Reading the Electronic Intifada's report on how U.S. corporate media coverage of Gaza "blindly asserted Israel's right of self-defense regardless of what was happening on the ground" reminded me of a passage in the book I'm reading, Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee. Diamond argues that the ability to exterminate other groups of our own kind is something that we share with our closest animal relatives, pointing out that genocide in human history is not as uncommon as you'd like to think.

He identifies three mechanisms by which genocide is justified by groups that claim to subscribe to a universal code of justice. Two of them I think are fairly well-known: "Possessing the 'right' religion or race or political belief, or claiming to represent progress or a higher level of civilization, is a...traditional justification for doing anything, including genocide, to those possessing the wrong principle"; and "modern genocidists routinely compare their victims to animals in order to justify the killings."

Diamond's other rationalization, though, is not as obviously associated with genocidal violence:

Most believers in a universal code still consider self-defense justified. This is a usefully elastic rationalization, because "they" can invariably be provoked into some behavior adequate to justify self-defense. For example, the Tasmanians delivered an excuse to genocidal white colonists by killing an estimated total of 183 colonists over 34 years, after being provoked by a far greater number of mutilations, kidnappings, rapes and murders. Even Hitler claimed self-defense in starting World War II: He went to the trouble of faking a Polish attack on a German border post.

So while it might seem odd to cite "self-defense" as a rationale for unleashing violence that kills hundreds of times more people than the violence it supposedly is a response to, such claims are actually a standard justification for attacks on the relatively powerless. Ideally, though, journalists would be highly skeptical of accepting an argument that has been one of the main tools for rationalizing genocide.

Public Citizen attorney Paul Alan Levy's news (1/30/09) of bloggers' win over Fox News provides a dark glimpse into the network's anti-Fair Use machinations:

Public Citizen, which represented ProgressIllinois.com in this matter, tried to talk to Fox about its claim filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and discuss possible guidelines for future use, but we received a chilling demand. As a price of getting the DMCA takedowns [from YouTube of Fox newscast excerpts] lifted, Fox demanded that ProgressIllinois waive its fair use rights for all future uses of Fox material.

Fox contends that if a non-commercial bloggers wants to make fair use of excerpts from its news broadcasts is that an otherwise non-commercial blogger must allow Fox to run advertisements on the blog as part of the excerpt. That is an outrageous imposition on fair use.

Specifically, Fox is negotiating with a third-party video-hosting service, which bloggers who want to use Fox excerpts would be required to use (rather than bloggers making their own choice between YouTube, blip.tv or other services). The third-party service would then incorporate ads from Fox advertisers into any excerpt made from Fox material and Fox would receive the proceeds from the ads. It appears that Fox is preparing to argue that, because it has the capacity of charging advertisement revenues for excerpts posted by bloggers, any blogger who does not use these services fails the "fourth" factor in the fair use test--"the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."

Though ProgressIllinois' YouTube account has been "completely restored" and the video excerpts are back online, Levy sees the episode as "a reminder of the need to amend the DMCA so that political commentary is not put on hold while the procedure of notices of copyright infringement and arguments of noninfringement plays out." His more public-minded solution: "The presumption should be that material remains online until either the blogger fails to object to the takedown after receiving notice, or, if the blogger objects, a judge decides whether there was fair use."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Fair Use It or Lose It: Copyright Owners' Threats Erode Free Expression" (5-6/06) by Marjorie Heins

Giving TheAtlantic.com's Marc Ambinder credit for "at least trying to understand the details of secret ballot/majority sign-up" unionizing legislation, FireDogLake blogger Jane Hamsher (1/23/09) still notes that "he tends to lean a bit heavily on overpaid hacks spreading disinformation on behalf of the business lobby." Specifically, she takes issue with Ambinder's citation of a Coalition for a Democratic Workplace poll question to conclude that "privacy is the killer for unions" because "when Americans are read descriptions of the bill that make it plain that their votes won't be kept secret (that's the point of card check, in a way), their support plummets":

Today, corporate toady Mike Murphy of CDW writes Ambinder to say that their polling, by McLaughlin and Associates, is probably "far more accurate" because it uses the words "effectively replace a federally supervised secret ballot." Note the introduction of the word "effectively," and what can only be characterized as an abject lie that "workers' signatures would be made public to their employer, the union organizers and their co-workers." Nothing of the sort ever happens.

In fact, the Employee Free Choice Act allows workers to have a "secret ballot" election if they want one. Woo hoo! Have a party. What Murphy and his fellow hacks don't say is that when given a choice, most workers probably aren't going to want one.

Hamsher writes that she's bravely "going out on a limb here to guess that corporate lobbyists are probably more worried about that eventuality than they are defending the rights of poor beleaguered workers"--but Ambinder is in solid corporate media territory by omitting such skepticism from his own reporting.

Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Steve Early on Card Check" (12/12/08)

The invaluable Electronic Intifada website has a Shervan Sardar analysis (1/8/09) of "the first three days of the Israeli offensive from 28-30 December," during which time he finds

editorials and op-eds from five major U.S. papers overwhelmingly adopted the official U.S. and Israeli government talking points on the conflict--even where this version was clearly contradicted by the legal and historical record, widely available to the public.

The editorial pages erroneously put forward the view that Gaza was no longer occupied, ignored Israel's numerous cease fire violations, and blindly asserted Israel's right of self defense regardless of what was happening on the ground. Overall, the commentary presented a disturbingly false and misleading picture of the conflict to the American public.

You can forget about presenting the facts of the current IDF offensive fairly or accurately when even the basic "legal status of Gaza is repeatedly being misrepresented" by "editorial pages [that] chose to adopt and promote the Israeli government view of a 2005 'complete withdrawal' from Gaza so that Israel no longer retains official responsibility there." Sardar is explicit about the views of entire rest of the world: "The international consensus position at the U.N. and among human rights organizations is that Gaza remains occupied even after the 2005 Israeli disengagement."

Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Phyllis Bennis on Gaza & the Law" (1/16/09)