PALAST PUTS DOWN THE TIMES

BIAS IN MIDDLE EAST REPORTING

9/11: WHAT DON’T WE KNOW?

Let us begin this August morning by praising infamous men.

A tip of the Dissector’s keyboard to FOX News for dropping their lawsuit against author Al Franken, after a court ruled that the humorless minions of Murdoch could not try to stop Al’s use of the phrase “Fair and Balanced” that Roger Ailes and Company had appropriated, they thought, for their own exclusive use. Sorry, Fox and Friends. There is the Constitution. Ask your in-house “judge” about it.

Al, meanwhile is laughing all the way to the Bank as his new book rockets to the top of the Amazon.com best seller list while CNN delightfully replays an exchange from the LA Book Fair between media bully-in-chief Bill O’Reilly who screams at Franken to “shut up.” Frank retorts: “This is not your TV Show Bill.” Earlier a Fox exec ordered his news stable not to refer to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movies in their reporting — a possible sign that they are backing away from boosting a candidacy that seems to be losing favor as fast as the recall circus in California.

IRAQ: US DEATHS UP, FACTOIDS DOWN

From Iraq comes word that the number of US post-war deaths now officially matches the war deaths. More unrest seems the order of the day as clashes between ethnic and political factions in the North compete with protests by Shia from the south and an epidemic of crime. That has been reported without reference to the vast unemployment that continues to devastate the economy and the lives of the people. In the spirit of the ONION whose current issue mocks a “factoid finder” for CNN Headline News, Harper’s Index reports, citing the Central Command that 32% of all the bombs dropped in Iraq were NOT precision guided. This certainly contradicts what I kept hearing in the news about how our weapons were so much more accurate this time around and so carefully targeted. If you recall, during the first Gulf War, only 7% of the bombs were precision targeted even though the TV images made it seem as if all were.

LIVE FROM ISRAEL

India has joined the terror sweeps with 50 dead in Bombay from two bomb attacks blamed on religious tension. Our contributing editor Jeanette Friedman called from Israel to report that more suicide attacks are expected there and that streets are being closed in Jerusalem, and the town of Jenin is again closed off. Jeanette raged at me for not fully appreciating the costs to Israelis of these terror attacks. She attended a funeral and is staying in a hotel that was targeted, I can understand her emotions.

She also attacks me for suggesting that Israel is to blame for the latest cycle of violence, just the latest allegation of bias that pollutes every debate on any deeper causation. Yesterday, I excerpted a report by an Israeli writer, writing in an Israeli newspaper blaming the policies of the Sharon government of Israel. I blamed the CYCLE OF VIOLENCE that continues, and the policies that lead to it, but partisans cannot hear or stand any attempt at more evenhanded analysis. It must be bias as if they are bias free.

BLOOMBERG TO THE RESCUE: “NOT POLITICAL”

Today I received a letter from a pro-peace Israeli who criticizes New York Mayor Bloomberg for rushing to Israel for a 7-hour visit and photo-op. Michael Bloomberg says he wants to show solidarity with Israeli victims. She faults him for saying nothing about Palestinian victims in this PR pandering stunt. Ha’aretz reports: “According to the official program for his visit, published yesterday . . . Bloomberg will visit the Western Wall. There he will board the No. 2 bus - the same bus that was bombed on its way back from the Western Wall last Tuesday - and ride it as far as Shmuel Hanavi Street, where the bombing took place. He will lay a wreath at the site in memory of the victims, and he will also meet there with representatives of Israel’s rescue services and of Zaka, the organization that collects body parts for burial after an attack.

“The visit, he said, is not political, and he will not be meeting with any Israeli officials (other than his welcome from Naveh). What he wants, he said, is to meet the man in the street and show Israelis that New Yorkers are not afraid to visit Israel. Bloomberg will be accompanied on the trip by senior members of his staff; former New York mayor Ed Koch; New York City Councilman Simcha Felder, an ultra-Orthodox Jew who represents the Boro Park district; and Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, rabbi of one of New York’s largest Orthodox synagogues, Kehilath Jeshurun. The visit will be Bloomberg’s third to Israel. His first visit took place before he was elected mayor, and his second took place shortly after his election.” No Arab New Yorkers have been invited to go on what might have signaled a call for tolerance and peace. Bloomberg is not alone. More US politicians, including members of Congress, are visiting Israel this summer than ever before.

AM I BIASED?

My view that peace is still possible (and necessary) in the Middle East seems to offend some readers who see it as, what else, BIASED!!!!!. Boaz Gosher writes: “I still find myself reading your weblog so it should be obvious to you that I identify with most of what you write. But on 25th Aug. your bias against Israel struck me. Nowhere in that passage was there any reference to the Jerusalem suicide bus bomb the previous week or any other attacks by Palestinian extremists. You often criticize the media for being biased in their reporting which is fair comment, but you yourself are often guilty of exactly that. Maybe it’s YOUR weblog that should be dissected.

“Just like you always portray the ANC in a glowing light and the ‘apartheid regime’ as evil, the Israelis are always the ‘bad guys’ (except of course Uri Avnery and Amira Haas). Try a bit of objectivity and evenhandedness, it might enhance your credibility.” Fair enough, dissect away but consider: perhaps, I offer perspectives by critical Israeli journalists precisely because those are views that are filtered out of the media discourse in our country. As troubling as policies of the Israeli government may be, there is still more debate in Israel — and among Israeli Jews — than appears to be the case here. As for the apartheid regime, what was not evil about it?

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?

The Shuttle report is in, and it is human error that is being criticized with NASA execs admitting they missed the seriousness of the materials failure that led to the disaster. One of the problems cited is the way in which engineers at NASA who spotted the problem were dissed in the agency’s bureaucratic, ‘you do your job, you do mine’ culture. Paul Krugman in the Times dissects another government failure — and in this case deliberate deception by the Bush Administration in fudging the dangerous investigation of toxic dangers unleashed by the World Trade Center collapse. He writes in part:

KRUGMAN ON THE CASE

“The Bush administration has misled the public on many issues, from the budget outlook to the Iraqi threat. But this particular deception seems, at first sight, not just callous but gratuitous. It’s only when you look back at budget politics in 2001 that you see the method in the administration’s mendacity.

“A draft E.P.A. report released last December conceded that 9/11 had led to huge emissions of pollutants. In particular, releases of dioxins - which are carcinogens and can also damage the nervous system and cause birth defects - created “likely the highest ambient concentrations that have ever been reported,” up to 1,500 times normal levels. But the report concluded that because the outdoor air cleared after a couple of months, little harm had been done.

SUPPRESSING TRUTH

“In fact, the main danger comes from toxic dust that seeped into buildings and remains in carpets, furniture and air ducts. According to a recent report in Salon, businesses that did environmental assessments of their own premises found alarming levels not just of dioxins but also of asbestos and other dangerous pollutants. So the most shocking revelation from the new report is that under White House direction, the E.P.A. suppressed warnings about indoor pollution. Scattered evidence suggests that as a result, hundreds of cleaning workers and thousands of residents may be suffering chronic health problems.”

“All in all, the people running Washington, while eager to invoke 9/11 on behalf of whatever they feel like doing, have treated the city that bore the brunt of the actual attack very shabbily. In September 2004 the Republicans will hold their nominating convention in New York. Will New Yorkers take the occasion to remind them about how the city was lied to and shortchanged?

BEHIND THE BLACKOUT

As for studies, we still await word of what was behind the blackout. Last night I ran into a Belgian engineer who asked for directions to visit Nasdaq (as if it is a real place, and not a TV set). He told me he was flown in from California as part of the fix that is still underway of the equipment that failed. Something about semiconductors.

One of the reporters on the case here has co-authored a book on electricity. Readers know him for his expose of the Florida voter purge scandal but MediaChannel Advisor Greg Palast has been monitoring the corporate failures behind the power failure as well as the media failure to tell the real story. When I chatted with him over some reheated fish soup on Long Island, I beseeched him to share his insights into the failure of other media for us. He has now done so with a dispatch he says was written for MediaChannel. Hopefully, there will be more to come:

BLACK-OUT AT THE TIMES
Readers Forced to View Unsolicited Corpornography
by Greg Palast

I guess the lights never went back on at the Times. That’s the only acceptable explanation for the loving “Lewinsky” that The Paper of Record gave to the power industry on the front page of its Sunday edition.

Over 20-some column inches, we are told that “experts say” that the reason the lights went out over one-fourth of our continent ten days ago was that the electric industry, most particularly, transmission lines, “remained regulated.” The answer to our woes, the Times informs us, is more deregulation — except for the visionary rules contained in the President’s energy bill. In the editorial posing as a news story, the Times lectures us that the president’s proposals would have been law, and saved us from the power outage, “but politics have stymied their progress.”

“Later in the article, the stymiers of progress are named: those evil small-minded “consumer groups.” …

Read the rest of Greg Palast’s piece and share your
thoughts in the Citizens’ Media Watch.

FROM BLIMEY: THE UK CONNECTION

“A colleague in San Francisco sends along an article from the Guardian by Paul Foot who also notes the British connection that has not been reported widely in the US press: “Is this just a North American problem? Among the harassed electricity company executives who stammered in front of television cameras on the night of the power cuts was Bill Edwards, president of Niagara Mohawk. His company supplies electricity to more than a million people in upstate New York. For six awful hours, many of them were cut off from power. Mr. Edwards said he couldn’t comment on the suggestion that Niagara Mohawk had caused the blackout, at least until after a full investigation. In the meantime he warned his customers to turn down the air-conditioning and turn off unnecessary lights.

“Now you might think that Niagara Mohawk is an American or a Canadian company. But you’d be wrong. Niagara Mohawk was bought in January last year for £2bn by the National Grid company, a private firm in Britain. National Grid merged last October with the Transco/Lattice Group, thus forming a monopoly that provides everyone in England and Wales with all their gas and electricity. More and more of the efforts of the new monopoly have been devoted to buying up power companies abroad - it has spent nearly three times as much on buying companies in the US as on capital investment in power in Britain.

“How did the stale old socialist power monopoly created in the late 1940s to provide British people with gas and electricity become a brand new dynamic capitalist monopoly snapping up not altogether successful power companies abroad? Simple. Among the first and, for the City of London anyway, the most profitable of the great Thatcher privatisations were gas (don’t tell Sid) and electricity. At a stroke, parliamentary responsibility for these crucial areas of public concern was transferred to private boardrooms, whose jumped-up executives, reveling in their new power, awarded themselves fantastic salaries and bonuses.”

More to come!

YOUR LETTERS

Haiko Lietz, a Reporter from Germany (his homepage here) writes: “regarding 9/11 and the intelligence failure to stop the attacks has caused a discussion whether or not parts of the administration let the attacks happen on purpose to benefit from the situation.

A poll shows that every fifth German believes in such a conspiracy. Among the under-30-year-olds it is every third.

As in the US, a variety of authors has published books about alternative versions of 9/11. Some are quite absurd theories by hobby publicists, some belong to borderline journalism and a few to investigative reporting.

One investigative reporter, Gerhard Wisnewski, is being attacked as being an anti-Semite. He is being quoted as having said: “suicide blasts are organized by Mossad.” Wisnewski denies even having such a position. He is also being attacked as “openly sympathizing” with Neonazi groups. That is because in 2002 he recommended to elect the party of Lyndon LaRouche’s wife, which is regarded and being monitored as a conspiracy sect in Germany.

What Wisnewski does, however, is investigate the Pentagon and Pennsylvania crash sites. He sites the mayor of Shanksville as saying: “When we arrived at the crash site, there was no airplane” and he shows pictures of the Shanksville detonation and the Pentagon damage. He openly doubts that a Boeing crashed in Shanksville and hit the Pentagon.

The former research minister of Germany, Andreas von Bülow, is also being called an anti-Semite, because he speculates about a Mossad role in 9/11. Last year, the German newspaper “Die Zeit” wrote about the “art student spy ring” and that Mossad agents lived next door to Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader, in Florida.

The respected investigative TV magazine “Panorama” recently reported about the “conspiracy theorists” and produced what a media watchdog has since called a “masterpiece of manipulation”.

HIS QUESTIONS, YOUR ANSWERS?

He is writing an article about all this and asks me some questions that I will share with all of you for comments. I will get back to him in a few days: “How do you view the ‘anti-Semite’ accusation in the German context? Is ‘9/11 skepticism’ widespread (among journalists) in the US? Where does it come from? (Is it a result of the increased secrecy since the Bush administration took the White House? Is a deliberate intelligence failure a possible version of the events leading to 9/11 or should it be treated as such?) How is the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ being used in this context?”

Jo Murphy from San Diego CA got me: “Freudian slip found in “Pentagon Chicanery” which pretty well describes the “Recall Chicanery” out here!” I refer to Arnold Anderson. Not Arthur Anderson. Excuse. Sharp-eyed editor Bill Curry was in the dentist’s chair filling cavities, not gaps in my dissections.

EARTH REPORT

Robert Lamb writes to tell us about the TV series “Earth Report” now back on BBC World: “Earth Report returns this Monday on BBC World TV with a 26 new program run. The subject of the output is the state of the planet’s living resources. Broadcast first on BBC World TV to 253 million homes in 200 countries and territories. Local broadcast times available from www.bbcworld.com.

“150 Earth Report programmes broadcast. See TVE archive on www.tve.org. Contact sales@tve.org.uk for information on how to buy programmes or footage.

“Hands On” is a monthly ’solutions’ strand within Earth Report - comes with an Internet information referral service: handson@itdg.org.uk More information on www.tve.org.

Who to contact? Robert Lamb, Earth Report series editor/executive producer - Robert.Lamb@blueyonder.co.uk

WERE YOU ON THE DREAM TEAM?

I will be writing and recollecting on the March on Washington which took place with me in the front row 49 years ago. Today all the news out of the South seems to revolve around that Ten Commandments statue in that courthouse in the cradle of the Confederacy. I welcome any reflections from others who were in DC that day or want to share thoughts on the March and the coverage of racial divides that persist in our United States of Confusion.

Write to me: dissector@mediachannel.org (P.S. If you live in NYC, and have the inclination, Mediachannel is looking for interns that get what we are trying to do and have time to help.)