Solving the Media Puzzle: A Day in the
Life
November 15, 2005
By Bernard Weiner, The
Crisis Papers
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When
I was growing up, my teenage mind needed to find the pieces to the
confusing, chaotic puzzle that was reality. How to make sense of
all this information that constantly was coming at me? Part of my
solution was to become a journalist, getting right into the heart
of the information barrage. Consequently, the use of reporting and
analyzing skills has helped me make my way through the world's seeming
chaos.
These thoughts came to me the other morning as I was reading the
daily newspaper. If I were a visitor from another planet, I imagined,
what sense could I make of earthling - especially American - society
from what I read on this single day, November 11, 2005, in one hometown
paper, in this case the San Francisco Chronicle? Were there
connections, larger lessons, hidden clues?
So here goes, one morning's newspaper seen as a political jigsaw
puzzle. Here are the pieces; let's see how they fit together with
each other where possible and with what we now know from other media
sources, including television.
THE FRONT PAGE
The two large-headline, above-the-fold stories involved California's
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Fox News' larger-than-life personality
Bill O'Reilly.
Virtually everyone, including his wife, had warned Schwarzenegger
not to call a special election but he bulled on through at a cost
to the state and counties of nearly $45 million. But the lead story
indicates that Schwarzenegger, having run into a brick wall with
all of his special-election measures defeated across the state,
took personal responsibility for the fiasco.
He didn't try to shift the blame and said he'd learned valuable
lessons, the main one being that the voters clearly wanted these
issues settled by the legislators and governor working together,
not by the costly initiative process outside the usual lawmaking
channels. He promised he'd work more closely with Democrats, labor
unions (nurses, teachers, firefighters, police, et al.) - all of
whom he grievously insulted time and time again in the run-up to
the election - in solving the state's many economic and social problems.
The governor hasn't kept many of his previous promises - not to
be beholden to special interests, not to take money from the state's
education fund without paying it back, etc. - so we shall have to
wait and see if he keeps these new promises.
Meanwhile Bill O'Reilly more or less encouraged Al Qaida terrorists
to attack San Francisco because the voters last week approved sense-of-the-city
resolutions disapproving of military recruiters on public school
campuses and against handgun ownership by civilians. Now one can
agree or disagree with the wisdom of one or both of those measures,
and of the intelligence of voters in approving them, but that's
not what O'Reilly did. He favored a more extreme option. Here's
what he said to San Franciscans on his show the other night:
"You want to be your own country? Go right ahead. And if
Al Qaida comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do
anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place
in America is off limits to you except San Francisco. You want
to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."
To O'Reilly, free speech, where voters express themselves at the
polls, is somehow totally illegitimate when O'Reilly doesn't like
the way they voted. Therefore and ergo, it follows in O'Reilly's
perfect logic that the city in which such thoughts are expressed
should be blown up, in this case by terrorists. The rest of America
will then turn its back on a sinful place that received its just
desserts.
And O'Reilly isn't the only Hard-Right conservative to express
such radical views. On Page 16, Pat Robertson, the Christian evangelical
preacher, expressed pretty much the same feelings about the voters
in Dover, PA., who basically fired their entire board of education
because they authorized science instructors to teach theological
speculation rather than science. The issue, of course, was whether
something called "intelligent design" theory should be taught in
science classes along with Darwin's evolutionary findings. Here
is what preacher Robertson said after the voters acted:
"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a
disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him
from your city."
Robertson, you see, believes he speaks for God; if you don't agree
with the preacher, then clearly you're in need of some serious Biblical
smiting. If a tornado strikes Dover or if there should be a terrorist
attack on that town, you're on your own. You've rejected The Lord.
Tough love, brother.
These kinds of dumb verbal attacks - and others like them, including
rightwing radical Ann Coulter calling liberals "traitors" who should
be taken out and shot - normally would be ignored as the mad ravings
of political idiots. But such extreme behavior and commentary reminds
us too easily of what Nazi propagandists were saying about Jews
and others in '30s Germany, that these citizens were "vermin" or
"cockroaches" who deserved to be rounded up and slaughtered. The
Nazi propagandists were laughed at, weren't taken seriously, regarded
as nutcases to be ignored. But the laughing stopped suddenly when
those making such outrageous comments assumed power and actually
were able to put into effect what they had only talked about doing
in their wild fantasies.
ON PAGE 3
In America, when an ambassador criticizes the regime currently
in power, he is the object of vicious political sliming and his
wife, a covert intelligence officer, has her identity revealed,
thus putting her out of work and at physical risk, along with anyone
else with whom she'd worked undercover for the past decade. Punishment,
but relatively light, as things go. In China, we learn, a Beijing
Communist Party official who rose to fame last year by denouncing
official corruption in a letter on the Internet was sentenced to
life in prison on trumped-up corruption charges after a year-long
campaign to silence and discredit him. Chinese communist hardliners,
Stalinist bureaucrats, Nazi tyrants, Bush & Co. bullies - what did
we do to deserve such abominations?
ON PAGE 4
Moderates in the Republican-dominated House - yes, there still
are a few - were able to cancel an immediate vote on the Bush Administration's
budget plan, because it included oil-drilling in the pristine Alaskan
wilderness and draconian cuts in such important safety-net social
programs as Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, student loans, foster
care, child-support enforcement and other federal programs.
Given the political weakness of Bush (down into the mid-30s in
recent polls), the absence of former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (under
indictment in Texas), and the gains by Democrats in last week's
elections around the country, the moderates apparently feel better
able to enforce their demands on their party. Needless to say, the
Hard-Right Republican leadership is not amused, and is threatening
and twisting arms big time.
ON PAGE 8
The U.S. Supreme Court in June 2004, noting the Constitutional
requirement for habeas corpus rights for all defendants, ruled that
"enemy combatants" held by the federal government at Guantanamo
have a right to challenge their detentions in court. For a year
and a half, the Bush Administration has refused to fully enforce
that ruling, taking appeals to one court or another. Wanting to
find a way to turn the court into an irrelevancy, a few days ago
the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate voted to nullify the Supreme
Court ruling; if the House agrees, the time-honored concept of habeas
corpus - which is designed so that those accused have the right
to a speedy hearing on the merits of their incarceration - will
be null and void. Welcome to the world of American jurisprudence
in the post-9/11 era, the operating Bush & Co. principle of which
seems to be that since "they hate us for our freedoms," we'll just
eliminate the freedoms.
Also on Page 8, someone in the government leaked the fact that
the CIA has a series of secret prisons (so-called "black sites")
in eight countries around the world, where presumably many high-value
terrorist suspects and others are sent for special processing and
interrogations. Rather than investigate those revelations and the
damage those secret jails and tortures do to American prestige and
national interests around the globe, the Senate Intelligence Committee
is going to investigate who leaked the information. The usual: deflect
attention away from the message by going after the messenger.
After the Democrats' invocation of a rule requiring a closed session
of the Senate, the Intelligence Committee supposedly finally agreed
to investigate how the Bush Administration used the faulty intelligence
provided it in taking the country to war with Iraq - in other words,
whether Bush & Co. lied and deceived us all in order to gain popular
support for the upcoming war. But the committee chairman, Republican
Pat Roberts, who managed to delay the promised investigation past
the 2004 election, feels OK about another delay while they look
for the leaker of the classified CIA "secret prisons."
On Page B8, a Chronicle editorial questions not only the politically
motivated hunt for the leaker, but also the reasons for setting
up secret CIA prisons in the first place; doing so "begs the question
of why our government feels compelled to hold suspects outside the
U.S. legal system and beyond the reach of independent oversight."
Meanwhile, Dick Cheney is fighting like crazy to permit the CIA
to continue to torture suspects in U.S. custody. (This in addition
to the "black-site" gulags in Eastern Europe and elsewhere and the
"rendition" of key suspects to countries in the Middle East and
elsewhere who are less squeamish about "harsh interrogation" methods.)
What is it in the neo-con mind that cannot understand that torture
does damage to America's long-term national interests, alienates
many populations we should be cultivating, puts our own captured
troops at added risk - and doesn't work anyway, since prisoners
being tortured will say anything to stop the pain and terror, including
outright lies?
ON PAGE 14
Ayman Nour, a leading foe of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak,
has lost his legislative seat after he and his supporters were harassed
and intimidated by Mubarak thugs. Human rights groups monitoring
the recent Egyptian elections said the vote in Nour's district was
marred by vote-rigging, ballot-box stuffing and intimidation at
the polls.
In this country, there has been virtually no mainstream media
coverage of the General Accounting Office's recent report verifying
that voting anomalies in the 2004 presidential election in Ohio
raise serious concerns about the likelihood of fraud, meaning that
Bush probably didn't actually win the 2004 election.
Readers may remember when "people power" demonstrations brought
down governments in the Ukraine, Philippines and elsewhere that
had assumed power after fraudulent elections; the U.S. media, especially
television, was all over those foreign miscarriages of electoral
justice. Apparently, the U.S. media assumes that fraudulent elections
never happen in America, and reporting on the possibility of rigged
vote-tallies is simply not done by mainstream media outlets.
ON PAGE C1
The lead story in the Business Section reveals that in California,
and no doubt in other states as well, about 21% of private health
spending goes to insurance paperwork - close to $26 billion per
year in California alone. In contrast, administrative costs for
our country's one national-insurance program, Medicare, are estimated
at around 2%.
In other words, if our country had some variant of Medicare as
a safety-net base for all citizens - a national health-care system,
along with your right to see your own private physicians if you
chose to - it would be far cheaper and perhaps even better-run than
most folks' HMOs.
ON PAGE C3
Halliburton, the giant conglomerate formerly run by Dick Cheney
that has received all those no-bid government contracts in Iraq
and New Orleans, had to pay $8.6 million in fines because of violations
in its pension-plan program, including charging some costs of the
company's executive pension and bonus plans to the workers' pension
fund. In other words, they apparently were doing some skimming-type
accounting, for which their $8.6M fine is little more than chump
change. Such is life in the corporate fast-lane.
This kind of story helps explain why large corporations - the
Enrons, Halliburtons, Bechtels, the tobacco giants, the big pharmaceuticals,
the energy industry, et al. - are suspected by average, middle-class
citizens as gouging and greedy, not terribly interested in the welfare
of ordinary people.
.......
I could go on to stories on other pages, trenchant columns and
angry letters to the editor, further tales of outrage regarding
the Bush Administration, the revived Taliban in Afghanistan, the
deteriorating situation in Iraq and elsewhere - but you get the
idea:
There is hypocrisy, mendacity, deception, corruption at all levels
of public life - in our business (and labor) and religious sectors,
and certainly in the Bush White House. Most of the time, government
scandals involve either money or sex. But the current scandals of
our federal government, as evidenced by just one day's worth of
news stories, are much more serious.
In what ways are they more serious? Because tens of thousands
of people are dying or being maimed because of the lies underpinning
Bush's war policies; because a significant number of detainees in
our care are being tortured and sometimes killed as torture under
Bush is now enshrined as official national policy; because the Constitutional
protections of citizens' rights, which our genius Founding Fathers
worked out carefully several hundred years ago and which have stood
us in good stead until now, have been shredded and ignored by Bush
& Co.
"ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE"
The old political gadfly I.F. Stone's famous truism that "all
governments lie," and that it is the journalist's job to ferret
out those falsehoods and alert the public, is all the more potent
today - and, in some ways, more tragic, since the corporate mainstream
press does such a poor job of getting the facts out.
To get a better sense of how the puzzle pieces fit together, one
usually has to go not only to the "official" corporate-owned media
but also to the foreign media and to our generation's "alternative
press," the Internet. Just think of major stories that probably
would have continued to be buried by the corporate media had not
the progressive websites and bloggers and alternative-media reporters
not raised a hue and cry: the Iraq-war revelations of the Downing
Street Memos, Bush's going AWOL from the Air National Guard, the
Government Accounting Office's findings of electoral fraud in the
2004 election, the presence of a non-reporter GOP shill posing as
a legitimate journalist in the White House press corps - all of
these stories were unearthed or kept alive by Internet writers and
editors.
But even if you live in a small city or town - away from the large-city
Blue states on both coasts - I think it's still possible to glean
the truth of what's going on by learning how to properly deconstruct
and decipher the daily newspaper and TV news broadcasts. It's often
in a kind of elitist code, but it can be broken. And foreign media
and the Internet are great aids in this endeavor.
If we proceed to ignore the news-behind-the-news that's out there,
we wind up as sheeple, all too willing to accept the lies, deceptions,
corruptions and incompetencies of the government temporarily in
power, and letting zealot-like rulers enact, in our case, their
ruinous right-wing agendas.
Can it happen here? Not if you and I prevent it. Let's get to
work.
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught government & international
relations at various universities; has worked as a writer/editor
with the San Francisco Chronicle for 19 years, and currently
co-edits The
Crisis Papers. To comment, contact [email protected].
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