Much of the media coverage of the riots in England dwells on the issue of police restraint.  There is a "public backlash against police restraint," the Washington Post explained (8/11/11), with some wanting "a tougher response to the rash of disturbances that has sullied Britain's image." The problem is the "seemingly halting, even timorous, policing," according to one New York Times story (8/12/11). Another Times piece added:

A former senior riot police officer with knowledge of current operations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the most recent riots were allowed to rage, in part, because police officers felt constrained.

While there is no doubt that some people feel this way--one British poll found a third of respondents supported using live ammunition against demonstrators--it is rather odd to focus on police restraint when the immediate context of the uprisings concerns police brutality. The protests started after police killed Mark Duggan in Tottenham last Thursday. Early, inaccurate reports suggested Duggan fired on the officers.

While some commentary is quick to point out that looting can't possibly be connected to one police killing, there is a far bigger problem here. As you might expect, independent media are covering this better than the corporate media. From a Democracy Now! interview (8/10/11) with London blogger Richard Seymour:

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask Richard Seymour about one of the pieces in the Guardian written by Caroline Davies, who says, "A total of 333 people have died in or following police custody over the past 11 years, but no officer has ever been successfully prosecuted." That’s according to the government; it's according to a watchdog report. "'Prosecutions were recommended against 13 officers based on 'relatively strong evidence of misconduct or neglect,' but none resulted in a guilty verdict." This is quite remarkable. Three hundred thirty-three people have died in or following police custody over the last 11 years? This is more than two people a month over the last more than decade. Can you talk about the significance of this, Richard?

RICHARD SEYMOUR: Yeah. I mean, first of all, there has been, over the last generation or so, some efforts to overcome the antagonisms between the police and black communities in Britain, but that didn't, obviously, get rid of institutional racism. Institutional racism was acknowledged in the outcome of the Lawrence Inquiry, but the steps undertaken to deal with it were obviously inadequate. And the result of that has been that there has been a disproportionate amount of stop-and-search of young black men, a disproportionate amount of harassment and violence, and, of course, as you mentioned, deaths in police custody.

But it's worth mentioning that it’s not just deaths in police custody. There have been a number of recent notorious deaths outside of police custody, including that of Ian Tomlinson at a G20 protest, and including that of the artist Smiley Culture, who, they said, stabbed himself in the kitchen while police were visiting with him to discuss allegations of drugs. And I don’t think anybody really believes that, but there were peaceful protests in response to that, quite large protests by the local community. And to be honest, they were largely--in fact, completely--ignored by the media. They were a very important democratic moment, but just completely ignored.

And that puts these riots in an interesting light, because when one of the young people was asked by a reporter, "Do you really think the rioting is the right way to go about getting what you want?" he said, "Yes, because if we weren’t rioting, you wouldn't be talking to us." A political establishment, a media, and a state system that gives people that impression, that gives people the impression that they won’t be listened to unless they force themselves onto your attention, is going to lead to riots.

That kind of analysis stands in stark contrast to a New York Times story today that explores anti-police resentment in minority communities:

The broader question, though, is this: How did a national institution once held in esteem, or at least respect, by many Britons--"bobbies on the beat" to an earlier generation--become a force of such contention, even as, in recent years, it has taken credit for shielding the country from an array of terrorist plots?

The Times adds that "in recent years the force, overwhelmingly white, has faced accusations of racism, brutality and incompetence that it has struggled to shake off." Of course, accusations that are true are bound to be are hard to "shake off."

An ABC World News report (8/10/11) introduced by Diane Sawyer asked a similar question that's bothering many reporters.

And now, overseas to those riots in England. And a question we had today, where are the British parents as their young people run wild in the streets of London and other cities?

The piece that followed showed correspondent Lama Hasan asking rioting teens why they it was happening. One says, " We're just showing the rich people we can do what we want." Another says: " The problem is there ain't enough opportunities for people out here.... People's lives are like a dead end."

It sounds like parental authority might not be the most important factor. But if you're going to ask these kinds of questions, then by all means: Over 300 people have died in police custody. What went wrong with the parents of those officers?

The answer might depend on which media outlet you rely on.

I read the headline at Democracy Now! on Friday:

"Justice Dept Drops 99 of 101 Cases Against CIA for Abuse and Torture"

The New York Times, on the other hand, offered a different sort of emphasis:

"U.S. Widens Inquiries Into 2 Jail Deaths"

Bill Moyers appeared on Democracy Now! this morning (6/8/11) to discuss his new book about his days at PBS, The Conversation Continues.

Interviewed for the  hour by anchors Any Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Moyers said,  "The consensual seduction of the mainstream media by and with the government is one of the most dangerous toxins at work in America today."

He spoke, too, of the lost mission of public broadcasting, and how its reliance on the political whims of Congress for some of its funding prevents it from living up to its potential:

Sometimes self-censorship occurs because you're looking over your shoulder, and you think, well, if I do this story or that story, it will hurt public broadcasting. Public broadcasting has suffered often for my sins, reporting stories the officials don't want reported. And today, only...a very small percentage of funding for NPR and PBS comes from the government. But that accounts for a concentration of pressure and self-censorship. And only when we get a trust fund, only when the public figures out how to support us independently of a federal treasury, will we flourish as an independent medium.

Today's broadcast of Democracy Now! featured an excerpt of Noam Chomsky's address at FAIR's 25th anniversary celebration. Watch it:

Want to see the whole event--with more of Chomsky, Michael Moore, Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman? Buy the DVD from FAIR today.

In addition to his repeated murder fantasies, Glenn Beck harbors apocalyptic fantasies of mass death--suggesting, for instance, that if the direction of the country doesn't change,  "God will wash this nation with blood." (Barack Obama, are you listening?) But the Fox News host harbors many deranged obsessions.

He has long obsessed over Frances Fox Piven, the 78-year-old distinguished professor at the City University of New York. Central to Beck's lies about Piven is the charge that a Nation article she co-wrote with Richard Cloward in 1966 somehow holds the blueprint for a violent leftist takeover of the United States. Beck's similar fascination with the supposed threat posed by the Tides Foundation apparently led one of his fans to attempt an armed assault on the organization (FAIR Blog, 7/22/10).

Beck's supposed anti-violence pledge, issued in the wake of the Tucson massacre, contains a bizarre equation of Piven with a violent paramilitary cult under indictment for plotting the wholesale murder of police officers:

I denounce violent threats and calls for the destruction of our system--regardless of their underlying ideology--whether they come from the Hutaree Militia or Frances Fox Piven.

Needless to say, equating Piven's advocacy of grassroots democratic political activism with terrorism-based revolution is hardly an effective way to discourage violence. Unsurprisingly, some Beck followers have taken his demented fulminations a step further, posting death threats against Piven in the comment section of his website, the Blaze. As Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman recounted on her January 14 program:

On December 31, Glenn Beck’s website, the Blaze, published an article titled "Frances Fox Piven Rings in the New Year by Calling for Violent Revolution." In response to that article, several readers posted direct death threats to Piven. A user named JST1425 wrote, quote, "Be very careful what you ask for, honey.... As I mentioned in previous posts...ONE SHOT...ONE KILL! 'We the People' will need to stand up for what is right.... A few well-placed marksmen with high-powered rifles.... Then there would not be any violence," unquote.

User name SUPERWRENCH4 wrote, quote, "Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas [sic] ready and I'll give My life to take Our freedom back. Taking Her life and any who would enslave My children and grandchildren and call for violence should meet their demise as They wish. George Washington didn't use His freedom of speech to defeat the British, He shot them," unquote.

Another reader wrote on Glenn Beck's website, quote, "We should blowup Piven's office and home. And while at it. Keel haul Bernardine Dohrn under one of her freedom ships and blow up Bill Ayers' house cars and anywhere he can be found," unquote.
And a user who goes by the name GREEN_MANALISHI wrote, quote, "I'm all for violence and change Francis, where do your loved ones live?" unquote.

Despite the overt threats, Glenn Beck has not removed any of the messages from his site, even though readers of the Blaze are encouraged to highlight troublesome posts.

In Tucson last week, shooting victim James Eric Fuller was arrested after exclaiming "you're dead" to a Tea Party activist who was criticizing gun control at a post-massacre forum. So apparently the laws against making violent threats still apply to some people.

UPDATE: Last June (6/10), Glenn Beck's demonization of progressives took an eliminationist turn when he told his Fox News audience that "radicals"-- he named Code Pink's Jody Evans, environmental and civil rights activist Van Jones, University of Wisconsin professor Joel Rogers, progressive strategist Jeff Jones and labor leader Andy Stern--ought to be "shot in the head" by Democrats instead of being courted by them.

Adressing Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, about American "radicals" and "revolutionaries," Beck said:

You've been using them? They believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You're going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.

They are dangerous because they believe. Karl Marx is their George Washington. You will never change their mind. And if they feel you have lied to them--they're revolutionaries. Nancy Pelosi, those are the people you should be worried about.

Here is my advice when you're dealing with people who believe in something that strongly--you take them seriously. You listen to their words and you believe that they will follow up with what they say.

Of course, there is no danger that Pelosi or other Democratic leaders will take Beck's demented words to heart. The danger is that Beck devotees are being told by their hero that these dangerous progressives, who may be homicidal themselves, are worthy of assassination. It wouldn't be the first or second time a Beck devotee took murderous action.

Note that Beck's words were in dead earnest. Without a hint of irony, Time magazine's civility panelist called for Democrats to assassinate American political activists.

--On Democracy Now! (11/8/10):

While Keith Olbermann's donations became front-page news, little attention has been paid to the massive amount of political spending by MSNBC's parent company General Electric, one of the nation's largest military contractors. Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting reports GE made over $2 million in political contributions in the 2010 election cycle. The top recipient was Republican Senate candidate Rob Portman from Ohio. The company has also spent $32 million on lobbying this year and contributed over $1 million to campaign against a California ballot initiative aimed at eliminating tax loopholes for major corporations.

--George Curry, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer (11/3/10)  about the state of public broadcasting and NPR's decision to fire Juan Williams:

When NPR fired Williams, conservatives--who have campaigned for years to eliminate the network's federal subsidies--charged that it was violating Williams' First Amendment rights. Williams agreed in a column on Fox's website, saying: "To say the least, this is a chilling assault on free speech."

No it isn't. Juan Williams, a frequent critic of federal entitlements, is not entitled to a job at NPR or anywhere else. And NPR has done nothing to curtail his freedom of speech. Its executives have decided they no longer want his services, as is their right. It's a question of fee speech, not free speech.

I worked for a year as a commentator for a show Ed Gordon hosted on NPR. When my contract was not renewed, I did not assert that NPR had violated my First Amendment rights. There is nothing unconstitutional about not renewing a contract.

More important than NPR's firing Juan Williams for the wrong reason is its failure to fulfill its original mission. The watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting noted that the network "has consistently shown a tilt toward elite guests and sources--government officials, corporate representatives and journalists from commercial media."

FAIR observed, "If the pressure from the right is to be effectively countered, it's not enough to say, 'Don't Defund NPR.' What is needed is a call for public broadcasting to fulfill its mission" with "independent, provocative programming that features voices ignored or marginalized by the commercial media."

By definition, Juan Williams wouldn't fit that description.

Under the succinct Consortium News subhed "Too Late the Leak" (7/24/09), former CIA analyst Ray McGovern revisits the Downing Street Minutes--which he says should

represent the kind of documentary evidence after which trial lawyers, intelligence analysts--and serious investigative journalists--lust.

Though the unauthorized disclosure did not come early enough to head off the war, which had started more than two years before the document surfaced, the unique disclosure could have thrown some harsh light on the war's origins--if the Fawning Corporate Media in the United States did its job.

However, having been acrobatic cheerleaders for war on Iraq, the FCM did its level best to suppress this documentary evidence of the war's fraudulent character.

McGovern recalls U.S. Representative John Conyers' "temporary fit of courage" in scheduling a June 16, 2005 "hearing" on the documents "in the only space the Republican majority would make available--a basement room under the Capitol." McGovern's description of the U.S. press response indicates as much about independent reporters' value as it does about corporate media perniciousness:

On the morning before the hearing, Amy Goodman invited Conyers and me to be interviewed on Democracy Now!. Just before the interview, I had a chance to look at the editorial page of Pravda, er, I mean the Washington Post, for that morning, and guess what? The Post saw fit to mention the Downing Street Minutes, though dismissively so as not to tarnish the newspaper’s glorious cheerleading for war.

Listen to the After Downing Street founder on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "David Swanson on Healthcare Reform" (7/24/09).

Independent investigative journalist John Pilger recently (7/6/09) gave Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman his view of the broad media landscape, informed by the fact that "we have many alternative sources of information now, not least of all your own program, though I wouldn't call that alternative":

But for most people, the primary source of their information is the mainstream. It is mainly television. Even the Internet, for all its subversiveness, is still a very large component of the mainstream. And that means we're getting still this singular message about wars, about the economy, about all those things that touch our lives. All we are getting is what I would call a contrived silence, a censorship by omission. I think this is almost the principal issue of today, because without information, we cannot possibly begin to influence government. We cannot possibly begin to end the wars.

All of this, it seems to me, has come together in the presidency of Barack Obama, who is almost a creation of this media world. He promised some things, although most of them were more for us, and has delivered virtually the opposite. He started his own war in Pakistan. We see the events in Iran and Honduras as quite subtly, but very directly, influenced in the time-honored way by the Obama administration. And yet the Obama administration is still given this extraordinary benefit of the doubt by people, who in my view are influenced by the mainstream media.

Still, with all the non-corporate media available today, Pilger sees this as "a time when. I think, where either we are going to begin to understand how the media really works, or we're going to let that opportunity pass." For more views on what Pilger calls "almost a historic opportunity that we understand that the perception of our world is utterly distorted" by so-called "mainstream" news providers, listen to the latest FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Jim Naureckas on the Future of Journalism" (7/10/09).

The unlikely news source Voice of America (6/15/09) has Adam Phillips' profile of Amy Goodman and "the largest public media collaboration in the United States," Democracy Now!, in which Goodman lays out "her job as a journalist" as "to bring out 'the voices of people closest to the story at the grassroots'":

In Goodman's program, as well as in her column and the three bestselling books she has co-authored with her brother, David Goodman, she also accuses the mainstream media of dangerous laziness in its reliance on so-called "pundits."

"We need to bring out the voices of people who think outside the box, [and include] creative thinkers, [and] people at the grassroots, who know exactly what they're talking about, because they've experienced policy in a very real way," she says. "These are the stories we have to tell until they can tell their own."

The great disparity between complicit corporate reportage and Democracy Now!'s invaluable muckraking is boiled down to one crucial observation: "The media's job is 'to serve democratic society,' she adds 'not to win a popularity contest.'" Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Amy Goodman on The Exception to the Rulers" (5/21/04).

Amy Goodman recently interviewed independent journalist Jeremy Scahill on her Democracy Now! show (5/19/09) regarding the fact that, in Scahill's words, "while much of the focus has been on the tactical use of torture at Guantánamo, almost no attention had been paid to a parallel force" known as the Immediate Reaction Force. Describing the methods of this "thug squad that is used to mercilessly punish prisoners"--"They go in, and they hogtie the prisoner... douse them with chemical agents.... They've squeezed their testicles.... They've taken the feces from one prisoner and smeared it in the face of another prisoner"--Scahill tells us the results, and their reaction:

In February of this year, about a month after Obama was inaugurated, there were 16 prisoners on a hunger strike at Guantánamo. The ...Immediate Reaction Force was used to go in and violently shove massive tubes down their noses into their stomachs.... They would use no anesthetics or any painkillers, shove this massive tube by force down their nose into their stomach and then yank it out. Some prisoners have described this as torture, torture, torture. And many have passed out from the sheer pain of this operation.

When Scahill mentions that "this force has received almost no scrutiny in the U.S. Congress or the U.S. media and operates at this moment," Goodman wonders, "How do you know about this?" It turns out Scahill used a little-known tactic called "reporting": "I discovered these teams, because I've been covering the investigation being done by Judge Baltasar Garzón in Spain into the Bush torture system":

And yet, the only time when it's really made any kind of a flash in the corporate media was when a U.S. soldier, a young guy named Sean Baker... was ordered, he says, by his superiors to dress up in an orange jumpsuit and play the part of a restive or combative detainee at Guantánamo. He was told that the team that was going to come in to handle him knew that he was a U.S. soldier, knew that it was a training drill, and he was given a word, a codeword, "red," that when he said it, the beating was supposed to stop.... He describes them just mercilessly beating him, and he's yelling out "Red!" and they continue to beat him, even after he then said, "I'm a U.S. soldier! I'm a U.S. soldier!"

And the fate of not-even-real-prisoner Baker?--he "has permanent brain damage, suffers from multiple seizures, and had actually sued Rumsfeld and other officials because of his treatment."

The current Democracy Now! (5/8/09) features New York Times Pentagon Pundits reporter David Barstow giving Amy Goodman the background on the U.S. military's retraction of a report clearing itself of domestic propaganda wrongdoing:

So the report comes out in January, and it effectively exonerated the program. Now, one thing your viewers should know is that as soon as the stories ran, the program itself was suspended by the Pentagon, pending the outcome of this investigation. But what happened earlier this week was really unusual. It really is very rare for the inspector general of the Defense Department to rescind and repudiate and, in fact, even withdraw the report from its own website.

And the reason why they did is because after the report was released, it became pretty clear that there were significant problems with it, significant factual problems with it. The one that jumped out to me immediately as I read through the report for the first time was that it listed one particular general who I had written an awful lot about, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who's probably the preeminent military analyst for NBC and MSNBC. They listed him as having absolutely no ties to any defense contractors.

In a piece of reality too large for even the Pentagon to deny, the most prominent paper in the U.S. had published Barstow's "5,000 words that detailed tie after tie after tie he had to defense contractors" as board-member, consultant and adviser--which much corporate media apparently cared little about, offering as they do, to this day, a platform for propaganda-worker McCaffrey's conflicted views.

Interviewing Progressive magazine editor Matt Rothschild on Democracy Now! (5/1/09), Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman get the now 100-year-old magazine's high-minded take on the threatened existence of other periodicals:

Rothschild: Well, the magazine industry is in crisis. The newspaper industry is in crisis. A lot of the news weeklies don’t know how to function right now; the idea that you have a Newsweek magazine right now, that's antiquated. That's a dinosaur. People get the news within minutes or hours; they don’t need to go find it a week later as to what happens. So the intellectual reason for being for these magazines is kind of kaput. And their economic model is kaput, too.

So I think magazines, to the extent that they're going to be able to survive and the Progressive is going to be able to survive, need to become more like books or need to take a higher altitude look at the news and do investigative reporting and give people analysis that they can't find anywhere else. But if you just say what did Barack Obama say at his press conference yesterday, newspapers and magazines are going to go.

The "cardinal principles" to which Rothschild ascribes his publication's longevity: "We're still fighting corporate power. We're still fighting for civil liberties and human rights and against these foreign interventions that just help the corporations."

Reading some of the latest headlines, one might think that Spanish investigations and possible indictments of six former Bush officials for alleged involvement in torture were dead in the water.  As the Associated Press banner put it (4/17/09): "Spain: No Torture Probe of U.S. Officials," while the Los Angeles Times headlined a news brief (4/17/09), “Spain; Prosecutors Reject Trying Bush Officials."

On the prosecutors' announcement, the AP story reported:

While their ruling is not binding, the announcement all but dooms prospects for the case against the men going forward. On Thursday, Spain's top law-enforcement official Candido Conde-Pumpido said he would not support an investigation against the officials--including former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

So perhaps Bill O'Reilly is be excused for celebrating the news last night (O'Reilly Factor, 4/16/09), though the Fox host may have gone too far when he claimed credit for Spain's reported change of heart: "I don't know if the Factor was a factor in this decision, but I am taking full credit for it," said O'Reilly, who went on to suggest that it was his recently threatened boycott that forced Spain's hand: "We were going to boycott Spain,' said O'Reilly, "and they folded pretty darn fast."

But according to Harper's legal blogger Scott Horton, the reports, and the O'Reilly boasts they seem to have prompted, are, at least, premature. Appearing on Democracy Now! on Friday, Horton criticized AP's reporting, pointing out that in the Spanish system, investigating judges make the call on indictments, not prosecutors.

Well, the Associated Press is giving you extremely faulty legal analysis, because a decision as to whether the case will go forward rests entirely with the investigating judge. The Spanish system is not like the American system, where prosecutors decide who and when to bring cases and who to prosecute.

And Horton explained that the investigating judge in this case, Baltazar Garzon, is not known for  acceding to advice from Spanish prosecutors:

In the Spanish system, the prosecution is managed by an investigating judge. In this case, it’s Baltasar Garzon. And you may recall he handled the case involving Augusto Pinochet, and he did that against the stern opposition of Spanish prosecutors, I think which shows you the weight that that recommendation may hold with him in his court.

Horton underlined another important fact, a point that was reported in some news media (e.g., New York Times, 4/17/09), but missed by others, including by O'Reilly: The Spanish prosecutor thinks the U.S. should prosecute the Bush officials:

But there's a different consideration to weigh in here, as well, and that is that this is a statement that was announced by the prosecutors at the Audencia Nacional in Madrid, and we know, in fact, that those prosecutors who have made this recommendation not to go forward in fact concluded that the case should be prosecuted.

They prepared a 37-page memorandum--and I've discussed, I've talked with several people in Madrid who have read it--that laid out the case, showed how it could fairly easily be brought, how it involved a joint criminal enterprise, how it could be sustained on the basis of documents, including some of those that were released yesterday. And that decision by the career prosecutors was overridden in a political act by Spain's attorney general, who's a political figure. He was a member of the cabinet of Prime Minister Jose Zapatero.

And Horton reports a story that to our knowledge has not been reported in U.S. corporate media thus far, that the top Spanish prosecutor's decision to oppose indictments was prompted by politics--high-level communications between the U.S. and Spanish governments. Because of this, according to Horton, the prosecutors objections were likely to be taken less seriously when and if indictments are considered:

Moreover, the attorney general's decision, which was announced yesterday morning in Madrid, came after several days of high-level discussions between Washington and the Zapatero government, during the course of which, I've been told, the Obama administration suggested very strongly that the pendency of this case was inconvenient and that it would be viewed as a great favor by Washington if Zapatero's government could do what was within its power to shut this down. And I think what we see here is an accommodating nod from Jose Zapatero.

So it has really nothing to do with justice, and it has nothing to do with the merits of the case. It's a political act. And it's certain to be understood by the judges of the Audencia Nacional as a political act, which means I don't think it really forms much of a barrier to the prosecution going forward.

In a discussion with Jessica Newman of Campus Progress (2/17/09), Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman gives her motivations for entering journalism: "I just always saw it as a way to pursue issues of social justice, to hold those in power accountable, to really work hard to get at the truth." When asked if she sees "a successful and profitable way to embrace multimedia...in a for-profit system, like the mainstream media," Goodman makes an important distinction: "It depends on what you mean by a 'for-profit system'":

For the profit of society, yes. I can only speak from my own experience with what we do. [I] deeply believ[e] that we need to work on every kind of platform to get independent information out, which is why we're on community radio and NPR, Pacifica radio and PBS and public access TV and then on the Internet. We believed from the very beginning in working online and open source so that everyone can get information out there.... When we're on a station, it's bringing attention to that station, bringing resources to that station. Public access is under threat in the United States. You know, the telecoms and the cable companies don't want to have these free channels. But they're the ones--the cable companies--that get the monopoly in a town to have their cable network. They've got to give something back to the community. What better way to serve a community than to provide a space where people can make their own media, because the media are the most powerful institutions on earth.

In response to the old question of "what line as journalists should we draw between advocacy and objectivity," Goodman points out: "You really can’t become more of an advocate than the corporate press. They provide the model. Just look at the lead-up to the invasion [of Iraq in 2003]. All of the networks, over and over again, beating the drums for war. I know what every one of those journalists thinks because they talked about it all the time." See the FAIR article: "In Iraq Crisis, Networks Are Megaphones for Official Views" (3/18/03)