REPORT FROM BERLIN

Eva Dolan writes:

“Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII here. The streets were amazing with demonstrations throughout the city. 7000 Polizei with dogs, body armour and tanks controlling a ‘neonazi’ demonstration in Alexanderplatz, which had been moved from it’s originally planned location of the new Holocaust Memorial!

“At the Brandenburg Thor, some band I never heard of played a fantastic punk version of a song from ‘The Threepenny Opera.’ This is Berlin!”

REPORT ABOUT STUDENT PROTEST IN HAWAII

Mary Ellen Churchill relays this news about a University of Hawaii protest against a military research center:

“The occupation lasted six days and we won three of the four demands and halted the process towards a U.S. Navy center at UH for a while. Now we can regroup and plan our strategy for the coming months. The young students were stunning, really organized, committed, energetic — it was marvelous.”

NEW FRIEND IN THE TWIN CITIES

Chris Lomheim, the great jazz pianist of the Twin Cities, came to see “WMD” Friday night. He writes:

“You are doing one hell of a great service to our country by doing what so many other journalists have neglected to do the past four years. The truth has been so suppressed that people are numb to what this administration is doing to our country. I agree with you that we need to educate people without coming off as know-it-alls or being arrogant in the belief that people should know how terrible this administration is. The fact is that most people don’t have the time to search and sift through alternative news resources because they are busy with work and raising families.

“That’s why your work is so valuable to so many people. Keep up the good fight to get the truth out there, Danny.”

ON THE WEBSITE JIHADUNSPUN.COM
Susan writes from Ashville on that Jihad Unspin website I cited Friday:

“I read ‘Today In Iraq’ blog on a daily basis (like your blog!) and we have had people on there from Iraq (some inside, some living in other countries, like USA) and from all over the English speaking world. That is where the discussion of Jihad Unspun came up, and several knowledgeable people thought it was a ’spy’ site by U.S. psych-ops. And a lot of information from that site is crap. They report that dozens or hundreds of U.S. troops were killed, which cause us to wonder if the U.S. really has forces in U.S. uniforms that aren’t part of the regular service (beyond the 20,000 ’security contractors’). It is reported that the U.S. is recruiting in Latin America countries. Anyway, we finally reached group consensus that dozens or hundreds of U.S troops killed (in uniform), no matter where they were from, would be news in the corporate media too — so, must be inaccurate.

“Sometimes the corporate media reports a ‘western’ dead who turns out to really be an Iraqi. Some of them do have blue eyes and blond hair, and some of them look like they came directly from deep Africa. More multi-cultural and multi-racial than I would have thought.”

Virginia Weldon writes as “faith boggled” from Boulder:

“Well, Danny… it finally hit the news… concrete proof (as if we really needed it) that our Founding Fathers knew what they were talking about when they made separation of church and state a pillar of our republic.

“On Monday last, one-dimensional, delusional thinking reared its ugly head in North Carolina when Pastor Chandler of the Waynesville Baptist Church barked at his parishioners and announced that ‘his church’ was to be a ‘politically run church’ and that, 1) all members who voted for Mr. Kerry in the presidential election (republicans or democrats),& did not come to the altar to repent, would now be subject to ‘disfellowship’ and cast from the church! 2) any new members will be required to sign a pledge to vote the way Pastor Chandler tells them to vote and then to bring that pledge to the altar for dedication, & last but not least, 3) a large sign was placed in front of the church that said, ‘Democrats Not Welcome.’

“I just want to know how ‘church’ tax exemption status will work in this parish with this dog leading the hunt. And, more to the point… how many other pastors, ministers, priests, deacons, etc., have done the very same thing and arrogantly have no fear that they have now placed their tax-exempt status up for grabs? Gosh, we could certainly ’save’ Social Security… with those funds, couldn’t we?”

Jennifer Ryan writes on British election coverage:

“…my faith in the British and American media was totally restored when CSPAN ran a blow by blow account of the British election returns as they were released and BBC America ran an entire evening full of Monty Python — at times it was hard to tell the difference! the other aspect that cheered me no end was the fact that George Galloway, renegade Scotsman beat the Blairite in a largely Muslim precinct of London and in another Scottish constituency a party called (I think I got it right, I was laughing so hard it was difficult to concentrate) the Monster Loony Left Party won 303 votes. Long Live Cool Britannia.”

ON AL-JAZEERA

Craig Tollis writes from Atlanta:

“Thanks for publishing my previous note. It was interesting to see it up against the other guy’s castigation of you for dealing with al-Jazeera.

“Here’s my take on al-Jazeera, by the way:

“I check al-Jazeera occasionally, in part because it’s useful to know what people are thinking in the Middle East. Also, they’ll run stories way before the Western media (not only the U.S. media) will touch them. That doesn’t mean they’re right, or even neutral, but at least it fills out some level of diversity that you don’t get otherwise.

“Al-Jazeera has the same basic issue as any other media outlet: credibility. If they ran only the kind of stories we’d like to see, they’d instantly have zero credibility in the Arab street. Our question should be, how can we get our message to the Arab street in a credible way?

“Should Danny have done on interview with al-Jazeera? Of course! How do we expect to sell democracy and freedom of the press to the Middle East if we don’t act like we believe in them here? It serves us to represent America as]a pluralistic society in which individual opinion is not dictated by government, political or religious affiliation. This is the model we’re trying to promote.

“More importantly, we want to represent difference of opinion as a normal part of the political process — not an aberration that needs to be crushed. The constructive way to disagree with someone is to write an article, do an interview, produce a film; not to gun them down, blow something up, or cut someone’s head off on the Internet.”

IN THE TWIN CITIES

I had a whirlwind visit Friday with interviews on Air America Minnesota, Minnesota Public Radio (Tom Crann did an excellent interview there) and WCCO Radio. The Minneapolis Star Tribune gave “WMD” three stars:

“But whatever your ideology, if you believe that democracy depends on getting the truth from your government and your press, ‘WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception’ is required viewing.”

“DEAD JOURNALISTS” SURFACE

A highlight of the screening at the Minnesota Film Arts auditorium at the Bell Museum was the very moving and creative “happening” staged by the Twin Cities Artists Front which sent a delegation to the premiere of “dead journalists,” artists made up as victims of killing to mark World Press Freedom Day.

Dead Journalists: James Miller, Liqaa Abdul-Razzaq, Dina Mohammed Hassan, Dolores Guadalupe Garcia Escamilla and Mazen Dana will make a special appearance. Their presence is to increase awareness to the public that the number of journalists killed as they do their job is spiraling… Check out their website: http://www.mnartists.org/work.do?rid=67773

QUOTE OF THE DAY: HAIL CAESAR

“… my going there is a giant fuck you to the insurgents. They know that I go. They all have cable TV. They know I bring this bravado. These concerns I’m expressing I’m voicing to you — I don’t express them on TV. So I am swaggering in there. ‘Here I am –fuck with me if you can.’ And the GI’s get a tremendous kick out of it. I am going to pump them up at every place we stop. To do my best at any place I stop and I will sign as many autographs as I can, say as many ‘Hey Moms’ as I can. In a sense it’s my duty…”

— Geraldo Rivera, Fox News Channel, on plans to return to Iraq. Quoted in The Atlantic Monthly, June 2005

WHAT IS TV NEWS?

Jonathan Klein, new president of CNN/US, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal Sunday that “the news business is the drama of storytelling and emotion, not just the conflict of argument. ” What ever happened to the idea of reporting to inform the public? Huh?

A STORY YOU MAY HAVE MISSED

Tsunami brings better treatment for Thai stray dogs:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/tsunami_thailand_dogs_dc

THE ANSWER AT LAST

And, finally: Tucker Clark sends along this bit of a Mesopotamian riddle:

“Q: How many Bush Administration officials does it take to screw in a light bulb?

“A: None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are a delusional spin from the liberal media. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate freedom?”

Got that?

Check out my piece on the Media Reform conference in St. Louis next weekend.

Feedback to: dissector@mediachannel.org