Correcting the Abysmal 'New York Times' Coverage of Occupy Wall Street

Correcting the Abysmal 'New York Times' Coverage of Occupy Wall Street

Allison Kilkenny on September 26, 2011 - 9:06am ET

Over the weekend, my inbox exploded with angry messages from people who had just read this New York Times article (though it reads more like an op-ed) about the Occupy Wall Street protest. Ginia Bellafante gives a devastating account of the event’s attendees, depicting them as scatterbrained, sometimes borderline-psychotic transients.

Bellafante, who is not a reporter but a columnist for the Times, offered a representation of the protesters that is as muddled as the amalgam of activists’ motives she presents in the span of the article. She first claims a Joni Mitchell lookalike named Zuni Tikka is a “default ambassador” of the movement. In one of the following paragraphs, she then describes the protest as “leaderless.” Either the people at Zuccotti Park have official leadership or they don’t (they don’t, by the way). So either Tikka is an official spokesperson who warrants first-paragraph favorability, or Bellafante’s own biases persuaded her to put the kooky girl dancing around in her underwear in the spotlight.

The more serious aspect of the protest—the “scores of arrests” that occurred over the weekend including the arrests of more than eighty people, several of whom the police first penned and then maced—is offered as an aside in Bellafante’s article (she doesn’t mention the macing at all). By the way, none of the young women in the following video are in their underwear.

Bellafante goes on to (rightfully) wonder why the response to the widening class divide hasn’t come in the form of a more serious movement. A proposed hypothesis never emerges, even though Bellafante almost stumbles across one when she describes a young man who is stopping by only in “fits and spurts” because his mother fears he’ll be tear-gassed by the police. It sounds as though Bellafante is on the cusp of critiquing the US police state that has completely terrified the activist community into submission, but then she retreats.

The main bone the article wishes to pick is the scattered ideologies of the attendees—a fair point. However, Bellafante never attempts to do the job of real journalism here, which is to use this slice of life to help her readers understand the world around them. Instead, she comes across as a rubbernecker leering at a particularly bloody wreck.

Okay, she managed to interview a few strange and inarticulate individuals, but I could do that at any protest. No meeting of this kind is a monolith, and you can always find a couple people who are there simply because the cause is fashionable, or their friends dragged them along, or they’re tripping balls and just stumbled across the thing and are desperately looking for a safe place to ride out the terrible journey. Gawking at these people doesn’t help us understand, say, why a million other people haven’t joined them in the streets, demanding an end to the corporate hijacking of their country.

Now, in Bellafante’s defense, the protesters described in her article do exist, and they’re super-loud and eye-catching. But in my experience, the quiet people who mingle on the edge of the crowd are the ones you want to speak to—the sort of half-in activist who will probably have to go back to work on Monday, if they’re lucky enough to have a job.

I’m reminded of Matthew Prowless, a 40-year-old father of two, who attended the Occupy Wall Street protest, and who is as unassuming of a man as I’ve ever seen—not someone who would have caught Bellafante’s gaze. He wore a baseball cap and stood with his friend by a group of black bloc protesters, whom Matthew was eyeing curiously like they were exotic fish in an aquarium.

When I spoke with him, Matthew called the louder aspects of the protest (the black bloc, the “protest yoga,” etc.) distractions from the far more serious cause.

“My home has been seized, I’m unemployed, there’s no job prospects on the horizon. I have two children and I don’t see a future for them. This is the only way I see to effect change. This isn’t a progressive issue. This is an American issue. We’re here to take our country back from the corporations,” he said, adding he fears for the future of the United States where corporations can now spend unlimited, anonymous dollars to elect the candidates of their choices. After the protest ended for the day, Matthew couldn’t occupy the park because he had to go care for his two children.

I also spoke with a young man named Kevin Stanley, a nurse who made the trek to the protest filled with optimism and left feeling simultaneously elated and disappointed. He was alarmed that the protesters (he calls them “kids”) are held up in Zuccotti Park without the presence of medical professionals. During his time there, he treated three cases of hypothermia and a person going through withdrawal as well as infected wounds from not being able to care for open blisters.

It’s a shame Bellafante didn’t run into Kevin, because they actually agree on the poor organization aspects of the event.

“Many times the communal nature of things will get the actual task done quickly, but all the competing views with no defined hierarchy just reminds me of Lord of The Flies,” he said.

For every batshit-crazy quote Bellafante presents, I can match it with a calm, articulate response from another attendee. I guarantee that. However, that’s not the point. I’m not a believer in the “perfect objectivity” goal for journalists because it’s impossible to ever obtain. Human beings inherently possess prejudices and biases that blind them to aspects of reality. Bellafante is less likely to see the Matthews. I’m less likely to see the black bloc.

Yet we risk much when we traipse into this false-equivalency territory. The two approaches I’ve described above aren’t given level platforms in our society. Bellafante reaches a far, far larger readership, and the ones who dismiss protesters always do because their corporate overlords love depicting protesters as flower-waving, stoned-out-of-their-gourds hippies. If you think those are the only people on your side, why get off the couch at all?

This rubbernecking style of journalism is particularly dangerous right now because it amounts to criticizing a burning house for the color of its curtains. The curtains might be brash, ostentatious and completely unhelpful in maintaining the overall flow of the home’s ambiance, but it’s perhaps not the most pertinent detail of the moment. Here’s a more pressing question: Why are the people Bellafante described in her article the ones left behind?

The teargas aside starts to tap into something important: how the police state and its domestic weaponry and bureaucratic assist with the needs for permits to do anything in protests have successfully crippled the activism community. Activists are afraid. You can smell it in their midst. They talk about the constant presence of agent provocateurs and undercovers at every protest. They share battle stories of being abused by the police, like being tazed or held so long in makeshift police pens that they had to defecate in their clothing. And these are the brave ones that still show up to the protests.

It’s not mere paranoia. We know for a fact that the FBI monitors activism groups, and this practice reached a frenzied level during the Bush administration years. These intimidation practices continue under President Obama in the form of raids.

Now, imagine you have a job you can’t get time off from, or kids. Are you going to risk that precious job security, or the safety of your children, to go protest in an event that may—if you’re really lucky—get some dismissive coverage in the New York Times?

There was a time when individuals cast aside those fears because they had union-protected jobs, and unions organized events with tens of thousands of confidence-inspiring fellow members in attendance. While those events do still occur, they’re a rarity these days as union membership dwindles, the privatization of the country continues and the establishment media still don’t grant them fair coverage when they do occur. Not one of the young people I spoke to at the Occupy Wall Street protest said they were union members. Bellafante is right in the sense that they are scattered, lost and leaderless, but she never explores why that’s the case.

While the left loses the valuable organizational mechanism of unions, the right has gained corporate masters like the Koch brothers to disseminate millions of dollars into astroturfing campaigns to organize and destroy on their behalf. While the left makes signs, the right has already deployed troupes to scream at town hall events.

These are the kinds of massive oppositional forces activists find themselves facing these days: an incredibly oppressive police state and a corporate cash monster bearing down on them from the right. Meanwhile, their union support army is either in retreat or preoccupied fighting other battles on other fronts in Wisconsin or Ohio, or one of the other forty-eight states where anti-union legislation was introduced this year courtesy of ALEC, a front group that serves as proxy for corporate interests.

Instead of bemoaning the fact that protesters haven’t arrived in matching uniforms with a coherent PowerPoint presentation, these are the issues we should be addressing. Of course the majority of Zuccotti Park occupiers are young, brash and lost. They’d have to be to do something like this, and risk getting hypothermia for the chance to be ignored and belittled by the media. Young people are always the first ones willing to risk comfort and security for the romantic vision of a better tomorrow.

No, a movement can’t be supported on a shaky foundation, nor do I expect journalists to also serve as activism advisers, but Bellafante’s piece does nothing to help us understand why Zuni Tikka is the last woman standing.

Editor's Note: This piece originally referred to Ginia Bellafante as a "critic." She is a columnist. We have corrected the text to reflect that.

Banned in America: The War You Won't See

September 25, 2011 at 16:20:28

Banned in the US: the Film You Won't See

The War You Don't See by John Pilger
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Film Review

The War You Don't See

Produced and directed by John Pilger

Americans now have the opportunity of seeing John Pilger's critically acclaimed The War You Don't See as a free download at http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/war-you-dont-see/ The groundbreaking documentary was effectively banned in the US when Patrick Lannan, who funds the "liberal" Lannon Foundation, canceled the American premier (and all Pilger's public appearances) in June 2010. Pilger provides the full background of this blatant act of censorship at his website www.johnpilger.com. After seeing the film, I believe its strong support of Julian Assange (who the US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute) is the most likely reason it's not being shown in American theatres.

Pilger's documentary centers around the clear propaganda role both the British and US press played in cheerleading the US/British invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. It includes a series of interviews in which Pilger confronts British and American journalists (including Dan Rather) and news executives regarding their failure to give air time to weapons inspectors and military/intelligence analysts who were publicly challenging the justification for these invasions. The Australian filmmaker focuses heavily on the fabricated evidence (Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction and links to 9-11) that was used to convince American and British lawmakers to go along with an illegal attack on a defenceless nation (Iraq).

Making News Executives Squirm

Pilger also confronts the British news executives (from the BBC and ITV) for reporting -- unchallenged -- Israeli propagandist Mark Regev regarding the May 2010 Israeli attack (in international waters) of the international peace flotilla and murder of nine Turkish peace activists (including six who were executed in the back of the head at point blank range).

Although none of the news makers offer a satisfactory explanation for their actions, British news executives show obvious embarrassment when Pilger forces them to admit they knew about opposing views and failed to offer them equal air time. In my view, the main value of the film is reminding us how essential it is to hold journalists to account for their lack of objectivity. Too many activists (myself included) have allowed ourselves to become too cynical about the mainstream media to hold individual reporters and their editors and managers accountable when they function as government propagandists instead of journalists.

The War You Don't See was released in Britain in December 2010, in the context of a Parliamentary investigation into the Blair government's use of manufactured intelligence to ensnare the UK into a disastrous ten year foreign war. Government/corporate censorship is far more efficient in the US, and the odds of a similar Congressional investigation occurring in the US seem extremely low.

Edward Bernays: the Public is the Enemy

The film begins with a thumbnail history of modern war propaganda, which Pilger traces back to Edward Bernays, the father of public relations. Bernays, who began his career by helping Woodrow Wilson to "sell" World War I to the American people, talks in his famous book Propaganda about the public being the "enemy" which must be "countered."

Independent Journalism is Hazardous to Your Health

The most powerful segment features the Wikileaks gunship video released in April 2010, followed by Pilger's interview with a Pentagon spokesperson regarding this sadistic 2007 attack on unarmed Iraqi civilians. This is followed by excerpts of a public presentation by a GI on the ground at the time of assault, who was denied permission to medically evacuate two children injured in the attack.

The documentary also focuses heavily on the Pentagon's deliberate use of "embedded" journalists to report the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the extreme threat (often from American forces) faced by independent, non-embedded journalists. According to Pilger, a record 240 independent journalists were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Palestine, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has killed ten independent journalists since 1992. The War You Don't See includes footage of a recent IDF attack on a Palestinian cameraman, who miraculously survived, despite losing both legs.

Pilger goes on to talk about the deliberate bombing of Al Jazeera headquarters in Kabul and Baghdad, mainly because the Arab network was the only outlet reporting on civilian atrocities. This section features excellent Al Jazeera footage of home invasions of two civilian families -- in one case by British and the other by American troops -- who were brutally terrorized and subjected to torture tactics.

The Interview that Got the Film Banned

The film concludes with a brief interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who discusses the increasing secrecy and failure of democratic control over the military industrial intelligence complex. Assange presents his view that this complex consists of a network of thousands of players (government employees and contractors and defense lobbyists) who make major policy decisions in their own self-interest with virtually no government oversight.

Pilger and Assange also discuss the aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers by Obama, who has the worst record of First Amendment violations of any president. They also discuss the positive implications of the willingness of military and intelligence insiders to leak hundreds of thousands of classified documents. It shows clear dissent in the ranks about the blatant criminality that motivates US foreign policy decisions.

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The War You Don’t See

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A powerful and timely investigation into the media’s role in war, tracing the history of embedded and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq.

As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an electronic battlefield in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims. But who is the real enemy?

John Pilger says in the film: “We journalists… have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else’s country… That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear, however seductive and insidious it is.

For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home… In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us… Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power.”

Watch the full documentary now

What Media Coverage Omits about US Hikers Released by Iran

Published on Monday, September 26, 2011 by Salon.com

What Media Coverage Omits about US Hikers Released by Iran

by Glenn Greenwald

Two American hikers imprisoned for more than two years by Iran on extremely dubious espionage charges and in highly oppressive conditions, Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer, were released last week and spoke yesterday in Manhattan about their ordeal. Most establishment media accounts in the U.S. have predictably exploited the emotions of the drama as a means of bolstering the U.S.-is-Good/Iran-is-Evil narrative which they reflexively spout. But far more revealing is what these media accounts exclude, beginning with the important, insightful and brave remarks from the released prisoners themselves (their full press conference was broadcast this morning on Democracy Now).Shane Bauer (center) and Josh Fattal, two US hikers held by Iran on spying charges, were greeted by fellow former detainee Sarah Shroud after returning to the United States yesterday. (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images)

Fattal began by recounting the horrible conditions of the prison in which they were held, including being kept virtually all day in a tiny cell alone and hearing other prisoners being beaten; he explained that, of everything that was done to them, "solitary confinement was the worst experience of all of our lives." Bauer then noted that they were imprisoned due solely to what he called the "32 years of mutual hostility between America and Iran," and said: "the irony is that [we] oppose U.S. policies towards Iran which perpetuate this hostility." After complaining that the two court sessions they attended were "total shams" and that "we'd been held in almost total isolation - stripped of our rights and freedoms," he explained:

In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay; they'd remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world; and conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S.

We do not believe that such human rights violation on the part of our government justify what has been done to us: not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments - including the government of Iran - to act in kind.

[Indeed, as harrowing and unjust as their imprisonment was, Bauer and Fattal on some level are fortunate not to have ended up in the grips of the American War on Terror detention system, where detainees remain for many more years without even the pretense of due process -- still -- to say nothing of the torture regime to which hundreds (at least) were subjected.]

Fattal then expressed "great thanks to world leaders and individuals" who worked for their release, including Hugo Chavez, the governments of Turkey and Brazil, Sean Penn, Noam Chomsky, Mohammad Ali, Cindy Sheehan, Desmond Tutu, as well as Muslims from around the world and "elements within the Iranian government," as well as U.S. officials.

Unsurprisingly, one searches in vain for the inclusion of these facts and remarks in American media accounts of their release and subsequent press conference. Instead, typical is this ABC News story, which featured tearful and celebratory reactions from their family, detailed descriptions of their conditions and the pain and fear their family endured, and melodramatic narratives about how their "long, grueling imprisonment is over" after "781 days in Iran's most notorious prison." This ABC News article on their press conference features many sentences about Iran's oppressiveness -- "Hikers Return to the U.S.: 'We Were Held Hostage'"; "we heard the screams of other prisoners being beaten" -- with hardly any mention of the criticisms Fattal and Bauer voiced regarding U.S. policy that provided the excuse for their mistreatment and similar treatment which the U.S. doles out both in War on Terror prisons around the world and even domestic prisons at home.

Their story deserves the attention it is getting, and Iran deserves the criticism. But the first duty of the American "watchdog media" should be highlighting the abuses of the U.S. Government, not those of other, already-hated regimes on the other side of the world. Instead, the abuses at home are routinely suppressed while those in the Hated Nations are endlessly touted. There have been thousands of people released after being held for years and years in U.S. detention despite having done nothing wrong. Many were tortured, and many were kept imprisoned despite U.S. government knowledge of their innocence. Have you ever seen anything close to this level of media attention being devoted to their plight, to hearing how America's lawless detention of them for years -- often on a strange island, thousands of miles away from everything they know -- and its systematic denial of any legal redress, devastated their families and destroyed their lives?

This is a repeat of what happened with the obsessive American media frenzy surrounding the arrest and imprisonment by Iran of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, convicted in a sham proceeding of espionage, sentenced to eight years in prison, but then ordered released by an Iranian appeals court after four months. Saberi's case became a true cause célèbre among American journalists, with large numbers of them flamboyantly denouncing Iran and demanding her release. But when their own government imprisoned numerous journalists for many years without any charges of any kind -- Al Jazeera's Sami al-Haj in Guantanamo, Associated Press' Bilal Hussein for more than two years in Iraq, Reuters' photographer Ibrahim Jassan even after an Iraqi court exonerated him, and literally dozens of other journalists without charge -- it was very difficult to find any mention of their cases in American media outlets.

What we find here yet again is that government-serving American establish media outlets relish the opportunity to report negatively on enemies and other adversaries of the U.S. government (that is the same mindset that accounts for the predicable, trite condescension by the New York Times toward the Wall Street protests, the same way they constantly downplayed Iraq War protests). But to exactly the same extent that they love depicting America's Enemies as Bad, they hate reporting facts that make the U.S. Government look the same.

That's why Fattal and Bauer receive so much attention while victims of America's ongoing lawless detention scheme are ignored. It's why media stars bravely denounce the conditions of Iran's "notorious prison" while ignoring America's own inhumane prison regime on both foreign and U.S. soil. It's why imprisonment via sham trials in Iran stir such outrage while due-process-free imprisonment (and assassinations) by the U.S. stir so little. And it's why so many Americans know Roxana Saberi but so few know Sami al-Haj.

An actual watchdog press is, first and foremost, eager to expose the corruption and wrongdoing of their own government. By contrast, a propaganda establishment press is eager to suppress that, and there is no better way of doing so than by obsessing on the sins of nations on the other side of the world while ignoring the ones at home. If only establishment media outlets displayed a fraction of the bravery and integrity of Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, who had a good excuse to focus exclusively on Iran's sins but -- a mere few days after being released from a horrible, unjust ordeal -- chose instead to present the full picture.

Read more at Salon.com

© 2011 Salon.com

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy. His next book is titled "With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful."

Meet the the Real Chuck Todd, MSNBC News and the Corporate Media

FAIR

Meet the Other Chuck Todd

09/22/2011 by Peter Hart

I caught this MSNBC commercial last night featuring their own Chuck Todd, explaining (apparently) how he thinks about his job:

My job is to bring up issues that Americans care about.

It's my responsibility to ask the tough questions. No matter who's leading the country, they need to be held accountable.

I have unique access to the president, his advisers, the candidates and members of Congress.

I'd better use that access for a greater good. Use it for people who can't get through the White House gates. For people who can't be heard.

The American people deserve answers.

Huh. The Chuck Todd I see on television is more like this, this, and this--and don't forget the time he met a journalist (Jeremy Scahill) who actually does work that resembles Todd's self-description. Scahill appeared on a TV show panel with Todd, and criticized him for saying that investigating Bush-era torture policies would be a distraction. Off the air, Todd told Scahill that he shouldn't be so impolite: "You sullied my reputation on TV."

I guess my question is this: Does Chuck Todd have another job? One that more closely resembles this description of a fearless truth-teller, giving voice to the voiceless?

Tags: Chuck Todd, Jeremy Scahill

Facebook's enraging status update

Wednesday, Sep 21, 2011 12:33 ET

Facebook's enraging status update

The social media network annoys its users, again, with a confusing revamp. There must be an agenda here, somewhere

By Andrew Leonard

• 
  

iStockphoto/shotbydave/Salon

Like, oh, around 750 million other users of Facebook, I logged on to the world's biggest social media network this morning and was immediately annoyed. Facebook had changed its user interface, again. Gone was the "Most Recent" button, which allowed users to see what their friends have posted in a simple, straightforward, chronological order. Now Facebook was indulging, again, in outright effrontery: employing its own secret algorithmic sauce to highlight what it considered the most important "top stories," while mixing in other recent posts far below.

Facebook also added a "Ticker" at the top right hand side of the page, which provided a real-time Twitter-like stream of status updates from all my friends. When I first checked it, it was packed with complaints about the new interface change. Judging solely from comments from my friends, people don't want Facebook deciding what's most important, Facebook's suggestions were wrong, irrelevant and insulting, and why oh why oh why can't Facebook leave a good thing alone?

Oh, and people hate change. And, goddammit, they're switching to Google+ (which conveniently opened its doors to the general public today), or Twitter, or giving up on the Internet altogether.

When you disgruntle nearly a billion people, it becomes fairly big news, right away: The biggest tech news sites were on the story in nanoseconds. Moments after I encountered the interface change, TechCrunch was offering the almost instantaneously obsolete "How to Go Back to the Previous Facebook Interface (While You Still Can)" while Gizmodo ambitiously promised Everything You Need to Know About the New Facebook Update.

Experienced users of Facebook nearly collapsed from the overwhelming déjà vu. More than any other consumer-facing company, Facebook routinely makes fairly major tweaks to its user interface in ways that surprise and discomfit and piss off its users. But so far, at least, the users always get over it. The pattern is set in stone. First there's a big uproar, then a flurry of suggested workarounds that will either revert the changes back to the idyllic past or otherwise nullify the most outrageous new abuses of our sensibilities. Some of these workarounds work, and some don't. Occasionally Facebook rolls back some particularly egregious privacy violation. But usually, the uproar soon subsides. We return to our gossip, snark and embarrassing family photos. And Facebook continues its inexorable growth.

We don't ultimately leave for a very simple reason: The golden fetters of the network effect. We're locked in by the comprehensiveness of the Facebook universe. We might look longingly at Google+, but is that where the birth of a friend's new baby will get announced? Is that where your sister will post the picture of the lewd nun?

The dynamic is beyond irritating: The fact that Facebook user complaints never amount to anything much probably emboldens Facebook in its behavior.

But amid all of our grumbling, we should probably be paying closer attention. Because Facebook is clearly up to something. On the one hand, it seems like Facebook is intent on imitating or co-opting everything its competitors are up to. The recent introduction of Friends Lists and the Subscribe button enable far more granular control of what you see in your News feed (and what your friends see from you). That seems like a clear response to Google+. The Ticker, as already mentioned, reeks of Twitter.

And there's clearly more of the same (that is to say, constant discombobulating change) coming down the pike. The trade press is rife with rumors of even more significant changes to Facebook that could be rolled out as soon as Thursday at Facebook's f8 developer conference. Details are sketchy, but the gist seems to be that Facebook wants to become the place where you consume and purchase all kinds of media -- music, video, et cetera.

And that may offer a hint as to what Facebook is trying to achieve with its emphasis on deciding for you what you see when you log in. If Top Stories are determined by popularity -- how many comments or "likes" they get from your friends, how much they're shared -- then anything viral will quickly move up the rankings. Facebook, in effect, will be broadcasting those Top Stories to you. If the goal is to encourage on-site e-commerce, prominently flaunting what users are excited about might be one way to achieve that.

I'm sure we'll all be annoyed when these changes arrive. And at some point, maybe we'll be so annoyed that we really do leave. Nothing lasts forever on the Internet -- the social media universe is littered with the corpses of once-mighty networks that failed to innovate or evolve as fast as new competitors.

Which, of course, is another reason why Facebook can never stand still. To survive, it must annoy.

• Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More: Andrew Leonard

CNN Throws a Tea Party

Published on Monday, September 12, 2011 by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting)

CNN Throws a Tea Party

Network aligns with controversial far-right activists

Tonight's Republican debate might look familiar, with a well-known journalist posing questions to a stage full of candidates. But CNN's event is actually a co-production of sorts with the far-right Tea Party Express, raising serious questions about a journalistic outlet's decision to formally partner with a controversial political group.

As CNN explained the relationship (9/8/11):

CNN and the Tea Party Express, along with more than 100 local Tea Party groups from every state across the country, will team up Monday, September 12, to present a first-of-its-kind debate from the site of the 2012 Republican National Convention.

In addition to questions from [CNN's Wolf] Blitzer, audience members inside the debate hall, made up in part by members from Tea Party groups in 31 states and the District of Columbia, will be invited to ask questions directly to the candidates. Questions will also be taken live from Tea Party members at debate watch parties in Phoenix, Arizona; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Portsmouth, Virginia.

There were earlier indications that the event would be structured to cater to the Tea Party's ideological agenda. The Associated Press (6/14/11) reported that, according to CNN, "topics for the debate will be tailored for the interests of this political insurgent movement." When the partnership was announced, CNN political director Sam Feist (Daily Kos, 12/17/10) called the Tea Party movement "a fascinating, diverse grassroots force."

It's unusual for a centrist news outlet to take an openly partisan group as a partner in producing a political event; we can't recall progressive groups being granted any similar opportunities in recent years.

But the Tea Party Express has been criticized by actual grassroots conservative activists, who liken it to "a GOP-linked slush fund," as a Politico report (12/20/10) noted. The group is connected to a political action committee called Our Country Deserves Better, run by a California-based Republican strategist (New York Times, 9/19/10).

And there's much more. Tea Party Express chairman Mark Williams made a number of bigoted statements before moving from chair to spokesperson in June 2010 -- including calling Barack Obama an "Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist-in-chief" (CNN, 11/14/09). Williams, unsurprisingly, was also a "birther" who doubted the legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate (Boston Globe, 4/22/10). And he was active in the campaign against efforts to build an Islamic center near Ground Zero, calling it a place to worship "the terrorists' monkey god" (Daily News, 5/19/10).

After Williams, apparently responding to NAACP criticism of Tea Party racism, posted a "satirical" letter from "We Colored People" to Abraham Lincoln (sample "joke": "How will we coloreds ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn?"), the Express was booted from the National Tea Party Federation, an umbrella group for the conservative protest movement, over its failure to repudiate its spokesperson (Think Progress, 7/19/10).

His successor has a similar record, as the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (1/25/11) points out:

Williams was replaced by TPE director of grassroots & coalitions Amy Kremer. But just like Williams, Kremer has a problem with racism. Like Williams, Kremer is a birther. Her blog, Southern Belle Politics, is filled with calumny for the president, including repetition of the (false) charge that he is not a natural-born American. She's also gone out of her way to defend a fellow Tea Partier after he sent out racist emails depicting President Obama as a witch doctor.

© 2011 FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting)

Modern Censorship in Corporate Media

Is the Corporate Media Still Censoring Stories?

Friday 9 September 2011

by: Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview

Project Censored has an illustrious history of drawing attention to stories that the mainstream press overtly censors or ignores through a corporate media culture that dismisses the existence of topics that threaten the status quo. The organization also promotes media literacy by educating the public about strategies that are used to disseminate misinformation and propaganda.

With the forthcoming publication of the newest edition of Project Censored, Truthout interviewed long-time project Director Peter Phillips and current Director Mickey Huff to gain a sense how this project began, and how it intends to continue making an impact in a constantly transforming media landscape.

The Truthout Progressive Pick of the Week, "Project Censored 2012" (Book) is available (advance order) by clicking here.

Mark Karlin: Some progressive critics have asserted that Project Censored is no longer relevant because of the openness of the Internet. How do you respond to that charge?

Peter Phillips: The Internet is huge with a lot of misinformation and managed news. One of the reasons we started both our Validated News site and News We Trust was that one of the major questions asked over the years has been “whom do you trust?”

We have created these online sources and repositories: Validated News & Research, Daily Independent News, and we also have a Spanish site, Daily News in Spanish.

The big problem still is that well over half the world has never made a phone call, let alone seen the Internet.

MK: Although you didn't found Project Censored in 1976, you oversaw it for the longest period of time. What was the “spark” that caused the founding of Project Censored?

PP: Actually, in 1976 Carl Jensen was trying to explain how Richard Nixon got elected in '72 despite Watergate. He went back in the corporate media and found that they had mostly ignored Watergate until after the election, and he began to ask what else are they (the media) skipping or delaying publishing stories about. So he had his students - in the sociology of media at Sonoma State University - research stories from the alternative independent press that were not covered by the mass media. His list was quickly picked up by the independent alternative media and republished worldwide.

MK: Journalistically, when a story is literally censored, is it known as being “spiked” by an editor or publisher. How are subjects censored in the modern-day corporate press due to the current “culture of mass media” as compared to actually being “spiked”?

PP: Stories are still deliberately spiked! We call this managed news. And it is quite widespread. On October 25, 2005 the American Civil Liberties (ACLU) posted to their website forty-four autopsy reports, acquired from American military sources, covering the deaths of civilians who died while in US military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2002-2004. The autopsy reports provided proof of widespread torture by US forces. Twenty-three of the reports said the cause of death was homicide. The balance of the reports mostly indicated that the cause of death was heart failure. The conditions of the bodies indicated clearly that these people were tortured to death. A press release by the ACLU announcing the deaths was immediately picked up by Associated Press (AP) wire service making the story available to US corporate media nationwide. A thorough check of Nexis-Lexis and Proquest library data bases showed that at least ninety-nine percent of the daily papers in the US did not pick up the story, nor did AP ever conduct follow up coverage on the issue.[1]

In a January 2008 report, the British polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB) reported that, “survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003. ORB interviewed 2,400 randomly selected families in 15 of 18 provinces in Iraq, asking the question has anyone in your family died from war violence. The data resulted in a report that stated, “We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000.”

The ORB report comes on the heels of two earlier studies conducted by Johns Hopkins University published in the Lancet medical journal that confirmed the continuing numbers of mass deaths in Iraq. A study done by Dr. Les Roberts from January 1, 2002 to March 18, 2003 put the civilian deaths at that time at over 100,000. A second study published in the Lancet in October 2006 documented over 650,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the start of the US invasion. The 2006 study confirms that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of these deaths and that over half the deaths are directly attributable to US forces.

The Associated Press, which reaches over one billion people in the world, released three times in 2009 the story claiming only 87,000 Iraqis had died as a result of US invasion and occupation. The story was originally published April 23, 2009: updated July 25 and October 14.

MK: Have you seen Project Censored having an impact on news coverage over the years?

PP: It is hard to tell but over 1/3 of our stories go on to receive some corporate coverage

MK: Given your long experience with Project Censored, how do you regard the emergence of WikiLeaks?

PP: Outstanding!

MK: Mickey, can you explain briefly how this year's book is structured? It's a lot more than the 25 “censored” stories that are recognized.

Mickey Huff: Each year since 1993, when the first full length Project Censored book was published (prior to that there were smaller publications dating to 1976), we have researched, vetted, and voted on the most important censored (or under reported) stories of the year. Indeed, it is what the Project is known for, the Top 25, or the Top 10 censored stories. This is certainly important, and this year, we have organized our analysis of the top stories in what we call censored news clusters, to highlight the overall architecture of censorship along topical lines in the corporate media.

Year after year, and now more than ever, the book itself contains more sections, chapters, and investigative reports and scholarly studies on not only what is wrong with mass media in the US and the failures of the free press, but on what can be done about it, and what is being done in terms of solutions to achieve the concept in practice of a truly free press - how the founders philosophically intended (think theory, not practice). A journalism that keeps the public informed on crucial matters of the day so that they may participate meaningfully in the maintenance of democracy, in order to attain a state of relevant and representative self-governance.

MK: Project Censored is somewhat unusual in that students at Sonoma State University (California), as Peter mentioned, do much of the work on identifying the top 25 articles. How has this worked out over the years??

MH: In the past few years, Project Censored has grown and now includes student and faculty researchers at over 30 colleges and universities across the US, and we have participants in over half a dozen countries. We are a student centered, media literacy education organization at heart, but there are many more facets to the project as evidenced in our coverage of what we call junk food news and news abuse (looking at the increased tabloidization of news coverage); signs of hope and health (showcasing the many positive community building stories); media democracy in action (highlighting activists for media freedom); the truth emergency section of the book on propaganda studies; and the Project Censored International section that looks at media democracy issues in the US and around the globe. So, we are ever expanding and are seeking participants in educational fields, we are looking to hear from teachers, students, concerned citizens of the world who understand the importance of fighting for the right to be informed about the world in which we live.

MK: On the Project Censored web site, you refer to section two of the book focusing on “the truth emergency.” Can you explain the relationship between a “truth emergency” and propaganda?

MH: This truth emergency we face is a result of the lack of factual reporting by the so-called mainstream media over the past decade. This truth emergency is the result of a lack of source transparency and factual substance in news transmission. Americans are subjected to mass amounts of propaganda, from misinformation to disinformation, on a daily basis, about some of the most significant issues of the day. Whether this involves the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, the health care reform fiascoes, election fraud, or economic collapse and bailouts, most Americans are unaware of all the facts of how we got where we now are as a society. It is the duty of the constitutionally protected free press to report factually to the public on these matters. However, as shown by Project Censored’s work dating back to 1976, that is not happening.

One way of combating this truth emergency is by understanding the nature of propaganda. This year, our truth emergency section is a primer on propaganda studies, which includes a brief history, theory, application, and case studies all presented to enhance media literacy among the general public.

MK: Getting back to the “truth emergency,” to what extent is US government propaganda about many issues in congruence with corporate media propaganda?

MH: Often times they are one in the same, from the view in government and corporate media on WikiLeaks and transparency to the current NATO actions in Libya, the two have a similar view because there is so much overlap of interest in both involved parties (which in and of themselves have great overlap - from the corporate world to government posts or lobbyists and back again).

Both the US government and the corporate media essentially have a duopoly on manipulating the public mind for political or commercial gain. Leading the public to one view or another is the name of the game, rather than reporting all the facts and letting the chips fall where they may.

This clearly represents a crisis for democracy; the truth of major issues remains illusive to the public. The antidote lies not only in exposing the charlatans of the establishment order as propagandists, but also in providing a broader understanding of how propaganda works, what it looks like and how to detect it, and what the public can do about it. Namely, the solution is to create an independent free press, one not beholden to moneyed interests, but rather one that tells people the truth about all matters, regardless of which powerful parties may be exposed.

MK: If you look at Berlusconi's ownership of media in Italy and Rupert Murdoch's de facto influence on the government in the UK, aren't we facing a worldwide problem of the media representing the ruling elite?

MH: Yes, we are. And that has been a growing trend that seems to be unabated, save for the recent actions in the US to investigate and possibly block the latest AT&T merger. But overall, that is a rare action by the US government. The trend over the later 20th century has been in support of consolidation of ownership and a shutting out of public participation, oversight, and inclusion of views from everyday people. In fact, the FCC just recently drove another nail in the coffin of the Fairness Doctrine, which was mostly dismantled under the Reagan years.

Despite many well-intentioned people in the so-called media reform movement, reform measures via government agencies have rarely worked at the federal level. This is why we must all be the media, we must create and share our own transparently sourced, fact-based news, and we must support independent voices that are doing the same. We cannot depend on those that have created the problems of the news media, contributed to problems of the news media, and benefited from those conditions to take heed and go about fixing said problems in the public interest. That has not, and likely will not happen.

1. For more on the ACLU study “U.S. Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq” from 10/24/2005, click here; and for more on the bias of The Associated Press see Project Censored’s study online.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

CIA Told New York Times About 9/11 Warnings

Command Negligence: NY Times Lied

by Susan Lindauer / September 11th, 2011

9/11 denialists like to swear smugly that the official 9/11 story must be true, because the government could never keep such an important secret without getting caught.

Somebody would spill the beans, right? In fact, a number of us tried. Media watchers should savvy up, as the air waves get blitzed this weekend with 9/11 memorials. If the corporate media had done its job as a watch dog, the world would have got an earful of reliable intelligence sources debunking the official 9/11 story.

Unhappily, the corporate media has been a co-conspirator in the 9/11 Cover Up from day one. They have actively abetted the government with its dirty work. Say a truth teller got arrested on the Patriot Act—like me— and locked in prison on a military base, while the public debate raged over 9/11 and Iraq without access to knowledgeable sources. The government could rely on corporate media to squash the story, while the Justice Department fought my demands for a trial, playing every dirty trick in the book to stop a New York jury from hearing testimony about 9/11 and Iraq.

My nightmare is described in “Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq”. It was a frightening ordeal with secret charges, secret evidence, secret grand jury testimony, and threats of indefinite detention on a Texas military base.

However, the Patriot Act by itself was not enough to silence facts about the command failure before 9/11 or Iraqi Pre-War Intelligence. Over and over, friends and colleagues reached out to the corporate media, delivering independent confirmations about my 9/11 warnings, the Iraqi peace framework and my work on the Lockerbie case, which proved my status as an Asset. Supporters pleaded for the media’s help to expose the government’s manipulations, so I could get my day in court, and bring that truth to the people.

Over and over again, the corporate media in New York, itself, mounted a wall of silence to buttress America’s leaders.

Most New Yorkers and New Jersey residents would be appalled to discover that the worst media whore in the 9/11 Cover Up turned out to be the New York Times.

By May, 2004, the New York Times received no fewer than four confirmations of our Intelligence team’s 9/11 warnings to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Office of Counter-Terrorism at the Justice Department. Confirmation was made six months before release of the 9/11 Commission report, when public discussion could have impacted the findings. Most importantly, a discourse of the facts about 9/11 would have educated voters before the November 2004 elections, holding leaders in Washington accountable to the people. For this reason, I offered to waive my Fifth Amendment rights under indictment, so the 9/11 Commission could take my testimony under oath.

Most critically, the New York Times gained two of those all important confirmations about the 9/11 warnings from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Both of my handlers, Dr. Richard Fuisz and Paul Hoven, men freely volunteered our 9/11 warnings and the Iraqi Peace option to the New York Times. They also explained my work as a U.S. intelligence Asset engaged in the Lockerbie negotiations with Libya, and my role spearheading talks to resume weapons inspections with Iraqi Ambassador Dr. Saeed Hasan. The journalist, David Samuels, called me excitedly, after the interviews.

You read that correctly. The CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency both gave information about the 9/11 warnings to the New York Times, expecting the newspaper to alert its readers of the command negligence before the attack. The New York Times‘ readership was most personally impacted by the tragedy, after all. They made an effort to inspire discussion while the 9/11 Commission was hearing testimony. The New York Times acquired two more confirmations of our 9/11 warnings from Dr. Parke Godfrey, a highly respected computer science professor of York University in Toronto, and my brother, John Lindauer of Los Angeles.

That took guts for the Intelligence Community. By this time, writing was on the wall that Republican Leaders would punish anyone who spoke against them.

One would expect the New York Times to rush to press with such a hot story. Think about it: a long-time U.S. Intelligence Asset, second cousin to President Bush’s Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, warns about 9/11 and has full knowledge of Iraq’s cooperation with the 9/11 Investigation — then gets arrested on the Patriot Act, after requesting to testify before Congress.

Wasn’t that newsworthy? Not according to the editors of the New York Times. Instead of objectively reporting independent confirmations of the 9/11 warnings and properly identifying me as an Asset, the New York Times engaged in gross public fraud. They abetted the government in concealing information of critical significance to the paper’s home town. They manipulated the people of New York City into believing the CIA gave no advance warnings of 9/11 at all. While the American public screamed for impeachment, the New York Times blocked information that showed President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez engaged in active public deception. The people were left believing the government had simply made mistakes before 9/11 and the Iraq War.

In other words, the New York Times acted like an old whore, clinging to GOP leaders like a last client, seeking assurances of her waning attractiveness to the public.

When one of Washington’s most stellar attorneys, Brian Shaughnessy, forced the Court to grant my request for a single, pre-trial hearing—four years after my arrest—Parke Godfrey delivered shocking testimony about my 9/11 warnings less than a thousand feet from where the World Trade Center once graced the New York skyline.

Yet again, New York Times reporter, Alan Feuer, fraudulently and libelously invented a phony lead sentence: “She stuck her tongue out at the prosecutor.” And the New York Times parroted the Justice Department’s line that “half a dozen psychiatrists” had declared me incompetent to stand trial—a blatant deception. Ignoring a morning’s worth of testimony, Feuer suggested that I was a “religious maniac,” something hysterically funny to everyone who knows me. There’s no reality contact in the one and only psychiatric report that postulated such claims. (That single evaluation was presented by the Justice Department’s psychiatrist and tossed by the Bureau of Prisons in the first hour of my arrival at Carswell).

If the New York Times had scratched the surface in its reporting, journalists would have recognized the Justice Department was running what’s called “a psy-op” designed to hide major government deceptions from voters. A quick examination of the record would have revealed that half a dozen psychiatrists had challenged the Justice Department, and declared me fully competent in all areas of life. Even psychiatrists at Carswell Prison acknowledged I suffered “no evidence of hallucinations,” “no depression.” They said I socialized well, posed “zero behavioral problems.” Weekly reports stated consistently that I was “cooperative, smiling, with good eye contact.”

Notably, psychiatrists at Carswell Prison ruled out delusional disorder, citing first-hand observation, witness interviews, and diagnostic testing.

The slightest attention to witness testimonials would have exposed the whole public fraud. Yet the New York media carefully ignored evidentiary testimony that exposed the 9/11 warnings and denied symptoms of mental instability. While my attorney, Brian Shaughnessy, protested for my right to a trial, the New York media assured the public that the Court finding was “gift wrapped for my defense.”

Casting journalists as “controlled opposition” might be overly generous given these circumstances, since it implies they have any backbone at all. Alas, most of them don’t. They whine for pity for their low ratings. Then they let government officials write their news scripts in exchange for political access.

Hey, it’s a tough job defending the official story of 9/11. You have to overcome janitorial crews, fire fighters and emergency rescue teams who all reported hearing explosions pop through the towers. They had to ignore damage to the front lobby— windows that exploded before the first plane hit the building.

You have to ignore what your own eyes see—a neat, clean, controlled demolition of the Towers, which dropped free-fall into a pile of thermatic dust — and fires that burned under the Towers until December, months after jet fuel would have gasped its last flame.

Airplanes crashed into the Towers that day, sure enough. However, I can testify myself the U.S. had significant advance warnings about the airplane hijackings, back to April and May, 2001. The decision to go to War with Iraq, in the aftermath of the terrorist strike, was already made “at the highest levels of government above the CIA Director and Secretary of State.” I know that firsthand, because I was instructed to deliver that message, precisely worded, to Iraqi diplomats, and to demand “any fragment of actionable intelligence that would pinpoint the attack.” And I did so.

Iraq had no intelligence. However, the CIA’s advance knowledge of the conspiracy and advance threats against Iraq created powerful motivation and opportunity for a separate orphan team, domestic or foreign, to wire the Towers with military grade explosives.

The New York media never investigated reports that security cameras in the parking garage had photographed mysterious trucks/vans arriving at the World Trade Center at about 3 a.m and departing at 5 a.m, before Type AAA personalities arrived to start their days on Wall Street. The vans were different than the janitorial trucks in make, model and decal. They arrived at the World Trade Center from August 23 to September 3.

Those are important missing pieces of how the 9/11 tragedy unfolded. Myself, I have concluded that airplane hijackings were used as a public cover for a controlled demolition of the Twin Towers and Building 7. From that point, it’s up to explosives experts to determine the sorts of materials applied to the detonation.

I won my freedom when the blogs and alternative radio took up my cause. In a practical sense, 9/11 marked the changing of the media guard. And it proved the internet boasts some fine journalists of its own, like Michael Collins and radio host Bob Tuskin at The Intel Hub.

No thanks to the government’s top dogs at the New York Times. But perhaps that’s not fair. A dog would have shown more loyalty to the people of Manhattan and New Jersey.

Susan Lindauer covered the Iraqi Embassy at the United Nations for seven years before the invasion. She is the author of Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq. Read other articles by Susan.

This article was posted on Sunday, September 11th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under 9-11, CIA, Disinformation, Espionage/"Intelligence", Media, Security.