This excerpt is from an article exclusively published at Truthout. May not be reprinted without their permission.
The Republicans' Manufactured Media War
Sunday, 08 November 2015
By Michael Corcoran, Truthout | News Analysis
After the first Republican presidential debate on August 6, 2015, Donald Trump, a former reality television star, made a joke about the moderator's menstrual cycle. Trump also spoke of how he wants to build a $6.4 billion security wall along the border and charge the bill to the Mexican government (which is understandably befuddled by the candidate's "enormous ignorance"). At the second GOP debate on September 16, Dr. Ben Carson answered a question about his flat-tax proposal that made it painfully clear he does not understand the difference between progressive taxation and socialism. Using Carson's criteria, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were both socialist presidents.
These ridiculous comments from past debates came from the two front-runners in the Republican primary - who both complain about a lack of substance in presidential debates.
These kinds of ironies abound in the Republican candidates' latest crusade against the media. The Republicans took issue with several of the moderator's questions in the October 28, 2015, GOP presidential debate in Colorado. Since then a wave of Republican anger has erupted over the way "the media" handles the presidential debates. The crux of the argument is that CNBC - and the rest of the media - have what Carson calls "a political agenda" to discredit the Republican candidates. The issue has dominated the news cycle, led some candidates to make a list of demands for future debates and prompted some high-profile candidates to support suspending future debates on NBC platforms.
There is no doubt that presidential debates in America, for both parties, are deeply flawed and lacking in substance. The politicians and the media all share in the blame for this. But the Republicans' latest campaign is not an effort to solve this problem but rather an effort to scare the public into believing that the mainstream media are conspiring to advance a leftist agenda.
If one looks beyond the GOP's alarmist rhetoric, however, a different reality emerges. The truth is that CNBC's coverage is extremely hostile to the left and embraces the GOP's worldview in many ways. Further, the relationship between its parent company, Comcast, and the Republican Party, is just one example of just how the corporate media and the GOP have many shared interests. This latest anti-media blitz following the CNBC debate is merely a disingenuous act of political theater
Read the rest at Truthout.
(Please consider supporting independent media by donating to Truthout)
Showing posts with label Michael Corcoran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Corcoran. Show all posts
2/1/12
Uygur out at MSNBC (Extra!)
Extra! November 2011
Uygur Out at MSNBC
Another progressive show canceled for political reasons
Uygur Out at MSNBC
Another progressive show canceled for political reasons
When talkshow host Cenk Uygur announced that his short tenure at MSNBC had come to an end due to his criticism of “those in power” (Young Turks, 7/20/11), it highlighted an unsettling pattern at the channel.
Uygur’s ouster represented the third time in recent years that a show hosted by someone with progressive ideals and a willingness to challenge the status quo was canceled, despite good ratings. In January of this year Keith Olbermann, well known for his public disputes with right-wing figures, was terminated by MSNBC, just after control of the channel was sold by General Electric to Comcast (Extra!, 3/11). In 2003, during the run-up to the Iraq War, Phil Donahue (one of the few elite media members to openly oppose the invasion) was taken off the air due, a leaked memo would reveal, to his antiwar views (FAIR Action Alert, 3/7/03).
Uygur, who began hosting MSNBC Live in the 6 p.m. weeknight slot in January, said he was warned before his show was cancelled by MSNBC president Phil Griffin that his aggressive style did not reflect MSNBC’s role as a reputable establishment outlet, and that he needed to “tone it down.”
“Outsiders are cool—but we’re insiders, we’re the establishment,” Uygur says Griffin told him (Salon, 7/21/11). “There are two audiences. There is the audience you are trying to appeal to, the viewers. And there is management. And management is basically the club. And they want to make sure that you are cool—can play ball with the club.”
His bosses also told him that “people in Washington were concerned about [his] tone,” Uygur said, and even sent him notes asking him to “act more like a senator.”
Ignoring this advice, Uygur saw his ratings consistently increase; his show, he said, consistently beat its 6 p.m. competition on CNN. But ratings clearly aren’t everything at MSNBC: In June his show was axed.
MSNBC took a drastic ratings hit following the removal of Olbermann, whose replacement, Lawrence O’Donnell, lost about 35 percent of the viewers in the advertiser-coveted 25-to-54 age group. The weak lead-in ratings have also hurt Rachel Maddow’s ratings at 9 p.m., which are down 15 percent, and have put the channel “on the verge of falling back into third place among the cable news networks,” the New York Times (9/27/11) reported.
Uygur was offered a reduced role as a weekend and fill-in host that would have paid him twice as much money, but he declined the offer (Democracy Now!, 7/22/11).
Griffin took issue with Uygur’s account, telling the New York Times that (7/20/11) “we never told Cenk what to say or what not to say.” (Uygur acknowledges that he was never directly censored, just pressured to conform.) But in the same article, Griffin acknowledged he did, as Uygur alleged, reference “people in Washington” having negative views of the show.
“The ‘people in Washington,’ [Griffin] said, were MSNBC producers who were responsible for booking guests for the 6 p.m. hour, and some of them had said that Mr. Uygur’s aggressive body language and overall demeanor were making it harder to book guests.”
But given MSNBC’s past record in similar instances, Uygur’s accusations seem quite plausible. After Donahue’s show was canceled in 2003, a network memo leaked out (FAIR Action Alert, 3/7/03) saying the host’s antiwar views presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The show, the memo said, could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
Olbermann’s firing came just after NBC was purchased by Comcast (Extra, 3/11). The host had come to represent the channel’s reputation as the most liberal option on cable news. He had long drawn the ire of the corporate executives he answers to at NBC, and a few months before his firing, he was briefly suspended for making political donations to guests (Guardian, 11/5/10). Olbermann had also raised hackles at the network for his constant spars with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, which prompted Fox News and NBC officials to attempt to muzzle their stars from further back-and-forth attacks (FAIR Action Alert, 8/7/09).
Fears that Comcast—whose executives have prominently donated large amounts to conservative campaigns and causes—would make the network even more inhospitable to progressive voices have hardly been allayed by Uygur’s cancellation. As Lee Fang of Think Progress (11/5/10) reports, Comcast also has a motive for avoiding antagonizing the incumbent administration:
Unlike Donahue, Uygur could not be accused of promoting a “liberal antiwar agenda”; he supported the Afghan War until very recently (Huffington Post, 12/1/09) and supported Obama’s decision to bomb Libya as part of a NATO campaign (Truthout, 6/3/11).
Uygur was, however, frequently quite critical of Obama, especially in his dealings with Republicans on economic and environmental issues. Before being given his own show, he suggested that Obama was either “the world’s worst negotiator” or might actually “not be a progressive” (Dylan Ratigan Show,12/8/10). When the White House lashed out at progressives who were critical of the administration in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections, saying they were “irresponsible,” Uygur responded angrily, saying Obama lives “in a bubble in D.C. where you try to please all your Washington buddies, the right-wingers and the media” (Early Morning Swim, 9/29/10), and accused him of trying to “scapegoat his own base” for a poor showing in 2010.
As a full-time host, he continued his attacks on Obama. Uygur said Obama passed a weak financial regulation bill in June because he didn’t want “to offend the Wall Street guys,” in part because he “takes their money” (MSNBC Live, 6/2/11). He also criticized the president for legitimizing Bush administration surveillance tactics, such as the warrantless wiretapping program (MSNBC Live, 6/2/11): “As a former constitutional law professor, he should be embarrassed of that decision. That program basically destroys the Fourth Amendment.”
Could Comcast have been unsettled by such critiques from the left? Former presidential candidate Al Sharpton, who replaced Uygur, recently vowed “not to criticize the president about anything” in an interview with 60 Minutes (5/19/11). The segment also noted that Sharpton was now “a trusted White House adviser” and that “given his loyalty and his change from confrontational to accommodating, the administration is rewarding him with access and assignments.”
Interestingly, Current TV, which hired Olbermann earlier this year to host a nightly news program, has recently hired Uygur to bring his popular Internet show, the Young Turks, to cable TV (Current TV, 9/20/11). While the young channel has only a tiny fraction of the audience that MSNBC gets, its willingness to collect talentMSNBC deems too anti-establishment could steal away some of the very viewers the psuedo-left channel is trying to target.
Michael Corcoran (MichaelCorcoran.blog spot.com), a freelance journalist based in Boston, writes frequently for Extra!, as well as for such outlets as the Nation and the Boston Globe.
Uygur’s ouster represented the third time in recent years that a show hosted by someone with progressive ideals and a willingness to challenge the status quo was canceled, despite good ratings. In January of this year Keith Olbermann, well known for his public disputes with right-wing figures, was terminated by MSNBC, just after control of the channel was sold by General Electric to Comcast (Extra!, 3/11). In 2003, during the run-up to the Iraq War, Phil Donahue (one of the few elite media members to openly oppose the invasion) was taken off the air due, a leaked memo would reveal, to his antiwar views (FAIR Action Alert, 3/7/03).
Uygur, who began hosting MSNBC Live in the 6 p.m. weeknight slot in January, said he was warned before his show was cancelled by MSNBC president Phil Griffin that his aggressive style did not reflect MSNBC’s role as a reputable establishment outlet, and that he needed to “tone it down.”
“Outsiders are cool—but we’re insiders, we’re the establishment,” Uygur says Griffin told him (Salon, 7/21/11). “There are two audiences. There is the audience you are trying to appeal to, the viewers. And there is management. And management is basically the club. And they want to make sure that you are cool—can play ball with the club.”
His bosses also told him that “people in Washington were concerned about [his] tone,” Uygur said, and even sent him notes asking him to “act more like a senator.”
Ignoring this advice, Uygur saw his ratings consistently increase; his show, he said, consistently beat its 6 p.m. competition on CNN. But ratings clearly aren’t everything at MSNBC: In June his show was axed.
MSNBC took a drastic ratings hit following the removal of Olbermann, whose replacement, Lawrence O’Donnell, lost about 35 percent of the viewers in the advertiser-coveted 25-to-54 age group. The weak lead-in ratings have also hurt Rachel Maddow’s ratings at 9 p.m., which are down 15 percent, and have put the channel “on the verge of falling back into third place among the cable news networks,” the New York Times (9/27/11) reported.
Uygur was offered a reduced role as a weekend and fill-in host that would have paid him twice as much money, but he declined the offer (Democracy Now!, 7/22/11).
Griffin took issue with Uygur’s account, telling the New York Times that (7/20/11) “we never told Cenk what to say or what not to say.” (Uygur acknowledges that he was never directly censored, just pressured to conform.) But in the same article, Griffin acknowledged he did, as Uygur alleged, reference “people in Washington” having negative views of the show.
“The ‘people in Washington,’ [Griffin] said, were MSNBC producers who were responsible for booking guests for the 6 p.m. hour, and some of them had said that Mr. Uygur’s aggressive body language and overall demeanor were making it harder to book guests.”
But given MSNBC’s past record in similar instances, Uygur’s accusations seem quite plausible. After Donahue’s show was canceled in 2003, a network memo leaked out (FAIR Action Alert, 3/7/03) saying the host’s antiwar views presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The show, the memo said, could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
Olbermann’s firing came just after NBC was purchased by Comcast (Extra, 3/11). The host had come to represent the channel’s reputation as the most liberal option on cable news. He had long drawn the ire of the corporate executives he answers to at NBC, and a few months before his firing, he was briefly suspended for making political donations to guests (Guardian, 11/5/10). Olbermann had also raised hackles at the network for his constant spars with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, which prompted Fox News and NBC officials to attempt to muzzle their stars from further back-and-forth attacks (FAIR Action Alert, 8/7/09).
Fears that Comcast—whose executives have prominently donated large amounts to conservative campaigns and causes—would make the network even more inhospitable to progressive voices have hardly been allayed by Uygur’s cancellation. As Lee Fang of Think Progress (11/5/10) reports, Comcast also has a motive for avoiding antagonizing the incumbent administration:
Why would Comcast be interested in silencing progressive voices? Histori-cally, Comcast has boosted its profits by buying up various telecommunication and media content companies—instead of providing faster Internet or better services.... Many of these mergers, as Public Citizen and Free Press have reported, have been allowed by regulators because of Comcast’s considerable political muscle. Com-cast’s latest regulatory battle has been to oppose net neutrality—a rule allowing a free and open Internet—because the company would prefer to have customers pay for preferred online content.
Unlike Donahue, Uygur could not be accused of promoting a “liberal antiwar agenda”; he supported the Afghan War until very recently (Huffington Post, 12/1/09) and supported Obama’s decision to bomb Libya as part of a NATO campaign (Truthout, 6/3/11).
Uygur was, however, frequently quite critical of Obama, especially in his dealings with Republicans on economic and environmental issues. Before being given his own show, he suggested that Obama was either “the world’s worst negotiator” or might actually “not be a progressive” (Dylan Ratigan Show,12/8/10). When the White House lashed out at progressives who were critical of the administration in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections, saying they were “irresponsible,” Uygur responded angrily, saying Obama lives “in a bubble in D.C. where you try to please all your Washington buddies, the right-wingers and the media” (Early Morning Swim, 9/29/10), and accused him of trying to “scapegoat his own base” for a poor showing in 2010.
As a full-time host, he continued his attacks on Obama. Uygur said Obama passed a weak financial regulation bill in June because he didn’t want “to offend the Wall Street guys,” in part because he “takes their money” (MSNBC Live, 6/2/11). He also criticized the president for legitimizing Bush administration surveillance tactics, such as the warrantless wiretapping program (MSNBC Live, 6/2/11): “As a former constitutional law professor, he should be embarrassed of that decision. That program basically destroys the Fourth Amendment.”
Could Comcast have been unsettled by such critiques from the left? Former presidential candidate Al Sharpton, who replaced Uygur, recently vowed “not to criticize the president about anything” in an interview with 60 Minutes (5/19/11). The segment also noted that Sharpton was now “a trusted White House adviser” and that “given his loyalty and his change from confrontational to accommodating, the administration is rewarding him with access and assignments.”
Interestingly, Current TV, which hired Olbermann earlier this year to host a nightly news program, has recently hired Uygur to bring his popular Internet show, the Young Turks, to cable TV (Current TV, 9/20/11). While the young channel has only a tiny fraction of the audience that MSNBC gets, its willingness to collect talentMSNBC deems too anti-establishment could steal away some of the very viewers the psuedo-left channel is trying to target.
Michael Corcoran (MichaelCorcoran.blog spot.com), a freelance journalist based in Boston, writes frequently for Extra!, as well as for such outlets as the Nation and the Boston Globe.
11/20/11
Michael Corcoran on Ring of Fire Radio discussing 'Democrats and the Death of Keynesian Economics'
This radio interview I did with Ring of Fire is about my article in Truthout, "Democrats and the Death of Keynesian Economics."
Note: I am having some trouble with the embed feature on YouTube. To watch it please click on the above link, or you watch it on the Ring of Fire website, here.
11/15/11
Smear Campaigns Fuel Shutdowns of Occupations Across Country
Originally posted at Truthout
by: Michael Corcoran, Truthout | News Analysis
An Occupy Wall Street protester is detained following an attempt to re-enter Zuccotti Park, in New York on November 15, 2011. Hundreds of police officers arrested about 200 demonstrators early Tuesday in an operation to clear the nearly two-month-old camp. (Photo: Todd Heisler / The New York Times)
City officials in Burlington, Vermont, recently used the suicide of a 35-year-old man as an excuse to deceptively close down the occupation. In New York City, just this morning, police threatened arrest to anyone who did not clear Zuccotti Park - the birthplace of the Occupy movement. Across the nation the media, right-wing critics and city officials are wrongly blaming Occupy for seemingly any crime or incident that occurs anywhere in their respective cities in an especially sinister smear campaign that aims to discredit and ultimately try to destroy the movement. Other occupations are in jeopardy of being shut down by the police. Organizers and supporters must act bravely and quickly to save - and expand - this movement as we head into the dead of winter.
A new and vicious smear campaign against the Occupy movement is in full swing. The narrative of this campaign is to portray the movement as a hotbed for violent crime and danger. This false narrative, if it sticks, could prompt more city and town officials across the country to shut down occupations, as the City of New York has attempted to do just this morning, and weaken the movement. This cannot be tolerated.
The full picture of the smear campaign became evident to me when I received a message on a social networking site from a right-wing relative of mine. His message linked to a right-wing smear site [3] that, citing the suicide of a 35-year-old homeless man in Vermont among other things, painted the occupations as one of "sexual assault, violence, vandalism, anti-Semitism, extortion, perversion and lawlessness."
My relative and many of his right-wing comrades, it seems, really believe that the Occupy movement is in favor of murder, violence, rape and drug dealing. This is rather astounding, but it is also the reality of how far beneath contempt the opponents of Occupy are willing to go to kill this movement. The mention of "sexual assaults" is especially slimy, given that it was a protester from Occupy Wall Street [4] who was the victim, not the perpetrator, of an alleged rape and her fellow protesters assisted her with medical and legal help and reported the alleged rapist to authorities.
It is fascinating - as well as scary - to see the way attacks on Occupy have evolved since it first started in late September. Originally, the media coverage and the right-wing attacksattempted to portray the protesters [5] as aimless, lazy, hippie freeloaders, who were fornicating and defecating on the streets, while banging on drums and rambling about nonsense. This caricature did not work, as the support and diversity that make up the movement and its supporters were just too obviously different from the cartoonish portrayal the movement's critics tried to paint. As Bill Maher rightly said on his HBO show "Real Time," "Occupy is not the counterculture. It is the culture [6]."
But, now, this new and far more sinister smear campaign is well underway. The corporate media, right-wing critics and city and town officials are trying to blame the protests for virtually any and all crime that has occurred on or near the encampments. The headlines in the media outlets - which are owned by corporations [8] that make up the 1 percent in most instances - continue to amplify these narratives and push for the closing of the occupations. The vast majority of these crimes and incidents have nothing to do with the Occupy movement; in fact, many of them speak more about the major social and economic injustices the protesters are trying to end. But that has not stopped city officials from trying to use these instances to stop the occupations. The occupation in Burlington, Vermont, has already been shut down. Occupy Oakland has been shut down twice. Zuccotti Park, the birthplace of the movement, is being cleared out by police as I write this [9]. And if the false narratives continue, other occupations - and the strength of the movement - could be in jeopardy.
This is now a crucial moment for the Occupy movement. How organizers and supporters proceed in the next few days may well shape the health and survival of the movement heading through the winter and into the spring. It is absolutely essential that Occupy organizers and supporters (including independent media) work aggressively to: 1) counter the false narrative that tries to, absurdly, link the movement to street violence, rapes and drugs deals, in order to discredit the movement; 2) better explain the relationship between the homeless and the Occupy movement, as the media has portrayed the relationship between organizers and the homeless as vitriolic and divisive, while understating the spirit of acceptance and cooperation between activists and the homeless - themselves products of our unjust economic system; and 3) most importantly, the movement must continue tomaintain the occupations, even in the face of crackdowns from city officials and police. This movement is the single most exciting development in decades for the prospects for creating a more just society. It must continue.
Read the rest here.
10/30/11
Michael Corcoran Discusses the Death of Keynesian Economics With Rick Smith
From Truthout
Michael Corcoran Discusses the Death of Keynesian Economics with Rick Smith
by: Rick Smith, The Rick Smith Show | Radio Interview
Press play to listen to Michael Corcoran's interview with Rick Smith about his latest story, "Democrats and the Death of Keynesian Economics":
Click here, to listen to more interview with Truthout authors on The Rick Smith Show.
4/10/11
Michael Corcoran: Corporate Media Takes a Side in Debate over 'Entitlements'
Originally published at Truthout
Michael Corcoran
March 30, 2011.
Corporate Media Takes a Side in Debate over 'Entitlements'
Pundits and politicians have often said that the thought of cutting Social Security and Medicare are, as Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post described them, the "third rails of American politics. Nobody wants to touch them." This, Cillizza argues, is an unfortunate trend, since chopping these staples to the United States ever-thinning safety net, is the "obvious fix" to our nation's budget problems. "The simple solution is to make cuts to two large government entitlement programs: Social Security and Medicare," he notes.
Despite this often repeated claim that cutting Social Security and Medicare is never discussed in American politics, in reality, the media is relentless in its perpetuation of the myth that cuts to these programs are needed - and right away. In recent months, the media has served to amplify the ideological claims of elites that use the recession - caused by large financial institutions' reckless behavior - as an excuse to further burden the nation's poor and elderly, even as the rich continue to benefit from massive tax breaks and bailouts. The question the media pose is not whether Social Security and Medicare should be cut, but when and how. But there is no debate as to who should sacrifice to balance the budget: the poor and the elderly.
In recent months, especially since President Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform released their initial report on deficit reduction and the GOP took over the House, the corporate media has excluded views of labor or working class-people, ignored alternative proposals to cutting these programs - such as various forms of revenue increases, all more popular with the populace - and perpetuated the falsehood that Social Security is in the throes of a deep crisis and is responsible for our budget woes. The idea that those on Wall Street who caused the financial crises - and the extreme revenue shortfalls that followed - should be asked to help pay a little more of their massive profits in an age of historically-low taxation on the rich is, indeed, the true "third rail" in the media.
Corporate Media, Corporate Agenda
To close followers of the economics of the mass media, it comes as no great surprise that the media is effectively serving as a communications arm of corporate America - the media is corporate America. And the corporatization of the media has only grown this year. In a few weeks, media activists will meet in Boston for Free Press's National Conference on Media Reform. Among the major topics to be discussed are the increasing corporate domination of the media; increased consolidation with the merger of NBC and Comcast; the passing of Citizens United, which served to createan effective "stimulus package" for media companies due to increased political ads; the battle over net neutrality, which will determine if corporations will dominate the web at the expense of independent web sites and the attempted desecration of public media, further enabling corporations to control information in the United States.
So, it comes as little surprise that the same media that supported the urgentpassing of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the most massive example of upward redistribution of wealth in US history, and are currently singing itspraises as an unmitigated success, would then ask for the nation's fiscal woes to be "fixed" on the backs of working-class people.
This sentiment does not merely come from the opinion makers, but the news pages of the major national papers, which continue to perpetuate the myth that Social Security is in crises. Consider the appraisal of New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes, who said Congress was tasked with the "unsustainable combination of fast-growing entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare and inadequate tax revenues." The Washington Post's news pages, likewise, push the same flawed narrative. Reporter Lori Montgomery concluded that "budget experts say it would be difficult to significantly reduce future deficits without addressing the rising cost of Social Security."
It appears the Post ignored "budget experts" who offered a differing view. For example, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and its co-founder Dean Baker - one of the only economists to predict the housing bubble that the media missed out on - have shown that the program is solvent at least until 2037, giving us decades to tweak policies to make sure those who receive benefits in 2038 get 100 percent benefits.
But, the likes of Baker are rarely given a platform in the US mainstream media, where the expert pundits represent an incredibly narrow range of opinions. On shows such as "Meet the Press," conservative Democrats, such as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council Harold Ford, often, absurdly, appear on the show as representatives of the left.
Consider the panel discussion on the show after the release of the deficit reduction report. The panel included Newt Gingrich, Alan Greenspan on the right and on "the left," Ford and Vanity Fair's Bethany Maclean (not exactly a modern-day Eugene Debs). Ford used the platform to give right-wing talking points and bash the left. "As long as you don't allow the far left and the far right, again, to crowd out the predominant middle, we can get a lot of this done," he said. "If that means making tough choices on Social Security - I'm 40, I'm willing to give mine up and I think a lot of people my age who may reach a certain income level are willing to do the same."
Host David Gregory was convinced by the wisdom of cuts to entitlements. "I don't see why, for instance, some of these suggestions, Harold, on Social Security are going to be demagogued to death," Gregory said. "Why, in 50 years, people can't look at raising the retirement age and have that be a serious discussion point?"
The Real Social Security Crisis
While the likes of Ford and Gregory may be able to endure cuts to Social Security, statistics show current and future retirees cannot. In fact, the real Social Security crisis is not that the program is insolvent - as noted above, it is in decent fiscal shape - but that the benefits are no longer sufficient to enable many people to live decent lives.
As CEPR reports, "the vast majority of near-retirees will rely on Social Security for the vast majority of their income in retirement," and therefore "cuts in Social Security imply large cuts in income for a population that is already not especially wealthy." The real debate in the media ought to be over how to increase benefits, so we can provide retirees with a dignified life.
Raising benefits should not be viewed as a radical idea. Contrary to media hysteria, Social Security is not reckless overindulgence in social welfare, but rather a modest (relative to other countries) pension program, that could be improved in the richest nation in the world. According to a report from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), our federal pension system offers quite meager benefits, compared to other developed nations in the OECD. Social Security accounts for about 16 percent of our total public expenditure, which is lower than about 80 percent of all developed nations.
In fact, there are many changes we can make to increase Social Security benefits - the most obvious of which is to implement more progressive taxation. Currently, Social Security taxes are capped at $106,000. This means that someone making $1 million a year is only paying Social Security taxes on about 10 percent of their income. If we removed the cap, the program would remain solvent for 75 more years, according to theCongressional Budget Office. Another option would be a tax on financial speculation, a modest tax on Wall Street trading that could raise $1 trillion in revenue over the course of a decade.
In fact, Baker estimates that raising Social Security by 25 percent would cost about 1.5 percent of GDP, about 66 percent of which would be covered by a financial speculation tax. To put this into perspective, the increase in defense spending just from 2000 - 2010, accounted for 1.8 percent of GDP. "This seems affordable to me," Baker said in an email.
Indeed, wealthy people can afford the tax. According to a study done by an economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, between 1979 and 2005, mean after-tax income for the top 1 percent increased by 176 percent, while the bottom 20 percent saw an increase of 6 percent only. With the extension of the Bush tax cuts, this trend seems likely to continue. But the idea of raising taxes, even slightly, on the rich is out of the realm of acceptable discourse in the media.
The Real Health Care Crises
Media attacks on Medicare are also fallacious. The general argument portrayed in the media is that the inefficiency of Medicare is causing costs to rise at a fast rate, adding to the deficit and thus, it must be cut. But Medicare is actually more efficient than private health care plans - its cost is rising 8.3 percent annually per beneficiary for Medicare, compared to 9.3 percent for private plans. The increase has a lot to do with the increase of people over the age of 65, not flaws with the program.
But rather than cutting Medicare, as pundits proclaim we must, the media should target on the real villain of the deficit: the exploding health care costs associated with the US's broken private health care system. Public plans such as Medicare are actually more efficient than private plans, since they have considerably less administrative waste. In fact, as this graph shows, if you replaced the US wasteful system - which costs about 17 percent of GDP, almost double of the average developed nation - with any public system from any OECD country, the deficit would be eliminated.
But, as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has documented, the narrow ideology of the mass media does not even allow for a discussion of public health care. In a study of news coverage during the debate over federal health care reform, the organization concluded that out of "hundreds of stories" that mentioned health care reform "all but 18 of these stories made no mention of 'single-payer' ... and only five included the views of advocates of single-payer - none of which appeared on television."
The Media Agenda
As noted above, it is neither surprising, nor conspiratorial, to suggest that media companies - owned by large corporations - would produce information that would benefit their own institutions. This is precisely why the increasing corporate stranglehold of the media is such a topic of concern for media activists and why alternative media sources are so crucial to our democracy. The coverage of Social Security and Medicare in recent months is a perfect example of the narrow, ideologically driven agenda of the corporate media that is serving to help the rich dismantle important social programs.
3/10/11
Al-Jazeera, as endorsed by Hillary Clinton (The Guardian)
With its Arab Spring coverage, al-Jazeera won new fans. Isn't it time to end the channel's virtual blackout on US cable networks?
By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher
Al-Jazeera's esteem in the United States has reached unprecedented heights in the aftermath of its coverage of the revolutionary uprising in Egypt, which clearly displayed how embarrassingly inadequate US cable news outlets are by comparison. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was compelled recently to concede that al-Jazeera English (AJE) provides "real news" coverage and actual on-the-ground journalism, unlike its American counterparts, which, she said, rely too heavily on cheap punditry.
Despite the US's unique position of power and influence, cable providers in America do not offer a single world news channel. Not even CNN International, the grownup sister channel of CNN, is available in the US; American audiences are forced to endure the entertainment-centric, domestic version of the channel – as Clinton described it, "a million commercials … and arguments between talking heads."
Al-Jazeera's impressive coverage of the uprising in Egypt has reopened a debate over whether cable providers should offer AJE as an option for US viewers. The channel is pressing the issue as never before, devoting a page on its site to encourage Americans to "Demand al-Jazeera", and using Twitter and Facebook to build a national movement for cable companies to offer the channel. With recent reports that Comcast is in negotiations with the Qatar-based network, now is the time for the effective blackout of al-Jazeera English in the US to end.
Read the rest, here.
10/7/10
Media Continue Bank Bailout Advocacy
Originally published at Extra!, the magazine for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher
For corporate media, the verdict is already in: The Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), the unpopular program that redistributed some $700 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds upwards, to the very financial institutions that contributed to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, is an unabashed success.
It is hardly stunning that corporate media would react favorably to one of the biggest boons for big corporations in U.S. history. When the bailout initially failed to make it through Congress in 2008 due to House opposition, journalists quickly accepted and reinforced the narrative that the unpopular legislation--which gave unprecedented power to the Treasury Department with virtually no mechanism for oversight or review--needed to be passed so urgently that a serious national debate was not even possible (Extra!, 1/09).
"In the Congress of the United States, the insane are now running the asylum," wrote Dana Milbank in the Washington Post (9/30/08). The Post editorial page produced three editorials in three days (9/30/08=10/2/08) in support of the policy. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (10/1/08) claimed, "We have House members, many of whom I suspect can't balance their own checkbooks, rejecting a complex rescue package because some voters, whom I fear also don't understand, swamped them with phone calls."
As Dean Baker and Kris Warner of the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted (Extra!, 1/09), despite claims echoed throughout the media that the bill was too urgent to even be subject to reasonable scrutiny, the Treasury Department "took no action for 10 days after the bill had been passed."
Now that the program is coming to an end, media--with a few notable exceptions like Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times (4/18/10)--are claiming the corporate bailout they so fervently supported has been a monumental success. Two primary claims have been pervasive: that TARP was a good idea that’s “working,” and that it was a “great deal for taxpayers” (Washington Post, 4/1/10). Progressive critiques challenging the official narrative have been almost entirely ignored by the corporate press, despite the fact that such challenges have appeared throughout alternative media (Pew Research Center, 4/28/10; FireDogLake, 7/15/10).
In the words of the Post editorial board (7/5/10), even though "pretty much everyone hated" the "$700 billion bailout fund," it has "arguably saved the U.S. economy.... Any member of Congress who supported TARP, Republican or Democrat, took a sensible risk that has been vindicated by the program's result."
Similarly, Reuters (8/19/10) reported that TARP's success would "dilute the previously potent political attack that lawmakers who voted for the bailout were rewarding Wall Street greed while putting taxpayers at risk." Former George W. Bush administration official James K. Glassman declared in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (8/26/10), "It has to be said that the TARP and the other financial rescues were necessary and efficient."
Prominent progressive critics contend TARP is a program that is doomed to failure. Even if it succeeds in temporarily rescuing the financial sector, the failure to enact broad systemic changes only increases the risk of future, more expensive bailouts. Dean Baker, for instance, suggested (CEPR, 7/5/10) that the "financial Armageddon" averted by TARP
>>>would have meant the demise of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and most of the other Wall Street titans, but probably would not have led to a qualitatively worse economic situation for the rest of us than what we actually saw. In fact, there would have been a great benefit from this financial Armageddon in that it would let the market wipe out the fast-dealing, high-flying Wall Street gang in a single blow.
This would eliminate the culture of synthetic CDOs and naked credit default swaps that provide ever more sophisticated and expensive ways to gamble. It would also eliminate many of the huge multi-million dollar paychecks that the Wall Street boys take home every year (or week). In other words, this is not obviously a bad story.<<<
Financial blogger Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism, 6/23/10) likewise criticized the Obama administration’s choice to “patch the system up with duct tape and baling wire, and if it looks even remotely operational, tout it as tremendous success,” rather than enacting serious reform. The choice, she continued, reflects the administration’s "decision to reconstitute, as much as possible, the banking industry that had just driven itself and the global economy off the cliff” and “to cast its lot with an unreformed banking industry."
Yet these important ideas were rarely presented to the American people by the corporate-owned press, thus limiting their impact and damaging citizens’ ability to come to informed conclusions. "I have almost never had my criticisms of the TARP in the media," said Baker in an e-mail to Extra!.
Indeed, media adhered to their time-honored practice of framing the debate between centrist Democrats and far-right conservatives (Extra!, 9=10/04)--in this case, restricting the “debate” to pro-TARP voices on one side and militant free-market absolutists on the other, who oppose the program as a violation of laissez-faire principles. That was the form the debate took on Fox Business Channel (12/22/09), TARP supporter Lawrence Ausubel, economics professor at University of Maryland, faced off against Cody Willard, a right-wing libertarian critic.
A New York Times article (7/1/10) looking back on TARP included critiques of the plan from conservatives like Sen. Richard Shelby (“blatant accounting fraud”) and Rep. Spencer Bachus (“a ridiculous scheme”), but ignored progressive critics in Congress, such as Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The claim that the taxpayers are being fully reimbursed by beneficiaries of TARP is likewise being vigorously advanced by the corporate press. The New York Times has been ebullient regarding the program's outcome for some time now (8/30/09): "Nearly a year after the federal rescue of the nation’s biggest banks, taxpayers have begun seeing profits from the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid.... So far, that experiment [TARP] is more than paying off."
More recently, the Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin asked (4/12/10), "What if, after all that panting over Washington’s bailout of the financial system, we learned that it actually worked?" He continued:
>>>Some officials [are] suggesting that if the economic recovery continues apace, the bailout program could eventually turn from red to black. That may seem far-fetched to anyone who remembers the dire predictions about banks like Citigroup, but the numbers tell a different story. The government’s $45 billion investment in Citigroup alone is on track to make a profit of nearly $11 billion, plus $8 billion or so in interest and other fees. People inside the administration no longer refer to Citigroup as the "Death Star"; now it is a "profit center.”<<<
Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/5/10) wondered whether the assertion that TARP did not cost the taxpayers anything is “based on ungodly stupidity or is just plain dishonest”:
>>>The TARP money was a form of insurance. The vast majority of insurance policies are never paid off, but that does not mean they have no value. The point here is that the banks were on the edge of going bankrupt. The government, through the TARP and the Fed, gave the banks the loans and the guarantees that assured the markets that the banks would survive.... This is all a gift from the taxpayers to some of the richest people in the country.<<<
In a rare instance where a progressive critic was quoted by the mainstream press on the issue--albeit buried in an otherwise upbeat TARP story by Sorkin (New York Times, 4/13/10)--Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz said widespread efforts to glorify TARP's success are "disingenuous and a real attempt to distract people," as they don't factor in lost interest on the money spent. "Did we get back anything commensurate with the risk?... Clearly the answer is no," he said. Sorkin dismissively reminded readers that Stiglitz "has made a career of seeing every glass as half-empty."
Even Elizabeth Warren, who has been featured in the news as a potential leader for the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, has been largely ignored by the press when she reported on TARP’s flaws. As the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel monitoring the use of TARP funds, she issued a strong critique of TARP's impact on small banks in the panel's July report (Congressional Oversight Panel, 7/14/10), saying TARP "served Wall Street much better than anyone else." Neither the Post nor the Times published a single article citing Warren's findings. The panel’s May report (Congressional Oversight Panel, 5/12/10), also quite critical of aspects of TARP, was mostly ignored as well, getting only two small mentions in the Post (5/19/10, 8/4/10).
When TARP was pushed through with no sizable programs attached to help the average American (Economic Policy Institute, 9/29/08), the priority for policy makers became clear. As Baker observed in CounterPunch (6/2/10), the same people who praise TARP are now saying we must “act aggressively now to reduce the budget deficit” and “accept large cuts in Social Security and other important programs.”
"Why on earth," Baker asks, "should anyone trust what the bankers' economist accomplices are telling us?"
8/31/10
Media Manipulates the "End" of the War in Iraq
Originally published at Truthout.
Just as the media lied to help us get into a war, they are now lying us out of one.
In the introduction to season five of HBO's critically acclaimed series, "The Wire," Det. Bunk Moreland and fellow murder investigators laughed as they duped a hapless, young street gangster into confessing to a murder by pretending a copy machine was a polygraph test. "The bigger the lie, the more they believe," he said.
The statement reflects the political dialogue in this country perfectly over the last month, ever since Barack Obama touted the troop drawdown in Iraq in an August 2 speech in Atlanta and leading up to tonight's Oval Address celebrating the "end of combat operations in Iraq." The president, the DC establishment and the media have been perpetuating a lie on a massive scale: the war in Iraq is now over, they claim.
But this is patently misleading, as Andrew Bacevich, of Boston University noted in a recent essay. "For the rest of us to pretend that this unnecessary and ill-advised war has ended would only add one more lie to a pile that is already too large," Bacevich said, noting that internal strife between sects, an increasingly defiant Kurdistan and recent attacks in Baghdad, prove that the war in Iraq is by no means over.
Sadly, it is not merely the president and others who have a political motive for perpetuating the myth that the United States has ended out national nightmare in Iraq. More troubling has been the performance of the mainstream media, which, in print and on television, have been witting pawns in this massive deception, reporting on the war as if it were truly over, celebrating this historical moment and ignoring crucial details, as they mislead the American public about the nature of the US role in Iraq. The woeful media performance is just the latest of what has been an especially regrettable eight years of media coverage of Iraq
Read the rest here.
Just as the media lied to help us get into a war, they are now lying us out of one.
In the introduction to season five of HBO's critically acclaimed series, "The Wire," Det. Bunk Moreland and fellow murder investigators laughed as they duped a hapless, young street gangster into confessing to a murder by pretending a copy machine was a polygraph test. "The bigger the lie, the more they believe," he said.
The statement reflects the political dialogue in this country perfectly over the last month, ever since Barack Obama touted the troop drawdown in Iraq in an August 2 speech in Atlanta and leading up to tonight's Oval Address celebrating the "end of combat operations in Iraq." The president, the DC establishment and the media have been perpetuating a lie on a massive scale: the war in Iraq is now over, they claim.
But this is patently misleading, as Andrew Bacevich, of Boston University noted in a recent essay. "For the rest of us to pretend that this unnecessary and ill-advised war has ended would only add one more lie to a pile that is already too large," Bacevich said, noting that internal strife between sects, an increasingly defiant Kurdistan and recent attacks in Baghdad, prove that the war in Iraq is by no means over.
Sadly, it is not merely the president and others who have a political motive for perpetuating the myth that the United States has ended out national nightmare in Iraq. More troubling has been the performance of the mainstream media, which, in print and on television, have been witting pawns in this massive deception, reporting on the war as if it were truly over, celebrating this historical moment and ignoring crucial details, as they mislead the American public about the nature of the US role in Iraq. The woeful media performance is just the latest of what has been an especially regrettable eight years of media coverage of Iraq
Read the rest here.
6/26/10
Michael Corcoran: Israel's Ongoing War Against the Press
Originally published at Truthout.
As stunning as the Kamm affair may seem, it is far from an isolated incident. Over the years, Israel, known for its restrictive military censorship laws, has become notorious for thwarting journalism in various ways: they have repeatedly barred journalists from covering certain issues, prohibited reporters from entering Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, engaged in violent attacks against foreign journalists, bombed and attacked media outlets, and jailed reporters on numerous occasions. These abuses show that, in addition to the crimes committed as part of its occupation of Palestine, Israel has shown contempt to the basic rights of Israelis as well. Worse, it lessens the ability for people all over the world to understand the important issues and events taking place in the Middle East.
Systematic Censorship: Israeli Censors in Action
Despite its glowing reputation as a strong democracy, Israel has a systematic, institutionalized system of censorship. While the country’s Supreme Court has “affirmed that freedom of expression is an essential component of human dignity,” according to Freedom House’s annual report on press freedom, “the country’s basic law does not specifically address the issue.”
All news articles are subject to censorship by the Israeli Military Censor, and while not all articles are screened, those about especially sensitive military issues, such as nuclear weapons or military actions, are watched very closely. In 1982, the New York Times published an article titled “Censorship by Israel: How It’s Carried Out.” It reported that Israeli military censorship “applies to foreign newspaper and wire service dispatches transmitted from Israel during both war and peacetime on military and security issues,” and noted that articles on sensitive issues “are to be submitted to the censor before they are sent abroad.
This censorship has been used very recently, not only in the Kamm arrest, but also in Operation Orchard, when Israel bombed an alleged nuclear reactor site in Syria. In 2005 a BBC reporter was banned from the country for not showing the nation’s censor video footage of an interview he did with nuclear whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu.
Perhaps no issue has been as heavily censored as Israel’s nuclear program. Israel is widely known to have a large stockpile of nuclear weapons, but refuses to allow any international oversight, or even admit to having them. This is rather ironic, given Israel’s regular refutations of Iran for not cooperating enough with international inspectors with its nuclear program. Aluf Benn, writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, observed the Orwellian nature in which Israel is “censoring the past,” engaging in what he calls, “an offensive … aimed at trying to conceal the country’s nuclear history, much of which has already seen the light of day.” He described how Israeli officials arrested various authors who published books about sensitive issues, such as Avner Cohen, author of “Israel and the Bomb.” Benn asks: “Is it illegal even to ask questions about nuclear matters? Do former officials have to die with their lips sealed? Is there no time limit on old secrets?” These questions reveal the extent of Israel’s insistence on keeping the public from understanding the reality of its policies.
The Gaza Blackout and Restricting the Foreign Press
Israel’s infringement of the press extends beyond Israeli journalists. Since Israel controls access to the Occupied Territories, it can exert a great deal of control over the ability of foreign journalists to enter the territories, and for Palestinian journalists to leave. This control over freedom of movement is one crucial way that Israel attempts to keep its actions hidden from the public.
Israel’s refusal to let Western journalists enter Gaza during the 2008-09 invasion was especially disturbing, as it enabled numerous war crimes to take place with minimal press oversight. The decision was condemned by news outlets and press freedom groups all over the world, and prompted Freedom House to downgrade its status from “free” to “partly free.” Not even The New York Times had a reporter in Gaza during the invasion.
The policy had the desired effect. “An Israeli official told me they were delighted at a BBC TV correspondent broadcasting from Ashkelon in a flak jacket,” wrote Chris McGreal in the UK Guardian, “reinforcing the impression that the Israeli city is a war zone when there is more chance of being hit by a car than a rocket.”
What the journalists did miss was the collective punishment of the “people of Gaza as a whole,” concluded the Goldstone Report, a fact-finding mission of the United Nations Human Rights Council. The Goldstone Report called the war an effort to “humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
A small sample of the carnage that most media members were unable to cover (but were chronicled by the Goldstone Report and other human rights organizations) include: the bombing of the Al-Maqadmah mosque while hundreds of people were praying inside that killed 15 people; the killing of 21 members of the al-Samouni family, including children, who were located in a house by the orders of the Israel Defense Forces; and the use of white phosphorous in attacks on two hospitals filled with filled ailing civilians. Israel also bombed the United Nations-run Al-Fakhura school, killing 35 people.
Speaking on this issue, Danny Seaman, Israel’s press officer, openly expressed pleasure about how the absence off the foreign press – who he called a “fig leaf” for Hamas – greatly benefited Israel.” Take the UN school [where 42 people were killed by an Israeli shell] for example,” he told McGreal. “There’s a lot of questions as to what actually happened. If the foreign media had been there, it would have had much more of an impact on the conflict than it has at the moment. For the first time, when Israel raised questions, journalists had to address these issues and not get caught in feeding frenzy of reporting the story.”
Another example of Israel’s infringing on foreign journalists was on display earlier this year when, in January, Jared Malsin, a young Yale graduate attempted to fly back to the West Bank , where he worked as an editor for Ma’an, a Palestinian agency that covers the occupation, after a trip with his girlfriend outside the country. While at Ben Gurion International Airport, he was held and interrogated for eight hours by Israeli officials, before being jailed for a week and then deported out of the country.
Malsin was guilty of merely doing his job. He was, as he described his job as the English editor of the paper, giving “voice to people who don’t have a voice,” by telling stories that would otherwise go untold. Israel officials gave no real explanation for the detention and deportation, other than to acknowledge that Malsin was “criticizing the State of Israel,” from “inside the (Occupied) Territories.” But few doubt the motives were political. His jailing sends a stern message to other journalists who might consider covering the plight of the Palestinians.
The move was sharply condemned by press groups throughout the world. “We condemn this intolerable violation of press freedom,” said Aidan White, the head of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), a global union of media professionals. “The ban of entry in this case appears to be as a reprisal measure for the journalist’s independent reporting and that is unacceptable … This kind of interference has no place in a democracy.” Similar condemnations were made by many other groups including Reporters without Borders, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate and the International Press Institute, which made the astute observation that Israeli “authorities should recognize that the right of press freedom applies to all journalists, not just to reporters who write favorably about Israeli government policy.”
The health of Israel’s democratic values have also been called further into question light of Israel’s refusal to allow the entry of iconic academic and critic of US and Israeli policy, Noam Chomsky, to the West Bank from Jordan last weekend. This comes on the heels of rejecting the entrance of others who are well known for expressing critical views of Israeli policy, such as Norman Finkelstein and Richard Falk. The meaning of blacklisting critical voices and what it means for Israeli democracy is not lost on many Israeli commentators. “The decision to shut up Professor Chomsky is a decision to shut down freedom in the state of Israel,” wrote Boaz Okun, Yedioth Ahronot’s legal affairs commentator and a retired Israeli judge, of Israel’s decision to reject Chomsky from entering the West Bank.
Violence Against the Media
Even worse than jailings and deportations, other media organizations and journalists have been violently attacked and intimidated.
On July 13, 2006, just a day into Israel’s 34-day long devastating invasion of southern Lebanon, Israel bombed Al-Manar, the Beirut-based television station of Hezbollah. Even though Israel was fighting with Hezbollah, this bombing was a clear violation of international law. As Human Rights Watch noted when condemning the attack, “It is unlawful to attack facilities that merely shape civilian opinion; neither directly contributes to military operations.”
Much like Israel’s (along with the US) isolation compared with international consensus on solutions to the peace process, they were once again at odds with most of free world on the issue of targeting press outlets in combat.
“The bombing of Al-Manar is a clear demonstration that Israel has a policy of using violence to silence media it does not agree with,” said White, the General Secretary of the IFJ. “This action means media can become routine targets in every conflict. It is a strategy that spells catastrophe for press freedom and should never be endorsed by a government that calls itself democratic.”
Israel was so irked by White’s statement they threatened to leave the organization, according to the Jerusalem Post. This is consistent with Israel’s contempt for international institutions that attempt to hold Israel up to reasonable standards of transparency.
Violence against smaller groups of journalists has also been a frequent issue of late. In late January, Israeli forces attacked Rami Swidan, a photographer for Ma’an News Agency, Ashraf Abu Shawish, a cameraman for Palmedia, and Reuters photographers Abdel Rahim al-Qusini and Hassan Titi. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Swiden said, “Israeli soldiers told the journalists they were not allowed to take pictures because the area was a closed military zone. When the journalists refused to stop, soldiers hit them and attempted to take their cameras before throwing teargas canisters and stun grenades.”
The incident came just months after two other journalists were assaulted “while covering clashes between settlers and Burin’s residents,” CPJ reported. Just recently, CPJ has documented seven cases of attacks or harassment of journalists, and asked Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak in a letter to please “take decisive action to end the harassment of journalists and bring the IDF’s practices in line with international standards of press freedom, allowing journalists to conduct their work safely and without deliberate interference.”
Why This Matters to Americans
Israel is not the only country to crack down on press coverage they don’t agree with. But given its reputation as a democracy, which is often hailed as a major reason they are the largest recipient of US foreign aid in the world, Israel’s long record of harassment, censorship and violence against reporters is especially unfortunate.
It is crucial that journalists from other countries such as the US, which are often able to say what Israeli reporters are not, bring attention to suppressed issues in the region. Ideally, the US government would also apply pressure by threatening to withdraw military aid if it does not reform its press policies, though this seems unlikely given the US refusal to take similar measures to end settlements.
A major reason for Israel’s crackdown on media is that it allows the occupation of Palestine to continue with minimal scrutiny. American taxpayers who subsidize the Israel military, and all citizens of the world who wish to expose the suffering of those on the receiving end of state violence, should fight hard to enable the truth to come to light in such an important part of the world.
Source
The recent arrest of an Israeli journalist who allegedly leaked materials to a reporter, and the gag order that followed, is just the latest in a long string of Israel's systematic attacks on press freedom.
Today in Israel, a nation so often hailed by Western commentators as the lone shining beacon of freedom and democracy in the Middle East, sits Anat Kamm. Kamm is a 23-year-old muzzled female journalist, under house arrest for her role in exposing a secret Israeli assassination plot by leaking government documents to Ha’aretz, one of Israel's most prominent dailies. She faces the possibility of life in prison. Uri Blau, a reporter for Ha'aretz who covered the covert plot, has fled to London, fearing for his safety and freedom.
Kamm's story has been difficult to piece together, since there was a gag order that kept anyone from covering her arrest and surrounding events until April 8. Violating the gag order can carry harsh punishments, including shutting down a publication. We do know from recent reports that Kamm’s house was vandalized by Israeli settlers, and that Blau will be returning leaked documents to the government. But the details are foggy. Israel essentially made a journalist - and her story - disappear.
Dov Alfon, the editor-in-chief of Ha'aretz, acknowledged his paper is challenging the gag order and standing by their reporter, telling the UK Guardian that, “Israel is still a democracy and therefore we intend to continue to publish whatever public interest demands and our reporters can reveal."
Alfon is absolutely right to make the connection between freedom of the press and democracy. One cannot truly exist without the other, and this point is often made by staunch defenders of Israel when they attack nations such as Iran for lacking press freedom. This is precisely why this incident should be so troubling to Americans. In the US, it is often taken for granted that Israel, which receives more than $3 billion annually from the US in aid, is a true democracy, despite its harsh treatment of Arab citizens in Israel and in the Occupied Territories. President Obama has claimed that the US-Israel relationship is "mutually beneficial" as both countries "share common values, histories, and a dedication to democracy." But clearly the values are not identical. Unlike Israel, in the US freedom of press is seen as essential to a functioning democracy.
As stunning as the Kamm affair may seem, it is far from an isolated incident. Over the years, Israel, known for its restrictive military censorship laws, has become notorious for thwarting journalism in various ways: they have repeatedly barred journalists from covering certain issues, prohibited reporters from entering Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, engaged in violent attacks against foreign journalists, bombed and attacked media outlets, and jailed reporters on numerous occasions. These abuses show that, in addition to the crimes committed as part of its occupation of Palestine, Israel has shown contempt to the basic rights of Israelis as well. Worse, it lessens the ability for people all over the world to understand the important issues and events taking place in the Middle East.
Systematic Censorship: Israeli Censors in Action
Despite its glowing reputation as a strong democracy, Israel has a systematic, institutionalized system of censorship. While the country’s Supreme Court has “affirmed that freedom of expression is an essential component of human dignity,” according to Freedom House’s annual report on press freedom, “the country’s basic law does not specifically address the issue.”
All news articles are subject to censorship by the Israeli Military Censor, and while not all articles are screened, those about especially sensitive military issues, such as nuclear weapons or military actions, are watched very closely. In 1982, the New York Times published an article titled “Censorship by Israel: How It’s Carried Out.” It reported that Israeli military censorship “applies to foreign newspaper and wire service dispatches transmitted from Israel during both war and peacetime on military and security issues,” and noted that articles on sensitive issues “are to be submitted to the censor before they are sent abroad.
This censorship has been used very recently, not only in the Kamm arrest, but also in Operation Orchard, when Israel bombed an alleged nuclear reactor site in Syria. In 2005 a BBC reporter was banned from the country for not showing the nation’s censor video footage of an interview he did with nuclear whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu.
Perhaps no issue has been as heavily censored as Israel’s nuclear program. Israel is widely known to have a large stockpile of nuclear weapons, but refuses to allow any international oversight, or even admit to having them. This is rather ironic, given Israel’s regular refutations of Iran for not cooperating enough with international inspectors with its nuclear program. Aluf Benn, writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, observed the Orwellian nature in which Israel is “censoring the past,” engaging in what he calls, “an offensive … aimed at trying to conceal the country’s nuclear history, much of which has already seen the light of day.” He described how Israeli officials arrested various authors who published books about sensitive issues, such as Avner Cohen, author of “Israel and the Bomb.” Benn asks: “Is it illegal even to ask questions about nuclear matters? Do former officials have to die with their lips sealed? Is there no time limit on old secrets?” These questions reveal the extent of Israel’s insistence on keeping the public from understanding the reality of its policies.
The Gaza Blackout and Restricting the Foreign Press
Israel’s infringement of the press extends beyond Israeli journalists. Since Israel controls access to the Occupied Territories, it can exert a great deal of control over the ability of foreign journalists to enter the territories, and for Palestinian journalists to leave. This control over freedom of movement is one crucial way that Israel attempts to keep its actions hidden from the public.
Israel’s refusal to let Western journalists enter Gaza during the 2008-09 invasion was especially disturbing, as it enabled numerous war crimes to take place with minimal press oversight. The decision was condemned by news outlets and press freedom groups all over the world, and prompted Freedom House to downgrade its status from “free” to “partly free.” Not even The New York Times had a reporter in Gaza during the invasion.
The policy had the desired effect. “An Israeli official told me they were delighted at a BBC TV correspondent broadcasting from Ashkelon in a flak jacket,” wrote Chris McGreal in the UK Guardian, “reinforcing the impression that the Israeli city is a war zone when there is more chance of being hit by a car than a rocket.”
What the journalists did miss was the collective punishment of the “people of Gaza as a whole,” concluded the Goldstone Report, a fact-finding mission of the United Nations Human Rights Council. The Goldstone Report called the war an effort to “humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
A small sample of the carnage that most media members were unable to cover (but were chronicled by the Goldstone Report and other human rights organizations) include: the bombing of the Al-Maqadmah mosque while hundreds of people were praying inside that killed 15 people; the killing of 21 members of the al-Samouni family, including children, who were located in a house by the orders of the Israel Defense Forces; and the use of white phosphorous in attacks on two hospitals filled with filled ailing civilians. Israel also bombed the United Nations-run Al-Fakhura school, killing 35 people.
Speaking on this issue, Danny Seaman, Israel’s press officer, openly expressed pleasure about how the absence off the foreign press – who he called a “fig leaf” for Hamas – greatly benefited Israel.” Take the UN school [where 42 people were killed by an Israeli shell] for example,” he told McGreal. “There’s a lot of questions as to what actually happened. If the foreign media had been there, it would have had much more of an impact on the conflict than it has at the moment. For the first time, when Israel raised questions, journalists had to address these issues and not get caught in feeding frenzy of reporting the story.”
Another example of Israel’s infringing on foreign journalists was on display earlier this year when, in January, Jared Malsin, a young Yale graduate attempted to fly back to the West Bank , where he worked as an editor for Ma’an, a Palestinian agency that covers the occupation, after a trip with his girlfriend outside the country. While at Ben Gurion International Airport, he was held and interrogated for eight hours by Israeli officials, before being jailed for a week and then deported out of the country.
Malsin was guilty of merely doing his job. He was, as he described his job as the English editor of the paper, giving “voice to people who don’t have a voice,” by telling stories that would otherwise go untold. Israel officials gave no real explanation for the detention and deportation, other than to acknowledge that Malsin was “criticizing the State of Israel,” from “inside the (Occupied) Territories.” But few doubt the motives were political. His jailing sends a stern message to other journalists who might consider covering the plight of the Palestinians.
The move was sharply condemned by press groups throughout the world. “We condemn this intolerable violation of press freedom,” said Aidan White, the head of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), a global union of media professionals. “The ban of entry in this case appears to be as a reprisal measure for the journalist’s independent reporting and that is unacceptable … This kind of interference has no place in a democracy.” Similar condemnations were made by many other groups including Reporters without Borders, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate and the International Press Institute, which made the astute observation that Israeli “authorities should recognize that the right of press freedom applies to all journalists, not just to reporters who write favorably about Israeli government policy.”
The health of Israel’s democratic values have also been called further into question light of Israel’s refusal to allow the entry of iconic academic and critic of US and Israeli policy, Noam Chomsky, to the West Bank from Jordan last weekend. This comes on the heels of rejecting the entrance of others who are well known for expressing critical views of Israeli policy, such as Norman Finkelstein and Richard Falk. The meaning of blacklisting critical voices and what it means for Israeli democracy is not lost on many Israeli commentators. “The decision to shut up Professor Chomsky is a decision to shut down freedom in the state of Israel,” wrote Boaz Okun, Yedioth Ahronot’s legal affairs commentator and a retired Israeli judge, of Israel’s decision to reject Chomsky from entering the West Bank.
Violence Against the Media
Even worse than jailings and deportations, other media organizations and journalists have been violently attacked and intimidated.
On July 13, 2006, just a day into Israel’s 34-day long devastating invasion of southern Lebanon, Israel bombed Al-Manar, the Beirut-based television station of Hezbollah. Even though Israel was fighting with Hezbollah, this bombing was a clear violation of international law. As Human Rights Watch noted when condemning the attack, “It is unlawful to attack facilities that merely shape civilian opinion; neither directly contributes to military operations.”
Much like Israel’s (along with the US) isolation compared with international consensus on solutions to the peace process, they were once again at odds with most of free world on the issue of targeting press outlets in combat.
“The bombing of Al-Manar is a clear demonstration that Israel has a policy of using violence to silence media it does not agree with,” said White, the General Secretary of the IFJ. “This action means media can become routine targets in every conflict. It is a strategy that spells catastrophe for press freedom and should never be endorsed by a government that calls itself democratic.”
Israel was so irked by White’s statement they threatened to leave the organization, according to the Jerusalem Post. This is consistent with Israel’s contempt for international institutions that attempt to hold Israel up to reasonable standards of transparency.
Violence against smaller groups of journalists has also been a frequent issue of late. In late January, Israeli forces attacked Rami Swidan, a photographer for Ma’an News Agency, Ashraf Abu Shawish, a cameraman for Palmedia, and Reuters photographers Abdel Rahim al-Qusini and Hassan Titi. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Swiden said, “Israeli soldiers told the journalists they were not allowed to take pictures because the area was a closed military zone. When the journalists refused to stop, soldiers hit them and attempted to take their cameras before throwing teargas canisters and stun grenades.”
The incident came just months after two other journalists were assaulted “while covering clashes between settlers and Burin’s residents,” CPJ reported. Just recently, CPJ has documented seven cases of attacks or harassment of journalists, and asked Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak in a letter to please “take decisive action to end the harassment of journalists and bring the IDF’s practices in line with international standards of press freedom, allowing journalists to conduct their work safely and without deliberate interference.”
Why This Matters to Americans
Israel is not the only country to crack down on press coverage they don’t agree with. But given its reputation as a democracy, which is often hailed as a major reason they are the largest recipient of US foreign aid in the world, Israel’s long record of harassment, censorship and violence against reporters is especially unfortunate.
It is crucial that journalists from other countries such as the US, which are often able to say what Israeli reporters are not, bring attention to suppressed issues in the region. Ideally, the US government would also apply pressure by threatening to withdraw military aid if it does not reform its press policies, though this seems unlikely given the US refusal to take similar measures to end settlements.
A major reason for Israel’s crackdown on media is that it allows the occupation of Palestine to continue with minimal scrutiny. American taxpayers who subsidize the Israel military, and all citizens of the world who wish to expose the suffering of those on the receiving end of state violence, should fight hard to enable the truth to come to light in such an important part of the world.
Source
Read the rest at at Truthout.
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