NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION

ATTACK ON THE WASHINGTON POST

OUR MEDIA HOPES

My first resolution for the New Year is never to watch another New Year’s Eve broadcast from Times Square. The now mummified and robotic Dick Clark has been holding forth, if you can believe it, for 32 years. Presidents come and go. Wars and earthquakes may shake the Earth like the one in Iran or yesterday in Bali, but one thing never changes:

The omnipresence of the appropriately named Dick Clark.

MALL AS A METAPHOR

What used to be a public celebration has been turned into a hypercommercial event from which any semblance of spontaneity has long been squeezed. New Year’s Eve is now a media event, a highly controlled and programmed entertainment/advertisement, packaged by Dick’s company with mostly pre-produced and predictable segments simulating a New Year’s Eve party. What was once TV coverage of people having fun is now a TV show for people watching a TV show to see people having fun.

In a sense, it is a perfect expression of the Disney-fied Times Square — a public space that became a mall.

Times Square now is merely the set, with New Yorkers as unpaid extras subsidizing an army of police to assure that everyone follows orders and keeps the show on track. This year they brought in metal detectors from every school in the city as pre-event security paranoia “built the gate” (i.e., aroused worldwide interest). No doubt some in the audience expected (imagined?) something would happen on a 9/11 scale. Of course it didn’t. Police agencies now will take credit for that, of course, as they justify the exorbitant amount of overtime they take home.

SCARED YET?

The news tells us of passenger planes being escorted into the US by fighter jets or turned back to Mexico. At WorldNetDaily.com Jon Dougherty reports, “Intelligence pros say the White House is manufacturing terrorist alerts to keep the issue alive in the minds of voters and to keep President Bush’s approval ratings high.” Capitol Hill Blue reports, “The Thursday report said that the administration is engaging in ‘hysterics’ in issuing numerous terror alerts that have little to no basis in fact.”

DISCO MANIACAL

And the show? Yuk. The usual. Departed divas like Donna Summer were reconstructed from the disco-fried 70’s to make the broadcast appear party-like. Dick, working from on high, peered down at the masses while shilling for the classes. His banter, like his face, does not change. Both have decayed. When he retires, if he ever does, up on Mount Rushmore he goes.

This year, like last, he brought in one of his “buddies,” Steve Doocy who the Associated Press recently said “resembles a grown-up, well-groomed Shaggy, the beatnik pal of cartoon dog Scooby-Doo.” For his day job he’s one of the comic hosts of Fox and Friends. Dick turned this wannabe weatherman into a street reporter from the Square. Maybe next year ABC and FOX will give up the appearance of competition and just merge so I can really purge.

IT MELTS IN YOUR BRAIN, NOT IN YOUR MOUTH

Not to be outdone, the M&M candy people also have cartoon figures “reporting.” Pretty soon we will be getting “real” news from their counterparts. In an age of graphic simulation, the networks can replace reporters with animated cartoons bearing logos. It is a logical extension of where it is all going. The Orange Company already did it in England with Ananova, the she-news robot.

The M&M brigade gave the event the sugary dignity it deserves. Even worse was the way the celebration has been turned into a pseudopatriotic Nuremburg rally with collective singing of “Proud to Be an American” amidst cutaways of uniformed military service members in formal regalia. And then, to top it all off, an obligatory shot of a teary NY Mayor, Michael the Mogul Bloomberg, in a pricey “I Love New York” sweater. Gag me with an M&M.

The broadcast cut back and forth to fireworks cum Mickey and Minnie in Disneyland so that the Disney company, which owns ABC, could reap a maximum promotional benefit while a billion people including your News Dissector was suckered into watching. Who ever heard of an amusement resort in Schwarzeneggerland being given equal time with New York? You can do it with cameras. Disney really doesn’t have to go west to hype itself. It now practically owns 42nd Street.

A VIOXXATHON

Yes, there were some momentary flashes of celebrations in other countries, but we didn’t hear people singing “I am proud to be a Hong Konger.” We saw Honk Kong but were not told what was going on there. (That’s what happens when candies do the reporting.) CNN carries a Reuters dispatch today:

Tens of thousands of people streamed into Hong Kong streets on New Year’s Day to demand greater democracy in the biggest march since huge protests in July shocked local leaders and Beijing. Shouting “We demand more democracy,” “Return power to the people” and “One man, one vote,” political activists, workers and families filed slowly from a park in the busy Causeway Bay shopping district to government offices in central Hong Kong.

Can you imagine the response if New Year’s Eve in the USA was politicized this way? A demand for greater democracy would not be out of place these days.

Instead, all you kept hearing from the kids down in the Square was how “awesome” it was to be penned like cattle and used as extras for a TV show that makes millions for the network. (By the way, why all the VIOXX ads if the audience is supposed to be so young?) No wonder CNN staged a “viewer “party to give the flavor of the event. ABC probably locked up the spectacle exclusive.

If cryonics is advanced enough to bring Dick Clark back year after year, why not conjure up Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians to play “Auld Lang Syne” one more time? I guess those Canadians are out after being blamed for the mad cow and the power blackout. If there was ever an event in which the word “program” could be viewed as verb, it was this one.

THE VIEW FROM CHINA

Add this program to the reasons for dumping Michael Eisner. New Year’s Eve deserves better. An hour into the New Year, a Chinese friend called me from the People’s Republic to wish me well. I told her what I had just seen. Her response: “The United States is becoming more and more a ‘strange country.’”

We used to call China “inscrutable.” Now that term is being used to describe us.

PENTAGON BULLIES WASHINGTON POST

I have reported on the Washington Post’s Tom Ricks. He is the paper’s military reporter and has a mind of his own, not a quality admired in Rumsfeld world. When I last saw him, he was telling a panel of journalists that the United States has not yet won in Iraq. That doesn’t please the Good News Bears of the Administration, who want him gone. Washington.com reports that the Pentagon is trying to get the 17-year military journalist fired. It has complained to his editor:

The Pentagon’s letter of complaint to Post executive editor Leonard Downie had language charging that Ricks casts his net as widely as possible and e-mails many people.

Details of the complaints were hard to come by. One Pentagon official said in private that Ricks did not give enough credence to official, on-the-record comments that ran counter to the angle of his stories….

Ricks has not exactly been a cheerleader for the war in Iraq. The Pentagon was not pleased with his March 27 piece quoting military brass that they had trained for the wrong war against a different enemy that would take longer to defeat….”Tom Ricks is a great reporter, the best covering military affairs,” says national editor Abramowitz. “And we have complete confidence in him.”

Washintonian.com

WHO BOMBED THE KURDS? ANOTHER LIE BITES THE DUST

For years now the conventional wisdom has held that Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds in a place called Halabja in l988. It is a point of faith. This crime was cited repeatedly as a reason for the war, though at the time of the gassing the Republican Administration was slow to condemn Baghdad. Now the New York Times carries a piece that says we don’t really know who did it. Stephen C. Pelletiere was the Central Intelligence Agency’s senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000. He is the expert on this issue and has access to classified material. Says he in the NY Times on January 31:

The truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.

OUR MEDIA HOPES

I tacked a small invite to my last blog of the year gone by inviting readers to share some comments on hopes with us. Quite a few of you responded. Here’s a sampling.

Richard Deckhart writes from Minneapolis:

Thanks for your year-end messages, including “Their Media Wars and Ours in 2004.” And yes your powerful message to the MAP’ers at Hennepin Avenue Methodist is still reverberating through the Twin Cities. In watching Bill Moyers’ inspiring special on New York’s Riverside Church and the Reverend James Forbes, I couldn’t help but think that Hennepin Avenue is Minnesota’s Riverside.

My first 2004 “offensive on media issues” is included below, and addresses the following text of that year-end analysis of major state, national and international stories by several “Star Tribune” reporters (not including Eric Black and commentary editor Eric Ringham):

By year’s end, Iraq could be on its way to becoming the world’s newest democracy, the first in the Arab Mideast. The U.S. occupation authority is scheduled to hand off control of the country to Iraqi leaders by June 30.

Then, a referendum on an Iraqi constitution is expected in late 2004, with elections for a new government to follow.

Their “first in the Arab Mideast” statement obviously reflects William Blum’s “Forgotten History” of the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of the parliamentarily elected Iranian government of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh. But I’m saving that for whatever response Sternberg & Co. make to my initial message. My best to you and your colleagues in 2004.

HOPING FOR STRONGER INDY MEDIA

Serena Blaiz writes “I live in the OKC area and work with the OKCIndependent Media Center and the Greens”

My hope for 2004, a crucial year for American democracy, is that Media will be transformed from the sport-like spectacle it now is – its players an overrated, overhyped and overpaid class — into a vital, vibrant participatory community function in which providing and obtaining information becomes a resource for enhanced understanding and deepened compassion. I am hoping that the burgeoning independent media movement, i.e. media by, for and of the people, will become a stronger resource in every nation and neighborhood. I resolve to make this my primary goal in my own community.

I moved into the Bible Belt this year and commentary like yours in my inbox every day has helped to buoy my spirits and maintain a sense of hope.

ON RESILIENCE

My pal Stephen Goldstein opines from Boston.

The column on disasters captured my feeling exactly. What an end to the year to a strange year. There is a historian (I forget who) that posits that all centuries begin in turmoil. I am going to research how the last 2-3 began. Krakatoa, according to a geologist on Nightline last night, was not the worst natural disaster. An earthquake in China in the 1600s she claimed killed 850,000 people. Talk about resilience. Best wishes for the New Year.

HOPES FOX GOES BANKRUPT

Isn’t it already? Kathleen Clementi continues:

I hope Fox News goes bankrupt. I hope that 1934 FCC ruling with regard to media consolidation is returned and upheld. I hope, but doubt that television, radio and newspaper journalists return to true journalism. The kind of journalism that represents integrity, intelligence, balanced reporting, and even has the courage to take the side of truth and justice and the courage to expose liars and their lies. I hope that television commentators return to being commentators instead of celebrities.

I hope freedom of the press remains freedom of the press given the new Patriot Acts. I hope that journalists and the media who have the courage to report the truth are not threatened with losing their jobs or in fact fired from their jobs. I hope that truth comes before profit in the news media, I hope that truth comes before who gets the “story first”.

I hope that we do not have to “listen to same sound bites ad nauseam.” Particularly when they are slanted, biased sound bites, such as “shock and awe”, “embedded” “We got em!”, just to name a few. Last but not least, the last thing I want to hear from the media in 2004 is that Bush lost the election.

DOWN WITH “DRIVELERS”

Michael Dunley says, “thanks for asking”

My hopes for the media are that it will have move to really life-enhancing and affirming positive news, since this time we’re in is as amazing as any we have ever lived through, yet mostly all we get are snivelers, swivelers and drivelers boring us with lying lies, treating us like we’re dumber than dust, trying to dumb us down into supporting the lies, and then lying to ourselves that we can’t be worth better than this.

When the sleeping giant that is world common sense awakens and breathes its first deep breath of the morning, the morons that think the universe is one big piece of real estate will all pop off the face of this bounteous planet like the buttons on the hulk’s shirt!

Such a great sight to see, when my email box has your name in it!

You rock.

Thanks for one more year of insight and wisdom. I’ve just donated $30 to mc.org. Wish I could send more. Hope your New Year is happy and successful. Keep doing what it is you do so well. Thanks.

BOYCOTT TV NEWS

Dick Bernard calls for action:

A massive boycott of commercial television “news” till they get the message–and a refusal to believe any political advertisement from anyone. (I haven’t watched TV for seven years and I’m better informed than ever.)

Hprof writes: “Critique, and honestly report the truth. How much longer do we have to wait for a Watergate?”

VIVA “THE LANGUAGE OF THE HEART”

Raffaella Carlini gets personal:

One of my biggest hope lies in the work that Marshall Rosenberg, www.cnvc.org has been doing so far. I will be continuing to work on developing the skills to speak this language called nonviolent communication, the language of feelings and needs, which is the language that I find most easily connects humans beings.

I am personally going through a conflict (discrimination based on religion) that is very much universal: my boyfriend does not want to commit to our relationship because I am not a Christian, even though every day I work to become more connected with people, more compassionate, more selfless, and I am a big promoter of nonviolence even though I do not label myself a Christian. Wait does not that sound like something Jesus would care about?

So my hope lies in translating all these beliefs, moralistic judgments, between my boyfriend and I into feelings and needs with the help of a trained NVC ( Non Violent Communication) mediator. This experience would meet my need for hope that human beings can solve conflicts, and that all needs can be met after connection takes place among them, by speaking a different language, the language of the heart.

POET, PEOPLE?

Susan Taft volunteers to become our poet:

I wish I could be chosen to be sort of the Calvin Trillin of this portion of your enterprise. Example: (pardon limerick form - I can do all sorts of others)

Title - DC. “Ol’ Billison Franklin’s so posh,/ his agitant general, by gosh,/ takes checks unretraceable. All stains eraseable! /Baconand eggs in the wash.”

By Susan B Taft. Thank you, and THANK YOU

Finally, a reprise of an insight I liked on the difficulty of tackling our media system. Musician Brian Eno commented recently on our propaganda system: “Its greatest triumph is that we generally don’t notice it - or laugh at the notion it even exists. It takes something as dramatic as the invasion of Iraq to make us look a bit more closely and ask: How did we get here? It isn’t just propaganda any more, it’s ‘prop-agenda ‘. It’s not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about.”

I am writing on New Year’s Day. I hope it has been good to you. Thanks again to the generosity of readers who have made our financial crisis their challenge.

Those of you with other media hopes for 2004 to share can still send them to me: dissector@mediachannel.org.