WHITE PHOSPHORUS

Thomas Strock writes

”The pentagon has now admitted that white phosphorus was used as a weapon in the battle of Fallujah. Not as a luminating device as they said before. This is simply a crime of war. In 1999 the Army published a handbook that stated “It’s against the law of land warfare to employ white phosphorus against personnal targets.” This is also against the rules of the chemical weapons convention. I as a American find it difficult to understand the acts that we as a country have now commited. It is time for this folly,
this crime, this war to end.”

STUDENT LOANS

Grace writes:

”A few weeks ago I tried to refinance $50,000 in student loans, but was told I couldn’t because I had already done it once a few years ago.

THERE IS NO COMPETITION FOR STUDENT LOANS.

“So now I am stuck with a high interest loan. I thought I was the only one upset about it until I saw Dick Morris’s column on The Hill newspaper. (Yes, that Dick Morris! From Fox News).

Turns out some folks are trying to change that. Morris wrote a great column about it.

“He calls it “Special-interest legislation doesn’t get much more obnoxiousthan the bill now making its way though Congress to clamp down onstudents and former students who want to refinance their loans at lower
interest rates.

The student-loan rip-off is a test of GOP rhetoric

http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/DickMorris/111605.html>

Wendi Meremark likes to write late at night but this morning I can’t share all of her thoughts because I am full up. I will extract this nice ending:

” The death of media IS the struggle for democracy, and your book, Danny, is Common Sense. Just as Bill Clinton said: “Democracy is what comes out the end of the internet.”

See below.

VIDEOS OF THE DAY

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=audioVideo&itemID=25

And if you liked the Terminator, you will love this:

http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2683788?htv=12&htv=12

AUDIO OF THE DAY

Mother of Slain U.S. Soldier Describes Her Grief and
Opposition to Iraq War

Interview with Dolores Kesterson, mother of Army chief warrant officer Erik Kesterson killed in Iraq Nov. 15, 2003,conducted by Scott Harris

Real Audio:

http://www.btlonline.org/kesterson112505.ram

FIRST REVIEW

I mentioned yesterday that my new book THE DEATH OF MEDIA. The first media mention of it is in Inside Higher Ed.com by Scott McLemee.

It reads in part:

“ Schechter, one of the first producers for CNN and a winner of two Emmys for his work on the ABC program “20/20,” has been a Neiman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University. He is also the author of a book called The More You Watch, the Less You Know (1999), which I haven’t read — though reportedly it did upset Bill O’Reilly, which seems like recommendation enough.
“Schechter, then, is someone who brings tacit knowledge aplenty to the work of commenting on the state of the media. Last year, in his documentary WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, he did more than reconstruct how the print and electronic media alike fell into line with the administration’s justifications for war. In that, he drew in part on a piece of scholarly research that certainly does deserve the closest and most shame-faced attention by the entire journalistic profession, the study Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction, by Susan D. Moeller, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park. (The full text is available here.)
But Schechter went a step further — zeroing in on moments when reporters and editors worried aloud that changes in the mass media were eroding the difference between practicing journalism and providing coverage. That distinction is not a very subtle one, but it’s largely missing from the conceptual universe of, say, cultural studies.
“Providing coverage” is rather like what Woody Allen said about life: Most of it is just showing up. The cameras record what is happening, or the reporter takes down what was said — and presto, an event is “covered.” The quantity of tacit knowledge so mobilized is not large.
By contrast, any effort to “practice journalism” involves (among other things) asking questions, following hunches, noticing the anomalous, and persisting until someone accidentally says something meaningful. There is more to it than providing stenography to power. It involves certain cognitive skills — plus a sense of professional responsibility.
In his manifesto, Schechter runs through the familiar and depressing statistics showing a decline of public confidence in the mainstream media, increasing percentages of “infotainment” to hard news, and steady downsizing of reporting staff at news organizations.
One public-opinion poll conducted for the Pew Center found that “as 70 percent of the people asked expressed dissatisfaction with the news media.” And the same figure emerged from a survey of people working in the news media: about 70 percent, as Schechter puts it, “feel the same way as their customers.” He quotes Hunter S. Thompson’s evocative characterization of the television industry as “a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
To all of this, Schechter offers the alternative of … uh, Wikipedia?
Well, “citizen journalism” anyway — through which “the ideas, observations, and energy of ordinary people” will serve as “not only a way of democratizing the media but also enlivening it.” He points to “the meteoric growth of the blogosphere and the emergence of thousands of video activists,” plus the contribution of scholars to “first rate publishing projects,” including “a new online, non-commercial encyclopedia that taps the expertise of researchers and writers worldwide.”
Well, it’s probably not fair to judge the possibilities for citizen journalism by the actual state of public-access cable TV — or any given Wikipedia entry written by a follower of Lyndon LaRouche. (Besides, are either all that much worse than MSNBC?) But something is missing from Schechter’s optimistic scenario, in any case.
It is now much easier to publish and broadcast than ever before. In other words, the power to cover and event or a topic has increased. But the skills necessary to foster meaningful discussion are not programmed into the software. They have to be cultivated.
That’s where people from academe come in. The most substantial interventions in shaping mass media probably won’t come from conference papers and journal articles, but in the classroom — by giving the future citizen journalist access, not just to technology, but to cognitive tools…”

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/11/17/mclemee

Well I think he simplifies my argument a bit but at least he tackles it with intelligence. To check THE DEATH OF THE MEDIA out for yourself, visit:

Http://www.newsdissector.org/store.htm

Another week will soon bid us adieu. Thanks for being here. Your comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

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