*NY TIMES TO CONSUMERS: PAY MORE

*COLIN POWELL TO NORTH KOREA: NUKES ARE OK

*CAMUS FOR YOU

The news this morning is that the news will cost more. Despite all of economist Paul Krugmans’ thundering in the New York Times against corporate greed, the New York Times itself raises its newsstand price today from 75 cents to one dollar — for newsstand sales only — a whopping 25% hike. (Oops, my math is wrong. See above.) It is expected that, besides consumers like myself, this may strike a blow against Rupert Murdoch. Here’s why. His New York Post costs a quarter, and it seems that many people bought it with what was left, after they put down a buck down for the Times. The remaining quarter went for the Post. The smart money here in media city says that now that that Times costs a buck, Post sales may go down since it has been a supplementary purchase all along. You can still read both papers online for nothing — that is until the Internet gets further privatized which may not be so unthinkable anymore.

Also, here in Gotham, a media deal over the weekend made publisher Russ Smith–the cranky columnist who writes as “Mugger.”–$5 million dollars richer with the sale of his weekly neo-con paper, The New York Press, to a suburban chain. The bad news about the deal is that the new guys want to fire the eclectic editor, the brilliant John Strausbaugh, and want to keep Smith, whose column length I emulate (but not his ideas). I hope the new crew keeps Alex Cockburn’s column. This bit of business is all about competing with the Village Voice — which just added a radio station its website.

WANTED

It is Breaking News Monday with both Fox and CNN reporting that three American doctors were in a hospital owned by a Christian order in Yemen. There is also another alert the government which says it wants to “talk” to five men, possibly Algerians, Pakistanis and Afghanis, who are believed to have smuggled themselves across the border from Canada on Christmas Day and may be up to no good. A usual, no specific threat has been cited. The New York Post, never a paper for understatements, says the FBI is looking for a gang of 19 described as a “terror team.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell set a new Sunday morning talk show record by appearing on all five programs yesterday to say war with Iraq is not “inevitable” and to try to notch down tensions with North Korea — a government known to create crises for negotiating purposes

Reports the Times: “The Bush administration has backed away from a longstandingdeclaration that it would not tolerate a North Korean nuclear arsenal.” (And they blamed the showdown on the Clinton Administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policies.)

SHOULD WE FEAR NORTH KOREA?

I was surprised when a former Clinton Administration official, an expert on Korea, showed up on Fox yesterday to say that he believed that North Korea had some concerns, including the fact that nuclear reactors that were supposed to open in 2003 are years behind schedule. Pyongyang says it is not threatening anyone with nuclear war, and claims that Washington is.

Recall that President Bush is quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book s saying he personally “loathes” the “Dear Leader” who rules the North. Sounds personal.Curious, isn’t it, that a turn of phrase invented by a former Presidential speech writer has now a phrase used by the media. The Post this morning calls North Korea a member of the “Axis of Evil” as if the Axis is a gym or club to join.

Just for the heck of it, I googled bit of US Korean history and found out why some of our friends in South Korea are finding the US bit out of whack in trying to chill the crisis. Speaking at UCLA last September, Sung Chul Yang, South Korea’s Ambassador to the United States, said: “My government is not happy about President Bush’s [Axis of Evil] phrase.” He added that the future of the two Koreas could be better prepared by acting on an old Korean proverb that says “Gentle words can open the iron gate.”

“RORSHACH INKBLOT”

The media was having a field day over the holidays stoking the alarm about North Korea, and suggested, in some cases, that war might be just around the corner. This is not new. Bruce Cumings, the University of Chicago expert on Korea, has long criticized the simplistic coverage of both South and North Korea. He blames the press for exaggerating the threat

‘’North Korea became a Rorschach inkblot, evoking Orientalist, anticommunist, racist, and outlaw imagery all in one neat package.'’

At the same time, most of the coverage has painted US intentions and our history in the region as benign. That is, until recently, when Associated Press won the Pulitzer Prize for a report on a massacre of South Korean civilians that had been covered up ever since the Korean war.

Years ago, Cumings wrote a book with Jon Halliday called Korea: The Unknown War (London: Viking; New York: Penguin, 1988). It documented American behavior there long before the AP story had reminded us of some of the largely forgotten behavior of US troops. Collier’s magazine began an article by saying, “Our Red foe scorns all rules of civilized warfare, hid[ing] behind women’s skirts.” then quoted the following colloquy between American soldiers:

“The young pilot drained his cup of coffee and said, ‘Hell’s fire, you can’t shoot people when they stand there waving at you. ‘Shoot ‘em,’ he was told firmly. ‘They’re troops.’

‘'’But, hell, they’ve all got on those white pajama things and they’re straggling down the road’ . . .

“‘’See any women or children?’

‘'’Women? I wouldn’t know. The women wear pants, too, don’t they? But no kids, no, sir.’

“‘They’re troops. Shoot’em.’”

Reginald Thompson, a sensitive British war correspondent, wrote in Cry Korea:

“There were few who dared to write the truth of things as they saw them. Journalists found the campaign for the South ’strangely disturbing’, very different from World War II in its guerrilla and popular aspects. Thompson witnessed an American Marine kill an elderly civilian as if in a fit of absent-mindedness, showing no sign of remorse, and remarked that GIs ‘never spoke of the enemy as though they were people, but as one might speak of apes’. Even among correspondents ‘every man’s dearest wish was to kill a Korean. ‘Today . . . I’ll get me a gook.”‘

Americans called Koreans ‘gooks’, he thought, because ‘otherwise these essentially kind and generous Americans would not have been able to kill them indiscriminately or smash up their homes and poor belongings’.

Charles Grutzner, who reported the war for The New York Times, said that in the early stages “fear of infiltrators led to the slaughter of hundreds of South Korean civilians, women as well as men, by some US troops and police of the Republic.”

He quoted a high-ranking US officer who told him about an American regiment that panicked in July and shot “many civilians.” Keyes Beech, another American correspondent, wrote, “It is not the time to be a Korean, for the Yankees are shooting them all . . . nervous American troops are ready to fire at any Korean.”Reginald Thompson found himself sickened by the carnage of the American air war, machined military might used against “an almost unarmed enemy, unable to challenge the aircraft in the skies.”

MEDIA ROLE IN COVERING WAR

That Korean War belongs to history. The still expected war on Iraq may surface in the next few months. Dave Edwards of Media Lens in Britain, writing on ZNET, says the media should be challenging, not cheering for it.

“We live in strange times. Day to day, journalists are seriously debating whether a single omission in a dossier on arms, or a single failure to open a door within two hours, justifies launching a massive war against a broken Third World country with a force of upwards of a third of a million troops. There is occasional dissent in the comment pages, asking why this is happening now when the target country has done nothing but suffer, sicken and starve for over a decade, threatening no one.

“But generally there is respectful silence - the media has assigned itself the role of ‘weather forecaster of war’, predicting if and when war will come, as though addressing an act of God (or perhaps, as they see it, an act of +the+ Gods). The idea that it might be the media’s job to do all in its power to prevent the mass slaughter of innocents by a small group of patently cynical and ruthless men and women is dismissed as cringe-making ‘committed journalism’. On current performance, it is reasonable to assert that the media would always adopt this servile stance no matter how corrupt the interests driving war.

“A further remarkable feature of media coverage is revealing. While there has of course been endless speculation on possible violent conclusions to the current crisis, we at Media Lens have seen literally no mention of the possibility of what might happen in the event of a peaceful resolution.”

DECLARATION FROM BERLIN

Intellectuals and activists in Germany have released a Berlin Declaration that has not, to my knowledge. found its way into any US news outlet. It says in part:

“The war on terrorism does not work. Every week, there are new reports of bombings and hostage-taking in different parts of the world - Moscow, Bali, Mombassa.

“The war on terrorism cannot work. It cannot work because terrorism is a crime, the expression of a new type of global privatized violence. The word ‘war’ dignifies the terrorist as an ‘enemy’ instead of a criminal. It polarizes the world between ‘us’ and ‘them’, which is just what the terrorists want. It inflicts further violence on innocent people and nurtures feelings of hate and revenge that lead to terrorism.

“We are on the verge of an escalating process of world-wide violence, something akin to the Israel-Palestine conflict on a global scale. This impending cycle of destruction might include the possibility of the use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, further genocidal crimes, unpredictable acts of terrorism, not to mention more US ‘preemptive strikes’, which will turn out to be counter-productive strikes….”

CHOMSKY ON KURDISH HUMAN RIGHTS

The Declaration calls for more support for human rights, as does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And so does Noam Chomsky, also writing on ZNET, on recent US treatment of a Kurdish human rights activist–even as Washington makes noises about human rights abuses in Iraq and Iraqi abuses towards the Kurds.

“…the US is now refusing entry to human rights activists recording and protesting these crimes. A few weeks ago Dr. Haluk Gerger, a leading figure in the Turkish human rights movement, arrived with his wife at a New York airport. INS cancelled his 10-year visa, returning him and his wife at once after fingerprinting and photographing. Dr. Gerger has received awards from Human Rights Watch and the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his outstanding contributions to human rights; his punishment by the Turkish authorities had been singled out by the State Department as an example of Turkey’s failure to protect elementary rights.

“In an open letter to the US Ambassador, the spokesperson of the Freedom of Speech Initiative in Istanbul, protesting this treatment, writes that Dr. Gerger is ‘a founding member of the Human Rights Association of Turkey’ and ‘an ardent defender of Kurdish rights,’ who “has written extensively on the issue and has criticized governmental policies,’ likening “the Turkish government’s treatment of the Kurds to Serbia’s ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia,’ and suffering imprisonment and heavy fines as well as loss of his academic position for his writings on human rights issues.

“Colin Powell’s State Department has now declared him persona non grata in the United States, adopting the stand of extremist elements in the Turkish military and ultranationalist parties….”

HYPOCRISY ON TERRORISM

Your news Dissector was quoted this month by journalist Mark Sommer in the Buffalo News in a piece about US hypocrisy on issues of terrorism: “Danny Schechter, a journalist and filmmaker who has long written about and made documentaries on South Africa, says it’s hard for many to forget.

“‘The South African government called Nelson Mandela a terrorist and created anti-terrorist legislation aimed at people, like him, who simply wanted a democratic society. And the U.S. - including Dick Cheney, when he was in the Congress - supported them. It is for reasons like these that there is so much skepticism about the U.S. around the world’.

“Schechter says there is also a selfish reason why supporting tyrants isn’t in the country’s best interests: Such actions can eventually come back to haunt us.

“He points to Iran, where the CIA ousted the Mohammed Mossadegh government in 1953 and installed Reza Pahlavi - the Shah of Iran - who maintained control until 1979. He did so through a secret police force, SAVAK, which Amnesty International named in 1976 as the world’s worst human rights abuser. U.S. payback came in the form of radical fundamentalists, who drove the shah from power in 1979, says Schechter. For nearly a quarter century, the U.S. has had to deal with a country that despises it and promotes terrorism.”

MEDIA NEWS FOR A GRIM MONDAY

It is good to be quoted in a US news outlet and interviewed by Jimmy Durchslag on KMUD community radio in Redway, California. I sometimes feel that only overseas outlets are interested in what I find interesting. In the last two weeks, I was on BBC and the Voice of America’s Mandarin service.

In some media news of note, Iwantmedia.com is carrying reports that that my old friend Mozambican Journalist Carlos Cardoso’s suspected killers are on trial (That’s good news in Africa. Better news is that Daniel Arap Moi is out as Kenya’s tyrant president; our own Murad Rayani is in Kenya and we hope to hear more on his return. )

…The Guardian reports that Al-Jazeera now broadcasts in English…

The New York Times reports: “The major television news networks and The Associated Press are seriously considering dissolving the Voter News Service,” the organization formed to do election polling and save media company money. Its performance, as we recall, was less than stellar in Florida…ABC 20.20’s former science reporter. Dr. Michael A. Guillen, has, the paper of records also notes “has agreed to evaluate a religious sect’s claim to have created the first human clone.”

NOMINEES FOR THE “IZZY” AWARD

I have had some response to my call for nominees for a new media award for conflict reporting named after the late I.F. Stone, a legendary US journalist. Ann Hemenway nominated me but I have declined, since I am trying to get the award going. Someone named ‘techno’ put in the word for a Canadian columnist:

“I nominate Eric Margolis, columnist and contributing foreign editor at the Toronto Sun. He’s been one of Bush’s harshest conservative critics regarding the impending war with Iraq.”

Journalist Tom Goltz, now back in Istanbul, who will soon to publish a book on his reporting on Chechnya writes:

“I fully support your awards idea; the problem is, sadlyl how to go mainstream and not marginal. A scathing piece on Pacific News, whom we love, for example, is not a piece in the NYTimes. SADLY…..Keep pushing the ball forward.”

DROPPING THE BALL FOR 2003

The ball will be dropping in this neighborhood tomorrow night. We have to be out of our building by 4 PM, alas, so cannot watch the frenzy. Security reasons. I will be back tomorrow for an end of the year wrap-up of news and news criticism of the year. I leave you on an up note, with some thoughts from a blast from my past, Albert Camus.

Last night, my daughter found a dusty copy of one of his books on a self, with my brother’s name scribbled in it, and this morning I found, by coincidence (are there coincidences?) this wisdom of his on a Swedish peace site. It is from TFF, the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research in Lund.

CAMUS FOR YOU

“Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, a gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever-threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all.”

AMEN. Until tomorrow when I am back with my year in review, share your comments by writing: dissector@medichannel.org