AP: HOW CHENEY & CO MANIPULATE MEDIA

A smorgasbord of Washington insider details has emerged during the perjury trial of the vice president’s former chief of staff. For example, when Dick Cheney really needed friends in the news media, his staff was short of phone numbers. No one served up spicier morsels than Cheney’s former top press assistant. Cathie Martin described the craft of media manipulation - under oath and in blunter terms than politicians like to hear in public.

The uses of leaks and exclusives. When to let one’s name be used and when to hide in anonymity. Which news medium was seen as more susceptible to control and what timing was most propitious. All candidly described. Even the rating of certain journalists as friends to favor and critics to shun - a faint echo of the enemies list drawn up in Richard Nixon’s White House more than 30 years ago. The trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby owes its very existence to a news leak, the public disclosure four summers ago of CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity. A private brainstorm of Plame’s in 2002 brought a rain of public attacks on Cheney the following year. Cheney was accused of suppressing intelligence and allowing President Bush to present false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2000303,00.html

LISTS OF POLITICAL DONATIONS BY RUPERT MURDOCH AND OTHER NETWORK EMPLOYEES

(http://mpetrelis.blogspot.com/2007/01/fec-06-files-abc-news-cbs-news-cnn-fox.html)

JAYNE STAHL ON MEDIA CRITIC WILLIAM POWERS
http://ladyjaynestahl.blogspot.com

GET WELL MOLLY IVINS
The great columnist is in the hospital.

BBC: Shilpa Shetty, the Indian actress at the center of the Celebrity Big Brother race row, wins the fifth series

FROM THE DAVOS DIARY OF THE TIMES OF LONDON

A surprising, and ironic, vote of confidence yesterday in traditional newspapers from two people who might be regarded as among the biggest threats to the survival of the print media, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. Page and Brin still believe in a real future for the printed press, they reveal. But it is hardly a ringing endorsement: Larry gets all his news needs fulfilled online, while Sergey reads The New York Times but only on Sundays. “It’s nice,” says Brin.

Doug Latimer on the Media and the March (see below)

Danny, was Urbina’s piece in the NYT longer than the dozen paragraphs or so I saw in the San Francisco ChronicLiar? I’m just wondering, as what I read didn’t seem particularly “well done” … might there have been some creative editing?

The sense I got from it was pretty much what you were describing from other outlets … though perhaps not as overt. A paragraph plus is spent on Fonda’s appearance … bringing up, of course, the whole “Hanoi Jane” thing .

(I had to arch a brow at her being quoted as saying that “she had held back from activism so as not to be a distraction for the Iraq anti-war movement, but needed to speak out now.”

Okaaaay … )

There was also a description of T-shirts “featuring sinister depictions of Bush” … and the vital information that he “spent part of the morning on his weekly bicycle ride at a Secret Service training facility in Beltsville, Md.”

As you well know, placement counts … either at the beginning or the end, right? So the piece finished by looking askance at the numbers UFPJ provided:

“The group had hoped 100,000 people would attend … . They claimed even more afterward, but police, who no longer give official estimates, said privately that the crowd was smaller than 100,000.”…..

You’re dead friggin’ right that the mainstream media are complicit in this horror show. Unfortunately, the indies, from DEMOCRACY NOW! on, have done a poor job in general of putting the pieces together when it comes to seeing Afghanistan as more than a sideshow.

Rob Kall of OpEdNews.com writes:

I was there. Not one progressive media or blog speaker was included.

CNN showed, not the big crowd, but a small less dense edge of a crowd. Then showed a dozen counter demonstrators. Pathetic. But how do we protest the media’s failure to cover the event and march?

HOW DENMARK COVERED THE MARCH

Pia Raug writes:

There was a report on DR-TV. A female DR-reporter entered a bus early Saturday morning in Bronx or Brooklyn neighbourhood and took the ride Washington with the people to join the march. She interviewed these everyday Americans. I guess tonight there will be more coverage from the actual march.

Difference between DK and US is that our 2 main news-casters are still under Public Service obligation - bur maybe not for long. During the week our Prime Minister – who is also the minister for the press - went out and vehemently accused DR because of the documentary I told you about week before last - a doc on how Danish soldiers in have given over Afghan prisoners to the Americans in spite of the clear message from Bush and Cheney that the US would not respect the Geneva convention in their “war on terror”. This would make it unconstitutional according to Danish law to hand over prisoners.

Jackie Newberry on the revelations above on Cheney’s media strategy:

As much as this information is intriguing, there’s still the Fox position that Plame suggested her husband for the trip….is this Fox or AP? Or an AP journalist for Fox?

JOE DUNPHY follows up on his letter of Friday:

I kept looking around for more information and have these items to add:

Raytheon’s website offers a video of the $10 million Silent Guardian system, saying waves penetrate to only 1/64 th of an inch, basically just below the epidermis, to where nerves begin. Frequency of the waves is 94 GHz. It can operate in winds up to 40 mph, and in ambient temperatures up to 125 degrees F (i.e. maybe not quite good enough for Iraq). An operator looks at a screen, a little square comes into focus, he looks for the human “target” and drills down the square for the person to zap, and the ray goes out for two seconds. Raytheon claims that one is not subject to skin burns from the ray unless the dose lasts 250 seconds (4.17 minutes). In essence, the machine is more like a semi-automatic rifle, as opposed to a crew-served machine gun.

There is an excellent article in The Guardian (10-5-2006) by Steven Wright et al, showing that in human tests, “subjects” were asked to remove glasses and all metallic objects, such as jewelry, to avoid creating “hot spots.” And that military “working dog” teams (mil-speak for the old K-9s) were warned that they ran the risk of being bitten or scratched by their dogs during the tests. As to the scientific claims made about the human tests, Microwave News on Dec. 8 cited reporting from Wired Magazine noting that the Air Force is the only source of medical information on the subject, and that the “research” does not appear to have been verified by independent testing labs.Testimony by the Air Force’s Michael Wynne before Congress indicates some doubt about the feasibility of using it in combat operations if medical and legal considerations would limit or bar use of the system in the US. Thus, at the very least, the press release from the Pentagon this week is completely misleading as to the medical claims, which remain unproven at the time of the Wired report, and the Pentagon release offers no new medical information.

NITYA JACOB WRITES FROM INDIA

You are invited to an exhibition and Forum on “Community Radio - Innovation, low cost solutions and access”, that is being organised jointly by UNESCO, Plan India, CARE India and OneWorld South Asia. The Exhibition is being held from 1-3 February in Pragati Maidan as part of the BES Expo 2007, the conference and exhibition on terrestrial and satellite broadcasting.

The Exhibition will showcase low-cost solutions for setting up community radio stations in the light of the Community Radio policy announced in November 2006 that allows NGOs and community-based groups to set up and run low-powered FM radio stations. This is a major step forward towards putting the control of the airwaves in the hands of ordinary people and making radio a truly democratic communications medium.

On display will be the Radio in a box, costing USD 6000 (Rs 3 lakhs) developed by UNESCO and the Asia Broadcasting Union. This is a complete studio and transmission center rolled into one.

REMEMBERING STEW ALBERT WHO DIED A YEAR AGO

Judy Gumbo writes in part:

Stew began his literary career as a writer for the “underground” newspaper the Berkeley Barb and was an editor of the Berkeley Tribe. He was what we called at the time a “participatory journalist” which meant it was ok as a journalist to be involved in protest activities and your writings could be agitational, passionate and have a political point of view – just like today’s bloggers and pundits.

In 1968 Stew, along with Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner, founded the Yippies (Youth International Party). (HEY JUDY, I WAS THERE TOO!) The Yippies levitated the Pentagon, brought the Stock Exchange to a halt by throwing money at stockbrokers, and ran a pig for President at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago 1968. Stew’s reporting about these protests appeared on the front page of the Berkeley Barb : “Here in Chicago, I know there will be a revolution; because it has begun and I am in the red and black center of it.”

INTRIGUING OBIT

On Danny Finegood From the LA TIMES:

The first time Danny Finegood played a word game with the Hollywood sign, he hung curtains to make it read Hollyweed. That was Jan. 1, 1976 — the day the state’s relaxed marijuana law took effect.

The prankster and friends obscured consonants to coin Holywood for Easter later that year and Ollywood to protest the hero worship of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987.

In his final round of wordplay, Finegood made a political statement against the Persian Gulf War by draping plastic sheeting over the 50-foot-high letters to form Oil War in 1990.

Finegood, who viewed his hillside handiwork as environmental sculpture, died of multiple myeloma Monday at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, said his wife, Bonnie. He was 52.

RESOURCE: Blog By Indy Media Pioneer DeeDee Halleck
www.deedeehalleck.blogspot.com

NEW STUDENT DOCUMENTARY
http://www.komotv.com/home/video/5001856.html?video=YHI&t;=a

SUNDANCE REDUX

I critiqued the Festival in this blog on Monday. On Friday, Manolla Darguis of the New York Times was even more critical, writing:

“Not surprisingly, the hustling and the flowing and the pimping continue stronger than ever at this media-saturated event, where the signal-to-noise ratio has become seriously out of whack…. the contradictions that grip Sundance, which insists on its commitment to quality even as it continues to program work that suggests otherwise.

…The single most depressing and brutally honest remark I heard all week, the statement that seemed to sum up what Sundance has become for many attendees, came from a distributor who explained why he had stayed to watch a bad comedy that features a clutch of low-level film and television actors. The movie might be lousy, he explained, but imagine “all those names on a box,” meaning, imagine all those recognizable names once they are printed on a DVD box. It didn’t matter that the film was incompetently made and, from the half-hour or so of it that I watched, unfunny in the extreme. It didn’t even matter that the film probably wouldn’t make much money when or if it was released in theaters. The bo would be aesthetically and intellectually empty, but the box would sell.

Your comments always welcome. Write Dissector@mediachanel.org