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May 9, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The Armey Plan:
Palestine to Ft. Worth?
May 8, 2002
James
Masterson
Hysteria
and Panic
About France
Robert Fisk
The Solution to this Filthy War: Foreign
Occupation
Edward
Hammond
and Jan van Aken
Pentagon
Pushed for Offensive BioWeapons Development
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
May 6, 2002
Fran Schor
Invasion
of Iraq:
Coming Soon
Dave Marsh
Love Hurts
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
May 3, 2002
Arundhati Roy
Democracy and
Religious Fascism
Wayne
Madsen
Dispatch
from Paris:
Le Pen's Strange Coalition
Yigal Bronner
A Journey to Beit Jalla
CounterPunch
Wire
Otto
Reich Named to Board of School of the Americas
John Troyer
Hatemongers Try to Cleanse History:
Gays and 9/11
John Stauber
Big
Food/Tobacco/Booze
Attacks "Mad Cow" Authors
Kathleen Christison
Before There Was Terrorism
May 2, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Rep.
Dick Armey Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians
Rami Kaplan
Israeli Soldiers Resisting
the Occupation:
Why We Refuse to Fight
Carol
Norris
Subterranean
Mini-Nuke Blues
Bernard Weiner
A Peek Inside Colin Powell's Personal
Diary
May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
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Al Gore:
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May
9, 2002
American Mainstream Media: Institutionalized
Subjectivity
The hopelessness of getting
accurate coverage from the mainstream media has Americans looking
elsewhere
By Alex Lynch
Years of prewar comfort and lax government oversight
of the consolidation of media owners, like the 1996 deregulatory
Telecommunications Act, have led to this. The entertainment business
has teamed up with news outlets, which are often owned by corporations
who make billions dealing weapons. Advertisers are more powerful
and influential than ever before and government and corporate
policy have become increasingly institutionalized as a sort of
perspective-template for the reporter/editor to plug each story
into.
Though American media is not under the
direct control of the government as in some other countries and
does provide limited coverage of oppositional beliefs on issues,
it is under direct corporate control and often gives one-sided
preferential treatment of arguments and debates. Considering
the power American opinion has over the world due to periodicals
and broadcasts that span the globe, it could be argued that American
mainstream media is by far the most important and should be the
most scrutinized of any.
The most Orwellian aspect of all is that
possibly the only defenders of objectivity in American mainstream
media are the media employees themselves, the very definition
of subjectivity. Bernard Goldberg's book Bias:
A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News
proclaims the media is biased towards liberals. The book
that took over Goldberg's for the No. 1 spot on the New York
Times best-seller list in April was Stupid
White Men by Michael Moore, which also criticizes the
media, this time as being too closely aligned with conservatives
and corporations.
Certainly, mainstream news in America
is not dictated by the millions of Americans, black, white, Hispanic
and so on that work at the local McDonalds or Taco Bell for minimum
wage. And what about the millions left without health insurance
and even more millions that live below the government's conservative
definition of the poverty line. It doesn't cater to the hundreds
of thousands that protested in Seattle in 1999 or Washington
D.C. recently. And it doesn't model its subject matter in the
interests of labor and unionists around the country.
Noam Chomsky's highly influential book
Manufacturing
Consent provides quite an argument in its thesis that
the news and the media can influence and mold the conscience
and beliefs of the masses. If this Frankfurt School premise stands
true, which hardly a media watchdog or professor would deny,
then looking at American media's influencers, those who influence
influence, uncovers quite a scandal. Yet, it's hardly debated.
Of course, no self-serving media outlet would lend airtime for
such an investigative report. Symbolically, across universities
all over the United States, Public Relations, the practice of
molding and influencing minds, and Journalism stand side by side
in the same department of Mass Communications in equal standing.
No other issue unveils American mainstream
media bias than does the Middle East conflict. Fairness and Accuracy
in Reporting (FAIR), a media watchdog, offered an interesting
report aptly titled; "In
U.S. Media, Palestinians Attack, Israel Retaliates"
where a study took place that reveals details of how the U.S.
media portrays the conflict in the Middle East.
"Both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict routinely present their attacks as being retaliation
for previous attacks or actions. Both sides portray their struggle
as essentially defensive (American) network news shows have characterized
Israeli violence as "retaliation" almost nine times
more often than Palestinian violence" (April 4, 2002).
Terrorism?
The impact of the word "terrorism"
in the linguistics of mainstream media automatically vilifies
a population of peoples. The sheer weight of the word discredits
the supposed "terrorist" to the point that they are
not worthy of fighting back or even defending themselves in many
cases. When weapons were smuggled into Palestinian territories
on the ship KarinA for the weaker of the two nations it
is called "weapons for terrorism." But when the United
States gives almost $2 billion annually to the stronger of the
two nations simply to buy weapons it is called "defense"
or "security."
Whereas the rest of the world's media
has sympathy for the plight of a stateless and desperate people,
Americans identify with the oppressive occupiers who break international
law. American politicians, and American culture, no longer identify
with the historical aspect of struggling against foreign occupiers
for independence, such as the British colonial empire in its
own history. Instead, the historical aspect that Americans identify
with is of conquest and submission, such as the ethnic cleansing
of American Indians (as evidenced by the recent bills S. 2194
and H.R. 1795) for a clear statehood. But the fact that the media
willingly streamlines this degenerative strategy into its own
print and broadcast policy is counterproductive and completely
undermines the necessity of dissent in a democratic nation.
Courageously, the Minneapolis Star Tribune
took a bold stance in avoiding the usage of the word "terrorism"
in its pages, preferring to allow their readers "to come
to their own judgments about individuals and organizations,"
Roger Buoen, assistant managing editor said (Feb. 3) U.S. Senators
and politicians including Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura then attacked
the Star Tribune. But in the end, the Star Tribune planned to
employ a double standard by allowing the tag to hold on al-Qaeda
because it is a "non-governmental group."
Massacre?
Another debatable usage in the linguistic repertoire of American
media is "massacre," particularly pertaining to the
city of Jenin in the Palestinian territories. The Israeli Defense
Force had already admitted that some civilian deaths occurred.
Reports from Israeli soldiers surfaced later that military personnel
were ordered to shoot in every window of every home. Also, the
IDF has been blamed for using Palestinians as human shields and
handicapped Palestinians were not allowed extra time to be removed
from their homes before they were bulldozed, smashing them to
death. But the IDF denied from the onset that a "massacre"
ever occurred. A term even Israeli foreign minister Shimon Perez
used to describe what passed in the city.
In the meantime, 16 people were slaughtered
at a German school. Many newspapers around the United States
ran as a headline in big bold letters "Massacre" describing
the incident.
On April 29, Cox News Service reported
that the IDF had moved into Hebron in response to a Palestinian
"terrorist" attack that killed four Israelis. The terrorist
attack was described as a "cruel massacre" which justified
the Israeli reaction.
In both cases, the media described a
relatively small amount of deaths as "massacres." Leading
a reader to believe that a massacre does not have as much to
do with large numbers of dead as it does with the cruelty of
their murderers. Yet cruel is not a word that typically describes
the IDF in the American media. This then can lead a reader to
believe that the word "massacre" only describes scenarios
where certain types of people (U.S. allies) are killed by other
certain types of people (enemies of the U.S.).
It is not a new tactic for a state to
try and belittle an enemy. But the complete demoralization of
a tiny group of peoples fighting against one of the world's largest
military powers, with help from its media to render this "enemy"
defenseless is pure politics, not objective reporting.
In any mainstream media outlet, the only
mention of "massacre" describing what happened in Jenin
is earmarked with the necessary disclaimer "Palestinians
claim" It takes a United Nations inquiry, at the approval
of Israel, to determine if it actually was a massacre. Even then,
the Israelis protested certain U.N. representatives for the inquiry
and demanded that retired U.S. military experts be added to the
group. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan complied, and still
the investigation was cancelled. American media, backed in a
corner, didn't question why the inquiry was cancelled; instead
it blamed Palestinian officials for sending "disinformation"
about the numbers of dead and questioned their "integrity"
because of it.
One case in point is MSNBC's show Making
Sense with host Alan Keyes, a former government policy planner
during the Reagan administration and a two-time Republican nominee
for the U.S. Senate. Keyes opened the show (May 1) with a seven-minute
castigation (reminiscent of a fiery preacher preaching to the
converted) of Palestinians sending "lies of propaganda"
about the numbers of dead in Jenin. Yet, as we have learned,
it is not numbers that matter in describing what the media calls
a "massacre."
As of May 3, Human Rights Watch confirmed
22 Palestinian civilians had been killed in Jenin, almost half
of the total dead and more than the 16 in Germany and the four
Israeli's, but not considered a "massacre" by the media.
Rise of
the New Media
Complete submission of all Palestinian
arguments in mainstream media is the goal of American conservatives
and Jewish-Americans who support Israel and for the large part,
since Sept. 11 and even before, that has been accomplished.
In reaction, the American left has picked
up the Palestinian plight where the American conscience and its
belief in sympathy for the oppressed began to wane after World
War II when the United States became a world power and a corporate
colonizer. The left's response to the themes Attorney General
John Ashcroft sent after Sept. 11 were typical and empowering
to the left in the long-term chess game of American opinion.
"Aiding terrorists" by questioning authority is fodder
for conspiracy theorists, which use these quotes to plant seeds
in the heads of apathetic Americans who would normally spend
their lives on the fence.
No other symbolic example personifies
the new information battle being waged between the mainstream
and New Media than do the events that passed in the fateful city
of Jenin. Even as CNN and Associated Press reporters were being
shot at with live rounds by the IDF for trying to enter Jenin,
mainstream media support continued without wavering.
"Despite Israel's effort to restrict
coverage of its destructive invasion of the West Bank's Palestinian
towns and refugee camps," explains Edward Said in The
Nation (May 6) "Information and images have nevertheless
seeped through. The internet has provided hundreds of verbal
as well as pictorial eyewitness reports most of it unavailable
or blocked or spun out of existence from the mainstream U.S.
media."
Just a few weeks before the Israeli invasion
of the West Bank, the Independent Media Centre (IMC), part of
http://indymedia.org, opened
a website in Jerusalem where millions of people, not just Americans,
can receive first hand reports from families and victims of the
Israeli assault.
The nationally syndicated Pacifica
radio program Democracy Now!, which features the boisterous
and viral voice of host Amy Goodman, has also led the charge
and has teamed up with the International Solidarity Movement
to boldly challenge the dominance of mainstream information and
reporting.
The proof of the effect of this New Media
appeared in Washington D.C. on April 20 when nearly 100,000 protesters
marched on Washington in support of Palestine, against the "war
on terrorism" and demonstrating against the IMF/World Bank
meeting. Organizers of the event used New Media websites and
radio programs to bring protesters from far and wide.
Media Activism
and Growth
Some call it "New Media," others
"Independent Media." Yet, it could be argued that it
is "Product Media" because of its reaction to mainstream
media's defense of status quo and security of the state, a product
of a docile and complicit media. It is often called bias and
a simple opposite of mainstream media. Even if that be true,
Americans deserve to hear opposing perspectives on issues if
mainstream media will not provide or give those perspectives
due credit. Particularly during wartime and the consolidation
of nationwide conservative opinion since Sept. 11, opposing views
need to be heard.
"Since we have no political parties
and opposition media, there is always a semblance of 'consensus'
for these wars." Gore Vidal said before the beginning of
the New Media's revolution.
Whatever it is called, it's opposition
to abuse of power, corporate greed, war and racism characterizes
it as "media activism." It does not claim to be objective,
but because of its small comparative size to mainstream media,
its goal is to be a voice of dissent and to even out perspectives
of issues of great importance.
Because of the success of Democracy
Now!, indymedia.org as well as many other websites on the
Internet and progressive magazines, the next logical step for
the "New Media" is a nationally circulated daily newspaper
that, in its beginning, reaches America's biggest cities.
Considering computer technology and the
cheap price of newsprint paper, such an excursion wouldn't seem
too far off. The only thing needed would be a national organization
of qualified reporters, editors and outgoing volunteers to get
it off the ground.
Funding is always a problem, but if successful
New Media outlets help, donations and fundraisers could easily
produce enough money to publish a first issue to create interest
and excitement in New York City, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago,
Seattle and Los Angeles. Small businesses could also advertise,
but advertising should be limited to the local level and a strict
adherence to avoid large chain stores or powerful corporations
should always be adhered to at all costs. Even the slightest
perception of advertiser influence should be avoided.
Columnists for the opinion pages should
begin with some of the most experienced intellectuals and activists
including the likes of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker,
Nat Hentoff, Alexander Cockburn, Cornel West, Gore Vidal and
many others. This would counter nicely conservative columnists
that dominate the mainstream media like Thomas Friedman, Charles
Krauthammer and William Safire.
Critical reporting, Groundbreaking investigative
reporting and intelligent feature stories should be a mainstay
and experimental forms of journalism like "New Journalism,"
which combines reporting and narrative together, should also
be considered.
Most countries of the world have a well-organized
dissent media and the necessity for such a media in the most
powerful country in this uni-polar world is incredibly important.
It only takes a few well-informed volunteers
to begin what could turn into an extremely important activist
forum and a periodical dedicated to reason and the balancing
of American opinion.
Whose ready to begin?
Alex Lynch
is Editor of THE SHANACHIE Alternative Campus Newspaper at the
University of South Florida and can be contacted at shanachie51@hotmail.com.
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