thrown down a memory hole to be incinerated. Now The Memory Hole Website rescues knowledge in danger of being forgotten, ignored, or suppressed. See: http://www.thememoryhole.org

“The reason that literal memory holes don’t exist,” says Russ Kick, the site’s editor and publisher, “is that they don’t need to. Thanks to litigation, spin control, self-censorship, media laziness, and info-glut, a lot of important facts are buried. Websites disappear. Articles from the Associated Press are changed. The New York Times buries a major revelation in the 18th paragraph of an article on page A23. The FBI withholds evidence. Transcripts of Congressional hearings go out of print after a week. Crucial government documents are never put online. Citizens have to pay hundreds of dollars for a single Freedom of Information Act request. Investigative books reveal startling facts, but who has time to read900-page exposes? There are lots and lots of reasons why important facts often don’t get the exposure they deserve.”

Kick is the author and editor of five books and regularly writes for the Village Voice.

THEY THINK WE ARE ARROGANT, HOW DARE THEY?

Maybe the Times is trying to make up for deficits in US government propaganda overseas. I thank PR Watch for reprinting this quote from the newspaper of record:

“The United States is doing a poor job of countering growing anti-American sentiment overseas and must revamp the way it promotes its foreign policies abroad, the Council on Foreign Relations contends,” the New York Times writes. “In a report to be released this week, the council asserts that many countries, in particular predominantly Islamic ones, see the United States as ‘arrogant, self-indulgent, hypocritical, inattentive and unwilling or unable to engage in cross-cultural dialogue.’ … The [report’s] recommendations include: expanding the use of political campaign techniques, including polling, to shape attitudes toward the United States; establishing a White House unit to coordinate efforts,headed by a senior adviser to the president; and creating an independent Corporation for Public Diplomacy, modeled after the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to develop programs to communicate American messages overseas.” Already the government is acting on some of these recommendations.

OH, ORWELL (AGAIN)

And for Daniel Kurtzman, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle., this is all one more sign that fiction and faction are blending with Orwellian ideas percolating into policy prescriptions. Kurtzman asks: “Can a sitting president be charged with plagiarism? As President Bush wages his war against terrorism and moves to create a huge homeland security apparatus, he appears to be borrowing heavily, if not ripping off ideas outright, from George Orwell. The work in question is “1984, ” the prophetic novel about a government that controls the masses by spreading propaganda, cracking down on subversive thought and altering history to suit its needs. It was intended to be read as a warning about the evils of totalitarianism — not a how-to manual…

“Serving as the propaganda arm of the ruling party in “1984,” the Ministry of Truth not only spread lies to suit its strategic goals, but constantly rewrote and falsified history. It is a practice that has become increasingly commonplace in the Bush White House, where presidential transcripts are routinely sanitized to remove the president’s gaffes, accounts of intelligence warnings prior to Sept. 11 get spottier with each retelling, and the facts surrounding Bush’s past financial dealings are subject to continual revision.

“The Bush administration has been surprisingly up front about its intentions of propagating falsehoods. In February, for example, the Pentagon announced a plan to create an Office of Strategic Influence to provide false news and information abroad to help manipulate public opinion and further its military objectives. Following a public outcry, the Pentagon said it would close the office — news that would have sounded more convincing had it not come from a place that just announced it was planning to spread misinformation.”

DON’T BLAME NADER

As we discuss misinformation, Sam Smith’s excellent Progressive Review is neutering some with a new study on the Florida electoral fiasco of 2000. (The focus of our new film COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY [see: www.globalvision.org])

“A study by the Progressive Review of national and Florida polls during the 2000 election indicates that Ralph Nader’s influence on the final results was minimal to non-existent.

“The Review tested the widely held Democratic assumption that Nader caused Gore’s loss by checking changes in poll results. Presumably, if Nader was actually responsible for Gore’s troubles, his tallies would change inversely to those of Gore: if Gore did better, Nader would do worse and vice versa.

“In fact, the only time any correlation could be found was when the changeswere so small - 1 or 2 percentage points - that they were statistically of 2000, Gore’s average poll result went up 7.5 points over August, Nader’s only declined by 1 point. Similarly, in November, Gore’s average poll tally declined 5.7 points but Nader’s only went up 0.8 points.

“In the close Florida race, there were similar results: statistically insignificant correlation when the Gore tally changed by only one or twopoints, but dramatic non-correlation when the change was bigger. For example, in nine successive surveys in which Nader pulled only 2 or 3 points, Gore’s total varied by 7 points. As late as two weeks before the election, Gore was ahead by as much as 7-10 points.

“Nationally, the Review’s five poll moving average showed Gore steadily hacking away at Bush’s 15 point lead until he was ahead by as much six points in September. But this lead rapidly disappeared until Bush was back in a narrow lead by early October. While Gore eventually won the popular vote, the election was so close that most polls projections were still within the standard margin of error.”

MIDDLE EAST DEBATE

Gush Shalom of the Israeli Peace Movement issued this appeal in the aftermath of today’s horrific terror attack at Hebrew University: “Today’s horror at the campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem was a preordained bombing. From the moment when PM Sharon ordered the lethal Air Force bombing of Gaza, cutting off a promising effort to achieve a cease-fire and arousing a Palestinian demand for revenge, it was clear that this moment was coming and that even the Israeli Army ’s control over all West Bank cities cannot prevent it. There is no justification for the indiscriminate murder of random Israeli civilians, as there was no justification for the killing of Palestinian children which today’s act was supposed to avenge. Somebody has to stop the cycle of revenge and counter-revenge. Further retaliations contemplated by the government of Israel, and in particular collective punishment of family members of suicide bombers by deportations, house demolitions and the like, can only further fan the flames. The only way to break the cycle of bloodshed is to renew and intensify the efforts to achieve a cease-fire, so as to prevent further attacks on civilians. A cease-fire is now a practical possibility - though no cease-fire can long endure without a clear, visible prospect for an end to the occupation.”

Some reading on the Middle East from NYU’s Global beat reporting unit: “Gal Luft, a former lieutenant colonel in Israel’s defense force, argues that continued use of brute force will not stop the wave of bombings. It makes more sense to steer the Palestinians towards other options. By Gal Luft (Foreign Affairs, July-August 2002). In that same issue, former Clinton negotiator asks if Arafat ever wanted peace. His response: No, not really.

IS THE BOSS BRAVE ENOUGH?

Bruce Springsteen is all over the media these days as his new album “The Rising” drops. He spoke of his agony and even his therapy with Ted Koppel last night. He spoke about the bravery of so many on September 11th, and the agony of their loss but had nothing political to say at all about the Administration or the War on Terror or anything really controversial, although I am told he has some Muslim singers on the album. Contrast that with another American musician I read about in London’s Guardian where Duncan Campbell reported:

“Since September 11, few entertainers have made explicit, high-profile attacks on President Bush and his policies in the ‘war on terrorism.’

“So it was interesting this week to see the singer and songwriter Michael Franti of the band Spearhead pull no punches when he appeared at the Hollywood Bowl as part of the 2002 world music festival.

“Franti, who was once a member of the Beatnigs and of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, opened his session with a mocking imitation of George Bush telling people: ‘You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.’ As a choice, said Franti, that was like telling people they had to eat either at McDonald’s or Wendy’s. Franti was neither with Bush nor with the terrorists, he informed the vast crowd in the 20,000 capacity arena. And for good measure he attacked terrorism and militarism, any action where civilians were killed by bombs. “Power to the peaceful!” he pronounced.

“The political nature of his intro made you realise how rarely the subject of the “war on terrorism” is addressed on public stages, let alone at such mainstream venues as the Hollywood Bowl, famous for its Symphonies Under the Stars programs; the evening was sponsored by one of our esteemed local radio stations, KCRW, but also by such establishment concerns as United airlines and Lexus cars. (Lexus was the prime sponsor of Nightline’s interview with the BOSS last night.)

A WORLD OF MEDIA BLUES

In the media news, a few items from around the world: Ifex reports: “Algerian television journalist Mourad Belkacem has been found murdered in his home in Algiers, leaving many in the local journalism community “seriously distressed,” reports the Algerian Centre for the Promotion of Press Freedom (Centre algérien de defense de la liberté de la presse, CALP). Although it was not clear at press time whether his killing was politically motivated, it comes during a period when journalists are beginning to live and work relatively normally followingthe extraordinarily violent years between 1993 and 1997 which left 110 journalists and media workers dead, CALP says”…”VARIETY reports from India: “Bollywood is reeling after police played tapes of phone conversations in court alleged to be between underworld boss Chhota Shakeel and four Indian film personalities revealing a plot to kill actor HrithikRoshan.”

NEWS NOT IN THE NEWS

Last night, I dropped in at the Earthpledge Foundation’s reception for economist Jeffrey Sachs, who recently left Harvard for Columbia University’s Earth Institute and to be closer to the UN, where he is an advisor on the tragedies befalling the nearly one quarter of the world’s people–who are dying of poverty and related diseases, and the West’s inattention to their plight. (Sach’s track record as advisor is not remembered with great fondness in Russia, where his prescriptions are credited with helping to torpedo the society.)

However, his comments and passion about what was happening in Africa is both frightening and compelling. One of his unreported revelations last night: that after 20 years of the AIDS crisis, NOT ONE human being is receiving drug therapies paid for by the United States. NOT ONE, he insisted, noting that tens of millions are dying without much attention in the US media. The talk was part of the run-up to the UN conference on Sustainable Development, which gets underway in South Africa at the end of next month.

Ok, now I can say it again. July is leaving us. Welcome the dog days of August. And welcome your comments and items for this ongoing weblog. Write dissector@mediachannel.org.