BLOGGING BACKWARDS

MEMORY LANE

HOPING FORWARDS

I remember many songs from my news dissecting days on the radio. One line comes to mind again as the theme of the day: “All the news just repeats itself like some forgotten dream that I once knew.”

And so I dipped back into the blog-chives of this year to arbitrarily offer some selections to remind you of some of its moments and some of my takes on them. These are not necessarily the big stories. Just as well. I begin my recycling with the introduction to a similar treatise I wrote a year ago:

At year’s end, a summing up is in order, a looking back, a projecting forward—you know the drill. Every network assigns someone to create a master reel with the hottest video and most poignant moments, usually brought to a close with a collage of well-known personalities and politicians who bit the big one and are no more set to teary music. In that moment, news becomes nostalgia and the present belongs to history.

As regular readers know, your News Dissector has been here every day with a collage of my own, usually drawn from the news not in the news, or not in the news yet or news half told. My focus has been and remains on the media system as well as its products in an ongoing effort to understand how it is we have so much information available and yet know so little about what is really going on.

ALTERING AND ILLUMINATING OUR TIMES

Truth to tell, I am not a cynic, not a skeptic, and not even a know-it-all. I am just trying to keep track of all the tracks I am riding.

“What kind of a year has it been?” I hear Ed Murrow’s voice this time: “A year like all years, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times, except you are there.”

We were here, all right, even though most of the time, who wanted to be? The only word that comes to mind to sum it up is “bleak.”

Here are some snatches of the blogs I dropped in 2003 the way musicians “drop” new albums. Bear with me.

JANUARY 3  (full post)

So, please, class, pay attention as we hop aboard this weblog express leaving our Globalvision station in Times Square just after we remember the annual media event that filled these streets a day ago.

Were you watching the ball drop on New Year’s eve? Supposedly there were a billion of us, eyes glued to that spot, in some ritualistic custom that in another culture might be called a cargo cult. Chief of cargo, of course, was once again former DJ Dick Clark, who a lifetime ago was rockin’ on “Bandstand, Philadelpha ‘Pee Ay.’” For the last three decades or more this professional youth icon with the mummified face and zombiized look (you bet, he has had “work”) has played TV’s designated “welcome wagon to the New Year.” He lapped Guy Lombardo years ago. He is an old acquaintance who can’t be forgotten even if we wanted to (tho’ after watching Dick reveal his real dick self in Bowling for Columbine, I wanted to.)

FEBRUARY 14  (full post)

Happy Valentine’s Day, the day once set aside for making love not war. Dem days seem long gone. Anyone remember the song “Peace Sells But Who’s Buying?” That’s the question on the agenda at the Security Council, which meets in the World House of Peace (aka the UN) to hear the chief inspectors report back on their recent trip to Iraq and the new information, if any, that Iraq has turned over. The United States is, rhetorically, at least turning today’s meeting into an ultimate test of the UN itself. With the Council divided and criticism of US policies mounting worldwide, the tone of discourse is getting uglier by the second. Will the UN join the march to war the day before what is expected to be largest peace march in New York history assembles on its doorstep?

MARCH 20  (full post)

I have not seen North Korean TV, but I have been told that it is one unending commercial for the government that features three channels locked into the same programming. We had a dose of that last night as every channel locked onto the same stationery pictures of Baghdad and followed the same format, if not script. Anchor update. Breaking News. Cut to White House announcement. Anchor update. Military expert. Cut to Presidential message about the ongoing armed “disarmament” of Iraq, which began with the most expensive assassination plot in history—36 cruise missiles and two megabombs at a cost that David Martin of CBS estimated was $50 million. The Iraqis claim one civilian was killed, 40 wounded. Of course, we don’t know the truth. The NY Post reports “Allies Take Over Iraqi Radio.” This morning, CNN reported that their correspondent in Baghdad was listening to the radio.

WAITING TO BE SHOCKED

They tried what they called a “decapitation strike” against a “target of opportunity,” later said to be a bunker that Saddam and crew were holed up in. The information came from the CIA, which missed the signals for 9/11. When the strike was reported, all the network guys—and so many look the same, sound the same, and make the same points—were surprised since they had clearly been told when the “real” war would begin. Many seemed disappointed not to be able to see the pictures of Baghdad that they had agreed to share turn into an apocalypse. Tom, Peter, Dan et al. were waiting for the fireworks, the videogame, the promised “shock and awe.” On Fox News, Britt Hume stumbled after calling Iraq “Al Qaeda” and quickly corrected himself. All of the bad guys seem to have merged into one as the crusade for freedom, liberation and more defense spending moves into high gear just like the terror alert.

APRIL 24  (full post)

Just as I was wallowing in the thrill of victory as more wanted Iraqis experience the agony of defeat, just as I thought it was safe to eat French food again—as I did last night with guava beans on the side—word comes that secretary of State Powell intends to “punish” France for the transgression of disagreement. Sorry, Colin. The food has already been recycled. And then there was this morning’s shocker coming from the land of coalition cronies and Blair Baathists: Our TV system is under attack.

BBC: SHOCK AND BORE

A new front in the media war erupted across the Atlantic when the “topper” (to use a Varietyism) of the BBC opened up on American television. Embroiled in some criticism in the home counties for less-than-objective war coverage, Greg Dyke is shifting attention across the seas and, in this case, hitting his mark in a gutsy manner that we have yet to hear from most of his US counterparts. The Guardian reports:

“BBC director general Greg Dyke has delivered a stinging rebuke to the US media over its ‘unquestioning’ coverage of the war in Iraq and warned the government against allowing the UK media to become ‘Americanised.’”

MAY 21  (full post)

Will the New York Times fire the acclaimed antiwar journalist Chris Hedges. He will find out later today when he meets news executives at the scandal-tinged newspaper of record. “It is very serious,” Hedges told me early this morning as he waited to be interviewed by Amy Goodman on the Democracy Now radio show. “I have very few friends at the paper” confided the award-winning author of “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” and the new “What Every Person Should Know About War.” Hedges, just back from an incident at Rockford College where microphones were cut during his graduation speech, may face problems with his “freedom of the press” just as he had with his freedom of speech. He traces his fall out with the Times to an article he wrote for Harper’s on his experience of covering Gaza. He refused to cover the War on Iraq.

Chris Hedges was booed during a graduation ceremony at Rockford College in Illinois. Why? He opposed the war. Carrie Waters reports in the Rockford Register Star:

Hedges began his abbreviated 18-minute speech comparing United States policy in Iraq to piranhas and a tyranny over the weak. His microphone was unplugged within three minutes.

Voices of protest and the sound of foghorns grew.

Some graduates and audience members turned their backs to the speaker in silent protest. Others rushed up the aisle to vocally protest the remarks, and one student tossed his cap and gown to the stage before leaving.

JUNE 27  (full post)

It is the 27th day of June, the 178th day of 2003. There are 187 days left in the year. How many times have we heard days described in relation to other days in this way? Historically, it was a day in which the Mormon Leader Joseph Smith was killed, a day in which Boston and New York were linked by telegraph wires, a day the stock market crashed back in 1893, the day John Dean revealed the existence of Nixon’s enemies list, and a day of Gay Liberation, the anniversary of the Stonewall riots of l969. Captain Kangaroo was born today. So was Ross Perot.

And also on this day during the Big War in which Allied forces fought in a place called Mersa Matruh in a country I don’t recall, an infant later to become your News Dissector screamed his way into life in a hospital that no longer exists in northern Manhattan.

JULY 17  (full post)

The British Open opened on two continents today. Tiger Woods is the object of attention on the links while Tony Blair will hog the headlines in the US (that is, if the Emmy nominations expected today don’t push his visit down the news agenda). No sooner do I return from a sweltering Mother Country than its prime minister arrives on our shores for what promises to be another well-scripted Emmy-worthy performance by a leader known for polished sincerity and skillful deception (”honorable deception,” his former Cabinet Minister Clare Short called it).

With a majority of public opinion in Britain now questioning Blair’s credibility, he now brings the act to America, where the official reception promises to be warm and filled with head-patting.

AUGUST 28  (full post)

I can still remember the morning. We had spent the week circulating flyers and trying to anticipate what would happen. No one had ever even attempted a march on the scale of this one. And none of us who marched on Washington forty years ago today would have believed that the media in 2003 would mark it as the anniversary of one man’s speech and not the still unmet demands of a mass people’s movement.

SEPTEMBER 10  (full post)

All eyes on Cancun. That’s where the WTO meeting gets underway tomorrow. And that’s where some deals can go down that will affect countries with the most needs and the least resources. Watch how these meetings are reported, if they are reported at all. George Monbiot writes in the Guardian: “Outside the world trade talks beginning in Cancun in Mexico tomorrow, two battles will be fought. The first will be the battle between the campaigners demanding fair trade and the rich-nation delegates demanding unfair trade. The second will be the dispute now brewing within the ranks of those who claim to be helping the poor.”

OCTOBER 14  (full post)

Have you ever noticed how routinized most TV news is, how genre-bound, and how the same stories and features tend to be followed day after day. You can tell because they generally have been around long enough to rate their own pre-produced graphics. The graphics are like a hole in some donut. The news goo is just poured around it. I begin this Tuesday morning not with new bang-bang underway in Iraq, the Middle East paralysis, the sniper trial, the newly un-conjoined twins, the latest diet craze, the terrible terror war, or the fact that Ben loves the Sox while JLO is loyal to the bombers. No, I will take you where the TV news nets fear to tread—to Bolivia.

NOVEMBER 13  (full post)

On Tuesday night in Minneapolis I stood in the pulpit of a great Methodist cathedral and faced 700 people attending the annual conclave of the alliance of Peacemakers. I was preaching about the imperative of saving our media and democracy.

Most of the faithful were older than me and probably can’t stand and won’t watch most of the programming I watch, for what passes for a living. It was one of those crowds that listen to NPR and don’t watch TV, mostly for the right reasons. They were responsive and attentive, eager to learn how they can play a role in the emerging media and democracy movement.

It was gratifying that the issues I have been advocating resonate with a straight-laced, mainstreamish audience in the Midwest. It was exciting to be well-received and to autograph lots of books, and it was wonderful to find people who generously supported my film-in-the-making on the media coverage of the war in Iraq, even though they hadn’t seen it.

And then suddenly Christmas came and went and tragedy has brought us face to face with the humanitarian disaster in Iraq, and with the way in which the news cycle lives for disasters, coups and mad-human disease.. I seem to be writing up a storm with new articles on 9/11—”Youth and the Media” and “The Media and Spirituality.” My book finally got noticed in a newspaper published in Pasadena, Calif.—Thanks, Ed Rampell—and a parade of visitors continue.

DECEMBER 30, 2003

Later today I meet Palestinian filmmaker Leila Sansour whose film Jeremy Hardy versus the Israeli Army has been playing in 35 theaters in the UK. It tells the story of the nonviolent International Solidarity Movement in Palestine and is dedicated to the American activist Rachel Corrie from Olympia, Washington, who died under an IDF bulldozer fighting to save a home from demolition. The film follows this global band of committed, brave and frightened activists as they try to speak truth to power and challenge injustice. It should be shown in the US.

Meanwhile, with editing brilliance by Kozo Okamura, I plod on with finishing WMD, my still partially funded film on the media coverage of the war. The beat goes on.

It felt good yesterday to pick through the many checks in the mail from readers who understand the need to help keep Mediachannel channeling. If you are planning to help, make checks payable to The Global Center with “Mediachannel.org” marked below. The address again is

575 8th Avenue, Suite 2200
New York, New York l0018.

Tomorrow the ball drops up the street. I hope to keep dropping blogs in the year ahead. Encouragement and support always welcome.
Write: dissector@mediachannel.org