Rathergate and the US Mass Media

I spent my summer reading. Unlike back in elementary school, I didn’t get coupons for a free personal pan at Pizza Hut.

My favourite was “Manufacturing Consent” by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman (“The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins was a close second). I had been meaning to read it since I got it the previous Christmas.

The book discusses what Chomsky and Herman term the “propaganda model”. In a nutshell, it proposes a theory that the US mass media, because of the corporate-oriented nature of it, functions on a model that acts in accordance with the policies and objectives of the United States government. More specifically, it functions in the interests of the capitalist powers that control the US government. Considering how corporate the US mass media is, this is hardly a surprise.

Chomsky and Herman propose five “filters” that serve to remove news that matters to the people, while allowing information that casts US domestic and foreign policy in a positive light. The five, of which the first three are considered the most important by the authors, are:

1. Ownership of the medium
2. Medium’s funding sources
3. Sourcing
4. Flak
5. Anti-communist ideology

Josef Popieluszko, a Polish priest murdered by rogue police officers under the “Communist” Polish government, was treated as a “worthy” victim, receiving extensive press exposure in the United States. Although the assailants were tried and convicted in a fair trial (something rare in the days of authoritarian Eastern Europe), the US mass media continued to assault the case, casting it in a light that made the Polish government appear despotic and murderous of its clergical citizenry.

Conversely, four American nuns were murdered and raped by a Salvadoran death squad (under direct government control) on December 2, 1980. What little press attention they did receive failed to hold the Salvadoran government (a US ally in their anti-communist crusade) responsible.

Rathergate, the incident involving popular American news anchor Dan Rather, illustrates another case of the propaganda model functioning in full compliance.

First and foremost, the information that Rather presented has been deemed false. The issue isn’t whether or not Rather told the truth: no, he did not. The point that I want to drive across is that misinformation is constantly – I must emphasize, constantly – included in news broadcasts that are uncritical of the US establishment.

The lead-up to the Iraq War saw the mass media toe the government line in a way that would have made Stalin envious for its obediency. The President of the United States and his governments’ official stance (i.e. that the Iraqi government possessed numerous weapons of mass destruction) were uncritically touted by the media. Undoubtedly this helped to secure the loyalties of more than a few Americans who, with nobody telling them that the government was lying, bought into the culture of fear peddled by the Republican Party and its allies.

Of course, we know now that Iraq probably did not have any WMDs. As soon as the US government came to realize this, their original justification for the invasion spontaneously turned to “liberating the Iraqi people”.

Dead bodies of Iraqis? Constant attacks on US military personnel? Continually growing resistance movements? An insurgency that seems to have no prospect of ending in the near future?

Yeah, some liberation.

Don’t count on hearing much about this in the US mass media.

The scandal with Dan Rather erupted over documents that he presented as proof that George W. Bush’s record in the Texas Air National Guard does not stand up to scrutiny. After a few conservative bloggers rushed to their master’s defence, calling into question the authenticity of the documents, Bush was probably saved from losing the presidency in the 2004 election that was mere months away.

Hold the US government responsible for its lies about the invasion of Iraq? No.

Inform the American people about the Republicans’ relentless attacks on social programs? No.

State the obvious and suggest that the Iraq War is unwinnable? No.

Call into question the military service of the lamest president every to run the Great Republic? HELL NO!

Yeah, whatever. Free press my ass.

The Future of Journalism

The journalism industry is struggling to figure out the future: and rightfully so.

In an age where any jackass on the street can be a journalist, via their cell phone camera or their celebrity gossip blog – one of millions – the real journalists out there must pursue a course that keeps the industry respected.

Of course, the definition of a “real” journalist is loose. Simply based on the word, anyone who records a log of daily activity (i.e. a journal) on any level is a journalist.

But nobody in this program really came to college to learn how to keep a “log of daily activity”: we came to learn how to disseminate the news.

A journalist is someone who puts the news out there. The news is, plain and simple, whatever is known and verified as indisputable fact.

Or so we’d like to think. 40 million Americans may call Rush Limbaugh a journalist, but these same people would be hard pressed to call Rushie’s claim that styrofoam is biodegradable “fact”.

And who would call a man who tells a caller that, as a “sodomite”, he should “get AIDS and die, (you pig)” a journalist. That was Michael Savage, by the way.

As Frank Bedek explained, the American media is a bastion for such bizarre opinions because of the concentration of corporate ownership. Or, in Peter Maurin’s words, “conglomeration”.

A lack of diverse voices is amplified in weirdness by the bigoted nature of the people who typically own the big media in the United States, Rupert Murdoch being a great example of this.

For journalism to survive into the future, it must adapt one way or another. Diverse voices to stimulate intelligent public discussion are necessary, otherwise the big media will continue to hold incredible influence over public opinion, giving way to more half-Nazi bloggers and right-wing pundits who attack anyone less conservative than Ann Coulter as “commies” and such.

On that note, the future of diverse broadcasting is tied to the future of public broadcasting. Be it a national broadcaster like the CBC or a community newspaper, the media must begin a process of serious devolution of they hope to gain back the faith of the people. The alternative is for the industry to fade away and lose all its relevance in public discussion. After all, there’s only so many times one can listen to Rushie rant about “affirmative action” being the only reason black people have jobs, or how the “gay agenda” is destroying the fabric of American society before it all gets too tired.

Just the Basic Facts

It’s easy to get lost searching for the truth in the Donkey Rodeo of information known as “research material”.

More to the point, it’s about determining which information is cleverly-disguised bullshit and which is genuine fact. The two can sometimes be difficult to distinguish, you see.

In times past, the issue would have been less prevalent. It was widely believed – and I say this by virtue of testimony from older relatives – that what the Western media said was fact and what the Eastern (i.e. Soviet-influenced) media said was fiction. It was the belief in the private enterprise of media and their inherent righteousness that fueled this impression.

Yet in this day and age of heavily decentralized information a la the internet coupled with heavily centralized information a la large corporate dominance, and all the spin-doctors in between, searching for the truth is a more daunting task for a journalist.

One source could set the GDP of the United States as being the highest in the world, another might claim that it is China. Herein lies a perfect example of conflicting information, particularly when it could be from two equally credible sources.

The best option would be to try to find additional credible sources to see which comes up as the most common result: the US or China as the possessor of the world’s largest GDP. If 5 out of 6 sources say the US, and that one dissenting source says China, then the best option would be to interpret the information as confirming the US.

But if the information is 11 out of 21 for the US and 10 for China, we experience a clusterfuck of competing information that seems to unnecessarily complicate our work.

The underlying principle that should guide every journalist in his or her publications is that nothing should be printed without being verified a clear majority of times by clearly reliable sources as being absolute fact. Nothing is more embarrassing, not to mention discrediting, for a journalist than to be caught in a lie that he or she never intended to commit.

Another Library Presentation

Even though I arrived slightly late for class – an unfortunate result of my recent bout of insomnia – I got there in time to start filling out the library survey. Winning that free iPod Touch would be pretty sweet.

First and foremost, the presentation was fairly dull. I wish I could profess that I had learned something (I really do). But the search techniques that made up a significant amount of the presentation were nothing new to me. I had learned them all in a middle school video on using search engines, which due to good memory retention have stuck with me. Admittedly, though, I had forgotten the use of the dollar sign in a search to account for different suffixes.

I also found the lesson on striking the balance between precision and non-specific information valuable.

This presentation came at a good time, considering our need to do research for our “Politics and Government for Journalists” reports. Public transportation being my topic, the different in using certain punctuation, let alone specifying the search, is clear when searching for such a controversial and well-discussed topic.

Once again, I reiterate that the topic was dry, meaning that it would have been difficult to be seriously interested in the presentation inherently. That being said, I have no criticism of Peggy’s presentation techniques. Despite the fact that I found the presentation uninteresting, she clearly went to some lengths to try to make it interactive and educational for the class.

Photo Manipulation

“Whenever you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Multimedia and the manipulation programs that come with it on computers have given journalists (and bloggers) a limitless capacity to change images. Doing so, though, can have negative affects, unintended or otherwise.

Want a photo of a heroic US soldier standing up to the bloody insurgents or saving a dying Iraqi infant? Want to fake a reason to attack a sovereign nation but lack photo evidence to prove it?

How about displaying for the public the gallantry of the police force?

Photo editing can do it all.

The DixieCrats Turn Around

To my complete and utter – albeit positive – surprise, Barack Obama has not only stayed tight in his race against establishment-backed Hillary Clinton, but has won in Minnesota, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Idaho, North Dakota, Illinois, Missouri, Alaska, Kansas and Delaware.

Even though a black man winning in states that can be characterized as white and rich is a surprise, nothing came as more of a shocker than his wins in Georgia and Alabama.

Those familiar with racial history in the United States know that the South was ground zero for segregation and opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. What would surprise those who are not familiar is that the Democratic Party of the South was just as bigoted as today’s Republicans.

George Wallace, the Democratic governor of Alabama in the 60s, is an icon of this. You may remember him being featured in Forrest Gump.

Obama’s win in South Carolina was less a surprise, despite the state’s history, because over half of the Democratic electorate is black.

The margins weren’t particularly slim, either: Obama won Alabama with 56% to Clinton’s 42%, and George with 67% to Clinton’s 31%.

What does this say for the South? Hard to say. Perhaps they would rather have a young up-and-comer black man than a bureaucratic career politician. Perhaps they’re finally beginning to repent on their days of slavery and oppression. Perhaps the area experienced a wave of excessive Jack Daniels binging on Super Tuesday.

Whatever the cause, if it indeed indicates solid support for Barack Obama, the Democrats could have the chance to win back the South after decades of Republican domination a la their Christian fundamentalist program.

Of course, if Alabamans and Georgians feel the way most Canadians do, they simply would rather have a president who would use diplomacy with so-called “rogue nations” than a chickenhawk who will meander about the globe pushing “dictators” out of the way to make room for American-style democracy courtesy of B1 bombers.

Liberty and Oppression

There are fewer things that “grinds my gears” more than anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed out from a neverending cesspool of ignorance sourced by a whole lot of racism.

Are we forgetting the utmost significance of this symbol? (note: I am not an American, but I believe in what this is supposed to represent)

This statue was originally called “Liberty Enlightening the World”, and is colloquially referred to as the Statue of Liberty. For millions upon millions of immigrants to the United States of America, this statue symbolized escape from oppression.

The type of oppression being fled by the immigrants ranged: the Irish were escaping national oppression; the Germans were escaping religious oppression; the Jews were escaping ethnic oppression.

Isn’t it ironic, then, that the very things that millions of immigrants fled were present in the United States upon their arrival?

Ever since North America was colonized, beginning with the merciless genocide of the First Nations, the Anglo-Saxon establishments have done a very good job of promoting discrimination against non-English arrivals. The Irish were portrayed as lazy drunks; the Germans were portrayed as segregationist outsiders; the Jews were portrayed as money-grubbing thieves.

Even those forced into the Land of the Free (e.g. Africans) were grossly mistreated and misrepresented

Today, Mexicans and Middle Easterners are entering the United States to find the same hurdles that their white predecessors faced.

One of the major reasons why xenophobia runs deep into the collective American bone is because they have been taught that America exists as a nation, and that any failure to assimilate into that culture is an affront to the American nation.

Yet if liberty means anything, it means the right of an individual or a community to express culture and live by independent standards and codes.

I have been uncompromisingly unforgiving of the United States government, largely because I believe that they are the prime example of the deadliness of the cocktail of nationalism and statism. What began as a beacon for freedom has turned into a bastion for oppression. Lady Liberty, ever guarding New York Harbor, may mean something to millions of white men, but to members of the black, GLBT, Hispanic, Islamic, First Nations and millions of other communities, she only symbolizes a dream broken by government-bred nativism.

And so, I leave you with the words of Jewish-American poet Emma Lazarus:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Never forget what it would be like to live in a world where all people can set foot on a land and breathe freely, be it the United States or Canada, France, England, Japan…the world belongs to all people, and it must be a world of absolute freedom.

Reactionaries in the Hallowed Halls

Not in the government: we KNOW they’re there.

Whatever happened to the days when being a college student meant a sense of intellectual exploration? A little freedom to explore and adhere to political ideas that were hardly mainstream?

Remember this?

Now, student protesters are more likely to look like this

or this

What happened?

Hard to say, really. I suppose the downright embarrassing failure of the socialist movements in the West in the 60s and 70s had something to do with it.

It was a time of revolutionary ferment. Radical students were joining dissenting artists, bohemians, and workers in demanding swift and fundamental change to Western society, from San Francisco to London.

Yet they were often without solid leadership, or even the most basic thing necessary: a plan. There was no guiding manifesto other than perhaps the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)’s Port Huron Statement. And even the SDS lacked a significant program. Consider this scene from Across the Universe:

If a revolution is to be sought, a plan needs to be laid out. I’m not talking about a political party – the last thing we need is another “labour” or “social democratic” party to betray the working class and throw socialism out the door. And the last thing we need is a Bolshevik-style revolutionary party that will seize power and establish a brutal dictatorship. I’m saying what’s needed is an organization that can help people in their neighbourhood organize to form true, community-based, participatory democracy fused with workplace democracy, i.e. genuine socialism.

But the failure of the radical left, both tactically and morally once they began to hesitate to speak out against the brutal Khmer Rouge or Communist Vietnam regimes. Political disillusionment opened up a huge void in campus activism that was filled by the aspiring Murray Rothards, Ludwig von Miseses, and Milton Friedmans. They wanted liberty, a tried, tested and true principle of any activist, but they offered up to the alienated activists a moralistic and theoretical justification for capitalism which they wholly embraced.

This does not speak for any success of capitalism. Since the 1970s the Canadian economy has grown by 72% and worker productivity is up 51%, but average wages have remained stagnant. But don’t despair: the fat cats have gotten much, much fatter. Meanwhile, the skinny cats are struggling to balance their budgets to have food, shelter and heat. After all, the real minimum wage (calculated to factor inflation) dropped from $9.14 in 1976 to $7.32 in 2006.

The capitalist superstructure has grown very strong indeed – media consolidation brought on by liberalized ownership regulations in the 1990s has placed the major media outlets in the hands of a few people. No wonder activists today are looking like the latter two pictures!

Democracy, Democracy, Democracy

Recently, I’ve seen a lot of editorials in various Canadian newspapers praising the style of selecting a candidate for US President. They claim that the primary/caucus process is more democratic than Canada’s way of nominating candidates.

The process south of the 49 works in one of two ways.

The first way is a “primary”, where citizens in a particular state will vote for a candidate to represent the party come election time. Just who gets to participate is a state-by-state matter, with some states allowing just party members to vote, some states allowing party members and independents only, and some states opening their party to all voters.

The other way is a “caucus”. In a caucus, citizens gather based on precincts and elect delegates to state conventions, who then elect delegates to national conventions. Slightly complicated.

I have come to learn that the democracy is less powerfully defined by Abraham Lincoln (by the people, of the people and for the people) than by the established media (more and more elections). It prompts the question of whether elections are a truly democratic means of electing a government.

Many would consider such a question absurd: of course elections are the only way to have democracy, that’s how it’s always been! Yet I beg to differ. Many people have given up on elections because they believe it won’t make a difference. Recent figures show voter turn-out across the developed world to hover somewhere between 60 and 75 percent.

The reason they have given up is the very reason why elections are not democratic: they involve big organizations (“parties”) spending big bucks to pay for slick advertising campaigns full of rhetoric like “your voice and choice” or “time for real change”, the latter of which has emerged full-force from both the Obama and Clinton campaigns.

Because of the power of big parties, funded in part by big corporations with big interests in a government friendly to them, the common person is but off from the voices of smaller parties. As we go about our daily lives, so pre-occupied with working, school, family, friends, and celebrity gossip, how can the establishment legitimately expect us to take time out to do extensive research on political parties and candidates?

Well, they don’t need that, because there’s only one demographic that matters to the big parties. It’s the demographic that forms the nucleus of their support, more so in power than in numbers. It is the demographic that is often unemployed and spends much of their time engaging in recreation rather than doing anything productive. Because of this, they are naturally able to figure out which party best suits their interest.

It is the capitalist class. The ones whose ownership of business and production gives them all the free time to figure out politics, and the importance of voting for and supporting a candidate who best suits their interests. And their parties, so propped up with their money, are not difficult to see around election time.

And in the States, with no mass working class party, this is more apparent than ever. The Republicans and the Democrats can maintain their dual monopoly on power by the veil of democracy surrounding their primary process, but if that fails they at least have the inpenetrable power of the financial elite behind them.

That being said, elections are in a way democratic, but certainly nothing close to representing the maximization of democracy. Can the leaders be recalled by their constituents? Are local councils empowered to make the decisions that affect them? Are elections decided by who is the most virtuous candidate, or whose pocketbook is big enough to convice the people that he or she is their champion and not an elitist lackey?

What a wonderful system.

Ron Paul

I simply can’t understand the hype surrounding grassroots-campaigner for the Republican presidential ticket, Congressman Ron Paul.

Actually, I may have answered the question already. It’s easy to see why, after years of disillusionment, the people of the United States might turn to a candidate who is not corporately-funded. After all, look at what Dubya, Slick Willy, and Ronnie Reagan delivered: militarism, nationalism, corporatism, neoliberalism…the list is quite extensive.

Paul may not have the backing of Corporate America – he’s not too friendly towards the government, as as their natural allies the capitalist class have an interest in protecting the government – but he’s got the backing of the internet community. While the “Stop (insert candidate’s name)” groups are typically the largest, individual Facebook groups in support of Paul have reached up to 4,000 members. Combined, they probably exceed 20,000 supporters.

The largest Hillary Clinton-related group is Stop Hillary Clinton: (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary), with over 735,000 members. Barack Obama for President in 2008, meanwhile, has 66,982 members.

But Ron Paul: why this wave of evidently popular support? Being anti-government certainly helps, with the inflated US government waging expensive wars while allowing a significant amount of the American people to “fend for themselves” (i.e. starve) breeding a lot of discontent. God bless the neoconservative agenda.

He is, for better or worse, loyal to his constituents. He has made efforts in the past to reflect what he believes are the views of residents of Texas’ 14th Congressional District.

The question arises, therefore, whether those same Texans are xenophobes who wish to withdraw from the UN. Or do they hold Ron Paul’s view that ” we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in Washington DC are semi-criminal or entirely criminal”?

Or are they willing to sacrifice their schools and hospitals to recklessly cut taxes? They don’t need to be: the military consumes over half of US government spending. Yes, over half. Imagine the shining beacon to the world that America could be if training young Yanks to kill foreigners wasn’t such a high priority.

Still, with 6 estimated pledges delegates after six primaries/caucuses, Paul is trailing a distant fifth, behind even long-shot candidate Fred Thompson.

Simply put, Ron Paul is supported by post-secondary students inundated with capitalistic rhetoric and white supremacists who like his platform of “states’ rights”. I’m all for allowing local jurisdictions to resolve their own issues, but I’ll be candid and come out and say that in the US, states’ rights is less about empowering the locals and more about empowering the local bigots.

Paul for President? That’d be up there with other possible milestones. Barack Obama: first black president. Hillary Clinton: first woman president. Ron Paul: first Klan-supported president. God bless America.