OOPS

THE NEWS TEMPLATE

MICHAEL POWELL’S COMPLAINT

When I was at the BBC’s New York office yesterday afternoon to do an interview about bloggers invited to cover the party conventions, the office talk was all about how much yesterday’s hilarious New York Post “EXCLUSIVE” reporting that John Kerry had picked Dick Gephart as his running mate was selling for on EBAY. It was $15 then. By the time I got back to the Mediachannel the going price was up to $40.

Leave it to Rupert Murdoch to do another press run of the embarrassing Dewy Beats Truman look alike front page if only to recoup financially, as what there is of his credibility turns into more of a laughing stock. Was the Post had, or did they do themselves? Not that it matters. Their “KERRY’S CHOICE” headline was no different really in its contempt for truth than many others. I remember how the then Murdoch owned Star handled the Hitler Diaries which he bought and were later exposed as a fraud. His TV ads asked viewers then to “judge for themselves.” (Duh?)

Edwards was laughing all the way to the stage where he threw his hands up in his best cheer-getting gesture. Forgotten now were his firm assurances that he would not settle for the Vice Presidency. But life is like that — as the song says — “you can’t always get what you want.” Most Democrats were pleased by the choice — at least we have a live one was the sentiment, not to mention parity between millionaires squaring off across the Party divide. FOX asked this morning if the two who now begin campaigning together are "the dynamic duo or double trouble." Maybe both! Predictably, the Bush-Cheney campaign unleashed a negative attack on Edwards alleging inexperience.

FROM ONE WAR TO ANOTHER

America’s political wars may soon be heating up but the real war that all the candidates seem to want to avoid is at fever pitch with the suggestion that terror is being used against terror as a new masked group suddenly materialized with a video broadcast on Al-Arabiya TV vowing to kill the alleged Al Qaeda Iraq franchise owner: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. This outfit calls itself the Rescue Group and, according to CNN, is "warning al-Zarqawi and his followers to leave Iraq or face the consequences." Meanwhile Al Jazeera reports 14 people killed and 70 wounded in a car-bomb attack in Khalis, near the Iraqi town of Baquba.

Mortars slammed into Baghdad’s green zone today targeting the new Prime Minister’s home and political party. Another hit a terminal at Baghdad airport. In response to escalating violence, the government announced "security measures’ that will impose curfews and give it new powers of detention. They were announced at a press conference featuring the justice and human rights minister. (Interesting idea that — why does Iraq have a human rights minister and we don’t?) Actually human rights groups are worried about the broad repressive powers that the new unelected government has given itself.

EXPERIENCE ANYONE?

Others in Iraq worry about the competence of the new government. In her blog, Riverbend, challenges the new government’s loyalty to Iraq and ability. Example:

My favorite minister, by far, is the Defense Minister, Sha’alan Hazim. According to American newspaper Al-Sabah, Mr. Sha’lan Hazim "received a Masters degree in business administration from the UK before returning to Iraq to run a Kuwaiti bank. After being forced to leave Iraq by the former regime, Mr.Sha’alan became the head of a real-estate company in London until he returned to Iraq last June and has since worked as the governor of Qadisiya.

Now this is highly amusing. I must have missed something. If anyone has any information about just *how* Mr. Sha’alan Hazim qualifies as a Defense Minister, please do send it along. At a point when we need secure borders and a strong army, our new Defense Minister was given the job because he? what? Played with toy soldiers as a child? Read Tolstoy’s War and Peace six times? Was regional champion of the game Commandos?

The other headlines seem as if they are a recurring template of more daily disasters as if headlines are repeated day after day. No wonder people tune out and turn off:

US troops kill Iraqi preparing wedding feast

US marine is ‘free and alive’

Allawi backs Falluja strike

US forces have failed to find WMDs in Iraq

CIA accused of lying about WMDs

Powell fudges on Iraqi WMDs

AND GET THIS

The most intriguing new story was on from Al Jazeera:

The United States has secretly moved out more than 1.7 tons of enriched uranium and other radioactive materials from Iraq. Washington on Tuesday said the operation, carried out just days ahead of the 28 June handover of power to the Iraqi interim administration, was aimed at preventing the materials’ use for the manufacture of a radiological bomb or in a nuclear weapons program.

BBC report:

Friendly-fire’ US pilot punished

The deaths were Canada’s worst wartime losses for decades A US pilot who bombed a team of Canadian troops in Afghanistan, killing four of them, has been fined and reprimanded by the US air force. Maj Harry Schmidt, 38, forfeited $5,672 in pay and was found guilty of “willful misconduct.”

POV ON THE UNILATERAL JOURNALISTS

As someone who is making a film about media coverage of Iraq I hesitate to criticize the work of colleagues but last night’s POV on PBS (produced by the BBC) seemed to lack a point of view. It was a war-ologue chronicling the experience of unilateral journalists who seem to always arrive on the scene after some big event went down. One came away with renewed respect for the journalists who did not take the Embed option and set out on their own to cover the war. They were gutsy, but also at risk from US forces more than from the Iraqis.

This program offered one of those slow paced fashionable character-driven story-telling exercises which lacked much insight into the flawed coverage or any real critique of the news business. It was a reality doc shot in a surreal situation. The images were strong, the dialogue weak. The fact that PJ O’Rourke, a conservative, was in it probably made it acceptable to PBS, even though his wit, insight and perspective was missing. He was reduced to being a straight man with one-liners.

The film told us that war is hell but also showed some of the obscenity of group coverage as squadrons of photographers invaded a hospital to show us unidentified Iraq victims. Those on the beds were as terrified of the probing cameras as their own wounds.

Alas, the film, like far too much of the coverage, was "all about us." It picked up in the end as the Iraqi protests and resistance picked up steam but then seemed to lose its media focus and instead show more about Iraq than the press. BBC Producer Nick Fraser always does a quality job but this was not one his more informative efforts. It seemed sanitized for US consumption.

PROTESTS IN IRAN

Iranian students are protesting their regime: "Iranian students will commemorate the legacy of the 1999 Students Uprising by gathering inside and in front of the Iranian universities despite the official ban.In addition, thousands of Iranians are expected to come into streets and squares of most Iranian cities or on their roof tops and to condemn the Islamic regime in another show of rejection of the theocracy."

SHARON CONCERNED

The Mail and Guardian reports:

Fears of far-right plot to kill Sharon

Israel’s intelligence service has warned of growing concern for Ariel Sharon’s safety as the far-right gives increasing support to violent resistance to his plan to remove Jewish settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Amid echoes of the assassination of the then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin nine years ago, Sharon told parliament he was disturbed by the warnings.

MICHAEL POWELL: “IT’S EASY TO CRITICIZE" …

The ever vigilant RW noted this story linked to the Drudge dump:

Here’s the truth: the ownership debate is about nothing but content. Don’t be fooled. I mean, this is my greatest warning to the American public. It’s easy to go after every ill in society by claiming it’s the media’s fault. It’s the American pastime, right? Anything you don’t like, it’s the media’s fault,” said FCC Chairman Michael Powell in an interview with Kenneth McGee, a research fellow and Group VP for Gartner, Inc.

Powell addressed the controversy over the loosening of ownership rules by saying, “We’re required to review rules at a very high, ruthless standard. A lot of the rules, which are 30 or 35 years old, are difficult empirically to justify in the current environment. There’s really only one rule that everybody’s talking about — the national ownership cap, which most people think means we let you own 45 percent of the country. It’s only audience reach, right? You don’t explain to me why satellite can reach 100 percent or cable can reach 100 percent, but broadcast uniquely only reaches 45 percent. If you listen carefully to the debate about ownership, there’s always a quiet struggle going on, just like there is in any antitrust case is: how do you define the market? We did the work, we did the research; this market is not concentrated in antitrust terms.

The Chronicle in San Francisco meanwhile reports on demands for low power radio:

When the Federal Communications Commission changed the rules in 1996 to allow a single broadcaster to own any number of stations, proponents of local programming feared that the death of competition, diversity and community-oriented dialogue on the radio was just a matter of time.

Now, with a handful of owners rapidly gaining market share — Clear Channel Broadcasting has about 1,200 and Infinity Broadcasting 180 — such worries continue to grow. Listeners from coast to coast are complaining to the FCC about the lack of local input and information on the airwaves.

They say that ethnic voices, community-driven issues, local debate and matters of concern to the elderly, youth, the poor and others have been drowned out by a flood of homogenized music and news.

nyu.edu/globalbeat/index.html#oil”>NYU’s Global Beat reports:

Looters attacking Iraq’s vulnerable oil pipelines over the weekend cut output in half. That was bad enough, but on Saturday, Moscow special police swarmed into the offices of Russia’s petroleum giant, Yukos, raising immediate questions about whether it would be able to continue producing oil. To make matters worse, OPEC oil producers are hinting that they find the current high prices acceptable, and may fudge on their promise to step up production at the end of July, and Nigerian oil workers are threatening to go on strike. (Middle East on Line.com, July 5, 2004) The Moscow Times reports on the police raid on Yukos’ offices. (Moscow Times, July 5, 2004)

MATT SLAMS HITCH FOR MOORE ATTACK

New York Post’s Matt Taibi responds to the attack on Fahrenheit 9/11 by Christopher Hitchens, a criticism that was cited on Mediachannel:

That’s rich, isn’t it? Christopher Hitchens crawling out of a bottle long enough to denounce Michael Moore as a coward. I can’t imagine anything more uplifting, except maybe a zoo baboon humping the foot of a medical school cadaver.

All journalists are cowards. Hitchens knows it, I know it, everybody in this business knows it. If there were any justice at all, every last goddamn one of us would be lowered, head-first, into a wood-chipper. Over Arizona. Shoot a nice red mist over the whole state, make it arable for a year or two. A year’s worth of fava beans and endive for the children of Bangladesh: I dare anyone in our business to say that that wouldn’t represent a better use of our rotting bodies than the actual fruits of our labor.

No one among us is going to throw that first stone, though. Not even Chris Hitchens, a man who makes a neat living completing advanced Highlights for Children exercises like the following: “Denounce a like-minded colleague, using the words ‘Lugubrious’ and ‘Semienvious.’” Such is the pretense of modern journalism, that we are to be lectured on courage by a man who has had his intellectual face lifted so many times, he can’t close his eyes without opening his mouth.

MERICA

The Weekly Spin reports: "According to The Hill, nearly half of the Voice of America’s staff signed a petition complaining that the Broadcasting Board of Governors launched “new services in the Middle East with no editorial accountability” while cutting back VoA programs in the region. One VOA editor called the new Middle East networks - Radio Sawa, al-Hurra and Radio Farda - “expensive and ill advised.” The VOA petition claims the new networks “provide inadequate news coverage and do not operate under VoA’s charter, which guarantees balanced reporting.” Other Middle East media have questioned the credibility of the new U.S.-funded networks.”

YOUR LETTERS KEEP COMING

Stef Johnson writes from Duluth, Mn: "First, let me say please keep up the good work. I look forward to your blog updates every day and rely on your insight to round out my view of current events. After viewing Michael Moore’s film “Farenheit 9/11″ on opening night I have been struck more and more each day with the large volume of footage that film contained that had been available but not viewed on any of the “major networks” or the “News” channels (CNN and FOX). This “censorship of reality” strikes me just as hard as some of the facts in the film about President Bush; if not more so. The evening news should show footage of caskets being unloaded, interviews with amputees in rehab, and people (both American and Iraqi) shedding their blood in the streets of Baghdad or Falluja. Not that I want to see these images, but that we DESERVE to see them and THEY deserve to be seen.

"We brought this war to the world, and so we need to acknowledge before the world the consequences of that war. It’s the responsible, adult thing to do. Oh, sure, I know that footage of caskets is unpopular. It should be. It’s SUPPOSED to be unpopular. So is war. And so should be censorship of that war. Our brave young men and women have sacrificed themselves for a cause we have put before the world as just and right, and then we deny their sacrifice by hiding their death from view. Does this fall under the category of ignorance is bliss? Or will less “visible death” help this war remain “popular”? I don’t know. What I do know is this….if we deny ourselves the reality of the direct consequences of our actions we deny ourselves the ability to improve upon them. Thanks for your part in the fight against censorship in Media Danny, and keep going…there’s so much out there to improve upon."

FROM DOWN UNDER

David Cameron Staples tells about a story making the rounds in the Australian media that shows how Washington used other countries to mete out torture:

US abducted Habib from Pakistan

The Pakistani government has said the US requested Aussie terror suspect Mamdouh Habib be taken to Egypt for interrogation, where he was allegedly tortured. SBS’s Dateline program, to be aired tonight, will report the admission by Pakistan’s Interior Minister Makhdoom Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat.

Habib, with Adelaide-born David Hicks, is one of two Australians detained at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba by the US as part of its war on terror following the September 11 attacks in 2001. The Sydney Morning Herald said today the Dateline program also contains an interview with a former Qatari justice minister who says Mr Habib was tortured and interrogated in Egypt “in a way in which a human cannot stand up”, to the point where Mr Habib would admit to anything …

"Our Prime Minister has recently said that he doesn’t want Habib and Hicks returned to Australia, because his legal advice is that they cannot be charged with anything [read: have committed no crimes], and must be let go immediately. Effectively, in his eyes they are guilty, and he only wants them back if he can punish them for something. I heard a rumor once that Johnny’s job is looking out for the rights of Australian citizens, but that must have been a furphy."

NOTE: What is a FURPHY? That’s a new word for for me. Incidentally, readers in Australia might want to listen for me on the ABC’s morning breakfast show tomorrow.

SLOGANS DU JOUR

Andrew Stone of New Mexico passes this along: "Seen on a t-shirt of a fairly conservative looking fellow: ‘My friend went to Iraq to look for Weapons of Mass Destruction and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!’

Seen on a bumper sticker: “Outsource Bush.”

DISAPPEARING NEWS

Gary of RenemberXYZ.com writes: "Back in January I was reading the Where’s Raed blog I was stunned after reading the story and was pretty sure nothing was going to come of it. Talk about being floored, when I saw today’s Wash Post front page. As it turns out, the story disapeared off the front page of the Post within hours, with no link to it further down the page, and I have yet to see it on any other site. No mentioned of soldiers being arrested even on Drudge of all things. Keep an eye on healingiraq.blogspot.com for further details."

LAZY MEDIA?

Jay Spark sent along an analysis by Murray Drobbin on the role media outlets played in the recent elections in Canada. Here is a taste:

More than any election in recent memory, the media drove the campaign - with a lot of help from pollsters. The latter were wildly off in their seat projections and even their polling numbers. None of them admit that the huge refusal rate of people (having to go to over 2000 people to get 1000 willing to talk) is having an effect on the accuracy of their results. They have a lot to answer for though it is hard to see how Canadians can hold them to account …

A FLAG FOR US

Susan Oehler writes from Asheville: "I am working on my very own little project, an I Want Peace flag, modeled on the USA flag. The blue field will have the word Peace in English and Arabic instead of stars. The red and white stripes will be made up of white and red fabric donated to me from where ever I can get it. I want fabric that has I Want Peace written on it, and signed by the person’s first name and country of origin. I will make this into an 8 by 12 foot flag to fly at Peace Rallies here in Asheville, NC. If I get enough material, I will make more than one and sent them to other peace organizations. Could you please put this request on your blog? The requirements for the fabric is that it be washable, white or red (colorfast red) and at least 8 inches wide (length can vary). Please put the writing on the fabric piece in permanent marker. More than one person can sign the piece. They can be mailed to: Susan Oehler, 2605 Vineyard Blvd., Asheville, NC 28805, USA. I am hoping I get some from overseas."

And long may it wave. Wave your ideas my way: dissector@mediachannel.org