CounterSpin

Jodi Jacobson on the Stupak amendment, Barbara Miner on 'merit pay'

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0100

This week on CounterSpin: The Stupak Amendment, a last-minute addition to the House’s recently passed healthcare reform plan, would severely restrict abortion coverage for those on the "public option" part of the plan and those buying private insurance using government money. Many House Democrats journalists and pundits have portrayed Stupak as a sacrifice that must be made to get healthcare reform. Reproductive health advocates and many others differ, saying it could enormously impact reproductive healthcare access. We'll talk with Jodi Jacobson, editor of the RH Reality Check website about Stupak. Also on CounterSpin today, there's a lot of talk in the media about education reform. That can mean a lot of things, but in the corporate media the 'reformist' label tends to be applied to anyone who emphasizes improving test scores and, more importantly, takes on the teachers unions. One big issue is so-called merit pay, which we're told the unions vehemently oppose. Barbara Miner from Rethinking Schools will join us to talk about the issue and how the media mishandle it. LINKS: --RH Reality Check --"The Debate Over Differentiated Pay: The Devil is In the Details," by Barbara Miner (Rethinking Schools, Autumn 2009)

Trudy Lieberman on health care, Laurie Williams & Allan Zabel on cap & trade

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0100

This week on CounterSpin : a source from a senior citizens group quoted in the Washington Post said the group’s main challenge today is simply to try to keep the record straight about what's actually in the health care reform bill, as opposed to what’s being claimed about it. That would seem to be the basic challenge facing reporters, too, but have they been too caught up with coverage of congressional politicking to do justice to it? We’ll hear from journalist Trudy Lieberman on that. Also on the show: Two EPA lawyers have been speaking out against cap and trade climate legislation, saying that these schemes won't do enough to reduce carbon emissions. Making their position public has got them into trouble with the agency, and certainly puts them at odds with leading Democrats and the Obama White House. We'll speak with Laurie Williams and Alan Zabel about their position on cap and trade, and the problems they've encountered in trying to make their case. LINKS: --Trudy Lieberman, CJR --Carbonfees.org

Greg Gordon on Goldman Sachs, Phyllis Bennis on Israel/Palestine

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0100

This week on CounterSpin: A new investigative series by McClatchy newspapers' Greg Gordon reveals that in 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs sold more than $40 billion in securities backed by risky home mortgages, "but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting." Sounds important. We'll talk to Greg Gordon about his story. Also on the show: Israel/Palestine is in headlines at the moment as the press engage both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's changing line on settlements and the continued fallout from a UN report critical of Israel's actions in Gaza early this year. We'll talk with Phyllis Bennis, author of, among other titles, Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer That's coming up, but first as usual, we'll look back at the week's press. —New York Times reporter Alissa Rubin's November 1 look back on her experience as a war correspondent in Iraq is mostly interesting, though when she gets to the part where she draws the big lessons, the piece takes an Orwellian turn:

In my five years in Iraq, all that I wanted to believe in was gunned down. Sunnis and Shiites each committed horrific crimes, and the Kurds, whose modern-looking cities and Western ways seemed at first so familiar, turned out to be capable of their own brutality. The Americans, too, did their share of violence, and among the worst they did was wishful thinking, the misreading of the winds and allowing what Yeats called "the blood-dimmed tide" to swell. Could they have stopped it? Probably not. Could it have been stemmed so that it did less damage, saved some of the fathers and brothers, mothers and sons? Yes, almost certainly, yes.

In the culture of "respectable" American journalism, imputing bad intentions to U.S. policy—at least until decades after the fact—is rarely done. Thus, uncounted dead, wounded and displaced are often written off as the unfortunate byproduct of American idealism or optimism. And so for instance U.S. policy in 1980s Central America was generally described as a matter of democratic idealism—bloody, but idealistic. And so for Rubin, it was mostly "wishful thinking" that killed the "fathers and brothers, mothers and sons" of Iraq. —When Honduran coup leader Roberto Micheletti finally agreed to let ousted president Manuel Zelaya finish out his term in a reconciliation government, the Washington Post editorial page called it "a win in Honduras"—but who was the loser, according to the paper? Hint: Regular readers won't be suprised. The Post argued in an October 31 editorial that Zelaya's return will make the upcoming presidential election legitimate—and since neither of the two leading candidates is allied with the democratically-elected Zelaya, that "means that Honduras's democracy should be preserved, and Mr. Ch�vez's attempted coup rebuffed." Yes, while you may have thought the coup at hand was the one where Zelaya was forced out of the country by Honduran military leaders, the truly twisting editorial logic at the Post has it that the real coup was Zelaya's plan to hold a referendum on whether to rewrite the constitution, a move which, though it could not, as we've discussed, have led to Zelaya remaining in office, still somehow represented what the Post calls a "model of populist authoritarianism" which, if you're still following, is also promoted by Hugo Ch�vez, who is, well, very bad. As for the actual coup, as most of the world's people understand the term, the Post concedes that did "violate democratic norms" but more nefariously, it provided "Mr. Ch�vez and his client with a convenient means to rally support." So the anti-democratic event of a military coup was a vital step toward democracy because of the way it put down the aspirations of the democratically elected leader, because he had support from another democratically elected leader, the two of them forming the region's primary obstacle to, um, democracy. It's really very simple. —Washington Post ombud Andrew Alexander wrote a column November 1 about journalistic conflicts of interest. One of his main examples was Howard Kurtz, the paper's own media reporter, who listeners may know moonlights as the host of a program about the media on CNN, Reliable Sources. The Post's conflict of interest rules say that journalists "cannot accept payment from any person, company or organization that he or she covers." What's more: the rules seem to anticipate precisely the situation that Kurtz is in, since they do allow journalists to sometimes accept money from broadcast organizations—as long as covering those broadcasters is not part of the journalist's job. So why don't these rules apply to Howard Kurtz? Apparently because he's Howard Kurtz. As Kurtz told Alexander: "My track record makes clear that I've been as aggressive toward CNN—and The Washington Post, for that matter—as I would be if I didn't host a weekly program there." Kurtz's response makes it clear that he, like many corporate journalists, doesn't understand what it means to say that someone has a conflict of interest. If you are both reporting on and working for a particular organization, than you have interests as a reporter and other interests as an employee. To point out that those interests are in conflict is not to say that everyone in that situation will choose to ignore their journalistic responsibilities—it's to say that reporters shouldn't have to make that choice, if it can be avoided. Part of Kurtz's job as a media reporter, it should be noted, is to point out other journalists' conflicts of interest. How he can possibly do that given his own personal situation is hard to imagine. —Afghan activist and politician Malalai Joya has been on a media tour to discuss her book, A Woman Among Warlords. As noted by Eric Garris at AntiWar.com, Joya was treated very differently by CNN International than by CNN. Appearing on CNN October 28 Joya described Afghan civilians crushed between the oppression of Taliban warlords on the ground, and the fatal bombing from the sky of occupation forces. CNN host Heidi Collins seemed offended by part of that:

Heidi Collins : Again, "occupation" would certainly be your word. A lot of people would take great issue with you calling the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, in your country an" occupation."

Perhaps some people would take great issue with Joya's characterization; perhaps some people would prefer the word "picnic," but before calling her guest out as hopelessly or hysterically subjective, Collins might check with a group like the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose expressed position is that "Once a situation exists which factually amounts to an occupation the law of occupation applies—whether or not the occupation is considered lawful. Therefore, for the applicability of the law of occupation, it makes no difference whether an occupation has received Security Council approval, what its aim is, or indeed whether it is called an "invasion", "liberation", "administration" or "occupation." As the law of occupation is primarily motivated by humanitarian considerations, it is solely the facts on the ground that determine its application." I suppose CNN's Collins could claim to be speaking for all of those no doubt real people who don't understand international law or who disapprove of it, but CNN should consider how much should such ideas be allowed to shape a newscast. —And finally, former vice president Al Gore is on the cover of the November 9 Newsweek, to coincide with the release of his new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. The piece on the inside is a mostly favorable take on Gore's work, though reporter Sharon Begley couldn't resist throwing in a little dig at Gore's wonkiness:

To anyone with bad memories of how Gore's fact-filled debate performances against George W. Bush in 2000 failed to connect with voters, it may come as no surprise that Our Choice has a graphic on "how a wind turbine works," and a long section that begins: "Conventional hydrothermal plants are built according to one of three different designs. The steam can be taken directly through the turbine and then recondensed."

Imagine that—a description of wind power, with a graphic in a book about green energy. Once a hopeless wonk, always a hopeless wonk. As to our memories of those 2000 debates, maybe Begley meant to type "reporters" instead of "voters." The public reaction to the first Bush-Gore debate was pretty well studied, and the polls showed that most people thought Gore won. In any event, it's hard to believe reporters found anyone who seriously called for fewer facts in debates, though imagining such an audience must make a journalist's job much easier to do. GREG GORDON CounterSpin: Goldman Sachs is often portrayed as the gold standard of Wall Street investment firms. The smartest, by virtue of its having weathered the recent financial storms, and virtuous too, encouraging its top officials to take time out for public service. Of course the public service part has left Goldman well-connected in high government circles. But some recent reports have also tarnished Goldman's image. Not least of these a series of investigative reports published by McClatchy newspapers that suggest, among other things, that Goldman secretly bet on the housing collapse. Joining us now to talk about the story is the series' author, Greg Gordon. Welcome to CounterSpin Greg Gordon! Greg Gordon: Hi, Steve, thanks for having me. CS: Well, let's begin with why Goldman, why did you investigate Goldman and what did you find? GG: Well, we investigated Goldman because Goldman is sort of the 24-karat investment bank, it's the most prestigious investment bank in the world and because Goldman of all the Wall Street firms came out of this subprime meltdown intact, virtually intact. They lost a billion and a half dollars where everybody else was writing off tens of billions or folding entirely. So we looked at how they got out and the way in which they appear to have escaped disaster is that they secretly made wagers that the U.S. housing market would decline at the same time that they were selling off bonds which were backed by risky mortgages. They would portray themselves as an insignificant player in the subprime market, but actually Goldman was not that small. They sold $135 billion in bonds or securities backed by risky mortgages that were registered in the United States and then many more tens of billions of dollars overseas or offshore. So that was sort of the first part is they did this using these exotic bets known as credit default swaps and they did it in dark markets where nobody really knew they were doing it. And they saved themselves billions of dollars, covered themselves. Of course they bought $20 billion of this kind of protection from the big insurer AIG. Then we looked at what's been going on with these mortgages after they've defaulted and found that Goldman Sachs in various of its subsidiaries had been reduced to filing papers seeking foreclosure of homes across the country to try to recover what they can for their bond holders and perhaps in some cases for themselves. We also looked at the offshore aspect of this—how they sold these securities through the Cayman Islands and they didn't have the same disclosure requirements that they have in the United States when they're being watched more closely by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and so some of these prospectuses that were very closely held—I got ahold of a couple of them—and they exaggerated the safety of these securities. Here's Goldman Sachs selling triple-A rated securities that are based on a failing housing market and on mortgages that were not underwritten properly by the shady mortgage bankers. And then lastly we took a real close look at the way Goldman had entered into business relationships with New Century Mortgage, which started out in the mid-'90s with about $350 million in revenues and the decade later had rocketed to number two in the subprime industry with close to $60 billion in sales. And Goldman made more than a dozen deals with New Century and sold off its mortgages, and if you take a good look at some of these pools of loans you can see where lots of what's known as "liar's loans" among them—where people just stated their income and there was no verification—and there are all kinds of other failings in the mortgages. CS: So your series shows that while Goldman Sachs was selling as highly rated bonds stuff that was essentially junk, that really hit hard on some pension funds and other investors. But what are the legal questions here, if it is a violation of the law is it because Goldman did not disclose to potential investors or to investors? GG: One of the key questions is—and I'll take even a step back: here you're selling triple-A rated securities, why do you need to hedge them? Why do you need to bet the other way, secretly, on them if they're really triple-A securities? And I asked Goldman Sachs can you give me another example of triple-A securities that you were also hedging, and I didn't get an example from the company. The legal questions are going to come down to—if anybody gets off the dime and investigates this stuff, and I kind of feel that it warrants an investigation by some government agency—is what did Goldman know? What was the state of Goldman's knowledge, was Goldman selling these bonds when it thought they were toxic waste? And is that why they were hedging, is that why they were betting the other way? Because if that's the case, that would be securities fraud. There are also, you mentioned, these pension fund suits alleging that Goldman omitted material facts when it circulated these prospectuses on the securities because allegedly Goldman did not say fully enough that these mortgage lenders were using poor lending practices. They were really checking out who they were giving subprime mortgages to or other risky types of mortgages. CS: Well you mentioned that you thought the series and your investigative report merited official investigation, but could it be that Goldman is so well-connected that it may evade the kind of official scrutiny that you're suggesting should be done because they're so well-connected? GG: I don't throw around conspiracy theories a lot. Having been in Washington for 32 years, I've seen a lot, but you really have to question—I mean, this is a major campaign donor to both parties and a major player in Washington. They provided Treasury secretaries during the Clinton years and again during the Obama administration, and in fact, the current Treasury secretary's chief of staff is a former Goldman lobbyist. By the way, a former Goldman official named Adam Storch was just named to a senior job in the Securities and Exchange Commission's enforcement unit. So you wonder what it would take to get an investigation, but there's a new team running law enforcement apparatus in Washington, and we'll have to see. CS: Well, we're running out of time, so of course I have a two-part question for you: I want to ask you, even though it's still early, if you're seeing other journalists becoming interested in picking up and advancing your story and relatedly in this day and age, isn't it difficult for journalists to do that as the beat of investigative financial journalism seems to be going through the same straits as other journalistic beats? GG: McClatchy has thirty daily newspapers across the country, and we like every other newspaper company, are in tough financial times, and I'm very proud of McClatchy for keeping our two investigative slots in Washington, but you wonder, how much longer will it be able to hang on? We need newspaper readers. I think democracy needs newspaper readers because I think democracy needs newspapers. And to your question about whether others will follow on what we've done on this, I hope so, but we are planning to follow what we've done. We've gotten a lot of tips since the story came out, and we're going to try and follow them. We'll see where they go you know, we're very eager to do that. CS: We will certainly follow them too. We've been speaking with Greg Gordon, investigative reporter with McClatchy newspapers. You can read his series on Goldman Sachs online at www.McClatchyDC.com. Greg Gordon thanks again for joining us today on CounterSpin! GG: My pleasure. PHYLLIS BENNIS CounterSpin: Israel/Palestine is a static storyline in much of U.S. media. Coverage presents two sides, locked in mortal combat, with a preference of perspective given, to be sure, to the worldview of Israel, an official U.S. ally. But does that media intransigence, if you will, reflect present day political reality? Are congressmembers who reject virtually any condemnation of Israeli government actions just reflecting the strongly held opinions of most Americans? Joining us now is Phyllis Bennis, she's a fellow at the Transnational Institute and the Institute for Policy Studies where she directs the New Internationalism Project. She's also an author and her book, Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer is just out now in a recently updated edition. She joins us now by phone from Washington, D.C. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis! Phyllis Bennis: Thank you. Great to be with you. CS: Well, Palestine and Israel are never far from the front page, but one reason for the attention right now is continued debate on the so-called Goldstone report, a UN fact-finding report into the conflict in Gaza in January. Recently Congressfolk including ranking Democrats and Republicans in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, signed a resolution calling on Barack Obama to "strongly and unequivocally oppose any further consideration" of the report. Is there anything outrageous in the Goldstone report, and if not, what do things like this Congressional condemnation say about U.S. official thinking? PB: Well, no, there's nothing outrageous in the Goldstone report. However, it wouldn't matter if there were, you can be pretty sure that no one in Congress, and although I don't have the evidence of this, I would bet a great deal of my very small life's fortune on the fact that not one of them has read it. It's 575 pages long, the executive summary is more than 50 pages long. I doubt if very many, perhaps one or two, have read the executive summary. The problem was not about the report, and the attack, ironically, was not about anything in the report. To this day, no one in the Obama administration and on one in Congress has been able to say that a single thing the report says is actually wrong. The attack is not on the message, it's on the messenger. And the problem is that Congress is not aware that the discourse on this question has dramatically changed across this country. Unfortunately, I don't think the Obama administration is aware that the discourse has qualitatively changed. They seem to be making decisions as if the idea of real pressure on Israel—something as what should be a very small thing like holding them accountable for potential war crimes, that should be a no-brainer, as if that is somehow still political suicide. It isn't. But I'm afraid that they really don't get it. CS: Well, what are some of the signs that you're seeing? Because I saw a commentary on GRITtv recently in which you were talking about this change in the public discourse on Palestine/Israel. What are some of things you're thinking of when you say that? PB: I think there's a number of interesting developments. One has to do with the changes within the Jewish community. There are Jewish anti-occupation organizations popping up all over the place, and there have been for several years. In response to that, you have the rise of J Street, the new Jewish lobby, that is challenging AIPAC directly, going head-to-head saying we're pro-Israeli but pro-peace. Exactly what that means hasn't really been fleshed out yet; they're pretty new on the block. But this is a reflection of that kind of change. All of the major Jewish lobby organizations came out against Barack Obama as a candidate at various points saying he's not pro-Israel enough, we don't trust him, etc., etc. Well despite that, 78 percent of American Jews voted for President Obama. So that's a huge shift in what is now a clear inability of those lobbies to claim that they speak in the name of all Jews. More broadly, this isn't only about the Jewish community. You guys are concerned particularly with the media, Janine. Look at the media coverage of the 60th anniversary of Israeli independence, and compare it to ten years ago, to the 50th. The 50th anniversary, there was nothing but Israeli triumphalism across the spectrum of the U.S. press. The 60th anniversary in 2008, there was plenty of Israeli triumphalism, but you also had Palestinian voices on the front pages and on the lead stories. You had Palestinians being asked why do Palestinians use the word catastrophe to describe the creation of the state of Israel? You have an entirely different discourse because the understanding of people in this country has changed. The use of the word apartheid to describe Israeli policies of discrimination as well as the apartheid wall, which ironically enough Israelis use the same term—they just use the word apartheid in Hebrew: "hafrada." They use the same word. But that you couldn't do two or three years ago. You would be hounded out as being anti-Semitic or whatever. If it was me, it would be a "self-hating Jew." But suddenly the debate over which policies of Israel might in fact violate the international covenant against apartheid is a very viable debate. The discourse had changed dramatically. The problem is those in power haven't gotten it yet. And the challenge for those of us who are working to change the discourse is to get to the next level. CS: Well, let me just ask you finally about one of the factual elements in that discourse which there is confusion over. A November 2 Washington Post article headlined, "Israel Putting Forth 'Unprecedented' Concessions, Clinton says," described the Palestinian position on settlements in this way: "The Palestinians regard the land occupied by about 300,000 West Bank settlers as part of a future Palestinian state, and consider continued settlement activity an effort to influence negotiations." Now if I'm trying to understand things, it's not really on base to suggest that the primary objection to settlements from the Palestinian side is the role that they play in negotiations is it? PB: No, one of the big problems in this discourse at the official level—in Congress, in the White House—is the treatment of everything on the ground as political issues to be decided in negotiations rather than the legal status of in this case Israeli settlements, which is that they're all illegal under international law. Any international lawyer will tell you, under the Geneva Convention of 1949, article 33 is very clear. You can't, as an occupying power, move any of your people into the land that you're occupying. Period. Full stop. They're all illegal. The problem is that the discourse hasn't caught up to the reality, so we still have a position where President Obama, and Secretary of State Clinton, and Senator Mitchell, the special envoy, are not pressuring Israel around settlement. We don't see—I don't agree with those who say there's been a cave in or a reduction of pressure, I think the problem is there never was any real pressure. What we heard was a series of requests: please stop settlement construction. No. Please stop expanding settlements. No. Please stop expanding some settlements. No. Please stop expanding a few settlements, not including Jerusalem and only for a few months. Well, maybe...No. That was what we heard. And then the requests stopped. Serious pressure would have been Those settlements are illegal. Your first step needs to be to immediately freeze all settlement activity as a first step towards ending them. If you choose not to do that, you know that $30 billion that I, President Obama, agreed to implement that was called for by President Bush? You can kiss that $30 billion goodbye. Americans need healthcare. Americans need education. They don't want me to give $30 billion dollars to the Israeli military, which is what we agreed to do, and if you don't freeze settlements, that's the first thing that goes. The second thing will be the promise of a veto in the United Nations Security Council to prevent you from being accountable for war crimes. You know our history of providing a veto? You can kiss that goodbye, too. That's what pressure looks like, and unfortunately, we haven't seen that yet. CS: Well, and perhaps it's hair-splitting but the constant references to occupation by settlers, I think obscures a point that you've just made very clearly, which is when you're talking about occupation, you're talking about Israeli state occupation, military occupation, and not sort of pioneers as are often depicted. PB: Absolutely. And one of the problems is we're talking about settlements which are now the size of cities. The settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim outside of Jerusalem, it's a city of almost 40,000 people with two colleges and I don't know how many high schools, and lawns that are healthy and lush while the Palestinians who live down below only have access to running water twice a week. So this is a settlement, but if you ask people who live there who mainly vote Labor or who even vote the left-wing Meretz Party they'll say you know settlers are a real problem. And you say well you live in a settlement. Oh, no, no, this is a city. The settlements are out there, those little outposts, those are the settlements, this is permanent, this is ours. And this is a real problem. CS: We've been speaking with Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies. Her book Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer is out now in a newly updated edition from Interlink. Thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis. PB: Thank you, Janine, it's been great. LINKS: --Goldman Sachs: Low Road to High Profits, by Greg Gordon --Phyllis Bennis

David Swanson on healthcare debate, Bruce Dixon on the 'public option'

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:00:00 +0100

This week on CounterSpin: Making sense of the health care debate. In the past week we've supposedly seen the comeback of public and political support for the public option, in some form or another. We're also told that Democratic majority leader Harry Reid must gather 60 votes to pass any bill. Is any of that true or is media coverage of political possibilities off base? Author and activist David Swanson will join us to try and untangle these story lines. Also, Progressives and others interested in truly universal healthcare, as in healthcare that would cover everyone, have been more or less prodded in recent months to give up the idea of a single payer system—dismissed as it's been for years by not corporate press corps as not politically viable—and to get behind the public option, presented as single payer's less ideal but more achievable variant. But does the public option as it's now presented have anything at all to do with healthcare that covers everyone? We'll talk with Bruce Dixon, managing editor of Black Agenda Report, about that. That's coming up, but first as usual, we'll take a look back at the week's press. —With all the attention on the public option in the health care debate, some important pundits are warning that there's something else going on. Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt warned on October 26 that the "public option" is just a backdoor way to bring a single-payer system to the United States:

Private companies would have to raise their rates, so more people would choose the public plan, so private rates would rise further—and we could end up with only the public option and no competition at all. Single-payer national health insurance may be the best outcome, but we should get there after an honest debate, not through the back door.

Well, on the same day Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson hit on the same theme:

Many would say: Whoopee! Get rid of the sinister insurers. Bring on a single-payer system. But if that's the agenda, why not debate it directly?...That's the debate we need, but in truth, doctors, hospitals and patients don't want to be limited, whether by government or markets. Congress reflects public opinion. Fearing a real debate, we fake it.

Two columns in the same paper declaring the need for a true single-payer debate? This is good news. One of these guys should speak to an editor at the Post who could encourage more op-eds about single payer, which has faced a virtual blackout in the corporate media debate. Maybe Fred Hiatt could speak to the person who runs the opinion pages at the Washington Post; after all, what better place to encourage a Washington debate? Wait—isn't that Fred Hiatt's job? —James Zogby used to be considered a reputable pollster. But of late he's made it clear that he'll ask just about any question someone pays him to ask—no matter how loaded or offensive. He hit a new low recently with a poll he did for right-wing pundit Brad O'Leary, that actually asked this question:

Federal Communications Commission Chief Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd wants the FCC to force good white people in positions of power in the broadcast industry to step down to make room for more African-Americans and gays to fill those positions. Do you agree or disagree that this presents a threat to free speech?

Boy—forcing good white people to step down to make room for African-Americans and gays—kind of sounds as though Zogby were doing polling for the Ku Klux Klan. Strikingly, as slanted as this question is, he only got 51 percent of the people he polled to agree with it; maybe some of the other 49 percent rightly smelled a rat. The question, of course, is based on a distortion of something Lloyd actually said, which was an honest acknowledgment of the moral dilemma you face when certain classes of people have been systematically excluded from media power; as Lloyd put it, "Unless we are conscious of the need to have more people of color, gays, other people in those positions, we will not change the problem." Zogby claimed that quality control processes had broken down, but really twisting words to offer red meat to McCarthyites like Glen Beck is something that no responsible pollster would having started doing in the first place. —On his October 22 show, CNN host Lou Dobbs had some supposedly big news on—you guessed it—immigration:

New evidence that the American public wants action on the illegal immigration crisis in this country. A new CNN poll finds the vast majority of the American public wants illegal immigration stopped and most want illegal immigrants now in the country to leave.

Well for starters, the poll he's talking about found that 37 percent of people want illegal immigrants removed immediately, which is not most people. But what Dobbs did with the results of a strangely-phrased poll was another matter. As CNN reporter Lisa Sylvester put it, "These polling numbers show that comprehensive immigration reform is going to be a tough sell." Sylvester added that Barack Obama still supports such reform. Funny, though, the poll never asked anything like that at all. But when you look at polls that do, you find that mostly people are open to some sort of overhaul of the country's immigration laws. An April survey from ABC/Washington Post, for example, asked if people supported giving illegal immigrants a path to legal citizenship, 61 percent said yes. A CBS poll around the same time found a similar result. So maybe some of the people who say they want illegal immigration stopped don't mean it the same way Lou Dobbs means it. So then this CNN poll by itself doesn't tell us much of anything about the immigration debate. It does, however, give Lou Dobbs one more chance to mislead viewers on his favorite subject. —It's not every day that a president is compared to Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin all at the same time. No, we're not talking about right-wing talkers and Barack Obama; this is the November 2 issue of Newsweek magazine, and the president is the Venezuelan president Hugo Ch�vez. As the magazine's Latin America correspondent Mac Margolis sees it, there's something a little creepy about the fact that Ch�vez has put money into a public film studio, including facilities that are intended to be used by Venezuelan filmmakers. They call it Cinemaville, though Newsweek tells us that "many Venezuelans just call it Hugowood." But building a movie studio is not the real problem as Margolis sees it; as he put it, Ch�vez "courts Hizbullah and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is stockpiling Russian-made fighter jets and tanks, and has given aid and comfort to Colombian narcoguerrillas." That last one's actually just a charge made against Ch�vez by his opponents, but no matter—remember, it's Hugo Ch�vez's clunky propaganda that we're supposed to be concerned with. Margolis went on to write, "Like the 20th-century autocrats he emulates, Ch�vez is fascinated by the power of cinema. Ever since Hitler turned to Leni Riefenstahl..." well, you don't need to read much more than that. —And finally, investigative journalist Jack Nelson died October 21. Nelson played a key early role in unraveling the Watergate scandal but may be best remembered for his work covering the civil rights movement in the South, including the Selma to Montgomery freedom march. As Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, Nelson produced powerful stories about the FBI's use of informants and agents provocateur in the civil rights movement. In 1968, he uncovered the truth behind an incident in which three black students were shot to death and 27 others wounded by state troopers at South Carolina State College, a black college in Orangeburg. The troopers claimed that the students had charged them, throwing bottles and bricks. But Nelson got hold of victims' medical records, which told a different story, revealing shots in the soles of victims' feet and in the backs of their heads. But, as Nelson noted in an interview,

Even today, if you ask somebody about the Orangeburg massacre, hardly anybody has a clue. But if you ask about Kent State, where it was white people, everybody knows about it.

Deemed an official enemy by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI for his work, Nelson serves as a reminder that there are some reporters who prefer grilling powerful officials to sipping cocktails with them. DAVID SWANSON CounterSpin: It seems like every couple of weeks we are at another turning point in the health care debate. As it stands now, the public option is apparently very popular, and that public shift has pushed the Democrats to take some sort of action. Either that or Harry Reid is merely trying to placate the left-wing base of the party, who are really the only ones who like this business about a public option to begin with. It might not matter anyway, because we're told that anything that passes the Senate requires 60 votes. Does any of this make any kind of sense? And what about an actual public health plan? Joining us now to talk about where things stand is author and activist David Swanson. His new book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union is out now from Seven Stories Press. David, welcome back to CounterSpin. David Swanson: Great to be back. CS: Let's start with that public option; we've talked about this before, but the media consensus seems to be that the public has warmed to the public option, based on some polls showing that the idea is getting support from over half the public. That has pushed the Democrats to be a little bolder about pushing an idea that the pundits have been saying for weeks is way too far to the left. How important, do you think, are these polls about the public option? DS: They're very important to me; I'm not convinced they're of the greatest importance to the Democrats in Congress. I think it's been the activism around it that's had significance and the actual taking of a stand by the more progressive members in the House, committing to voting no unless there is a so-called robust public option, which, for many of them, of course, was a dramatic compromise down from an actual Medicare for all single-payer healthcare system. But, of course, what robust means has never been exactly agreed upon by everyone, and by most arguments what has come out in the House bill is not robust, and so it remains to be seen which of those members now is going to vote no having committed to vote no and which are going to say well this is better than nothing, I'm going to go with it. CS: Do you think there's something strange about the Washington Post pushing this poll idea so hard and even liberals, MSNBC like Keith Olbermann are giving a lot of weight to this. From where we sit, single payer has often been very popular in the polls, but I don't recall anyone saying the public has now demanded Medicare for all? DS: [Laughing] That's an excellent point. It has been by most polls, a strong majority of Americans for decades have been willing even to increase their taxes in order to provide Americans with a healthcare system like most wealthy countries have, where everyone is simply covered, and healthcare is a right rather than a perk or a privilege. And it's just been blocked out, blocked out by the media, blocked out by the more progressive members in the House who opened this negotiation by agreeing with the President to not mention single payer, and blocked out by activist groups who sort of do an astroturf maneuver where they go and ask the Democratic leadership in Congress, what should we ask our members to lobby you to do. Whereas, of course, most of the members of these labor unions and activist groups want single payer, they've been holding rallies around the country for months now where you're not supposed to mention single payer. The problem with that, of course, is that it makes the public option the left side of the debate, and then the middle ground and the compromise becomes something much less than that, which is where we are now. CS: I want to ask you about activism because all the while throughout all this single payer activism has actually been picking up especially in the last couple of weeks. Again the media blackout has been almost total. I think it was someone named David Swanson who once pointed out that not many people are pushing for or are willing to get arrested for a public option but people are willing to do that for single payer. DS: Oh, absolutely, and as we speak, some good friends of mine, doctors, are risking serious jail time, violating the probation they are under having protested previously in a Senate Committee hearing, chaired by Senator Baucus, having spoken up out of turn, having been denied a place at the table. And you can imagine the size of this movement were there a push by any of our elected officials for single payer here in Washington. Of course there's been a very marginal push, Congressman Kucinich successfully put in an amendment back in July that would have made it much easier for states to do single payer at the state level, which is the most likely path to success, I think. It parallels how Canada got it with one province first. And that was passed with bipartisan support in July. Speaker Pelosi has now unceremoniously stripped it out. In addition Congressman Anthony Weiner from New York, put in an amendment in another committee back in July to have a national Medicare for all plan, and Chairman Waxman told Congressman Weiner publicly in the committee hearing, Nancy Pelosi has agreed to give you a floor vote on that if you will back off and not insist on a committee vote, and Congressman Weiner said fine. Well, now Nancy Pelosi has gone back on her word and will deny that floor vote. So the single payer movement is left with nowhere to go but to say vote this bill down—it's worse than nothing, and those who have really pushed honestly for a robust public option where that meant something significant I think are in the same position. They have to push now for voting this bill down. And if those groups unite and push for that and are successful, then we start round two with a more honest and open and wide-ranging debate. CS: Now, you're in the phase now of counting votes and certainly that's what majority leader Harry Reid is doing and this is the big storyline that's, I think, washing over this entire debate: the idea he needs 60 votes in the Senate in order to pass some kind of public option. The Democratic caucus theoretically has 60 people in it, but this is still presented as some unusual hurdle, and it might strike readers or viewers as an odd thing anyway—why does something need to have 60 votes to pass by a majority vote? Explain where the 60 vote thing comes from since the media seem to not want to do that. DS: Well there's a rule in the Senate rule book that's been changed many times through our history. We got through most of our nation's history without it being there at all, it's not in the Constitution, it's not in the Holy Bible, it's just a rule, and 51 Senators can change any rule at any time, but it's a filibuster rule which says that you need three fifths of the Senators, that is to say 60 of the Senators, in order to cut off debate and have a vote. And so any 41 Senators can say we filibuster, and they're not made to stand up a made to read dictionaries all night, they just say we filibuster and that's the extent of it. They could be made to stand up and read dictionaries all night, but they typically are not. And so you can have 41 Senators representing at the lowest level 11 percent of Americans block all legislation in the Senate, and therefore most legislation in the House as well. And that is the most anti-democratic thing imaginable, and yet all the Senators from both parties, plus Senator Sanders, treat it as inviolable, as if it is much more important to Americans with untreated diseases and illnesses to maintain the filibuster rule than it is to get healthcare. And of course if they threw out the filibuster rule they would have a much better playing field across all issues, not just healthcare. Instead, the extreme of the proposals has been to use a reconciliation bill that could maneuver a healthcare bill through the Senate without facing a filibuster. But of course that would leave us with nowhere to go on the Employee Free Choice Act or any other issue. You would still have that 60 vote hurdle and the problem of course is that the Democrats don't effectively pressure their 60 members to get in line and the Republicans do successfully pressure their 40 members to get in line, and that puts all the power in the hands of someone like Senator Lieberman. CS: But technically, once they got past that cloture vote and were actually at the stage of voting for or against healthcare reform, it's a 50-vote margin again, isn't it? DS: Oh absolutely, yes. You may have a couple of cloture votes in the process, but once you have a cloture vote on whether to have the vote, then you just have the vote. And at that point you just need 50 plus 1, you just need a majority of Senators present, whoever's present—just a bare majority. And so it is entirely possible and has happened millions of times for a Senator to vote yes on cloture, that is let's have the up or down vote, and then turn around and vote no on the actual bill. It's a perfectly respectable thing to do if you can talk about respectability in such an anti-democratic institution. CS: We've been speaking with author and activist David Swanson. His new book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union is out now from Seven Stories Press. You can find David at DavidSwanson.org. Thanks for joining us this week, David Swanson. DS: My pleasure. Thank you. BRUCE DIXON CounterSpin: When our next guest asked back in July, "Is the Obama Health Care Plan Really Better Than Nothing?" some might have seen it as too negative. After all, the plan included something called a "public option" that sounded good, and it was being resisted by big insurance companies, so how bad could it be? Months later, as reporters slowly, slowly, start to ask substantive questions about the plan, it turns out to look, in fact, quite different from what many progressives imagine they were promised. But what are the alternatives? According to corporate media, there aren't any. But then according to corporate media, the single payer idea that majorities of Americans have said for years now they would support is not "politically viable", so how grounded is media coverage in reality, anyway? Here to help us find some solid ground on the issue is Bruce Dixon, he's managing editor of Black Agenda Report. He joins us now by phone from Marietta, Georgia. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Bruce Dixon! Bruce Dixon: Thanks for having me, Janine. CS: Well, Trudy Lieberman is covering healthcare at Columbia Journalism Review, and she recently pointed out that in more than 2000 stories on what's called the public option from August 15 to September 15, only 76 stories actually told people that in all likelihood the public option didn't apply to them. In other words, this is the story of the day, public option public option, but there's virtually no effort being made to connect it to most people's lives. Is it your sense also that media are having a healthcare conversation that's divorced from reality? And what else then are we not learning about this so-called "public option"? BD: Well, the first thing you need to know about the public option is that it doesn't apply to most of the public, that it only applies to a very, very small section of the public. Barack Obama in his early September healthcare speech described the public option that he said would only apply to at most 5 percent of the insurance market. Now if a public option is supposed to keep insurance companies honest by competing with them, it's got to be far, far larger than that. The guy Jacob Hatcher, who invented the term public option back around 2001, he envisioned a public option that would contain 120 million people, and that would have made it large enough to actually compete in the marketplace against private insurance companies, but the public option that's being described by Democrats now is just a tiny, tiny public option. So it's not going to be able to compete with the big guys on price, it's going to be restricted to people who can't get insurance any other way, and you won't be able to... well, it's neither public nor optional, I guess you could say for most people. It's not public because it's only open to a small number of people, and it's not an option that most of them will be able to avail themselves of, because you won't be able to switch from your employer provided insurance to it, and you won't be able to switch from the insurance that they'll make you buy in most cases to it. So, it's neither public nor optional. CS: Well, what it could have, as you pointed out, is the effect of almost pitting the very poor against the slightly less poor who will be asked to subsidize that public option for the tiny fraction of the public to whom it applies. BD: It's going to be financed in part by taking money away from Medicaid, which provides coverage to the poor and also by a tax on people who are already getting decent benefits from their jobs, middle class people and working people in many cases. And they will be forced to pay for this, so it does have that magnificent effect of dividing the population one against the other. And it's going to be means tested so you're going to have to have a level of poverty to be able to avail yourself of it. So it's going to be stigmatized and means tested. So people are going to dislike people who are on the public option. They're going to be seen as freeloaders who are hitching a ride on the benefits of ordinary people who worked hard for their benefits. CS: And we can only imagine what media coverage will do to contribute to that situation. Well, when media aren't dismissing the universal coverage option that most people want, they're pretending that other things are that truly universal option. Back in the presidential campaign, when former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney was running, reporting on health care in Massachusetts was calling that "universal health care". And that's kind of happening now, with things being called "universal" that really are emphatically not universal, isn't that true? BD: Well, the Massachusetts plan, and the plan that's being put forward by Democrats is something that's going to be a step closer to universal insurance coverage, and what it is is it's instead of being a universal healthcare program for people, it's a universal bailout for the insurance companies because people will be forced to buy their private insurance product, whether it actually covers anything or not and whether the deductibles and co-pays are affordable or not. And people who can't afford to buy their insurance product will be subsidized with tax money and also through the taxes on people with existing benefits. And a few of those people who can't afford to buy regular insurance even at the subsidized rates are going to be able to avail themselves of the so-called public option. CS: And many others will not, as folks like Steffie Woolhandler who've been looking at Massachusetts have made clear. It doesn't seem like it requires too much to say that requiring people to buy healthcare coverage is not the same as providing them healthcare coverage. BD: No, not even close, but that's the Massachusetts plan, that's what we're going to get. CS: Well, let's talk about those insurance companies, because I always remember a New York Times article from 2006 by David Leonhardt in which he was talking about single payer, and he said it really made the most sense in terms of cost containment, which is supposed to be the number one concern, and also in the matter of actually providing people healthcare. But, in that sort of standard corporate analysis, he said, single payer isn't gonna happen, but he said why not in terms that were unusually frank. He said, "Health insurers made $100 billion in profits last year, and industries of that size are just not legislated out of business." BD: Too big to sail, I guess. CS: Yeah, I can't help but think, though, that if the lines were drawn that clearly day after day, people would find it pretty easy to figure out which side they're on. BD: And that's exactly why media are not drawing lines in that way. And on the other hand, that's exactly why Democrats are painting a picture of the public option that makes it hard to tell their imaginary public option from Medicare for all. They want people to believe that they will be able to choose some alternative to the predatory private insurance with this bill, and it's hard to understand how they think they can keep fooling people like this forever. It's easy to do when the bills are a thousand pages long and obscure and cryptic and hard to read and hard to understand, but pretty soon they're going to actually have to pass something in the law and enact it, and the scales are going to fall off people's eyes when they see what they've really got here. CS: We've been speaking with Bruce Dixon, he's the managing editor of Black Agenda Report. You can find his work and the other work of that outlet on the web at BlackAgendaReport.com. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin! BD: Thank you for inviting me. LINKS: —David Swanson —Black Agenda Report

Kristin Thomson on the Performance Rights Act; Jennifer McLennan on Open Access

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 05:00:00 +0100

This week on CounterSpin: The Performance Rights Act would require broadcasters to pay royalties that would be split between recording artists and record companies. The bill has just passed through house and senate committees, and will presumably be debated and voted on. The legislation, naturally faces strong opposition from the broadcasting industry, who say it will hurt stations and artists alike. Kristin Thomson, of the Future of Music Coalition, a group that supports the bill, will join us to discuss the Performance Rights Act. Also on the show: October 19th marked the beginning of the first international Open Access Week, in which hundreds of academic, research and advocacy groups will show support for free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research. It's a growing movement with wider relevance than you may realize. We'll talk to Jennifer McLennan of SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resource Coalition, about what it's all about. That's coming up, but first as usual, we'll take a quick look back at the week's press. —An October 19 headline in the Washington Post over a report about its latest healthcare poll read "Public Option Gains Support: Clear Majority Now Backs Plan." But a more accurate headline would have been "Clear Majority Still Back's Public Option," since the new poll shows just a two percent rise in support, from 55 to 57 percent, over the paper's poll a month earlier. In fact, a quick visit to PollingReports.com reveals that, with a couple of outlying exceptions, polls have consistently showed majority support for a public plan for months on end. A September New York Times/CBS poll showed 65 percent support for a public option. But this information hasn't apparently sunk in at the Post, or with ABC World News anchor Charles Gibson either, who seemed caught off guard by the fact that the public supported a public option (as it nearly always has). In reporting the poll, Gibson said: "But perhaps the biggest surprise, 57 percent support one of the plan's most controversial elements, perhaps the most controversial, a government-sponsored health insurance option." Well, if Gibson could pull his head out of Washington's media bubble long enough to find out what the public actually thinks, he might not find it all so controversial—but that would be journalism that served the public instead of Washington insiders. —One of the big media stories of the moment is the White House's beef with Fox News. Tired of the channel's relentlessly right-wing slant, several administration officials have decided to go on the attack. When White House communications director Anita Dunn went on CNN to explain their case, one example she offered was Fox's non-coverage of the latest news on Republican Senator John Ensign. In early October, the New York Times reported that Ensign had arranged a lobbying job for a staffer whose wife he had been having affair with—a possible violation of Senate ethics rules. Dunn noted—correctly—that Fox had not covered the Ensign revelations; a search of the Nexis news database shows the subject coming up once briefly on the network, when a Washington Post reporter mentioned it during an unrelated discussion. But Dunn's charge didn't sit well with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace. On his October 18 show, Wallace said he had to "fact check" Dunn—and he ran a tape from July, in which he asked a guest about Ensign's extramarital affair, as illustration that Dunn was "just plain wrong." But that wasn't the same story; Dunn was clearly referring to the recent revelations, which suggest that Ensign was making political arrangements in connection with the affair—a much more serious and newsworthy issue. Dunn had also complained that Fox zealously fact-checks Obama administration guests. We're all in favor, actually, of journalists fact-checking public officials. It's just not clear that that's what Fox does. —A little more on that: Glenn Beck also responded, unsurprisingly, to the White House criticism of Fox News as being something other than a real news outlet. On his October 18 show, Beck mocked the administration for being "more worried about the war on Fox than the actual war in Afghanistan." He went on to say "America is fighting the war in Iraq.They're fighting Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and now, these people have taken on another enemy—FOX News." OK, spotting hypocrisy at Fox is like shooting fish in a barrel, but still. If Beck's line is that the White House ought to pay more attention to the real wars the United States is fighting abroad than to its ideological opponents at home, is it really crazy to ask whether that's a principle Beck practices or merely preaches? The website Politico took a look at the topics that have been discussed on Beck's show since it debuted in January. Afghanistan has come up 97 times, Iraq 95 times. There have been 50 mentions of Osama bin Laden, 40 of Al-Qaeda, 38 of the Taliban. But if the number of times he returns to a topic is any indication, those aren't the country's most important enemies or issues. No, the important enemies of the United States are the SEIU labor union, who came up 259 times, and the White House aide Van Jones, mentioned 267 times. And the number 1 enemy of the United States, for Beck, would seem to be... the community organizing group ACORN, whom he has brought up 1,224 times. So it's unclear: does Beck want the White House to match his espoused priorities, or his actual ones? —What does it take to be newsworthy these days at NBC? The New York Times reported on October 15 that musician Jon Bon Jovi has arranged an unusual deal to become what they're calling an "artist in residency" on NBC—which means he's appearing exclusively on that network's various shows to promote an upcoming album. It's not just a kind of icky "synergy" thing, though; the deal includes a segment on NBC Nightly News—part of the show's "Making a Difference" series—to promote Bon Jovi's philanthropic pursuits. So apparently he's making a difference by refusing to appear on other networks. And speaking of questionable news judgment at NBC Nightly News, on October 18, in a segment on the latest healthcare bill, correspondent Mike Viqueria noted that some who were "normally Obama allies" announced they would oppose the bill—but that there was also "opposition from a more familiar foe, Sarah Palin posting on her Facebook page and echoing insurance industry claims that the latest plan will mean higher premiums." Yes, a Facebook posting from the former governor of Alaska. And yes, single-payer advocates representing a majority of the population have to get arrested to try and make the news, but at NBC anyway, Sarah Palin just needs to type. —And finally, many people think of the U.S. as a place where anyone can put pretty much any message out there in public, as long as they—or someone—are willing to pay for it. After all, we've got people on the public airwaves spouting all manner of hateful nonsense about immigrants, Muslims, foreigners and so on. So it's good to be reminded that there are, actually, some things you can't say in some places, even if you've got the cash. That's the takeaway from a recently reported story about the American Medical Association Alliance. That's a group that issues periodic reports on the depictions of smoking in popular movies. This past spring, according to the October 18 New York Times, the group, along with the Los Angeles Department of Public Health, announced a plan to run billboards with their latest findings—to be placed near the studio found to be the biggest smoking offender, which turned out to be Universal. Then corporate reality intervened, as billboard vendors throughout Los Angeles refused to run the ad. It wasn't that the group couldn't pay the billboard vendor, of course, just that those vendors get paid much more by the entertainment industry. (Indeed, in many cases, they are the industry: the country's two biggest billboard companies are Clear Channel and CBS.) Evidently to allow public criticism of even one aspect of that industry was just too much. As the group's spokeswoman said, "It's a sad day when movie studios can promote smoking to youth, but public health advocates cannot find a billboard in the whole city of Los Angeles that will run an ad to alert the public about the problem." The New York Times, for its part, called it an example of Universal "catching a break." KRISTIN THOMSON CounterSpin: Legislation that could affect the relationship between recording artists and radio stations has passed through committees of both the U.S. Senate and the House. The legislation, the Performance Rights Act, would require radio stations pay a royalty every time they played a recording. Those royalties would be in addition to publishing fees already paid through the groups BMI and ASCAP to publishers and songwriters. Reportedly, the new royalties would be divided about 50/50 between recording artists and record companies. With us to explain the bill further is Kristin Thomson. She is the education director of the Future of Music Coalition, a group representing recording artists that supports the Performance Rights Act. She joins us now by phone from Philadelphia. Welcome back to CounterSpin Kristin Thomson. Kristin Thomson: Thank you for having me, Steve. CS: Well, Kristin, we'll get to why Future of Music suports the bill in minute, but tell me, have I summarized the Performance Right's Act sufficiently, or do you have anything to add to that? KT: Yes, your summary was accurate. The part about the legislation being divided 50/50 is true, and it's actually embedded in existing legislation, so it's an important part to underscore we want to make sure that recording artists and sound recording copyright owners, which are usually the record labels are paid simultaneously. CS: Well, tell us why Future of Music supports this bill. KT: There are two reasons the FMC has long supported this effort. It's mostly an effort of parity, and there's two types of parity: there's the first which is that the United States is one of the only countries in the Western world that does not have this performance right for sound recordings, and so this means that when American artists are played on radio stations in other countries, in Canada and overseas, there's a royalty that's generated, but because we don't have a reciprocal right here, there's no infrastructure and there's no way for that money to flow back to American artists. And by passing the Performance Rights Act, we would make sure that artists could get their compensation on that. CS: So where is that money? KT: Oh, it's held in black boxes in foreign countries and sometimes absorbed into the countries' arts in education and culture programs. CS: What's the other parity part? KT: The other parity has to do with the differences between different media platforms. This performance right for sound recordings already exists in the digital world. So cable operators, webcasters, satellite radio, they're paying not only the songwriters and the publishers, but they're also paying the performers and the sound recording copyright owners. They're already paying it; that right already exists. And because the terrestrial over the air broadcasters don't pay it, that's an unlevel playing field, and we think that everyone should be paying the same types of rights. CS: Well, you were explaining to me when we talked earlier how somebody could be driving in a car and listen to the same music and there could be a different financial arrangement. KT: Right. So say you were listening to your local rock station in your car and one signal's coming through your car antenna and through your car radio, and then say you have an iPhone that is able to capture a webstream, and you could listen to it in your car as well. For me as the user or the consumer, it's the same music experience, I'm hearing the same song from the same source, but because of the method of delivery through my car stereo, or through my iPhone, it's a different royalty structure. And so we think this is a difference without a distinction, meaning that as technology gets more and more integrated into our daily lives, these types of differences about the method of delivery are becoming sort of silly. And we should make sure that the royalty structures are more harmonized so that all the different types of emerging technologies kind of pay the same types of rates and royalties. CS: Well, this show, CounterSpin, airs on several small stations that also air music. Early on there was some concern that the Performance Rights royalties could break stations that air music. How does the bill address that issue, I mean, whose interest would it be in for small music stations to go under? KT: Oh, absolutely, and there are I think a lot of members of Congress and certainly people in the music advocacy community recognize the value of radio, especially noncommercial radio as well. And there have been good efforts made by legislators to make sure that noncommercial stations have a lower tier of rate structure so that even a noncommercial station that has gross revenues of $100,000 a year, the flat fee that they would pay per year is just $1,000 to play all the music that they'd want. There's a similar tiered structure even for commercial stations, so even a station that's making up to $1.25 million in gross revenue, they would just have a flat fee of $5,000 a year. So it's recognizing the different types of revenue available to different stations and also recognizing the value that some of these smaller stations provide to communities. CS: And some of those stations are not-for-profit or public broadcasting as well. Well, one of the arguments that the radio industry, which is obviously opposed to the act, puts forward, is that with the added fees, broadcasters will only give airplay to the most popular artists, and avoid new or less popular artists, in order to maximize income. How do you respond to that argument? KT: FMC has done some research on the types of music that get played on commercial airwaves these days, and in fact, we did a fairly extensive research document in 2009 that looked at airplay and playlists from 2005�2008, and we realized that looking at the release date of some of the songs that they played, for the most part, radio stations, commercial stations, are fairly risk adverse. They like to play music that's recognizable to their audience, and then they'll sprinkle in the new hits and the new things that are coming out. So I'm not sure that radio stations aren't already doing that, that they're already playing things that recognize, and so it's always been very difficult for new artists and emerging acts to get on radio airplay anyway, so I'm not sure that that argument is very valid. CS: Yeah, I think a lot of people would say that's what they've been doing for years. It's just going with the blockbuster acts. Well, now that the bill is out of the House and Senate committees, and will presumably be debated more broadly, in those two institutions, how does the Future of Music Coalition see its prospects? Have you done any head counting? KT: FMC hasn't done any head counting itself. There are other organizations working on that. What we continue to do is to educate the musician community about the value of the Performance Rights Act, how it impacts their, each musician's revenue stream, and how when we get to a point where there is a Performance Rights Act, and the right is in place, how artists will actually collect their royalties. So we just continue to do our education work, and in some cases, we convene events and meetings where people can, different stakeholders can talk about the different issues at stake. CS: Speaking of that education work, tell us how listeners can find out more about the bill. KT: Future of Music Coalition has a factsheet on our website, which is at FutureOfMusic.org. There's also organizing groups, including the Music First Coalition, which includes a lot of the different content owners, recording artists, and the record labels and the unions, which are organizing around this as well, and so MusicFirstCoalition.org is also a good resource to look at some of the issues at stake. CS: We've been speaking with Kristin Thomson, the education director of the Future of Music Coalition. You can, again, visit the group's website at FutureOfMusic.org. Thanks for joining us today on CounterSpin, Kristin Thomson. KT: Thank you, Steve. JENNIFER MCLENNAN CounterSpin: Anyone who's been involved in academic or scholarly research knows about those journals—you might rely on them for your work, even hope to publish in them some day yourself, but you can only get them at the library because their subscription rate is tens of thousands of dollars a year. It's a fact of life for students and researchers but what does it mean for the larger society to have so much information locked away from the public? Isn't that privatizing ultimately anti-public knowledge, or even anti-science? That's just one of the questions being raised and discussed right now as part of Open Access Week, in which groups around the globe are raising awareness of the idea and the movement for open access to the fruits of research. Joining us now is one of the organizers of the project. Jennifer McLennan is Director of Communications with SPARC, that's the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resource Coalition; she joins us by phone from Iowa. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jennifer McLennan! Jennifer McLennan: Thanks, Janine. CS: Well, this international week of events is unprecedented but the open access movement is not brand new. I wonder if you would tell us about the origins of this movement and what it stands for. JM: Open access is a principle. It's a principle that the results of research should be available immediately online and for free. Open access also means that the results of research should be available to use and reuse in the ways that are made possible by the Internet. Open access was formalized as a principle around 2000�2001 at a meeting in Budapest, after which the meeting participants signed the Budapest Open Access Initiative. But open access itself was not a new concept at the time. Publishers like Archive.org have been making results of research openly available since 1997. CS: It's just the web, I guess, has really catalyzed and made new things possible following this principle that weren't really possible before, I would think. JM: Exactly, exactly, and libraries really got onboard in the late '90s because of the cost of access. As you say, institutional libraries can pay thousands of dollars for access to a single journal, and that is, it's counter to science, it's counter to scholarship, and it's ultimately counter to the public good that should evolve out of research. But also open access is about taking advantage of the opportunities of openly available research. Just thinking of the connections, all the things that we can do when we can get access to everything online at our fingertips. CS: Well, who were some of the sorts of participants in that original Budapest meeting? Is this just scientists or who were some of the folks involved early on in addition to librarians? JM: The meeting was coordinated by the Open Society Institute, SPARC's founding executive director—and SPARC represents academic and research libraries of all sizes. Our founding executive director, Rick Johnson, was present. Also Leslie Chan from Canada, Iryna Kuchma, and others representing research and libraries in the developing world. CS: Well, in terms of the broader issues, who would you say are stakeholders here? You've sort of hinted at it, but we're not just talking about something that's of interest to scholarly researchers. It's really the whole public that could benefit from this. JM: Well, exactly, everyone's a stakeholder. I mean, through the research process we have authors and researchers, the consumers of published research, and teachers, whose projects are dependent on access to available materials, as well as libraries that deliver access to campuses. Higher education administrators want to make sure that their campuses have access to what they need to help advance their missions as higher education institutions. Students have an important stake, which they have very clearly and energetically articulated over the past few years. And, as you say, the public has a really important stake in this conversation, and that is multifaceted. First, as taxpayers, the public of every nation in the world contributes to the funding of research through their governments. So doesn't it make sense that taxpayers should have access to taxpayer funded research? And that has direct implications for individuals. Whether as an individual who wants to learn about the latest developments in energy research or in climate change or if it's a patient wanting the latest research on their condition or the condition their child has been diagnosed with. That's really, really important. But even beyond that, as the public, wouldn't we like to know that research is being advanced in the most effective way, that researchers conducting research on behalf of society at large has access to everything they need to keep the pace of research going at the rate that it needs to be. CS: Well, who would be against this? And why? It's sort of difficult to imagine what the counter position or the pushback would be? JM: It really is and the opposition is represented by a small subset of the scholarly publishing community, and they are not widely representative. There are many publishers that do support specifically public access, so open access after an embargo, but there are also publishers represented in the directory of open access journals, which lists over 4,000 journals, open access journals. CS: Well, it's sort of like alternative media, though, you've got to really grow those alternatives in order for folks who just want to publish and just want access to the information to be able to rely on something outside that small circle of very expensive materials and resources. JM: Exactly, and if I may say the alternatives are growing, but another approach has emerged in the past couple of years where the producers of research, like the faculty of Harvard University, has said it doesn't matter to us how the research gets out we would like the outputs of our research institutions to be openly available, whether it goes out through a report repository ultimately, or through a journal ultimately, or through an online peer review platform. Ultimately we want a copy of our research to be made openly available through our institutional repository. CS: Alright, then. Well, finally, let me just ask you to fill us in on what are some of the groups that are involved in this week in particular, and what are some of the things they're doing to raise awareness on this issue? JM: I'm thrilled to say, I'm so excited about the participation in Open Access Week this year. Governments, the Netherlands has declared Open Access Year to be 2009, Germany has been very, very active through the Alliance of National Science Organizations, has coordinated involvement by 60 campuses, if not more, across that country. Campuses around the world, and in North America in particular are hosting events to raise awareness of open access, so Athabasca University has webcasts every day over noon hour. I was just at the University of Calgary, where they are having seminars throughout the week, and a Friday event that will be chaired by their V.P. of Research. And, importantly, folks are using Open Access Week as an opportunity to act, to really commit their support of open access through the enactment of policies and signing statement of support. For example, the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research announced a policy for open access this week. And also the University of Salford among others. We can't wait to do the at the end of the week. CS: Alright then, we've been speaking with Jennifer McLennan of SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resource Coalition. You can learn more about Open Access Week and open access at OpenAccessWeek.org. Thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin. JM: Thanks, Janine. LINKS: --Future of Music Coalition --SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resource Coalition)

Marie Trigona on Argentina media law, Peter Richardson on Ramparts

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:00:00 +0100

This week on CounterSpin: Argentina just passed a media law that will severely curb the power of the country’s largest conglomerates by putting a majority of the country’s broadcast licenses in non-corporate hands. How did the law come about, and how is it expected to change Argentina’s media landscape. And what lessons might U.S. media activists take from Argentina’s example? We’ll talk with Marie Trigona, an independent journalist and filmmaker based in Argentina. Also on CounterSpin today: "A bomb in every issue" was how Time magazine described the 60's muckraking magazine Ramparts. It's also the title of a new history of that publication. We'll talk to author Peter Richardson about Ramparts place in the history of alternative media, and what lessons can be learned from the publication's rise and fall. All that's coming up, but first we'll take a look back at the week's press. --Returning recently from Afghanistan NBC, chief foreign affairs correspondent Richard Engel told MSNBC's Morning Joe, "I honestly think it's probably time to start leaving the country," adding, "I really don't see how this is going to end in anything but tears." Well this was an occasion for raised eyebrows for Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, who wrote, "That sounds awfully opinionated for a working reporter." But we had to wonder if what irked Kurtz was Engel's stating an opinion, or the opinion itself? For years FAIR has documented journalists stating opinions in support of hawkish policies with impunity, so we wondered if Kurtz would complained if someone like Engel was championing escalation. We needn't have wondered. Lara Logan holds the same position at CBS News as Engel does at NBC. And she is at least as vehemently for escalation as Engel is for withdrawal. Indeed Logan has expressed a disturbing devotion to U.S. Afghanistan commander Gen. David McChrystal, a leading proponent of escalation. As Logan recently told CBS's Bob Orr: "I don't understand why no one will listen to the man you put your faith in and said he is the guy who is going to do this for us." Since Logan "sounds awfully opinionated for a working reporter," we wondered how she managed to escaped Kurtz's scrutiny? For us, it isn't so much that journalists have and express opinions; the public is better served when we know what reporters are thinking; but we are troubled that this despair over the lost standards of objectivity are trotted out only when reporters' opinions are at odds with official views. So we are glad to know of Logan's hero worship, even if it is at odds with the worthwhile journalistic ethic that says reporters should hold the feet of the powerful to the fire; not massage them. --In the October 9 New York Times, reporter Isabel Kershner wrote about the changed reality in southern Israel, thanks to the invasion of the Gaza Strip late last year that killed over 1,000 Palestinians. In the article, she recycled the myth that the war sharply reduced what had been a constant barrage of rocket fire from Gaza: "According to the Israeli military, some 3,300 rockets and mortar shells were launched from Gaza at southern Israel in 2008, compared with fewer than 300 since the end of the war." But this is highly misleading; much of that rocket fire came after the invasion and bombing of Gaza was underway. In fact, a cease-fire was negotiated in June of 2008 that dramatically reduced rocket fire into Israel; which is something that you would have learned if you were a careful reader of the New York Times. Right before the invasion, the paper reported that much of 2008 was quiet: "While more than 300 rockets were fired into Israel in May, 10 to 20 were fired in July, depending on who was counting and whether mortar rounds were included. In August, 10 to 30 were fired, and in September, 5 to 10." Not a single Israeli was killed from the beginning of the cease-fire until after the invasion began. Rocket fire increased significantly in November after Israel attacked a Hamas tunnel and killed six militants. The more natural lesson to draw is that negotiations work better than violence. This is apparently not what the New York Times wants you to believe, though they did once report that reality. Perhaps it was an accident. --It was good to see the New York Times publish a front-page article on October 8th about the involvement of some old Cold Warriors in the lobbying campaign on behalf of the coup leaders in Honduras, and how that lobbying is, in the Times words, "muddling" the White House's position on the coup, or, in the words of a source, holding that policy "hostage". But in discussing the present-day role of people like Otto Reich and Roger Noriega, reporters Ginger Thompson and Ron Nixon gloss over the U.S. history in the region. The pro-coup lobbying effort, they write, "has also drawn support from several former high-ranking officials who were responsible for setting United States policy in Central America in the 1980s and '90s, when the region was struggling to break with the military dictatorships and guerrilla insurgencies that defined the cold war." When "the region was struggling to break with the military dictatorships and guerrilla insurgencies"? A little more clarity is needed here. The U.S.; to take just two examples; supported a thuggish military government in El Salvador and created a "guerrilla insurgency" to try and defeat a left-wing government in Nicaragua. In other words, while "the region" may have wanted one thing, U.S. foreign policy sought to bolster violent, anti-democratic force. Stating these facts clearly would give readers a better sense of context; and provoke more informed questions about what side people like Otto Reich are on today. Economist Dean Baker pointed out in his Beat the Press blog a striking example of financial illiteracy from a financial columnist at the New York Times. Andrew Ross Sorkin, columnist for the Times' business section, has an excerpt from his forthcoming book Too Big to Fail in the November issue of Vanity Fair. And in this excerpt, he lists some signs of the crisis in September 2008, including: "Treasury bills were trading for less than 1 percent interest, as if they were no better than cash, as if the full faith of the government had suddenly become meaningless." Now, if you were giving someone a ten-minute introduction to investing in bonds, which is what Treasury bills are, one of the things that you would probably say is that when bonds are considered risky investments they have high interest rates, because investors are reluctant to take a chance on them, whereas when bonds are seen as safe, their interest rates are low; since people don't need to be promised a big return to invest in them. So Sorkin's observation is entirely backward; Treasury bills had such low interest rates because in the midst of the crisis, the fact that they were backed by the government made them extremely attractive. This is such a basic point about investing that you have to wonder that no one at Vanity Fair caught the mistake—or that someone who works as a financial columnist for a major newspaper made it. --And finally, if there's one thing that never goes away, it's the idea that the corporate media are liberal. The latest variation on that argument came from former Washington Post reporter Tom Edsall, writing on the Columbia Journalism Review website. Edsall was responding to media worries about being out of touch with right-wing complaints about things like community organizing group ACORN. Edsall's point is that media should just come out and admit they're liberal. But his notion of what term means is a little odd. Edsall points out that reporters aren't as working class as they once were. That sounds like an elitist media, if anything; Edsall also refers to reporters' perceived left-wing views on abortion and civil rights. But then he tries to expand the case, writing this: "In a UCLA study of media bias, reporters were found to be substantially more liberal and more Democratic than the public at large." Well that's not what the study showed, though; a reminder that if you're going to link to something on your website, you should probably describe it accurately. That study was a complicated attempt to gauge media bias that came up with results that were laughed off immediately; the right-wing Drudge Report, for example, leaned left, according to the study's authors, while Fox News Channel's Special Report was centrist. If Edsall wants to cite a survey of reporters' beliefs, though, he could have referred to the one FAIR conducted in 1998. But it found that Beltway reporters were more conservative than the public on key economic and political issues. There goes that liberal media again. MARIE TRIGONA CS: Last week Argentina passed sweeping legislation that would force the country's largest media conglomerates to divest themselves of many of their holdings, leaving just a third of the Argentina's broadcast resources in the hands of corporations. With the U.S. plagued by a similar pattern of corporate concentration of media, but prospects for similar reform remote at best, we thought it made sense to take a closer look at how Argentina's media law came about. Marie Trigona is an independent journalist and filmmaker based in Argentina. She is also part of a video collective called Grupo Alav�o. She is also Free Speech Radio News' South American correspondent. She joins us now from Buenos Aires. Marie Trigona, welcome to CounterSpin! MT: Thank you for having me. CS: I mentioned one part of the Argentina's new media law, tell us more about what the law will do, how it might change the media landscape in Argentina? MT: Well, basically, up until the legislation was passed on Friday, early Saturday morning rather, no community organization, association, nonprofit, university, cooperative could access a broadcast license. According to the previous law, only private media companies, or holders, or corporations, or entities could access broadcast licenses. So this basically shut out any possibility for any community media group, nonprofit group, to access a broadcast license to broadcast a radio signal or a television signal. The law which was passed late on Friday night in Senate outlines that one-third of broadcasting licenses will be reserved for private media holders, one-third will be reserved for public arena or governmental organizations, and one-third will be reserved for nonprofit entities. This is the most important aspect of the media legislation. Up until the media law was passed last week, there was basically no limits on how many broadcast licenses a private media conglomerate could access. For example, Grupo Clarin, which is one of the largest media holders in Argentina, had over 264 broadcast licenses, one media conglomerate held over 250 media licenses, whereas a university association, a not-for-profit group, grassroots media were not able to access broadcast licenses within the law or outside of the law. Media communication is a right. It's a right for all citizens and all citizens should be able to access the media, they should be able to access some type of local form of communicating. For example, here in Argentina, most people in other provinces in the very north of Argentina get most of their news from a national network, a national news station, rather than a local station. There aren't very many local stations to report on local issues. The whole idea for this law; it will allow for local organizations to create their own media and not to have to rely on one news station that broadcasts nationally. CS: Well, how was the law pushed forward? Can we assume that some of those grassroots groups and pro-media democracy groups were involved in pushing that forward? MT: This law, which was passed last week, is the result of years of work from grassroots media organizations, human rights organizations, union groupings pushing for new media legislation. There was a coalition of over 500 organizations, which were grouped in the coalition called Coalition for Democratic Broadcasting. This included unions, human rights groups like Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a diverse array of community organizations and also many artists also joined this coalition to push for new legislation. Essentially the legislation was carried over from the dictatorship, and it never changed. There was little basis of argument to keep the legislation which was still intact, legislation and law which was signed in by a military dictatorship government which ruled Argentina from 1976 till 1983, which persecuted and disappeared over 30,000 people, activists, students, even journalists. CS: As you said, the new media law grants a third of the licenses to corporate broadcasters, a third to non-profit broadcasters, and so forth. Money's really in short supply in Argentina, is there any provision so that not-for-profit or public broadcasters will have a trust? Is there any provision to set up a trust that would fund this or are we possibly facing the prospect of having grassroots groups have the right to broadcast but not money to put stations on the air? MT: This is one of the criticisms that came out during, before the law was passed. I spoke with a lot of grassroots networks, a lot of alternative media groups, and their criticism of the law is while the law is definitely a step in the right direction, it's progress for opening up access for community groups to gain access to the media, specifically in the law there was no provision to provide funding for groups to start up television stations, to start up a radio station. One of the things that's missing within the law is to provide funding and to guarantee that indigenous groups will be able to access broadcast licenses and to have infrastructure to transmit within their communities. The law, it doesn't differentiate community groups from nonprofit groups. So this means that private corporations, their foundations or their nonprofit groups; many corporations they found nonprofit groups; will have the same access as community groups. So community groups with very little resources still have to compete for access with foundations, with private nonprofit organizations, and also with church organizations. And this is one of things that are problematic, and there was a demand from alternative media collectives saying we're not inside the law but we exist, was their demand. CS: So perhaps there's some flaws, but altogether it's a step forward for media democracy in Argentina. We've been speaking with Marie Trigona, Free Speech Radio News' South American correspondent based in Argentina. Thanks for joining us today on CounterSpin, Marie Trigona! MT: Thank you so much. PETER RICHARDSON CS: Somehow, a small literary magazine originally pitched to the "mature American Catholic" turned out to be something else entirely; a rollicking, publicity-seeking left-wing muckraking enterprise that exposed CIA misdeeds and Vietnam War lies and atrocities. Contributors to Ramparts magazine resemble a who's who of the American left and progressive journalism; Noam Chomsky, Seymour Hersh, Robert Scheer to name a few. The story of the rise and fall of Ramparts, and what it meant for American journalism, is told in a new book, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. We're joined now by the author of the book, Peter Richardson. Peter, welcome to CounterSpin. PR: Thank you, Peter. CS: Well, there's no shortage of historical inquiry, or nostalgia even, into the personalities and politics of the Bay Area in the 1960s. It seemed like plenty of folks have very fond memories of Ramparts and what it meant to their own political maturation, but the history of this magazine hadn't been nailed down until you decided to do it. For those who didn't come of age reading Ramparts, tell us why you thought this was an important story to tell. PR: Well, the truth is that I didn't come of age reading Ramparts. It was only when I began researching my last book on Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, that I started hearing about Ramparts. So for me it was a kind of a curiosity; how come I've never heard about this magazine if all these important people had contributed to it? So my interest in the story was quite versatile. I just wanted to figure out as much as I could about the magazine, and then I discovered that it was incredibly successful and influential and short lived. So to me it just looked like a project I could take on and finish and that people my age and younger; I'm 50 years old; might be interested in. And as you pointed out, there is a reservoir of good will among the magazine's readers and contributors, so in a way it was a kind of an easy book to put together because everyone was willing to talk about it. CS: You do tell the story of the personalities there, which I think sometimes were almost as powerful as the journalism they were producing. Warren Hinckle and Bob Scheer and kind of these clashes of egos maybe. Also the look of the magazine was something that's striking as somebody who didn't grow up reading this either. That look, the very professional look of Ramparts was part of what people at places like Time magazine found so disturbing because it looked professional and yet you opened it and it was so radical. PR: Right, and that was why Warren Hinckle and others called it the nation's first radical slick. They used all the high production values of the slick magazines of the day, including Time, which hated Ramparts, partly because it used many of its own mainstream methods to advance a very different kind of politics. But I'm really glad you mentioned the look because that was indispensable part of its success. And Dugald Stermer, who was you know the first really powerful art director at the magazine, made this contribution possible, and it often included a kind of whimsy even if the stories were very hard hitting. There was a kind of irreverence and a kind of irony in the way the covers would appear, for example. Even with very grave, sometimes lethal stories; whistleblower stories on Vietnam and Napalm and the CIA covert operations and so on. So it was this interesting combination of visual irreverence and also there was a lot of humor in the text as well in very hard hitting whistleblower stories. CS: For people who didn't grow up reading Ramparts, give us sort of the one minute description of where you would place their investigative journalism or their muckraking. What kind of stories came out of Ramparts that the mainstream media weren't telling? PR: A lot of it started with Vietnam. Robert Scheer returned from Vietnam and joined the magazine and his proposition could be boiled down to the simple fact that the mainstream media just simply wasn't covering what was really going on in Vietnam at the time. He brought a lot of expertise to that subject. He had been a graduate student at the Center for Chinese Studies at Berkeley before he joined the magazine, and as I say, he had been on the ground there, so they did some big stories on Vietnam. One was actually a contribution from a special forces sergeant named Don Duncan who was a staunch anti-Communist, obviously Green Beret, Catholic; it was a Catholic magazine still at that time; who said you know the whole thing is a lie, I mean what's going on in Vietnam in no way resembled what you're being told. So Vietnam was a big part of it. The CIA was another target for muckraking stories by Ramparts and I suppose it should be pointed out that really no other magazines were doing this kind of muckraking at the time, and once other news outlets, new organizations, even CBS news, the New York Times, Washington Post, once they saw that there was an appetite for this kind of work, they began to pick up their game. So Ramparts had this indirect effect on the media as well. Mainly, other organizations thought, you know, maybe we should be doing this, maybe that's part of our job. And that sort of diminished the need for smaller magazines like Ramparts who sort of constituted these savvier fringe players in the media ecology at that time. CS: A victim of their own success. You did—the name of the book is A Bomb in Every Issue, that's what Time magazine called Ramparts. Talk a little bit about that relationship between Ramparts and the mainstream media. I know in the book you made the argument that 60 Minutes, of all places, kind of picked up some of what Ramparts was doing many years later. But at the time what was the general media reaction to Ramparts' stories? PR: Well, Ramparts had a very, kind of, connection with the New York Times. The New York Times picked up several of its stories, probably a half dozen of its stories over a ten-year period and put it on the front page. And that was very much part of Ramparts' plan. They knew they couldn't reach everybody they wanted to reach, so their notion was let's do big stories that the other media, mainstream, big mainstream media outlets can't ignore and then let them run it and get to their readers. They had a slightly more entangled relationship with Time magazine who also ran a number of stories on Ramparts, but mostly to disparage the stories and discredit the magazine. And CBS news, I mean I don't know if there's a direct connection, but just chronologically, Ramparts won the George Polk award, very prestigious journalism award for what the committee called the revival of the muckraking tradition. That was 1967, the next year CBS news started 60 Minutes magazine, which of course, did investigative reporting as well, but mixed in some lighter cultural fare. A couple of years later the New York Times did the Pentagon Papers story with Daniel Ellsberg, and you know some people I interviewed thought you know it's hard to really pin it down, but they may not have taken that chance had not Ramparts been doing stories like this for five years with some success. And of course Washington Post picked up the Watergate story a couple of years after that. Not from the experienced political reporters, but from the police reporters, the young guys who stumbled upon a big story, but they had the guts to run it. And, you know, prior to that period, the pre-Ramparts period, there were very few outlets doing this. The Nation, under Carey McWilliams was doing a lot of big stories but often lacking the kind of showmanship that Ramparts brought to its major stories. CS: I think the book can be fairly considered a warts-and-all biography of the magazine in the sense that some of the problems at the Democratic Convention in 1968, some of the essays on the radical student activism, you talk about the problems that they caused within the magazine and among some of the readers. At the end of the book you discuss the effect Ramparts had on other independent media; Rolling Stone and Mother Jones are kind of established directly as a result of Ramparts. How do you assess the magazine's effect beyond that time frame; did it change anything about the way the independent media looks now, it's sprawling but do you see the effects of Ramparts across the independent media now? PR: Yeah, I think I do. For one thing about Ramparts is that it effected the mainstream media. Many of the people who worked there went on to work in the mainstream media. For example Bob Scheer at the Los Angeles Times. But I also trace a line between what Ramparts was doing and what many political blogs are doing now. It's not a genetic connection, they're not connected by actual people who worked at both places, and in many cases the bloggers aren't even aware of Ramparts, or even that it existed. And yet there's some really striking historical parallels between the rise of the blogs, especially during the Iraq war and the rise of Ramparts during the Vietnam war. And I wanted to bring that to the surface, that historical connection and that parallel because in many ways it's very uncanny. I picked DailyKos, I could've picked others. In many ways it very much resembles the story of Ramparts, and where it goes from here, I don't know. And I know many people are looking at the blogs as an outlet to pick up the kind of spirit of Ramparts. Some of the muckraking is going to have to come from those quarters. I know there are many people who want to do it. I just hope that they do it with the skill and the elan of Ramparts magazine. CS: We've been speaking with Peter Richardson. He's the author of the new book A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. It's available now from the New Press. Peter Richardson thanks for joining us this week on CounterSpin. PR: Thank you very much for having me.

Cyrus Safdari on Iran, Nomi Prins on bailouts

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:00:00 +0100

This week on CounterSpin: The story of Iran's nuclear program certainly isn't going away; glance at the newsstands this week and you might see the Newsweek cover story 'After Iran Gets the Bomb.' And a leaked report suggesting Iran is indeed pursuing nuclear weapons made its way to the front page of the New York Times. What should we make of that story, and the general media consensus on the Iranian threat? Analyst and Iranaffairs.com blogger Cyrus Safdari will join us to share his thoughts. Also on the show: The implication from many corners of corporate media is that the government's bank bailout scheme for all its flaws has pretty much worked; we've avoided a great depression and are backing away from the abyss. It's a fair bet that most regular folks on the other hand don't really know what just happened, and the more they do know, the angrier they are. Nomi Prins calls it a 'toxic combination of rage and confusion' that makes it hard for us to know what to do to prevent it all from happening again. Nomi Prins is the author of It Takes A Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses and Backroom Deals From Washington to Wall Street and a former managing director for Goldman Sachs. We'll get an update on the heroic efforts to subsidize the country's financial sector from her. LINKS: --Iranaffairs.com --Nomi Prins

Gareth Porter on Iran, Christopher Martin on ACORN

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:00:00 +0100

This week on CounterSpin: This week on CounterSpin, did the White House really disclose the existence of Iran’s new Uranium enrichment plant, and does the plant, as many news stories seem to indicate, really violate the law? And what evidence is there that the new plant may have anything to do with a nuclear weapons program, as certain prominent U.S. media figures have claimed, but which U.S. intelligence agencies say does not exist? We’ll talk to historian and free lance journalists Gareth Porter about the latest wave of allegations against Iran. Also this week: The community activist group ACORN has been in the news lately, thanks to the efforts of two right-wing activists, who posed as a pimp and a prostitute seeking business advice at local offices. The story's become a national scandal, but a new study suggests that this is par for the course for ACORN and the corporate media. Who's behind the anti-ACORN campaign? We'll talk it over with Christopher Martin, professor of journalism at the University of Northern Iowa and co-author of a new report on ACORN and the media. All that's coming up, but first we'll take a look back at the week's press. --When it comes to the ongoing debate over healthcare, the distance between public sentiment and the corporate media is striking. On September 25, the New York Times fronted their new poll on various political issues ranging from Afghanistan to the healthcare overhaul—which the article's lead said made people "anxious and confused." But to get to the really newsworthy part you had read the article from the bottom up, where you'd quickly find this buried gem: "On one of the most contentious issues in the health care debate—whether to establish a government-run health insurance plan as an alternative to private insurers; nearly two-thirds of the country continues to favor the proposal." What's more, the poll actually asked whether people supported "the government offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan like Medicare." That would be more ambitious than even some of the "public option" proposals discussed in Congress. In other words, the public prefers a substantially more progressive health care plan than anything being discussed in the Beltway or in the corporate media. In fact, they seem to support something resembling the "Medicare for all" concept that was trashed in the previous Sunday's New York Times. But after being buried, that news was quickly erased from the Times' memory. In a story four days later about the Senate Finance Committee voting not to add a public option to the committee's healthcare bill, the paper reported, "The votes vindicated the middle-of-the-road approach taken by the committee chairman, Senator Max Baucus." The Times poll had found just 26 percent opposed to a public option; to call the approach favored by the rightmost one-quarter of public opinion "middle-of-the-road" is something. --Addressing Iran's recent disclosure to the U.N. of a new uranium processing plant near the city of Qom, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote on September 29th: "They then turned themselves in to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and, as usual, said the site was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. These Persians lie like a rug." Get it? The fact that this bigotry appears in a column chastising Barack Obama for not being serious enough only makes it worse. As Cohen put it: "Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is the president of the United States." But it's worth remembering that Cohen also once wrote that "only a fool; or possibly a Frenchman" would argue with Secretary of State Colin Powell's 2003 U.N. presentation about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Too bad that, in addition to the anti-French slur, Cohen's assessment of Powell's speech; which Powell has since called a blot on his career; was also wrong. And so it follows naturally that there is no credible evidence for Cohen's suggestion that Iran's new plant is part of a secret weapons program. Iran has invited the U.N. to begin inspections of the facility and, while some observers believe Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, others believe Iran has not had a nuclear weapons program for decades. It is the consensus view of 16 US intelligence agencies that Iran stopped pursing nuclear weapons in 2003. Whatever the case may be, only a fool or a Washington Post editorial page editor would bank on Richard Cohen's bigoted arguments. --A piece in the October 5 edition of Time magazine wondered if fair trade coffee is too cheap; in other words, should consumers be paying more than they're currently paying for coffee that is designated as a better deal for coffee workers? The prevailing rate for fair trade coffee is about $1.50 a pound, according to the Time article;and some observers think that the proper price should be closer to $2 a pound, with the extra money going to workers harvesting and roasting the coffee beans. Far be it from a corporate media outlet to present workers' struggles without a catch, though, and Time locates the problem by finding someone drinking a four dollar Starbucks in Miami. That consumer, we're told, applauds the coffee chain for buying fair trade beans, but when Time asks if she's willing to pay 50 cents or a dollar more for her drink, well she's not so sure. But the math here doesn't make any sense. Let's say the price of a pound of coffee rose by even a dollar; that pound will make about 25 coffees. So the actual increase in the price of a coffee drink; if the price of coffee is the determining factor; would be more like a nickel at the most. It's reminiscent of the times when corporate media fret over things like sweatshops; sure, we'd all like workers to be paid more, but do we really want to pay twice as much for, say, a pair of sneakers? That kind of thinking makes no sense economically, but it does serve to send the message that a living wage can't be paid to workers in the developing world. --Conservative pundit Bill Bennett has questionable values. After years of decrying the country's values deficit he was exposed as a gambling addict. As Reagan's drug czar he was addicted to cigarettes. He once said that, while it would be reprehensible, aborting all black fetuses would lower the crime rate. So Bennett would be an awkward choice for a speaker at something called the Values Voters Summit, right? Wrong. At the September event, Bennett evoked the name of Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became a leading progressive intellectual, telling the crowd: "I don't know why more of the African American leadership doesn't talk about Frederick Douglass.... Probably because of his deep devotion to Lincoln, and his deep devotion to this country." Suggesting that black leaders dislike this country or Lincoln, or that they are insufficiently appreciative of Frederick Douglass, shows, at best, ignorance, but Bennett's main point, that Douglass' was deeply devoted to Lincoln, is just wrong. At an 1876 memorial for Lincoln, Douglass said, among other things, "truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought and in his prejudices, he was a white man." Douglass added that even Lincoln's arguments against the extension of slavery "had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race." But it turns out that Bennett's "history" lesson may not have been the most embarrassing thing at what turns out to have been an event with questionable values, where the organizers also presented Fox's Bill O'Reilly, the well-known bully and sexual harasser, with its courage award. --And finally, the headline on Fortune magazine's story is "Why Business Loves Charlie Rose," but it's clear the feelings are mutual and it's easy to see why. Readers are told that Rose had a career in commercial media before taking the PBS gig, where we're told, he took a really substantial pay cut: down to "under $500,000." Yes, Rose is a veritable slave to public broadcasting, but it's OK. Because it turns out the scramble to raise money for the show has led him to a number of beautiful friendships—or what the article calls "peculiar interconnections between Rose and the people he covers." Media mogul Barry Diller and designer Diane von Furstenberg, for instance, are longtime financial supporters of the show, and also guests, presumably favorably treated. Same for Rupert Murdoch. Media owner and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg donates studio space. Nevertheless, it's explained, Rose "relishes his independence." This evidently includes the "independence" to disclose his money ties or not. A rep from a venture capital firm in which Rose is a limited partner has made repeated appearances on his show; sometimes Rose discloses his role; other times he's said the guy was a "business friend and colleague," or someone with whom he had a "business relationship." It might be a little hard for readers to imagine the same coming from Edward R. Murrow, whom we're told Rose aspires to emulate. Before you start sending him care packages though, keep in mind that Rose supplements his meager half-million dollar salary with between 1 and 2 million dollars' a year worth of "appearances," at things like the Microsoft CEO summit, and board memberships, like the one at Citadel Broadcasting that brought him $50,000 a year until very recently. But seriously, the point of Fortune's story is that Rose "obviously isn't in it for the money." One has to wonder what on earth he would do if he were. GARETH PORTER CounterSpin: When the White House announced that Iran has a new Uranium enrichment facility near the city of Qom, and declared the plant illegal, much of the media followed suit. Stories crediting the White House with disclosing the existence of the plant, and echoing charges that Iran was breaking the law were widespread. But what's the real story here? How does the law actually apply to the developments in Iran? And how does this latest story of Iranian malfeasance fit into a larger pattern of Iran coverage? Independent historian and journalist Gareth Porter joins us now, his latest piece for Inter Press Service, is "U.S. Story on Iran Nuke Facility Doesn't Add Up." Welcome back to CounterSpin Gareth Porter! Gareth Porter: Thanks very much for having me. CS: Well, let's begin with how this story emerged. We've seen claims in the New York Times that Obama himself disclosed the plant's existence. What really happened here? GP: Well, of course, the reports by news media didn't actually explicitly credit Obama with having revealed it so much as having credited U.S. intelligence with having discovered this and forcing the hand of the Iranian government to then inform the International Atomic Energy Agency on Monday of last week, by letter, of the existence of this second enrichment facility. So the problem is that the Iranian letter was not covered but it was covered, but it was buried in the stories, certainly in the Washington Post and New York Times stories, it was buried pretty deep in the stories, so that you got the impression that in fact somehow Obama had come out with the news that this second facility had been discovered, rather than being tipped off by the Iranian government of the existence of the site and then coming out and denouncing the Iranian government. CS: The whole gist of the coverage, across the country then, is that Iran had something secret going on to begin with. GP: Exactly, and of course, the problem here is that secrecy, covertness, is a very ambiguous concept in the context of this problem of the Iranian nuclear program, and this has been a problem all along with regard to the official U.S. stance as well as the media coverage of the issue. If you think about, just for a moment, the history of the Iranian program, Iran never hid the fact that it had the intention of mastering the nuclear fuel cycle. Going all the way back to the early 1980s, they have been above board and public about that, and they consulted with the I.A.E.A. throughout that period in regard to their desire to do that. And the United States treated that Iranian policy, that Iranian ambition to master the fuel cycle and to enrich uranium for nuclear power as illegitimate from the beginning. And so the Iranians chose not to inform the I.A.E.A. or the United States, obviously, of everything that they were doing in detail. And so that's where the issue of whether this is covert and secret or simply avoiding the sanctions by the United States and its allies becomes an issue. CS: Well, as it plays out, if U.S. officials can make their version of things prevail; and that depends greatly on a servile media;they can cast doubt on all of Iran's intentions. After all, if Iran is keeping secret nuclear facilities, it must be because they're doing something wrong, and that thing must be that they are developing nuclear weapons. GP: Right and so just to get to this specific case, what we now know; there's still ambiguities about this, there's still things that are not known for sure;but since I wrote my story there has been some further development in terms of the information available. We now know that the Iranian, the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency has said that he took over the site only last year and that previously it had been an ammunition dump owned by the Iranian military. And I would add that further analysis of the satellite photos of this site by the I.S.I.S., a think tank in Washington DC, which has been very critical of the Iranian program, now suggests that the head of the Iranian atomic energy organization may be correct, may be honest in his statement about this. So we now see the possibility that in fact the Iranians have been telling the truth that they did not change their stance on the reporting to the I.A.E.A. about the design of a facility until they had decided that they were going to make this enrichment facility in 2008. In other words they changed their position in order to be strictly in line with their safeguards agreement and that is a very complex legal problem. But the Iranians may be on sound ground in withdrawing, saying that they withdrew from the revised commitment to inform the I.A.E.A. as soon as the decision was made and to go back to the previous commitment that they had had that they would do so only 180 days before the introduction of nuclear material. And that has, of course, as you suggested earlier, that difference has been the basis for saying that this was illicit, that this was illegal rather than in line with their safeguards agreement. CS: You've said that the main reason this story has been so botched by U.S. corporate media; and just to give a couple of examples here: Fox's Bill O'Reilly and ABCs Diane Sawyer have both suggested that this new plant was part of a nuclear weapons program. You've said that the reason that the story was originally botched was because the sources for the story were all U.S. officials, and that journalists failed to follow up on that original story. What other advice would you give to a journalist trying to tackle the Iran story? GP: Well, that's right. I mean I think that the problem is that the journalists who wrote this story in the print media, certainly, were relying on the briefing that they got, and not really going back and checking to see if the account that they were given was really the only possible way that this could be; that the story could be constructed and actually it's consistent with the known facts or whether it makes sense or not. And I think that, you know, had they waited a little bit, or at least gone back to check on this they would have seen that further filling in of the facts would suggest that it was a much more ambiguous situation, that in fact U.S. intelligence did not know for sure that this was an enrichment facility. They had indications, they had hints that it might be in recent months, but they were not prepared to go public precisely because they did not really know for sure until the Iranians told the I.A.E.A. And furthermore, of course, there was the legal angle of this is much more complex than was suggested by the illicit charge. CS: I'd like to point out that writers such as Cyrus Safdari and Scott Ritter, and others, in addition to you, have been challenging the official story and what has become the corporate media's story, too. We've been speaking with historian and journalist Gareth Porter. His latest story, "U.S. Story on Iran Nuke Facility Doesn't Add Up," is available from Inter Press Service at IPSnews.net. Gareth Porter, thanks again for joining us today on CounterSpin! GP: My pleasure. Thanks a lot. CHRISTOPHER MARTIN CounterSpin: Community activist group ACORN has been a target of the right for some time now, and that campaign has ramped up in the past few weeks. Two conservative activists went undercover posing as a pimp and a prostitute in order to embarrass staff workers at local offices of the group. That stunt, of course, has received national exposure; it's led Congress to quickly vote on limiting the group's federal funding, and it's caused some big media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post to admit, in one form or another, that they haven't paid enough attention to the right wing's complaints about ACORN. Looking at the right's current crusade against ACORN, it pays to remember that all of this didn't start two months ago. The right's war goes back some time, and contrary to the mythology promoted by the likes of Glenn Beck on Fox, accusations against the group have been picked up by the mainstream media. Joining us now to talk about that history is Christopher Martin. He's a professor of journalism at the University of Northern Iowa and co-author of a new report on ACORN and the media. Christopher Martin, welcome back to CounterSpin. Christopher Martin: Thanks, it's nice to talk to you. CS: Now, it's been reported that one of these undercover conservative activists was motivated by the group's defense of homeowners facing foreclosure, which tells you quite a bit about where he's coming from. Your study found that the main storyline on ACORN in the mainstream media was voter fraud, but that conservatives have been pushing that into the mainstream media but they've also been using that as a sort of a proxy; that the behind-the-scenes they've been concerned about other aspects of ACORN well before October 2008. Where did this story come from, originally? CM: The efforts against ACORN have been around for years. We looked at all the reports on ACORN from fifteen mainstream media organizations from 2007�2008 and found that the story on ACORN was emanating from who we called opinion entrepreneurs, which are conservative Republican operatives, oftentimes bloggers, and then gets filtered up through the conservative media, like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, Lou Dobbs of CNN including, and works its way up into the mainstream media. CS: And the overwhelming storyline that you found was voter fraud in the ACORN—culpability in that? CM: Yeah, the suggestion was that ACORN was doing voter fraud, and that became a huge story in October of 2008. It actually was one of the most dominant stories, and I actually think that if the economy hadn't surfaced as a story it might have been even more influential in the election but what we found out was that, well first of all, voter fraud is actually a misnomer, it was actually allegations of voter registration problems, so.... And what ACORN was doing—and one of the many things that wasn't fact checked by the press—is that ACORN was actually passing those fraudulent registrations back into the county boards of election as they're required to do by law. Organizations just can't selectively decide to submit some registrations and not others and they actually flagged them and said we think these are bad registrations and so that's what they're required to do, but in more than 80 percent of the stories we looked at the mainstream new media organizations did not mention that, that ACORN was actually doing that, and they're required to do that by law. CS: You mentioned October, and that was when the ACORN coverage really exploded. We had this debate with John McCain and Barack Obama where McCain was quoted saying that ACORN was on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history and maybe destroying the fabric of democracy. The rhetoric was kind of overwhelming, and it wasn't just voter fraud. When you look at the frames that you selected, how ACORN is talked about in these stories, the positive frames versus the negative frames, overwhelmingly if you paid attention to the media, you heard bad stories about this community activist group. CM: Exactly, most of the, over 2007�2008, most of the stories were about voter fraud, or those allegations, but there were also accusations that public funds were being funneled to ACORN, gross overstatements that billions of dollars were going directly to ACORN with the stimulus bill, and that was completely untrue. There were stories that ACORN is a front for registering Democrats, and it turns out that ACORN registers anyone regardless of party, as we just talked about. But actually that gets to some of the reason and motivation for Republicans not liking ACORN is that they do register and have very effectively registered people in urban areas who are more likely to vote Democrat. So that's actually one of the reasons they really don't like ACORN. CS: You pointed out that some of the stories were pushed initially by these shadowy business groups like the Consumer Rights League and the Employment Policies Institute, groups that aren't identified in the media as being behind this at all. But clearly they're not motivated by voter registration, there's something else, they've got more skin in the game than that? CM: Exactly, voter registration is one thing that the Republicans don't like about ACORN but business groups have not liked ACORN for many years because ACORN does other things like support minimum wage laws, increasing the minimum wage, and also working for living wage laws. And so businesses that employ people at low wage jobs like restaurants and organizations have paid money to astroturf lobbying organizations like Berman and Company in Washington, D.C. that then sets up websites and sets up bloggers that are constantly trying to tear down ACORN, usually with plenty of mistruths in those allegations. CS: It wasn't just the right-wing media that was pushing this stuff, once it got into Fox and into talk radio you have quite a bit about CNN, for example, where some of the most irresponsible reporting was actually happening on CNN which is not usually considered part of that right-wing media machine. CM: Well, it's interesting, Lou Dobbs was just as conservative as Fox news, Glenn Beck used to be on CNN, and he actually went over to Fox where he probably fits a little bit better. But the mainstream organizations performed oftentimes just as badly on this story as the conservative media, and actually what this whole study of ACORN in two years' worth of coverage suggests is that the allegations that there's a left-wing or liberal mainstream media just doesn't hold up. In fact they were taking the same narrative frames from the conservative media and ultimately, going back further, in their lineage came from Republican operatives and business groups, they took those same frames and actually put them in the mainstream media with little or no fact checking. So that's not a liberal media, that actually a rather careless media, and one that sounds very conservative. CS: There was something that we were struck by in looking at the report and subsequent to the report some of the reactions of the big papers. The Washington Post and the New York Times in particular, they've now said, I guess we aren't paying enough attention to what Glenn Beck is worrying about and maybe in the case of the New York Times we'll assign an editor to monitor opinion media to do this. So it does seem like on this story and on others certainly that the "mainstream" media have an opening for the conservative media to kind of funnel their stories directly into the mainstream. CM: Yeah, someone should be telling the mainstream media, the Post and the New York Times, that they've already been taking their story and been paying attention to them whether they've been cognizant of it or not. They've actually been doing their story for them. But in this most recent story, I mean, if you consider the background of it, and I look at it from kind of a journalist's eyes, I teach journalism, you know we had selectively edited videos by an avowed conservative videographer who used questionable hidden camera methods and then posted them to a partisan website and then it was hyped by the same conservative media that's been crying wolf about ACORN for years. I mean from my perspective, I think you need to take a step back and say let's check this out, let's take a little bit of time and get it right, rather than what Glenn Beck was suggesting was that you rush to it immediately, which was exactly what he did on Fox news. CS: We've been speaking with Christopher Martin. He's a professor of journalism at the University of Northern Iowa and he's co-author of the report: "Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong." You can find that study at MediaCrit.com. Christopher Martin, thanks for joining us this week on CounterSpin!. CM: Thank you.--> LINKS: --"U.S. Story on Iran Nuke Facility Doesn't Add Up," by Gareth Porter (CounterPunch, 9/30/09) --"Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong," by Christopher Martin and Peter Dreier

Joseph Romm on Climate Summit, Elinore Longobardi on ‘Subprime’ vs. ...

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:00:00 +0100

This week on CounterSpin: the highest-level conference yet on climate change took place this week at the UN. The press made much of the obstacles faced on the way to any international agreement -- but if the front page of the country's paper of record is saying that temperatures haven't risen in 10 years, maybe one of those obstacles is media coverage? We'll talk to Joseph Romm of Climate Progress.org Also on the show: Words mean things and the way reporters use them can shade the way we see the world. A new study published in the Columbia Journalism review looks at the way "predatory," as in the term "predatory loans," a term that puts the onus on lenders, has been eclipsed in business reporting by the term "subprime," which puts the spotlight on the borrower. We'll talk to Elinore Longobardi the author of the new study "How 'Subprime' Killed 'Predatory.'" That's coming up but first as usual we'll take a look back at recent press. � --You can’t rely on corporate media for real debate. On September 22nd the Washington Post’s dreadful “Topic A” column featured five conservative Republicans and two conservative Democrats offering media advice to Barack Obama. Republican panelists included Karl Rove, former John McCain advisor Dan Schnur, former Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush aide Ed Rogers, George W. Bush press secretary Dana Perino, and former Reagan aide Linda Chavez. Added for “balance” were Fox News liberals Lanny Davis and Douglas Schoen. USA Today’s regular ‘debate” between conservative right-wing Republican Cal Thomas and Fox News Democrat Bob Beckel featured no argument at all on September 17. The headline said it all: Time to Dig In, Not Bail Out. Thomas and Beckel agreed that now is not the time to end the war with the exchange ending with Beckel saying: “As much as my liberal instincts want us out of this war, I have to agree with you that it's time to stay and fight. The more dangerous path would be to retreat.” Thomas responded:

Among the many things I admire about you, Bob, is that you are often able to overcome your instincts when facts get in the way. Your party was once a keeper of freedom's flame when it came to engaging and defeating Communism. Now we have a new enemy. Nothing would benefit America more than to see Democrats and Republicans unite to defeat this enemy.

The thing that the conservative Thomas admires in Beckel—his inability to advocate left �positions—is the same thing corporate media look for in liberal pundits. It’s this amazing coincidence that earns democrats like Beckel, Davis and Schnur prominent positions in our national media. --Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana unveiled his long-awaited health reform proposal recently, the results of weeks of negotiations among the Senate Finance Committee's so-called "Gang of Six"--three conservative Democrats and three moderate-to-conservative Republicans. The bill does not include a public option and could end up leaving middle-income Americans paying a great deal for health insurance, according to an analysis by Think Progress. At the same time, no Republican--including those in Baucus' "Gang"--has indicated that they intend to vote for this bill. � But in some media's skewed view of things, pleasing almost no one is a good thing for legislation. USA Today's front page headline on September 17 was "Bill Seen as Step in the 'Right Direction.'" But the story itself didn't include any actual 'fans'; the source who sees it as a step in the "right direction" is Sen. Olympia Snowe, who the paper says isn't sure she'll support the bill anyway. � The same day, Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly gave a similar take, with a piece that led: "On the surface, it appears that no one is happy with Sen. Max Baucus--and that may be the best news President Obama has had in months." � What exactly is the good news? Well, beyond the objections to the bill, dismissed here as "rhetorical fireworks," Connolly explained that� "the fragile coalition of major industry leaders and interest groups central to refashioning the nation's $2.5 trillion health-care system remains intact." In fact, these "influential players" found reasons to be happy: "Most enticing was the prospect of 30 million new customers." So that is good news -- if you believe that pleasing health insurance companies is the key to passing meaningful reform of that industry. � � --Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya snuck back into his country this week, putting the Honduras story back in the news. Unfortunately, corporate media are still misreporting the story behind his ouster, relying on those who supported the coup to explain their actions. � Take the Associated Press dispatch that ran in the September 22 edition of USA Today: "The legislature ousted Zelaya after he formed an alliance with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Ch�vez and tried to alter the nation's constitution. Zelaya was arrested on orders of the Supreme Court on charges of treason for ignoring court orders against holding a referendum to extend his term. The Honduran Constitution forbids a president from trying to obtain another term in office." � Where to begin? Besides being confusing -- is an "alliance" with Hugo Ch�vez� illegal? -- this formulation repeats the baseless claim that Zelaya was seeking to illegally extend his rule, when, in reality, he sought a non-binding poll in June about whether to revise the constitution. A 'yes' vote would have led to a vote on the November ballot about convening a Constitutional Assembly to revise the Constitution, and at the same time voters would choose Zelaya's successor. So the process could not have resulted in Zelaya extending his term. The claim is simply false, and was still false the next day, when USA Today ran another AP report that said, "Zelaya was put on a plane by the military in June for trying to force a referendum to change the constitution's limit of one term for presidents." But here's the thing: Before the coup, the Associated Press seemed to know these claims were untrue. On June 26, they reported that the referendum Zelaya sought "has no legal effect: it merely asks people if they want to have a later vote on whether to convene an assembly to rewrite the constitution." If they got the story right once, readers have a right to wonder why they decided to start getting it wrong. � --New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman opened his September 19 piece with some provocative questions. "Do we owe the French and other Europeans a second look when it comes to their willingness to exercise power in today’s world? Was it really fair for some to call the French and other Europeans 'cheese-eating surrender monkeys'? Is it time to restore the French in 'French fries' at the Congressional dining room, and stop calling them 'Freedom Fries'? " Which likely provoked questions among lots of readers. Like: Is Thomas Friedman just now getting around to forgiving the French for warning the U.S. against invading Iraq?� Can he really not be bothered to use Google for 30 seconds and find out that Capitol Hill has been calling its French fries "French fries" for three years now? The answer is: No, Thomas Friedman can't be bothered to write any more carefully or thoughtfully about U.S./French relations, because that's not what he's really writing about.� What he is writing about is why nuclear power is so great, and France--which gets 80 percent of its electricity from nukes--is typically brought up by nuclear energy boosters as an example the U.S. should follow. France, according to Friedman, has, "managed to deal with all the radioactive waste issues without any problems or panics." Actually, as Harvey Wasserman points out in the September 22 CounterPunch, France has thousands of spent fuel rods piling up at its nuclear reactors, because they haven't figured out what to do with longterm waste--part of their short-term solution involves releasing radiation into the English Channel.�But, you know, if you can't look up what they call "French fries" at the U.S. Capitol, how can you be expected to know the details of a nuclear energy program on a whole other continent? � --Finally -- Listeners may have heard the news: Barack Obama's energy proposals will cost each American family $1,761. That talking point has ricocheted around the mediasphere and although it's far from true, it does serve to illustrate how this process can work. As FAIR noted on our blog on September 16th, elite media touchstone the Drudge Report ran the figure in a scary red headline that day, with a link to post on CBSNews.com. That post referred to a 'previously unreleased analysis' by the Treasury Department that listed that figure as "the upper end of the administration's estimate." More importantly, that analysis was based on a plan that bears no relationship to reality, as it called for auctioning all of�the carbon-burning permits, while the bill that passed the House auctions just 15 percent of them. Which is different. So different that CBS felt obliged to add an "update" indicating as much, though they presented the reality as the 'viewpoint' of an environmental group. � Likewise the popular-among-journalists site Politico, which had run a similar story, but then ran an actual correction, in which the writer acknowledged that the vaunted documents refer to a version of the legislation profoundly different than the one that passed, and even cited a critic's question: "Why not use the [Congressional Budget Office] analysis of the house bill? Republicans seem more than happy to use CBO when it helps their case... But CBO said that ACES [that's the current energy bill] would only cost a postage stamp a day per household...in 2020." � And that, in case you wondered, is how we arrive at the sight of Fox News' Glenn Beck on September 18th, fanning himself with an oversized $1,761 postage stamp and claiming that "buried" documents have revealed “outright lies” by a “spooky” White House. Because as regular media watchers know, being untrue is just not enough to stop a story if some in the media really want to tell it.� � Thank you very much Steve. You're listening to CounterSpin, brought to you each week by the media watchgroup F.A.I.R. I'll be giving more information about F.A.I.R. later on the program. JOSEPH ROMM, CLIMATE SUMMIT CS: The recent U.N. summit on climate change described as the highest level conference yet on the issue garnered headlines. But although U.S. president Barack Obama made strong statements about the need for action, saying our prosperity, our health, and our safety are in jeopardy, the major media take was generally somewhat downbeat, with major newspapers like USA Today underscoring the illusiveness of any international deal, and the myriad political and economic issues that hinder talks to stop warming. “The deadline is nearing and hope is fading,” the paper wrote, referring to the December conference in Copenhagen, in which they say a treaty was to be finalized. What role are media playing in informing the public about policy decisions on warming? Especially given that alongside such sober concerns, we also get a hearty mixture of climate change denialism, from the Washington Post's George Will to the various T.V. talking heads. Here to help us access some of the sorts of coverage we're seeing is Doctor Joseph Romm. He's the editor of Climate Progress a project of the Center for American Progress where he's a senior fellow, and author of Hell and High Water: Global Warming, the Solution and the Politics and What We Should Do. He joins us by phone from Washington D.C. Welcome to CounterSpin Joseph Romm. JR: Hello CS: Well what is your take away from the U.N. Summit this week? Do you think that the deadline nearing, hope-fading theme seems appropriate? JR: Well, I think people need to understand that the United States has not only done nothing for eight years, but under President Bush, we actively blocked international action. So, we haven't been able to start negotiating internationally until January 20th of this year, so, I think anyone who thought there would be a sign in deal out of Copenhagen was not really paying attention. I think the media wants to tell the story that everything is going badly because that's sort of their frame right now. But I think fundamentally things are actually going okay, the House passed a climate bill, the Senate is poised to consider it. I think Obama's speech makes clear that this remains a very high priority issue for him and that's the most important thing to pass the bill. We've seen India start to talk about making carbon reductions, we've seen China clearly saying that it is going to off of the business as usual admissions pass. Japan has announced a stronger target. There's no question that the United States is a laggard. But, I don't think that anything that's happened in the last two days is a particular surprise. CS: Well we always make the point here that public opinion shapes public policy and that media, in turn, helped shape public opinion. On this issue it matters very much that corporate media have for years now sustained a debate about warming when there really no longer is a scientific debate, and that's generated a fair amount of confusion and, perhaps, inertia. Ah, speaking of confusion then, I wanted to talk about the New York Times' September 23rd piece by Andrew Revkin, which begins:

World leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge. Building momentum for an international climate treaty where global changes have been relatively stable for a decade, and may even drop in the next few years.

Well, I know you had a reaction to it, tell us your thoughts on that. JR: I wrote at length on the blog that that statement just has no scientific validity. This decade, the decade...of the 2000s will be the hottest decade on record. In fact, it will probably be about three-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit warmer then the decade of the 1990s, which was the warmest decade on record. So, this myth that the planet has not been warming, I just think that Revkin knows better. And his notion that the next two years might actually cool down is in fact the exact reverse of a number of major peer reviewed articles that appear in the next couple years. I expect that the next decade will be the hottest decade in record, again, easily beating this decade. We've already seen by the way, that the National Oceanamic and Atmospheric Administration has said that this summer (June/July/August) the oceans were the warmest they've ever been in the hundred and fifty year temperature record. Whether your looking at the unexpectedly fast melting of the Arctic ice, the unexpectedly fast melting of the Greenland and Arctic ice sheets, or the unexpectedly fast melting of the inland glaciers, the planet is warming up, and its just going to get much hotter if we don't take action soon. CS: Revkin might say that he's reporting on people's opinions, and people's misunderstandings, and those are valid subjects, but, doesn't a reporter have a responsibility in a piece like this to be clear about what some people's opinions and what the reality is? JR: Absolutely. He's the top climate science reporter at the so-called paper-of-record. And I just think that that article was misleading, he had a line there about the recent state of relatively cool years, when in fact, every year this decade was in the top fourteen warmest years in the temperature record. So, we've been having a state of relatively hot years and its just going to get hotter. CS: Well let's talk about another piece of this because if we're talking about commercial media or corporate media, its not a conspiracy theory, its just the case that they have, big industries in many cases polluting industries as major sponsors, and that they are deluged ,these outlets, every second of the day by corporate P.R. from these industries. This may have some relevance to when you described climate progress as “the worst major media story on energy this year.” Can you tell us a little about the piece you're talking about there? JR: Well, this was the Newsweek piece, which I think the headline was: “Big Oil Goes Green for Real.” And, big oil has not gone green for real. In this country, big oil is spending a lot of money through the American petroleum institute and through companies like Exxon Mobil, to push disinformation on global warming and to block action on climate and green energy. They have been funding, not only disinformation campaigns, but these phony grassroots campaigns trying to convince members of Congress that there's some sort of uprising against creating clean energy jobs and reducing pollution. And all the polling shows the exact opposite is true. These companies are largely green-washing. They spend a tiny fraction of their funds on, so-called “green projects,” while they continue to produce the principle contributor to warming up the planet and ruining clean air and clean water. One thing is very safe to say. Big oil has not gone green yet. CS: You do site good coverage when you find it. You pointed to an Eric Pooley commentary about Exxon Mobil, that was actually on bloomberg.com. Do you think that the coverage of climate change is getting better? JR: I don't think its getting better—there's more of it. CS: Hmm JR: There is certainly some good coverage out there. I think one of the problems is that now that global warming has become a major political issue a lot of the major political reporters have started to right about it, and they don't know anything about the subject. So you get people like David Broder, the dean of the Washington moderate pundits, and those types of people writing about a subject that they don't know much about. They don't understand its importance, and so they haven't bothered to educate themselves. People can come to blogs like climateprogress.org, and others, if they want what I consider to be the unvarnished analysis. One other point—the mainstream media has downsized its science reporting staff, downsized its environmental reporting staff, is pushing more drama and personality based reporting, and fluff. So I'm afraid that if people really want to know what's going on, they're really going to have to pick and choose. CS: We've been speaking with Doctor Joseph Romm. He's the author of Hell and High Water, you can find climate progress on the web at climateprogress.org. Thank you Joseph Romm, very much, for joining us this week on CounterSpin. JR: My pleasure. ELINOR LONGOBARDI, 'SUPRIME' VS 'PREDATORY' CS: Decades ago, journalist and media critic A.J. Liebling wrote about how terms can skew a story in the minds of newspaper readers, in one instance, noting the frequency with which journalists described disputes between management and labor by employing two loaded verbs, offers and demands. As in the construction, “management officers, labor demands.”Now, as then, words matter, and the terms journalists choose to tell their stories make a difference in the way we can see those stories. That's why a new study published in the Columbia Journalism Review caught our eye. The study looks at terms journalists use to tell the story of financial collapse, how those terms have changed over time, and what those changes mean. Joining us now is the study's author, Elinore Longobardi, staff writer for The Audit, the Columbia Journalism Review's online business desk. Longobardi' study, “How Subprime killed Predatory” can be read in the September/October issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. Welcome to CounterSpin Elinor Longobardi. EL: Thank you very much for having me. CS: Well tell us about the study. What did you look at, and what did you find. EL: We at The Audit have been very analyzing the press' coverage of the recent financial crisis. And, while I was reading reams of coverage, I noticed that the term 'predatory lending' was at one point seen to be fairly common in coverage, and then, kind of, fell out of use. We did a much more systematic analysis of the coverage using news databases and found out that indeed, 'predatory lending' as a term did have a kind of hay day, between 2000 and 2003, which I think its no coincidence corresponded with a lot of regulatory activity, primarily on the part of the state, who were very concerned about predatory lending. But in 2003-2004, the federal government, spearheaded by the office of control of currency really cracked down on the states for trying to regulate on behalf of consumers. And so at around that point, uses of the term predatory lending declined significantly, and uses of the term, sub-prime started to increase and bloomed to on order of 75,000 or so by the year 2007. And what is additionally significant about this is the years 2004 or so to 2006 were really kind of the worst for predatory lending, and the subprime market as a whole ballooned and then the lending practices, the tactics used, reached their low point. And so, it was particularly tragic that the press lost sight of the larger picture just at that moment. CS: And so, could it be said that the term sub-prime supplanted or eclipsed the term predatory lending? EL: It did, it definitely did. Its not that predatory lending quite disappeared, but it became the subtext to the story when it should have been the primary story. CS: Now what's important? What's significant about that language, about those two terms and the switching from one to the other, if you will? EL: Well subprime is a very market-oriented term and it is a classification of the borrower. It doesn't say anything about lenders. And I think lenders are really what we needed to focus on here. The importance of the term predatory lending is that it injects a moral aspect into the argument, which I think is crucial. And I think often, the business press is uncomfortable with that but the fact is there's some stories that you just can't cover if you don't have that angle. CS: Well you quote a couple of definitions of predatory lending, one in The Wallstreet Journal, that states: “under predatory lending, a bank knowingly lends money to people who it knows don't qualify for loans in order to foreclose on them later and sell the property at a profit.” That puts in bold relief why choosing to use the term subprime and not predatory makes a real difference. EL: Oh definitely. And I also think its also kind of instructive that it appeared in The Wallstreet Journal, because that again, appeared during the high years of coverage when I think the national business press was really more aware of the problem, and that kind of trailed off in later years. If the national business press had continued that kind of coverage, I think we would have had a different idea of the financial crisis that's causes and its implications. CS: I think you've touched on this already, but how do changes like this come about? Why the switch, or the eclipsing of the term predatory by the term subprime? EL: I think the full explanation for that is probably beyond my can at the moment. Its a very broad topic, and I think that study of language is not really scientific in a lot of ways. But, I think what I can say about it is, subprime got a lot of support from people in powerful positions, so on Wall Street. CS: As you say, its industry friendly. EL: Its an industry friendly term, the industry definitely backed it. It didn't for obvious reasons back the term predatory lending. So in some ways, I think subprime is a safer term to use, and I think, when the crisis hit, everyone was scrambling to cover the story, and didn't have the time or take the time to understand predatory lending because subprime was kind of an alternate term. Which, while in our mind, not ideal, was accepted enough to be used by the major institutions and the press. CS: Do you think it had anything to do with the fact that journalists are quoting other sources, and that therefor, when those sources change their terminology, the press language changed. In other words, the less independent thinking, if you will, by reporters. People their talking to are using a different term now and they're just writing it down. EL: I think its true. I think they definitely follow those kinds of trends and the fact is, it takes a lot of resources and time to go beyond that. And in some cases there is just such a scramble to report on the facts that happen that that kind of fell by the wayside. CS: F.A.I.R.'s magazine Extra! recently published a study or the term 'class war,' and how it was used to describe advocates for policies that would benefit the wealthy, and how often it was used to describe the advocacy for the less well off. We found that the term was applied eighteen times as often to describe bottom-up advocacy as it was to describe top-down advocacy. What do you think these kinds of choices tell us about journalism in your case, business journalism? EL: One of the big lessons here is that the closer you look at consumers and borrowers and the more familiar you are with their situation, the more well-rounded the story's going to be. There were some local papers, some local and regional papers that did some really excellent coverage on predatory lending. The Atlanta Journal Constitution comes to mind. In the early 1990s they were on the story. I think that one of the reasons that that happened is that they were really close enough to the sources, they really saw the devastation that was going on. Something that I don't think fully filtered up to the national press until much later. And so, I think it is really important to kind of connect the ethereal world of finance, with what's going on in people's everyday lives. CS: So the journalists might be too close to the lenders, and not close enough to the borrowers. EL: I think that can happen. CS: We've been speaking with Elinor Longobardi, you can read her study, “How 'Subprime' Killed 'Predatory,'” in the September/October edition of the Columbia Journalism Review. Thanks again for joining us today on CounterSpin, Elinor Longobardi. EL: Thank you for having me.

Daniel Ellsberg and Rick Goldsmith on 'The Most Dangerous Man in America'

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:00:00 +0100

This week on CounterSpin: The Most Dangerous Man in America. That's how Henry Kissinger described whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked a top-secret study of the Vietnam War in 1971 to the NY Times and other news outlets. The publication resulted in a landmark Supreme Court decision on freedom of the press, increased pressure to end the Vietnam War and was a key factor in the resignation of Richard Nixon. A new film tells that story. This week on a special edition of CounterSpin we'll talk to Daniel Ellsberg and Rick Goldsmith, co-director of the new film "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers." LINKS: --Daniel Ellsberg --The Most Dangerous Man in America