02
May
Tory At Sea
TAILHOOKING FOR ATTENTION
BELATED MEDIA INTROSPECTION
CALENDAR OF WEEKEND EVENTS
“TOP GUN” cheers this morning’s New York Post as President Bush, in full flight gear, flashes a peace sign. Now that the first phase of what Bush advisors project as a thirty year war is over, peace symbols have been appropriated as skillfully as the language of liberation and human rights. Once again, the White House has used a military “set” to stage a propaganda pose in what is still being called a ‘war on terror.” Even the plane that took him there, a twin-engine Viking, had his name stenciled on, and lest he forgot, the words “Commander-in-Chief.” The sailors ate it up, but according to a fawning account on MSNBC this morning by the still-embedded John Eliot, most of the sailors want to get the hell off the ship and go home. “Mission accomplished,” boasted the Prez as the men had their minds on other missions to come. Humility was the order of the day: “When I look at the members of the United States military, I see the best of our country, and I am honored to be your Commander-in-Chief,” he said.
David Corn writes in his Nation blog abut the coverage of reenactment of the great TV documentary series “Victory at Sea.” (I still have the soundtrack) “As the cable news networks enthusiastically covered George W. Bush’s trip to the USS Abraham Lincoln–cool military hardware, guys in uniforms, the Big Man, and a touch of can-anything-go-wrong drama–there were plenty of references to Bush’s days in the Texas Air National Guard, when he flew F-102 fighter jets.
THE PRESIDENT’S MILITARY RECORD
On MSNBC, correspondent George Lewis noted that Bush, with his tailhook landing on the aircraft carrier, was “becoming one of” the troops on board. He didn’t add, only 25 years late. That is, neither Lewis nor any of the other television journalists covering this gee-whiz event (whom I saw) mentioned Bush’s rather spotty (to be kind about it) record in the National Guard….
Enlisting in the Guard was one way to beat the draft and avoid being sent to Vietnam. Is this why Bush signed up? During the campaign, Bush said no. Yet in 1994, he had remarked, “I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.” …. The Boston Globe obtained copies of Bush’s military records and discovered that he had stopped flying during his final 18 months of service in 1972 and 1973. More curious, the records showed Bush had not reported for Guard duty during a long stretch of that period. Had the future commander-in-chief been AWOL? …”
VICTORY IN VIEQUES
While the Navy was hailing the president’s arrival, Puerto Ricans were hailing the Navy’s departure from the Island of Vieques, a paradise despoiled for a half a century as a place to test bombs. The Times reports ‘For most of the more than 9,000 people of Vieques, the official end of Navy bombing exercises after more than 60 years was cause for an island-wide celebration.” Needless to say, there was no live coverage there of a decision prompted by years of protests, jailings, and resistance.
BIN LADEN AND BECHTEL
As we focus now on rebuilding Iraq — and please note that the much maligned UN has been invited back, we have a tantalizing report in the New Yorker indicating a strange connection. Jane Mayer reports: “It turns out that a money trail runs — albeit rather circuitously — from the lucrative business of rebuilding Iraq to the fortune behind Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden’s estranged family, a sprawling, extraordinarily wealthy Saudi Arabian dynasty, is a substantial investor in a private equity firm founded by the Bechtel Group of San Francisco. Bechtel is also the global construction and engineering company to which the U.S. government recently awarded the first major multimillion-dollar contract to reconstruct war-ravaged Iraq…”
CASTRO FEARS ATTACK
Where will the next war erupt? It looks like tensions with Syria have been chilled so, as you will note, there have been fewer hostile stories in the media. (The new Onion, the satire on the news newspaper, has a front page article revealing that US intelligence has discovered that that country is overrun with Arabs.) Tensions with Cuba are on the rise, with Fidel Castro accusing the US yesterday of “wanting to attack Cuba. Speaking at a May Day rally, he said according to the Cuban press:.
“We do not want Cuban or U.S. blood to be shed in a war, we do not want anincalculable number of lives of persons who could be friends lost in anybattle. But never did a people have such sacred things to defend, or suchprofound convictions for which to fight.
“In any case, Cuba would prefer to vanish off the face of the Earth ratherthan renounce the noble and generous work for which many generations ofCubans have paid the elevated cost of the many lives of their finest sonsand daughters. We are accompanied by the most profound conviction that ideascan do more than weapons, however sophisticated and powerful they might be.
AP reported: “The crowd responded with cries of “Whatever it takes,Fidel!” while waving handheld Cuban flags. One group hoisted an effigy of President Bush that read, “Bush: Don’t mess with Cuba.”
WORLD PRESS FREEDOM DAY
Today is the day before World Press Freedom Day, so perhaps we should turn to celebrate the beleaguered Fourth estate. (I am beleaguered myself because there is a construction crew hammering through concrete right outside my window.) The World Association of Newspapers is offering editorial packages at:
http://www.worldpressfreedomday.com
The Wall Street Journal in Europe is asking questions about the “Collateral” damage that claimed the lives of some journalists in Iraq. The death of ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd and disappearance of two of his colleagues raises questions about press coverage of conflict and the role of the US military.”
FREEDOM FROM THE PRESS
Meanwhile in the US, more mutterings and expressions of self-doubt, if not outright disgust, are surfacing. I wrote about the White House Correspondents dinner which presented a picture of a press corps on “bended knee” to use a term, Mark Hertzgaard applied to media subservience to President Reagan years ago. I wasn’t there butSridhar Pappu of the New York Observer was. He reports from behind the scenes:
“George W. Bush had won the Iraqi war and also the media war. His White House had cajoled, contained, embedded, and largely co-opted the press. The Correspondents’ Association Dinner — in which Presidents come and show their combative respect for the men and women who cover them, while reporters reveal themselves to be big, patriotic Lou Grant–like huggy-bears — was off its game. The war had taken all the sport out of it….
“Richard Belzer, the dark comic Duke of Non-Self-Deception, in a Matrix-issue black trench coat, was tucked into the corner of the main bar.
“The press has become an arm of the state,” Mr. Belzer said. “The whole mind-set of the mainstream press seems to be strangely muted and cowardly. I was watching the BBC yesterday, and someone asked the question, ‘What will the Iraqis say when people in America can’t speak out without being criticized?’
“The lingering sense that the media had been charmed by Mr. Bush during the 2000 campaign had not been derailed by the approach of war — especially after the President’s pre-war press conference, a softball affair that reeked of a rusty press corps.
“And then the administration came up with the plan to give the press unfettered access to the battlefield. The decision paid remarkable dividends, both for the correspondents and the war planners: The press got its story and astonishing pictures, the White House got its story line. With the exception of a few questionable days on that first weekend in southern Iraq, it worked for both.”
DISINFORMATION DEMOLISHES DEBATE
Harpers Publisher John MacArthur was in Philadelphia slamming war propaganda posing as news: Reuters rerported his appearance. He said: “”The concept of a self-governing American republic has been crippled by this propaganda,” MacArthur said. “The whole idea that we can govern ourselves and have an intelligent debate, free of cant, free of disinformation, I think it’s dead.”
“White House spokesman Scott McClellan denied the existence of any administration propaganda campaign and predicted the American public would reject such notions as ridiculous. A Pentagon spokesman also denied high-level planning in the appearance of the American flag in Baghdad. “It sure looked spontaneous to me,” said Marine Lt. Col. Mike Humm.
“In fact, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that Americans were happy with Iraq war coverage, though many wanted less news coverage of anti-war activism and fewer TV appearances by former military officers. But MacArthur insists that both Gulf wars have been marked by phony tales calculated to deceive public opinion at crucial junctures.
“EVENTUALLY YOU WILL KNOW NOTHING”
We told you about New York Magazine’s Michael Wolff;Now his editor Simon Dumenco offers the back story in fOLIO: “As Michael noted in his first dispatch from Doha, the more time he spent at CENTCOM, the less real information he received, leaving him with an ever-diminishing sense of reality. Spend enough time at the facility, he wrote, and “Eventually you’ll know nothing.”
“When you send a journalist to a place that’s already overrun withjournalists, you always wonder how the hell your guy is going to pindown a story that nobody else will get. But in Doha, the story, whichhelpfully, none of the other storytellers seemed willing to tell, wasabout the nonstory: that Doha was a bit of theater. A highly stylized,ritualistic spoon-feeding, by the U.S. military, of journalists hungryfor a Persian Gulf dateline opportunity.
“As it turned out, I needn’t ever have worried about our man in theMiddle East. Michael was more of a menace to Doha than Doha was toMichael. After a CENTCOM staffer told him that he would never be calledon again, he packed it in and headed back to New York, having filed acouple of thoughtful dispatches about how information is disseminated–and not disseminated–in the war.”
DEFERENTIAL FAWNING
Now that the war is safely over, Tom Shales of the Washington Post is finally turning his top gun on the reporting. “A Rosy, Hawk’s-Eye View of War” reads, “The troops at the battlefronts are worthy of pride, and so are most of the journalistic troops, TV and print, who reported the war on Iraq from the war zone itself. But back on the home front there was much not to be proud of-the demagogic flag waving, the maudlin “human interest” stories about relatives of relatives of soldiers and the deferential fawning accorded military and political leaders. Suddenly, the airwaves were glutted with mawkish hawks-not demonstrators or congressmen but anchors and correspondents.
“Obviously, the age of irony is not over, after all. This was to a large degree a parody of a war and of war coverage. We go for nostalgia in music and movies and TV shows, why not nostalgia in war coverage? Why not approach Gulf War II with the same sense of moral absolutism with which journalists of another time reported on World War II? Embedment, the practice of letting journalists ride along with military units and report from wherever they alighted, turned out to be not a tool for truth but a clever public relations device by the Pentagon.”
BELATED REPORTING DEPARTMENT
This morning, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell finally did what should have been done before the war, contrast the rhetoric and the reality. She went back to Secretary of State Powell’s UN presentation and reported that many of his claims have yet to be substantiated. The piece was titled rhetoric vs. reality. Who is going to do the same about the media coverage? Oops, that’s what I am trying to do.
In the media news, Al Jazeera reporters have been welcomed back on to the floor of the stock exchange… The Times reports: “Paula Zahn’s contract with Fox News Channel is ruled to have allowed her to negotiate with other parties before the deal expired…TV Week reports: ‘NBC News has won the competition for Richard Engel, who became a star of the war in Iraq as a free-lancer who stayed in Baghdad, reporting for ABC News, after other U.S. TV news crews were ordered out either by their protective management or by the Iraqi government.”
MADONNA “SPINELESS”
New Music Express in England reports that Madonna is being criticized by one of her fellow artists: “SHAKIRA has called MADONNA “spineless” for axing the controversial anti-war video to new single ‘AMERICAN LIFE’. She says the star should have stuck with the original promo for the track, rather than putting together a new one weeks before its release because of the war in Iraq. In the first video
THE ECONOMY ANYONE?
I was just on the BBC world service — a reason I am running behind — listening to Republicans and Democrats talking about the need to refocus on domestic issues. The media might like that too. There is a report that the Iraq conflict cut Disney earnings by 12% We will be hearing more about tax cuts as a way to revive the economy but little about how wealth might be distributed a bit fairer.
Holly Sklar reports in a Knight-Ridder column: “Median CEO pay at the 100 large companies in Fortune’s survey rose 14 percent last year to $13.2 million. Half earn more than the median, half earn less. Median CEO pay at the 365 large companies measured by Business Week rose 6 percent to $3.7 million, including salary, bonus and long-term compensation such as exercised stock options.
“CEO pay went up in 2002 while company revenues, profits, stock value and employment went down. The S&P 500 stock index dropped 21 percent last year. Total revenues for the Fortune 500 fell 6 percent and profits plunged 66 percent. Another 1.5 million Americans lost their jobs. Personal bankruptcy filings set a new record.
Here’s another angle of interest on our economy: The Mail and Guardian in South Africa is reporting; “Marijuana, pornography and illegal labor have created a hidden market in the United States which now accounts for as much as 10% of the American economy, according to a study.” Where have you seen this?
SOME OF YOUR LETTERS
Jeff Levy writes from Denver: I’m a producer at KGNU Radio, Boulder, and expect to be teaching a college-level media course in the Fall. I’d love to look at Media Wars; it looks like an excellent subject for interview and course material.
Margaret Hamer checks in from The Bronx: “Dear Danny Is your Media Wars at any stores yet? I am glad you are staying alive!!! Keep up the great work! ” NOTE: Media Wars is in some stores. Ask for it. Rowman & Littlefield is the publisher. You can order on line too. See above.
B Russell was pleased that MoveOn.org will be citing us. “I guess I’m cool like that, I know what time it is! And it seems you ARE mentioned today (I’m waiting for the moveon.org newsletter), fantastic. I can’t wait to see what you folks are up to. Thanks and keep up the good work…. and oh yeah, I’m thrilled to see my letter on your log. -devoted fan”
A friend sent me a letter she received written by Karelib” ” I am wondering if President Bush is working under cover for Al-Qaida. First, despite the massive intelligence-gathering capacity and precision weaponry, Osama Bin Laden has disappeared without a trace. But that point is rather mute by now. The more damning evidence is that the so-called Bush Doctrine directly accomplishes the major goals set forth by Osama: 1. The demise of Saddam Hussein (too secular for OBL) 2. The withdrawal of U.S. bases and troops from Saudi Arabia (OBL’s homeland) 3. The unification of world-wide terrorists and their sympathizers 4. The downfall of the US economy. Shall we “out” the Bush Administration or just wait until the rest of the country catches on?”
LIVING FOR THE WEEKEND
We are beginning to raise several thousand dollars in response to my frequent appeals. Thank you. We have a long way to go. I was also gratified when one asked for the tax exempt number of the Global Center, our oversight body for now (501(c)(3) #13 3580901. The reason: she wants to get her company to match her donation. Great idea. If you can do it, please do. Also if you are in New York this weekend, here are a few events I will be appearing at:
Saturday May 3: 3 PM Media panel with Amy Goodman and others at the City University Graduate Center at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue. This is a big weekend long event with Ralph Nader and a cast of thousands. Our appreciation to Rick Ulfik of WE for inviting us.
Saturday NIGHT: 8-11, TRIBUTE TO POET ALLEN GINSBERG and benefit for alternative media including Democracy Now, FAIR and Mediachannel.org. Amy Goodman and Peter Hart will join me at the Bowery Poetry Club 308 Bowery, New York City. .Thanks to poet Eliot Katz for arranging this fun event.
Sunday, May 4, 8 PM: INDY MEDIA EVENT, Walker Stage, 56 Walker Street, Lower Manhattan, See http://www.informationliberationfront.net for details. Hats off to War Cry for her vision in this event.
If you live in these parts, we hope you can share this media weekend with us. If you can’t, stay in touch with me and mediachannel. Write dissector@mediachannel.org. IF YOU ARE A NEW READER, SCROLL UP FOR HOW YOU CAN JOIN MEDIA CHANNEL: The # 1 source of media news and views.
There is also information on how to order MEDIA WARS, our new book on news at a time of terror. Please donate to support our work, by clicking on PAYPAL ON THE HOME PAGE.
Have a great weekend. I NEED a break.
