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An Assault From Obama's Escalating War on Journalism Saturday, 31 May 2014 11:08 By Norman Solomon, NormanSolomon.com | Op-Ed font size In a memoir published this year, the CIA's former top legal officer John Rizzo says that on the last day of 2005 a panicky White House tried to figure out how to prevent the distribution of a book by New York Times reporter James Risen. Officials were upset because Risen's book, State of War, exposed what -- in his words -- "may have been one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA." The book told of a bungled CIA attempt to set back Iran's nuclear program in 2000 by supplying the Iranian government with flawed blueprints for nuclear-bomb design. The CIA's tactic might have actually aided Iranian nuclear development. When a bootlegged copy of State of War reached the National Security Council, a frantic meeting convened in the Situation Room, according to Rizzo. "As best anyone could tell, the books were printed in bulk and stacked somewhere in warehouses." The aspiring censors hit a wall. "We arrived at a rueful consensus: game over as far as any realistic possibility to keep the book, and the classified information in it, from getting out." But more than eight years later, the Obama White House is seeking a different form of retribution. The people running the current administration don't want to pulp the book -- they want to put its author in jail. The Obama administration is insisting that Risen name his confidential source -- or face imprisonment. Risen says he won't capitulate. The Freedom of the Press Foundation calls the government's effort to force Risen to reveal a source "one of the most significant press freedom cases in decades." Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg says: "The pursuit of Risen is a warning to potential sources that journalists cannot promise them confidentiality for disclosing Executive Branch criminality, recklessness, deception, unconstitutional policies or lying us into war. Without protecting confidentiality, investigative journalism required for accountability and democracy will wither and disappear." A recent brief from the Obama administration to the nation's top court "is unflinchingly hostile to the idea of the Supreme Court creating or finding protections for journalists," Politico reported. The newspaper added that Risen "might be sent to jail or fined if he refuses to identify his sources or testify about other details of his reporting." This threat is truly ominous. As Ellsberg puts it, "We would know less than we do now about government abuses, less than we need to know to hold officials accountable and to influence policy democratically." So much is at stake: for whistleblowers, freedom of the press and the public's right to know. For democracy. That's why five organizations -- RootsAction.org, The Nation, the Center for Media and Democracy / The Progressive, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) and the Freedom of the Press Foundation -- have joined together to start a campaign for protecting the confidentiality of journalists' sources. So far, in May, about 50,000 people have signed a petition telling President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to end legal moves against Risen. Charging that the administration has launched "an assault on freedom of the press," the petition tells Obama and Holder: "We urge you in the strongest terms to halt all legal action against Mr. Risen and to safeguard the freedom of journalists to maintain the confidentiality of their sources." The online petition -- "We Support James Risen Because We Support a Free Press" -- includes thousands of personal comments from signers. Here's a sampling of what they had to say: "Freedom of the press and freedom of speech are the cornerstones of our democracy. Stop trying to restrict them." Jim T., Colorado Springs, Colorado "Protected sources are essential to a real democracy. Without whistleblowers, there is no truth." Jo Ellen K., San Francisco, California "Enough of the government assault on freedom of the press! Whistleblowers are heroes to the American people." Paul D., Keaau, Hawaii "It seems our government is out of control. The premise of deriving power from the people would appear to be a quaint notion to most within the three branches. Instead they now view us as subjects that must bend to their will rather than the other way around." Gary J., Liberty Township, Ohio "'Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.' -- George Orwell" Todd J., Oxford, Michigan "As a writer, I support freedom of the press around the world as a vital first step toward regaining control of our compromised democracies." Patricia R., Whitehorse, YT, Canada "You promised an open and transparent administration. Please keep that promise." Willard S., Cary, North Carolina "Without a free press, we really have nothing." Robin H., Weehawken, New Jersey "The Obama administration's attack on press freedom is an issue of grave concern. Why are we spending billions of dollars going after supposed 'terrorists' when the greatest threat to democracy resides right here in Washington, DC." Karen D., Detroit, Michigan "Damn you, Obama! You become more like Nixon daily!" Leonard H., Manchester, Michigan "Congratulations, Mr. Risen!" Marian C., Hollister, California "The U.S. is becoming an increasingly frightening place to live, more than a little like a police state. President Obama, you have been a huge disappointment. I expected better from you." Barbara R., Newport, Rhode Island "Come on, President Obama... you're a Constitutional scholar. You know better than this. Knock it off." James S., Burbank, California "There can be no true freedom of the press unless the confidentiality of sources is protected. Without this, no leads, informants or whistleblowers will be motivated to come forward. Reporters should not be imprisoned for doing their job." Chris R., North Canton, Ohio "You took an oath to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,' freedom of the press!" Diane S., San Jose, California "Whatever became of the progressive Obama and the change you promised? Evidently it was a load of campaign bull puckey, making you just another politician who says whatever it takes to get elected. In other words, you and your administration are a complete sham. As for your constitutional scholarship, it would appear to be in the service of undermining the Constitution a la Bush and Cheney." Barry E., Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania "Without a free press, our republic is paper-mache. Remember John Peter Zenger! We must not shoot the messenger -- we must raise the bar for conduct and probity!" Lance K., Chelsea, Massachusetts "A free press is the only counterbalance to crony capitalism, corrupt legislators, and a pitifully partisan Supreme Court, that continues to destroy our Constitutional protections." Dion B., Cathedral City, California "I implore you to RESPECT THE FIRST AMENDMENT." Glen A., Lacey, Washington "Did you not learn in grade school that freedom of the press is essential to a free country?" Joanne D., Colorado Springs, Colorado "We've been down this road before. What amazes me is that we condemn other countries for stifling freedom of the press, then turn around and do the same thing to advance our own purposes. Are we proponents of democracy and a free press or not?" William M., Whittier, California "Journalism is a vital component of a democracy, and it is a core function protected by the freedom of expression enshrined in both international and domestic law. You must stop harassing and persecuting journalists and their sources who are providing a vital public service in prying open the activities of governments that are illegitimately concealed from the public. If the public is not informed of state actions executed in their name, they cannot evaluate and render consent to those actions through the vote. This secrecy therefore subverts democracy, and you must stop using police powers to destroy the whistleblowers who enable government accountability to the public." Jim S., Gatlinburg, Tennessee "I support freedom of the press, not the attorney general's vicious abuse of his position!" Bettemae J., Albuquerque, New Mexico "Compelling reporters to reveal their sources just means that sources will stop talking to reporters. That will cripple the free press. If you think that's not important, please resign immediately." Stephen P., Gresham, Oregon "As an old woman who remembers the lies of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush (especially) and the current administration, I do not trust my own government to tell me the truth anymore. Freedom of the press is my only chance [to] find out what the truth is. Protect reporters' sources!" Monica O., Lomita, California "Without freedom of the press, we might as well kiss democracy goodbye!" Melvin M., Vashon, Washington "I am ashamed of this administration, its policies and its Department of Justice -- what a travesty of criminal turpitude and mass media complicity. 'Transparency' -- hah! Cheap campaign rhetoric." Mitch L., Los Altos Hills, California "Walk the walk or stop talking about democracy. Free press is the basis of our constitution." Carl D., Manassas, Virginia "No free press, no democracy!" James F., Moab, Utah "If you force the media to reveal its sources, no one will ever come forth with a news story or lead again. I'm sure this is precisely what the politicians and big business want. Then there'd be absolutely no accountability. We need an effective shield law rather than persecuting journalists and news organizations for reporting the news." Jim S., Ladera Ranch, California "Freedom of the Press is the hallmark of a free society. Your administration has done everything in its power to subvert Freedom of the Press by jailing whistleblowers and reporters who uncover wrong doing. This must stop!" Ed A., Queens, New York "We have very few real journalists left. Let's not jail them!" Karen H., West Grove, Pennsylvania "As the press goes, so goes citizens' rights." Kathy F., West Bend, Wisconsin "I have been shocked at how this administration has treated the American people's right to know, prosecuting reporters, whistleblowers, and others who have had the temerity to cast light into the dark corners of our government. You bring the whole concept of democracy into disrepute and set a bad example for the rest of the world." Marjorie P., Montpelier, Vermont "We need our investigative reporters more now than ever in history. Keep our press free." Joan R., Novato, California "Investigative reporting is becoming too rare in the U.S., and compelling J. Risen to reveal his sources will only make such reporting even rarer. Is this your deliberate intent?" Elaine L., Elk Grove, California "I am responding in support of James Risen. Freedom of the press is one of the cornerstones of our democracy and should never be trampled on by government." Lois D., San Jacinto, California "Freedom of the press is more important than some stinking government attempt to find out how bad shenanigans made it into the press. Quit this crap about trying to make a reporter reveal his or her sources. We need good reporting a lot more than lousy stinking politicians trying to shut up the truth." Ralph M., Bakerstown, Pennsylvania "Without a free press tyranny will ensue." Bob P., Holland, Pennsylvania "I thought Mr. Obama was supposed to be a Constitutional lawyer and swore to uphold it. I thought the Attorney General was supposed to also protect the Constitution. It seems you both have abandoned those duties. Prove you hold the Constitution as the authority from which you derive your own and cease this persecution of a reporter who epitomizes one of the crucial things the Constitution stands for -- a truly free press." Michael S., Tukwila, Washington "I've seen mud more transparent than the Obama admin." Paul H., Carlton, Oregon "Wow, this coming from the Obama administration who supposedly is for open govt. Isn't it a police state when the govt cracks down on reporters for telling the truth? James Risen is a hero who will go to jail before revealing his source and the fact that you want to throw him in jail is the real crime here." Gayle J., Seattle, Washington "Shocking." Peggy K., Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin "You have way overstepped your authority. I consider myself a moderate, but your aggressive pursuit of journalists and whistleblowers strikes fear in my heart. Your use of intimidation to weaken the press is contributing to the dismantling of our democracy." Marcia B., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania "Quit trying to silence journalists! This is a Vladimir Putin approach to government. Hope and Change? Get Real!" Rich W., Grass Valley, California "Stop destroying our heroes, the courageous whistleblowers and journalists, including Risen and others who should be thanked, not prosecuted! You know damn well that the People want these people honored!" Nancy G., Palm Desert, California "Please recognize the need for a journalist to be free of coercion to reveal confidential sources. Bravo to James Risen for having the courage to resist this onerous government intimidation." Thomas S., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania "We are already seeing freedom of the press undermined by consolidation of media ownership. The founding fathers believed that we could only keep this republic if we have free press and an informed public. Stop the suppression of information. Free access to information is not an optional ingredient." Janelle J., Buffalo, Missouri "Stop persecuting journalists and whistleblowers. Information is the lifeblood of a democracy." William C., Sherman Oaks, California "Our government has become big brother. Journalists must not be forced to name their sources if we are to know the truth." Carolyn S., Los Angeles, California "A free press is gone if confidential sources are revealed." Vincent H., Rutledge, Tennessee "Frankly, Mr. President, I'm surprised at you, and I have to say, disappointed. This seems like something that happens in totalitarian countries." Karen B., Felton, California "Freedom of the press is already under siege because big business controls so much of the message. The Obama administration must respect James Risen's right to withhold his source." Patricia B., Marco Island, Florida "Whistleblowers are vital to keeping our democracy from turning into a police state. And a free press is vital to keeping us informed. Drop this case, and uphold the principles of our Constitution." Cynthia D., E. Boston, MA "The press should be free to do its job! How about some of that 'most transparent administration' stuff. If an administration has nothing to hide it has nothing to fear." Mike H., Terre Haute, Indiana "James Risen is an investigative reporter of high repute who should not be subjected to state harassment and punishment for upholding his pledge of confidentiality to his sources. These encroachments on our Fourth Estate's watchdog function as a check on the abuse of power must not stand." Barbara K., Santa Fe, New Mexico "You both have to stop talking out of both sides of your mouth, i.e. lying. We are fighting for freedom of the press. Stop being enemies to us people." Judith N., North Bonneville, Washington "Please don't trash the Bill of Rights. Protect the freedom and independence of the press. Drop the case against James Risen." Andrew M., Lower Gwynedd, Pennsylvania "Daniel Ellsberg was right. James Risen is right." Leonore J., Toledo, Ohio "When the light of free press is no more, darkness prevails and evildoers flourish. I know this is what this corrupt government wants but over our dead bodies." Felix C., San Antonio, Texas "What Mr. Risen did in this instance, was not criminal. Rather it was EXACTLY what a free press should do, without fear of reprisal. Stop the strong arm tactics." John S., Trumbull, Connecticut "The investigative work of journalists sheds light on the world and what is happening. The increasing punishment of journalists is pushing our world and news into a scary age of non-information. Safeguard the confidentiality of journalists and their sources." Christin B., Barnegat Light, New Jersey "Stop persecuting journalists and truth tellers." Phyllis B., Desert Hot Springs, California This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source. Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. Related StoriesSnowden Honored by Ex-Intel OfficialsBy Staff, Consortium News | ReportWhistleblowers: Information Warriors for the Modern AgeBy Ted Asregadoo, Truthout | Video InterviewConversation With James Risen: Can Journalists Protect Their National Security Sources?By Dina Rasor, Truthout | Solutions Show Comments Fracking Linked to Cancer-Causing Chemicals, Yale Study Finds - BuzzFlash Donald Trump Has Close Financial Ties to Dakota Access Pipeline Company - Guardian US Does the First Amendment End at the Prison Gate? - The Marshall Project An Assault From Obama's Escalating War on Journalism

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More Ways to LISTEN Violence And Other Threats Raise Press Freedom Fears In Hong Kong By Anthony Kuhn Police remove a protester during a pro-democracy rally early on July 2 in Hong Kong. Frustration is growing over the influence of Beijing on the city and its press. Philippe Lopez Former Ming Pao chief editor Kevin Lau is transferred to a private ward in a hospital Saturday in Hong Kong after three days in intensive care. Originally published on July 16, 2014 11:08 am On the evening of July 1, just hours after Hong Kong's biggest pro-democracy protests in years, the printing presses of the Ming Pao newspaper - long respected for its editorial independence - suddenly ground to a halt. The paper's managers removed the bold headlines from the front page and replaced them with new ones that made no mention of the protesters' main demands: free, fair and direct elections for the Chinese-ruled special administrative region. And that - along with a brutal knife attack on the paper's editor earlier this year - is fueling a growing anxiety about whether the former British colony will be able to keep the autonomy it was promised when it was handed back to China in 1997. An independent judiciary and a free press are the mainstays of that autonomy, and anxious residents say those pillars are slowly being weakened under increasing pressure from the Hong Kong government, and the central Chinese government in Beijing. The Hong Kong Journalists Association's annual report, "Press Freedom Under Siege," cited Ming Pao's last-minute headline change as an example of a pattern of censorship, violence and interference. Shirley Yam, the association's vice chairperson and a columnist at the South China Morning Post, says Hong Kong's press freedom is in its "darkest moments ever since the handover in 1997, because of the increasing tightening that we've seen. Sometimes [it's] from authorities directly and, most of the time, [it's] from within, in terms of self-censorship." Ming Pao journalists were also outraged at the situation. However, they faced even greater shock earlier this year when their chief editor, Kevin Lau, was fired from his job and, later, seriously injured by assailants who wielded meat cleavers. In February, thousands of Lau's colleagues and local residents protested against the attack as a threat to press freedoms. Protesters carried one sign that optimistically proclaimed: "They can't kill us all." Kevin Lau's law school classmate, Eric Cheung, is a law lecturer at Hong Kong University and a member of a civic group that is calling attention to the attack. Cheung says he doesn't believe it was a random criminal act. "Knowing Kevin," Cheung says, "we know that this attack could not have been triggered by personal matters, financial matters and other things not related to Kevin's work as a journalist." Cheung says Lau's attackers severed nerves in his legs and apparently were aiming to cripple but not kill him. Police have arrested several people in connection with the case, but it's unclear what their motives are. Of course, Hong Kong journalists' mainland Chinese counterparts face a much harsher working environment. New rules bar mainland journalists from publishing "previously undisclosed information" or "critical reports" without official authorization. But HKJA's Shirley Yam points out that Beijing has sent some chilling messages to local media. In April, she notes, more than a dozen Hong Kong media executives met with China's vice president, Li Yuanchao. Li reportedly told them to cover the news objectively and fairly. But he added that a Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, called Occupy Central, is illegal. "Imagine yourself as a journalist," Yam says. "Not many would be able to say, 'no' to one of the most senior officials in the country. Even if the editors can, how about your management? How about the one who signs your paycheck?" Veteran American journalist Francis Moriarty reported for Hong Kong's public broadcaster RTHK for nearly two decades until this year. He notes that several major Hong Kong media outlets, which used to be seen as independent, have recently been sold to local real estate tycoons. "The so-called tycoons, as people in Hong Kong refer to them, their financial interests are largely no longer in Hong Kong," Moriarty says. "Virtually all of them have major interests on the mainland Chinese side of the border." Moriarty says that means they may be more susceptible to Chinese government pressure. But he argues that press freedoms are essential if Hong Kong is to continue to exist as a global center of finance and commerce. "I don't see how it can function in that role successfully if it's not also an international hub for the flow - and the free flow - of information and expression," he says. Moriarty says the fight for press freedom in Hong Kong is not just a local fight or a local issue. He says it's an international issue.Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit . View the discussion thread. © 2016 WKAR

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Carney's backhanded dig at Pulitzer winners By Hadas Gold White House press secretary Jay Carney on Thursday seemed to question the Pulitzer Prize Board's decision to honor The Washington Post and The Guardian for their reporting on Edward Snowden's National Security Agency revelations. In an appearance at The George Washington University, Carney declined to comment on specific prizes but said be believed the best Pulitzers go to reporters who practice "shoe-leather reporting" and "develop sources," a not-so-subtle suggestion that the Post and the Guardian had simply benefited from having secret government documents fall in their laps. "My view in general is that the best of those awards go to reporters who break new ground through the shoe-leather reporting of the past and who develop sources, who find information, devote hours, days, weeks and months to getting a story right," Carney told CBS News White House correspondent Major Garrett, who conducted the interview. "I think year after year you see the Pulitzers and other similar awards - [the] work held up that meets those standards." (Also on POLITICO: Carney: Never been a more transparent administration) Carney's remarks echo criticism made by others about the Guardian and Post's reporting on the Snowden leaks, which is that it didn't require the traditional, boots-on-the-ground reporting that makes for award-winning reporting. Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian reporter, and Barton Gellman, the Post reporter, have both pushed back against that suggestion, citing the work they did to mine through and contextualize the documents Snowden provided. Elsewhere in the interview, Carney told Garrett that President Barack Obama's toughest interview in 2012 was the one he did with Jon Stewart, the comedian and host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show." "If you look back at 2012, at the series of interviews the sitting president gave, probably the toughest interview he had was with Jon Stewart," Carney said. "Probably the most substantive, challenging interview Barack Obama had in the election year was with the anchor of 'The Daily Show.'" (Also on POLITICO: Pulitzer Prize fight) Carney grew defensive when Garrett suggested that "all the briefings" the press had received before the rollout of the Affordable Care Act website "were in fact false." "The briefings you got weren't false," Carney said, as Garrett offered the term "less than accurate." "What I'm contesting here is that the use of that word suggests that the people giving the briefings were misleading the press. ...The people giving the briefings believed that the system was going to work with some glitches; no one expected ... the kind of problems we saw." Carney also said he disagreed with PolitiFact's decision to label Obama's oft-repeated health care promise - "If you like your plan, you can keep it" - as the 2013 "Lie of the Year." (Also on POLITICO: CPI's Chris Hamby to BuzzFeed) "I think on that particular issue, I think that a lie is one of intent, and the president believed that that's what the policy would deliver and it didn't, and when it [became] clear that it wasn't and there were things that needed to be fixed and to help those individuals ... that it ought to be done," he said. The press secretary also touched on the issue of White House transparency, noting that he has "empathy, if not always sympathy" for the press corps' plight to gain greater access to the administration. "It is absolutely the case today ... that the White House press corps will never be satisfied with the level of access it has ... but the press should keep pressing," Carney said. (Also on POLITICO: 2014 Pulitzer Prize winners) Obama has given more interviews and open press conferences than his predecessors, Carney said, adding that he thinks the White House's approach to not let reporters ask questions at every photo spray is balanced out by the press being able to ask more probing questions at Obama's press conferences. "I would be willing to go head to head with past presidents on the number of minutes this president has spent answering questions from the free press compared to the number of minutes" his predecessors did, Carney said. As for leaks investigations, Carney said that the facts thrown out about how this administration has prosecuted and investigated more leaks than any other administration is "misleading." "Some of the shorthand is misleading when it comes to the number of active investigations and prosecutions into leaks," Carney said. "The fact is, a number of them were inherited from the Bush administration." Hadas Gold is a reporter at Politico. Hadas Gold @hadas_gold This story tagged under:

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Encyclopedia > Literature and the Arts > Journalism and Publishing > Journalism and Publishing news agency Evolution of News Agencies As early as the 1820s a news agency, the Association of Morning Newspapers, was formed in New York City to gather incoming reports from Europe. Other local news agencies sprang up, and by 1856 the General News Association - comprising many important New York City papers - was organized. Out of this agency emerged in the 1870s the New York Associated Press, a cooperative news agency for New York papers that sold copy to daily papers throughout the country; the United Press began in 1882. Ten years later these organizations were merged, but the same year a rival agency, the Associated Press of Illinois, was founded. In Europe three international agencies had arisen - Agence Havas of Paris (1835); the Reuter Telegram Company of London (1851), known simply as Reuters; and the Continental Telegraphen Compagnie of Berlin (1849), known as the Wolff Agency. These began as financial-data services for bankers but extended their coverage to world news. By 1866 national agencies were arising in many European countries; they covered and sold news locally, relying on the major services for coverage and sales abroad. After the Associated Press of Illinois signed exchange contracts with the worldwide networks, the United Press went under (1897). In 1900 the Associated Press of Illinois, desiring to restrict its membership, reincorporated in New York state and was thereafter known as the Associated Press (AP); in 1915 the United States forbade the agency to restrict its members' use of other services. A Supreme Court decision in 1945 ended the exclusion of members' competitors. In 1906 William Randolph Hearst founded the International News Service (INS), available to papers of other publishers as well as his own. The United Press Association, usually called United Press (UP) although there was no connection with the earlier organization, became an affiliate of the Scripps-Howard newspapers and sold reports to others. The AP, UP, and INS grew steadily, and by the 1930s their foreign operations freed them of dependence on the European agencies, which tended to reflect national viewpoints in political news. In 1958 INS was merged with UP, forming United Press International (UPI). Since the 1980s, UPI has had a series of owners and undergone extensive downsizing; many other agencies have reduce the number of their employers since the late 1990s, as new agencies have been forced to adjust to changes in newspaper publishing and broadcasting due to the rise of the Internet. After World War II many agencies, including Reuters, AP, and Agence France-Presse (the renamed Agence Havas) became cooperatives owned by their member publishers. In 2008 Reuters was acquired by the Thomson Corp., which became Thomson Reuters. CNN, the television news network, began offering a wire service to newspapers in 2008. Sections in this of News AgenciesGovernment AgenciesNews TransmissionBibliography The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.See more Encyclopedia articles on: Journalism and Publishing

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More journalists killed in 2010 Geneva - At least 90 journalists have been killed doing their job so far this year, a 25% increase on the same period of 2009, the media watchdog Press Emblem Campaign (PEC) said on Wednesday."This is a failure, there is no progress, and the situation instead is deteriorating," a statement quoted PEC's secretary general Blaise Lempen as saying."Lempen called upon the media associations worldwide to become more active and that governments act in firmness to prevent crimes against journalists and fight against impunity," it added."He stressed that it is becoming essential to launch the process concerning an international convention to protect journalists to strengthen existing laws."PEC claims Mexico remains the most dangerous country, with 13 journalists killed in the ongoing battles between the army and drug cartels in nine months.It is followed by Honduras and Pakistan, with nine deaths each.Most dangerous region"A number of journalists were targeted and executed in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which makes it one of the most dangerous regions for media work," the PEC said.Five journalists were killed in Iraq since January, "a marked deterioration after a period of calm", another five in Russia's North Caucasus region "as a result of settling accounts", and the same number in the Philippines.Three journalists were killed in Colombia, Indonesia, Nepal, Nigeria and Somalia, and two in Angola, India, Thailand, Uganda, Venezuela and Afghanistan, where two reporters from a French television station have also been held captive.PEC said one journalist was killed in each of these countries: Argentina, Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Cyprus, Democratic Republic of Congo, Greece, Ecuador, Lebanon, Rwanda, Turkey, Ukraine and Yemen.A Turkish journalist was also killed when Israeli forces boarded a Turkish-led aid flotilla heading for the Gaza Strip.Regionally, Latin America saw 30 journalists killed in nine months, followed by Asia with 27, Africa with 13 in what the PEC called "a marked deterioration", and the Middle East with eight.Europe"Europe has witnessed worrying isolated cases of targeting journalists in seven countries leading to the death of 12 journalists this year," the report said.PEC president Hedayat Abdel Nabi noted with satisfaction that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) had highlighted the importance of protecting journalists, the group said.But he also "noted that the horrifying figures as well as the escalating nature of killings require an added attention from the international community to the global problem of the protection of journalists".The PEC called on the UN Human Rights Council to take up the matter urgently before the end of the year.It published a list of the victims on its website .

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Offering Snowden Aid, WikiLeaks Gets Back in the Game By Scott Shane June 24, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "NY Times" - WikiLeaks once again seized the global spotlight on Sunday by assisting Edward J. Snowden in his daring flight from Hong Kong, mounting a bold defense of the culture of national security disclosures that it has championed and that has bedeviled the United States and other governments. Accompanying Mr. Snowden on the Aeroflot airliner that carried him on Sunday from Hong Kong to Moscow � continuing a global cat-and-mouse chase that might have been borrowed from a Hollywood screenplay � was a British WikiLeaks activist, Sarah Harrison. The group�s founder, Julian Assange, who has been given refuge for the last year in Ecuador�s embassy in London, met last week with Ecuador�s foreign minister to support Mr. Snowden�s asylum request. And Baltasar G�rzon, the legal director of WikiLeaks and a former Spanish judge, is leading a volunteer legal team advising him on how to stay out of an American prison. �Mr. Snowden requested our expertise and assistance,� Mr. Assange said in a telephone interview from London on Sunday night. �We�ve been involved in very similar legal and diplomatic and geopolitical struggles to preserve the organization and its ability to publish.� By Mr. Assange�s account, the group helped obtain and deliver a special refugee travel document to Mr. Snowden in Hong Kong that, with his American passport revoked, may now be crucial in his bid to travel onward from Moscow. More broadly, WikiLeaks brought to global attention the model that Mr. Snowden has wholeheartedly embraced: that of the conscience-stricken national security worker who takes his concerns not to his boss or other official channels but to the public. The group�s assistance for Mr. Snowden shows that despite its shoestring staff, limited fund-raising from a boycott by major financial firms, and defections prompted by Mr. Assange�s personal troubles and abrasive style, it remains a force to be reckoned with on the global stage. �As an act of international, quasi-diplomatic intrigue, it�s impressive,� Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said of WikiLeaks� role in Mr. Snowden�s flight. �It�s an extraordinary turn of events.� The antisecrecy advocates are themselves secretive � Mr. Assange said he could not reveal the number of paid staffers at WikiLeaks because of �assassination threats� or its budget because of the �banking blockade� � but the group has dedicated volunteers in several countries, notably Britain and Iceland, and a large number of supporters. Since publishing the military and diplomatic documents in 2009 and 2010 that made it famous, the group has released several lower-profile collections: documents on commercial spying equipment; internal e-mails of an American security consulting company, Stratfor; millions of e-mails sent by Syrian government and business officials; and a library of cables to and from Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, though most of those were already public. Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks, which he started in 2006, has a �seven-year history of publishing documents from every country in the world.� He added: �We�ve documented hundreds of thousands of deaths and assassinations, billions of dollars of corruption. We�ve affected elections and prompted reforms.� WikiLeaks played no role in Mr. Snowden�s disclosures of classified documents he took from his job as a National Security Agency contractor. But since joining forces with him, WikiLeaks has used his case to boost its profile; its Twitter feed on Sunday made an appeal for donations along with news about Mr. Snowden�s flight. Even as Mr. Snowden�s odyssey continued, the source whose disclosures brought WikiLeaks to broad public attention, Pfc. Bradley Manning, was in a military cell in the fourth week of his court-martial at Fort Meade, Md. Private Manning, who became disillusioned as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, has admitted that he gave WikiLeaks roughly 700,000 confidential government documents. He faces a possible sentence of life in prison if convicted of charges that include espionage and aiding the enemy. In a statement on Saturday, Mr. Assange suggested that President Obama was the real �traitor,� for betraying the hopes of a generation of idealists represented by both Private Manning and Mr. Snowden. �They are young, technically minded people from the generation that Barack Obama betrayed,� Mr. Assange wrote on the WikiLeaks Web site. �They are the generation that grew up on the Internet, and were shaped by it. The U.S. government is always going to need intelligence analysts and systems administrators, and they are going to have to hire them from this generation and the ones that follow it.� Mr. Assange added a warning to the government: �By trying to crush these young whistle-blowers with espionage charges, the U.S. government is taking on a generation, and that is a battle it is going to lose.� The claim sounded like bravado. But Mr. Snowden is the seventh person to be prosecuted by the Obama administration in its unprecedented campaign against leaks. And while by many accounts the threat of prosecution has distinctly chilled conventional national security reporting, Mr. Snowden has said he was inspired to leak by several high-profile, self-described whistle-blowers who have faced criminal charges since 2010: Private Manning; Thomas Drake, a former N.S.A. official; and John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer now serving a prison term. Instead of waiting on American soil to be arrested, Mr. Snowden headed to Hong Kong before going public and sought help from WikiLeaks more than a week ago. Explaining his decision to leave the United States, he said in an online question-and-answer session with The Guardian that it made no sense to �volunteer� for prosecution at home �if you can do more good outside of prison than in it.� Though in one initial comment Mr. Snowden appeared to distance himself from WikiLeaks and Private Manning � suggesting that he had deliberately been more selective in his leaks than the soldier had been � he later said that was a misimpression. �WikiLeaks is a legitimate journalistic outlet,� he wrote on The Guardian site on June 17, �and they carefully redacted all of their releases in accordance with a judgment of public interest.� Diplomatic cables were later released without redactions, and Mr. Assange and a British journalist have disputed who was to blame, but claims that Private Manning was responsible were a �smear,� Mr. Snowden wrote. Even among advocates of greater government openness, WikiLeaks evokes mixed feelings. Mr. Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists, called it �an adolescent phenomenon of rebellion against authority.� �WikiLeaks and Mr. Snowden have elevated issues that have been neglected in public discourse,� he said. �But they don�t offer solutions to the problems they�ve raised.� Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Harvard who has written extensively on WikiLeaks and is a possible defense witness at the Manning trial, said he found it �tragic� that the interaction of both WikiLeaks and Mr. Snowden with the United States government had become so adversarial. WikiLeaks began as an innovative media venture, he said, but the government�s overreaction has turned it into more of an activist venture. �It was so easy to portray Assange as an unpleasant weirdo,� he said. Mr. Benkler noted that a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., is believed to still be looking into the possibility of prosecuting WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange for publishing Private Manning�s leaked documents, a development he said would be dangerous to democracy. Government employees who leak classified information may deserve modest penalties, he said, but the Obama administration needs to make clear that reporting or publishing classified information will not be prosecuted. �It�s a big policy decision about relative threats: on the one hand, occasional leaks of classified information; on the other hand, shutting down the Fourth Estate�s oversight of national security,� Mr. Benkler said. Mr. Assange, from his embassy lair, said the Obama administration appeared intent on criminalizing national security journalism but promised that WikiLeaks would keep revealing secrets. For naysayers who say that since 2010 the group has never come close to publishing anything with the impact of the Manning documents, he offered a riposte. �As Joseph Heller said when people said he hadn�t published anything as good as �Catch 22�: �Neither has anyone else.� � What's your response? - Scroll down to add / read comments Sign up for our FREE Daily Email Newsletter

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EDITORIAL: Old tactics on Chinese media failing - Taipei Times Wed, Jan 09, 2013 - Page 8 News List EDITORIAL: Old tactics on Chinese media failing Ongoing controversies in Taiwan and China surrounding the media are once again highlighting the delicate balance that must be struck in cross-strait cooperation in all matters pertaining to journalism.As the editorial staff at Guangzhou-based Southern Weekly defied censors this week over government intervention in the newspaper's editorial last Thursday, several Taiwanese who in recent months have launched protests against the monopolization of the media and the risks of increasing Chinese influence, received just what they needed to confirm that their actions were justified.Since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) came to power in 2008, Taiwan has made a series of moves to encourage cross-strait journalistic exchanges, with government agencies calling for more cooperation in news and entertainment media. One of the premises under which such liberalization was launched, we are told, is that the more Chinese journalists are exposed to operating in a democratic society, the likelier they are to pollinate China with liberal thoughts once returning.Although a case can be made for such efforts, after decades of Chinese journalists operating in Europe, the US and Canada, such results have yet to materialize. This is not because Chinese journalists - the real ones, as opposed to those who work for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) - are intrinsically anti-democratic.It would be unfair to argue that Chinese need to physically leave China to learn the virtues of liberty and democracy. Over the years, there have been ample examples of Chinese journalists, academics, writers and activists who, at great risk, exposed social ills and corruption in their country. Many of them have never worked abroad. The problem, rather, lies with the strong grip the CCP has on all forms of media throughout China.From comments to the effect that there is no such thing as "so-called censorship" in China to a Global Times editorial arguing that "Even in the West, mainstream media would not choose to openly pick a fight with the government" - as if the Pentagon Papers had never happened, to use but one of many examples - Chinese authorities are making it clear that efforts to liberalize Chinese media through contact are failing. In several instances, the environment hardened under Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), just as such contact was accelerating.China can expel Western journalists, delay their visas, have them followed and roughed up, and can pressure foreign governments, such as Canada's, to bar certain journalists from covering events attended by visiting Chinese officials, but somehow, the rest of the world must continue to play by the rules.If the theory of exposure were valid, keeping the door open would make sense. However, as Beijing shows no sign of wanting to play by the rules, it is perhaps time we reassessed the means by which we intend to help journalists and activists in China who are driven by a need to speak truth to power.Given Taiwan's small size and China's designs upon its people, the one-way street of media cooperation with China is especially dangerous. Beijing will take and impose change, but it will deny any reciprocity in the process. Under such dynamics, Taiwan's media environment as it is today is gravely threatened, while China's remains insulated, with little prospect for change. Knowing this, the importance of ensuring that journalism in Taiwan remains free of political and commercial influence becomes all the more apparent.

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Inside the Monitor, a culture of camaraderie - and a shared mission Staff parties, shibboleths, and a dedication to being a 'real newspaper.' By Roderick Nordell / Lineup: Staff from the Monitor's newsroom and composing room formed a baseball team soon after the paper's founding (shown: 1931). the Christian science monitor/archive Way back, long before there were Google-driven page views to be concerned about, there was the legend of the "passed-on mules."For decades you could get a laugh in the newsroom by mentioning the World War I battlefield littered with them. The phrase often appeared in articles about The Christian Science Monitor and its preference for saying that people "passed on" as more precise than "died." The mules were traced to a piece from behind German lines about a battlefield littered with "passed-on horses." This was sent from one delighted staffer to another - but never considered for publication. What was being considered was how to be a "real newspaper," as intended, while being published by a church. By the time Franklin Roosevelt passed on in 1945, quotations were published about his "death." Soon the paper carried stories about others who had "died."This is just one way in which the Monitor - enigmatic to the mass market, often subject to what publishing types call "brand resistance" - has tried to look like a real paper as well as be one. It has always reported the bitter and the sweet of human existence. It has always stressed efforts, great and small, to make things better for humanity and its planet. Those who put it together try to express its founding religion by publishing an excellent paper, reserving space for just one article on Christian Science each day. The goal is genuine accuracy."We believe that the balancing fact should be attached directly to the misleading assertion," said Erwin D. Canham when he was editor 50 years ago. "News interpretation, with all its hazards, is often safer and wiser than printing the bare news alone. Nothing can be more misleading than the unrelated fact, just because it is a fact and hence impressive."To help everyone get the point, there were the sandwich sessions where thoughts on the paper could be shared. In 1968 came the in-house publication called The Editing Corner: A periodic commentary on Monitor content. One included a "Tip to makeup editors: Boxes placed down among the ads are lost. If placed higher on the page, they break up gray type and enliven the page."Beyond such professional minutiae, Monitor workers sought to keep the paper in line with statements its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, had given earlier in answer to questions from other newspapers: "To my sense, the most imminent dangers confronting the coming century are: the robbing of people of life and liberty under the warrant of the Scriptures; the claims of politics and of human power, industrial slavery, and insufficient freedom of honest competition; and ritual, creed, and trusts in place of the golden rule, 'Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.'" And: "I am asked, 'What are your politics?' I have none, in reality, other than to help support a righteous government; to love God supremely, and my neighbor as myself."To its first editor, Archibald McLellan, the Monitor was to be "a paper which goes into the highways and byways of humanity and by its very character proclaims the potency of good to meet the seeming aggression of evil with a tangible proof of supremacy." This underlies not only the news but also the features - home, business, environment, sports, natural science, education, the arts, cartoons. Occasionally, a variation of this high calling was put to use in relation to Christian Science shibboleths such as no smoking. Col. Evans Carlson, a World War II hero, said to the editor he was visiting, "I suppose it's all right to smoke here." "Oh, quite all right," said the editor. "Of course, nobody ever has."That doesn't mean the whole staff was made up of Christian Scientists. As Mr. Canham wrote in "Commitment to Freedom," his 50th-anniversary book, "Nobody has given the paper more able, loyal, and effective service than the non-Christian Scientists who have worked for it down through the years." I still run into a minister, who recalls being a Monitor newsboy in days when a pool table was provided in a recreation room.What hasn't changed - besides a proclivity for innovation - is the easy interaction among staffers of all stripes, the kind of camaraderie born of working with a clear mission. Employees used to walk downtown for lunch at a Greek restaurant. In recent years, another eatery option has been added - Quotes, in the Mary Baker Eddy Library building. Writers and editors made music together for parties in the newsroom or the composing room. The Monitor baseball team began almost as soon as the paper itself and flourished for decades. (Today it might be bowling at Kings in the Back Bay.)It may not be because Paul S. Deland said never throw anything away, but I didn't throw away a mock front page from Dec. 16, 1958, with the two-inch-high headline: DELAND'S FIFTIETH. A photo shows President Eisenhower presenting an anniversary award to Mr. Deland, associate editor of The Christian Science Monitor, on board since the beginning.Russia's Sputnik had come along in 1957. So a bit of doggerel on the apportionment of columns was entitled "Paul S(pace) Deland": "For even when space was tight as a drum/ He tried to see that we all had some./ He knew, you see, that fair is fair./ (A little hard on us who wanted more than our share.)"That's one of the ways we had fun while making a point. One current Monitor editor, reading this, said "It's funny, the newsroom just recently wrote some lyrics and crooned for a departing editor. And we still issue those introspective internal memos, only now they're about exactly what a Monitor blog should be."• Roderick Nordell joined the Monitor in 1948 and retired in 1993 as executive editor of World Monitor: The Christian Science Monitor Monthly. In between, he was a staff correspondent in New York, books editor, arts editor, assistant chief editorial writer, Home Forum editor, and features editor. The American Society of Paperless News? My long love affair with Monitor journalism New editor named to lead The Christian Science Monitor

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China's new leadership isn't easing up on foreign journalists Naomi Rovnick Beijing wants the screens turned off. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) On freedom of expression, China is going backwards. The New Yorker blogged today that China is exerting a "pattern of pressure" on American media organisations that "the US government cannot ignore." In recent months, and in response to "a level of forensic detail that we have rarely, if ever, seen in foreign correspondence," China has blocked access to Bloomberg and the New York Times and refused the Washington Post's correspondent a visa. This is part of a more general clampdown on both domestic and foreign reporting by Beijing. In the self-governed Chinese territory of Hong Kong, journalists are complaining of heightened harassment by Chinese police when they try covering stories on the mainland. And while Hong Kong media are not directly controlled by Beijing's censors, self-censorship is rising as media owners fear losing valuable patronage from mainland Chinese politicians and connections with state-owned companies. Hong Kong's leading English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post, was accused of muzzling itself last year. Last June Paul Mooney, a journalist who has won several awards, complained the paper had canceled his contract in a "political decision." In addition, Al Jazeera correspondent Melissa Chan was expelled from China last May after filing a series of reports that riled the Beijing authorities. There were also reports last year of Polish, German and Japanese reporters being assaulted or detained by Chinese authorities. In 2012, journalists suspected this intimidation had to do with the impending leadership change. Social controls that included heightened web censorship and even a ban on balloons increased strongly during the power handover in November. But policing of the Chinese web has not slackened since the political reshuffle. And while the international media loves to report on itself, it is worth also sparing a thought for China's domestic bloggers, especially those who expose official corruption or human rights abuses and rely on anonymity for safety. The Beijing city government has proposed new rules making it illegal for bloggers to write under assumed names. That is worrying because where the capital city goes, other Chinese cities tend to follow. While Washington needs to press Beijing on guaranteeing freedom for America's journalists, it should also stick up for the rights of Chinese reporters and bloggers. It's an open secret that most foreign news bureaux in China get much of their content from Chinese language micro-blogs on services such as Sina Weibo, as parodied on the satirical website China Daily Show. Businesses the world over will have an even harder time navigating the tricky Chinese markets if they have no idea what is going on in the country because the Chinese internet, that rich seam of information for international media, is blacked out.

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UtahDeseret News set to lead, innovate Plan includes staff cuts, new business model and 7-day print publication By Sarah Jane WeaverDeseret News Published: Sept. 1, 2010 12:00 a.m. Deseret News publisher steps down Loss and change are painful Deseret News editor to leave paper SALT LAKE CITY - The Deseret News announced Tuesday work force reductions and unveiled a plan to refocus the quality and reach of its product. "Changes in the industry have forced some newspapers to fade or even close," said Clark Gilbert, Deseret News CEO and president. "At the Deseret News, we choose to lead and innovate." Part of that leadership, he added, is the willingness to make hard choices. "Today we have announced the reduction in our print work force by 57 full-time and 28 part-time employees, which reflects just over 43 percent of our work force," Gilbert said. Gilbert called the decision to reduce staff "enormously difficult." "We honor all the outstanding contributions that have added to the great heritage of the Deseret News," he said. "This makes these decisions even more difficult." At the same time, he said, the Deseret News is now positioned to print a daily newspaper into the foreseeable future and expand its reach and influence throughout the world. These changes, Gilbert added, make one thing certain: "The Deseret News will run as a daily newspaper for the foreseeable future." Other leading industry executives recognize the need for change. "All of us involved in the newspaper business have been challenged to adapt our traditional newspaper business model to our new realities," said Mark Contreras, senior vice president of E.W. Scripps, chairman of the Newspaper Association of America. "The Deseret News team has showed courageous leadership, not just to make the difficult decisions around costs, but to define a broader and more digitally focused future." Gilbert said change is necessary because innovation and technology have fundamentally changed the newspaper industry. "There are exciting and wonderful elements to the Internet as it has expanded the reach of news and information to a level never before possible. But those same changes have altered the fundamental business model and print publishing. In particular, classified advertising nationally has collapsed in most markets." In response, the Deseret News unveiled a five-part plan "to become a leader in the industry and a model for change," said Gilbert. First, the newspaper will integrate its newsroom with KSL, creating the market's largest news coverage team. This integration gives both organizations more reporters on the ground covering more stories than any other local news source. As part of the integration, the Deseret News staff will move to the Triad Center "to promote greater synergy in coverage and operations," said Gilbert. Second, the Deseret News will increase in-depth coverage from the organization's strong journalists on relevant issues audiences care most about. Third, the Deseret News has created a new editorial advisory board, a group of renowned industry leaders who will provide breadth and depth in opinion and thought through editorial guidance. These leaders are spread across the country, allowing the Deseret News to expand nationally in nature and scope. Fourth, the newspaper has launched Deseret Connect, an innovative system to collect writers and editors who will provide high-quality, relevant stories on a regular basis. "The content will be qualified, edited and peer reviewed," said Gilbert. "We have attracted people from across the nation with impeccable credentials and the highest respect of their peers." Deseret Connect will complement journalists working at the Deseret News. Fifth, the Deseret News has created a cutting edge digital team "that is on par with the most innovative new media companies in the country," said Gilbert. "What is remarkable about what is happening at the Deseret News is that they are becoming Exhibit A for the future of news in this country," said Clayton M. Christensen, a nationally recognized new media leader and professor at Harvard Business School who recently chose to join the paper's editorial advisory board. "I would expect you will see the Deseret News become the model of growth and innovation for the entire industry." Gilbert said underlying all these changes is a renewed commitment to the Deseret News' mission and values. Print readership of the Deseret News grew by 20 percent in 2009, the highest growth rate of any newspaper in the country. Deseretnews.com attracts the most traffic of any online newspaper site in Utah, serving approximately 24 million page views to nearly 2 million unique visitors per month, according to Deseret News' online analytics. "Our readers have been clear that they want more than information," Gilbert continued. "They crave and deserve insight, context and thought leadership relevant to the events and issues of the day from sources they trust. The values we champion are time-honored concepts that belong to people of goodwill around the world. Our new direction positions us to deliver on the expectations of our current and future readers." Gilbert said the Deseret News will bring a distinct voice to the marketplace - a voice that is driven by its values. As part of the entire vision, six areas of focus have emerged from these values. The family. Financial responsibility. Excellence in education. Care for the needy. Values in the media. Faith in the community. Deseret News editor Joe Cannon said the changes will take advantage of technology without leaving behind good, old-fashioned newspaper work. "I believe the new direction we are taking is going to pay rich dividends for our readers and is also going to create a model for the expanded reach and influence of the Deseret News," Cannon said. e-mail:

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States Project Michigan's 'free-market' media machine The Mackinac Center for Public Policy is a major player in state media. What to make of it? By Anna Clark, CJR Followthe author DETROIT, MI - In a time of upheaval for both politics and media, state-level think tanks sit at a peculiar nexus of influence: they both shape the news and report it. And few are more influential on either score than the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a "free market" think tank based in Midland, MI, that is one of the largest of its kind in the nation. Along with an affiliated legal arm, the Mackinac (pronounced MAK-in-aw) Center uses its considerable resources to wage an aggressive and often successful campaign on behalf of smaller government and against measures that it sees as limiting personal freedoms or private markets. Often, that means targeting teachers' unions and other labor groups, who engage in their own counter-attacks against the center. Since its founding in 1987, Mackinac has also become a major player in the state's media ecosystem. Mackinac has a two-part media strategy. The first, more traditional flank involves putting out a steady stream of reports designed to move the state's news agenda, and making its analysts readily available to journalists. For example, the center's recent release of "report cards" on Michigan elementary and middle schools drew wide coverage, some of which made little mention of the center's philosophical outlook. Bill Shea, a reporter and editor with Crain's Detroit Business (and past CJR contributor), described Mackinac as a professional and responsive organization, and "a serious player in the state conversation. It's hard not to use them" as a source, he said. And Mackinac is generally well-regarded at what are still the state's most prominent outlets for analysis and opinion - the editorial sections of the Detroit newspapers. Ingrid Jacques, deputy editorial page editor of The Detroit News, told me that "personally, I have used Mackinac Center experts - especially on education and labor policy - quite a bit in my reporting for editorials. I find them to be extremely well-informed and helpful." Stephen Henderson, editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, said his own views on the center were "mixed" - he is most critical of Mackinac's agenda on the "right-to-work" debate and charter schools. But "they seem to want to raise the intellectual stakes in every discussion," Henderson said, adding, "generally, they're a plus on the policy debate landscape." The second, more novel part of Mackinac's strategy is to make its own media. The center publishes the polished Michigan Capitol Confidential news site - CapCon for short. (This should not be confused with Mackinac's blog, which offers updates on its policy priorities, or IMPACT Magazine, a colorful bimonthly delivered in print to members, with features like "Michigan's Craziest Laws.") The three-year-old CapCon is the most journalistically ambitious of Mackinac's media operations; its four-member staff includes three former reporters for traditional outlets. On its "About" page, the site pledges to "fill [the] void" of dwindling state coverage with "balanced, substantive reporting, aided by insightful analysis, hard data and legal expertise." But the same page makes clear that CapCon shares a perspective with the think tank: Michigan Capitol Confidential is the news source for Michigan residents who want an alternative to "bigger government" remedies in policy debates. CapCon reports on the public officials who seek to limit government, those who do not, and those whose votes are at odds with what they say. For CapCon editor Manny Lopez, who did turns as both the auto and opinion page editor at The Detroit News, part of the appeal of working for the site is that it is "not trying to be everything to everyone." CapCon was developed, Lopez said, because Mackinac's white papers were "hard to digest," and the think tank "saw the need to create a news outlet." Lopez says plainly that he is "conservative," and has found CapCon a good fit. But the site is not partisan, he said. Among its stories are "hundreds of pieces on Republicans who are doing bad things for good government" - meaning, Republicans who support policies that, from a free-market point-of-view, are problematic. For example, a recent CapCon series profiled the 28 Republicans in the Michigan House who voted for "Obamacare's Medicaid expansion." In speaking of CapCon's audience, Lopez said, "the stories we write are widely read by Republican legislators for sure, and a lot of Democratic legislators too, whether or not they admit it." Beyond the state capitol in Lansing, "we want to be a statewide, widely-read news source," he said. The site has had some successes. Jacques, of The Detroit News, said, "CapCon is ... an informative site that does break stories, despite a very small staff." Another writer at a traditional in-state news outlet agreed, saying "they've broken some big stories that the traditional media has ignored." The News's editorial page editor, Nolan Finley, suggested that CapCon's perspective is a plus in Michigan media: "Certainly they report with a point-of-view, but it's a point-of-view often not otherwise represented." (Alternatively - and humorously - a Free Press staffer told me, "I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to CapCon, at least not recently. I think The Detroit News follows them more closely than we do.") CapCon's most influential reporting to date is probably its coverage of so-called "dues skimming" - an arrangement in which state-supported home-based caregivers, including parents caring for disabled children, were required to pay monthly dues to the Service Employees International Union. That was "a big story that caught the attention of the 'mainstream' media," says Jacques. It's also a story that dovetailed nicely with the Mackinac Center's decades-long push for anti-union legislation, which is widely credited for helping to propel swift passage of a right-to-work bill during the lame duck legislature in December - a shift once deemed impossible in a state with such a rich union legacy. (I wrote about it for The American Prospect, a left-leaning magazine, in December.) More recently, CapCon reporting provoked a large state union on a touchy issue - and in the process, revealed the benefits and limitations of CapCon's journalistic model. The occasion was Michigan's 2012-13 Teacher of the Year Award, which the state bestowed on Grosse Pointe North High School science teacher Gary Abud Jr. CapCon submitted a records request to obtain Abud's salary. (While newspaper journalists here tell me that strapped budgets limit their ability to make records requests, CapCon uses the strategy frequently, and one of its staffers is described as a "FOIA expert." Mackinac is hosting a series of town halls this summer explaining how FOIA works.) In a June 10 story, CapCon's Tom Gantert revealed the salary information online, and noted that Abud, a relatively junior teacher, made less than both the state and district average. The story makes a case for merit pay, a key topic for school reform advocates (who, as I wrote recently for CJR, are experimenting with many models in Michigan). Gantert's story also highlights a specific policy fix to what is presented as an injustice - House Bill 4625, introduced in the state legislature this spring. The June 10 piece is no screed: the article maintains a balanced newspaper-style voice throughout. CapCon spoke with officials at Abud's school and gave them space to explain the district's pay structure. Abud is quoted at length, and in his first quoted comment, he de-emphasizes the importance of compensation for retaining high-quality teachers. CapCon also reached out to the Michigan Education Association, a teacher's union, which did not respond. Still, it's hard to shake the sense that the story's reason for being is less to present a debate on an issue - or even make the case for a specific policy - than it is to use a fairly innocuous news event to pump up a particular pending legislation, and to give a Mackinac wonk an opportunity to opine. The center's education policy director is quoted as arguing that "unions and school boards have historically agreed to ignore teacher effectiveness altogether when determining salaries," and so Michigan's best teachers are underpaid. Though there is a tagline below the site's logo that says CapCon is "a news service for the people of Michigan from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy," there is no disclaimer about the relationship in the text, and no other experts are cited. Gantert followed up with a June 21 story on an earlier Teacher of the Year finalist earning a comparatively low salary. Again, a Mackinac think-tanker was prominently quoted without a disclaimer, and again, HB 4625 was presented as a possible solution. (This time, the MEA provided a local education professor to argue against the bill.) A July 8 article repeated the formula, though without mentioning the bill. The initial teacher-of-the-year story was picked up widely by education reform advocates, conservative news sites, and blogs. It also inspired an angry counter-reaction from Mackinac's liberal-blog antagonists, and a more measured but still critical response from Abud himself. While many complaints suggested that Abud's story had been co-opted by CapCon and school reform groups to back a policy that he doesn't support, Abud also claimed one of his statements was misrepresented by CapCon. (Lopez, CapCon's editor, disputes this, but a blog post Abud published, which echoes his comments to CapCon, backs up his claims.) From Mother Jones to the National Review, aggressive point-of-view reporting has a long and often proud tradition in American media. But the teacher-of-the-year stories highlight the tensions in CapCon's model. Lopez said the site distinguishes between news and commentary much like a traditional newspaper, but straight news is unapologetically framed in ways that are friendly to Mackinac's policy preferences. (See also this.) The site promises "insightful analysis," but stories recite talking points from in-house experts. There is formal balance, but often, little sign of real grappling with opposing views - a formula that works okay for muckraking, but less well for wisely hashing through policy disputes. Also problematic is Mackinac's - and thus, CapCon's - lack of disclosure about its funding sources. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the center does not have to disclose its supporters, and says on its website only that it "enjoys the support of foundations, individuals, and businesses who share a concern for Michigan's future and recognize the important role of sound ideas." By contrast, the nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, which I wrote about last month, makes a point of disclosing its financial supporters online and even makes its tax returns readily available for download, noting that these are public documents: "... as investigative journalists, we use (them) all the time to understand what organizations do. So here's a look at us." In contrast, various parties have attempted to bring sunlight to Mackinac's ties - for example, this American Prospect article explores the State Policy Network, of which the center is a prominent member. But CapCon should have beat them all to the punch. Bill Shea, the Crain's reporter, sees CapCon filling a niche. "They obviously reflect a certain ideological point of view, and I think it's important that statewide dialogue reflect as many of those points-of-view as possible," he said. It's a good point, and one CapCon embraces. "We're not trying to... hide anything," Lopez said when I asked about the site's transparency norms. "We're proud to be a product of the Mackinac Center." But while filling a niche and even breaking news is important, it's not enough. The best news organizations demand transparency of others while practicing transparency themselves - particularly when it comes to funding sources and conflicts-of-interest. The best policy reporting - even reporting from a particular point of view - offers a fair-minded representation of other arguments. There's no reason a pro-free-market news site can't do those things consistently. Even amidst our modern media turmoil, these are journalism standards we should all be able to get behind. Correction: This post originally identified Watchdog Wire as a publication of the Mackinac Center. It is not. CJR regrets the error. Follow @USProjectCJR for more posts from this author and the rest of the United States Project team. Love news about local news? Then sign up for the United States Project weekly email. Anna Clark is CJR's correspondent for Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. A 2011 Fulbright fellow, Clark has written for The New York Times, The American Prospect, and Grantland. She can be found online at and on Twitter @annaleighclark. She lives in Detroit. Tags: CapCon, Mackinaw Center for Public Policy, Manny Lopez, Michigan Capitol Confidential, Teacher of the Year Award Trending stories

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'Mr. Rogers' of news gets edgy Bill Moyers combines fireside chat style with penchant for in-depth news. By Janet Saidi, Special to The Christian Science Monitor / At a time when TV news programs feature war in real time and talk shows morph into shouting matches, there is one program going against the grain - with lengthy interviews, philosophical insights, and tireless coverage of domestic issues."Now With Bill Moyers," which airs Friday nights, debuted in January last year in answer to what PBS felt was a need for responsive, post-9/11 news programming. Mr. Moyers, who aired a series of special reports after the Sept. 11 attacks, delayed a planned retirement in order to host the weekly newsmagazine. Viewers familiar with Moyers's special reports and documentaries, such as the well-known "Power of Myth" series with Joseph Campbell, or the recent "Becoming American: The Chinese Experience," probably aren't surprised to find Moyers's philosophically framed questions and fireside-chat style on "Now."What may set "Now" apart from previous Moyers programming is a tone of urgency that offers not only hard-driven, alternative news, but decidedly cutting-edge content."We're trying to get the truth behind the news," says Moyers, who also credits his production staff, who are half his age, for the edgy tone. "An official person speaks, and we as journalists often act as stenographers for it ... when all too often what's actually happening behind; the words is the real story. Someone once said that news is what's hidden, everything else is advertising."That may sound a little, well, radical for a man in a Mr. Rogers sweater. In fact, while Moyers still comes across as empathetic and engaged in interviews, his on-air style is more probing and direct: "I've become impatient with the superfluous," Moyers admits.'Spinach' TVThe "Now" method of letting people finish their thought doesn't always thrive in a sound-bite landscape. The future of the respected in-depth program "Nightline" was called into question last year. At the time, "Nightline" was drawing more than 4 million viewers - almost double the 2.3 million who tune in each week for "Now."Bob Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, compares the investigative format of "Now" to "eating your spinach," admitting that he has not watched the program enough to form an opinion. Speaking generally, "seriousness and sobriety don't make for good television," Mr. Lichter explains. "The most popular talkers are loud and more sure of themselves.... There needs to be a place for serious discussion of real issues on television, and PBS is about the only place to have it - except for Fox, of course," he quips.Nor does this seem to be the best time to be a news commentator with views to the left of Bill O'Reilly. Liberal analysis programs hosted by Phil Donahue and Jeff Greenfield were canceled in the past year - leaving Moyers one of the few liberal commentators on TV.The more popular debate formula used by news-talk programs involves what Lichter refers to as "rock 'em sock 'em" - pitting people who don't agree against one another. Think "The O'Reilly Factor" and "The McLaughlin Group" - or HBO's "Real Time" with Bill Maher.The "he said, she said" debate styles that are the order of the day are ineffective, says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications, who has been a guest on "Now.""Moyers presents a framework through which you see something from an ideologically coherent perspective," says Ms. Jamieson, coauthor of "The Press Effect," "and if you don't like what you're seeing, there are places you can go to listen to the other side.... What makes 'Now' important is that it provides a regular menu of the unexpected, presented in a complex fashion by a good interviewer."As for Lichter's "spinach," Jamieson adds, "There are people who like spinach - and you can develop a taste for it."An average interview on "Now" runs a lengthy 16 minutes, and some have been stretched to 20. "Now" executive producer John Siceloff admits that the program makes larger demands of its viewers, but believes it's a matter of adjusting to the high level of discussion: "We've grown an audience that delights in that complexity and that insight because they don't get it anywhere else."Funded by taxpayersNot everyone watching "Now" is delighting in its complexity. The conservative Media Research Center awarded Moyers with the quote of the year at their annual "dishonor" awards in March, for a November statement criticizing the Bush administration: "... If you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture."Conservatives' main objection is that Moyers delivers liberal commentary on PBS - publicly funded television. "Even if he's marshaling facts," says Media Research's Tim Graham, "he's marshaling facts at the service of his agenda ... and he's got this enormous tax-payer-funded megaphone.""Now" - which has had a number of conservative guests - sees its programming not as liberal but as alternative. "We don't say, 'How can we beat up on Bush this week?' " says Mr. Siceloff. "We think it is indeed the duty of good journalists to say, 'OK, let's understand this issue in a deep way.'... Sometimes that will be in praise of what's going on and sometimes in criticism - we do think that just because Bush said it, doesn't make it right."In addition to stints at Newsday and the CBS evening news, Moyers's early career included working for Lyndon Johnson from 1963-1967, with two years as White House press secretary. Moyers says that what he learned in those early years has helped to shape his interests as a journalist. Of his time in the White House during the Vietnam War, Moyers remembers: "Our credibility was so bad that we couldn't believe our own leaks, and I decided right then that I should've been on the other side."Moyers feels the pressure of challenging the official line in a politically charged post-9/11 atmosphere. "It's a time when exercising your normal civil liberties brings an abnormal and excessive response to them," Moyers says.In this atmosphere, he's felt a degree of personal attack, which - though he is considering retiring after 2003 - only seems to add fuel to his fire."Unless you're prepared to take hit after unfair hit accusing you of bias and even of having an opinion," he explains, "you have to love it. And I do." For kids with loss or addiction in their families, these camps offer comfort Mega Millions winners: Florida pair claim half of a $414 million prize Carrie Underwood stars in NBC remake of 'The Sound of Music' (+video)

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Related Program: Morning Edition Pakistan's Former Leader Musharraf Charged In Bhutto's Death By editor Originally published on August 20, 2013 4:55 am Transcript DAVID GREENE, HOST: This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene. RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST: And I'm Renee Montagne. A dramatic turn of events in Pakistan this morning where a court has indicted the country's former military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, in the murder of Benazir Bhutto. Bhutto was an internationally known name and a popular former prime minister of Pakistan who was making a political comeback in 2007 when she was assassinated at a campaign rally. Musharraf was president at the time, having initially led a coup to take over the post. After being forced to step down, he went into exile and he's returned in recent months. It's a case that contains both lots of intrigue and serious implications for Pakistan. To help understand what those are, we go to Rebecca Santana, who is a reporter in Islamabad for the Associated Press. Thank you for joining us. REBECCA SANTANA: Thank you for having me. MONTAGNE: Now what happened in the court there today? The charges, what are they exactly, against Musharraf? SANTANA: Well, he was charged today in court in Rawalpindi with murder, conspiracy to commit murder and facilitation of murder. They have not specifically said what exactly he has done that would constitute one of these charges. What the prosecutors have said, previously, is that he failed to protect her. Now, Musharraf, at the time, said that the Pakistani Taliban was responsible for her death. But there's always been questions about exactly who is responsible for her assassination. MONTAGNE: Aside from the allegations in this case, isn't it a big step to bring a former leader of the Pakistani military and a long-time president into court? SANTANA: It is very serous to do something like this against a former army chief, which is really the top position within the Pakistani military, the most powerful position within the country. And it's unprecedented to formally indict them on any charge. So, you know, each step along this political process for Musharraf has been fairly new ground for Pakistan. The military here is sacrosanct. To be fair, the courts are fairly independent. You know, they have a lot of animosity towards Musharraf because he is accused of detaining a number of top judges, including the chief justice. And that sparked protests across the country by lawyers that essentially led to his downfall. MONTAGNE: And there's a fair amount of intrigue around this case. One thing is that the current prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, is a political enemy of Musharraf. But this prosecution might not be something he wants to see. SANTANA: Exactly. It's a very strange turn of events, you know, and a change of fortunes for both men. Because Nawaz Sharif was the prime minister who was deposed by Musharraf in that 1999 coup. He was in handcuffs. He was very embarrassed. He was forced to leave the country and went into exile in Saudi Arabia. He didn't return until 2007, about the same time that Benazir Bhutto did. And then finally, this May, his political party won a very strong victory and he was returned to the prime minister's office. But this decision to go after Musharraf and to push these cases, it also puts Nawaz Sharif in very delicate territory because he has a lot of other things on his agenda. He needs to improve electricity, improve security, and going after the former army chief is such a public way could pick a fight with the military at a time that Nawaz Sharif just doesn't want to do that. MONTAGNE: And just briefly, where does the case and Musharraf go next? SANTANA: Legal cases in Pakistan can drag out for years, if there is will, they can be done fairly quickly. So it's really, you know, there's going to be a lot of focus on how quickly this case moves forward and what exactly happens. MONTAGNE: Associated Press reporter, speaking with us from Islamabad, Rebecca Santana, thanks very much. SANTANA: No problem. Thanks for having me. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.View the discussion thread. © 2016 KBIA

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VOL. 38 | NO. 18 | Friday, May 02, 2014 News media challenge ban on journalism drones From (email): Message: WASHINGTON (AP) - More than a dozen media organizations challenged the government's ban on the use of drones by journalists Tuesday, saying the Federal Aviation Administration's position violates First Amendment protections for news gathering.The organizations, including The Associated Press, filed a brief with the National Transportation Safety Board in support of aerial photographer Raphael Pirker. Pirker was fined $10,000 by the FAA for flying a small drone near the University of Virginia to make a commercial video in October 2011. He appealed the fine to the safety board, which hears challenges to FAA decisions.An administrative law judge ruled in March that the FAA can't enforce its policy against all commercial use of drones when the agency hasn't issued regulations for those uses. The FAA has appealed the judge's decision to the full five-member safety board. Agency officials have said they hope to issue regulations for the use of small drones later this year.The FAA won't currently issue drone permits to news organizations. Officials have sent warning letters to journalists found to have used small unmanned aircraft - most of them no bigger than a backpack - to take photos and videos. The agency suggested to one Ohio newspaper that it refrain from publishing video of a burning building taken independently by a drone hobbyist, even though hobbyists, unlike journalists, are permitted to fly drones, according to the brief."The FAA's position is untenable as it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding about journalism. News gathering is not a 'business purpose.' It is a First Amendment right," the brief said.Media organizations are intensely interested in using drones for photography and videos because they are far less expensive to buy and operate than a manned airplane or helicopter, and because their size and versatility provide visual perspectives often not possible with manned aircraft.Integrating unmanned aircraft into the national airspace also has the potential to improve the safety of reporting under less-than-ideal conditions, and unmanned aircraft by their nature pose less risk than helicopters, the news organizations said. Reports on traffic, hurricanes, wildfires, and crop yields could all be told more safely and cost-effectively with the use of unmanned aircraft, it said."This brief, filed by the country's leading news organizations, supports the proposition we have argued that federal agencies must consult with the public before banning the use of new technologies that have many beneficial purposes," said attorney Brendan Schulman, who is representing Pirker. "The argument becomes even stronger when First Amendment considerations are taken into account."Other media groups participating in the brief are Advance Publications Inc., Cox Media Group, Gannett Co., Gray Television Inc., Hearst Corporation, The McClatchy Company, the National Press Photographers Association, The National Press Club, The New York Times Company, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Radio-Television Digital News Association, Scripps Media Inc., Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., the Tribune Company and The Washington Post.FAA officials didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Hrant Dink (1954-2007) If you are not a Subscriber, Subscribe Now!Back to site Regions and Countries February 5, 2007 Issue A courageous editor and fervent Turkish patriot is killed in the name of nationalists intent on burying the inconvenient realities of history. By Ronald Grigor Suny January 22, 2007 Hrant Dink, the courageous editor of the Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos, was murdered in the middle of the day on Friday, January 19, on a city street in front of his office in Istanbul, by a 17-year-old man he had never met. Shot three times in the nape of the neck, he lay face down on the sidewalk, the blood pooling under him. His killer fled, brandishing his pistol and shouting, "I have killed an Armenian!" Dink was not killed for any deed or personal grudge but for who he was and for his words-words that were thought by nationalist Turks and right-wing opponents to be a threat to the Turkish state and to "Turkishness." He was 52 years old, a man of enormous energy and passion, someone who embraced those who met him, enveloping them both physically and with his charm and charisma. The circles of his admirers extended far beyond the small, beleaguered community of Turkish Armenians. Ad Policy Thousands gathered in Istanbul's central square, Taksim, in the hours after his killing and chanted, "We are all Armenians! We are all Hrant Dink!" For those who loved him or were moved by his words, it is impossible to believe he is dead. Whatever the immediate motives of the young assassin from Trebizond to stop Dink's pen, Dink knew that he was extraordinarily vulnerable in the corrosive political atmosphere gathering in Turkey, an atmosphere enflamed by state prosecutions of dissident voices and nationalist media. "My computer's memory," he wrote in his last editorial, "is loaded with sentences full of hatred and threats. I am just like a pigeon.... I look around to my left and right, in front and behind me." Like novelist Elif Shafak and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, both of whom have raised the issue of the genocidal deportations and massacres of hundreds of thousands of Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire, so Dink had been brought before Turkish courts and accused under the infamous Article 301 of "insulting Turkishness." And like the others he had not been jailed but given a suspended sentence, a gesture signaling that the Turkish state was still wavering between adopting the legal norms of Europe and turning its back on the invitation to join the European Union. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other officials from the government condemned the murder, and the culprit-Ogun Samast-was quickly apprehended. But in statements from the authorities some of the blame was placed on those outside Turkey who have brought forth parliamentary resolutions, as in France recently, to recognize the events of 1915 officially as a genocide. For eleven years Dink had edited Agos, a small-circulation newspaper, and though it had but 6,000 subscribers, its resonance was like a bell in a quiet night. In an interview with the Committee to Protect Journalists in February 2006, he remarked, "The prosecutions are not a surprise for me. They want to teach me a lesson because I am Armenian. They try to keep me quiet." When asked who "they" are, he answered as many in the Turkish opposition answer: "the deep state in Turkey," referring to the dark forces within the military and power ministries, as well as nationalist elements, to which even the mildly Islamist Erdogan government must defer. The paradox of Dink's death is that he was killed in the name of a particularly narrow notion of patriotism while he was himself a fervent Turkish patriot. His vision of his native country was of a modern democratic, tolerant state on the eastern edge of Europe, in which his own people, the Armenians, could live with Turks, Kurds, Jews, Greeks and the other peoples who had coexisted, however uneasily, in the cosmopolitan empire out of which the Turkish Republic had emerged. What he could not tolerate was the denial of the shared history of those peoples, a history that involved mass killing of Armenians and more recent repression of Kurds. Dink was an active participant in the vital civil society in Turkey, key members of which have taken up the question of the Armenian genocide as an opening wedge to investigate the blank spots of Turkey's past. He participated in international meetings that included Armenian and Turkish scholars exploring the causes and consequences of the policies of the Young Turk government during World War I. Last year he spoke at a Turkish academic conference on this theme at Istanbul's Bilgi University, a breakthrough meeting that clearly frightened those nationalists who want to bury the inconvenient past. While he was vitally interested in setting the record straight on 1915, Dink was more interested in the movement for Turkish democracy than in international recognition of the Armenian massacres as a genocide. Democracy in Turkey, he believed, would easily settle that historical matter. For some Armenians in the diaspora who know Turks far less well than their compatriots who live in Turkey, Dink's lack of fanaticism on this issue made him suspect, though his outspokenness in the face of official sanction gave him a heroic aura. Last year the Norwegians awarded him the Bjornson Academy Prize for protection of freedom of expression. In his speech at Bilgi University last year, he told the largely Turkish audience, "We want this land; not to take it away but to lie under it!" Facebook Ronald Grigor Suny Ronald Grigor Suny, the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History and the director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan, is also professor emeritus of political science and history at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (Oxford) and is currently writing a biography of Stalin. Why the Gun-Control Movement Fails By Gary Younge Jan 24, 2007 Stop the Iran War Before It Starts By Scott Ritter Jan 24, 2007 The Maya Survivors vs. Los Genocidios By The Nation "AN INDISPENSABLE VOICE IN OUR POLITICAL DIALOGUE."

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25 Years After Tiananmen Protests, Chinese Media Keep It Quiet By Bill Chappell Jun 4, 2014 ShareTwitter Facebook Google+ Email View Slideshow Chinese paramilitary police stand guard in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4, the 25th anniversary of a violent crackdown on protesters by Chinese troops. Kevin Frayer Tens of thousands of people attend a candlelight vigil at Victoria Park in Hong Kong on Wednesday to mark the 25th anniversary of the Chinese military crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Beijing. Vincent Yu Originally published on June 4, 2014 11:23 am On the 25th anniversary of the massacre that broke up pro-democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, China's government is quashing many attempts to mention the fateful date, with heavy security and online monitoring. "Silence surrounds this anniversary. So, too, does repression," NPR's Louisa Lim reports. "For the first time, activists trying to hold private commemorations have been detained." In Beijing today, "There are police at every downtown intersection, and lots of security checkpoints and bag-checks around the square itself," NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports for our Newscast unit. "Police kept foreign reporters, myself included, out of the square." Anthony adds that "online, even the most indirect references to June fourth and Tiananmen Square are blocked or deleted." He also discussed the anniversary on today's Morning Edition. That led us to wonder how Chinese media are handling the landmark confrontation between demonstrators and soldiers that culminated in the image of a man facing off with a row of tanks on June 5, 1989, the day after the government broke up the protest. We didn't see any mention of the Tiananmen anniversary; here's a rundown of what we saw instead: State-run China Central Television, or CCTV, is featuring a piece about President Xi Jinping touting "engineering's role in development." Another prominent story is about a prize for a Chinese milk company. The official Xinhua news agency's most popular online story today is about Angelina Jolie's first trip to China to promote a movie. A plan to form closer ties with Kuwait is also highlighted. The English language (and state-owned) China Daily website is leading with a story about high school students coping with stress over college entrance exams. Major news outlets in Shanghai and Beijing followed suit. In contrast, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post has created a special multimedia project that tells the story with video clips and archive photos. The paper is covering several angles of the anniversary, from a live blog from a vigil to remembrances to a debate over the event's legacy in its Hong Kong edition. But readers' comments on that story seem to have been redacted, leaving several statements about the U.S. and its Kent State tragedy, as well as a theory that stories about what transpired in Tiananmen Square back in 1989 are a "myth." The Shanghaiist blog offers a rundown of coverage - and includes a link to the YouTube version of the documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace, which ran on PBS's Frontline. "After the shooting on the night of June 3rd, when I found out that so many people had died, I felt neither anger nor sorrow - nothing," student leader Wang Dan says in the film. "I was completely numb; there was a huge emptiness. I just couldn't believe they would open fire." Wang, who now teaches in Taiwan, spoke to the Taipei Times about the anniversary. Here's some of what he had to say: "My heart is heavy when looking back [at what happened] 25 years ago. There was never a political rehabilitation of the event, and historically, it has not yet received the redress it deserved. It has always been a great sadness that many sacrificed themselves in that event, yet it seems China's democratization is still far off." An official death toll of the events in Tiananmen Square has never been released. Update at 2:15 p.m. ET: State-Run Agency Weighs In In what seems to be the only mention of the anniversary in official media, an unsigned op-ed piece appeared in the Global Times, defending the actions of 1989. The article also said of Tiananmen Square, "not talking about it indicates the attitude of society." And it suggested that remembrances are mainly the product of dissidents and people who want to portray China's leaders as "very scared" of political change. The article states: "The mendacious impression is made by anti-China forces in the West and Chinese exiles who have been marginalized there. They hope it will deal a heavy blow to the stability of Chinese society but they will end up failing. "Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit . View the discussion thread. © 2016 KNAU Arizona Public Radio

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Changing Content Consumption Habits Across Europe Katherine Allen In my December 2012 column, I discussed the importance of real world/virtual world connections and the way in which digital sales of Fifty Shades of Grey had seeded and driven massive print sales. Fast-forward 12 months, and charity shops in the U.K. are grappling with a glut of donated unwanted copies of Fifty Shades, which cannot be recycled and which no one wants to buy.Tottering piles of unsold secondhand books are pretty hard to miss. But there's no doubt that publishing consumption habits are continuing to change across Europe in other, more subtle, ways despite the many cultural and political differences in play across the continent. Nowhere is this more evident than in the news and current affairs segment. A comprehensive study, released earlier this year by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, explores digital news consumption across nine countries, including the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Denmark.The headline finding of the report is that "[n]ews is becoming more mobile, more social, and more real-time." But the report also notes the digital revolution is not developing at the same rate in all countries. "What happens in the US does not necessarily follow automatically in Europe or elsewhere," according to co-editor Nic Newman. The report found considerable national variation in methods of news discovery. In France, Germany, Spain, and Italy search engines are an important gateway to information-45% of respondents in France and 49% in Italy said that search was one of their main ways to access news stories, compared to just 24% in the U.K. Social media was also ranked as a major gateway in Germany, Spain, and Brazil, but not in the U.K. I was fascinated to learn that Spanish, Italian, and American news consumers are more than twice as likely to use a social network to comment on a news story compared to someone from the U.K. Only 10% of U.K. consumers said they participated in this way, compared to 27% from Spain and 26% from Italy. In general, southern European nations seem to be much more comfortable with participating in sharing and news discussion. Given the highly developed technology ecosystems in the latter countries, cultural factors are clearly at play here, which publishers looking to roll out services across Europe would do well to bear in mind. In Europe, traditional brands still hold sway for many. In the U.K. and Denmark, for example, traditional news brands attract 80% or more of the online audience. That said, even the most celebrated traditional brands are not impervious to the changing landscape. The London-based Lloyd's List, which has provided news for the shipping industry since 1734, announced in September that it would be abandoning print and going completely digital. Parent company Informa, PLC said that 97% of customers preferred to access business information online and that less than 2% of readers use print only and no other means to access the publication. Lloyd's List is in a fortunate position: It provides valuable, highly specialist information and has more than 16,600 subscribers who pay almost £1,800 (about $2,919) for a single subscription. Early editions of Lloyd's List have been digitized and are freely available on the web. Browsing the archive, I was struck by the following announcement in the Friday, Jan. 2, 1740, issue: "This List, which was formerly publish'd once a Week, will now continue to be publish'd every Tuesday and Friday, &c. Subscriptions are taken in at Three Shillings per Quarter, at the Bar of Lloyd's Coffee-House in Lombard-Street. Such Gentlemen as are willing to encourage this Undertaking, shall have them carefully deliver'd according to their Directions."As I look back to 1740, and forward to 2014, I'm struck as much by the similarities as the differences in the challenges faced by publishers. Business models continue to evolve, whether it is changing to a twice-weekly publishing cycle or deciding to go all digital. Monetizing readership is vital, whether from 3-shilling subscriptions or via a paywall. And delivery remains key-it's just that now we expect our content on all devices, all the time. Other Sites from Information Today Database Trends and Applications

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Column: Role of newspapers remain vital in community By Bill Rogers Special to the Aiken Standard Oct 8 2013 12:01 am National Newspaper Week - Oct. 6-12 - is a good time to offer a fresh perspective on the newspaper industry. To paraphrase what Mark Twain said about the premature printing of his obituary, let me say that the reports of the death of newspapers in our state and nation are greatly exaggerated. While the printed edition continues to be the core product, many newspaper media companies today also offer news in a variety of digital options: websites, text alerts, mobile sites, social media sites, apps and more. And regardless of how your news is delivered, it still originates with your local newspaper. As a matter of fact, South Carolina today has more than 100 newspapers, including 16 dailies and 93 vital community newspapers. Each week, more than 2.5 million people read a S.C. newspaper. A recent survey conducted by the National Newspaper Association through the University of Missouri School of Journalism has a few points I'd like to share: • Seventy-one percent of the respondents read a community newspaper at least once a week. (A similar study done by the Newspaper Association of America found that seven in 10 Americans read the paper in print or online each week. And it is important to note that 59 percent of young adults ages 18-24 read newspaper media weekly.) • More than 70 percent believe the accuracy and the coverage of their local paper is either "good" or "excellent." • Sixty-nine percent agreed that newspapers provide valuable local shopping and advertising information. Newspapers are part of the fabric that builds strong communities across our state. From high school sports to weddings and obituaries, from police coverage to reporting on government, from grocery ads to want ads ... newspapers are there looking out for their readers. One of the prime functions of newspapers in our democratic society is to be the watchdog of government and people in power. And South Carolina newspapers are doing their jobs. From an unreported tuberculosis outbreak in Greenwood to the hacking of tax records from the Department of Revenue, newspapers broke the stories and stuck with them to uncover all the facts. A newspaper challenged the secrecy of the state Department of Public Safety to obtain records relating to the DUI arrest of an elected official. Another newspaper persistently reported on the hiring practices of a school district that resulted in numerous friends and relatives of the school board chair being hired. The paper also reported that the son of the board chair routinely used district vehicles to run personal errands while on the clock for work. Newspapers have been vigilant in reporting on the misuse of political campaign funds and instances where public officials and employees use public money as if it were their own. Like all businesses in these tough economic times, newspapers have had to deal with cost-cutting measures. Still, daily and weekly newspapers remain the only true mass media in almost every market in South Carolina. The times they are a-changin', but you can still get a newspaper delivered to you for less than the price of a cup of coffee. That's a lot of bang for your buck. Bill Rogers is executive director of the S.C. Press Association, the trade group for South Carolina's more than 100 newspapers.

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HOME / ABOUT / WRITINGS / POLITICS / NEW / CONTACT Radiating a False Picture: Focus on the Difference Between Soviet PR and RealityGeorge Schopflin,The Times, UK,July 11 1986 The Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachov is working hard at showing an image of reasonableness to the West. All the marks of modernity are wheeled out in the presentation of what the Soviet Union does, and there is more than a hint that the Gorbachov style is intended to be understood as proof of the existence of a Westernised elite with which the West can deal. This hides the persistence of a degree of coerciveness and brutality in the Soviet Union that no Western country can accept as reasonable.Vivid evidence of this comes in a documentary, The Nuclear Gulag, to be shown on Channel 4 on Saturday. It shows pictures, some taken from Soviet television, some shot clandestinely at considerable risk, of the Gulag as it is today. The image is not a pretty one. The unofficially shot film and the interviews with relatively recent survivors of the Soviet prison regime are both persuasive in shedding light on unknown aspects of the story.The most remarkable part of the documentary deals with a highly sensitive and secret topic - uranium mining by prison labour. The Soviet system uses prisoners to mine uranium partly as a deferred death sentence and partly because it is cheap. The human cost is not regarded as a cost. According to the evidence of a Protestant pastor, who has spent 18 months at two such mines, uranium mining is carried out with no regard to safety provision. There is no machinery to extract toxic gases and dust and no special clothing is provided.The death rate is high. So is the suicide rate - many prisoners preferring suicide to slow radiation poisoning. Medical support is worse then useless. There is tentative evidence that instead of offering treatment, some medical personnel regard the prisoners as guinea pigs and observe the progress of radiation sickness instead.The upshot is that the Gulag is hardly changed from the death camps set up half a century ago. Brutality and appalling conditions are the norm. The guards appear to have an informal licence to kill prisoners. The prisoners are treated, as they have been for decades, merely as economic units from whom the maximum amount of work is to be extracted and are then to be discarded.The cynicism of the system is reflected in the way that regulations are applied. Failure to meet a heavy work quota, often in appalling conditions, such as having to dig soil frozen three feet deep with a spade, results in solitary confinement and starvation rations. This further undermines the prisoner�s constitution and is, for all practical purposes, a death sentence. It is next to impossible to escape this vicious circle.The punishment cells at Vladimir prison, east of Moscow, are specifically designed to break prisoners physically. They are too small to allow a man to lie down and are deliberately overheated or kept frozen. One former inmate describes how he was kept in such a cell for 15 days at 5 degrees C, after his warm clothing had been taken away. He shivered for the entire time he was there and afterwards had a stroke.The medical staff are as much a part of the system as the guards. One doctor, to whom a prisoner appealed for help, declared, �First I am a Chekist, a KGB agent and then I am a doctor.� Brutality is not a monopoly of the guards. Some prisoners, common criminals, are permitted to kill politicals who come to be regarded as �awkward.�The documentary also produces evidence that the total number of executions in the Soviet Union is far higher than the official figure of about 30 a year. The real figure, calculated on the basis of confidential information from Soviet district courts and appeal courts, is between 865 and 895. Gorbachov�s campaign against �speculators,� who can face the death penalty, could well raise this to an even higher level.There is something to be said for the argument that any society can be judged by how it treats its prisoners. The emphasis is not on spectacular achievements but on the dark side, where state control is complete. The individual imprisoned is entirely at the mercy of the system, and the system is allowed its fullest expression. By this yardstick, the Soviet Union has a long way to go before it can be seriously regarded as Westernised.

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TV shows tarnish Gwangju history A foundation to honor the May 18 Gwangju uprising condemned programs run by two conservative TV channels that aired interviews with North Korean defectors claiming North Korea was involved in the civilian massacre.It further threatened to take legal action against the broadcasters for damaging the spirit of the democratization movement. "It is a serious misdeed that some television programs deliberately distorted the truth of the May 18 uprising," Oh Jae-yiel, head of the May 18 Memorial Foundation, said on Sunday. "After evaluating the response from the government, we will take all available legal action."Ahead of the 33rd anniversary of the uprising, right-wing broadcasters Channel A, owned by the Dong-A Ilbo, and TV Chosun, owned by the Chosun Ilbo, featured interviewees that said North Korean agents secretly penetrated into the South in 1980 and pretended to be civilians in order to cause social turmoil and the collapse of the government in the South. The programs were even supported by some far-right people, who argued the uprising was just an anti-government riot directed by North Korean agents and Gwangju people were all "reds," or communists. TV Chosun broadcast a talk show on May 13 featuring a North Korean defector, identified as Im Cheon-yong. Im said he was a former North Korean military officer of a special force unit that was involved in the Gwangju uprising in 1980. "A battalion composed of 600 North Korean soldiers penetrated into [Gwangju]," Im said. "It was North Korean guerillas who occupied the South Jeolla Provincial Office at the time."However, the allegation contradicts official records. According to the Web site of the state-run National Archives of Korea, it was Gwangju citizens who raided the South Jeolla Provincial Office on May 21 and forcibly removed the government soldiers from the office. Although the civil forces were later dragged out by government forces, the occupying of the provincial office is seen as a symbolic incident that showed the people's democratic spirit. Another North Korean defector then appeared on Channel A last Wednesday and made a similar claim. The defector, who used the pseudonym Kim Myeong-guk, said he was one of several North Korean soldiers sent to Gwangju during the uprising. Unlike Im, his face was blurred, apparently to protect his identity. "On May 21, 1980, soldiers of the special forces unit arrived on shore near Gwangju by ship," Kim said. "We pretended to be Gwangju civilian forces and even attacked the South's government forces together."Among the North Korean soldiers who participated in the uprising, some were promoted to be generals in the North later," he said. After the programs were broadcast, roughly 17,000 comments were posted on Ilbe, a far-right online Web site that many young people visit, denouncing the May 18 uprising. They mostly believed in the allegations by the defectors and denigrated the achievement of the movement. Most users ridiculed the activists and the victims of the uprising, by describing them as hongeo, or Korean name of skate, a fish and regional specialty of the South Jeolla region.The fish is red in color and is often used as a nickname for South Jeolla people when accusing them of being a "commie," or "red."The allegation that North Korea was possibly involved in the Gwangju movement was first raised by the Chun Doo Hwan administration in 1980. On May 21, 1980, Lee Hui-sung, then-Army Chief of Staff for the Chun administration, spread leaflets that said, "The agitation is being led by [North Korean] spy agents and rebellious gangsters." However, in 1995, during questioning by the prosecution, Lee reversed his words, saying, "At the time, that allegation was just a suspicion. It was a bit exaggerated."Many military experts also say that the possibility of North Korean agents' involvement is highly unlikely, as Gwangju was under thorough military surveillance by martial law at the time. Politicians and civic activists protested the programs and the comments of the Ilbe Web site. You Seung-hee, a Democratic Party lawmaker, issued a statement on Sunday saying: "The actions of the so-called general-programming cable channels, distorting the history of the protest against the military coup, which is part of the identity of South Korea, are no different than the acts of Japan that distort history [regarding their colonial rule during World War II and territorial claims]."Kim Si-won, an 18-year-old high school student, also staged a one-man protest in central Seoul. "The Ilbe members, who deny the spirit of the May 18 Democratization Movement, are not entitled to be citizens of this country."Kim Seo-jung, a media studies professor at Sungkonghoe University, said "[TV Chosun and Channel A] just ran the programs to get ratings without checking the facts about the Gwangju uprising, which is an important incident in Korean society. They failed to keep their responsibility as media for uncovering the truth."Kim Mun-jo, a sociology professor at Korea University, also said, "The far-right netizens, including the Ilbe members, are trying to solidify their status by making those anti-social allegations. Their acts, which lack understanding of history, could become a serious factor in hindering social unity."Shin Kyeong-jin, chairman of the Association for the Wounded from the May 18 Democratization Movement, said, "The broadcasters, who led the distortion of history regarding the May 18 uprising, are not qualified to be called media."Incheon Mayor Song Young-gil also said, "There's no difference between the distortion of the May 18 history and the comments of Japan's right-wing Shinzo Abe or Toru Hashimoto." By Kim Hee-jin, Lee Seung-ho [] Tweet

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L'Affaire Froomkin, as Told by Froomkin Froomkin and Rosen on accountability, impartiality, and the dangers of the journalistic lobotomy By Megan Garber Jay Rosen calls it "the Froomkin kissoff." Others call it, less colorfully, "l'affaire Froomkin." Many call it politically motivated. Some call it "dumb, short-sighted, and self-destructive." Some just call it stupid. However you choose to describe it, the event in question - the unceremonious dismissal of Dan Froomkin, the immensely popular blogger, from his contract with The Washington Post Company, and therefore from his blogging slot at The Washington Post - has been a popular subject among bloggers, in particular, since it was announced earlier this month. And it was the unofficial subject of a panel this afternoon at today's Personal Democracy Forum, in which journalism professor Jay Rosen interviewed Froomkin about the dismissal (before moving on to the official topic: "Accountability Journalism Online"). "What I was basically told is that they didn't think the column was working anymore," Froomkin put it to a roomful of political activists and media thinkers during the interview session, his voice punctuated with the crinkles of paper bags and plastic sandwich wrap, and the occasional pop of an opened soda can. (The interview was an optional event during the conference's allotted time for "Networking Lunch.") "They explained to me that traffic was down," Froomkin continued. Then, after a pause: "But...traffic was down compared to what?" Ultimately, Froomkin attributes his Post dismissal to a combination of "disagreements between myself and my editor" and the fact that, telecommuting as he did for the past five-plus years, he was disconnected in several ways from the institutional culture of the Post. "As a contractor, I was a particularly easy line item to scratch out," Froomkin said. But he also acknowledged a broader explanation for his contract's termination: "I was kicked out of the news side because I was too opinionated," Froomkin said, referring to the six years he spent working on the news side of washingtonpost.com; "I was kicked out of the opinion side because I wasn't opinionated enough." And part of that latter dismissal, Froomkin believes, was that his White House Watch column has focused on accountability not just for the occupants of the White House, but also for those who cover them. Froomkin thinks of himself as a press critic as well as a political critic; and "I suspect," he said, that in the "kissoff" Rosen refers to, "some of the trends and tension that both Jay and I have been writing about for years did have a role to play." The Froomkin/Rosen talk could have easily been, or could have easily devolved into, a gripefest/whinefest/doesn't-Fred Hiatt-suck-fest. But instead, Froomkin and Rosen made, if not lemonade of lemons, then at least wine out of sour grapes. The two media thinkers - both of whom, as Froomkin mentioned, have long been critical of the established system of Washington press coverage (Rosen makes a near-daily habit of disparaging what he refers to as "the Church of the Savvy" and the vagaries of 'he said/she said' coverage in political journalism; Froomkin's brand is based in large part on his outside-the-beltway status) - stayed true to the title of their talk: it was indeed about accountability journalism. What it's become, what it could be - and what's preventing it from living up to its full potential in the present moment. The principal culprit both men pointed to today is the one they've been singling out for years: an institutional and cultural structure of principle and practice that prevents individual journalists from taking a stand in their journalism - from, essentially, calling the world as they see it. Froomkin pointed to Len Downie, the former editor of the Post known for, among other things, his refusal to vote based on the principle of even-handedness. "Journalists' credibility, for him, lies in 'the impartial center,'" Froomkin said - and their striving to achieve it has become a kind of religion in itself. Of which "Len has been the chief acolyte, or high priest." And yet "the sense that, if you have a belief that you publicly espouse, you can no longer be fair about reporting a subject is problematic," Froomkin continued. "Reporters have beliefs, they have values - the key is for them not to let those beliefs affect their reporting. Downie wanted people to disenfranchise themselves." Besides, Froomkin continued, there are principles that journalists do, and more to the point should, stand for - accountability, transparency, fair play, human rights - and "there's nothing wrong with journalists wearing those values on their sleeves." "There's a lot of professional pride wrapped up in this idea" of impartiality, Rosen noted - noting as well that the flip side of that pride is a "fear of giving up what you've known and dominated for so long." Froomkin shared a story that David Corn - the White House correspondent for Mother Jones magazine, who also happened to be sitting in the front row of the audience during the Froomkin/Rosen talk - had told him during yesterday's PDF proceedings. During the 2004 Republican National Convention, Corn found himself in a bar with several WaPo reporters and editors, who were talking in strong terms about what a poor acceptance speech the president had just delivered. The next day, Corn read those same journalists' coverage of the Bush speech in the Post - very little of which reflected the feelings they'd expressed the night before. Which is to say, their true feelings. "My explanation for this - or my language for it - is that there's an innocence agenda in the press," Rosen said, describing the externalized profession of "Hey, I don't judge" that the press uses, ultimately, to seduce sources. That agenda, Rosen said, "comes from the inability to justify modern professional journalism in any other way than objectivity. And the demand for something stronger, better, more truthful just has never been met." Take, for example, journalists' tortured relationship with the word "lie." "The traditional media is so incredibly averse to that word - and especially when applied to President Bush - it isn't even funny," Froomkin said. But "it's inappropriate squeamishness." The rule for most mainstream news organizations, he noted, is that you can't come out and call someone a liar unless you have proof that the person's intention was to deceive - which rather absurdly puts the burden of proof on a confession, rather than an external judgment based on fact. "My wife, who is a federal prosecutor, just thinks this is the funniest thing," Froomkin said, as the crowd laughed along with him. The caution that has come to define so much of journalism's culture and products is "really the antithesis of what I think journalism should be," Froomkin said. "Which is: you call it as you see it." Or, as Rosen put it: "'Safety First' is a terrible principle for journalists." In accountability journalism at its best - and, really, journalism more generally at its best - "you're truth-telling," Froomkin said. "You're shouting it from the rooftops, and if that means people are constantly getting mad at you, so be it." Instead, much of the mainstream reporting we have today is diluted, triangulated, watered down, and weak. "It's kind of a self-inflicted lobotomy for journalists," Froomkin said. "You're cutting off the most important parts of the journalistic brain" - the ability to make determinations based on accumulated knowledge. "You have to try to imagine overlapping fears," Rosen interjected. "A newsroom is an apparatus of social control. It is organized in part to de-voice the individual journalist." And news organizations, he continued, are "in a situation in which, the way the world is going, that's not what's valuable." We're in a culture, instead, that creates and promotes journalistic celebrities whose fame is largely independent of the news organization they represent. And "it's scary," Froomkin said, "for them to think that the individuals might walk away from the brand." Froomkin was careful to blame the state of affairs not on individual press members - or even on press members in the aggregate - but rather to frame the problem as an institutional deficit. "The White House press corps is made up of terrific people who work hard under hard conditions," he noted. But "the corporate structures of the modern newspaper hold back these very knowledgeable beat reporters from calling it like they see it." So "the key is to free the people from these strictures." But that freedom had better come soon. "By playing it safe," Froomkin said, "they're making themselves irrelevant." Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.

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Related Program: Morning Edition Stokely Carmichael, A Philosopher Behind The Black Power Movement By Karen Grigsby Bates Mar 10, 2014 Related Program: Morning Edition ShareTwitter Facebook Google+ Email View Slideshow Martin Luther King Jr., shown here with Stokely Carmichael during a voter registration march in Mississippi in 1966, regarded the younger Carmichael as one of the civil rights movement's most promising leaders. Lynn Pelham / Time View Slideshow Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, speaks to reporters in Atlanta in May 1966. That year, his use of the phrase "black power" at a rally in Mississippi grabbed the nation's attention. Bettmann/Corbis Originally published on March 10, 2014 11:26 am Before he became famous - and infamous - for calling on black power for black people, Stokely Carmichael was better known as a rising young community organizer in the civil rights movement. The tall, handsome philosophy major from Howard University spent summers in the South, working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, to get African-Americans in Alabama and Mississippi registered to vote in the face of tremendous, often violent resistance from segregationists. Historian Peniel Joseph's new biography of Carmichael, titled Stokely: A Life, shows that for a time, the Trinidad-born New Yorker was everywhere that counted in the South, a real-life Zelig: "He is an organizer who had his hand in every major demonstration and event that occurs between 1960-1965." Joseph, a professor at Tufts University, says Carmichael was ever-present in what he considers "the second half of the civil rights movement's heroic period." (After the Montgomery Bus Boycott and before the attempts to integrate the North.) Photographs from the time show him walking down dusty highways with Martin Luther King Jr. in Mississippi, chatting easily with farmers in Lowndes County, Ala., listening to elderly black ladies who plied him with sweet tea on their front porches while he (often successfully) charmed them into joining him in organizing their neighbors. Joseph says Carmichael had "amazing charisma." A Call For Black Power Carmichael spent the early '60s firmly embracing nonviolent protest: sit-ins, marches, assemblies. But the soaring victories of the late '50s and early '60s seemed to bog down after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Joseph says Carmichael began to wonder if new methods needed to be considered. In 1966, he used the phrase "black power" at a rally in Mississippi. It caught the nation's attention, but it meant different things to different people. Many whites who heard the phrase were uneasy, Joseph says. "They assumed that black power meant being anti-white and really sort of violent, foreboding." Black listeners, on the other hand, heard a call "for cultural political and economic self-determination," Joseph says. The phrase, he adds, resonated powerfully for a people who'd long been measured by arbitrarily set white standards and aesthetics. "We have to stop being ashamed of being black!" was the first point in a four-part manifesto he often used in his speeches. Black, Carmichael told his audiences, was survivor-strong. It was resourceful. And beautiful. Tall and thin, with limpid eyes and a dazzling smile that contrasted with his deeply brown skin, Carmichael walked like he thought he was a good-looking guy - in an era when, for many blacks, lighter was better. "That was really one of his most important legacies," Joseph says. "He was really defiant in declaring 'black is beautiful' well before that became popular in the late '60s." In other words, Carmichael was black and proud years before James Brown turned the concept into a best-selling R&B hit. 'The United States Has No Conscience' He was also rethinking the practicality of nonviolence in an environment where black life was often viewed as disposable. The 1964 murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner in Neshoba County, Miss., the assassination of Malcolm X and the crushing government response to the unrest that had blazed through several cities by the late '60s caused Carmichael to rethink his beliefs. King (who regarded the younger Carmichael as one of the movement's most promising leaders) believed in the concept of "redemptive suffering" and thought the sight of protesters accepting beatings, dog bites and fire-hosing would soften America's heart and inspire the country to reject segregation. But after seeing so many of his comrades maimed and killed, Carmichael no longer shared that belief. King had gotten a lot right, Carmichael said, but in betting on nonviolence, "he only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a conscience. The United States has no conscience." And it was becoming increasingly hard for him to live in the United States. Hounded by the FBI at home, tracked by the CIA when he went abroad, Carmichael had had enough. He changed his name to Kwame Ture in homage to two African heroes - his friend Kwame Nkrumah (the first president of independent Ghana), and Sékou Touré, the president of Guinea, the country that had welcomed the former civil rights worker as an honored citizen. Ture would live for another three decades, visiting the United States frequently as he traveled the globe preaching the merits of pan-Africanism and scientific socialism. People listened - but not in the same numbers as they had in the early days. Ture, with his modest lifestyle and reminders of communal responsibility seemed ... quaint. "It's interesting," biographer Joseph notes: "Times changed, but Stokely didn't." The former civil rights warrior died in Guinea in 1998 at age 57, of prostate cancer. And while he's no longer a household name in most places, Peniel Joseph says, Stokely Carmichael's legacy is the very notion of black power, "which was enormously successful in redefining the contours of African-American identity but also race relations in the United States - and globally."Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit . Transcript RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST: Let's hear now about the man who back in the '60s popularized the term black power. "Stokely: A Life" is the work of historian Peniel Joseph. His new biography examines, in detail, the late Stokely Carmichael's life and legacy. NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates talked with Joseph about Carmichael's transition from civil rights work to black power advocate. KAREN GRIGSBY BATES, BYLINE: Many African Americans proudly wear afros, corn rows and dreadlocks today, but back in the early '60s, natural hair was considered wild and a little shameful by a lot of black folks. Stokely Carmichael's biographer, Peniel Joseph, says one of Carmichael's most significant gifts to black Americans was his encouragement that they accept themselves, their history and their looks. STOKELY CARMICHAEL: We have to stop being ashamed of being black. We've got to stop being ashamed of being black. PENIEL JOSEPH: And so he was really defiant in declaring that, you know, black is beautiful, before James Brown, before that became very popular in the late '60s. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) JAMES BROWN: (Singing) Uh, with your bad self. Say it loud, say it loud. BATES: The very phrase black power, says Joseph, made some white people anxious. JOSEPH: They assumed that black power meant being anti-white and really sort of violent foreboding. BATES: While black audiences heard a different message. JOSEPH: They received it and defined it as something that was positive, that it was about cultural, political, economic self-determination, so he becomes an icon both nationally but very positively within the African American community. BATES: Carmichael's words were powerfully resonant, politically and culturally, for a population that had long been measured against white standards and aesthetics and found wanting. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Singing) Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me around... BATES: At 19 he began organizing as a university student. Carmichael and other members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were spending dangerous summers in the Deep South. They were working to help register first-time black voters. Peniel Joseph says Carmichael had an uncanny ability to make genuine connections with black farmers still living in near feudal conditions on white-owned land. JOSEPH: He's the kind of activist who slept on dirt floors in Mississippi, in shotgun shacks in Alabama. Really was unadorned in the way in which he had a love for very, very poor people. BATES: A natural teacher, Carmichael gave user-friendly civics lessons to black tenant farmers, many of whom had not gone beyond the third grade. He urged them to see a future in which their votes mattered. CARMICHAEL: Now, in this country it says majority rules. We are 80 percent in this county and we have the right to rule this county and we're gonna rule it. I don't care how poor we are and how black we are, we're going to govern this county. BATES: After graduation from Howard, Carmichael turned down an offer from Harvard to do graduate work in his philosophy major. Instead, he returned south to continue organizing. The movement, he said, was his fate. Carmichael was so active that sometimes, his biographer, Peniel Joseph, observes, it felt as if he was everywhere at once. JOSEPH: Before the black power theme, he is an organizer who has his hand in every major demonstration and event that occurs between 1960 and '65, which is the second half of the civil rights movement's heroic period. BATES: But the period when blacks and whites work together for equality began to diverge around 1966. Many white liberals bristled when Carmichael pointed out that however well intentioned they were, they were privileged simply because they were white and the beneficiaries of institutional racism that existed in the country's financial, political and cultural institutions. CARMICHAEL: What do you want? UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Black power. CARMICHAEL: What do you want? UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Black power. CARMICHAEL: What do you want? BATES: He was also changing his mind about Martin Luther King's nonviolent philosophy, which depended on what King called the demonstrator's redemptive suffering to effect social change. Carmichael thought King had a good idea, but... CARMICHAEL: He only made one fallacious assumption. In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none. BATES: By 1967, Stokely Carmichael would become Kwame Ture and move permanently to Guinea, West Africa. His time as a household name was over. But, Peniel Joseph says, the effect Carmichael had on African Americans' racial identity and race relations in the U.S. and beyond created a lasting legacy. Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. © 2016 KMUW

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Home / Top News / U.S. News Longtime UPI White House reporter Helen Thomas dead at 92 July 20, 2013 at 7:50 PM Follow @upi Comments | License Photo WASHINGTON, July 20 (UPI) -- Helen Thomas, who doggedly pursued accountability from 10 U.S. presidents as United Press International White House correspondent, died Saturday. She was 92. President Obama said in a written statement that Thomas "never failed to keep presidents - myself included - on their toes." "What made Helen the 'Dean of the White House Press Corps' was not just the length of her tenure, but her fierce belief that our democracy works best when we ask tough questions and hold our leaders to account," said Obama, the last president in a string dating back to the 1960s to field questions from Thomas. Thomas was known to legions of Washington reporters simply as "Helen." She was the doyenne -- and, unofficially, the dean -- of the White House press corps since the Kennedy administration, but never succumbed to the allure of power, prestige and glitz surrounding the capital. "There is something about the White House that seems to encourage secrecy," Thomas once said. "Our role is really to try to make presidents accountable. The media, is the only institution in our society that has the privilege of questioning a president on a regular basis and making him accountable." Politico said word of Thomas' death was spread in an email from the Gridiron Club, a venerable association for Washington journalists.STORY: Helen Thomas' Humor "Former Gridiron Club president Helen Thomas, our first female member, died Saturday morning at her Washington apartment after a long illness," Gridiron's Carl Leubsdorf wrote. "She would have been 93 next month." Thomas -- who frequently reminded colleagues that, "You're only as good as your last story" -- wrote three memoirs: "Dateline: White House" in 1975 , "Front Row at the White House" in 1999 and "Thanks for the Memories, Mr. President: Wit and Wisdom from the Front Row at the White House," in 2002. "It is a sheer joy to know that the work you have dedicated your life to has impacted others," Thomas said. "It was never my intention to become a great personality, only a great reporter. Pleasure in your profession puts perfection in your work. It's a labor of love." Former President Bill Clinton said in a statement Thomas "was a pioneering journalist who, while adding more than her share of cracks to the glass ceiling, never failed to bring intensity and tenacity to her White House beat." "Throughout her career she covered the issues and events that shaped the course of our world with perseverance and a tough-minded dedication," Clinton said. He praised Thomas' "commitment to the role of a strong press." The White House Correspondents Association honored her in 1998 with its lifetime achievement award. Clinton at the time called Thomas "a symbol of everything American journalism can and should be -- the embodiment of fearless integrity, fierce commitment to accuracy, the insistence of holding government accountable. All of that in the spirit of the First Amendment and the free press it protects." Thomas was born Aug. 4, 1920, in Kentucky. She was one of six children of Lebanese immigrants and was raised in Detroit. She moved to Washington to take an entry-level job with the Washington Daily News. She joined United Press during World War II and joined UPI's White House bureau after John F. Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961. She was the UPI White House bureau chief from 1974 until she left the wire service in 2000. She spent another 10 years as a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. National Public Radio correspondent David Folkenflik said Thomas "broke barriers that prevented women from rising in the Washington press corps." She was the first female president of the White House Correspondents Association and enjoyed the longest tenure of any member of the elite White House press corps. Thomas' long career was not without controversy. She was known for asking blunt questions from her front-row seat in the White House press room and refusing to accept answers that were vague or off the subject. CNN quoted Thomas saying, "I have never covered the president in any way other than that he is ultimately responsible." Although she was well beyond retirement age, Thomas saw her career come to a premature end in 2010. She became the target of outrage and controversy when she told an amateur videographer outside the White House that Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine." Thomas later apologized for the remarks but did not back down from her opinion. "They do not reflect my heartfelt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance," she said in a subsequent column. "May that day come soon." Although Thomas was known for being prickly and not easily intimidated, she was also highly respectful of her position and always maintained she "felt very privileged to cover the White House." "I see people peering through the gates and know they would love to be inside and know what's going on," Thomas said. "I wish the doors could be as open to them as they have been to me." Her family said Thomas will be buried in Detroit, where she grew up, CNN reported. A memorial service is planned in Washington in October, her family said. Thomas, a graduate of Wayne State University, married Douglas Cornell, who died in 1982. Helen Thomas' Humor Helen Thomas returns to journalism Journalist rips Wayne St. for ending award Helen Thomas may get statue at museum Topics: Helen Thomas, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama Trending

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88.1 FM Greenville currently off air Speechwriters: After Bland First Inaugural, Second Is Tougher For Obama By Ari Shapiro Jan 18, 2013 ShareTwitter Facebook Google+ Email President Obama gives his first inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2009. Ron Edmonds Originally published on January 18, 2013 5:09 pm A presidential inauguration is an event defined by huge, sweeping optics: the National Mall full of cheering Americans; a grandiose platform in front of the Capitol building; the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. And the centerpiece: a speech. On Monday, President Obama will give his second inaugural address - and he faces a challenge in crafting a speech for this moment. The last time Obama gave an inaugural address, millions of joyous people tuned in around the world, ready to be inspired by a man who rose to prominence on the incredible power of his words. The president knew that the American economy was teetering on the brink of disaster. And four years later, the verdict on that address is pretty unanimous from former White House speechwriters of both parties: Speechwriter Mary Kate Cary, who wrote for President George H.W. Bush: "I think most people would have a hard time quoting you a line back from it. ... It just seems like there were a lot of platitudes." Jeff Shesol, who wrote for President Bill Clinton: "There really aren't very many lines in President Obama's first inaugural address that stood out even in the moment. ... It didn't have an animating idea. It didn't have a clear theme." George W. Bush speechwriter John McConnell: "I had to go back and look at Obama's inaugural address to really remember lines that I had at the time paused over." Clinton speechwriter Michael Waldman: "There's the old adage: You only get one chance to make a first impression. And I think President Obama might hope that's not true." They all know firsthand that one of the toughest speeches to write for any president is also one of the most high-profile addresses he'll give. They generally agree that the closest thing Obama had to a standout line four years ago was not even an original: "In the words of scripture: The time has come to set aside childish things." The blandness of the president's first inaugural address reminds Cary of a game speechwriters sometimes play, inspired by wine drinkers who cover a label and try to guess the grape by its taste. "They take a sip of wine and they can say, 'That's a 2009 pinot from Napa Valley,' right? So I'll take a speech and put my hand over the top of the speech, and if I can read the speech and say, 'This was Barack Obama, inaugural address, 2009, Washington, D.C.,' then I know it's a well-written speech," Cary says. By that test, the president fumbled on his first go-round. And Clinton speechwriter Waldman says his challenge this time is even greater. "First inaugurals often mark a change. They're easier to write and easier to give," he says. "It's harder to give a good second inaugural because, in fact, there's continuity." People have been listening to this president talk for years. It's hard to come up with something new to say. And many of the crutches that speechwriters often turn to are off-limits in an inaugural address: Jokes are a no-no. Statistics don't belong there. Quotes by the likes of Mark Twain and Yogi Berra are out of place. Most importantly, says Clinton speechwriter Shesol, inaugural addresses should look relentlessly forward. "More than probably in any other speech a president will give, people want the vision. They want to know where we are headed and what it looks like when we get there," Shesol says. Vision, yes. But policy? No. Save the laundry list for the State of the Union next month, says Bush speechwriter McConnell. "Look, President Obama is going to make more news in his next press conference than he's going to with his second inaugural address," McConnell says. "It's just the nature of things." So what does that leave? A very high bar, for one. All of these speechwriters agree that the key to cracking an inaugural address is to remember that this is the opposite of a campaign speech. It's the democratic equivalent of a coronation. "An inauguration is not a political event. It is an official event," McConnell says. This is a moment when the country wants to feel unified, even if the country is divided by bitter partisanship. Clinton speechwriter Shesol says on Monday, Obama must acknowledge both realities. "He's got to be inclusive in his rhetoric and not divisive, and I'm sure he will," Shesol says. "But he's also got to seem realistic and not naive. And that's a difficult balancing act to pull off." White House Press Secretary Jay Carney declined to preview Monday's address. But he said the president generally writes his speeches in longhand on a yellow pad - "and I've seen some yellow pads filled with writing of late."Copyright 2013 National Public Radio. To see more, visit . © 2016 Public Radio East

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PageWidth Original Content (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Associate Member, or higher). June 16, 2010 Holocaust as Religious Dogma By Joshua Snyder How "the Shoah cult" is used to prop up the Empire::::::::"The uproar over the literature professor who undertook to challenge the accepted historic fact that gas chambers were used to exterminate Jews in Nazi concentration camps turned out to be a key event in a process that has led to the establishment of the Holocaust, or 'Shoah' (the Hebrew religious term now commonly used in France) as a sort of religion of memory and repentance, raised to the status of official dogma," writes Diana Johnstone --Why the French Hate Chomsky. (She makes note that "the simple fact of defending the principle of free speech was interpreted as support for Robert Faurisson's theses, despite Chomsky's insistence that the two things were quite separate.") Ms. Johnstone makes mention of "the sacralization of the Holocaust, or 'Shoah', which has increasingly been regarded less as an historic event than as a sacred dogma." She continues, "In a secular state where traditional religions are excluded from public schools, only the Shoah demands both the mental and emotional adherence traditionally reserved for religion." Herein lies the genius ofMahmoud Ahmadinejad'sInternational Holocaust Cartoon Competition, in response to theJyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. Sponsoring cartoons about Christ would have been un-Islamic, and sponsoring cartoons about the Church or Pope would only have served to distance his country from her only friend in the West. (SeeAre the Attacks on the Pope a Prelude to Attacks on Iran?) Besides, how would he hope to beat Europeans at their own game? But sponsoring cartoons about the Holocaust had post-Christian Europeansfeelwhat Muslims felt when a central dogma of their faith was ridiculed by outsiders. Ms. Johnstone notes that the "law has been used to prosecute or silence persons who do not in fact contest, dispute or question the existence of the above-named crimes in general, but who question the use of gas chambers to commit mass genocide." She writes, "Since actual 'negation' of Nazi persecution of Jews is nearly nonexistent, the law has been brought to bear especially on persons who, because of their general political orientation, are suspected of concealed anti-semitism." I do not harbor any doubts about the veracity of the Holocaust. My much toutedGypsyquadroonhood would have likely earned me a one-way ticket on a cattle-car to the nearest concentration camp. (On which I would have protested all the way, "Doesn't the termIndo-Aryanmean anything to you National Socialistdummkopfs?") However, the scale and scope of the Holocaust should be matters for reasonable debate. "Making history an object of reverence rather than of curiosity marks a subtle but serious regression from the secular values of free inquiry," says Ms. Johnstone. "For much of the younger generation, the Shoah cult," she continues, "with annual obligatory commemorations and constant reminders of the 'duty of memory', is getting to be as boring as any other imposed religion." Ms. Johnstone earlier in her article suggests how "the Shoah cult" is used to "justify France's subservience to the United States." She writes, "The basic idea of the old 'new philosopher' Bernard-Henri Lévy is that fascism is 'the French ideology' and that the French people and government are not to be trusted." She notes that "[i]n cartoons and films, the French working class are portrayed as racist boors," and that "the pendulum has swung away from celebration of the French Resistance to self-flagellation for crimes against Jews committed under Nazi occupation." She continues:"The very existence of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front have, for nearly thirty years, contributed mainly to strengthening an opposing attitude of anti-nationalism. Justified criticism of the European Union for tearing down social welfare in favor of globalized finance capital is stigmatized as archaic and unacceptable French nationalism. The dominant center left has abandoned both economic issues and anti-militarism in favor of a human rights ideology more concerned with the Dalai Lama (about which France can do nothing) than with the deindustrialization of France. The human rights left has largely abandoned economic policy to the EU and military policy to NATO and its boss, the United States."Sound familiar? Is not the very existence ofPatrick J. Buchananon our own shores and his criticism of N.A.F.T.A. and N.A.T.O., of militarism and war, stigmatized as archaic and unacceptable American nationalism? Has not America's Left abandoned both economic issues and anti-militarism in favor of a gay and women's rights ideology, at home and abroad, saying nothing of the deindustrialization of America? So not only does "the Shoah cult" serve to "justify France's subservience to the United States," it justifies the American people's subservience to the un-American Empire, and most obviously it's unconditional support of Israel. Most sadly, in the wake of the Tea Parties, even "America's greatest intellectual" resorted to such fear-mongering in service of the Empire, calling the situation "very similar to late Weimar Germany" --Noam Chomsky Has 'Never Seen Anything Like This'. Submitters Website: Submitters Bio:An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder lives with his wife and two children in self-imposed exile in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science and technology university. Religiously orthodox and politically heterodox, he might be best described as a peace-and-love anarcho-traditionalist retro-progressive reactionary. He blogs at The Western Confucian. Back

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Media Attempt to Cover Up Obama Comments on IsraelBy Roger AronoffNovember 14, 2011TweetThe incident involving a live microphone that took place last week at the G20 summit in Cannes, France involving President Barack Obama, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, and the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, was an important revelation on several levels.First, it revealed the true feelings that Obama and Sarkozy have toward Netanyahu, which is quite different from their public pronouncements and actions. No big surprise in either case. But the bigger story is how corrupt the media are to go along with the attempted deception.What occurred is that the two presidents were speaking in what they thought was a private conversation. But what they overlooked was that the mics they were wearing were live, and a simultaneous translation of their conversation was being broadcast to the journalists outside the room. Those journalists were not to be given headphones until the session resumed, but a number of them had their own and were listening as a translator repeated the comments of the two men.Initially, in the conversation, Obama was critical of Sarkozy for not letting him know in advance that France would be voting to allow the Palestinians membership in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). After they were voted in to the organization, the U.S. Congress voted to cut off its portion of the funding for UNESCO, as it is required by law to do if Palestine is admitted as a member of any international organization before it reaches a peace agreement with Israel. Obama, whose spokesmen have made clear that he once again will ignore Congress and do what he can to help UNESCO, was also reported to have asked Sarkozy to try to help persuade the Palestinians to stop their bid to gain full UN recognition as a state.Sarkozy then said of Netanyahu, "I cannot bear him, he's a liar." To which President Obama reportedly said, "You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day."A number of journalists heard this, but did not report on it after staffers from Sarkozy's office went to the journalists and told them the comments were meant to be private. According to reports, French media tradition requires journalists to honor that privacy, and in keeping with that tradition, they were asked to sign agreements to that effect. Apparently many of them complied, "due to the sensitivity of the issue." But it was a French website, Arret sur images, that first reported the conversation. Reporters from Reuters and the Associated Press confirmed the account of the conversation. Sarkozy's and Obama's offices have refused to comment.There are a couple of excellent articles about this, though not much in the mainstream media. One is by Arnold Ahlert in Jewish World Review, in which he writes that "it is hard to decide which part of this story is more revealing: the incident itself, or the subsequent reaction by the Fourth Estaters whose commitment to the standards of journalistic integrity - or perhaps more accurately JournO-listic integrity - seemingly never reach the bottom of an apparently bottomless barrel." And to the issue of reporters agreeing, after the fact, to keep this quiet, Ahlert writes, "What reporter in his right mind would sign anything that prevents him from reporting on a story made available, not by subterfuge or anything else resembling illegality, but by the carelessness of two world leaders? Since when did a legitimate 'gotcha' moment become off limits to the press?"In a piece on FrontPageMag.com, Joseph Klein discusses some of the history between Obama and Israel that makes Obama's comments unsurprising: "...we all know what Obama really thinks. This is a president who has gone out of his way to visit Muslim countries in the same region as Israel, but has yet to visit Israel itself since taking office. Obama had no trouble bowing to the Saudi king, while insulting the Israeli prime minister at every turn."Added Klein, "Obama's latest blast at Netanyahu recalls his snub of Netanyahu during the prime minister's first visit to the Obama White House in March 2010. Obama presented Netanyahu with a list of demands, including a halt to all settlement construction in East Jerusalem. When Netanyahu resisted Obama's charms, Obama picked up his marbles. He stormed out of the meeting and declared, 'I'm going to the residential wing to have dinner with Michelle and the girls.' Obama also refused the normal protocol of a joint photograph with the Israeli leader."As I detailed in a recent AIM Report, Obama has made the situation much worse through his heavy-handed demands, and an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is more distant as a result. Obama raised the stakes enormously when he came to office in 2009 by demanding that Israel freeze all building of settlements, something they had never done before, and which had not been a pre-condition of the Palestinians. Then Obama pushed the 1967 borders issue, to make that a starting point for negotiations rather than one of many issues to be resolved through direct negotiations. And add to Obama's missteps the so-called Arab Spring; Iran's continuing efforts to possess nuclear weapons and to threaten Israel, both directly and through surrogates including both Hamas and Hezbollah; and the participation in the Palestinian government of Hamas, which controls Gaza. It is clear that Israel is less secure than at any time in recent years.The timing of this incident has been bad for Obama. After barely a year in office, in April of 2009, the Republican polling firm McLaughlin & Associates released a survey that showed that only 42 percent of American Jews would vote to re-elect President Obama, after having won 78 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008. He has slowly won some of that support back by trying to convince Jewish voters that he really does support Israel. A key test in that process came in September when he reluctantly made it clear that the U.S. would veto the Palestinians' bid for statehood.But this recent "live mic" revelation will clearly set back the Obama PR campaign to win over more Jewish voters.Copyright ©2011 Roger AronoffRead more by Roger AronoffTweetSend us and/or the Author your comments and questions about this article. Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and a member of the Citizens' Commission on Benghazi. He can be contacted at . Home Current Issue About Us Cartoons Submissions Subscribe Contact Links Humor Archive Login Please send any comments, web site suggestions, or problem reports to

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Synopsis of "Rich in Russia" HOW TO MAKE A BILLION DOLLARS The Oligarchs INTERVIEW WITH MIKHAIL KHODORKOVSKY Money, Power and Politics REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK Examining the Young and the Restless Government, Population, Economy Life in Russia Today and the Transition to Capitalism REACT TO THIS STORY Reporter Sabrina Tavernise waits for an underground train in Moscow. What does New York look like, after so many years in Russia? My life in Moscow was pretty much what it would be in America. I drove to work every morning. I drank beer with friends on the weekends. I shopped in grocery stores and ate out a lot. But it's different being a reporter in Russia -- interviewing was never direct. There were different levels of truth. You always had to sort through what you thought was an outright lie and what was partly true. One general rule of thumb was this: come to a conclusion about what's really going on in a government or business quarrel. Then step back. Think about it ten times more cynically, and that will be the closest to the truth. What was the key thing that struck you about working in Moscow? It was an amazing time in the country's history. Everyone's world had turned upside down, and people became immigrants in their own country. They had to scramble to survive. Tavernise talking on her cell phone next to Red Square in Moscow. How has that changed? They're still scrambling. For the vast majority of Russians, life is worse than it was in Soviet times. But I don't think most people would choose to go back, though they remember the past with great fondness. They miss feeling like a great superpower, and they've had to swallow this bitter pill of being weak. But the young folks who didn't grow up with Soviet ideology are more pliable. Can you talk a bit about the big gap between rich and poor in Moscow, and in general between Moscow and the rest of the country? In Russia, as in America, the gap between rich and poor is immense. But in Russia the poor, overall, are worse off. If you live way out in the countryside, and you get sick, it could be days before you get to the hospital. Not everyone has a car and buses run on very erratic schedules. Everyone has electricity, but not everyone has a phone. Life is exhausting, and even the simplest of tasks can be very difficult. Your report about the oligarchs makes Russia sound like America during the era of the robber barons. Very much so -- the wealth is huge, but very new, quite literally nouveau riche. There's not a lot of elaborate and rigid etiquette, the kind of mannered social structures you have in older economies like England. That will eventually crystallize among the wealthy, but right now there are few rules. Tavernise riding the Moscow underground. What are the biggest changes you've seen over eight years? Things are settling somewhat. To make money now you still have to be quite predatory -- but the difference is that if you want to hang on to it, you have to gather around you people who know how to manage your business. That's quite a new concept in Russia. People are beginning to get better at the dull day-to-day work of business. It's gone from a time when everything was up for grabs and people grabbed it, to a time, now, when people have to manage what they grabbed. What do you see as the biggest problem facing the country? Russia is not a law-based society. Simply, if you're big and strong and have money everything is for sale, even justice. The American idea of what was going to happen once the Soviet Union was gone was impossibly romantic. The Americans thought, here's this country that wants to be just like us, now at last they get to be free -- all that needs to happen is we have to write some laws. Well, it may have worked sort of like that in Poland and the Czech Republic, but Russia was too big and sprawling Russia is still an Eastern place. People don't say exactly what they mean. The government is this incredibly complex web of officials who get bribed and the businessmen who bribe them. After the big financial crisis in 1998 there was a real stepping back and taking stock�and lot of disappointment. It's heartbreaking for a lot of ordinary people who expected that all this stuff--all the resources of the country -- belonged to everyone, It didn't. But now there are people who have things to lose, so they're beginning to want rules of the game. It's happening in some sectors -- the oil companies in the mid-90s were run like casinos and now they're just businesses. I think the idea of law will become more attractive, as people try to consolidate their wealth. Tavernise waits to interview Yukos' CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Just a few days before the FRONTLINE/World broadcast, one of the men you reported on, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested. What does this mean for the oligarchs? The arrest of Khodorkovsky is definitely political. It's not that everyone is so sure he's innocent. Maybe he is. But if so, then so is every other tycoon. So why arrest him? Khodorkovsky, in fact, had made dramatic improvements in his oil company - hiring foreign managers, restructuring so that it ran more efficiently. The arrest is basically a stop-sign for investors. That's why it's baffling to me that Putin seems to have sanctioned it. Why would he risk ruining his reputation as basically a pro-market guy? The talks the company was having with ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco about a possible stake sale will presumably be put on hold. This arrest really tells me that it is still a very early stage in Russian capitalism. The law, quite simply, is not the main tool for ordering society. Law can still easily be trumped by political connections and behind-the-scenes infighting that is totally hidden from the view of the public. You've always worked as a print reporter. What was it like doing a story for FRONTLINE/World? I can't say I love TV -- I don't enjoy being on view that way. You know, I'd walk down the street and [the director] would say no, do that again. It felt pretty affected. But the oligarchs were quite open to being reported on -- I think some of them had fun being on camera. If you could go back and do other stories in Russia, what would you cover? I guess I wish I'd been able to write more about families, the ways they're changing. Men at this point are much sicker with alcoholism. Women still work, as they always have in Russia, but the women who are the wives of the new rich suddenly get to stay home, which is a new thing. For years they had to dress up in drab Soviet outfits and go to work at the factory. It's nice to finally get to be a princess. What do you see for the future in Russia? Russia's hope is definitely its young people. They are really different than their parents. Those who were born after the fall of the Soviet Union never saw lines -- the wealthy ones have never ridden on the subway. There is more chance for them to travel, to speak foreign languages, and to be part of the rest of the world, than their parents ever had. • "Russia's New Rich Are Living It Up, but Oligarchs' Children Wonder: How Long Will It Last?" (July 31, 2003) • "To Young, a Russian Enclave Is Too Much the Old Country" (October 8, 2003) • Interview With Sabrina Tavernise • Return to Introduction • back to top HOME

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SunshineBloggers Announces Growing Need for Burial Regulation Observance In the wake of an August 28th article in the Richmond Register, titled "Family Discovers Mother's Burial Did Not Meet Regulations", Sunshine Bloggers announced the growing need for more intensive burial regulations, preventing outrages such as those listed in the article. Sunshine Bloggers announced a rapidly expanding need for proper, more intensive burial regulations. This announcement came on the heels of a Richmond Register article published on August 28th and entitled "Family Discovers Mother's Burial Did Not Meet Regulations". The article discussed a distraught family's discovery that their beloved mother was buried too shallowly to meet regulations, necessitating a second, deeper burial. Though cemetery burial plot regulations are different in areas considered third world countries such as Libya, or even Bob Marley's homeland, Jamaica, American regulations are designed to protect both the living and the dead from the spread of disease and the possibility of unintentional exhumation by an animal. Crystal Wylie began her aforementioned article with the simple tale of a family intending to honor their deceased mother by planting shrubs over her grave. Upon digging a shallow hole over the grave site, however, the siblings found that they'd run into a concrete barrier - a barrier they soon found to be the concrete encompassing their mother's grave. The slab was discovered to be less than a foot from the ground's surface - despite regulations requiring at least 2 feet. The cemetery's director confirmed that the gravesite was too shallow, though he did not offer a reason as to why the mistake was made. The siblings faced a decision: their mother's coffin was either to be exhumed and reburied, or, due to the low-lying nature of her burial plot, could be covered over with a thick layer of soil, bringing the depth up from 9 inches to 24 inches. The siblings had not yet made a decision. An investigation regarding other plots in the area is underway. Gravesites are far more than just a means of disposing of those who have passed away; cemetery plots allow the family members of the deceased to visit from time to time, and honor a loved one with plants or mementos. Regulations were put in place to ensure both that the living are protected from the spread of disease, and to ensure that those put to rest are not accidentally exhumed by an animal's wayward paws. Burial rites differ from place to place; even in America, many different rites and rituals are observed. Some cultures within America dress in ceremonial garb, displaying their native world fashion and celebrate the deceased's new journey, while others dress in black and mourn the loss of a loved one. Whatever the culture or tradition, however, it is important to ensure that the deceased are treated with care and respect, adhering to all set health codes and regulations. While the case reported by Wylie is not common, it still begs the question of how a woman's burial was able to be over 1 foot too shallow, despite strict regulations. This instance suggests that, while regulations have been put in place, they are not being forcefully observed, whether by law enforcement, city workers, or the funeral director. This demonstrates both disrespect for the families who have lost a loved one, and the people who have died. To rectify this situation and prevent others like it, cities need to more effectively enforce the regulations set forth for burial procedures. Crystal Wylie is a staff writer for the Richmond Register, a publication delivering news to Richmond, Kentucky and the surrounding areas. Wylie's work typically involves announcing local news items of interest, without a singular focus or scope. She has been writing for the Register for 7 years. Following an article detailing the failure to adequately bury a Richmond, Kentucky mother, Sunshine Bloggers announced the need for greater observance of burial regulations. Destroying the fairytale notion of visiting with a loved one after she has passed, three of the mother's children discovered that their mother's grave was buried too shallowly, necessitating either an exhumation and reburial, or the addition of over 12 inches of soil. In light of the devastation such a discovery might cause, Sunshine Bloggers urged city ordinance workers and funeral directors alike to ensure that burial plots are dug adequately, and people's loved ones are sufficiently laid to rest. About SunshineBloggers: SunshineBloggers is an online resource for environmentally focused news and advice columns, including topics involving personal finances and lifestyle. Sunshine Bloggers Sunshine Bloggers (720) 295-8451 n/a

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100 Years Ago, Arrival Of Titanic Survivors In NYC Set Off Media Free-For-All Jim O'Grady The sinking of the Titanic on April 15 in 1912 was the biggest news story of its day. But people on land had only the barest facts about the tragedy at sea until almost three days later, when more than 700 survivors reached New York on the steamer Carpathia. What followed was an unprecedented media frenzy.The Carpathia had wireless communication with the shore but on its way to New York had sent only a trickle of news. After a couple of days, it was known that most of the passengers and crew on the Titanic had died - but not much beyond that. A theory for the near-news blackout is that the White Star Line, which owned the Titanic, was trying to manage the story by shutting out the media. For example, newspaperman Carlos Hurd, who worked for a Hearst paper in St. Louis, happened to be on the Carpathia. Hearst editors in New York sent frantic messages to him begging for news but the ship's crew intercepted them. That left the public was frothing for details of the disaster. By the time the Carpathia arrived in the New York harbor on April 18 around 9:15 P.M., thousands of people were standing outside Pier 54 at West 13th Street on the Hudson River. Many were family members of passengers who didn't know if their relatives were dead or alive. Reporters waded in and worked the crowd, interviewing relatives while waiting to catch survivors coming off the ship and record their memories while they were still visceral. Meanwhile, out in the harbor, more than 50 tugboats jammed with journalists met the Carpathia in lower New York harbor. Reporters with megaphones yelled up at the ship, offering $50 or $100 for eyewitness accounts. Photographers' cameras lit up the side of the ship with flashes of magnesium powder. This was before the rise of radio and movie reels, when newspapers ruled. It was also a Darwinian moment in the history of American journalism. Mitchell Stephens, professor of journalism at NYU and author of The History of the News, says there were dozens of papers in multiple languages coming out three times a day in New York, with 'Extra' editions. "It was cutthroat competition between these newspapers for stories and to be first on the streets with stories," he said. "So the streets were full of newspapers being hawked all day long." Stephens added that the U.S. also had the highest per capita newspaper circulation in the world in the early 20th century. The fight was on to feed that audience. "Races for news were nothing new and packs of journalists were already starting to develop," he said. Two of the heavyweights in the city were William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and the up-and-coming New York Times. Carr Van Anda was the editor of The Times in 1912. He rented out the top floor of the Strand Hotel, now called the Liberty Inn, and set up a temporary newsroom to better cover the disaster. The hotel was just a block from Pier 54. Then Van Anda set his sites on interviewing the Titanic's 22-year-old wireless operator, Harold Bride. He even paid Bride's employer, Guglielmo Marconi, who was the inventor of the wireless, to make sure he got an exclusive interview. Marconi sent a message to Bride on the Carpathia that read, "Stop. Say nothing. Hold your story for dollars in four figures." When Harold Bride got to New York, a Times reporter met him onboard and took down his istory. He then reported what he'd heard: that the band played on while the ship went down and that a stoker had broken into the wireless room and tried to steal Bride's lifejacket as the Titanic was sinking, forcing the operator to beat the stoker senseless. As for Hearst man Carlos Hurd, he spent his trip on the Carpathia interviewing Titanic survivors and hiding his notes from the crew. He wrote up his stories and put them in a cigar box rigged with Champagne corks as floats. When the ship reached the harbor, Hurd spotted a Hearst editor in a tugboat and hurled the cigar box into the water. The editor fished it out and rushed it back to the newsroom in Lower Manhttan. Before the Carpathia had docked, an 'Extra' edition of The New York World was on the street with the banner headline: "Titanic Boilers Blew Up, Breaking Her In Two After Striking Berg." Not quite as fast as the Internet, but fast. And accurate. And heartbreaking. Part of Titanic Centennial. April 15, 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the tragic sinking of the Titanic on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City.

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El Mosquito, April 20, 1890 El Mosquito, which described itself as a "weekly independent, satirical, burlesque periodical with caricatures," appeared for the first time on May 24, 1863. In the more than 1,500 issues published between then and the last issue in 1893, the newspaper satirized the behavior of local politicians. The publication provides a unique vantage point on the formation of the modern nation-state in Argentina. Published on Sundays, the newspaper consisted of four pages, with the two middle pages exclusively dedicated to lithographs that caricaturized current events and important figures of the day. The front and back pages were set aside for columns with satirical text, particularly "Los picotones," which offered harsh and informed commentary on contemporary events. Starting in 1880, the front page displayed the "Galería contemporánea," lithographic portraits of eminent leaders in Argentine society or eye-catching caricatures that sought to shock potential readers. Some historians recognize in the pages of El Mosquito a certain critical objectivity, adopted, they argue, with an eye to commercial survival. Others emphasize the rebellious character of the published lithographs and the links between them and various interests in Argentina, which place the publication more in the context of domestic political conflict. Between 1875 and 1890, the Frenchman Henri Stein was the owner-manager of El Mosquito, in addition to being its main artist. Stein defined the political-ideological outlook of the newspaper during those years, giving it a marked liberal and republican tendency. El Mosquito History of South America Caricatures and cartoons Illustrations ; 39-49 centimeters El Mosquito Newspaper Collection National Library of Argentina Other items from this partner (National Library of Argentina)

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A key reason to remember 9/11 The show business publication "Variety" reports "40-plus programs expected to commemorate 10th anniversary of (9/11) attacks." And those are just the specials. They don't include reports within news programs, or overseas TV memorials, which began last month. How we love our anniversaries. Whether it's "the Maine," "Pearl Harbor" or "9/11" we choose to remember, the question is "Why?" Why remember? To honor the dead? Yes, that is a good reason. How about to remember loved ones and survivors? That, too, is commendable. All of this, though, is about looking back, not forward. It is only by looking forward that we can avoid, or at least limit, the possibility of another major terrorist attack, which many believe is coming. On Sept. 12, 2001, I wrote in this space: "The first step -- even before military action is contemplated or taken -- is to expel from this country the people and organizations tied to radical terrorist groups in the Middle East." That is becoming increasingly difficult to do in large part because terrorism is now rarely centered in one location, or under a single banner. The so-called "lone wolf," operating on his own with no paper trail and who is self-radicalized, remains the biggest challenge for those charged with our security. Radical Islamists appear to be getting help from other nations that hate us, joining forces with them in what they consider a common goal: the destruction of the United States. According to Italy's respected Corriere della Sera, reported in Investor's Business Daily (IBD), "three Hezbollah terrorists operating out of Mexico have left that country to establish a permanent 'bridgehead' to the communist island, calling their clandestine operation 'The Caribbean Dossier.'" It sounds like the title of a Cold War spy novel, except this isn't fiction. "Twenty-three other terrorists from the Iran-linked terror group are expected to join the operation," reports IBD, "which has a startup budget of more than $500,000." Corriere reports, "The mission in Cuba is to provide logistical support for upcoming terrorist attacks planned in this hemisphere." So much for the left's defense of Cuba against charges it is a terrorist state. Does anyone believe that terrorists won't be smuggled into the U.S. (if they are not already here) to kill more Americans, possibly with weapons of mass destruction? That Iran is the future we ultimately must confront is evident from its actions on multiple levels -- from subsidizing terrorism in Iraq, to meddling in the uprisings throughout the Middle East, to the development of the ultimate terrorist weapon: a nuclear bomb. Iran also continues to promote the fiction that the U.S. attacked itself on 9-11. In a report carried by Independent Media Review and Analysis (IMRA), a senior Iranian Foreign Ministry official and career diplomat, Mohsen Pakaein, blamed American neoconservatives, saying they "have victimized thousands of Americans in a bid to attain an array of large-scale goals, including finding control over the world nations and their wealth." Looking back 10 years should be a learning experience, a reminder of how the attacks were able to happen as the hijackers managed to avert every security firewall in place at the time. Going forward, it would improve security if the remaining recommendations of the 9/11 Commission were implemented, including government action on federal standards for birth certificates and driver's licenses and allocation of radio spectrum space, which first responders need so as not to repeat the communications breakdowns so many experienced in 2001. In an editorial on these and other matters that need to be enacted by Congress, The New York Times also lamented "The failure to fill the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which was created in 2004 to monitor actions across the government that affect privacy." Why must we never forget 9/11? It's because this isn't as much about the past as the future. Our enemies are plotting to attack us again ... and again. We have not done all that is necessary to secure our future and we must do so before we are forced to ask a second time, "How did it happen?" You may email Cal Thomas at . $PHOTOCREDIT_ON$� 2011, Tribune Media Services Inc.$PHOTOCREDIT_OFF$ Related Article List of 2,977 Sept. 11 victims Thomas, Cal

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Double bombing kills 13 in northern Iraq March 7, 2012 6:28:46 AM PST BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Two bombs that exploded in swift succession killed 13 people Wednesday near a crowded restaurant in a mid-sized city in Iraq's north, officials said. Tal Afar Mayor Abdul Aal Abbas al-Obedi said a car parked outside a popular downtown restaurant exploded in the early afternoon. As people rushed to the scene to help, a suicide bomber in the crowd detonated his explosives belt, al-Obedi said. Al-Obedi and local politician Qusai Abbas said 13 people were killed in Tal Afar, a mixed Sunni Arab-Turkomen city about 90 miles (150 kilometers) east of the Syrian border and 260 miles (420 kilometers) northwest of Baghdad. Abbas said 22 people were wounded, although al-Obedi put the injuries at 15. Such confusion is common in the immediate aftermath of attacks in Iraq. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but car bombs and suicide bombers are hallmarks of al-Qaida. Tal Afar was a major battleground between U.S. forces and Iraqi insurgents in 2005, and the Americans claimed it as one of their first lasting counterinsurgency victories. It has however seen infrequent but bloody militant attacks in the years since. "The blasts of today turn our memories backward to the previous years of explosions, and return our minds to the violence and sectarian displacement of the people of Tal Afar then," said Abbas, a member of the Ninevah provincial council that includes representatives for the city. The town sits strategically between the Syrian border and the Ninevah capital of Mosul, which for years was a hotbed of insurgency during the years Iraq teetered on the edge of civil war. Sunni fighters emboldened by al-Qaida's battle in Iraq traveled from Syria to train and plot attacks in Mosul before heading south toward Baghdad to target the Shiite-led government and pilgrims there. A September 2005 offensive by U.S. and Iraqi troops chased extremists into the barren countryside. But the insurgency managed to keep a toehold in the city, which was devastated by a March 2007 marketplace attack where truck bombs killed 152 people. Shiites and police then went on a reprisal rampage, killing 70 Sunnis and prolonging the cycle of violence. Though al-Qaida's threat has been drastically weakened in Mosul over the last five years, it remains potent, and the city continues to be a staging ground for Iraqi fighters and smugglers now heading to Syria to help opposition forces overthrow the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose religion is an offshoot of Shiism. Wednesday's attack signals "that Tal Afar is still a hot area, and remains an al-Qaida stronghold as an area used by insurgents crossing the borders from and to Syria," Abbas said. Al-Qaida frequently targets security forces, as in a Monday attack in the western Iraqi city of Haditha where 25 policemen were killed in a brazen pre-dawn assault by insurgents dressed as government troops. Al-Obedi said only civilians were killed in the Tal Afar restaurant. "This cowardly terrorist attack only targeted poor civilians," he said. "There were no police or troops in this popular restaurant." Also on Wednesday, separate car bombings in Baghdad killed four people and wounded 14 in a Sunni area of the capital, according to police who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information. Violence has dropped considerably since the height of Iraq's insurgency just a few years ago, but deadly attacks still happen almost every day. Load Comments

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Sabbath & Holidays Jewish Ideas Daily has been succeeded and re-launched as Mosaic. Read more... A Convenient Hatred By Elliot Jager • Tuesday, March 6, 2012 With some 1,000 books currently in print on the subject, does the world desperately need another tome on anti-Semitism? What difference will it make, when anti-Israelism provides only the latest justification for Europe's persistent prejudice against Jews and anti-Semitic views are shared by 15 percent of Americans and 90 percent of Muslims worldwide?Relevant LinksThe British Strain Anthony Julius, Jewish Ideas Daily. The author of the magnum opus Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England speaks with Elliot Jager. Back to the Future Robert Wistrich, Jerusalem Post. Can rational refutations of false arguments play an effective role in combating "apocalyptic anti-Semitism?" Interview by Ruthie Blum. (PDF) The New Anti-Semitism Josef Joffe, Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism. Post-Holocaust, anti-Semitism is taboo - which means that people repress and conceal it even from themselves. (PDF) Phyllis Goldstein's A Convenient Hatred: A Short History of Antisemitism, published by the liberal-minded "Facing History and Ourselves" foundation, is nevertheless timely, because she writes not primarily as a historian or polemicist but as a teacher of tolerance. Though Harold Evans' foreword acknowledges that anti-Semitism is a "mental condition conducive to paranoia" and "impervious to truth," the hope seems to be that this book can inoculate high-school and college students against incipient anti-Semitism. Assuming that human beings are capable of moral choice, there is every incentive to continue this battle, no matter the odds of victory. Goldstein lucidly synthesizes the relentless hatred that Jews have confronted. Did anti-Semitism begin because Jews refused to embrace the gods of more powerful civilizations? Or when Jews lost their sovereignty and were scattered into the Diaspora? In either case, Goldstein makes clear that anti-Semitism is as ancient as the Jewish people. Greek and Roman stereotypes "dehumanized and demonized Jews as a group." The first regime-orchestrated pogrom against Jews dates to ancient Alexandria, which also spawned the first blood libel. In 325 C.E., as Roman Christianity solidified its hegemony, Church fathers taught their flock to detest Jews. With the birth of Islam in Arabia around 570 C.E., Jews found themselves at the mercy of yet another imperial empire, which generally tolerated them so long as they accepted dhimmi inferiority and paid tribute. How Jews were treated by Muslims "depended on who was king or caliph," Goldstein writes. A ruler tolerant of Jews "might be followed by one who was greedy, cruel, or just weak." For Christian civilization, subjugating the Jews wasn't enough. Between 1096 and 1149, scores of European Jewish communities were decimated by Christians on their way to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims. Over the 300 years beginning in 1144, Christians in England, France, and Germany promulgated the calumny that Jews used the blood of Christians for ritual purposes. French Christians marked St. Valentine's Day in 1349 by burning Jews alive. Barred from owning land and entering many professions, Jews were demonized because a number of them turned to the "sin" of money lending. Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella go down in the rogues' gallery of haters for having ordered the deportation of Jews from Spain in 1492. But, Goldstein shows, this expulsion was by no means unique: Jews were repeatedly expelled from France, Germany, Hungary, and Lithuania, and once from England. They headed for Muslim countries or Eastern Europe. Neither offered safe haven for long. With modernity came the prospect of acceptance. Yet, to paraphrase Napoleon, even where Jews abjured claims of nationhood and converted to Christianity in hopes of "blending in," they were not accepted as individuals. Emerging nationalisms viewed Jews, conversions notwithstanding, as foreign objects within the body politic. Economics, too, played a role, then as now. The dislocation engendered by the industrial revolution made Jews a target of antagonism. They became hated for fomenting capitalism and Communism, for being clannish and cosmopolitan. Old lies never fade away; they just metastasize. Though The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first fabricated by the Russian Czar's secret police in 1907, its falsehoods have thrived ever since, first under the Nazis, then, as remains true today, in the Muslim Mideast. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt hardly invented the insinuation that Jews are culpable of dual loyalty; that falsehood was in vogue by the end of World War I, when German Jews were charged with stabbing the Fatherland in the back. Wisely, Goldstein does not dwell on the Final Solution but moves swiftly to post-Holocaust anti-Semitism. Her capsule history of the Arabs' rejection of Israel is meticulously fair-minded, reporting that Palestinian Arabs became refugees in the course of the 1948 fighting while "less attention" has been paid to the 875,000 Jews forced from their homes in Arab countries. She does not gloss over the continuing Muslim penchant for anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, including the cant that Jews were behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The torture-murders of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Ilan Halimi in a Paris suburb are given their due. Goldstein also covers left-wing anti-Semitism, from Stalin's Soviet Union to the "progressive" anti-Zionism on display at the 2001 UN Durban Conference, where "nearly every slander hurled at Jews over the centuries was expressed." The author discusses right-wing anti-globalization sentiment as a xenophobic opposition to "the opening of national borders to ideas, people, and investments"; but she might have said more about the no-less-dangerous left-wing variety. This is a remarkably concise work covering an extensive period, so there is room to quibble. There is Goldstein's kumbayah description of the Soviet Jewry movement in the United States as an ecumenical affair enjoying the support of American officialdom; in fact, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was determined to put détente first. Goldstein's facile description of the first intifada as "dominated by young Palestinians who threw stones at soldiers" underplays a violent frenzy that took the lives of 160 Israelis and over 1,000 Arabs, many of the latter murdered as "collaborators" in internecine slaughter. None of this detracts from Goldstein's central argument that "the link between the language of extremism and actual violence remains as strong as ever." Anti-Semitism remains "a convenient hatred" because it mobilizes and unites otherwise disparate haters behind a common cause, diverting them from their own shortcomings. Over the millennia, anti-Semitism has indeed become almost metaphysically "impervious to truth." It may be hoisting hope over experience, but let A Convenient Hatred be read worldwide in schools committed to combating bigotry. Even the jaded have a right to hope that this worthy book will contribute to overcoming the terrible lies told about the Jews.Tags: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Europe, History, Holocaust, Islamic World, Israel & the Near East, Middle Age & Renaissance, Modern Times, Origins, People & Places, Pre-Modern & Modern, The Americas Joel S. Pachter on March 6, 2012 at 12:51 pm (Reply) Just when I thought I was inured to the shibboleths of anti-Semitism, Phyllis Goldstein's book riveted my attention as no other monograph. Chronicling this disease of the soul nearly from time immemorial, Ms. Goldstein makes abundantly clear that, like the most pernicious of pathogens, anti-Semitism never goes way; it just mutates and waits in hiding for the next vulnerable moment. To those who think they've "heard it all" on this topic, "Antisemitism: a Convenient Hatred" will still shock you with its bare truth. Cicero on March 6, 2012 at 2:39 pm (Reply) The figures cited are inaccurate. The Pew Center for Research, whose "Global Attitudes Surveys" are by far the most reliable, cite different figures in their 2008 study. In the United States, the least anti-Semitic country in the world, Pew found anti-Semitism in seven percent of respondents, not the 15 percent cited. In the Muslim world, anti-Semitism is essentially universal, with 95 to 100 percent embracing extreme anti-Semitic views. Things are better here than some know, and even worse among Muslims than some can imagine. ConcernedFriend on March 6, 2012 at 9:55 pm (Reply) At my son's school, he--we are not Jewish--was hearing the old nasty Jewish jokes. We live in Utah; not a huge Jewish population or a lot of sensitivity here. When I approached the school principal with my concern, his only concern was knowing the names of the kids who told the jokes (it was many different kids), not dealing with the general attititude at school. My son said, "If there are Jewish kids here, they must feel horrible every day." I will continue to speak out and plan to reach out to local Jewish groups to counter, I hope, this once-again-growing evil. Dr. Paramjit Singh Ajrawat on March 7, 2012 at 8:15 pm (Reply) I am a Sikh community leader; Sikhs are a minority like Jews and a very proud one. I am a graduate of Yeshiva University. I am grateful to Jewish institutions (Brookdale Hospital and Albert Einstein College of Medicine) for what they have done for me. Jews are hard working and creative people who are self-assured and self-confident, like Sikhs. Their contributions to the world in every field of endeavor are phenomenal. They should not think too much about anti-Semitism. They have been surrounded by people of different faiths who obviously have problem accepting them for who they are. That is the harsh truth about life, and unfortunately humans have to accept it. My people and I know about our persecution and that of Jews. We support the state of Israel wholeheartedly. We stand side-by-side with Israel's people and stand for its existence and survival. One day the Jewish state of Israel and the Sikh state of Khalistan (we struggle to reclaim our lost sovereignty) will be allies. So, Jews are not alone. God bless Israel and God Bless Khalistan. Dr. Paramjit Singh Ajrawat Ben Tzur on March 8, 2012 at 3:21 am (Reply) To equate pagan and Christian anti-sSmitism, as Phyllis Goldstein's book apparently does, is to make what logicians call a "category mistake." Pagan anti-Semitism was similar to the other ethnic and cultural xenophobias and chauvinisms that abounded in Graeco-Roman antiquity. Greek states hated even each other, and could wipe out whole island populations in war. The Romans hated the Carthaginians and committed genocide against them, only one of many such in Roman history. But there was one difference between the usual pagan chauvinisms and pagan anti-Semitism: Many pagan chauvinists especially hated the Jews because so many pagans were drawn to join them, converting to Judaism itself. So, pagan anti-Semitism fluctuated in accordance with political circumstances. It responded to the large number of conversions to Judaism in the Graeco- Roman period and the Judaic repudiation of pagan polytheism. But this phenomenon, according to most scholars of the subject, differed from the radically demonising anti-Semitism that arose in early Christianity, which went so far as to accuse the Jews of worshipping Satan and knowingly committing deicide. That anti-Semitism, unlike other xenophobias, was integrated into the primal self-definition and world-view of the new religion and, as such, endured through the centuries in ever worse forms, even in the absence of Jews. The demonisation of Jews and their persisting post-Christian Jewish religion was used as an essential justification for Christianity itself, legitimating the Church's appropriation and modification of the Jewish scriptures and the transferral to the Church of the religious claims of Jews to be God's true "Israel." For an overview of this historical and theological dynamic, see James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961), pp. 1-120; Friedrich Heer, God's First Love: Christians and Jews over Two Thousand Years (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1970), pp. 15-50, and for the most recent research, Robert S Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (New York: Random House, 2010), pp. 79-87. For more detailed studies of specific issues, see John Gager, The Origins of Antisemitism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) on how Christian versions of anti-Semitism differed from pagan types; on the New Testament sources for later anti-Semitism, see Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); and on the ramifications of "replacement theology," see Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: the Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury Press, 1974). Ben Tzur on June 7, 2012 at 8:43 am (Reply) A brief comment in passing on terminology may be relevant to the topic of antisemitism itself, namely how to define it. The Moderator has the practice of changing every use of the term "antisemitism" (one word) into "anti-Semitism" (two words). I would like to suggest that those posters (such as myself) who use the term "antisemitism," a usage found in many standard academic works, should be allowed to do so. There is a good justification for the one-word version. "Anti-Semitism" implies that the animus is against the Jews as "Semites." It gives credence to a racist error on the part of antisemites. Actually, Jews include most of the races of humanity. Hitler himself befriended the Arabs, including among others the Palestinian leader Haj Amin el-Husaini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, promising him rule over a Jew-free Palestine after the war. Antisemitism is an ideology, like fascism or communism. It is nominally about race but included amongst "Semites" all those converted to Judaism down through the ages, including even Aryan converts: They, too, died in the concentration camps. The real animus of the antisemite is against Judaism as such, and all those supportive of it and stemming from it, the Jewish people as such regardless of race. So it was from the start of its coining in the 19th century. It is merely a modern excuse for the ancient fevered hate, and remains entirely a part of that ancient history. Even the 19th and 20th centuries' racist definition of it merely serves as a secularist "scientific" veil for its roots in classic Christian polemic, where racist allegations are also made from the very beginning: e.g., in Matt. 23:29-33 and 27:24-25. I believe that "antisemitism" is far more accurate a usage than "anti-Semitism," and the use of the two-word version obscures its real nature. I should have given proper acknowledgment of my heartfelt appreciation for the comments of earlier non-Jewish posters who have expressed their concern and their feelings of solidarity with the Jewish people against the sickness of antisemitism. "ConcernedFriend" speaks for an America of decency, an America I love and have been very comfortable living in from birth, and so I appreciate his views. I am particularly moved by Dr. Ajarwat's remarks. The Sikhs have also suffered enormously from prejudice and aggression against themselves and their noble religion, and as a Jew I feel an especial resonance with them not only on this score but also because of the many striking commonalities in belief and practice between our two religions. So Dr. Ajarwat's comments I think reflect this strong historical and faith foundation, and I join with him in his hopes for the Sikh people and religion. E Feldman on April 11, 2013 at 9:44 am (Reply) Jager hits anohter home run. Well written and very enlightening. Good job as always! Comments are closed for this article. Home © Copyright 2010-2016 Jewish Ideas Daily. All Rights Reserved. RSS | Contact Us | Legal

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the News On the Ground: The Enemy of My Enemy Learning to trust in Iraq By Paul McLeary This month marks the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. For many of the journalists who have covered it, it has been the story of their lifetime, but we've nevertheless seen coverage of the war slip off the front pages over the last few months. While there are still plenty of reporters risking their lives doing great work in Iraq, much of the political, social, and economic complexity of today's war seems to be getting lost in the election-year crush, even as the war continues to be a major issue in the campaign. This series is CJR's attempt to add a little bit of context to the whole, while digging into stories that don't always make it into our morning newspapers. This is Part Seven in an ongoing series. Captain Christopher Loftis, commanding officer of C company, 2/25 in Tarmiya, was trying to feel out a group of Iraqi men who hoped to join the Sons of Iraq movement. The men were standing around a checkpoint that flew the yellow flag of the Anbar Awakening movement at an intersection a few miles outside of town, and he was asking them how things were going. The response was the same each time: "more weapons" to fight the insurgents. Loftis would smile, shake the man's hand, and move on. It was the usual request, always denied, but given that these men weren't even under contract to provide security, the plea was a little premature. The captain had come out to this checkpoint in front of a former Saddam-era uranium processing plant not just to meet these men, but the men who organized them, along with about six hundred others who wanted a contract with the American Army to provide security. The Sons of Iraq program, begun in the spring of 2007 and funded by U.S. taxpayers to the tune thus far of $123 million and counting, is basically a private militia - 80,000 strong at this point - hired by the American military to help fight the insurgency. Not surprisingly, the success of the SOI has produced conflict with the Iraqi government. At a meeting the day before with the local Iraqi police commander, the police complained that two people had been kidnapped and released by an "illegal checkpoint" manned by the SOI the night before, and that some of the men at these new checkpoints were wearing masks. The police commander wanted to make some arrests, which brought the American civil affairs officer assigned to Tarmiya, Major Guidry, to the edge of his seat. "Just get their names and give them to us," Guidry warned. "We don't want to put you in a position where you're in conflict with Abna al-Iraq [Arabic for Sons of Iraq]," The police colonel frowned, but agreed not to do anything drastic. This is how easily things can turn in Iraq. If the police commander had rolled up on the checkpoint and tried to arrest the men staffing it, the situation could easily devolve into a gun battle between Iraqi government forces and the irregular forces being paid by, and deriving their legitimacy from, the Americans. It's not a situation that anyone, for obvious reasons, wants. For starters, it would spotlight the fact that the American military is paying citizens to do the work that the Iraqi government security forces have been unable to do, therefore calling into question the effectiveness of the government itself. Also, in Iraq's tribal society, such a confrontation would likely start a bloody cycle of revenge with U.S. forces caught in the middle. In a piece about the increasing use military contractors by the American military, Michael Walzer wrote recently in The New Republic that: the state is constituted by its monopoly on the use of force...This is what states are for; this is what they have to do before anything else - shut down the private wars, disarm the private armies, lock up the warlords. It is a very dangerous business to loosen the state's grip on the use of violence But this loosening of the state's grip on the monopoly of violence is the only way that the American military has found to pull Iraq back from the unrestrained chaos of 2007, which set records for American and Iraqi deaths. And for now it's working, at least when it comes to keeping the American death toll lower than it had been for much of the past several years. None of this is ever far from the minds of American commanders, and as Captain Loftis walked up to the gates of the factory he told me that, just a week earlier, "these guys were not on the radar screen. It actually kinda surprised us when we saw the first new checkpoint about a week ago and we were like, 'Who are these guys?'" Loftis continued, We're very cautious when we see Sons of Iraq groups, not so much because we're worried that they're doing some kind of nefarious activity, but it's more of, we want to make sure they're part of the security solution. Let's make sure they're part of the security solution, let's embrace them and see who they are. We can't be naïve about it, though. Some of these guys might be exactly the people we were fighting five or six months ago, maybe last week before they threw up the checkpoint. It could be a cover, but this is all about them making legitimate progress to secure their area. We walked through the smashed gates of the plant, and were led to a small room in a one-story building that looked like it used to be administrative offices (no one could explain how the group seemed to have taken over the facility), where we were met by Sheik Maher, a thin, mustachioed man dressed in a dark tracksuit and kaffiyeh, and Ahmer, professional-looking man in a crisp, tan sport coat and jeans. Both claim to be former lieutenant colonels, Maher in the army and Ahmer in intelligence. American soldiers and Iraqis jammed into the room where they pored over a map of the area, trying to pinpoint the locations of the eight new checkpoints that the Sheik's men had established. The Iraqis made their case, describing all they can do to improve security in the area if given a contract to join the Sons of Iraq movement. Loftis pulled out all the tools in his counterinsurgency tool box, scolding a soldier for standing with his back to one of the Iraqis, which is considered rude, and working quickly to assign the Iraqis responsibility. He asked them to make a sign that the Americans can copy and distribute to the checkpoints so they're easily identifiable as being under U.S. patronage. "If we make the signs," Loftis said, "we probably won't use the right language." But best of all, Loftis speaks Arabic. A former intelligence and Special Forces officer, the Army sent him to language school in the early '90s, and it's a tool he uses effectively to catch the nuances in language that might be lost when relying on translators. At one point, deep in conversation in Arabic, Loftis and the Iraqis unleashed a big laugh, which Loftis translated for the rest of us: "I asked him why he wants security in his area, and he told me that once his area is secured, his men can join the Iraqi army and police and then overthrow the Maliki government!" I wasn't so sure he was kidding. Later, when I asked Loftis about this, he told me that Maher was merely trying to see how the Americans would react. What Loftis found much more interesting was that during the meeting, Ahmer used the phrase, "at the time of the fall of Saddam," and Sheik Maher broke in to correct him, saying, "You mean 'at the time of the occupation.'" The Iraqis have different words for "coalition forces" and "occupation forces," and Sheik Maher explicitly used the latter in conversation, Loftis explained, so "he kind of showed where his compass is pointing." In other words, Maher was showing Loftis his disdain for American forces, but given the choice between fighting the Americans and al Qaeda, he's made the decision to fight al Qaeda and take American money for doing so. So who, exactly, are Maher and Ahmer? There are indications that Maher is affiliated with the 1920s Revolution Brigade, a Sunni insurgent group that has long battled American forces and has been stridently anti-coalition. "Obviously maybe some of the stuff these guys have done is bad," Loftis said, and they "aren't necessarily happy with coalition forces being here, but we're the lesser of the two evils that they have to deal with." "But you've got to move forward. They're Iraqi patriots is what they are." At this point in the war in Iraq, it appears that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. And while many of these insurgent groups are reconciling with American forces, Maher's joke about the Maliki government shows that among some, reconciliation between Iraqis has a long way to go. Part One, "The Rejected," is here. Part Two, "Men With Guns," is here. Part Three: "Night Patrol," is here. Part Four: "The Suicide Bomber" is here. Part Five: "The End of the Weapons Cache" is here. Part Six: "Riding to Tarmiya" is here. Paul McLeary is senior editor of Defense Technology International magazine, and is a former CJR staffer.

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Peter Y. Sussman Journalist and Author DECCA Reaction Committing Journalism Committing Journalism "One of the great political works of our time" - S.F. Bay Guardian Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog By Dannie M. Martin and Peter Y. Sussman (W.W. Norton, 1993 hardbound, 1995 paperback) Dannie Martin was a bank robber, a heroin addict, a longtime federal prisoner and, he later wrote, "a criminal by any definition I know of." But in 1986, the self-educated convict's life changed dramatically when he submitted a freelance article on AIDS in prison to San Francisco Chronicle editor Peter Sussman. That article began a years-long collaboration in the course of which Martin wrote more than 50 eloquent and revealing profiles of prison life. Along the way, Martin and Sussman ran afoul of federal prison authorities, who threw the author into the hole two days after he criticized his warden in print. What followed was a high-profile First Amendment lawsuit. As Martin later framed the issue: "I committed bank robbery and they put me in prison, and that was right. Then I committed journalism and they put me in the hole. And that was wrong." In Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog (published by W.W. Norton in hardback in November 1993 and in paperback in June 1995), Martin and Sussman reprint Martin's riveting prison articles and tell the behind-the-scenes story of their collaboration and their long struggle to assure the First Amendment rights of prisoners and newspapers. Theirs is a story of personal risk and drama - and unlikely friendship - as well as the record of a path-breaking legal dispute. The most eloquent testimony to the significance of their struggle is in Martin's powerful essays from inside the joint. EXCERPTS FROM COMMITTING JOURNALISM: It's easy for a judge to say "20 years" or "30 years." It takes only a few seconds to declare. It's also easy for the person in the street to say: "Well, this criminal has harmed society and should be locked up for a long time." The public is unable to imagine what the added time does to a convict and what it does to his family. Two years is a lot of time. Twenty or 30 years is a Mount Everest of time, and very few can climb it. And what happens to them on the way up makes one not want to be around if and when they return. - Dannie Martin It is almost axiomatic that depersonalized people are capable of barbaric acts. If we continue to assume that every lawbreaker - or every lawbreaker who doesn't wear a white collar - is Jack the Ripper, then we can expect to find many more criminals acting out the roles to which we have relegated them. - Peter Sussman The real issues, I believe, are: (1) Does a convict have a First Amendment right to publicly define himself and his surroundings? And (2) does the public have a First Amendment right to hear a prisoner's viewpoint. ... Any permanent harm that comes to us all won't be because of what we talk about. It will come from what was passed over in silence. Before 1986, society defined Dannie Martin. When he began to define himself - as a writer - the government tried to take away his name and stop his writing. That action jeopardized society's interests, and it threatened the hope he represented for other convicts. In his dispatches from prison, Dannie did not exonerate his fellow prisoners. But he gave them back their names and personalities and families and the same vulnerable emotions we all have. He restored their human complexity. That may be the first step out of our quagmire of crime and punishment. REACTION TO COMMITTING JOURNALISM: "The whole is considerably more than the sum of the parts, for Martin's pungent essays coalesce into Sussman's sensitive narrative to form a poignant story of mutual discovery and self-discovery. As Sussman puts it, 'a junkie who has spent most of his adult life inside prisons and an editor who had seen prisons only from a car window' found themselves in a 'dialogue about crime and punishment in this culture that has had too much of each.' " From San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Committing Journalism is one of the great political works of our time, a book that ought to be required reading for every American citizen." Wilbert Rideau, Editor Emeritus, The Angolite, Louisiana State Prison, Angola: "This is a true tale of a man with the balls to point out the emperor's nakedness, and the emperor's efforts to squash him. Convict-writer Dannie 'Red Hog' Martin paints prisoners and their keepers in living color, showing them as human beings with the needs, desires, faults and foibles we all share. ... Committing Journalism is a significant contribution to public understanding of the people who live, work and die in prison." Carl Jensen, Founding Director, Project Censored, California State University, Sonoma: "Committing Journalism obviously should be a required text for all criminal justice programs in our universities; more important, however, it should be a required text in all our journalism programs. It is both a stirring reminder of the dedication it takes to become a real journalist and, at the same time, a case study of news media censorship. ... [A] powerful reminder of how vulnerable our society is to control freaks. We all owe Dannie Martin and Peter Sussman an enormous debt for their fight to preserve the First Amendment." From The Boston Phoenix: "Committing Journalism is one hell of a book." Author Jessica Mitford: "At last we have some first-rate description of life behind those clanging gates - but far more than that, we have the remarkable story of how and why Dannie Martin's prison writings got published by an intrepid editor, Peter Sussman, in the face of almost unbelievable roadblocks erected by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It is not only an exciting, well-told story - it may well prove to be one of those rare phenomena, a book that could become a catalyst for real reform. I only wish that a copy could be placed in the in-basket of every member of President Clinton's staff, cabinet, and above all of our Attorney General." Professor Norman Dorsen, ACLU President, 1976-91: "A gripping read. All the learned reports and conferences in the world will not provide as vivid a sense of the tensions, cruelties and humor of prison as Red Hog's firsthand tales." Sussman welcomed Martin at San Francisco airport after the prison writer's release from the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix "One hell of a book" - Boston Phoenix To order copies, please visit your local independent bookstores and help keep them in businesss. Or you can order from Amazon.com. COMPETINGFOR EYEBALLS "I'm competing for eyeballs with millions of narcissists." -- blogger Rick Redfern Marriage: God's Rules and Caesar'sWith the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, I have been unearthing some of my writings on the subject over the years, many of them emphasizing a common theme: the way some religious people confuse civil and religious institutions. I've previously posted on this website a 2009 blog on the subject. I now add this oped, syndicated by Pacific News Service in 2004, soon after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom unilaterally ordered the city staff to issue marriage licenses without regard to gender, setting off a brief, celebratory period during which the city was issuing marriage licenses as the Supreme Court acknowledged 11 years later is constitutionally required. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said it exactly right when he told the media that President Bush "has always strongly believed that marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman." Behind the exhilaration of the recent San Francisco gay marriages - or the angst, depending on your viewpoint - lie a few deceptively simple words that we have hopelessly confused. The easiest way to come to terms with the national tempest over gay marriages is to place those few words under a microscope for a moment.The operative words in the White House statement are "sacred" and "believed." McClellan's announcement accurately summarizes the president's religious view that marriage between a man and a woman is a sacred institution, not a governmental one. But what Mr. Bush is proposing is the President Bush "has always strongly believed that marriage is a sacred institution" inclusion in the United States Constitution, the ruling document of our secular government, of his personal "beliefs" on what is "sacred." Mr. Bush, said to be a deeply religious man who felt a "calling from God" to run for the presidency, is welcome to hisFinish reading Marriage: God's Rules and Caesar's >> Previous Blogs The March: A View From the Crowd The Other Hands on the Barrel Gatesgate: A lesson plan Meg Whitman: Save Marriage Take Me to Your Editor The Politics of Outrage Confessions of a Cyberscab Bye Bye Bush: The Shoe Management by Chaos Copyright © 2009 Peter Y. Sussman Powered by WordPress | Designed by Likoma

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Downing Street Memos: Maybe they will just go away Discussion in 'Middle East - General' started by Gabriella84, Jul 17, 2005. Gabriella84 Downing Street: A Dead-End In American Media By David Michael Green "What is surprising, is how little attention [the memo] has received in some of the most important news media in the United States despite its being an official document that contradicts the North American version of the beginning of the war." --Jorge Ramos Avalos, Washington correspondent for Univision. The Downing Street Memos have provided an unexpected fright for the minority of Americans who are aware of them. It's not that presidents lie about the wars they send other people's kids off to fight. And it's not even that the media in this country has grown lazy, intimidated and sycophantic. It's the degree to which this is true, and the deterioration of American democracy to which it testifies. At the same moment we were revisiting the Watergate story and celebrating the dogged persistence that unmasked the crimes of Richard Nixon, the media largely ignored what is one of the biggest stories since the end of the Cold War. Five main indictments emanate from this growing series of leaked documents. First, that the Bush administration decided to go to war earlier than was publicly stated. Second, that the reasons he gave for the war were bogus. Third, that Bush lied in saying that the war could have been avoided. Fourth, that the war actually began almost a year earlier than is assumed. And fifth, that the administration did almost no planning for the aftermath of the invasion. The media's response to these allegations has been to ignore, distort, deny and denigrate them. Why blow off such a huge story? Cindy Sheehan says, "The press and the public are afraid to admit they were duped, because that would mean they have to take partial responsibility for the mess in Iraq. It would take a great deal of personal integrity and honesty to admit that." Sheehan is the mother of Casey Sheehan, who was killed in action on April 4, 2004 in Sadr City. She has since co-founded Gold Star Families for Peace and is a highly visible activist in the anti-war movement. The story was almost completely absent from the mainstream media, especially in the weeks following May 1 when the story broke in the Sunday Times of London. A classic example was offered by the New York Times, which reported this bombshell in its coverage of the British elections, but somehow never thought to raise it as an issue of American politics. Even Times Public Editor Byron Calame found this inexcusable. "It appears that key editors simply were slow to recognize that the minutes of a high-powered meeting on a life-and-death issue--their authenticity undisputed--probably needed to be assessed in some fashion for readers," he wrote. But Calame was only addressing this at all because the Times was being bombarded by angry reader correspondence. Since this was happening all over, the media had to change tack. When ignoring the memos no longer proved viable, they began to substitute very limited reporting coupled with distortion and denial. The mainstream media approach has been to ignore most of the Downing Street memo implications, dismiss others by arguing that everyone in Washington knew the president was going to war back in late 2002, and grudgingly admit that there could have been better "post-war'" planning. The public, of course, had a very different understanding--an understanding based on what the president had said. Even if Washington insiders were discussing the pending invasion over dinner, the president was telling Americans that he was seeking to avoid war at all costs, and very many of them believed him. Bush said that war was to be his last resort, that Saddam could avoid it by telling the truth about WMDs, that he went to the U.N. to try to solve the problem peacefully, that Iraq represented such an urgent threat to U.S. security he could no longer wait for the inspectors to finish their work, that he therefore gave the order to attack in March 2003, and that U.N. resolutions gave him the authority to do so. Not a single one of those assertions was truthful, as the Downing Street Memos prove. Bush actually began attacking Iraq in July 2002. The purpose was to provoke a response that could become a casus belli for invasion. Ditto the entire U.N. inspections, which were done only in the hopes that Saddam would refuse inspections and thus provide a pretext for war. And we all know now about the distortion of intelligence concerning WMDs and al Qaeda links. Or do we? The media has rightly focused on the smoking gun in these memos, which states that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." But focusing exclusively on this line allows another popular dodge, the claim that "fixed" has another meaning in Britspeak, to be "bolted on." Apart from the fact that the Brits themselves find this a laughable bit of news about their dialect, making this argument requires ignoring the rest of the document's content, not least the line stating that the case for attacking Iraq was "thin," as well as the rest of the context (like the fact the Bush people actually were, in fact, wildly distorting intelligence at this time, as the memo explains). The nadir prize within mainstream American journalism probably goes to Dana Milbank of the Washington Post for his curled-lip rendering of Rep. John Conyers' (D-Mich.) ad hoc hearing on the memos. It was ad hoc because the House Republican majority has every interest in burying this scandal, so much so that they wouldn't even give Conyers a conference room in the Capitol to use, despite the fact that several were available. (Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ultimately found him a stuffy basement room of about 20' by 30'.) To further stymie Conyers, the Republicans simultaneously scheduled important committee meetings and an astounding 11 floor votes--a House record. Milbank had a slightly different perspective on the event in a story labeled "Washington Sketch." Titled "Democrats Play House To Rally Against the War," Milbank began with this lead-in: "In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe." Milbank went well out of his way to mock Conyers, omit salient facts, erroneously report others, and even somehow manage to play the anti-Semitism card. Fortunately, it produced what Post Ombudsman Michael Getler described as "a torrent of critical e-mails," which in turn led to him calling the paper's sole coverage of the news event by a columnist "a serious mistake." (In his column a week earlier, Getler had also written "The bulk of the mail last week, by far, was focused once again on the 'Downing Street Memo.'") Without the leadership of Conyers and the electronic foments of an angry blogopublic, Downing Street would have been DOA in the USA. It is the efforts of these folks, in particular, that have produced the most bizarre, yet hopeful, aspect of this sad display of journalism. A huge proportion of media articles and talk-show blatherings on the Downing Street Memo scandal has been devoted to discussing why the media is not covering the story, even while they continue to do just that. Rather than decide to actually cover this story of monstrous proportions, they resorted instead to bogus and pathetic bouts of existential soul-searching. What is especially disconcerting about this noncoverage is what it says about the state of American media, and to a lesser extent, its junk-news consumers. According to one count of TV segments covering this story versus those concerning Natalee Holloway (the Alabama teenager who went missing in Aruba) and Michael Jackson, from May 1 through June 20 on network news there were only 6 mentions of the Downing Street Memo (all on NBC), but 174 for Holloway and 465 for Jackson. It is as if coverage of WWII had been preempted by the Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall romance. But there are also reasons for optimism. In June alone, Google hits on "Downing Street Memo" went from 250,000 to 1.5 million. More and more outlets are carrying the story, especially regional papers as more Americans grow disenchanted with the war. David Swanson, co-founder of Afterdowningstreet.org, believes this is the direct result of citizens forcing the story on a reluctant media. Still, he says, "We are miles from the level of serious coverage afforded something of national importance, like the Michael Jackson trial or Ken Starr's walk to get his morning newspaper." But, he adds, "There are Congress members and senators taking important steps. Congressman Conyers has several new initiatives that will be announced shortly, and he and several other Congress members will be holding public forums in their districts on July 23, the 3-year anniversary of the meeting on Downing Street. Anyone interested can sign up to host a public meeting or a small house party, and others can sign up to attend it, on the afterdowningstreet.org Web site, where an extensive kit provides ample materials to produce a great event." The tide seems to have turned against Bush and a compliant press. Still, Swanson believes a very large critical mass of angry Americans will be required to make a difference. At the end of the day, the Downing Street Memo scandal is the proverbial half-full/half-empty glass. It has demonstrated both how deeply damaged is American democracy, but also how the capacity may still remain for a mobilized public to prevail over not only a hostile government, but a co-opted fourth estate as well.

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Email to share with The Second Oswald Josiah Thompson October 6, 1966 Issue In response to: The Second Oswald: The Case for a Conspiracy Theory from the July 28, 1966 issue To the Editors: Permit me to bolster R. H. Popkin's brilliant reconstruction of the Kennedy assassination (July 28) by adding to his account certain facts which have just recently come to light. (a) Commission Exhibit 399 - Popkin states that "there is no evidence that the Commission could obtain anything like pristine No. 399 in any of its tests." Actually, there is one test performed by the Commission which did produce two bullets virtually identical with 399. In order to get control rounds for use in ballistics comparison tests Special Agent Frazier test-fired two bullets from Oswald's rifle (3:437). Although Frazier indicates only that he test-fired the rifle to get these rounds, it is standard ballistics practice to obtain such rounds by firing into a long tube of cotton waste. When we look at the two bullets so produced (Commission Exhibit 572; 17:258), we find they appear to be virtually identical with 399. Although the Commission appears not to have realized it, a test had been performed which indicated quite clearly that 399 was a plant, that its most likely source was the test-firing of Oswald's gun into cotton. (b) The Autopsy Report - The disparity between the final autopsy report and the FBI reports of Dec. 9th and January 13th is explained as due to a reconstruction of the wounds by the autopsy doctors on November 23rd and 24th. Since FBI agents were not present at these subsequent conferences, the FBI was naturally ignorant of the reconstruction. Such an explanation seems plausible only as long as there is no substantive discrepancy between what the FBI observers say they saw at the autopsy, and what the doctors later report. Such a discrepancy emerges from an examination of the report on the autopsy submitted by the two FBI agents who were present. This report is entitled, "Autopsy of Body of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy."* Five pages single-spaced, it was dictated by Agents Francis X. O'Neill and James W. Sibert on 26 November 1963. The following citation gives the salient characteristics of Kennedy's wounds as they were observed by agents O'Neill and Sibert: Upon completion of X-rays and photographs, the first incision was made at 8:15 p.m. X-Rays of the brain area which were developed and returned to the autopsy room disclosed a path of a missile which appeared to enter the back of the skull and the path of the disintegrated fragments could be observed along the right side of the skull. The largest section of this missile as portrayed by X-Ray appeared to be behind the right frontal sinus. The next largest fragment appeared to be at the rear of the skull at the juncture of the skull bone. The Chief Pathologist advised approximately 40 particles of disintegrated bullet and smudges indicated that the projectile had fragmentized while passing through the skull region. During the autopsy inspection of the area of the brain, two fragments were removed by Dr. Humes, namely, one fragment measuring 7 × 2 millimeters, which was removed from the right side of the brain. An additional fragment of metal measuring 1 × 3 millimeters was also removed from this area, both of which were placed in a glass jar containing a black metal top which were thereafter marked for identification and following the signing of a proper receipt were transported by Bureau agents to the FBI Laboratory. During the latter stages of this autopsy, Dr. Humes located an opening which appeared to be a bullet hole which was below the shoulders and two inches to the right of the middle line of the spinal column. This opening was probed by Dr. Humes with the finger at which time it was determined that the trajectory of the missile entering at this point had entered at a downward position of 45 to 60 degrees. Further probing determined that the distance traveled by this missile was a short distance inasmuch as the end of the opening could be felt with the finger. Inasmuch as no complete bullet of any size could be located in the brain area and likewise no bullet could be located in the back or any other area of the body as determined by total body X-Rays and inspection revealing there was no point of exit, the individuals performing the autopsy were at a loss to explain why they could find no bullets. A call was made by Bureau agents to the Firearms Section of the FBI Laboratory at which time SA Charles L. Killion advised that the Laboratory had received through Secret Service Agent Richard Johnson a bullet which had reportedly been found on a stretcher in the emergency room of Parkland Hospital, Dallas, Texas. This stretcher had also contained a stethoscope and pair of rubber gloves. Agent Johnson had advised the Laboratory that it had not been ascertained whether or not this was the stretcher which had been used to transport the body of President Kennedy. Agent Killion further described this bullet as pertaining to a 6.5 millimeter rifle which would be approximately a 25 caliber rifle and that this bullet consisted of a copper alloy full jacket. Immediately following receipt of this information, this was made available to Dr. Humes who advised that in his opinion this accounted for no bullet being located which had entered the back region and that since external cardiac massage had been performed at Parkland Hospital, it was entirely possible that through such movement the bullet had worked its way back out of the point of entry and had fallen on the stretcher. Also during the latter stages of the autopsy, a piece of the skull measuring 10 × 6.5 centimeters was brought to Dr. Humes who was instructed that this had been removed from the President's skull. Immediately this section of skull was X-rayed, at which time it was determined by Dr. Humes that one corner of this section revealed minute metal particles and inspection of this same area disclosed a chipping of the top portion of this piece, both of which indicated that this had been the point of exit of the bullet entering the skull region. On the basis of the latter two developments, Dr. Humes stated that the pattern was clear, that the one bullet had entered the President's back and had worked its way out of the body during external cardiac massage and that a second high velocity bullet had entered the rear of the skull and had fragmentized prior to exit through the top of the skull. He further pointed out that X-Rays had disclosed numerous fractures in the cranial area which he attributed to the force generated by the impact of the bullet in its passage through the brain area. He attributed the death of the President to a gunshot wound of the head. On the basis of these observations by O'Neill and Sibert a host of questions must be directed to the doctors who signed the final, undated autopsy report: (1) How does a wound "below the shoulders and two inches to the right of the spinal column" become the neck wound pictured in Commission Exhibits 385 and 386? (2) How does a wound whose terminus "could be felt with the finger" become a transit wound with its exit in the President's throat? Surely to "reconstruct" a wound in this fashion is to falsify it. (3) What happened to what O'Neill and Sibert describe as "the next largest fragment" which they locate "at the rear of the skull at the juncture of the skull bone"? Nowhere in the autopsy report or in the testimony of any of the autopsy doctors do we find mention of this bullet fragment in the President's skull. This is a significant omission since the location of such a fragment might prove difficult to resolve with the official theory of a hit in the right occipital region exiting through the roof of the skull. (4) Why does O'Neill and Sibert's fully detailed report contain no mention of the small entry hole in the back of the President's head? In testimony before the Commission (2:352), Dr. Humes indicated that this wound had been examined in detail. He described its measurements as 6 by 15 millimeters, located it as "2.5 centimeters to the right and slightly above the external occipital protuberance," and told how the scalp had been reflected and the underlying bone examined. How is it possible that O'Neill and Sibert simply missed this important wound and its meticulous examination by Dr. Humes? When we pursue the matter of this head wound we find that O'Neill and Sibert were not alone in failing to notice it. For when we examine the testimony of the Dallas doctors and nurses together with that of the Secret Service and FBI agents who witnessed the autopsy, we find that (with the exception of an ambiguous answer from Roy Kellerman) no one except the three doctors who signed the autopsy report claim to have seen this entry hole in the President's head. Does it exist? I don't know. But there is a miraculously simple way to find out. The government need only produce the 11 X-Rays, 22 color photos, and 18 black and white prints which O'Neill and Sibert report were taken during the autopsy. Josiah Thompson Haverford, Pennsylvania This report bears the Commission File Number CD-7 and FBI file numbers 89-30. It was discovered in the National Archives by Mr. Paul Hoch of Berkeley, California. ↩ - - October 6, 1966 - - On Lenny Bruce (1926-1966) Jonathan Miller Smothered in Onions Alan Pryce-Jones Vulcanists & Neptunists Cecil J. Schneer A Visit to Washington Ronald Steel Eating Poetry Mark Strand More 'Men Without Work': An Exchange

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Eye Channel Surfing in Riyadh The combustible politics and morphing media of the Middle East By Paul McLeary The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East By Neil MacFarquhar | PublicAffairs | 359 pages, $26.95 Whatever else you can say about Neil MacFarquhar's new geopolitical travelogue about his years in the Middle East, you have to give the book its due for what might be the best title in recent memory. This semi-comical mouthful comes from an e-mail that the crack Hizbollah media shop sends to reporters on their birthday, and MacFarquhar uses it as a jumping-off point for his at times depressing exploration of the myriad ways in which politics and religion define all aspects of life throughout the region. Sprinkle into the pot a variety of longstanding grievances against the West (particularly Israel and the United States), and the end result is a dangerous, contradictory brew of inferiority and xenophobia. This is the world that MacFarquhar, who served as Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times from 2001 to 2006, tries in his own quiet way to untangle. The Middle East that MacFarquhar sketches in the book is in the midst of a grudging, sometimes painful transition - the latest in a chain of fitful eruptions that have repeatedly shifted the balance of power in the region. There were the early, freewheeling decades of the last century; the secular pan-Arabism of the 1960s; the decadent oil-boom years; and the moral rot of nepotistic police states that have simultaneously nurtured and suppressed a variety of Islamist movements. At the moment, the Middle East appears to mingle all these ingredients in a combustible mix. As an Arabic speaker, MacFarquhar's greatest strength is his ability to consume the local media, and he mines that vibrant, varied, and contentious landscape to powerful effect. Television is a powerful cultural force in Middle Eastern societies (as it is almost everywhere else), and we learn that yes, there are some rather subversive sitcoms on Saudi TV, and that one of the most popular shows from the Levant to Africa is a modern Lebanese cooking show. Also, people across the region are obsessed with talk shows (including Oprah), which differ from their Western equivalents in one key sense: they sometimes issue fatwas on call-in shows. Not surprisingly, MacFarquhar dwells on the phenomenon of Al-Jazeera. The cable channel's most important accomplishment, in his view, has been "creating a competitive news industry where none existed." Thanks to the success of Al-Jazeera, government-controlled news stations have been forced to loosen up their coverage in an attempt to win back viewers. This in turn "initiated a spillover effect in prompting newspapers and other publications to cover a far wider range of topics and issues like corruption and labor strikes." This doesn't mean that the press has become free, in any generally accepted Western sense of the word. But it is an unquiet revolution nonetheless, prompting debate and a deep cultural self-evaluation across the region. The author doesn't fault Washington for its stress on human rights, however intermittently, cosmetically, and even cynically it has pushed for them in the Arab world. The big mistake, he argues, is the way it has done so. Calling for free elections and sweeping democratic reforms before the requisite institutions and societal foundations are in place has done little more than stir anti-American resentment. If a greater emphasis were placed on situating human rights and electoral reform within the context of justice and respect - which are major tenets of Islam - these ideas would carry greater weight both on the street, and in the palaces and walled-off ministries. While making these broader policy arguments, MacFarquhar never loses sight of the fact that he is, in the end, a newspaper reporter. He repeatedly dwells on the ad hoc methods one is forced to employ when reporting in such a frustrating, heavily censored environment. (As MacFarquhar notes in his typically deadpan prose, "being arrested put a rather significant damper on reporting a story.") When a photographer he was working with was arrested - a not uncommon occurrence - the best response was usually "a question of timing." Before rushing forward to intervene, which would only land them both in jail, MacFarquhar would "call some senior official first, hoping the photographer would not be whisked away instantly. Then at least someone would know we were in custody and could hopefully gain our release." Working within a system that imposes rather arbitrary limits on speech, and where official explanations and opinions can shift with the desert sands, it's often hard for the author to know exactly which bits of information can be published. Nor can he forget that his visa status hangs on the whims of security organizations and bureaucrats looking out for their own interests (and for bribes). He is detained briefly in several countries, beaten by a mob in Saudi Arabia, and nearly kidnapped. His photographers and drivers are hauled in for questioning and expelled. Yet MacFarquhar keeps asking questions, even if the answers aren't always what we might want to hear. Paul McLeary is senior editor of Defense Technology International magazine, and is a former CJR staffer.

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A Down Under View On Public Broadcasting CJR talks NPR and more with Jonathan Holmes, host of Australian TV's Media Watch By Joel Meares Last week saw NPR CEO Vivian Schiller resign after the organization's chief fundraiser was caught in a hidden-video sting seemingly calling the Tea Party racist, Republicans stupid, and declaring that NPR would be better off without government funding. The sting was the latest imbroglio for the broadcaster in the lead-up to what will be a tough fight in a congress flush with representatives baying for the CPB's blood and treasure. We thought it would be interesting to see how public broadcasting controversies play in other countries. Unlike NPR, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) - which includes television, radio, and online - is fully and directly funded by the Australian government (bar for a small slice of revenue from retail sales at ABC stores); like NPR, it is frequently the subject of right-wing attacks. Assistant editor Joel Meares spoke to the ABC's Jonathan Holmes, host of twenty-year-old media watchdog show Media Watch, about the NPR situation, the difference between public broadcasters in the U.K., Australia, and the U.S., and why he couldn't work for PBS. This is an edited transcript of that conversation. What did you make of the way that NPR was stung in this situation, and the way the organization responded - by firing CEO Vivian Schiller? I haven't been reading everything written about the situation, but I'm a little bit surprised because there's no suggestion that she was actually involved in that meeting. Clearly, the whole thing is a classic example of entrapment, which in all honesty would not be legal in Australia (although you could justify it in public interest terms, possibly). All states in Australia have a law that used to be called the Listening Devices Act and nowadays is called the Surveillance Devices Act that applies to cameras as well as microphones. It basically says you cannot secretly record a private meeting and use that recording to do a public report without the consent of all people. There is a public interest defense: Someone would have to argue it was in the public interest, but the courts are very strict about that. That kind of entrapment is very rare in journalism in this country. Australia's two big tabloid news-magazine shows, Today Tonight and A Current Affair, don't use hidden cameras? No, they don't, and for precisely this reason. There was a very recent case here that shows this - though, mind you, it's not perfectly comparable. A seventeen-year-old girl was having an affair with a football coach - and football in Melbourne is far more important than politics. This guy had very unwisely gotten involved with this girl who had previously been involved with some of his players. She videoed him and tipped off The Herald Sun, the biggest newspaper in Melbourne, and the reports were all based on these recordings that were made without his knowledge. It would have been illegal to use them. Eventually, people did use them, but only after the story had been rumbling along for several days. So far, nobody has taken either the girl or the television station that finally used these shots to court. They were very concerned at the time that it was illegal to do it. So there is that constraint. In the NPR case I suppose you could argue that there's a much clearer public interest. We're talking about a partly publicly funded institution. That kind of deception and entrapment, which is used all the time in the U.K., would be very dodgy if done in Australia. That's a legal difference. But is there a difference in the political nature of the U.S. and Australia that changes the dynamic of the attacks on a public broadcaster? It might be clearer from this distance than when you're in the middle of it, but the degree of political divide in the United States is and has been for many years far more dramatic than in most other Anglophone countries. The consequence of that is that organizations like NPR and PBS, which are publicly funded and expected to be in the middle of the fray to a greater degree than the mainstream media, have an even greater difficulty than the classical mainstream media. The truth, which everybody knows but which they're always very reluctant to admit, is that the sort of people who are attracted to work at places like NPR and PBS, with their modest salaries and their particular output, are overwhelmingly people with left-of-center views. If you don't have left-of-center views, you either go to a bank and make a lot of money or you end up working at Fox or something. And yet those organizations still have to steer a middle course in political terms. There is that constant tension, and you will get it to a much lesser degree working at the ABC and at the BBC. They have similar umbrellas but the degree of the political partisanship and indeed the bitterness of the political partisanship, is not anything like the same degree. Having grown up in Australia though, I can recall the ABC being maligned in a similar way as a leftist organization. From my own father for one. Certainly those allegations are made all the time by the right in Australia. And, as I say, it's not entirely unjustified in the sense that I think if you asked anyone who was honest to examine which way the bulk of ABC employees vote I'd be very, very surprised if it wasn't 70 or 80 percent voting for the left-of-center party over the right-of-center party (to the extent that there's any distinction these days). And there might be a much higher percentage than in the general population who would vote Green, for that matter. The issue is: To what extent do people working for the ABC overcome those biases in terms of their reporting? I think the truthful answer is that they're pretty good at it. The bias comes in more in the selection of topics to write about and report on rather than the way it's done. These are all very well rehearsed issues that have been knocking around about public broadcasting in English-speaking countries for decades. I worked for PBS in the 1980s. The fear of being accused of being politically biased was greater there - even though we were working on a long-term documentary series - than it ever was at the BBC or the ABC. What kind of pressures did you experience while at PBS? In the 1980s, when I was at WGBH in Boston, they had produced a series about the Vietnam War in co-production with a British commercial station, Central Television [now ITV Central]. They had one Brit on a team of about four producers - he was a fairly classic sort of pugnacious, lefty, British TV documentary maker. There were really quite terrible culture clashes as to how opinionated the program should be, and the extent to which it should regard the North Vietnamese point of view as being as legitimate as the American, and so on. I did a similar series on nuclear weapons immediately after that, when there was quite a lot of sensitivity at GBH about how I would turn out. And indeed, I had similar arguments, and I didn't last the course in the end - I made two out of the three films I was supposed to make. I found it a very difficult working environment. Difficult because of the political pressure you found yourself under? In a sense, it was. We would make a documentary on a very complicated topic and take a long time to do it. It would then be taken by the executive producer and taken to a committee of advisors who, in the filmmaker's absence, would go through a bunch of criticisms that would then be brought back to us. Most of those would be: you haven't said this and you haven't said that. The answer was: well, I've got forty-eight minutes. It was just agonizing. This was funded by the Annenberg Foundation, which is a fairly mainstream and, if anything, right-leaning organization. It wanted a series that could be shown in educational institutions and that was therefore devoid of any controversy whereas I was from a school where what you looked for was the controversy when you do a thing like that. These kinds of internal disputes have always been there, in my experience, in PBS and NPR, because the right has always hated the notion of those places existing - even though they don't even begin to compare in terms of their place in the communications forum with the role of the ABC in Australia, let alone the BBC, which is a monster. NPR and PBS combined are little minnows in comparison. But that traditional anti-statist, free enterprise, capitalist approach of the mainstream in the United States is much more suspicious of anything that looks like state-owned media than is the case in Europe. Does the ABC have anything close to the kind of vetting process you experienced when making your documentaries for PBS? No - but that was a question of the fact that most of the funding was coming from an outside body which wanted to exercise editorial oversight that went with that funding. To the extent that the ABC co-produces, which it does occasionally for documentaries, though never for news and current affairs, there is quite a bit of a battle of shared editorial control. But largely speaking, and certainly for news and current affairs, there is no oversight much above the level of executive producer for almost anything. Of course, the government, which is your sole funder, must have had some issues with ABC content over the years and attempted to interfere? There have been occasions in which the government has made it clear that in its view what the ABC is doing is not satisfactory. There are two famous examples. The first was during the Gulf War in 1991. The then-prime minister, Bob Hawke, who is very pro-Israel, was furious at the amount of prominence the ABC gave to an American Middle East expert who was known for his pro-Palestine views. His expertise in this instance was all about Iraq, and he was very good, and I thought pretty impartial in terms of what he was talking about regarding the war in Iraq. But because of his history of anti-Israel comment the pro-Israel lobby, which included the prime minister, became very incensed. The outcome was that the ABC didn't really give way - the prime minister called for the sacking of various people who weren't sacked - and it blew over in time. The second and rather similar row was in the coverage of the current Iraq war. The Howard government had taken Australia into that war and the communications minister, Senator Richard Alston, was incensed by what he saw as biased political coverage, particularly on radio, and he basically wrote a formal complaint to the ABC - which is kind of bizarre, as though he were just another viewer, when he was the minister in charge of the ABC ultimately. The letter had around forty-five very specific complaints about what he claimed was biased coverage and it went through the normal ABC complaints procedure, through the independent review panel, and on from there to the official government regulator of broadcasting, at that time the Australian Broadcasting Authority. These people found various elements of the complaint justified, and most of them not justified. But the government does not have the power to instruct the ABC board and through the board to instruct ABC programmers to do one thing or another. Even in that instance, there was no other real way he could make note of his displeasure. Here the complaints are more than that. There's a very loud movement to see the Corporation for Public Broadcasting defunded. Are there similar calls in Australia from the ABC's attackers? There is a small lobby, mainly from the libertarian right, led by a couple of sort of militant Friedman-esque think tanks, largely on economically ideological grounds - a deep dislike of state funding of anything that doesn't have to be state-funded. They would argue there that if people want the kind of programming that the ABC provides these days they can pay for it through cable, or whatever, and in this age of media plenty there is far less justification for the existence of the ABC than there was when there was a real restriction of waveband. It's a very respectable argument in its way but it doesn't have a chance of getting much headway given the ABC's popularity with the public as a whole, which is considerable. Every time they do surveys of what people think about the ABC, asking whether they think it's biased, there's a massive majority who say they don't think it is. When they ask whether people value the ABC as an institution, there are massive majorities in favor. Even though it has a smaller audience than the commercial media in television, for example, its spread in radio means it's very widely listened to - in the bush, etc. And its television audiences are respectable - they channel 15 percent when a popular commercial station will get 23, 24, 25 percent. Someone in the coalition [of the conservative Liberal and National Parties] once said, "The ABC is our enemies talking to our friends." There is a certain truth in that. Whatever the ideological propensities of the people who work at the ABC, it is kind of middle class welfare - an awful lot of people who vote conservative prefer the ABC to commercial media because of the kinds of programs it makes and because it doesn't have huge swathes of advertisements all the way through it. Your role seems something like that of an ombudsman. Do you see yourself, and your job, that way? I don't have any official function at all, but I do criticize the ABC, as well as everybody else in the media when I think that's justified. At an official level we do have a director of editorial policies whose function, especially now that he is just about to put in charge of the whole ABC complaints procedure, in a sense makes him effectively the ABC's ombudsman. He's not in the editorial chain of command. On the whole, Australian media organizations don't have ombudsmen in the way that a lot of mainstream news organizations do in the U.S. Joel Meares is a former CJR assistant editor. Tags: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, James O'Keefe, Media Watch, NPR, Vivian Schiller Trending stories

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