Understanding Prejudice

While taking this survey remember how the US is preaching to everyone that it was formed from Christian principles. Tom

I have found this to be a very educational survey to take if taken with an open mind, click here

Is the Fourth Estate a Fifth Column?

Corporate media colludes with democracy’s demise

Without a free and independent press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-government will not make it. As journalism goes, so goes democracy

I heard this story a long time ago, growing up in Choctaw County in Oklahoma before my family moved to Texas. A tribal elder was telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself. He said, “It is between two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”
The boy took this in for a few minutes and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf won?”
The old Cherokee replied simply, “The one I feed.”
Democracy is that way. The wolf that wins is the one we feed. And in our society, media provides the fodder.
Our media institutions, deeply embedded in the power structures of society, are not providing the information that we need to make our democracy work. To put it another way, corporate media consolidation is a corrosive social force. It robs people of their voice in public affairs and pollutes the political culture. And it turns the debates about profound issues into a shouting match of polarized views promulgated by partisan apologists who trivialize democracy while refusing to speak the truth about how our country is being plundered.
Our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders.
These organizations’ self-styled mandate is not to hold public and private power accountable, but to aggregate their interlocking interests. Their reward is not to help fulfill the social compact embodied in the notion of “We, the people,” but to manufacture news and information as profitable consumer commodities.
Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent at the same time that it enhances the power of the state and the privileged interests that the state protects. And nothing characterizes corporate media today more than its disdain toward the fragile nature of modern life and its indifference toward the complex social debate required of a free and self-governing people.
Let’s look at what is happening with the Internet. This spring the cable giant Comcast tried to pack a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hearing on network neutrality by hiring strangers off the street to ensure that advocates of net neutrality would not be able to get a seat in the hearing room.
SaveTheInternet.com — a bipartisan coalition — and its supporters helped expose the ruse. Soon after, there was a new hearing, this time without the gerrymandering seating by opponents of an open Internet.
Now Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has introduced a bill to advance network neutrality, and it has become an issue in the presidential campaign.
We must be vigilant. The fate of the cyber-commons — the future of the mobile Web and the benefits of the Internet as open architecture — is up for grabs. And the only antidote to the power of organized money in Washington is the power of organized people at the net roots.
When Verizon tried to censor NARAL’s (National Abortion Rights Action League) use of text messaging last year, it was quick action by Save the Internet that led the company to reverse its position. Those efforts also led to an FCC proceeding on this issue.
Wherever the Internet flows — on PCs, cell phones, mobile devices and, very soon, new digital television sets — we must ensure that it remains an open and nondiscriminatory medium of expression.
By 2011, the market analysts tell us, the Internet will surpass newspapers in advertising revenues. With MySpace and Dow Jones controlled by News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft determined to acquire Yahoo!, and with advertisers already telling some bloggers, “Your content is unacceptable,” we could potentially lose what’s now considered an unstoppable long tail of content offering abundant, new, credible and sustainable sources of news and information.
So, what will happen to news in the future, as the already tattered boundaries between journalism and advertising is dispensed with entirely and as content programming, commerce and online communities are rolled into one profitably attractive package?
Last year, the investment firm of Piper Jaffray predicted that much of the business model for new media would be just that kind of hybrid. They called it “communitainment.” (Oh, George Orwell, where are you now that we need you?)
Across the media landscape, the health of our democracy is imperiled. Buffeted by gale force winds of technological, political and demographic forces, without a truly free and independent press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-government will not make it. As journalism goes, so goes democracy.
Mergers and buyouts change both old and new media. They bring a frenzied focus on cost-cutting, while fattening the pockets of the new owners and their investors. The result: journalism is degraded through the layoffs and buyouts of legions of reporters and editors.
Advertising Age reports that U.S. media employment has fallen to a 15-year low. The Los Angeles Times alone has experienced a withering series of resignations by editors who refused to turn a red pencil into an editorial scalpel.
The new owner of the Tribune Company, real estate mogul Sam Zell, recently toured his new property Los Angeles Times, telling employees in the newsroom that the challenge is this: How do we get somebody 126 years old to get it up? “Well,” said Zell, “I’m your Viagra.”
He told his journalists that he didn’t have an editorial agenda or a perspective about newspapers’ roles as civic institutions. “I’m a businessman,” he said. “All what matters in the end is the bottom line.”
Zell then told Wall Street analysts that to save money he intends to eliminate 500 pages of news a week across all of the Tribune Company’s 12 papers. That can mean eliminating some 82 editorial pages every week just from the Los Angeles Times. What will he use to replace reporters and editors? He says to the Wall Street analysts, “I’ll use maps, graphics, lists, rankings and stats.” Sounds as if Zell has confused Viagra with Lunesta.
Former Baltimore Sun journalist and creator of HBO’s The Wire, David Simon, chronicled the effect that crosscutting and consolidation has had in media businesses and on the communities where those businesses have made so much money. He wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, “I did not encounter a sustained period in which anyone endeavored to spend what it would actually cost to make the Baltimore Sun the most essential and deep-thinking and well-written account of life in central Maryland. The people you needed to gather for that kind of storytelling were ushered out the door, buyout after buyout.”
Or as journalist Eric Alterman recently wrote in the New Yorker: “It is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know.”
For example, we needed to know the truth about Iraq. The truth could have spared that country from rack and ruin, saved thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and freed hundreds of billions of dollars for investment in the American economy and infrastructure.
But as reporters at Knight Ridder — one of the few organizations that systematically and independently set out to challenge the claims of the administration — told us at the time, and as my colleagues and I reported in our PBS documentary Buying the War, and as Scott McClellan has now confessed, and as the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed in June, the Bush administration deceived Americans into supporting an unprovoked war on another country. And it did so using erroneous and misleading intelligence — and with the complicity of the dominant media. It has led to a conflict that, instead of being over quickly and bloodlessly as predicted, continues to this day into its sixth year.
We now know that a neoconservative is an arsonist who sets a house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it out. You couldn’t find a more revealing measure of the state of the dominant media today than the continuing ubiquitous presence on the air and in print of the very pundits and experts, self-selected message multipliers of a disastrous foreign policy, who got it all wrong in the first place. It just goes to show, when the bar is low enough, you can never be too wrong.
The dominant media remains in denial about their role in passing on the government’s unverified claims as facts. That’s the great danger. It’s not simply that they dominate the story we tell ourselves publicly every day. It’s that they don’t allow other alternative competing narratives to emerge, against which the people could measure the veracity of all the claims.
Now the dominant media is saying, “Well, we did ask. We did do our job by asking tough questions during the run-up to the war.”
But I’ve been through the transcripts. And I’ll tell you, you will find very few tough questions. And if you come across them, you will discover that they were asked of the wrong people.
John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for McClatchy, formerly Knight Ridder, recently said of his colleagues in the dominant media, “They asked a lot of questions, but they asked even the right questions of the wrong people.” They were asked of the sources who had cooked the intelligence books in the first place or who had memorized the White House talking points and were prepared to answer every tough question with a soft evasion or an easy lie, swallowed by a gullible questioner.
Following the March 2003 invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney dropped into a media dinner to thank the guests for their all-the-war-all-the-time coverage of the contrived and manufactured war.
Sadly, in many respects, the Fourth Estate has become the fifth column of democracy, colluding with the powers that be in a culture of deception that subverts the thing most necessary to freedom, and that is the truth.
But we’re not alone and we know what we need to say. So let us all go tell it on the mountains and in the cities. From our websites and laptops, the street corners and coffeehouses, the delis and diners, the factory floors and the bookstores. On campus, at the mall, the synagogue, sanctuary and mosque, let’s tell it where we can, when we can and while we still can.
Democracy only works when ordinary people claim it as their own.
This article was adapted from Bill Moyers’ keynote address at the National Conference for Media Reform Conference in Minneapolis on June 7. You can read and respond to the full speech at http://www.pbs.org/moyers.
Bill Moyers is the president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and the host of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.More information about Bill Moyers

McClellan’s Missile: Media Crimes As War Crimes

When Will US “Journalism” Be Held Accountable for Promoting War?

by Danny Schechter
Duh. The Bush Administration deployed a dishonest but very effective propaganda campaign to sell the Iraq War to the American people on virtually every media outfit. Their “Culture of Deception” is now acknowledged.

How do we know? Scotty McClellan told us so. It’s all in the former Press Secretary’s new book. And, happily, it’s all over the news.

It’s easy to put McClellan down. On the right he’s a traitor. The President dismissed him as “sad.” Karl Rove compared him to a left-wing blogger. Most of the real left-wing bloggers were equally contemptuous suggesting he’s just trying to sell books, some asking: Why did he wait so long? Wasn’t he part of the plot? Is this just the pot calling the kettle black?

Yes, but, at least, he had the courage, these many years later, to confirm what I and other have been saying for years. And he didn’t avoid taking a poke at the media which did the Administration’s job for them by carrying unverified claims as facts, while blocking out any other narrative. To his credit, McClellan called our media “deferential, complicit enablers.”

He’s not the first rat to jump ship and won’t be the last. Think of him like the informants who turn on the mafia. The fact that a high profile former propagandist blew a whistle matters in the same way that it was a former Vietnam strategist named Daniel Ellsberg, who with Anthony Russo, exposed the Pentagon Papers. We all knew the government had lied then, but the Pentagon Papers explained how they did it. (The Papers came out in 1971; the war had been underway since l945.)

Ellsberg was branded a rat too. But without rats, prosecutors can’t get convictions. In Ellsberg’s case, he was the one convicted. Let’s hope that in McClellan’s case, we can get to the real criminals in the dock along with the many who collaborated with them.

To be honest, what’s needed here are not more confessions by political insiders but an actual trial of the perpetrators. This government strategy, and the media coverage that served it, were not just mistakes or lapses in otherwise accurate coverage but crimes with real world consequences. Try a million dead in Iraq, and 4,000 Americans. And counting…

As I and others probed into the daily indifference to Iraqi suffering and the continuing orchestration of pro-war coverage, we came to see the problem not as continuously flawed reporting or even as a series of institutional failures, but in the same way as many whistleblowers tend to view the practices they expose — as a crime.

Given the number of lives lost and the amount of money wasted, these were the moral equivalents of serious felonies. When crimes take place in other settings, eventually government officials step in. As the scandals become public, there are exposés and then prosecutions. In this case, it is the government committing the crime, and the media, in essence, covering it up.

Yes, media crimes rationalize war crimes. Both are shameful and worthy of indictment.

Official scrutiny of media practices rarely happens, partly because of Constitutional protections afforded journalists and media outlets, and partly because wronged parties have little recourse.

It’s hard to fight back against media irresponsibility. Public shaming seems the only response, and its effectiveness depends on whether critics can be heard in the so-called public square. In the case of Iraq, there were 800 experts on all the channels in the run-up to the war. Only 6 opposed the war. No wonder judgments like this are left to historians.

After the Second World War at the Nuremberg Tribunal, American prosecutors wanted to put the German media on trial for promoting Hitler’s policies. State propagandists were condemned. More recently, hate radio was indicted by the Rwanda tribunal investigating the genocide there, while in the former Yugoslavia, Serbian and Croatian TV were criticized for inciting a war that divided that country, encouraging murderous ethnic cleansing.

The principle that media outlets can, for reasons of omission or commission, be held responsible for their role in inflaming conflicts and promoting jingoism, has been well established. Many remember William Randolf Hearst’s famous yellow journalism dictum: “You give me the pictures, I will give you the war.”

In February 2005, Italy hosted the citizens-initiated World Tribunal on Iraq, which put the media “on trial” for its role in selling of the Iraq War. It was of course not covered here. The Tribunal was modeled on an earlier initiative during the Vietnam War by the then-leading international intellectuals Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone du Bouvoir. As a young journalist, I covered their sessions in Stockholm in 1967. I saw it as an act of conscience.

Most of the U.S. media saw it as an exercise in propaganda. Most of the charges they made then about U.S. war crimes are largely corroborated by the historical record even though only a few were reported when they occurred. I still remember watching CBS correspondent Morley Safer filming a stand-up in Stockholm, denouncing the Tribunal. Decades later, his “60 Minutes” returned to the scene of the My-Lai massacre interviewing former US soldiers who charged the U.S. military with the very war crimes Safer had dismissed when it mattered.

Critics today believe the media has covered up war crimes in Iraq, minimized civilian casualties, downplayed the destruction of cities like Fallujah, and misreported the reasons for going to war and how it was conducted. And they are right.

Will any of the “enablers” in TV news, or our leading newspapers, face consequences for their actions? I am not just talking about high profile journalists but their editors, producers, executives and proprietors.

Unlikely.

Many pro-war reports won awards; many of those who engineered the propagandistic “coverage” were promoted. Their patriotically-correct ‘all the war, all the time’ approach raised ratings and revenues. Some were hailed as heroes, critics dismissed as zeros. Dick Cheney even dropped into a post-invasion media dinner to thank them for their service.

Media companies were happily co-opted as embeds while naysayers like Peter Arnett were banished. Later, many reporters were killed and wounded while trying to tell a story that has now largely disappeared from view.

Has there been any outbreak of conscience in newsrooms over the last five years or, more importantly, any commitment to cover Iraq in a less jingoistic manner? Not that I can see, even though there is occasionally some “good” reporting. The title of the book by Editor & Publisher’s Greg Mitchell sums it up: “So Wrong for So Long.”

No wonder many of the outlets abandoning journalism for “mili-tainment” lost viewers and credibility.

So thank you Scotty, whatever your motives, for reopening the debate. (And thank the indy media and a few gutsy websites and mainstreamers for telling the truth.)

Now it’s time to consider potential remedies even if we lack the power to enforce them. Our main media outlets have already been convicted in the global court of public opinion.

News Dissector Danny Schechter made WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception in 2004, a film shown in 40 countries.(Wmdthefilm.com). He wrote two books on media complicity, Embedded (2003) and When News Lies (2006). His latest, PLUNDER is about the financial crisis. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

Is Mainstream Media Biased Towards Israel?

There seems to be such a taboo in the media about anyone or any story that is critical of Israel. Witness the recent attacks on the Obama campaign via activities by his ex-pastor that was considered "Anti-Israel". Remember the vicious treatment that Jimmy Carter got for mentioning the words "Apartheid" and Israel in his book title? Candidate after candidate has to pay lip service and claim his blind allegiance to that state... and why? why is it the "kiss of death" to be critical of Israel.

There seems to be such a taboo in the media about anyone or any story that is critical of Israel. Witness the recent attacks on the Obama campaign via activities by his ex-pastor that was considered "Anti-Israel". Remember the vicious treatment that Jimmy Carter got for mentioning the words "Apartheid" and Israel in his book title? Candidate after candidate has to pay lip service and claim his blind allegiance to that state... and why? why is it the "kiss of death" to be critical of Israel.

Israel is by far the largest recipient of our tax dollar funded foreign aid, shouldn't we able to question the actions of that state? A lot of damage has been done in our name (and at our expense), yet we can't seem to questions anything in public without being castrated as social pariahs... Why is it much easier to criticize Israel in Tel Aviv then it is in Washington DC?

Here is what I know:

- Israel has maintained one of the longest occupations in modern history controlling the fate of over 2 million palestinians

- Israel is the only nuclear country in the area with no open access to their inventory and no signatures on any non-proliferation agreements

- Israel maintains one of the largest concentration camp style prison in the world known as Gaza. And yes, that's exactly what it is if you look at the living conditions of people there.

- Israel maintains an apartheid style system in the West Bank with separate roads and services for different groups.

- Israel continues to deny the right of return to over 2 million refugees spread all over the world for more than 50 years... can you imagine living in shanty towns and tents for over 50 years??

- Israel maintains a racial based system of government based on the failed ideology of Zionism. An ideology that at heart is based on racist nationalism granting rights to one "ethnic" (or is it religious?) group only

- While Israel claims to be living in the constant fear of terrorism, the death ratio of Palestinians vs. Israeli is roughly 13 to 1. Yet, somehow, they are the victims, and our media pushes that notion on us (and we wonder why the world hates us).

- Israel has TWICE invaded its northern neighbor, Lebanon and continues daily violations of its air space. Complaints to the UN are constantly blocked by, guess who?, the USA.

This list can go on longer, but I think I made my point.

So why, knowing all that, it is still a major faux pas for anyone to question our relation with Israel. And please don't give me the "You're an anti-semite" line... Being critical of Israel does not make one an anti-semite or a self hating Jew. Why is it that at a time when the US is heavily involved in a huge mess in the middle east, that our politicians, thinkers, activists, do not dare discussing the issue that is at the heart of the conflict?

So, Is Mainstream Media Biased Towards Israel? Yes