Can Social Media be Socialized?

Published on Saturday, November 9, 2013 by n+1 Magazine

Socialize Social Media!

by Benjamin Kunkel 

On Wednesday, November 6, Twitter, the so-called microblogging service, went public, in the private sense. Shares initially offered at $26 were by the end of the day trading near $45, giving a company with fewer than 900 employees a market value of more than $31 billion, and meaning that each of the service’s 230 million users—who are also, in a real sense, its producers—could be considered to be contributing $135 to the company’s value. That value is almost certain to fall, since Twitter shares appear ludicrously overpriced. As John Cassidy of the New Yorker calculated, “Investors were paying forty-nine dollars per dollar of revenues, and five hundred and forty-one dollars per dollar of cash flow . . . Apple, the most valuable technology company in the world, trades at less than three times its revenue and eight times its cash flow.” But large for-profit social-media services are contradictory entities at any price, because they attempt to profit from activity that, precisely because it is social, is basically non-economic and non-productive. Social media can either be profitable or it can be social. In the end, it can’t be both.

The IPOs of Facebook and Twitter should therefore be reversed, through the socialization of both companies and other social-media services that attain a similar scale. The time has come, in other words, to socialize social media. Keynes long ago called for “a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment” in modern economies, while leaving room for the skill and inventiveness of entrepreneurs “(who are certainly so fond of their craft that their labor could be obtained much cheaper than at present), to be harnessed to the service of the community on reasonable terms of reward.” The broader question can await another day. But large social media companies particularly invite socialization—that is, going public in the sense of public ownership—for the reasons that follow.

1. Social media should be socialized because services tend to be or become monopolies. Most private enterprises, whatever their business, have at least a few competitors. Large social media companies—Facebook, Twitter—tend to lack competitors, for the simple reason that their platforms are not compatible. I can’t create a profile on a non-Facebook site that then appears on Facebook, and no microblogging service could emerge to challenge Twitter unless it were capable of inducing mass defections. Social media services or social utilities, as they would better be called, are thus more like highways or railroads than like car manufacturers or freight companies. Trade in my Ford for a Toyota, and I can still drive on the same roads that lead to my friends’ doors. But even if there were another all-purpose social networking site like Facebook, I couldn’t switch to it without losing contact with my Facebook friends. This presents the familiar problems of monopoly. Twitter may not abuse its captive audience yet—by overcharging us, or by data-mining users in the way that has bred so much resentment among Facebook users—but it easily could, because we have nowhere else to go for an equivalent service. And the company’s executives may soon feel they have no choice but to abuse their monopoly position. The optimistic, not to say delusional, stock market valuations of Facebook and Twitter are premised on the unstated idea that these companies, having so far provided a public service at a loss, will in the future find a way to heavily exploit their cornered users. The rational way to treat natural monopolies is to make them into utilities provided to the public—either directly by the government, or indirectly through contracting and regulation—at cost.

2. Social media should be socialized because attaining profitability (through ads or fees) is impossible without degrading the service. So far executives hope to turn a profit by providing ad space and/or by data-mining users so that information can be sold to advertisers to use more broadly. The more social-media services are infiltrated by ads, the less the user enjoys the fundamental social right of choosing her own company. On Twitter I follow who I want and don’t follow the others. On Facebook, as IRL, I choose my friends as well as those people I find it socially convenient to call “friends.” And as with social life generally, there are no directly assessed fees for participation, any more than I have to pay a toll to walk down the street with a friend (or follower). Advertising degrades this freedom. I don’t get to choose whose ads I see, or whether I want to see any. Some people may enjoy corporate advertisements—and they should be able, accordingly, to follow Burger King or Pfizer. But I have something to advertise as well: my opinions, the articles I write, the books by other people I think you should buy, et cetera. That is my freedom, just as it’s yours to follow or block or unfriend me. We only lack this freedom when it comes to corporate entities with the budgets to override our choices. And everything suggests that as Facebook and Twitter try to increase revenues and share value, they will pollute social media with ever more ads. The alternative profit-making strategy would be to attempt to charge fees far in excess of operating costs. (Twitter’s operating budget is about $200 million a year, or less than a dollar per user.) The social character of these services would then swiftly erode, since access would be rationed by ability to pay. Better to socialize these utilities and cover operating costs out of public taxation.

3. Social media should be socialized because the fraternization of people is a democratic good, which for-profit operation impairs. In democratic societies, social media should also be democratic. Digital speech acts (tweets, posts, likes, photos, links, whatever) should be promoted to the extent that other speakers promote them, rather than according to the amount of money the speaker commands. Eliminating ads would hardly ensure that democratic conditions produce mutual enlightenment, and, to date, ads on social media are more an aesthetic irritant than an obstacle to democracy. (For that, we have the Constitution and the Supreme Court.) But the socialization of social media would imply that it’s meant to serve social ends, in all their variety—pleasure, knowledge, amusement, organization, community, and so on—rather than private gain. Whether social media is on the whole good or bad for democracy is obviously debatable—but citizens possess no wider forum for this debate than social media! And while it does take access to a computer and a reliable internet connection to participate in social media, these barriers are much lower than for any other form of broadcast communication. Of course citizens who don’t use social media might complain about the (minimal) taxes required to keep social utilities up and running, but this makes for no difference with roads or libraries, which everyone pays for regardless of personal use.

4. Social media should be socialized not in spite of, but in service of, entrepreneurialism and innovation. Against the proposal to socialize social media, it will be objected that the prospect of enormous fortunes stimulated its development. This is only a partial truth. The lure of getting rich may have been one factor to goad Mark Zuckerberg into the creation of Facebook, but he had no idea of how rich he might become nor, by all accounts, does he spend lavishly on himself. Only Facebook and Twitter are yet so massive and monopolistic as to be clear candidates for socialization, and it seems likely that the government, acting on behalf of the public, could have bought out the founders of these two companies, prior to an IPO, for what the founders would have regarded as an attractive price. The government could even overpay for Twitter next week at $31 billion (though Keynes might perhaps have considered founder Evan Williams $2.6 billion share value to exceed “reasonable terms of reward”). Still, suppose that entrepreneurs, knowing in advance that a handful of start-ups might one day become so eminent as to be socialized, also knew that, in the unlikely event of socialization, no founder would be paid more than $100 million for his interest in the enterprise: it’s hard to believe that such a cap would deter anyone. Besides, much of an innovator’s compensation is in renown or, failing that, a kind of obscure glory: whether or not people know your name, everyone knows your work. More than this, monopolistic privately-owned social media will stifle useful innovation. Grant that private companies often innovate to benefit their clients (though they equally often seek monopolized stasis, and engineer products to fall apart); even so, it’s not users of social media but advertisers and investors who form the clientele. Public utilities, on the other hand, can and should be continually improved from their users’ standpoint. Social-media services could also, crucially, be placed in competition with one another, through the requirement that their platforms be mutually compatible. Imagine a microblogging Twitter competitor, public or private: if these rivals had to make available any tweets posted to either service, users could simply choose whichever service they liked on the basis of secondary features. This would encourage attractive innovations which right now are discouraged, either because changes primarily serve advertisers and investors—hence the steady degradation of Facebook leading up to and ever since its IPO—or because no rival services, faced with such invulnerable giants, dare challenge Facebook or Twitter.

5. Social media should be socialized because its content is produced by society at large, and society is distinct from the economy. The staff of social media companies (Twitter’s 900 or so) are indispensable for their operations, but so are the vast numbers of users who produce the content on display (Twitter’s 230 million). Yet it would be perversely cumbersome to compensate these consumers-who-are-also-producers for every tweet or post, or even with a small annual salary. And to compensate “content providers” for their popularity would be to reward the meretricious and shallowly outrageous more than is already the case. Society is distinct from the economy in that no direct monetary rewards flow from participation. Being popular may help you make money, and having money may in turn make you popular, but no one is paid a fee for his personal popularity, nor can I pay people to like me. The autonomy of society is limited but nevertheless real. In the fact that neither Rupert Murdoch nor Kanye nor you nor I made any money directly from Twitter (until yesterday, when they may have scooped up shares) there was a kind of democracy, which public ownership would safeguard. Access to various social venues—a ballpark, a concert hall, a café, street, a park—clearly has to do with costs, whether these are high or low or consist only of public taxation. But it’s the venues, and any services provided there, that are cheap or expensive, not the socializing, which is either free or is not socializing. Rationing access, through fees, to infrequently attended and restricted spaces (the ballpark) makes sense, as does subsidizing expensive infrastructure (the concert hall) and performances (the concert) through ad sales. But social media is by no means characterized by restricted space, infrequent use, or expensive infrastructure or performances; it can be by used everyone, whenever they want, at exceedingly low cost, and it hosts performances, to call them that, which cost nothing to produce. To treat such eminently social activity as a form of economic production is either futile or grotesque. It’s futile if no profits result. And it’s grotesque if profits do result, since these are only a form of social rent. Should social-media ownership become profitable while users continue to produce content unpaid, we are in a situation, more economically lurid than any imagined by Marx, in which the owners of some very minimal means of production—servers, office buildings, or the title thereto constituted by their shares on the NYSE—enjoy all the revenue from the economic activity of people who receive no wage whatever.

Social media services can ultimately be run as public utilities, ad-free, at cost, in a democratic spirit and for social ends, in their enormous variety—or else digital society can become ever more subservient to the single end of the accumulation of private capital. The choice is between social life as an advertising platform and socialized social media. Tweeps and Facebook friends, unite! You have nothing to lose but some ads! (Except all the time you’re wasting. But you were already doing that.) 

Copyright 2013 n+1 Magazine

 

Government Should Not Define What a Reporter Is — or Isn’t

by Walter Brasch / August 24th, 2013

 

 

Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a horde of members of Congress of both parties want to decide who is and who isn’t a reporter. Sen. Feinstein says a “real” reporter is a “salaried agent of a media company.”

She mentions the usual suspects—New York Times, ABC News. She dismisses part-time staff. She dismisses freelancers. She dismisses those who write, often without pay, for the hundreds of alternative publications, and often break news and investigative stories well ahead of the mainstream media. She dismisses anyone who, she says, “have no professional qualifications.”

The reason she wants to define what a reporter is or isn’t is because there’s a proposed federal Media Shield Law that would protect reporters from revealing their sources. Forty states and the District of Columbia currently have shield laws. Sen. Feinstein wants to amend the federal bill to take away existing First Amendment protections from anyone not involved in—apparently—salaried establishment media.

There are people who have minimal qualifications to be a reporter. Many write nothing but screeds. Many have problems with basic language skills. Many have little familiarity with the AP Style Book. Many have an inability to ask probing questions of government officials; many merely transcribe what they’re told, whether from the president, a council member, or a local reader who is the focus of a feature. Some of them are paid salaries and are agents of media companies, which Sen. Feinstein believes are acceptable requirements.

There are also those who frequently allow “deep background” and “off-the-record” comments. Many news media won’t allow sources to go “off-the-record.” If the information isn’t available to the general public, it shouldn’t be available only to reporters. Access to news sources is something reporters enjoy that the average reader doesn’t; but there is a responsibility to the reader and viewer and listener not to hide information.

There are those who overuse the “veiled news source,” which is a part of the Shield Law. A veiled news source could be someone whom the reporter identifies as, “Sources close to the Governor state …” Often, the reporter doesn’t question a source’s motives for why she or he wants to give anonymous information, or if it is merely a “trial balloon” to use the media to put out information; if the people agree, sources become identified; if the public disagrees with a proposal, no one traces the “leak” to politicians or their staffs.

On more than a few occasions, reporters—whether “salaried agents” of a media company, part-timers for that company or for any of thousands of alternative publications or electronic media, or freelancers—have filled in holes in their stories with false identities—“A 55-year-old housewife in Podunka, who asked not to be identified, says …” Good reporters seldom use a veiled news source and then have to protect them should there be a court order to divulge the source of information.

On rare occasions, however, a reporter, in consultation with an editor, will allow a news source to be anonymous. Granting veiled news source status should not be given unless a source’s information and identity puts her or him into significant personal jeopardy—and the information can be verified.

But, even if there are reporters who are lazy, who plagiarize, who abuse the veiled news source privilege, there are no enforceable ethics rules in journalism. Reporters aren’t licensed—such as physicians, social workers, teachers, contractors, and cosmetologists. Only an editor can discipline or terminate an employee.

Nevertheless, whenever the government says it wants to define what a reporter is or is not—and the public, outraged over something a reporter or news operation did or did not do demands licensing and enforceable codes of ethics—a huge red flag should be in everyone’s face. Not one part of the First Amendment determines who or what a reporter is, or what is or is not news. The Founding Fathers didn’t forget to include that; they deliberately didn’t want to include that. They believed government shouldn’t be making those decisions, and the news media, even the media that base their news upon lies and scandal, must be independent.

And, yet, government and the news media often wink at the intent of the Founding Fathers and cozy up together.
The only thing more outrageous than reporters and sources playing golf or tennis together is reporters schmoozing at political receptions, the women dressed like they were movie celebrities on the Red Carpet, the men in tuxedos. And the reason why they go to these receptions? They claim it’s because they “get their information” there.

But, “socializing” isn’t the only thing that violates the intent of the Founding Fathers. It probably isn’t a good practice for Congress to appoint news correspondents to determine who is or is not qualified to receive press credentials—subject to the oversight of House and Senate leaders. Until recently, the establishment press of “salaried agents” refused even to acknowledge that members of the alternative press, even those who have won awards for investigative reporting, should be allowed the privileges that mainstream reporters are allowed.

It violates the First Amendment when police agencies and governments at all levels decide who can or can’t cover its activities. Usually, the ones excluded are reporters who are not “agents” of an establishment media company.

Until recently, it violated the intent of the First Amendment when the Federal Communications Commission determined what percentage of each day’s programming should be devoted to which category because of a law Congress created that decided electronic media, unlike print media, are required to meet the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.”
Under Sen. Feinstein’s belief of who and what a reporter is, Ben Franklin, who wrote hundreds of articles under the byline of Silence Do-Good, and was never paid for it, would not be considered to be a reporter.

Walter Brasch, during a 40-year work career in mass communications, has been a member of several unions, in both the private and public sectors. He is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the author of 16 books, including With Just Cause: Unionization of the American Journalist, Before the First Snow: Stories from the Revolution, and his latest Fracking Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at: walterbrasch@gmail.com. Read other articles by Walter, or visit Walter's website.

 

This article was posted on Saturday, August 24th, 2013 at 11:36am and is filed under Freedom of Expression/Speech, Legal/Constitutional, Media.

Fox's Shameless Misrepresentation Of SNAP Recipients

MEDIA as default persecutors of the people

Fox's Shameless Misrepresentation Of SNAP Recipients

Baier: "When A Safety Net Becomes A Hammock"

Blog ››› August 9, 2013 11:00 PM EDT ››› 

by  SAMANTHA WYATT 

 

In an attempt to make a surfing freeloader the face of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients, a Fox News special profiled Jason Greenslate, "a blissfully jobless California surfer" who has taken advantage of SNAP benefits. In reality, Greenslate bears no resemblance to the overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients, many of whom are elderly, children, or rely on the program for a short time while looking for work.

Prior to its August 9 airing, Fox News hyped the special, "The Great Food Stamp Binge," on Fox News Insider, FoxNews.com, and several of its daytime shows. Each preview focused on Jason Greenslate, a freeloading surfer who Fox correspondent John Roberts interviewed in Southern California. FoxNews.com described Greenslate at length in an article that teased the "new documentary":

The Fox News Reporting documentary profiles, among others, a California surfer and aspiring musician named Jason Greenslate. Greenslate shows how he supports his beach-bum lifestyle with food stamps, while dismissing the idea of holding down a regular, steady job.
"It's not that I don't want a job, I don't want a boss. I don't want someone telling me what to do.  I'm gonna live my own life," Greenslate tells Fox News' John Roberts. "This is the way I want to live. And I don't really see anything changing. I got the card. It's $200. That's it."

As promised, "The Great Food Stamp Binge" labeled Greenslate "the new face of food stamps," devoting two full segments to his lifestyle in a shameless attempt to characterize SNAP recipients as freeloaders.





According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service, the fraud and waste rate in SNAP is roughly 1 percent, contrary to recent Fox claims that the program is rife with fraud.
Unlike Greenslate, 41 percent of food stamp recipients live "in a household with earnings," and use SNAP benefits to supplement their primary source of income. Furthermore, the USDA reports that most food stamp recipients stay in the program for only a short period of time:

Half of all new SNAP participants received benefits for 10 months or less in the mid 2000s, up from 8 months in the early 2000s. Single parent families and elderly individuals tended to stay in the program longer than did working poor individuals, childless adults without disabilities, and noncitizens. Seventy-four percent of new participants left the program within two years. This is an increase from 71 percent in the early 1990s.

Fox's attempt to demonize food stamp recipients as a caricature of willful dependency ignores the fact that SNAP kept 4.7 million people out of poverty in 2011, many of whom are children or the elderly. Unlike Greenslate, the majority of these individuals relied on the program not because of laziness, but necessity.
Surely it would not have been difficult for Fox to find a realistic face of food stamp recipients, as 76% of SNAP households include a child, elderly person, or disabled American. This dishonest depiction of SNAP is the latest example of Fox's longstanding tradition of maligning the poor.

              

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Why Tom Friedman Is the Ayn Rand of Our Times

  Media  

AlterNet / By RJ Eskow

Why Tom Friedman Is the Ayn Rand of Our Times

Friedman is the dark prophet of unregulated marketplaces for every aspect of human activity. 

July 29, 2013  |  

If Thomas Friedman didn't exist, America's high-tech entrepreneurs would have had to invent him.  Come to think of it, maybe they did. The dark science-fiction vision he celebrates serves them well, at pretty much everyone else's expense.

Friedman's vision is worth studying, if only because it reflects the distorted perspective of some very wealthy and influential people. In their world the problems of the many are as easily fixed as a line of code, with no sacrifice required of them or their fellow billionaires.

Case in point: 15 or 20 million Americans seeking full-time employment? To Thomas Friedman, that's a branding problem.

Ayn Rand with a human face ...

Friedman occupies a unique place in the pundit ecosystem. From his perch at the New York Times, he idealizes the unregulated, winner-take-all economy of the Internet and while overlooking human, real-world concerns. His misplaced faith in a digitized "free" market reflects the solipsistic libertarianism of a technological über-class which stares into the rich diversity of human experience and sees only its own reflection staring back.

Friedman is a closet Ayn Rand in many ways, but he gives Rand's ugly and exploitative philosophy a pseudo-intellectual, liberal-friendly feel-good gloss.  He turns her harsh industrial metal music into melodious easy listening: John Galt meets John Denver. That make him very useful to those who would dismantle the engines of real economic growth, the ones which create jobs while protecting life and limb.

Friedman's column in this weekend's New York Times is, characteristically, a Panglossian panegyric to online technology as the salve for all economic problems. In it he paints the picture of a global dystopia where decent jobs are scarce, educational advancement is unattainable, and people must sacrifice their homes, their possessions, and their personal lives to serve and amuse complete strangers.

He can hardly wait.

Mi casa es su casa ...

The framing device for Friedman's vision is the tale of two twenty-somethings who, like so many Friedman protagonists, built an Internet company. Friedman's column is called "The Sharing Economy," and it celebrates the creators of an online platform called "Airbnb" which lets people rent out their homes to strangers.  Online marketplaces like Airbnb are very interesting economic phenomena. They can be useful and even transformative. But they can also be dangerous, unsafe, and overhyped.

Enter Thomas Friedman.

Digital libertarians like Jeff Bezos of Amazon see these digital marketplaces as the electronic realization of a free market fantasy. They promote platforms like Bezos' "Mechanical Turk" system of online job sharing, unconcerned about their ability to accelerate the destruction of decent wages and secure jobs. (They're also blissfully unaware of the embarrassing contradiction between their own libertarianism and the fortunes they've earned from government-created technologies like the Internet.)

Friedman seems to share a Bezos-like vision of unregulated marketplaces for every aspect of  human activity. He waxes ecstatic about Airbnb, which he sees as both a practical solution and a broader model for a future economy. Friedman thinks that renting out your private space, your personal time, and your possessions will soon become the only way to make ends meet - that is, unless you possess extraordinary skills, which could land you a mediocre job at best.

And he thinks that's just fine.

Decoding Friedman

Consider this passage from Friedman's column:

"In a world where, as I've argued, average is over -- the skills required for any good job keep rising -- a lot of people who might not be able to acquire those skills can still earn a good living now by building their own branded reputations, whether it is to rent their kids' rooms, their cars or their power tools."

This paragraph reads like a Zen koan pieced together from cast-away fragments of motivational sales speeches. We're left to infer the meaning of its more obscure phrases from their context, the same way World War II codebreakers cracked particularly difficult passages in enemy telexes. So let's try to tease out its meaning, phrase by phrase:

"In a world where, as I've argued, average is over ..." (Emphasis from the original.)

"Average is over"?  Averaging is a mathematical function, inextricably woven into the fabric of reality as we understand it. How can it be over? It's like saying that subtraction is over, or means and medians are null and void.  (Watch yourself, standard deviation. Thomas Friedman has his eye on you.)

What's he really saying here? The "as I've argued" offers one clue to motivation, if not meaning: Anything self-referential from this author - and that's a lot - is a signal that he's floating another potential "The World Is Flat" book title.

But what's he saying?  Our context-driven codebreaking takes us to the next phrase:

"... the skills required for any good job keep rising ..."

Ah, I see. "Average is over" is connected to job skills. Friedman apparently means that you can't get a good job anymore if your skill level is only average.

Why didn't he just say so?

20 Million Startups

What are the implications of a world in which you must be above average to get "any good job"?  When Garrison Keillor described Lake Woebegon as a place where "all the children are above average," it was a joke. But Friedman's not joking. He's describing a world in which ordinary people are excluded from decent employment - and he's doing it without expressing regret or demanding change.

To be fair, Friedman is an advocate for education - in his own way. But his education arguments, like his economic ones, focus on the online, the gimmicky, and the jargon-laden.  Friedman's world doesn't seem to include manufacturing jobs, or construction jobs, or good government jobs. He envisions a workforce made up almost exclusively of "lateral thinkers" and "integration" engineers. Students should be trained to "invent" their jobs, says Friedman, who claims that self-invented work will be the best source of future employment.

Based on the number of people currently seeking full-time employment in the US alone, 15 or 20 million people need to "invent" their jobs pretty quickly. That's a lot of Internet start-ups, along with a whole boatload of "lateral thinking."

Friedman's unrealistic view of the labor force, shared by many tech entrepreneurs, is one in which the middle class is as passé as a Commodore 64.  How can formerly middle-class Americans survive in the world they envision?

Average White Brand

According to Thomas Friedman, tens of millions of un- and under-employed Americans can "earn a good living online by building their own branded reputations." (That's right: He went there. He said "branded reputation.") Using websites like Airbnb, Friedman suggests, they can rent out "their kids' rooms, their cars or their power tools."

Friedman seems unaware that millions of Americans don't have kids' rooms. (Lots of people don't have cars or power tools, either.) He might be astonished to learn that even in New York City, where he is professionally based, nearly half the population is considered either "poor" or "near poor." Those who live in ghettoes or other concentrations of minority poverty don't seem to exist for him.

Airbnb was co-invented by a kid who needed rent money after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. But there are families that can't afford to send their kids to the Rhode Island School of Design. And not everybody can move to San Francisco, where Friedman's plucky young heroes conducted the business transaction which led to the creation of Airbnb.

"Three people stayed with us," said co-founder Brian Chesky, "and we charged them $80 a night. We also made breakfast for them and became their local guides."

San Francisco's one of the most desirable tourist destinations in the country. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Friedman that not everybody lives in such a desirable location - or that some of us would rather not give up a large chunk of our personal space to strangers while serving as their personal cooks and chauffeurs. What's next? Hiring ourselves out to millionaires as "faithful family retainers," antebellum-style ?

As I read this column my mind kept wandering to the recent Bill Moyers program about Milwaukee, "Two American Families," and to a recent visit to my equally hard-hit home town of Utica, New York. Trust us, Mr. Friedman: There won't be a lot of "Airbnb" tourists looking to rent beds or cars in Milwaukee or Utica.

hellonearth.com

Friedman seems blithely unaware of the role of regulation in keeping us safe. Do we really want to rent cars from strangers without knowing whether they've been properly maintained? A "branded reputation" is fine until the brakes give out on a steep incline. And power tools?  One broken chain-saw blade and you could wind up looking like a bit player in a Tobe Hooper movie.

But safety, important as it is, barely scratches the surface of the problem.  Friedman's overall vision, his conception of a "new economy," is what's truly terrifying.

Any rational person who has glimpsed Friedman's dystopian future - which he has pretty accurately envisioned, based on current trends - would urgently begin seeking out alternatives and solutions. They'd want to prevent our economy from becoming an electronic marketplace where the needy and desperate peddle their time, space and possessions to the well-to-do in a desperate bid for survival.

They certainly wouldn't celebrate this sci-fi dystopia, as Friedman does.

Mirror, mirror ...

There are alternatives we can pursue collectively: An aggressive government program of job creation. A return to the days of social mobility. An end to the gross concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. And, above all, affordable education for all so that we can restore the American dream of self-advancement.

Instead Friedman glorifies globalization and the destruction of good jobs. He's indifferent to the loss of social mobility and infatuated with mediocre or at best mildly clever web enterprises. Friedman is the praise singer of Palo Alto, the griot of Los Gatos, and he's never met a Internet billionaire he didn't like.

Thomas Friedman is the perfect mirror for the undeserved self-infatuation which has infected our corporate, media, and political class. He's the chief fabulist of the detached elite, the unfettered Id of the global aristocracy, the Horatio Alger of self-deluded, self-serving, self-promoting techno-hucksterism.

But give the man his due: When it comes to "building your brand reputation," Friedman's a master of the art. It helps to have the perfect platform, of course. As soon as the New YorkTimes is ready to hire 20 million more columnists, our employment problems will be over.

RJ Eskow is a writer, business person, and songwriter/musician. He has worked as a consultant in public policy, technology, and finance, specializing in healthcare issues.

Chris Hedges Defends Snowden's Heroism in the Face of a Growing Smear Campaign

Media  

Democracy Now! / By Amy Goodman, Chris Hedges, Geoffrey Stone

Chris Hedges Defends Snowden's Heroism in the Face of a Growing Smear Campaign

Hedges: "If there are no Snowdens, if there are no Mannings, if there are no Assanges, there will be no free press."

 

 

 

 

June 18, 2013  |  

 

 

In this excellent debate from Democracy Now!, Chris Hedges makes a brilliant defense of Edward Snowden, and the collapse of our institutions:

"Unfortunately, the press, like most institutions in this country, and I would add the legal profession, has largely collapsed under this corporate coup d’état that’s taken place and is no longer functioning. And I want to get back, that what this is fundamentally a debate about is whether we are going to have, through the press, an independent institution within this country that can examine the inner workings of power or not. And it is now—I mean, many of us had suspected this widespread surveillance, but now that it’s confirmed, we’re seeing—you know, why did Snowden come out publicly? Well, because I think he knew that they would find out anyway, because they have all of Glenn Greenwald’s email, phone records and everything else, and they can very quickly find out who he was speaking to and whether Snowden had contact with him. And that—I speak as reporter—is terrifying, because it essentially shuts down any ability to counter the official propaganda and the official narrative and expose the crimes. And we have seen in the last few years tremendous crimes being committed by those in power. We have no ability now to investigate them."

The full transcript is well-worth reading to the bottom 

Edward Snowden’s decision to leak a trove of secret documents outlining the NSA’s surveillance program has elicited a range of reactions. Among his detractors, he’s been called "a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison," (Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker), who’s committed "an act of treason," (Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee). To supporters, Snowden is a hero for showing that "our very humanity [is] being compromised by the blind implementation of machines in the name of making us safe," (author Douglas Rushkoff), one whom President Obama should "thank and offer him a job as a White House technology advisor," (American Conservative editor Scott McConnell). We host a debate with two guests: Chris Hedges, a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times, and Geoffrey Stone, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Stone served as an informal adviser to President Obama in 2008, years after hiring him to teach constitutional law.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to a debate on Edward Snowden’s decision to leak a trove of secret documents outlining the NSA’s surveillance program. In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Snowden described why he risked his career to leak the documents.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: I think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model. When you are subverting the power of government, that that’s a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy. And if you do that in secret consistently, you know, as the government does when it wants to benefit from a secret action that it took, it will kind of get its officials a mandate to go, "Hey, you know, tell the press about this thing and that thing, so the public is on our side." But they rarely, if ever, do that when an abuse occurs. That falls to individual citizens. But they’re typically maligned. You know, it becomes a thing of these people are against the country, they’re against the government. But I’m not. I’m no different from anybody else. I don’t have special skills. I’m just another guy who sits there, day to day, in the office, watches what happening—what’s happening, and goes, "This is something that’s not our place to decide. The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong." And I’m willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say, "I didn’t change these. I didn’t modify the story. This is the truth. This is what’s happening. You should decide whether we need to be doing this."

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Edward Snowden’s actions have elicited a range of reactions. Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and The New Yorker writes that Snowden is, quote, "a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison." Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that Snowden should not be considered a whistleblower because, quote, "what he did was an act of treason." And Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina tweeted, "I hope we follow Mr Snowden to the ends of the earth to bring him to justice," language echoing what Senator Graham once said in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Douglas Rushkoff wrote on CNN, quote, "Snowden is a hero because he realized [that] our very humanity was being compromised by the blind implementation of machines in the name of making us safe," unquote. The editor of The American Conservative, Scott McConnell, wrote, quote, "If Obama wanted to do something smart, he should thank Snowden and offer him a job as a White House technology advisor." And Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg sang Snowden’s praises, writing, quote, "In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release ofNSA material—and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago."

For more, we host a debate on Edward Snowden. Is he a hero or a criminal, whistleblower or a traitor? Here in New York, we’re joined by Chris Hedges, senior fellow at The Nation Institute; was a foreign correspondent for The New York Timesfor 15 years, was part of a team of reporters that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism; author, along with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, of the New York Times best-seller Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt . His most recent article is called "The Judicial Lynching of Bradley Manning" at Truthdig.org.

And in Chicago, Illinois, we’re joined by Geoffrey Stone, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. His recent piece for The Huffington Post is called "Edward Snowden: 'Hero or Traitor'?" Stone served as an informal adviser to President Obama in 2008. In 1992, 20 years ago, Professor Stone hired Obama to teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Geoffrey Stone is also author of many books, including Top Secret: When Our Government Keeps Us in the Dark and Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime: From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism.

Chris Hedges, Geoffrey Stone, we welcome you both to Democracy Now! Professor Stone, I want to begin with you. In your piece, you say that Edward Snowden’s actions were criminal. Can you explain why you feel he should be in jail?

GEOFFREY STONE: Well, there is a federal statute that makes it a crime for public employees who have been granted access to classified information to reveal that information to persons who are unauthorized to receive it. So, from a simple, straightforward, technical legal standpoint, there’s absolutely no question that Snowden violated the law. And from that standpoint, if he’s tried, he will be convicted, and he is in fact, from that perspective, a criminal. Whether one admires what he did is another question, but it doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not what he did was unlawful.

The question, why I think he deserves punishment, is—he said it actually himself in the clip that you played earlier: He said, "I’m just an ordinary guy." Well, the fact is, he’s just an ordinary guy with absolutely no expertise in public policy, in the law, in national security. He’s a techie. He made the decision on his own, without any authorization, without any approval by the American people, to reveal classified information about which he had absolutely no expertise in terms of the danger to the nation, the value of the information to national security. That was a completely irresponsible and dangerous thing to do. Whether we think it was a positive thing in the long run or not is a separate question, but it was clearly criminal.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges, your response?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, what we’re really having a debate about is whether or not we’re going to have a free press left or not. If there are no Snowdens, if there are no Mannings, if there are no Assanges, there will be no free press. And if the press—and let’s not forget that Snowden gave this to The Guardian. This was filtered through a press organization in a classic sort of way whistleblowers provide public information about unconstitutional, criminal activity by their government to the public. So the notion that he’s just some individual standing up and releasing stuff over the Internet is false.

But more importantly, what he has exposed essentially shows that anybody who reaches out to the press to expose fraud, crimes, unconstitutional activity, which this clearly appears to be, can be traced and shut down. And that’s what’s so frightening. So, we are at a situation now, and I speak as a former investigative reporter for The New York Times, by which any investigation into the inner workings of government has become impossible. That’s the real debate.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Chris, how do you respond to the point that Geoffrey Stone made and how Snowden identified himself as an ordinary guy? Should any regular government employee or contractor be allowed to disclose whatever information he feels the public ought to be privy to, whether it’s classified by the government and his employer or her employer or not?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, if—that is what an act of conscience is. And reporters live—our sort of daily fare is built, investigative reporters, off of people who, within systems of power, have a conscience to expose activities by the power elite which are criminal in origin or unconstitutional. And that’s precisely what he did. And he did it in the traditional way, which was going to a journalist, Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian, and having it vetted by that publication before it was put out to the public. Was it a criminal? Well, yes, but it was—I suppose, in a technical sense, it was criminal, but set against the larger crime that is being committed by the state. When you have a system by which criminals are in power, criminals on Wall Street who are able to carry out massive fraud with no kinds of repercussions or serious regulation or investigation, criminals who torture in our black sites, criminals who carry out targeted assassinations, criminals who lie to the American public to prosecute preemptive war, which under international law is illegal, if you are a strict legalist, as apparently Professor Stone is, what you’re in essence doing is protecting criminal activity. I would argue that in large sections of our government it’s the criminals who are in power.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Stone, your response?

GEOFFREY STONE: Well, first of all, there is, so far as I can tell from
everything that’s been revealed, absolutely nothing illegal or criminal about these programs. They may be terrible public policy—I’m not sure I approve of it at all—but the fact is the claim that they’re unconstitutional and illegal is wildly premature. Certainly from the standpoint of what’s been released so far, whether Mr. Hedges likes it or not, or whether Mr. Snowdon likes it or not, these are not unconstitutional or illegal programs.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me go to a letter that you co-signed, Professor Stone, in 2006 with other prominent attorneys about NSA surveillance under President Bush. You were criticizing it. You wrote, quote, "Although the program’s secrecy prevents us from being privy to all of its details, the Justice Department’s defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly the program appears on its face to violate existing law." How do you compare that to what we’re seeing today?

GEOFFREY STONE: They’re two completely different programs. The Bush NSAsurveillance program was enacted in direct defiance of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Obama program, if we want to call it that, was approved by Congress. That’s number one. Number two is, the Bush program involved wiretapping of the contents of phone conversations. The Supreme Court has long held that that is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, if there’s not an individualized determination of probable cause. The Obama program, if we want to call it that, does not involve wiretapping; it involves phone numbers. And the Supreme Court has long held that the government is allowed to obtain phone records, bank records, library records, purchase records, once you disclose that information to a third party. And there is no Fourth Amendment violation. So they’re two completely different programs.

AMY GOODMAN: But if you just heard our conversation with the mathematician Susan Landau, she argued that often metadata is more revealing than the transcript of an actual conversation. Do you think the law should change, Geoffrey Stone, to include this metadata?

GEOFFREY STONE: Well, I’m not persuaded by her argument that it’s more revealing. I do believe that it’s problematic, and I think, in fact, there should be statutes that prohibit the gathering of this type of data by private entities, as well as by the government, in the absence of at least a compelling justification. And I thought the Supreme Court’s decisions initially on this question were wrong. So I would certainly want to see them differently. But in terms of what the law is, it’s not unconstitutional, it’s not illegal, and it’s completely different from what the Bush administration was doing.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Chris Hedges, do you agree that—

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, there are plenty of lawyers who disagree with Professor Stone.

GEOFFREY STONE: Not many.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, the ACLU has just issued a lawsuit over this, claiming that it’s a violation of the Fourth Amendment. So, I haven’t done a poll. Frankly, the legal profession, under this steady assault of civil liberties, can’t hold its head very high. There are a few out there, at the ACLU—

GEOFFREY STONE: Unlike—unlike the journalistic profession?

CHRIS HEDGES: —Michael Ratner and a few others. But, you know—

AMY GOODMAN: Geoffrey Stone, aren’t you on the board of the ACLU, or were you?

GEOFFREY STONE: I’m on the National Advisory Council.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes. So what do you think of them suing the government over this?

GEOFFREY STONE: I think it’s great. I think that they are perfectly right to bring the question. That’s their job. Their job is to challenge whether or not things are constitutional, to raise those questions. That’s exactly what they should be doing. Doesn’t mean they’re always right, but they should be presenting these questions to the courts. That’s their job. That’s their responsibility.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Chris Hedges, one of the problems that people have pointed to is that there aren’t procedures or mechanisms in place for people within the government to point out wrongdoing when it does occur. Do you think that’s one of the problems that’s occurred in this case with Edward Snowden? Or, for that matter, your most recent article was on Army whistleblower, Private Bradley Manning.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, we used to have a mechanism. It was called the press. And we used to be able to tell our sources that they would be protected and that they would not be investigated for providing information that exposed the inner workings of power. Unfortunately, the press, like most institutions in this country, and I would add the legal profession, has largely collapsed under this corporate coup d’état that’s taken place and is no longer functioning. And I want to get back, that what this is fundamentally a debate about is whether we are going to have, through the press, an independent institution within this country that can examine the inner workings of power or not. And it is now—I mean, many of us had suspected this widespread surveillance, but now that it’s confirmed, we’re seeing—you know, why did Snowden come out publicly? Well, because I think he knew that they would find out anyway, because they have all of Glenn Greenwald’s email, phone records and everything else, and they can very quickly find out who he was speaking to and whether Snowden had contact with him. And that—you know, I speak as reporter—is terrifying, because it essentially shuts down any ability to counter the official propaganda and the official narrative and expose the crimes. And we have seen in the last few years tremendous crimes being committed by those in power. We have no ability now to investigate them.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Stone, let me ask you about whether the reporters from The Guardian and The Washington Post should be prosecuted. CNN’s Anderson Cooper put this question to Republican Congressmember Peter King of New York last night.

ANDERSON COOPER: As far as reporters who helped reveal these programs, do you believe something should happen to them? Do you believe they should be punished, as well?

REP. PETER KING: Actually, if they—if they willingly knew that this was classified information, I think actions should be taken, especially on something of this magnitude. I know that the whole issue of leaks has been gone into over the last month, but I think something on this magnitude, there is an obligation, both moral but also legal, I believe, against a reporter disclosing something which would so severely compromise national security.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Stone, your response to what Peter King is saying?

GEOFFREY STONE: He’s just wrong. The Supreme Court, in the Pentagon Papers case, for example, made very clear that although Daniel Ellsberg could be prosecuted for—as a public official stealing information, that The New York Times and The Washington Post could not be restrained from publishing that information. The court has essentially held that although the government can control classified information at its source by prohibiting employees from revealing it, once the information goes out, it cannot then punish the press for publishing it. It’s a little bit odd as a system. But the idea is that, on the one hand, we have freedom of the press, which has to be preserved; on the other hand, the government has a legitimate interest in maintaining confidentiality at the source within the government itself. So, no, clearly, Greenwald and Reuters and so on, none of those can be — The Guardian, none of those can be punished, consistent with the First Amendment. That’s clear.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Stone, so do you believe that Edward Snowden’s position is comparable to Daniel Ellsberg’s position with the Pentagon Papers and that The Guardian played a comparable role to The New York Times?

GEOFFREY STONE: So, I think Snowden’s position, based upon what I know now, is much worse. Ellsberg revealed historical information that had really no appreciable threat to the national security. It was all old information about what the government had done in the past. And what Snowden has revealed is information about ongoing programs, which, we’re told, are extremely important to the national security, and we’re told that the revelation of those programs makes them far less efficient. That’s a very serious—potentially very serious harm to the nation. That was not the case in Ellsberg’s situation.

AMY GOODMAN: But, Professor Stone—

GEOFFREY STONE: So I think, from that standpoint, what—

AMY GOODMAN: Henry Kissinger said—

GEOFFREY STONE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —Dan Ellsberg was "the most dangerous man in America," so they certainly—at that time, they were telling us that what he was doing was threatening national security.

GEOFFREY STONE: He said that at the time before they had an opportunity to really reflect on what was released. Years later, or even weeks later, that was no longer the case. So, I think that those two situations are not remotely comparable, in terms of the harm that Ellsberg did to the country, which I think was trivial, relative to what Snowden has done, which arguably is far more serious.

Let me make another point about civil liberties here, by the way, that it’s extremely important to understand that if you want to protect civil liberties in this country, you not only have to protect civil liberties, you also have to protect against terrorism, because what will destroy civil liberties in this country more effectively than anything else is another 9/11 attack. And if the government is not careful about that, and if we have more attacks like that, you can be sure that the kind of things the government is doing now are going to be regarded as small potatoes compared to what would happen in the future. So it’s very complicated, asking what’s the best way to protect civil liberties in the United States.

CHRIS HEDGES: I just don’t buy this argument that, you know, this hurts national security. I covered al-Qaeda for The New York Times, and, believe me, they know they’re being monitored. The whole idea that somehow it comes as a great surprise to jihadist groups that their emails, websites and phone calls are being tracked is absurd. This is—we’re talking about the wholesale collection of information on virtually most of the American public, and the consequences of that are truly terrifying. At that point, we are in essence snuffing out the capacity of any kind of investigation into the inner workings of power. And to throw out this notion that it harmed—this harmed national security, there’s no evidence for that, in the same way that there is no evidence that the information that Bradley Manning leaked in any way harmed national security. It didn’t. What the security and surveillance state is doing is playing on fear and using that fear to accrue to themselves tremendous forms of power that in a civil society, in a democracy, they should never have. And that’s the battle that’s underway right now, and, frankly, we’re losing.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Professor Stone, to reflect on Martin Luther King’s letter from Birmingham jail written April 16, 1963, when he said, "One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law." ... Could you respond to that?

GEOFFREY STONE: Sure. Obviously, King is right. The question is whether it’s an unjust law. So, people who violate a law because they think it is unjust don’t necessarily fit within the letter from the Birmingham jail. King was talking about protesting racial segregation, and that’s a little bit different in terms of the moral status of it. Now, maybe it’s true. I mean, maybe Chris Hedges is right, and maybe that—that Snowden is a hero, and maybe this is all a fraud on the part of the government, this information serves no useful purpose, and it’s fundamentally important to the United States that it’s been revealed. Maybe that’s true. And if it turns out to be true, then I’ll be the first to say Snowden was a hero. But at the moment, I have absolutely no reason to believe that. And to say that some people act on legitimate conscience and therefore violate unjust laws is not to say that everyone who violates a law is Martin Luther King in the Birmingham jail.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to put that question to Chris, but I wanted to ask you, Geoffrey Stone, if you were Edward Snowden’s attorney, what arguments would you put forward for him right now?

GEOFFREY STONE: Legally, I don’t think he has—honestly, I don’t think he has any legal arguments that would be a defense to the charge that he violated the law about government contractors not disclosing classified information to persons who are not authorized to receive it. I don’t think he has a defense. Some people commit a crime, and they committed the crime. And I don’t know that there’s any defense sometimes.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, Dan Ellsberg faced treason trial, but ultimately, the—he ended up being exonerated because of the illegal wiretapping that was done of him.

GEOFFREY STONE: Well, he wasn’t exonerated. In his case, the judge dropped the charges against him because the Nixon administration searched his psychiatrist’s office in violation of the Constitution, and the judge concluded that that was prosecutorial misconduct, and therefore dismissed the prosecution. If the government does something similar in Snowden’s case and the court finds that it’s a violation of his constitutional rights in the course of the investigation and dismisses the charges, that would be something, as his lawyer, I’d certainly want to know. But on the merits of the charge as they presently—as it presently stands, I think it’s a sentencing question, not a criminality question.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges, if you could respond to the King quote and the significance of what Snowden did?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, without figures like Snowden, without figures like Manning, without figures like Julian Assange, essentially, the blinds are drawn. We have no window into what’s being done in our name, including the crimes that are being done in our name. Again, I—you know, having worked as an investigative reporter, the lifeblood of my work were figures like these, who had the moral courage to stand up and name the crimes that they witnessed. And these people are always, at the moment that they stand up—and even King, of course, was persecuted and reviled and denounced, hounded by J. Edgar Hoover, who attempted, through blackmail, to get him to commit suicide before accepting the Nobel Prize. Let’s not forget that all of these figures, like Snowden, come under this character assassination, which, frankly, I think Professor Stone is engaging in. And that’s not uncommon. That’s what comes with the territory when you carry out an act of conscience. It’s a very lonely and frightening—and it makes these figures, like Snowden, deeply courageous, because, I mean, the whole debate—traitor or whistleblower—for me, you know, hearing this on the press is watching the press commit collective suicide, because without those figures, there is no press.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end with Professor Stone. You were an early adviser to President Obama. You gave him his first job at University of Chicago Law School. You were the dean of the University of Chicago Law School. What would you advise him today?

GEOFFREY STONE: I think there needs to be a really careful re-evaluation of the classification system. I—there’s no question that we wildly overclassify, and that creates all sorts of problems, both for the press and for the ability of the government to keep secrets, because if you try to keep everything secret, you don’t effectively keep very much secret. So I think that’s critical. I think there is a serious question about how we make the trade-off between security and privacy, and I think that that’s an issue that needs to be addressed carefully. Certainly, within the administration and within the government, to the extent there are genuinely secret policies that need to be kept secret, and I believe that perfectly possible, then I think that does not immunize them from serious debate by responsible people within the four corners of the administration, bringing in people who can have national security clearances to take the devil’s advocate position and challenge these issues. So I think there’s a lot that can and should be done, and I think that it’s easy to get swept up in the notion of security being the be all and end all. This is a nation that’s committed to individual privacy, to freedom of the press, to freedom of speech, and those values need to be respected. And I think government constantly has to be re-examining itself, because all the temptations are in the wrong direction.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Geoffrey Stone, before we conclude, I’d like to ask you about an article you wrote in 2011 for The New York Times called "Our Untransparent President." You wrote, quote, "The record of the Obama administration on this fundamental issue of American democracy has surely fallen short of expectations. This is a lesson in 'trust us.' Those in power are always certain that they themselves will act reasonably, and they resist limits on their own discretion. The problem is, 'trust us' is no way to run a self-governing society," end-quote. What’s your assessment of the comments that you made then relative to now and his—Obama’s record on transparency and civil liberties?

GEOFFREY STONE: Well, I think the comment was correct then, and I think it’s correct today. I think that there’s a temptation on the part of public officials to basically say, "We don’t to be hassled, we don’t want to be bothered, we don’t want to be criticized, so we’ll just do what’s in the best interest of the country, and we don’t have to tell anybody about it." And that’s a huge danger in a democracy. And—but the fact that I accept that and passionately believe it does not mean that everything the government does in confidence and in secret should not be in confidence or in secret. The problem is where to draw the line.

So, yes, I would criticize the Obama administration, in general, for being overly concerned with secrecy and not being sufficiently transparent. The point I made earlier about overclassification is a good example. But at the same time, I do recognize that there are situations in which secrecy is critical, and the problem is being able to discern when that’s necessary and when it’s not. And to do that, you need to have people within the debate who are internally challenging the necessity for secrecy and confidentiality. I don’t think the Obama administration has done a very good job of that.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges, just 30 seconds, and I know that you were attending the Bradley Manning trial, but linking the two.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, we’re talking about the death of a free press, the death of a civil society. This is far beyond a reasonable debate. We make the East German Stasi state look like the Boy Scouts. And if we don’t wrest back this power for privacy, for the capacity to investigate what our power elite is doing, I think we can essentially say our democracy has been snuffed out.

 

 

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Media  

AlterNet / By Lynn Stuart Parramore

9 COMMENTS

Why Does the NYT Refrain from Explaining the Predatory Motives of a Billionaire-Backed Think Tank?

 

By concealing the Peterson Institute's ideological bias, the paper of record is muddling the record. 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

 

 

 

May 27, 2013  |  

 

 

One of the all-time greatest hits of right-wing pundits is the insistence on a “liberal bias” in the media. Journalist and historian Eric Alterman exposed this myth in his 2003 book, What Liberal Media? yet it persists, often resulting in mainstream media outlets caving to a strategy known as “working the refs,” in which shrill cries of bias cause journalists and pundits to privilege right-leaning perspectives so they won’t be accused.

A disturbing example of this trend haunts the pages of the New York Times, in which the pernicious work of the decidedly right-wing Peter G. Peterson Institute is treated as ideologically unbiased while that of other organizations across the spectrum are consistently mentioned along with an ideological tag; often one designed to misguide readers on the actual nature of the organization’s agenda.
Let’s take a tour of the NYT archives.

When the Koch-backed Cato Institute is mentioned, the label “libertarian” tends to appear. An article about Ben Bernanke’s stance on China’s currency undervaluation, for example, tells us that “speakers at a conference in Washington, organized by the libertarian Cato Insitute warned that the Fed’s monetary policy could lead to asset-price bubbles….” The ideological tag alerts the reader to take the assertion with a grain of salt. The obviously right-wing Heritage Foundation is usually tag-less and never characterized as “right-leaning,” but occasionally the term “conservative” will appear when it is mentioned.

The Obama-supporting Center for American Progress is alternatively described as “liberal” or “center left” as in this article: “The center-left Center for American Progress opened in 2003 when the Democrats were in political exile.” The Institute for Policy Studies is called a “left-leaning think tank in Washington.” (AlterNet, on the rare occasion it is mentioned, is described as a “left-leaning news site.”)

Third Way, a big money front group whose governing board is totally dominated by Wall Street financiers, is absurdly characterized as a “moderately left-wing think tank,” when in fact, as Bill Black has pointed out, it is dedicated to a right-wing agenda of shredding the social safety net and imposing self-destructive austerity on America.

Which brings us to the case of the Peter G. Peterson Institute, which backs Third Way. Pete Peterson, the founder and principal doner of this “policy center” is a conservative Republican billionaire who made his money as a Wall Street hedge fund manager and served as secretary of commerce under President Richard Nixon. He has devoted himself and his billions to promoting deficit hysteria and convincing the public that programs like Social Security and Medicare will destroy the economy. His economic policies come from the far right and his organization is dedicated to producing propaganda masquerading as serious research. He has a huge and well-paid staff (and one of them will be contacting me after the publication of this article attempting to brow-beat me into telling lies about their boss).

The mythology promoted by Peterson has done incalculable harm to America. His belief in the absurd efficient market theory, in which financial markets magically regulate themselves, has helped produce widespread and continuing fraud epidemics. He has consistently pushed austerity (based, as we now know, on the discredited research of Harvard economists Reinhart and Rogoff) which has led to job loss, economic stagnation and untold misery for millions.
Yet something interesting happens when you type Peterson Institute” into the
New York Timesonline archives. Nowhere do you see the phrase “right-leaning.” When you do see a descriptor at all, it’s one of praise – Adam Davidson of the NYT Magazine, always eager to show off his affection for economic quacks, refers to the Peterson Institute as a “prominent Washington policy group.” The fact that the Peterson Institute never receives an ideogical tag conveys that its positions are neutral, and therefore highly credible.
Which is absolute bunk.

On Saturday, May 25, the NYT ran a front-page story purporting to examine a new trend in Chinese economic policy, a topic of great importance to readers. Quotations in the article come from bank officials, a Chinese government website, politicians, and exactly one think tank representative, Nicholas R. Lardy, “a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and an authority on the Chinese economy.” The reader is not informed that the positions of the Peterson Institute will tend to include free market fundamentalist economic theories that focus on discrediting economic stimulus, driving down wages and curbing regulation. All of these positions appear in the article, without any counterweight.

For what many people still consider the paper of record, this kind of reporting merely muddles the record and allows propaganda to disguise itself as truth.

Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of 'Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.' She received her Ph.d in English and Cultural Theory from NYU, where she has taught essay writing and semiotics. She is the Director of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.