Here are some recent and classic Daily Show clips regarding CNN’s form of “journalism.” Enjoy.
Jon Stewart on the recent CNN ratings woes:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| CNN Hires Erick Erickson | ||||
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CNN and fact-checking:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| CNN Leaves It There | ||||
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From outrage about ACORN to the recent so-called controversy over school children singing songs about President Obama, right wing media (and politicians) in America are certainly the most hypocritical, dishonest and hyperbolic people in the country. And rather than seeing this truism expressed and exposed on mainstream news networks, we instead see The Daily Show with Jon Stewart doing the real work of journalism. Watch the clip:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| America: Target America | ||||
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Project Censored has released its latest top 25 stories of 2008-09 that you won’t find in mainstream media. Project Censored is a media research group affiliated with Sonoma State University’s Sociology of Media and Sociology of Censorship classes and other independent groups. According to its website:
Project Censored’s principle objective is training of SSU students in media research and First Amendment issues and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States. Project Censored has trained over 1,500 students in investigative research in the past three decades.
Through a partnership of faculty, students, and the community, Project Censored conducts research on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media. Each year, Project Censored publishes a ranking of the top 25 most censored nationally important news stories in the yearbook, Censored: Media Democracy in Action, which is released in September. Recent Censored books have been published in Spanish, Italian and Arabic.[....]
In our view, the only valid justification for declining a news story is that in a medium limited by time and space, another news story was simply more important to the people of the community, whether local, national or international. While admittedly a subjective process, it is nonetheless, a process to be undertaken by the news people themselves (the investigative journalists and editors), NOT by the managers and CEOs of their “parent company.” No professional journalist or researcher should ever have to face the destruction of his or her career (or life) simply because they wanted to tell the truth. While no two people will always agree on what story is more important than another, a system where the working reporters and editors run the newsroom would at least provide a fertile environment for debate, dissent and critical thinking.
The growth of independent media and journalism in recent years shows that people throughout the world yearn to hold not only their leaders accountable, but their media sources as well. For that reason, the Project Censored research program continues, in its small way, to support and highlight those who tell the truth about the powerful (no matter the consequences) and are relentless in their quest to hold Big Media accountable for their decisions.
If you care about these issues, then Project Censored is certainly an organization that deserves our support.
Here’s a list of the top 25 stories of 2008-09 not mentioned by the mainstream media:
It’s funny how certain sections of the American public, with the help of mainstream media of course, are now so outraged by the actions of a handful of ACORN employees that Congress is now bravely cutting off all funding for this already underfunded, inconsequential organization. Yet the recent — nearly invisible — actions in Kabul by morons working for the private military contractor ArmorGroup, being paid far greater sums of American taxpayer dollars than anything dreamed of by ACORN, have been dismissed by the same media as little more than the exploits of silly boys letting off a little steam. Sure a few will be fired, but have a look for yourself:
Let’s put the whole issue into perspective. ACORN, a non-profit, grass-roots organization that represents poor Americans has received a mere $53 million in federal funds since 1994, while these douchbag contractors from ArmorGroup are the recipients of a $189 million 5-year contract to defend the US embassy in Kabul. That comes to $3.5 million a year for ACORN as opposed to nearly $38 million per year for ArmorGroup. Where’s the outrage? Barely a peep is heard.
One of the more obvious problems stemming from the government’s need for contractors like ArmorGroup — a relatively minor player in the realm of private military contractors — is that, given the US government’s commitment to the military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon must rely on these sorts of for-profit corporations to fulfil the work and procedures once handled by the US military.
It’s so bad that actions like those pictured above must go un-addressed. There’s little the Pentagon can do, even though they have had multiple problems with ArmorGroup. The New York Times recently discussed this issue:
The troubles with the ArmorGroup contract, and the State Department’s frustrated dealings with the company over two years and through two administrations, illustrate how the government has become dependent on the private security companies that work in war zones, and has struggled to manage companies that themselves are sometimes loosely run and do not always play by the government’s rules.
With a stretched military, the government relies on the security companies themselves to vet, train, and discipline the guards, all at the lowest cost.
“It’s expensive for the State Department to withdraw a contract from one company, rebid the project and award it to a new one,” said Janet Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who represents one of the ArmorGroup whistleblowers. “So businesses know that once they get a contract, State may ding them around a little bit, but it’s not going to fire them.”
The perils of this reliance were most graphically illustrated in Iraq in 2007, when security guards from another contractor, Blackwater, were involved in shootings that left 17 civilians dead on a Baghdad street. But interviews and documents show that the ArmorGroup affair, in its mundane, unsavory details, offers perhaps a more representative look inside the troubled relationship between contractors and the government in war zones.
Well I guess someone had to say it. In the chorus of blaming the internet and economic stagnation on what can only be seen as the downfall of modern newspapers, very few in the mainstream have pointed to the quality of the newspapers themselves as being ultimately responsible. David Sirota has recently done that:
The most preventable tragedy was the deterioration of quality. Downsized local publications were all but forced to rely on more national content, but that content didn’t have to become so vapid.
Beltway scribes didn’t have to miss the Iraq war lies or the predictive signs of the Wall Street meltdown. Election correspondents weren’t compelled to devote four times the coverage to the tactical insignifica of campaigns than to candidates’ positions and records, as the Project for Excellence in Journalism found. Business reporters didn’t need to give corporate spokespeople twice the space in articles as they did workers and unions, as a Center for American Progress report documents. National editors weren’t obligated to focus on “elevat(ing) the most banal doings” in the White House to “breaking news,” as the New York Times recently noted.
Here is yet another classic media critique by The Daily Show, this time they take on Rick Santelli and CNBC:
For a more in depth analysis of the segment see Ryan Chittum’s blog at Columbia Journalism Review. Chittum admits that the clips used by Stewart are selective, but there is still an important aspect to overall critical assessment of CNBC business reporting:
[W]hat makes this [segment] so interesting is what Stewart does to pierce the CNBC bubble on several different things that make the network so disliked by business journalists generally: Its lack of a line between opinion and reporting (and lack of disclosure about who’s a reporter and who’s not). Its Siamese-twin closeness to Wall Street. Its rah-rah rooting for the stock markets. Its inanity in interviews that too often veers into sycophancy. On the other hand, if there is a discomfort among the business reporters with CNBC, it might be because the network’s bad practices are only extreme manifestations of wider cultural problems in their profession.
While the mainstream media devote hours of analysis to lipstick-gate, they continue to accept without question the Bush and McCain claim that the surge in Iraq has been a success. One doesn’t have to look far to find example after example of this being put forward as a self-apparent truism. The logic behind the reporting is little more than, “Look, the violence is down, therefore the surge has worked.” Forget the over-arching goal of the surge was to bring about political reconciliation between the conflicting groups in Iraq. In reality, the political situation is worse than ever. As Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress writes:
The greatest myth promoted by Bush in his speech [at the National Defense University] was found in this line: “Political reconciliation is moving forward, and the Iraqi government has passed several major pieces of legislation.” By overstating the meagre steps taken by Iraq’s leaders in barely passing a few relatively insignificant laws in their parliament, Bush’s statement ranks right up there with his 2003 “mission accomplished” speech and vice-president Dick Cheney’s assertion that the insurgency was in its “last throes” in 2005.
Katulis continues:
The surge has frozen into place the accelerated fragmentation that Iraq underwent in 2006 and 2007 and has created disincentives to bridge central divisions between Iraqi factions. Moreover, rather than advancing Iraq’s political transition and facilitating power-sharing deals among Iraq’s factions, the surge has produced an oil revenue-fuelled, Shia-dominated national government with close ties to Iran. This national government shows few signs of seeking to compromise and share meaningful power with other frustrated political factions.
So much for political reconciliation. Rather than furthering steps toward some form of power sharing, the surge has solidified the divisions unleashed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But McCain, Bush, and the media will inevitably make the case that at least the surge has reduced violence. This is the core of the “surge worked” hypothesis, yet it rests on a basic logical fallacy. Just because Y came after X, it doesn’t follow that X caused Y. Professor Juan Cole recently pointed this out with regards to media commentary on the surge.
The reality is far more complex than this simplistic narrative. An important factor to declining levels of violence was the so-called Sunni Awakening movement in Anbar province in which the US allied with, armed, and paid Sunni insurgents to fight Al-Qaeda. But this began before the surge, and there is no reason to believe this strategy required an increased troop level. Cole agrees:
In al-Anbar Province, among the more violent in Iraq in earlier years, the bribing of former Sunni guerrillas to join US-sponsored Awakening Councils had a big calming effect. This technique could have been used much earlier than 2006, indeed, could have been deployed from 2003, and might have forestalled large numbers of deaths. Condi Rice forbade US military officers from dealing in this way with the Sunnis for fear of alienating US Shiite allies such as Ahmad Chalabi. The technique was independent of the troop escalation. Indeed, it depended on there not being much of a troop escalation in that province. Had large numbers of US soldiers been committed to simply fight the Sunnis or engage in search and destroy missions, they would have stirred up and reinforced the guerrilla movement.
An additional reason for the reduced violence in Iraq has been the unilateral cease-fire of the Mahdi Army ordered by Moqtada al-Sadr. Gen. Patraeus even admits this fact, stating that the “Sadr trend stands for service to the people,” and that he hopes Sadr’s organization will become “constructive partners in the way ahead.” While Patraeus would like to see the cease-fire as a result of the surge, the reality is again more complicated. Cole sees the successful ethnic cleansing of Baghdad – in which it has become a mostly Shiite city with almost no mixed communities and others separated by walls – as an important reason for the Mahdi Army’s cessation of hostilities because this was one of their major aims. As well, their pro-Iranian Shiite rivals, which include the Iraqi state, were becoming much more powerful militarily in relation to Moqtada al-Sadr’s organization.
Ethnic cleansing in Iraq points to a darker aspect of the surge, in which what so many call “success” is the result of brutality and violence. Robert Parry also makes this point:
With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society has been deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout history, at some point violent repression does work.
But this dark side of the “successful surge” is excluded from the U.S. political debate. As during the pre-invasion period, the Washington press corps acts more like Bush’s propagandists than anything close to skeptical journalists.
Instead media commentators waste our time with meaningless questions and speculation about what Barack Obama actually meant when making a comment about lipstick on a pig. Well all I can say, at least there are alternatives to the he-said-she-said style of reporting that passes for journalism and analysis. The following video is a commentary by Aijaz Ahmad from TheRealNews.com. It was originally broadcast following Bush’s State of the Union address in early 2008. Ahmad covers some of the issues I mention above and provides compelling reasons to question much of the conventional wisdom.
Some of you might remember way back in late 2001 the widespread reports of Al-Qaeda’s vast and sophisticated cave complex in Afghanistan. We were led to believe bin Laden used his family’s construction enterprise to build a high-tech underground compound with “its own ventilation system and its own power, created by a hydro-electric generator. Its walls and floors are smooth and finished, and it extends about 315m beneath a solid mountain.” The article, written by Richard Lloyd Parry writing with the Independent (London) at the time, goes on to claim:
It is so well defended and concealed that – short of poison gas or a tactical nuclear weapon – it is completely immune to outside attack. And it is filled with heavily armed followers of Osama bin Laden, with a suicidal commitment to their cause, and with nothing left to lose.
Scary stuff indeed. Sounds like the lair of an evil genius from an Ian Fleming novel. The cave story was quickly picked up by other news outlets, though certain details changed – was the complex built by the bin Laden family or the US government in the 80s for the mujahideen fight against the Soviets? Journalist Edward Jay Epstein details how the story spread and finally reached its pinnacle in the US when the late Tim Russert unquestioningly accepted it as fact during an interview with Donald Rumsfeld on Meet the Press.
The following clip is from Adam Curtis’ excellent three-part documentary The Power of Nightmares, originally broadcast on the BBC in 2004. I highly recommend this film to anyone who hasn’t seen it. It’s (legally) available online for download or streaming at Archive.org. The clip begins with part of the interview with Rumsfeld on Meet the Press. Note how the former Secretary of Defense states matter-of-factly that there are many such complexes in the Afghan mountains, going beyond claims made in the original reports.
Curtis exposes how this was little more than blatant propaganda used to incite fear, to make the mostly British and American public think Al-Qaeda was indeed a grave threat that needed eradicating. This wasn’t some rag-tag bunch of terrorists with little support, these were advanced extremists that could only be handled with high tech weapons and massive military force. And it worked. This is at least in part how – with other similar stories – the US government justified increased military spending on advanced weaponry following 911, even though the perpetrators used box cutters and a little flight training to achieve the attack. The message and purpose was clear: we should simply cower in fear while allowing our leaders to protect us against such a tremendous threat, all the while expanding the military industrial complex.
Nice video from the Daily Show:
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.Rick Davis, a long-time Washington lobbyist and currently John McCain’s campaign manager, recently told The Washington Post, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” It was a somewhat rare and candid admission by a high level party operative to how the political process actually operates in the United States. While Davis’ comments might seem specific to this election, both major parties have for years preferred to avoid real issues – universal health care, the militaristic state, corporate crime and domination, a growing prison-industrial complex, to name a few – instead choosing to emphasize the personal qualities and style of candidates, especially when it comes to presidential elections. As in advertising, which permeates American’s consumerist culture, the PR surrounding political campaigns is more about feelings and emotions, faith and brand identity than it is about the issues most important to the public.
Mainstream media coverage plays right along with the charade. In fact, it is the perfect vehicle for the branding of hollow political figures. Talk mostly revolves around questions like “Did he or she win over the public with this or that speech?” “How was the presentation?” “Does he come across as an elitist?” And on and on. It’s simple pundit-driven “journalism,” easy to produce, providing the illusion of substance while serving corporate masters.
When public opinion conflicts with elite interests, the public is silenced. Those seeking office know who their paymasters are, and if any issue supported by large portions of the population but opposed by corporate power gets through media filters, it is framed in such a way to be stripped of any substance. For example, take universal health care. For years large majorities of the American public have been in favor of it. So large in fact it can’t be ignored or easily swept under the rug. Ever since Bill Clinton – who was elected in large part for proposing universal coverage – eventually bowed to the insurance industry and HMOs and failed to make the necessary changes, any and all subsequent reform proposals, if even made, only give lip service to the idea of health care for all while doing everything to avoid making the real changes necessary.
Such is politics and democracy in America, a corporate friendly environment indeed.
Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has a slightly different take on this subject than I do. Where I see the depoliticization of politics as a much more bipartisan issue, he points to the Republicans as the main culprits:
Ever since Ronald Reagan’s election, this is what the Republicans do every four years. They render issues irrelevant and convert campaigns into cultural wars and personality referenda. They converted our elections into tawdry reality shows long before networks realized their entertainment value. And every four years, Democrats seems shocked and paralyzed by all of this and desperately delude themselves into believing that mean-spirited “negativity” and nastiness will alienate voters, while the media swoons at the potency of these attacks.
While he certainly is correct in his assessment of the GOP’s approach, it seems to me one of the reasons the Democrats cave in is because they are unwilling to push a truly democratic, issues-based politics to the fore. Basically limited to rhetorical promises at best, Democrats are easily exposed as the hollow populists most of the country sees them to be. You see, they play the corporate game as well, which limits the depth and reach their campaigns can actually go.
Greenwald takes the stance of a “realist,” which is understandable. He knows that “cultural tribalism, resentment and alienation are very powerful influences in how people think.” This is certainly true, but is the most effective response more tribalism, more attacks, an increased focus on qualities and style? I doubt Greenwald thinks so. But it’s not so clear what he proposes the Democrats should do. He rightly deplores the empty, personal attack strategy of the GOP, and calls for a more combative (defensive?) approach:
Democrats have clearly decided (yet again) to cede that lowly playing field to the GOP and are hoping (yet again) that those personality and cultural issues are not enough to outweigh the country’s dislike of Republican policies…. If John McCain remains — even from the mouths of Democrats — the Honored, Honorable, Principled, Heroic Maverick, the GOP chances will be as high as they can be.
As I see it, what is needed to win is not more attention to personality and qualities, but rather a greater focus on the fundamental changes we know are needed. But the liberal wing of the corporate power structure will never be able to go that far.
