The Orwellian Media

George Orwell did a great service to humanity with his book 1984, a parody of the Soviet state and Orwell's fears that the West would go down the same path into totalitarianism.

We live in a society where the elites, especially the media, seem intent on achieving a 1984 reality. Here is a post by Paul Krugman on the zombie-like "truths" that the media foist on their readership:

Legends Of The Rentiers

I feel Dean Baker’s pain. Dean is exercised over an NPR report which says that Argentina is suffering from its 2001 default — a claim that is totally at odds with the evidence. Argentina actually did very well by thumbing its nose at creditors.

This isn’t the only case where news organizations consistently report as truth something that didn’t happen, while failing to report what did. Another one that comes to mind is the California electricity crisis of 2001-2002. As some readers may recall, that crisis was caused by market manipulation — and that’s not a hypothesis, Enron traders were caught on tape telling plants to shut down to create artificial shortages. Yet “news analyses” published after the whole thing was revealed would often tell readers that excessive environmental regulation and Nimbyism caused the crisis, with nary a mention of the deliberate creation of shortages.

And as you’ll notice, in both cases the imaginary history just happened to be one more comfortable to status quo interests.

I don’t want to go all Chomsky here, but this sort of thing really can radicalize you.

What makes this particularly disgusting is that the media are paid to ferret out "the truth" and to spend time distilling the truth through "journalistic analysis". But, instead, they repeat the mantras of our 1% overlords. For this they expect to get paid?

No wonder there are tens of thousands marching day after day in the Occupy XYZ movement. Enough with the lies! Enough with the manipulation by the 1% elites. Enough with buying and selling politicians and the corruption of money in democracy.

Media Manipulation

You can't believe what you read. Even the "newspaper of record" in the US, the NY Times, manipulates "the news" to present something other than the facts.

Here is a post by Yves Smith in her Naked Capitalism blog:

Curious Omissions from a New York Times Story on a Foreclosure Auction Protest

As readers may know, we’ve reported from time to time on efforts by community members to block specific foreclosure auctions, since this is a sign of how citizens place much less stock in the credibility of banks and legal procedures than they once did.

So we took interest in a report in the New York Times on an effort to block a foreclosure auction in Brooklyn that resulted in 9 arrests. The article made much of the fact that the protestors sang to disrupt the auction. Key extracts:

It was just after 3 p.m. Thursday in a second-floor courtroom in Brooklyn when an auctioneer announced to a crowd of about 60 people that she would begin selling foreclosed properties…..

The interruption in business as usual at the State Supreme Court building on Adams Street was staged by Organizing for Occupation, a coalition of housing advocacy groups that recently helped halt the eviction of an 82-year-old woman in Bedford-Stuyvesant in a foreclosure proceeding that the woman and her supporters said resulted unjustly from a subprime loan…

Just before 3:30, court officers announced that anyone who did not clear the courtroom would be arrested. Most of the crowd got up and departed, but about 10 singers remained. A moment later, they emerged from the courtroom into a corridor, cuffed, escorted by court officers and still singing…

Inside, spectators and would-be bidders sat on wooden benches in a hallway as they waited for the auction to resume. Among them was Michael Nicholas, 50, from Ridgewood, Queens, who said that he had been attending foreclosure auctions in Brooklyn for a decade but had never before witnessed a choir take over the courtroom.

“I was expecting the auction to begin,” he said. “Then instead I got the chorus line.”

So the protest is made to seem entertaining, harmless (if annoying to people who wanted to conduct business), and quixotic. After all, the protestors were arrested and nothing got done, right?

If you read the more colorfully written account of the same incident at the Village Voice, you’ll see the Times made some crucial omissions. The first is that the foreclosure was under dispute and may have been proceeding improperly:

Morales said that, though negotiations are reportedly on-going between Ward, the man who bought her house, the bank who sold it to him, and the state Attorney General’s office, Ms. Ward is still facing eviction. Last Tuesday, the day before a planned meeting of these parties, the current “alleged” landlord served Ms. Ward with another eviction notice, breaking the lock on her front door to get in and post it. Morales called for a renewed effort towards Ms. Ward’s “eviction patrol.”

The Voice also reports that the protest did succeed in preventing the foreclosure on Thursday. It ins’t clear whether it will be rescheduled to tomorrow, delayed further, or whether the court will decide to seek another resolution. But the effort in the courtroom did achieve a measure of success, while the Times account would lead you to believe otherwise. It’s sort of sad to see that the need to watch out for the interests of the Masters of the Universe has reached the New York Times metro desk.

When the news media is more loyal to corporate interests than they are to the truth, then they are useless and it is time for newspapers to disappear. I find it funny that newspapers all across America complain that they are losing readership. They need to look at how they have sold their readership to their advertisers and then went one step further, they sold truth down the river. They have shown themselves willing to report propaganda and pretend that it is "the news". They deserve to go belly up.

How Big Corporate Media Utterly Fails the Public

Newspapers originated as partisan broadsheets full of pointed political views. They advocated. But by the 20th century newspapers fell into the hands of big corporations that were selling fish wrap (i.e. the paper was the medium of advertisers and they didn't want to upset readers, so toned down vague-and-fuzzy reporting replaced any serious opinion and investigative journalism). Papers stopped being intellectually challenging and because useful onto fish vendors to wrap the fish they sold or for homeowners to line the bottom of their bird cages to catch bird droppings.

Here is a post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog making this point for the umpteenth time:

Post Does the Old He Said/She Said on Perry Energy Plan

Texas Governor Rick Perry announced an energy program yesterday that involved drilling everywhere in sight. According to the Post article on the plan, Perry claimed that his plan would create 1 million jobs. In classic he said/she said style the Post told readers:

"Perry predicted his energy plan would create more than 1 million new jobs. Weiss [a researcher at the Center for American Progress] sharply disagrees."

This is utterly useless information for readers. A Washington Post reporter should have the time to talk to some experts on this issue and/or read some of the key articles. Post readers do not have the time. Simply reporting opposing claims that readers have no ability to access is a pointless exercise. Trees died for nothing.

(Perry's claim is nonsense -- it is unlikely that it would in the long-run lead to even 100,000 additional jobs [0.07 percent of total employment]. The short-run effect would be considerably less.)

Is there any surprise in the fact that newspaper readership is plummeting and newspapers will go extinct? Why pay for pablum like this?

And... is there any surprise that major political parties have quietly fallen into the hands of big corporate lobbyists? With no "press" to challenge the politicians, most Americans have no idea that their government has been stolen from them. They have no idea that the traditional electoral exercise is a farce. The decisions of what laws will be passed -- indeed, even the writing of the bills -- has passed into the hands of big corporations.

The whole world of "American politics" is a kabuki dance of smoke-and-mirrors with lots of pretended outrage and threats when in fact all the deals have been quietly done behind locked doors as money passes hands to fund politicians and their "campaigns" (think John Edwards with his million dollar slush fund to hide Rielle Hunter and his illegitimate "love child", this was a "campaign donation" from billionaire heiress "Bunny" Mellon).

The Political Program of the Bottom 99%

Here is an excellent statement from a disenchanged 2008 Obama supporter who has given up on Obama and joined the Occupy Wall Street movement:

In October 2008, my wife and I loaded our 6-month-old baby into her car seat and drove six hours to Reno. As 40-something new parents, a weekend road trip to walk precincts for a presidential candidate was not convenient or easy. But when we arrived at the staging ground for volunteers, we were rewarded by an inspiring sight: The line to sign in snaked through a parking lot the length of two football fields. Barack Obama's candidacy had inspired a lot of people to participate in their democracy.

What I most liked about Obama was the independence and intelligence reflected in his position, taken five years earlier when it was not politically expedient, to oppose the Iraq invasion plans well before they had been put into motion. In 2008, as a terrifying financial crisis was unfolding, Obama seemed to have the combination of sound judgment and courage that our country needed in the White House. It seemed reasonable to hope that he might become an FDR-for-our-time who would hold people accountable and get us back on a path toward shared prosperity.

But three years later, not one executive from a major firm involved in the 2008 disaster has been prosecuted. On the contrary, Obama hailed the CEO of the firm that most personified the abuses -- Goldman Sachs -- as a "savvy businessman." But the rest of us continue to be punished for their crimes. We are losing homes, watching our retirements vaporize and struggling with long-term unemployment.

And those least responsible, the young, will ultimately pay the most.

To lead us forward, Obama also needed to explain to the country how wealth and power had become more and more concentrated over several decades and how that trend had reached a critical point at which it was cannibalizing our economy and corrupting our democracy. He needed to put forth a vision for how we would take our country back from the 1 percent that has only continued to amass wealth and power. But such leadership never materialized.

So a few weeks ago, my wife, daughter and I set out on another civic journey. This time the little one was riding her trike as we walked to a park in our neighborhood where about 80 people came together to form Occupy San Jose, a local affiliate of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

There is more. Read the whole article.

The mass media claims that these protesters have "no program" and just a bunch disorganized ex-hippies and college students. False. That is media, owned and operated by the top 1%, making sure that their readers get a distortion instead of the truth, a distortion that will turn them off and insulate them from any meaningful participation in a democratic movement to regain control by the bottom 99%.

Matt Taibbi on "Occupy Wall Street"

Here is a journalist with his finger on the pulse of Wall Street corruption, Matt Taibbi, who has now turned his attention to the demonstrators. He is interviewed by Keith Olbermann:



Both Taibbi and Olbermann note the very suspicious "lack of coverage" for this movement given the extensive coverage of the "Tea Party" where a group of 20 would get national coverage. Here are demonstrations that have lasted for over 20 days with thousands attending, a large number of unions voting support, and 700 arrested on Saturday and some 30 arrested last week. And almost no coverage in the press. Extremely strange... unless you realize that the media is bought and sold -- like the politicians -- to sell the message of the ultra-rich, the message of more tax cuts, or a "tax burden", of a need to remove services and entitlements from the bottom 90%, the incessant demand that government be shrunk to the point where it can be "strangled in a bath tub".

That Insignificant, Ignored Protest in NY

The major media has studiously ignored Occupy Wall Street. If they write anything about it, they report it to be crazies and diehards, a hundred at most, who persist in hanging out in the Wall Street area, aimless, pointless.

Funny... that "less than 100" resulted in over 700 being arrested while thousands stormed the Brooklyn Bridge. At least the UK's Guardian newspaper is reporting what is happening in the US:

More than 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday evening during a march by anti-Wall Street protesters who have been occupying a downtown Manhattan square for two weeks.

The group, called Occupy Wall Street, has been protesting against the finance industry and other perceived social ills by camping out in Zuccotti park in New York.

During the afternoon a long line of protesters numbering several thousand snaked through the streets towards the landmark bridge across the East River with the aim of ending at a Brooklyn park.

However, during the march across the bridge groups of protesters sat down or strayed into the road from the pedestrian pathway. They were then arrested in large numbers by officers who were part of a heavy police presence shepherding the march along its path.

Will the major media in the US recognize this event? Will they continue to report it as a handful of odd mentally unstable youth with no political agenda? Will it take tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands mobilized and seizing major urban centres before the US media acknowledges that there is a public movement afoot in the US that is neither right nor left, but a mobilized citizenry who is fed up with the lies of the media and the fact that Wall Street has bought the politicians and control the news and police and the politicians?

By the way... this protest seems to have been carefully manipulated by the police so that it could arrest in bulk the whole crowd. Yet again, proof that the police and the politicians are conspiring to suppress the democratic impulse by prevent popular demonstrations:

But others said the sit-down protest appeared to happen only after the protesters were deliberately blocked off by police after actually being allowed onto the roadway. "They met the police line and ended up being arrested one by one," said Damon Eris, another protester.

The march ended in chaotic scenes with police buses driving up the bridge to be filled with arrested marchers. The packed buses then drove off to central booking. Meanwhile, other marchers waited at the bottom of the bridge's Manhattan side and cheered as some released protesters, or those who had escaped being blocked off, came back down. "Let them go! Let them go!" was a frequent chant.

From an Associated Press report:

More than 700 protesters demonstrating against corporate greed, global warming and social inequality, among other grievances, were arrested Saturday after they swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge and shut down a lane of traffic for several hours in a tense confrontation with police.

...

Some of the protesters said they were lured onto the roadway by police, or they didn't hear the calls from authorities to head to the pedestrian walkway. Police said no one was tricked into being arrested, and those in the back of the group who couldn't hear were allowed to leave.

...

Elsewhere in the U.S. on Saturday, protesters assembled in Albuquerque, N.M., Boston and Los Angeles to express their solidarity with the movement in New York, though their demands remain unclear. Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have been camped in Zuccotti Park and have clashed with police on earlier occasions. Mostly, the protests have been peaceful, and the movement has shown no signs of losing steam. Celebrities including Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon made recent stops to encourage the group.

This is going to blow up into a major social movement because the heavy-handedness of "the authorities". The police and the politicians are showing themselves to be puppets of Wall Street and the big money that for too long has controlled everything.

This is the Arab Spring come to America.

How the Whole Truth Never Makes it into what the Press Publishes

Journalism specializes in printing part of the news. The part that the elites want you to hear so they can shape your actions to what they want. Here is a post from Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog that lays out how truth is doled out in dollops:

If Millennials Do Worse Than Their Parents, It Will Be Because Bill Gates' Kids Have All the Money

The Washington Post had a column by a millennial columnist complaining about the lack of opportunity. It is striking that the column never once mentioned income inequality.

There is no doubt that millennials will on average be far wealthier than their parents. Output per hour has roughly doubled over the last three decades, meaning that the real wage could be almost twice as high today as it was in 1980. Insofar as the typical millennial is not seeing the benefits of this productivity growth it is due to the fact that so much income has been redistributed upwards, not the result of any generational dynamics.

Here's a bit from Alexandra Petri's Washington Post opinion piece:

Youth unemployment is 18 percent — double the overall rate. The polls teetered, then tilted. Will your standard of living be better than your parents’? Probably not. Is the American Dream still in reach? Define dream.

What’s worse is that no one seems to realize that we’ve noticed.

“The kids are all right,” they say. “Let’s tweet them a bone. They love it when you tweet.”

It’s enough to give a self-respecting millennial a headache.

Right now, there are at least 100 people Occupying Wall Street. It’s a protest movement. We are the 99 percent who will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent, they say.

They have a nice Web site. They want to find some sort of solution as a group. They also don’t have jobs — or a real plan.

That’s basically millennials in a nutshell.

What bugs me is that she puts down the Occupy Wall Street protest as "a hundred kids". Here's a picture of what "a hundred kids" looks like when reported by a UK newspaper, The Daily Mail with the title "Thousands of protesters descend on Manhattan as police gear up for a weekend of mayhem... but is this the start of a middle class uprising?":


Only the mainstream press in the US continues to "report" this as a handful of disorganized malcontents who have "no message" and aren't worthy of any media attention.

Here is the only thing close to

• a proper mainstream press appraisal of what is going on with this demonstration by Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC
and
• this follow-up interview by O'Donnell with Michael Moore.

Stories Fumbled and Lost by US Media

Here is Keith Olbermann investigating the strange fact that US media seems to not have noticed the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations:

Dean Baker gives Kudos for a Media Outlet that Gets the News Right

This is rare. Here is Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog toasting the AP news service for getting a story right:

AP Gets It Right! The Recession Caused the Deficit

AP did what news organizations are supposed to do; it checked the numbers and showed that politicians yelling about "out of control spending," don't know what they are talking about or are making things up. Its FACT CHECK, printed in the NYT, showed that the deficit exploded because of the recession. There was no issue of out of control spending prior to the increases for programs like unemployment insurance and other spending needed to counteract the effect of the downturn. AP gets an "A" for this one.

Now, if only the other news media picked up on this story maybe Americans could get out of the grips of the deadly Republican idiocy about deficits and debts being "the #1 problem" in the US and get back to the real problem: unemployment!

Understanding Economics

One of the fruitless tasks of Dean Baker on his Beat the Press blog is to point out the confusions and ignorance of the media. Here is yet another example:

National Public Radio reporters need to do a bit more homework before they do pieces on the economy. Today they had a piece on a Precision Iron Works, a specialty steel company. The piece told listeners that Precision relies on highly skilled workers. It also told us that it has a hard time finding new workers.

"finding workers like him [the experienced worker interviewed in the piece] is difficult. For months, the company has been advertising several job openings without much success. The company says there's not much interest in gritty, physically demanding work."

But the main point of the story is tell listeners how government regulations are impeding the growth of business. The piece continues:

"And staffing is just one of many challenges facing Precision Iron Works as it tries to double its revenues from about $10 million to $20 million a year.

A state law that's been on the books for more than a half-century requires Washington companies to pay their workers a prevailing wage — or an hourly rate set by the government — on state-funded projects.

But as Precision's Leighton explains, companies in states like Idaho and Utah, which don't have prevailing wage laws, can pay their workers less.

'It puts us at such a disadvantage,' he says. 'There could be a project right out on our backdoor out here that I can't get because a company in Utah gets such a competitive advantage by not having to pay these rates.'"

Okay, now let's just review what we have been told. Precision Iron Works "has been advertising several job openings without much success." This would imply that the wage it is offering is too low. Higher wages attract more workers [econ 101]. If Precision Iron Works can't get workers, then it needs to offer higher wages.

But then the piece tells us that the real problem is that an outdated Washington state law requires Precision Iron to pay higher wages than its competitors. Okay, but the piece just told us that the market is telling Precision Iron that it has to pay higher wages than it is already paying.

This means that it is not the law that is requiring Precision Iron to pay higher wages, it is the market. If the piece's assertion that Precision Iron can't attract workers is true, then it's claim that the government regulation is hurting business is false.

The tragedy is that "journalism" has lost its way. It is now entertainment. Newspapers originated a broadsheets that aligned with political factions and gave a very opinionated view of critical civic issues. These days, newspapers are losing market share because they have become "fishwrap", i.e. they are sold as carriers of advertisements and the publishers really have no care about content, journalism, or truth. So long as it is "interesting" and "entertaining" enough get enough readers to attract advertisers, the publisher is happy.

If you want real analysis you are left with magazines and books and even magazines are going the way of newspapers as "fishwrap".

Adam Smith's Invisible Hand

Dean Baker has found yet another invisible hand in the market of ideas with this post on his Beat the Press blog:

Erskine Bowles Gets $350,000 a Year from Morgan Stanley

For some reason the media never find room to mention the fact that Erskine Bowles is a director of Wall Street investment bank Morgan Stanley (an otherwise bankrupt beneficiary of the bailout). Bowles was a co-chair of President Obama's deficit commission and is now apparently one of the people whose name is being mentioned as a possible successor to Timothy Geithner if he were to resign as Treasury Secretary.

If Bowles was getting $350,000 a year from the United Auto Workers it seems likely that it would be mentioned in news reports. It's not clear why the media do not think his ties to a major Wall Street bank are relevant.

Call me a cynic, but I think people sing for their supper, I suspect Bowles' "advice" on the Debt Commission and as an advisor to Obama probably went like this: "Sir, do this-and-this-and-not-that to help our friends [the ultra-rich]". This was a wonderfully "invisible hand" that helps the rich in magical ways inside Washington and is amazingly effective at ensuring that government actions surprisingly favour the ultra-rich.

I find it funny that Dean Baker can spot the obvious while the rest of the "journalists" covering Washington don't see this kind of stuff.

Here's another example from another post by Baker:

This one is almost too painful to write about. The Post tells us that:

"Even some of the recent bright spots in the global economy are starting to dull. German economic growth, for example, appears to be slowing. Germany exports heavily to the European nations that are experiencing a debt crisis."

Is there anything in the world that was more predictable? Why on earth didn't the people making policy at the ECB see this?

Isn't that surprising! When you choke people to death, they don't hop up and ask you what they can do for you next.

Germany has been "reluctant" to help cover the bonds that are running up in price because of the threat of default by Greece and the other PIIGS. So these economies are being forced (choked) by Germany into austerity which cuts their GDP. Now, isn't it surprising that as they are gasping for air (austerity), they don't jump up and ask what more they can do (suddenly show a GDP growth spurt that demands more of your exports)? The world is a complex and nuanced place where only the subtlest minds -- Dean Baker -- can gaze through the murk and see these obscured truths.

I'm thinking the world wouldn't be so mysterious, dark, and unintelligible if the media presented real facts rather than their usual song and dance show, their magician moves, their propaganda for the rich.

Everybody should read the Beat the Press blog to discover just how beaten up they are by a press that only half covers "the story".

Murdoch & His Legacy

From a post by Russ Baker on the AlterNet blog:

What Rupert Murdoch Means For You Personally

Rupert Murdoch has had a profound influence on the state of journalism today. It’s a kind of tribute, in some sense, that the general coverage of his current troubles has reflected the detrimental effect of his influence over the years. Right now, the media, by and large, are focusing on tawdry “police blotter” acts of the very sort that have historically informed Murdoch’s own tabloid sensibility, while the bigger picture gets short shrift.

...

Here are twelve “take-away” points that are being obscured in the daily rush of revelations, and the related specialized coverage (his wife’s wardrobe and demeanor, the effect on his company’s stock price, etc.):

He has transformed world politics for the worse: It was George W. Bush’s first cousin(John Ellis), working as head of Murdoch’s Fox News election night “decision desk,” who, during the Florida voting uncertainties, called the election for Bush and set off a chain reaction from other media. The eight Bush years that followed, and all that came with them, can in this respect be laid at Murdoch’s feet. ...

He has ridiculed and raised doubts about global catastrophes, and about science itself, while elevating absurd theories and hyping minor matters. ...

He has undermined liberty: His outlets led the drumbeat for restriction or elimination of certain fundamental rights, including those under the US Fourth Amendment, while at the same time supporting unrestrained wiretapping, the harsh treatment of suspects who may have done nothing wrong, and fueling panic justifying the build-up of the national surveillance state.

He has turned the public against the press. By the generally inferior product produced, with a few exceptions, by the majority of the news outlets he controls and the tawdry methods sponsored by many of them, he has eroded the public’s confidence in media in general, tarnishing its belief even in those outfits whose work deserves to be taken seriously. He has also used his outlets to convince the public that other, more conscientious news organizations are ideologically suspect and biased.

He has simultaneously propagandized for “the law” and compromised it. Murdoch properties are the leading hagiographers of law enforcement and the military—while at the same time routinely assailing the patriotism of those who advocate for civil and privacy rights, who question wars, and so forth. Meanwhile, as shown by the unfolding UK drama, Murdoch himself stands accused of compromising the law enforcement establishment—and not just in that country. ...

Read the whole post. It is well worth your time.

Murdoch isn't the only evil influence on journalism. The infamous yellow press of the press barons Pulitzer and Heast go back to the latter part of the 19th century. The world will survive Murdoch like it has survived Hitler, Mao, and Stalin. But Murdoch is a blight on history. He did nothing positive in his life.

Hiding the Truth in Plain Sight

Here's another post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog pointing out how the media "reports" facts in a way that people are "informed" but have no way of understanding what they are told. They are given numbers, but unless you are an expert, the number has no context so you really don't know what it means:

Why Can't the Post Use Percentages in Discussing Proposed Cuts to the Military?

In a relatively lengthy article discussing potential cuts to the military budget, the Post never once told readers what baseline projected spending is, nor what the cuts would be as a share of baseline spending. The Post told readers that the military had prepared for cuts of $400 billion over the next 12 years, but now it seems possible that the cuts could be as large as $800 billion.

Wow! Those are really big numbers. And no responsible newspaper would ever print them without giving its readers some context, since virtually none of them will have any ability to assign meaning to these numbers.

The baseline budget shows that the government will spend approximately $9.5 trillion on the military. (This does not count veterans benefits and some other costs associated with maintaining the Defense Department.) The $400 billion in cuts would imply a reduction in the budget of a bit more than 4 percent. If the cuts reach $800 billion then the cuts would be a bit over 8 percent of the budget.

By comparison, the Gang of Six have proposed a reduction in the cost of living adjustment for Social Security that will reduce average benefits by close to 6 percent. The largest cuts would hit the oldest beneficiaries with beneficiaries in their 90s seeing benefit reductions of close to 9.0 percent.

Baker is hinting that the media doesn't use percentages for the same reason why a magician doesn't stop and show you how he is doing his sleight of hand. They really don't want you to understand. The "news" doesn't want you to realize that these "big" cuts in the military are smaller than the cuts in social programs. This is the way you can have "transparent" government with an electorate that has no clue of what's going on. The press leaves everybody like rubes at the carnival amazed at all the hoopla and excitement but without understanding anything. But having their pockets picked by the carnies who have set up the "transparent" system.

Tweaking the Tail of the Media Lion

Here is a post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog where he makes fun of the idiocy that passes for "serious journalism" in America's media:

Does the Post Have Polls Showing Centrists Want Cuts to Social Security and Medicare?

If so, they really should share them with readers. The Post told readers that Obama's decision to propose raising the age of Medicare eligibility to 67 and to cut Social Security is a way to appeal to centrist voters. This is difficult to understand since every poll done on this issue shows that people across the political spectrum, including Tea Party Republicans, overwhelmingly oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The Post either has some polls that no one else knows about or it's just making things up. (BTP reports, you decide.)

It is certainly true that many Wall Street types (e.g. Peter Peterson and Erskine Bowles) would like to see cuts to Social Security and Medicare. However, these people are important because of the money that they can give to President Obama re-election campaign, not the voters they represent.

This piece also identifies Third Way as a "left-leaning group." Third way has been prominent in pushing for large cuts to the budget, including cuts to Social Security and Medicare. This is not a position that would ordinarily be identified as left-leaning.

Sadly most readers don't realize they are being manipulated. They assume that the newspapers have hired sober, serious analytical thinkers who have judiciously looked at all sides of an issue and provide a neutral accounting. That just ain't so.

I have no sympathy for the shrinking newspaper business. They sell fishwrap and justifiably they are a dying business. They shouldn't be surprised that readers are turning away. If the owners of the media want to run a propaganda arm of some right wing political party, they should publish a political paper, not a newspaper. The news should be unbiased, but that doesn't mean "he said, she said" journalism. It should give the facts and provide the context along with analysis from various political points of view so that readers have the necessary information to make their own informed decisions.

Journalism and Politics

Here is a key bit from a post by the economist Tim Harford on his blog:

If price is not the issue, then what we are really concerned about is that newspaper readers get access to informative news about the key issues of the day – the kind of thing upon which our democracy depends. But it is foolish to expect this from competition alone. Sadly, we do not value information about how to vote nearly as much as information about which car to buy. We probably value shots of celebs in swimwear more than either.

True, competition can encourage certain kinds of quality journalism. For instance, the economists Jesse Shapiro and Matthew Gentzkow have pointed out that certain stories – of abuses by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib, for instance – are promoted by media pluralism. CBS had the story and sat on it at the request of the US government (the story was said to be dangerous to US hostages) before broadcasting after it became clear that the story would emerge in The New Yorker.

But competition also promotes gutter journalism and it probably promotes opinionated journalism, too. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s hugely influential TV news channel, seems to have become popular by staking out ground as the source of right-wing rabble-rousing, and MSNBC has gained ground as it has moved to the left. Competitive markets give people what they want rather than what is good for them.

Gentzkow and Shapiro have studied this question in the US. Using an objective (if imperfect) measure of bias, they found that newspapers closely match the political biases of their potential readers, as measured by votes cast in the 2004 presidential election, and by the source of campaign contributions to each party. No doubt the causation runs both ways, but one striking result is that the proprietor’s identity seems to make no difference to the bias. The media barons tell us what we wish to hear.

The most disturbing aspect of the phone-hacking scandal, it seems to me, is the reluctance of politicians to challenge Murdoch’s empire, and in particular its cosy relationship with the police. If more competition dispels that sense of fear in future, it will be all to the good. But don’t expect every journalist to suddenly start working on the next Watergate.

I worry most about the media acting as a microphone for fanatics. Seems to me the 1920s & 30s were an era where fanatics came to power through their control of the media. That led to WWII and a huge loss of life and a real setback for civilization. Currently we are 20 years into a war of "ideas" from fanatical fundamentalist Muslim terrorists (and on a smaller scale, but still very deadly, from fundamentalist Christian terrorists, witness Norway's mass killings).

I don't have any solutions, but I was thinking this morning of how we now put warning labels on cigarette packages along with graphic pictures to shock people. I'm thinking we probably should require by law that similar signs be put up on religious buildings warning people that the ideas propagated by the religious -- especially the fundamentalists -- can be very hazardous to their health, but even more hazardous to the innocent victims of their cruel "religious" acts.

OK, I know that 99% of religious people are reasonable, gentle, moral people, but there is something crazy at the heart of religion and it needs to be tamed. I don't know how, but we should at least talk about it. Ultimately you can't stop the determined crazy person, but we should find techniques to limit their ability to spew hate-filled speech. The media is a good place to start. I find Fox "News" to be offensive. I can't link any killings to their crazy distortion of reality, but I worry that they are spreading the seeds of fanaticism.

Again, I have no answers. Maybe the only answer is for civilization to stagger on hoping to get to happier times when the fanatics thin out and the wider population can relax and stop worrying about madmen attacking from out of the blue over some crazed idea of "injustice" or "mandate of heaven" or whatever.

We Gotta Deal With This Hacking Problem

Here is a very clever bit of progaganda. Fox "News" is owned by Rupert Murdoch, the very guy who owns the now defunct News of the World. That publication's reporters illegally hacked into roughly 5,000 phones in the UK in order to get dirt for publication. So how does Fox "News" present this fact?



They cleverly confuse the viewer of their "news story" by putting the "hacking" at News of the World side-by-side with the fact that the Pentagon has been hacked by unknown outsiders. This creates the impression that both the Pentagon and Rupert Murdoch are victims of hacking! Sure the Pentagon has been. But it was Rupert Murdoch's reporters who were hacking into the phones of innocent victims. The above "news story" claims "we gotta deal with this hacking problem" and leaves the impression that it is News of the World that is the victim of hacking when in fact it was Rupert Murdoch's company that was the perpetrator!

They do two moves:

1. Present Murdoch as a victim of "piling on" and claim that he "took responsibility" and "acted immediately" to fix the problem. Those are bald-faced lies. He denied responsibility in this scandal which is over a decade old with thousands of victims. Over the years Murdoch has thrown one or two sacrificial lambs in to get the heat off, but when it became clear that his "reporters" had been hacking a dead girl's phone to get "news" for the tabloid and when the mailbox was full deleted messages to make room for more messages to keep the story going (while leaving the parents with the impression that their daughter was alive and updating her mailbox when in fact she was dead). This was just plain cruel, and this is the bit that created widespread revulsion in the UK and has caused these arrests of key managers in the Rupert Murdoch empire.


2. Present Murdoch as a "victim of hacking" by confusing the hacking of the Pentagon with the hacking by Murdoch employees of roughly 5,000 innocent victim's phones in the UK. This is criminality on a massive scale and Fox "News" pretends it is "old news", of limited interest, and is really "unfair" to Murdoch to blame him for how he runs his companies!

This video is presented on Fox "News" as a "news story" but it is pure propaganda being put out by a sophisticated company hoping to confuse people and get them to misunderstand what has really been happening. A real news organization tries to inform people about the facts. Fox "News" is manipulating the "news" to get their boss, Rupert Murdoch, off the hook for his crimes!

Chinese Threat

Dean Baker has a post on his Beat the Press blog that helps clarify the Chinese "threat":

China Threatens to Raise the Value of the Yuan

Yes, the United States has officially been asking (demanding?, begging?) China to raise the value of its currency against the dollar. Yet, the media continually threaten the country with the story that China may sour on the U.S. and stop buying U.S. debt if we don't get our budget deficit down.

However, if China stopped buying U.S. debt it would lead to a rise of the yuan against the dollar. This is exactly what the Obama administration has ostensibly been asking them to do.

In other words, China has no leverage in this picture. Their implicit threat is to do exactly what we supposedly want them to do. So why is the media trying to scare us?

This is a lot like a terrorist holding hostages saying "if you take another step I'll blow my brains out!" Under those circumstances, the best option is to take another step and let the terrorist finish himself off and thereby free the hostages.

What is funny -- and what Baker is pointing out -- is that "the media" is too incompetent to understand the story it is "reporting".

It Isn't Censorship, It is News "Transparency"

Classic censorship was illustrated by George Orwell in his book 1984.

That is far too crude for the 21st century. Obama's administration "shapes" the news by manipulating what can be seen or heard. Here is an example from a article by Glenn Greenwald in Salon magazine:

I want to make one point more directly. There are, broadly speaking, three categories of political "leaks": (1) ones that reflect well on the U.S. government and its allies (here's the glorious leaked story of how the U.S. got bin Laden); (2) ones that reflect poorly on the U.S. government (U.S. officials are guilty of waste, corruption, illegality); and (3) ones that reflect poorly on foreign governments the U.S. wishes to demonize (Pakistan murdered a journalist). Obama's highly selective war on whistleblowers is design to eliminate category (2) leaks -- that's what it's been aimed at thus far -- leaving only categories (1) and (3), i.e., those that advance the U.S. government's interests and are often "authorized," either legally (by declassifying the information) or informally (with a wink and a nod).

Put another way, the Obama administration is creating a world of journalism where they exclusively control the information that the public learns and, in essence, defining the parameters of a free press in the U.S. The result is that the only "leaks" that will exist are coordinated government disclosures designed to advance government aims and disseminate propaganda (by deceitfully masquerading official government statements as anonymous "leaks"). That's why this behavior matters so much.

I love the fact that Obama campaigned on "transparency". As George Orwell would have pointed out had he lived until today, this is a wonderful example of Orwellian newspeak. Just as 2+2=5 in 1984, transparency means the government "shapes" what news is given to the press. From Huffington Post:

Obama Accepts Transparency Award In Private

President Barack Obama accepted an award for making the government more open and transparent – presented to him behind closed doors with no media coverage or public access allowed.

The discrepancy between the honor and the circumstances under which it was delivered bothered open-government advocates in attendance, they said Thursday. They were even more perturbed when they discovered later that the meeting hadn't even been listed on Obama's public schedule, so there was no way for anyone to know about it.

"To have such a meeting not be transparent is the height of irony. How absurd can that be?" said one participant, Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, which keeps tabs on the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Enjoy that breath of "fresh air" blowing in from the new and improved version of the Unitary Executive so beloved by George Bush.

Here is Glenn Greenwald giving a talk:



From the annotation on this video:

At Socialism 2011 in Chicago on July 3, Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald spoke about civil liberties in the age of Obama. The talk ran just over forty minutes. In this first part, Greenwald discusses how it has become conventional wisdom that Obama has continued many of the Bush Administration policies, which were regarded as policies that shredded the Constitution.

Dean Baker on the Washington Post's Political Advocacy

I enjoy Dean Baker's blog Beat the Press where he acts as a watchdog on the media. In this post, he catches the Washington Post sneaking editorial opinion into a "news" article:

The Washington Post Tells Readers that the Financial Markets Are Wrong

The people who are betting trillions of dollars in financial markets have considerable confidence in the ability of the U.S. government to pays its debts, as demonstrated by the fact that the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds remain extraordinarily low. However a front page Washington Post article told readers that these actors are mistaken, actually the United States is, "a nation already mired in red ink."

Most newspapers would restrict such sweeping and unsupported assertions to the editorial pages, however the Washington Post has made debt reduction a crusade. It has little concern for standard journalistic practices in pressing this agenda.

It is a tough enough job for the ordinary reader to absorb facts and understand issues well enough to fomulate an opinion. It doesn't help when the media drops its journalistic ethics and moves from "news reporting" to "editorializing" outside of the editoral pages.

I could accept this blurring of editorial opinion with honest reporting if all media did this. People could then look at the fact that media is owned by very wealthy people and recognize that these people have a political agenda and that they are using their media outlet as a political propaganda device. But the media in the US pretend to be objective (except for Fox "News" which is blatantly biased despite its claim of "fair and balanced").

Here is the "new face" of media in the US:

Obama Attacks a Free Press

Not only has the Obama administration been brutal with the not-yet-guilty-until-judged-in-a-court-of-law Bradley Manning. They are now going after the press to stop journalists from printing news. Funny, the Constitution is very clear that the press must be free of undue control by the government. The press must be free so that a "free" people can make judgements about their representatives so that the democracy is real and not fake. The 5th Amendment to the US Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Even Richard Nixon didn't go so far as to jail Daniel Ellsberg over releasing the secret Pentagon Papers, documents that proved that the US government had been systematically lying to the American people about its policies, intentions, and actions in Vietnam. Sadly, the Obama administration appears not to favour a free press. As well it does not appear to believe in "due process" of the law, i.e. you are innocent until proven guilty. Otherwise it would not be torturing Bradley Manning.

From BoingBoing:

Federal prosecutors, with the approval of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., are trying to force the author of a book on the C.I.A. to testify at a criminal trial about who leaked information to him about an effort by the agency to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program at the end of the Clinton administration.

What if 90% of the population thinks it should be illegal for agents of the US Government to be trying to assassinate the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? If the press isn't allowed to report the leak that the government is pursuing such a heinous plot, then the people will not have the requisite knowledge to protest and urge their legislators to stop the executive before it commits this crime on "behalf" of the American people. But Obama doesn't believe the US people should know about crimes its agents are doing in other countries. Otherwise it wouldn't be forcing a reporter to break the confidentiality of sources and undermine a free press.

We do know that when Obama says "capture" Osama Bin Laden, that mean "shoot to kill" and don't bother capturing him because we don't want the messy business of having to interrogate, try, and imprison him. We just want him dead. Gosh. I bet police forces all around the US would like to take up that policy when it comes to dealing with violent criminals. Why bother trying to capture them, going through the messy and expensive details of a trial, and then the long and expensive incarceration. Just shoot to kill and then "no fuss, no muss". So you kill a few innocent people. This will "expedite" justice and lower the cost of delivering "justice".

Despite what the rabid right wing Republicans think. Having an effective, lawful government is expensive and messy. It is important that goverment servants don't just short cut "red tape" and deliver what they perceive as "justice" or "services" without any oversight or measure of efficiency, utility, or justice. By its very nature, government is slow and expensive.

Update 2011may24: I watched the PBS Frontline program entitled WikiSecrets. They studiously avoided what I consider the key facts:

1. The US military used "top secret" as a technique to deny facts about a crime to Reuters that wanted an explanation of why their reporter was murdered in cold blood. There was no "secret" here other than ass-covering by the military. If the American public can't find out how badly the war is run, how will the public ever decide that it is doing more harm than good? How can the electorate be "informed" if the US government uses secrecy claims to keep critical information out of the hands of voters?


2. Bradley Manning is being tortured before he is convicted. That is criminal. The Obama administration is allowing the military to torture somebody who is presumed innocent, because he has not yet been tried and found guilty. This is a crime. But Frontline doesn't think that is a significant fact.

My opinion is that Frontline wasted most of an hour. It was fine that they give some background on Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, but they focused on sensationalism and spent little time of facts and they ignored very important issues. That is a disservice to their viewers.

They mentioned the sex charges against Assange, but they didn't bother to point out that it was consensual sex or look at the strange behaviour of these women. They didn't complain until the police got involved. I'm guessing the US twisted arms behind the scenes because they see these charges as their ticket to get Assange extradicted. The fact that the charges are bogus is obvious, but Frontline didn't bother.

The one truthful moment in the Frontline documentary was when they showed the hacker conference in May 2010 when Assange was supposed to show up to speak. The chair of the meeting asked people whether they believed that Assange would walk into the room. The fact that many said "no way!" was the most truthful moment in the documentary. They knew that the US had laid a trap and was hoping desperately that Assange would walk into it. But Frontline didn't talk about the entrapment. They didn't wonder why such a large audience would have a majority that were cynical about their own government and its motives and actions.

I watched three administrations lie about Vietnam. They put every effort into vilifying anybody who opposed that war. But the truth came out. The war was bogus and built on lies. All that money was wasted. All those lives lost for nothing. Today the US is "good buddies" with the Communist regime in Vietnam. But the lie that was fed by the government and the media was that if the youth of America didn't go over and die in some god forsaken jungle, then under the "Domino Theory" the commies would next be in San Diego and take over the US. It was a lie. The government knew it was a lie. But they spread that lie. The government knowingly ruined the lives of many good people who conscientiously opposed the madness of the Vietnam war.

This Frontline "documentary" is just one more bit of government propaganda that willingly smears somebody who does no immediately "buy" the government line that secrecy is sacrosanct and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are noble missions that will "save the world". They aren't. They won't. And all that money and all those lives are wasted for nothing. It is out-of-control militarism now as it was in the 1960s.