WebPosted Wed Oct 11 16:33:14 2000
OTTAWA - The Canadian Food Inspection Agency sponsored a special magazine supplement on biotechnology - and is being accused of creating propaganda for the biotech food industry.
The October edition of Canadian Living contains the eight-page supplement, which cost the CFIA $150,000. In it, the agency - which was formed in 1997 to enforce food safety and nutritional quality standards established by Health Canada - wanted to answer consumer questions about genetically modified (GM) foods.
It discusses how GM food is produced, how many products have been approved in Canada by the agency and how the agency assures such foods are safe for people to eat.
What is missing from the text is the dissenting opinions of such people and organizations as well-known geneticist David Suzuki, the Council of Canadians and Greenpeace.
"When Greenpeace was initially interviewed about our concerns over the dangers of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) I thought it was going to be a balanced piece that they were writing," said Michael Khoo of Greenpeace.
"But when we saw the final product in Canadian Living, it was clear that the CFIA was just interested in producing one-sided propaganda." Bart Bilmer of the Food Inspection agency denies that it forced the magazine to remove the comments of the biotech opponents.
"The publishers of Canadian Living were the ones developing the story, so the choice was theirs about how they saw fit to write the story," he said. "Our role in it was to check any factual errors and I think we gave some minimal comments towards the end."
But a spokesperson for the magazine contradicts that assertion. The spokesperson said the agency didn't want the negative comments in the final version.
Copyright 2001, CBC News Online
Reprinted with permission of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Return to chronology Oct 2000
ACTION ALERT:
FCC Moves to Intensify Media Consolidation
April 20, 2001
The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is moving to weaken or eliminate two of the few remaining broadcasting rules that protect some degree of media diversity.
On April 19, the FCC voted 3-1 in favor of eliminating the "dual network" rule, which had prevented one television network from buying another. This rule change will immediately benefit Viacom, which will be allowed to own CBS and part of the UPN network.
The other rule, expected to be lifted or amended in a matter of weeks, is the "cross ownership" rule, which prohibits a company that owns a local newspaper from owning a television station in the same market. Waivers have been granted in the past (Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. owns New York television station WNYW and the New York Post, for example), but watering down or eliminating the rule altogether has long been a goal of industry lobbyists.
This continues an intensely pro-business trend at the FCC, the government agency responsible for managing the broadcast spectrum and regulating the telecommunications industry. Under the impetus of the deregulatory Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC has overseen a period of intense corporate mergers. Since the Telecom Act, the number of television station owners in the U.S. has dropped by half (Los Angeles Times, 4/19/01), while more than half of the 11,000 commercial radio stations have been sold (Silicon Alley Reporter, 3/01).
The move to deregulate the media industry continued three years later, as the FCC in August 1999 changed its rules to allow networks to own two television stations in a given market. And last month, FCC chair Michael Powell approved a number of radio mergers that had been marked for public comment by previous Chairman William Kennard (Broadcasting & Cable, 3/19/01). The mergers given the green light by Powell would create local monopolies, where one company would control 50 percent of a given market's ad revenue, or two companies would control about 70 percent of total ad revenue.
Powell has indicated (New York Times, 4/16/01) that the cross ownership rule will fall as well: "I don't know why there's something inherent about a newspaper and something inherent about a broadcaster that means they can't be combined." Given that U.S. newspapers are overwhelmingly local monopolies, of course, mergers between the newspaper industry and the increasingly concentrated broadcast media would mean a dramatic reduction in media diversity at the local level.
Guarding and protecting the public interest is supposed to be central to the FCC's mission, but Powell has expressed some confusion about the very concept. When asked in February what he thought the term "public interest" meant (press conference, 2/6/01), he responsed: "I have no idea. The public interest at its core is the same thing as my oath of office: a commitment to making sure the American consumer is benefited.... I try to make the best judgment I can in ways I think will benefit consumers. Beyond that I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out."
Powell is not always so confused about whose interests he represents: Appearing before the House subcommittee on telecommunications (Washington Post, 3/30/01), Powell referred to broadcast corporations as "our clients." Powell has also mocked the concept of unequal access to technology, often referred to as the digital divide: "I think there is a Mercedes divide," he said (New York Times, 2/7/01). "I'd like to have one; I can't afford one."
The FCC's actions under Powell are discouraging for those who advocate for media diversity. "Powell has been very clear about his intentions to turn over more and more of the publicly owned broadcast spectrum to already huge media corporations. These moves reaffirm those corporate-friendly principles," said Jim Naureckas of FAIR. "The FCC's total lack of interest in protecting Americans as citizens or consumers is shocking and disgraceful."
ACTION: Please contact Michael Powell and let him know that media diversity should be a top priority for the FCC, and that media concentration is not in the public interest. Urge the FCC to preserve -- and refrain from weakening -- the rule prohibiting cross ownership of newspapers and television stations in the same market.
CONTACT: [Contact information deleted at the discretion of this editor. --MN]
FAIR contact information deleted as redundant. Click this link to access particulars.
Return to chronology 19 Apr 2001
ACTION ALERT:
Why Wasn't Kissinger Asked About War Crimes Charges?
June 29, 2001
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was summoned last month to appear at the French Palace of Justice to answer questions about murders and disappearances in Chile in the 1970s. While the story was carried by major European news outlets, it has received relatively little coverage in U.S. media.
French authorities wanted to ask Kissinger, who was visiting Paris, about Operation Condor, the terror network set up by the governments of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador and Bolivia. Evidence that the U.S. government was aware of and lent support to Operation Condor has been available for years (see The Nation, 8/9-16/99; New York Times, 3/6/01). The French magistrate who summoned Kissinger was particularly interested in what light he might shed on the disappearances of five French nationals who disappeared in Chile during or shortly after the U.S.-supported coup there in 1973.
But the French courts would learn nothing from Kissinger, who left town the day after being summoned without answering any questions.
After the episode in France, Kissinger did a lengthy, one-on-one interview with PBS's Charlie Rose (6/20/01). Kissinger also appeared alone with CNN's Wolf Blitzer (6/21/01) and Fox News Channel's Paula Zahn (6/13/01). None of the interviews even mentioned the French attempt to question Kissinger about human rights abuses. Nor did any of the journalists bring up the question of whether Kissinger might be indictable on war crimes charges, as journalist Christopher Hitchens argued in a two-part Harper's magazine article (2/01, 3/01).
Was there an agreement that the interviewers would avoid raising such uncomfortable issues for Kissinger? Charlie Rose was recently accused of making such an agreement with Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News Channel. In an interview with the New York Times Magazine (6/24/01), Ailes claimed that he had written assurance from Rose that he would not be asked about "politics" during his May 22 interview. Yvette Vega, the executive producer for the Charlie Rose Show, told FAIR that she was unaware of any such deal with Ailes.
But Kissinger himself seemed to have this kind of agreement with the National Press Club in Washington, DC, where Kissinger spoke on June 21. Noting that none of the questions asked of Kissinger, chosen from written questions submitted by the audience, dealt with war crimes or human rights investigations, journalists Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman asked Press Club moderator Richard Koonce if there was some sort of arrangement to avoid these topics.
According to Mokhiber and Weissman, Koonce explained that there was a "definite sensitivity" to those kinds of questions, and that Kissinger "was afraid that if we got into a discussion of that, for the vast majority of people that, it would take so much time to explain all of the context, that, you know, he preferred to avoid that."
Which raises the question: If a former Secretary of State receiving a summons about his knowledge of murder, torture and disappearances is not news, then what is?
ACTION: Please contact Charlie Rose and ask why he failed to ask Henry Kissinger about the newsworthy issues of human rights investigations and war crimes charges. You might also contact the National Press Club to voice your disappointment that journalists were not allowed to press Kissinger on these matters.
CONTACT:
The Charlie Rose Show mailto:charlierose@pbs.org Phone: 212-940-1600
National Press Club Melinda Cooke, Assistant to Club President Dick Ryan mailto:mcooke@npcpress.org Fax: 202-662-7537
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain a polite tone. Please cc fair@fair.org with your correspondence.
Read Mokhiber and Weissman's column, "Censorship at the National Press Club," at: http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2001/000077.html
Read "The Fugitive" by Christopher Hitchens (The Nation, 6/25/01) at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010625&s=hitchens
FAIR contact information deleted as redundant. Click this link to access particulars.
Return to chronology 21 Jun 2001
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 16:27:20 -0400
Reply-to: fair-l-request@listserv.american.edu
From: FAIR-L
Subject: [FAIR-L] Stossel Tampers with the Facts
To: FAIR-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
ACTION ALERT:
Stossel Tampers with the Facts
July 17, 2001
John Stossel plays by a different set of rules than other journalists, as demonstrated most recently by "Tampering with Nature," a one-hour special that aired on ABC on June 29.
Taking advantage of the unusual leeway the network gives him, ABC's favorite free-market zealot used the special to attack environmentalists, who are caricatured as "preachers of doom and gloom" whose extreme anti-technology views would have us all "running around naked, hungry for food, maybe killing a rabbit with a rock, then dying young, probably before age 40." As is often the case, Stossel's reporting relied on biased sources, twisted facts and the exclusion of information that might conflict with his thesis.
Central to Stossel's argument is that schools are overrun with green propaganda, leaving him to wonder: "Is this education or environmental boot camp?" To hear Stossel and his carefully chosen guests tell it, kids are being brainwashed when in fact there's little reason to worry about the environment.
Deforestation, for example, is a non-issue, according to one of Stossel's main sources, Patrick Moore, a former director of Greenpeace who now works for the timber industry. Moore explains that "the forest cover in the United States today is about the same as it was in 1920." Stossel chimes in, "I don't read that in the Greenpeace fundraiser," suggesting that groups like Greenpeace are part of a "huge industry" that profits by manufacturing a crisis.
It's true that total U.S. forest cover has been roughly stable over the last century. But taking total acreage as the sole indicator of environmental well-being is a simplistic approach. It discounts, for example, that the U.S. has logged most of its old-growth forests, which are crucial to biodiversity. Deforestation is a global crisis with global impact-- most of the forestry work done by Greenpeace, for instance, focuses not on the relatively well-protected U.S., but on Brazil, Canada and other areas where forest loss threatens the climate, endangered species and indigenous peoples. The United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization finds that deforestation is running about 22 million acres per year, an estimate many environmental groups say is too low, since it counts new tree plantations the same way as older forests (Environmental News Service, 3/12/01).
And are you worried about pollution? Then you're no better than those brainwashed schoolchildren: "Why don't they know the facts? The EPA says over the past 30 years, the air has been getting cleaner.... Every major pollutant the government measures is decreasing."
Stossel's implication that EPA data shows environmental improvement across the board is clearly incorrect. In fact, the EPA's website states that "total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions"-- which include carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride-- have risen significantly over the last several years, to 11.2 percent above 1990 baseline (as of 1998), and that emissions per person in the U.S. "have increased about 3.4 percent between 1990 and 1997." These emissions certainly qualify as "major pollutants" in terms of their environmental impact.
Stossel's discussion of global warming was highly selective in the information it presented. Instead of reporting the increasingly strong scientific consensus on global warming, Stossel chose to highlight the views of so-called "skeptics," giving center stage to three dissenters from among the 2,000 scientists of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which recently released a report stating that global temperatures are rising almost twice as fast as previously thought.
To back up the skeptics' claims, Stossel presents some deceptive evidence: "You may have heard that 1,600 scientists signed a letter warning of 'devastating consequences.' But I bet you hadn't heard that 17,000 scientists signed a petition saying there's 'no convincing evidence' that greenhouse gases will disrupt the Earth's climate."
The implication is that 10 times as many scientists question global warming. What Stossel doesn't note is that while the first petition was circulated by a group well-respected in the scientific community, the second petition has been famously discredited.
The first, smaller petition came from the Union of Concerned Scientists and its signatories included 110 Nobel laureates, including 104 of the 178 living Nobel Prize winners in the sciences, along with 60 U.S. National Medal of Science winners. The latter petition was a project of the George C. Marshall Institute, whose chair, Frederick Seitz, is also affiliated with the Global Climate Coalition (an industry group calling itself the "voice for business in the global warming debate"), in conjunction with the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, a lesser-known group whose leader, wrote columnist Molly Ivins, is a biochemist who "specializes in home schooling and building nuclear shelters" (Los Angeles Times, 8/17/98).
Though OISM's signatories did include reputable scientists, it also included dentists, nutritionists and others with no expertise in climatalogy; the only requirement for signing on was a bachelors degree in science. In fact, OISM's screening process was so lax that for a time the list also included a number of gag names added by environmentalists, including Ginger Spice and Michael J. Fox. The OISM petition also came under fire for being deceptively packaged: The petition was accompanied by an article purporting to debunk global warming that was formatted to look as though it had been published in the journal of the respected National Academy of Sciences. The resemblance was so close that the NAS issued a public statement that the OISM petition "does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy."
None of this controversy was mentioned in Stossel's report.
Stossel also cites an Energy Department study that "says if we try to reduce global warming by restricting emissions, gas prices will go up 50 percent. Electricity 80 percent." Stossel doesn't say exactly what study he's citing, but the numbers are most likely from the Energy Information Administration, which supplies data for the Energy Department.
In October of 1998, the EIA predicted that if the Kyoto Protocol were implemented, electricity prices might rise anywhere from 20 percent to 86 percent by 2010, while gasoline prices might rise 11 percent to 53 percent. But the report also predicted that prices would decline "as energy markets adjust and more efficient, new technologies become available and gradually penetrate the market." The report also cautioned: "The amount prices must rise is uncertain.... Forecasting technological change and public response to it under various pricing scenarios is an inexact science." It becomes even more inexact when Stossel picks the numbers he likes best out of a broad range.
During the program, absurd contentions from the guests Stossel favors pass without comment: "The average person hears the temperature has changed a half degree," says Richard Lindzen of MIT. "So what? Changes more than that while they wait for the street light to change." It's obvious that local temperatures have a wide range, yet even small changes in average global temperatures can have profound effects (Los Angeles Times, 7/13/01). Stossel lets this sophistry pass, but activists he doesn't agree with are not treated so kindly. "You're a scaremonger," he scolded genetic engineering critic Jeremy Rifkin, "Why should we listen to you?"
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the piece was Stossel's use of children. ABC had filmed interviews with schoolchildren from Santa Monica, California. The childrens' parents originally signed consent forms, but later withdrew them, citing concerns over Stossel's leading questions, and the fact that Stossel's participation had not been mentioned until the last minute.
Stossel's strategy was to get the students to make inaccurate statements about the environment, then blame the environmentalist propaganda that is taught in the schools. The tactic is demeaning and absurd; one could imagine Stossel quizzing students on spelling or math, and explaining incorrect answers as the result of a propaganda campaign. Stossel doesn't mention the fact that actual propaganda-- paid for by industries bent on improving their environmental image -- is increasingly used in place of materials designed by educators in America's classrooms (USA Today, 6/23/98).
In the end, Stossel took a fair amount of criticism for his manipulative tactics, and ABC forced him to pull the original interviews from the broadcast. One can't say he learned from the incident, though: He merely interviewed a different set of children to achieve the same results.
It's hard to imagine another journalist getting away with what Stossel does. It's ironic that a report on the evils of "propaganda" relied so heavily on misinformation and selective omissions-- tried and true propaganda techniques-- to prove its points.
ACTION: Let ABC News know that Stossel's manipulative interviews with children for the "Tampering with Nature" special were not the only things that should have concerned them. Ask them to provide airtime to advocates for the points of view Stossel attacks in his reporting.
CONTACT:
ABC News Phone: 212-456-7777 Fax: 212-456-4292 mailto:netaudr@abc.com
John Stossel mailto:stossel@abc.com
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain a polite tone. Please cc fair@fair.org with your correspondence.
For more of FAIR's work on John Stossel, see: FAIR contact information deleted as redundant. Click this link to access particulars. Return to chronology 29 Jun 2001
ACTION ALERT: October 26, 2001
Just two days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the FCC began to eliminate the last remaining shreds of regulation on media concentration. With all eyes elsewhere, the FCC voted unanimously to "review" laws that prohibit the same company from owning both a newspaper and a TV station in the same geographic area, and laws that limit the percent of the national audience that a single cable company can reach.
FCC chair Michael Powell has made no secret of his desire to abandon any substantive public interest restrictions on the dominance of big media corporations, claiming "the oppressor here is regulation." (See "Their Man in Washington," http://www.fair.org/extra/0110/powell.html.) He even presented this latest move as a patriotic act, declaring, "The flame of the American ideal may flicker, but it will never be
extinguished...We will do our small part and press on with our business, solemnly, but resolutely."
Pressure to drop the cross-ownership ban comes from companies like Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., whose recent acquisition of station operator Chris-Craft puts it in violation, giving it two TV stations and a newspaper in New York City. (News Corp. already had a waiver to operate one TV station and a newspaper in New York.) There are more than 40 markets with newspaper-broadcast combinations already, most 'grandfathered' in when the law was written in 1975. Other companies in violation of the
law include the Tribune Co. which owns TV-broadcast combinations in Los Angeles, New York, Orlando and Chicago.
Powell has called the cross-ownership ban "extremely prohibitive," and said he sees no reason a city's TV station and newspaper shouldn't be controlled by the same company. Indeed, media corporations routinely make deals that violate existing law, so confident are they of the current anti-regulatory climate -- "skating where the puck is going to be," is how one industry analyst described it (L.A. Times, 9/14/01).
Besides the wholly predictable result of a single company controlling a town's TV stations, radio stations, cable company and only newspaper, critics warn that elimination of this rule will essentially signal the absorption of the newspaper business into the television industry, with a negative impact on the quality of print journalism. Newspaper companies "see savings in news gathering by combining with TV stations as a big plus," an industry analyst told the L.A. Times (9/14/01), giving an
indication that the newly merged megacompanies would provide communities with less news, not more.
FCC reviews include a mandatory public comment period to give Americans a chance to weigh in on proposed regulations. Examination of some previous public comment periods shows that the comments received are often few and are overwhelmingly drawn from media companies and industry trade organizations.
The deadline for comment on the cable ownership cap has been extended to January 4, 2002; FAIR will release more information on that soon. More urgent right now are comments about the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban, which are due by December 3.
At a time of crisis, the dangers of such overwhelming concentration in media are more glaring than ever. The changes underway will make U.S. media even less diverse, more commercial and less accountable to the public.
ACTION: Please let the FCC know that lifting the cross-ownership ban to allow further media consolidation will not serve the public interest.
Because the FCC has time-consuming requirements for email comments which require that people format their message in a certain way, FAIR created a form to simplify the process. You can submit comments to the FCC about cross-ownership at: http://www.fair.org/mailform.php
For more details on the FCC's efforts to weaken ownership rules, see the Center for Digital Democracy's in-depth resources: http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/mediaownership/index.html
FAIR contact information deleted as redundant. Click this link to access particulars. Return to chronology 13 Sep 2001
ACTION ALERT: FCC Moves to Eliminate Cable Ownership Cap; December 21, 2001
The Federal Communications Commission is moving to eliminate one of the few remaining vestiges of public interest regulation on media concentration -- the rules that limit the percentage of the national audience that a single cable company can reach. If existing rules limiting a single company to 30 percent of the national market are abandoned, the country's cable TV industry, now dominated by just eight companies, could be controlled by as few as two. Such consolidation threatens the
diversity not just of cable TV but also of the Internet, since cable is likely to eventually be the way most people get Internet access.
Just two days after the September 11 attacks, the FCC moved to review both the cable ownership cap and the "cross-ownership" rules that keep a single company from owning both a newspaper and a TV station in the same geographic area. (See FAIR Action Alert, http://www.fair.org/activism/ownership-comment.html.) FCC reviews include a mandatory public comment period to give Americans a chance to weigh in on
proposed regulations. The public comment period for the cross-ownership rules closed on December 3, 2001, but the public has until January 4 to weigh in on the cable ownership cap.
Cable mega-companies like AOL Time Warner have aggressively moved to eliminate even the most modest of public interest regulations, claiming that any such rules impinge on their First Amendment rights. Despite the dubious idea of a "right" that only two giant corporations could take advantage of, a D.C. Court of Appeals accepted that argument, striking down the federal limit on the size of cable companies in March 2001; on December 3, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review that decision.
Several recent court rulings have favored media corporations' desire to grow ever larger and more concentrated; the FCC could resist, by offering justification for its regulations, but few observers expect the agency to do so. "If the Federal Communications Commission is heading in the direction many predict that it is, a new era of mega-media mergers may be on its way," reports the New York Law Journal (10/4/01). "The way to bet here is that they will loosen the rules," adds analyst and
former FCC official Blair Levin.
"Looser" rules will very likely also mean higher cable rates for consumers; since the deregulatory Telecommunications Act of 1996, cable rates have risen nearly three times as fast as inflation.
Those concerned about preserving the democratic potential of the Internet should take heed: "AOL Time Warner and other cable companies are seeking to dramatically overturn the limits on cable system ownership precisely so they can control the key access point for the Internet marketplace," explains the Center for Digital Democracy. The FCC needs to hear from the public now, the CDD's Jeff Chester told CounterSpin (12/21/01), in order "to assure openness and diversity in cable and in the
internet's future."
ACTION: Please let the FCC know that allowing further media consolidation by lifting the cable ownership cap will not serve the public interest.
The Center for Digital Democracy has created a special form that allows citizens to automatically file comments with the FCC. To access that form, go to: http://www.democraticmedia.org/getinvolved/fccfiling2.html
For more details on the FCC's efforts to weaken ownership rules, see the Center for Digital Democracy's in-depth resources: http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/mediaownership/index.html
FAIR contact information deleted as redundant. Click this link to access particulars. Return to chronology 21 Dec 2001
ACTIVISM UPDATE: February 5, 2002
On January 10, FAIR put out an Action Alert asking people to write to National Public Radio about an apparent blind spot in its Middle East reporting. NPR had been referring to the situation in Israel and Palestine around the New Year as a time of "relative calm" or "comparative quiet," explaining at one point that "only one Israeli has been killed in those three weeks." What NPR didn't explain was that during this "quiet" period, an average of one Palestinian per day was being killed by
Israeli occupation forces. (See http://www.fair.org/activism/npr-israel-quiet.html.)
In answer to our alert, at least several hundred people wrote to NPR, calling for Middle East reporting that paid attention to the victims of violence on all sides. Yet even as these letters were pouring in, NPR continued to present the same distorted view of the conflict.
All Things Considered anchor Noah Adams opened a January 14 report on the assassination of a Palestinian militia leader, and the militia's revenge murder of an Israeli civilian, by declaring that "deadly violence returned to the Middle East today"--as if deadly violence hadn't been happening to Palestinians on an almost daily basis all along. On the January 17 All Things Considered, anchor Melissa Block prefaced a question by asserting, "Until early this week there'd been almost a month of
relatively reduced violence there"-- a premise that was not corrected by correspondent Linda Gradstein. And on January 18, correspondent Peter Kenyon referred on Morning Edition to "the recent lull in violence."
NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin, to whom the activists' letters were addressed, does seem to recognize the problem. Appearing on January 17 with media critic Ali Abunimah on WJHU, a Baltimore NPR affiliate, Dvorkin agreed with the criticism and said that NPR's foreign desk had told hosts and correspondents to reflect the reality of the situation. But this intervention does not seem to have resulted in changed coverage -- in fact, two of the repetitions of the distortion noted above occurred
within the next 24 hours. Even as late as January 30, Linda Gradstein was referring to the "period of relative calm," as if no one had ever pointed out to NPR that this characterization ignored the deaths of dozens of Palestinians.
Despite the hundreds of individual letters he has received, Dvorkin has yet to issue a formal comment on the issue. But in a brief January 25 response to a FAIR activist, Dvorkin wrote, "After FAIR pointed out the phrase 'relative calm,' NPR corrected that inaccuracy in future reports." In fact, the inaccuracy was repeated, and keeps being repeated. Something seems to be amiss in the way NPR handles legitimate complaints from the public.
ACTION: Please write to NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin and ask him to respond substantively to the hundreds of letters he has received about NPR's Mideast coverage, including an explanation of how NPR can repeat the same distortion after it has been "corrected."
CONTACT: Jeffrey Dvorkin NPR Ombudsman: ombudsman@npr.org
FAIR contact information deleted as redundant. Click this link to access particulars. Return to chronology 05 Feb 2002
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 14:57:57 ACTIVISM UPDATE: October 7, 2002
Activists contacting major media outlets regarding their coverage of Iraq seem to be having an impact on the coverage of this timely issue.
On September 30, FAIR issued an action alert documenting the limited coverage of a major anti-war demonstration in London. The demonstration merited only passing mentions in the Washington Post and New York Times, so hundreds of activists contacted the papers to ask about this news judgment. On October 6, Post ombudsman Michael Getler, while not mentioning FAIR by name, agreed with the activists' concerns. Getler wrote:
--- Last Saturday, antiwar rallies involving some 200,000 people in London and thousands more in Rome took place and nothing ran in the Sunday Post about them. On Monday, The Post's London correspondent produced an informative, front-page article surveying broad European concerns about U.S. policies, with references to the rallies. A picture of the protesters in London accompanied the story. Nevertheless, the failure to report the news of the rallies when they occurred produced complaints
from readers and an organized e-mail campaign assailing the paper for this lapse.
I'm in agreement with the readers on these complaints. Whatever one thinks about the wisdom of a new war, once it starts it is too late to air arguments that should have been aired before. ---
The Post was not the only outlet that seemed to respond to recent FAIR alerts. On September 24, FAIR challenged the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe over their shifting coverage of the UNSCOM arms inspectors in Iraq being used as spies. As FAIR noted, these papers broke the story of the UNSCOM spying in 1998, citing U.S. officials; lately, however, the papers have shifted to referring to the spying as "allegations" leveled by Saddam Hussein.
On October 2, 2002, a Times story about Iraq included this reference to the inspections team: "The reform followed the disclosure that a United States spy on the United Nations team had planted an electronic eavesdropping device in Baghdad that helped guide allied bombing in December 1998."
A similar change was seen at USA Today, the subject of a FAIR action alert on August 12. The paper repeated the notion that the U.N. inspectors were "expelled" from Iraq in 1998, when in fact they were withdrawn by inspections chief Richard Butler. Subsequent reporting in the paper has been more accurate, like an October 2 report that explained that the "U.N. weapons inspectors left in 1998 amid a dispute over access to suspected weapons sites."
These stories show that media activism can have an impact. The very same errors are still being circulated in numerous mainstream media outlets, and anti-war demonstrations continue to be undercovered. FAIR encourages activists to communicate with news outlets when they see such problems.
FAIR contact information deleted as redundant. Click this link to access particulars. Return to chronology 07 Oct 2002
LOS ANGELES - A series of television ads linking SUVs to supporting terrorism has stirred up controversy in the United States.
An organization calling itself "The Detroit Project" has created ads that mimic the anti-drug campaigns run by the U.S. government.
In one of the two ads, SUV owners talk about why they buy their vehicles such as, "it makes me feel safe," and "everybody has one." The comments are interspersed with other people saying "I helped hijack an airplane" and "I helped our enemies develop weapons of mass destruction."
The project is the brainchild of Arianna Huffington, a California political commentator.
"We are at war," Huffington told CBC TV. "(We) need to stop kow-towing to anti-American states from the Gulf just because we are dependent on their oil."
Huffington says she used to drive an SUV until last year, when she switched to a hybrid made by a Japanese manufacturer.
Hybrid cars combine a gas burning engine with an electric motor to power the vehicle and are 20 to 50 per cent more fuel efficient than traditional gas-powered vehicles.
Americans own 20 million SUVs. There was a six per cent increase in SUV sales last year.
"Detroit spends one billion a year in advertising on these vehicles," says Huffington.
Huffington says the Detroit project ads are designed to elicit shame, much like the anti-drinking and driving public service announcements.
"(Those ads) turned drinking and driving from being cool to being socially irresponsible."
Sam Kazman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute criticized the ads as "elitist nonsense." The institute is a business lobby group.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacfurers says Huffington's campaign attacks people such as farmers and ranchers who rely on SUVs to do their jobs.
Huffington says the ads aren't just aimed at consumers. She wants the North American auto industry to take notice.
"The technology exists right now. We can have hybrid SUVs on the road."
North American automakers have promised to have hybrid SUVs and trucks available by the end of the year. But the only hybrids on the North American market are the Honda Insight and the Toyota Prius.
She says it's ironic that she has to buy a Japanese-made hybrid in order to be patriotic.
"We need (car makers) to advertise and market hybrids the way they market SUVs."
The ads are only running on NBC. Other networks have refused to feature them. They can be seen in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Detroit.
Copyright 2003, CBC News Online Return to chronology 10 Jan 2003
Date:Thu, 3 Apr 2003 14:17:45 -0800 MEDIA ADVISORY: April 3, 2003
Although the invasion of Iraq is being fought under the name "Operation Iraqi Freedom," it has constricted the range of expression sanctioned by media outlets within the U.S. Starting before the war began, several national and local media figures have had their work jeopardized, either explicitly or implicitly because of the critical views they expressed on the war.
* MSNBC canceled Phil Donahue's talkshow after an internal memo (leaked to the All Your TV website, 2/25/03) argued that he would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." The report warned that the Donahue show could be "a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."
An email from a network executive, also leaked to All Your TV (3/5/03), suggested that it would be "unlikely" that Donahue could be used by MSNBC to "reinvent itself" and "cross-pollinate our programming" with the "anticipated larger audience who will tune in during a time of war" by linking pundits to war coverage, "particularly given his public stance on the advisability of the war effort."
* Brent Flynn, a reporter for the Lewisville (Texas) Leader, was told he could no longer write a column for the paper in which he had expressed anti-war views. "I was told that because I had attended an anti-war rally, I had violated the newspaper's ethics policy that prohibits members of the editorial staff from participating in any political activity other than voting," Flynn wrote in a note on his personal website. "I am convinced that if my column was supportive of the war and it was a
pro-war rally that I attended, they would not have dared to cancel my column.... The fact that the column was cancelled just days before the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq raises serious questions about the motives for the cancellation." Although Flynn was ostensibly sanctioned for compromising the paper's "objectivity," he continues to serve as a news reporter for the paper, while losing the part of his job where he was expected to express opinions.
* Kurt Hauglie, a reporter and columnist for Michigan's Huron Daily Tribune, quit the paper after allegedly being told that an anti-war column he had written would not run because it might upset readers (WJRT-TV, 3/28/03).
* The website YellowTimes.org, which featured original anti-war reporting and commentary, was shut down by its Web hosting company on March 24, after it posted images of U.S. POWs and Iraqi civilian victims of the war. Orlando-based Vortech Hosting told Yellow Times in an e-mail, "Your account has been suspended because [of] inappropriate graphic material." Later, the company clarified: "As 'NO' TV station in the U.S. is allowing any dead U.S. soldiers or POWs to be displayed and we will not
either." As of April 3, the site was still down.
* The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera news network's attempts to set up an English-language website were foiled by unidentified U.S.-based hackers who launched a denial-of-service attack. Al-Jazeera is expected to try to relaunch its site in mid-April. The station's reporters also had their press credentials revoked by the New York Stock Exchange, and were unable to obtain alternative credentials at the NASDAQ exchange: "In light of Al-Jazeera's recent conduct during the war, in which they have
broadcast footage of US POWs in alleged violation of the Geneva Convention, they are not welcome to broadcast from our facility at this time," a NASDAQ spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times (3/26/03).
* Veteran war correspondent Peter Arnett was fired by NBC as a result of an interview that he gave to Iraqi TV in which he said that war planners had "misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces" and that there was "a growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war." After initially defending Arnett, NBC released a statement saying that "it was wrong for Mr. Arnett to grant an interview to state-controlled Iraqi TV-- especially at a time of war-- and it was wrong for him
to discuss his personal observations and opinions in that interview." Return to chronology 03 Apr 2003
Date:Fri, 20 Jun 2003 12:35:12 -0700 MEDIA ADVISORY: June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
--- RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
Clark's assertion corroborates a little-noted CBS Evening News story that aired on September 4, 2002. As correspondent David Martin reported: "Barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, the secretary of defense was telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks." According to CBS, a Pentagon aide's notes from that day quote Rumsfeld asking for the "best info fast" to "judge
whether good enough to hit SH at the same time, not only UBL." (The initials SH and UBL stand for Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.) The notes then quote Rumsfeld as demanding, ominously, that the administration's response "go massive...sweep it all up, things related and not."
Despite its implications, Martin's report was greeted largely with silence when it aired. Now, nine months later, media are covering damaging revelations about the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, yet still seem strangely reluctant to pursue stories suggesting that the flawed intelligence-- and therefore the war-- may have been a result of deliberate deception, rather than incompetence. The public deserves a fuller accounting of this story. Return to chronology 20 Jun 2003
2003, August 11: Fair and Balanced
The document filed is reported to be highly critical and ascerbic, even alleging: [I smell a frivolity born of petulance and spite. " . . . he appears to be shrill and unstable. His views lack any serious depth or insight." This is pretty much what some media critics say about Bill O'Reilly and Fox News itself; that neither is at all objective, but blatantly partisan and not due any journalistic respect. For some really Fair & Balanced(tm) views of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, read these two books.
For an alternative viewpoint and some wondrous invective about O'Reilly and Fox News, see Hal Crowther's comments from Weapons of Mass Stupidity. The New York Times reported in its article on this suit: Return to chronology 11 Aug 2003
2003, August 22: Fair and Balanced
Other issues dealt with in arguments are: [Also, as is usual with censorship efforts, this incident has rebounded against Franken's detractors. Because of the hype over the book, it was released about a month earlier than intended, going on sale on 21 Aug, which is why it is already in the stores, and the publisher ordered an additional fifty thousand copy print run to go with two hundred seventy thousand copies already out there. In a telephone interview by Associated Press, Franken commented, "In addition to thanking my own lawyers
I'd like to thank Fox's lawyers for filing one of the stupidest briefs I've ever seen in my life." —MN] Return to chronology 22 Aug 2003
MEDIA ADVISORY: August 22, 2003
The deadly bus bombing in Jerusalem on August 19 was foreshadowed by a pair of suicide attacks a week earlier which killed two Israeli civilians. While U.S. media tended to portray these attacks as a return to violence after a relatively peaceful period, there were numerous killings in the weeks leading up to the suicide bombings that underscore the lack of evenhanded attention given to loss of life in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
When the two Palestinian suicide bombers each killed an Israeli civilian along with themselves on August 12, U.S. news outlets immediately depicted the attacks as an apparent resurgence in Mideast violence. "Summer truce shattered in Israel," announced CBS (8/12/03), while NBC (8/12/03) reported that "the attacks broke more than a month of relative silence." The Los Angeles Times (8/13/03) wrote that the bombings "broke a six-week stretch during which the people of this war-weary land had
enjoyed relative quiet."
During this six-week period of "relative quiet," however, some 17 Palestinians were killed and at least 59 injured by Israeli occupation soldiers and settlers, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society. The dead included Mahmoud Kabaha, a four-year-old boy, who was sitting in the back seat of a jeep with his family at a checkpoint when an Israeli soldier shot him dead-- in a spray of bullets that the army simply called an "accidental burst of gunfire" (Associated Press, 7/25/03).
Virtually none of the major U.S. news reports on the August 12 bombings alluded to the Palestinian death toll in this period, leaving out a key piece of the story: For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the violence had never ceased; while the Israeli attacks had decreased, there had never been anything like an Israeli cease-fire.
An Associated Press report on August 19 (filed prior to that day's bombing) did acknowledge that since June 29, "more than 20 people have been killed on the Israeli and Palestinian sides." What it didn't note was that of those "more than 20," at least 21 were Palestinian, according to the Red Crescent.
After a month and a half in which Palestinians were being killed several times a week and receiving relatively little mention, the Washington Post and New York Times both put the bombings on their August 13 front pages, each declaring the violence a break from weeks of "relative calm," and each including a front-page photo of the victims' relatives in mourning. USA Today also put grieving relatives on the front page, along with the headline, "Two Suicide Attacks End a Six-Week Lull in
Conflict." One can empathize with the losses of those survivors while recognizing that the families of the Palestinians who died during the "lull" were virtually invisible.
On CNN, the August 12 bombings were a major story, with eight separate segments mentioning the attacks in a three-hour period. Anchor Wolf Blitzer declared a "grim return to the battle days in Israel and the Palestinian territories." His colleague Aaron Brown echoed that theme, noting that "after a period of relative calm there has been a major surge in violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories." Correspondent Jerrold Kessel reported that the bombings "cast doubt on the viability of
this peace process known as the road map for peace."
These bombings had killed four people, including the bombers. Just four days earlier, on August 8, two Palestinians and one Israeli were killed in an Israeli raid on a suspected militant, while two more Palestinians were killed at an ensuing rally-- one shot, and the other killed by Israeli tear gas (Chicago Tribune, 8/9/03). But those five deaths-- mainly Palestinian-- were not deemed a "major surge in violence" or a "grim return to the battle days" on CNN. Instead, anchor Carol Costello
(8/8/03) suggested that the Israeli raid "may be another smudge, a bump if you will, on that road map to peace."
The media's tendency to downplay-- or completely ignore-- Palestinian suffering and death is nothing new. In late 2001 and the beginning of 2002, for example, a loose cease-fire declared by Yasir Arafat led to a period of very few Israeli deaths, but sustained Palestinian deaths-- and the American media repeatedly referred to it as a time of "relative calm" (FAIR Action Alert, 1/10/02, 2/5/02).
In order to convey the Mideast crisis in all its complexity, journalists need to take seriously the violence suffered by all communities. References to "relative calm" while Palestinians are being routinely killed only serve to trivialize human life and obscure the cycle of violence that afflicts the region.
FAIR contact information deleted as redundant. Click this link to access particulars. Return to chronology 22 Aug 2003
2003, August 25: Fair and Balanced
Return to chronology 25 Aug 2003
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 15:13:58 -0700 http://www.fair.org/activism/powell-inspectors.html
ACTION ALERT: September 29, 2003
On a weekend when the Bush administration's pre-war intelligence on Iraq was a major topic on the Sunday talkshows, Secretary of State Colin Powell re-circulated a false story about United Nations weapons inspectors being kicked out of Iraq in 1998. Some major media outlets let Powell's comments pass without comment or correction.
On ABC's This Week (9/27/03), Powell explained that the Clinton administration "conducted a four-day bombing campaign in late 1998 based on the intelligence that he had. That resulted in the weapons inspectors being thrown out."
The actual history is much different. On December 15, 1998, the head of the U.N. weapons inspection team in Iraq, Richard Butler, released a report accusing Iraq of not fully cooperating with inspections. The next day, Butler withdrew his inspectors from Iraq, in anticipation of a U.S.-British bombing campaign that began that evening. Neither George Stephanopoulos nor George Will, who conducted ABC's interview, corrected Powell's false assertion.
In reporting on the interview, the New York Times merely repeated Powell's charge (9/29/03): "Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in a television appearance today, noted that the Iraqi leader threw weapons inspectors out in 1998, making it more difficult for intelligence agencies to get hard information." The Los Angeles Times (9/29/03), meanwhile, paraphrased Powell's words to make them more factually accurate, prefacing his quote with the statement that "U.N. weapons inspectors had left
Iraq in 1998 and did not return until late last year." The quote immediately follows, giving readers the misimpression that Powell accurately conveyed this background.
As the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq have become a public controversy, it is reasonable to expect journalists to point out continuing misinformation on Iraq by senior Bush administration officials. If New York Times editors were interested in correcting the record, all they would have to do is re-print a correction they ran over three years ago (2/2/00): "A front-page article yesterday... on Iraq misstated the circumstances under which international weapons inspectors left
that country before American and British air strikes in December 1998. While Iraq had ceased cooperating with the inspectors, it did not expel them. The United Nations withdrew them before the air strikes began."
ACTION: Please contact ABC's This Week and the New York Times and encourage them to correct Powell's false statements.
CONTACT: [Contact information deleted due to the timely nature of the issue. --MN]
[Addendum (13 Oct 2003): FAIR e-mailed the following newsletter on 07 Oct:
October 7, 2003
In the wake of a FAIR action alert, the New York Times printed the following correction on Saturday, October 4:
------ Hundreds of FAIR activists wrote to the Times after a recent report (9/29/03) repeated as fact a charge by Secretary of State Colin Powell that weapons inspectors were thrown out of the country in 1998. According to the Times, "Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in a television appearance today, noted that the Iraqi leader threw weapons inspectors out in 1998, making it more difficult for intelligence agencies to get hard information." In fact, as FAIR's action alert pointed out, the
inspectors were not kicked out, but were removed by team leader Richard Butler right before an American bombing campaign. The Times had corrected the same error three years earlier (2/2/00).
The TV program on which Powell made the false statement, ABC's This Week (9/28/03), has yet to correct the error.
FAIR thanks the many activists who took the time to write to the Times about this matter. For the record, the error was in Monday's edition of the paper, not in Wednesday's, as the Times indicated in its correction. Perhaps the NYT is still stinging over that Jayson Blair thing. If that were the case, though, you'd think they'd have gotten it right the first time considering it was such a contentious issue in the debunking. --MN]
FAIR contact information deleted as redundant. Click this link to access particulars. Return to chronology 29 Sep 2003
Date:Tue, 28 Oct 2003 13:40:54 -0800 http://www.fair.org/press-releases/iraq-good-news.html
MEDIA ADVISORY: October 28, 2003
Are the media ignoring the good news in Iraq? From pundits to White House officials, that's what many critics are saying. According to George W. Bush (10/6/03), "We're making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes it's hard to tell it when you listen to the filter." While these complaints have sparked extensive discussion and debate in the media, an examination of coverage finds very little substance to this critique of media treatment of Iraq.
The pro-occupation critics claim that there's not enough coverage of the rebuilt schools, for example, or the fact that hospitals in Iraq are open. Congressmember Jim Marshall (D.-Ga.) was perhaps the most blunt of them all, alleging in an opinion piece for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (9/22/03) that the media's "falsely bleak picture weakens our national resolve, discourages Iraqi cooperation and emboldens our enemy." Marshall concluded by lamenting "the harm done by our media. I'm
afraid it is killing our troops."
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough (9/26/03) told viewers that "some of the most powerful media players in America don't want America to succeed in Iraq.... American soldiers have told me that the biggest morale challenge that they are facing is not Saddam and Osama's thugs, but, rather, it's dealing with the biased, slanted reports that they're getting from American news organizations."
But are these critics complaining about bad press, or simply bad news? As the Associated Press (10/17/03) explained: "The schools, for example, need rehabilitation in large part because of the chaotic looting touched off by the U.S. military's entry into Baghdad in April. And many schools have not been rehabilitated, particularly in poorer neighborhoods and the south."
Newsweek (10/27/03) pointed out that "reporters who covered the war say that some of the Coalition's achievements are less impressive than they sound. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq's schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq's 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war."
Newsweek went on to note that journalists who might actually try to cover what these critics deem the "good" news are discouraged from doing so: "In Baghdad, official control over the news is getting tighter. Journalists used to walk freely into the city’s hospitals and the morgue to keep count of the day’s dead and wounded. Now the hospitals have been declared off-limits and morgue officials turn away reporters who aren’t accompanied by a Coalition escort." So while critics say journalists
should be chastised for not reporting on hospitals, the occupation forces are making it more difficult for reporters to actually visit them.
The fact that reporters are kept away from hospitals suggests that it's risky to assume that more coverage of Iraqi reconstruction would yield "good" news. Consider New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins' description of the scene at an Iraqi hospital (NPR's On the Media, 10/3/03): "The hospitals are open. If you've been in a hospital in Iraq, however, the reality is far different. One should not picture a hospital in the United States. A typical hospital in Iraq is a nightmarish place where
they don't have electricity yet. Where there's people sleeping on the floors; where the emergency rooms at night are flooded with people who have been shot and maimed in the chaos that breaks out after curfew."
But some reporters are still grappling with the criticism that their coverage has been too "negative." ABC's Baghdad correspondent Neal Karlinsky told Nightline (10/15/03) that "there's a lot of good news stories here that we are trying to get out. And, quite frankly, news events sometimes get in the way of that. It's hard to work on a feature story about life in Baghdad getting back to normal when there is suddenly a car bombing that kills a half dozen people nearby." Karlinsky seems to be
complaining that breaking news keeps getting in the way of reporting the news. CNN's Bill Hemmer (10/14/03) wondered if life in Iraq could "also be better than what's being reported also. If you consider that these reporters, many of them tell us they want to go cover the new school opening, but they can't because there's another bombing or shooting and that prevents them from sending that story?"
But other critics note that "good news" is hardly the only thing missing from Iraq coverage. Seth Porges writes in Editor & Publisher (10/23/03) that coverage of injured and wounded U.S. soldiers gets very little media attention. "For months, the press has barely mentioned non-fatal casualties or the severity of their wounds," writes Porges. "Few newspapers routinely report injuries in Iraq, beyond references to specific incidents. Since the war began in March, 1,927 soldiers have been
wounded in Iraq, many quite severely."
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, on the same day the Editor & Publisher piece was published, wrote that "we've had 900 wounded or maimed" in Iraq. Perhaps the fact that the Times so rarely publishes figures for wounded soldiers makes Friedman's error somewhat unsurprising; FAIR was able to find just one reference to the total number of wounded soldiers in the Times during the month of October. The paper did, however, run an editorial (10/5/03) that mentioned the "mournful daily roll
call of additional dead and wounded soldiers." Ironically, that roll call of the wounded is rarely published in the New York Times.
It is not unexpected for any administration to put forward its interpretation of news events. But the White House's aggressive pursuit of favorable news coverage threatens to squelch reporting on the actual human costs of the occupation. For example, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank reported on October 21 that the White House is "banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases."
Whether they are based in Baghdad or in Washington, journalists are obliged to report the news on the ground, not as "good" or "bad" but as news, regardless of how it fits with the vision the administration would like Americans to see.
FAIR contact information deleted as redundant. Click this link to access particulars.
Return to chronology 28 Oct 2003
Date:Thu, 15 Apr 2004 09:49:15 -0700 http://www.fair.org/activism/cnn-aljazeera.html
ACTION ALERT: April 15, 2004
As the casualties mount in the besieged Iraqi city of Fallujah, Qatar-based Al Jazeera has been one of the only news networks broadcasting from the inside, relaying images of destruction and civilian victims-- including women and children. But when CNN anchor Daryn Kagan interviewed the network's editor-in-chief, Ahmed Al-Sheik, on Monday (4/12/04)-- a rare opportunity to get independent information about events in Fallujah-- she used the occasion to badger Al-Sheik about whether the civilian
deaths were really "the story" in Fallujah.
Al Jazeera has recently come under sharp criticism from U.S. officials, who claim the Iraqi casualties are 95 percent "military-age males" (AP, 4/12/04). "We have reason to believe that several news organizations do not engage in truthful reporting," CPA spokesman Dan Senor said (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 4/14/04). "In fact it is no reporting." Senior military spokesman Mark Kimmitt had a suggestion for Iraqis who saw civilian deaths on Al Jazeera (New York Times, 4/12/04): "Change the
channel to a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station. The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda, and that is lies."
Acting as the substitute anchor on CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports, Kagan began the interview by asking Al-Sheik to respond to those accusations, citing U.S. officials "saying the pictures and the reporting that Al Jazeera put on the air only adds to the sense of frustration and anger and adds to the problems in Iraq, rather than helping to solve them." After Al-Sheik defended Al Jazeera's work as "accurate" and the images as representative of "what takes place on the ground," Kagan pressed on:
"Isn't the story, though, bigger than just the simple numbers, with all due respect to the Iraqi civilians who have lost their lives-- the story bigger than just the numbers of people who were killed or the fact that they might have been killed by the U.S. military, that the insurgents, the people trying to cause problems within Fallujah, are mixing in among the civilians, making it actually possibly that even more civilians would be killed, that the story is what the Iraqi insurgents are
doing, in addition to what is the response from the U.S. military?"
CNN's argument that a bigger story than civilian deaths is "what the Iraqi insurgents are doing" to provoke a U.S. "response" is startling. Especially in light of official U.S. denials of civilian deaths, video footage of women and children killed by the U.S. military is evidence that needs to be seen.
And Al Jazeera is not alone in reporting a reality very different from the one U.S. officials describe. Authorities have been able to keep a tight rein on the information flow from Fallujah, with only one small television network pool in the city that "travels and operates" under the watch of the Marines (Television Week, 4/12/04). (It's noteworthy that the U.S. has reportedly demanded, as a condition for lifting the siege of Fallujah, that Al Jazeera cameras be removed from the city--
IslamOnline.net, 4/9/04.)
But independent journalists reporting from Fallujah have described a scene consistent with the one broadcast by Al Jazeera. Rahul Mahajan, a U.S. journalist in Fallujah, estimated that of the 600 Iraqis killed in Fallujah, 200 were women and 100 young children, with many of the adult male casualties also non-combatants. He reported witnessing "a young woman, 18 years old, shot in the head" and "a young boy with massive internal bleeding" at a clinic (CommonDreams.org, 4/12/04). Mahajan
recounted that during the "cease-fire," "Americans were attacking with heavy artillery but primarily with snipers"-- with ambulances among the targets. The sniper activity was also reported by U.S. journalist Dahr Jamail (NewStandardNews.net, 4/11/04): "Fallujah residents say Marines are opening fire randomly on unarmed civilians and have attacked clearly marked ambulances."
When reports from the ground are describing hundreds of civilians being killed by U.S. forces, CNN should be looking to Al Jazeera's footage to see if it corroborates those accounts-- not badgering Al Jazeera's editor about why he doesn't suppress that footage.
ACTION: Please tell CNN that there is no bigger story in Fallujah than the deaths of civilians. Ask the network to report the reality of the siege-- including eyewitness accounts and video footage shot by non-embedded journalists-- before dismissing civilian victims as the responsibility of the resistance.
CONTACT: [deleted as timely by this editor. --MN]
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain a polite tone. Please cc fair@fair.org with your correspondence.
FAIR contact information deleted as redundant. Click this link to access particulars.
Return to chronology 15 Apr 2004
Date:Mon, 3 May 2004 15:05:51 -0700 http://www.fair.org/activism/womens-march-networks.html
ACTION ALERT: May 3, 2004
On Sunday, April 25, hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of Washington, D.C. to demonstrate for women's reproductive rights. Crowd estimates ranged from 500,000 to 1.15 million, but it was clear that the March for Women's Lives was one of the largest demonstrations in the capital's history-- and perhaps the largest ever. One might have expected, then, to see extensive coverage on national television-- but a look at both network and cable news during the days surrounding the
march turned up remarkably few reports.
A Nexis search of the week surrounding the women's march found a total of six stories from the broadcast networks (not counting incidental mentions of the march): CBS ran one story the day of the march and two the next morning; NBC ran two stories and ABC only one, all on April 25. CNN, as a 24-hour cable news outlet, gave more extensive coverage to the event, running several reports on Sunday. But even CNN failed to treat the march as the historic occasion that it was, running just a small
handful of brief march-related stories on Saturday and Monday.
Other cable news outlets focused not on the march itself but on abortion opponents, a few hundred of whom held a counter-protest at the march. Of three Fox News stories found on Nexis related to the march, two focused on anti-abortion activists (Special Report with Brit Hume, Hannity & Colmes, 4/22/04). Special Report examined anti-abortion opposition to the National Education Association's endorsement of the march-- a story that MSNBC also covered in that network's only march report found in
the Nexis database. (Fox and MSNBC do not transcribe their news coverage as thoroughly as CNN does, so the amount of coverage on the three cable channels cannot be compared.)
To put the women's march coverage in perspective, FAIR conducted a similar Nexis search of the week surrounding the Promise Keepers march in 1997. The Promise Keepers, an evangelical men's organization that has been widely accused of promoting misogyny and homophobia, drew an estimated 480,000-750,000 demonstrators to Washington-- roughly three-quarters the size of the women's march. Despite its somewhat smaller size, the Promise Keepers received much more media attention: Stories began
appearing on network news three days before the march and continued for two days afterward, with a total of 19 stories between the three networks-- more than three times the coverage the networks devoted to the women's march. Was the Promise Keepers march three times more newsworthy than the March for Women's Lives?
Why such little coverage? Women's issues routinely get short shrift in the media, and during this election year, news outlets found even more reason to discount women's voices. NBC Nightly News reporter Jeannie Ohm asked (4/25/04), "But just how big a factor will abortion rights have in the November election?... Political analysts say it's the economy and jobs, war in Iraq, homeland security and health care that will have more of an impact with undecided voters." CNN correspondent Elaine
Quijano sounded a similar note (4/25/04): "This election year, each group hopes to spark renewed interest, enough to have an impact at the ballot box. But political analysts say more than three decades after Roe v. Wade, most voters have already made up their minds."
A record-breaking number of people-- mostly women-- marched on Washington to demonstrate their commitment to women's rights and their dissatisfaction with Bush's record on women's issues. By minimizing coverage of the event and reducing women's rights to a low-ranking concern in the presidential horse race, television news stifled critical public dialogue on women's rights and health, and relegated women and their concerns to the sidelines.
ACTION: Please let the networks know that you were disappointed by the scant coverage given to the historic March for Women's Lives.
CONTACT: CBS Evening News NBC Nightly News FAIR contact information deleted as redundant. Click this link to access particulars.
Return to chronology 03 May 2004
Date:Fri, 14 May 2004 14:16:47 -0700 http://www.fair.org/activism/times-torture.html
ACTION ALERT: May 14, 2004
The New York Times, revealing the interrogation techniques the CIA is using against Al-Qaeda suspects, seemed unable to find a source who would call torture by its proper name.
The May 13 article, headlined "Harsh CIA Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogation," described "coercive interrogation methods" endorsed by the CIA and the Justice Department, including hooding, food and light deprivation, withholding medications, and "a technique known as 'water boarding,' in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown."
The article took pains to explain why, according to U.S. officials, such techniques do not constitute torture: "Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees."
The article seemed to accept that the techniques described are something other than torture: "The tactics simulate torture, but officials say they are supposed to stop short of serious injury." The implication is that only interrogation methods that cause serious physical harm would be real and not simulated torture.
The article quoted no one who said that the CIA methods described were, in fact, torture. Yet it would have been easy to find human rights experts who would describe them as such. The website of Human Rights Watch (http://www.hrw.org) reports that "the prohibition against torture under international law applies to many measures," including "near drowning through submersion in water." Amnesty International U.S.A. (http://www.amnestyusa.org) names "submersion into water almost to the point of
suffocation" as a form of torture, and emphasizes that torture "can be psychological, including threats, deceit, humiliation, insults, sleep deprivation, blindfolding, isolation, mock executions...and the withholding of medication or personal items."
The article did quote the Geneva Conventions' prohibition against "violence to life and person, in particular...cruel treatment and torture" and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." But it did not quote the definition of "torture" under international law, contained in the 1984 Convention Against Torture, which makes it clear that psychological as well as physical methods of coercion are prohibited. According to the Convention, "torture" is:
"any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or
acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity."
Noting the Convention's reference to "consent or acquiescence" would have been helpful in evaluating the claims made by officials in the article that the U.S. can skirt prohibitions on torture if detainees are formally in the custody of another country. In fact, the Convention Against Torture, which the U.S. signed in 1994, explicitly prohibits sending a person anywhere "where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture."
If the Times had included independent human rights or international law experts in the article, this information could have been available to readers. Even talking to military sources could have produced a more straightforward account of what kind of interrogation is prohibited by international law; the Wall Street Journal (5/13/04), in an article about Iraq prison tactics published the same day as the Times piece, quoted a former Marine judge who admitted that "there's no getting around it,
we have ignored provisions of the Geneva Convention in favor of gathering intelligence."
In fact, the Times might have looked back to its own archives on the subject to find critics of U.S. detention policies. Some of the information included in the May 13, 2004 article was first reported on March 9, 2003-- except the original story quoted Holly Burkhalter of Physicians for Human Rights, who decried the lack of a "specific policy that eschews torture." It also noted critics' assertion that "transferring Qaeda suspects to countries where torture is believed common-- like Egypt,
Jordan and Saudi Arabia-- violates American law and the 1984 international convention against torture, which bans such transfers."
While the article did impart important information about the tactics being used by American agents to interrogate terrorist suspects, it's also critical to know whether these methods violate international or domestic law. By relying solely on administration officials to define what torture is and what the U.S. government's legal obligations are, the New York Times failed to provide the context necessary for readers to make an informed judgment.
ACTION: Please ask the New York Times ombudsman to remind editors that experts on human rights and international law should have been included in the Times' May 13 report on CIA interrogation methods.
CONTACT: [deleted as timely by this editor. --MN]
Toll free comment line: 1-XXX-XXX-XXXX
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Return to chronology 13 May 2004
Date:Tue, 22 Jun 2004 12:57:43 -0700
http://www.fair.org/activism/fox-commission.html
ACTION ALERT: June 22, 2004
The Bush administration's long-running attempts to link Iraq and Al Qaeda were dealt a serious blow when the September 11 commission's June 16 interim report indicated that there did not appear to be a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Osama bin Laden, and that there was no evidence that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks.
But if you were watching the Fox News Channel, you saw something very different, as the conservative cable network eagerly defended the Bush administration and criticized the rest of the media for mishandling the story.
On Fox's Special Report newscast (6/16/04), anchor Brit Hume charged that the media were mischaracterizing the report: "The Associated Press leads off its story on a new 9/11 commission report by saying the document bluntly contradicts the Bush administration by claiming to have no
credible evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11 terrorist attacks." Hume maintained that the AP story was inaccurate: "In fact, the Bush administration has never said that such evidence exists."
In fact, it's Hume that is misrepresenting the AP story-- quoting from the story's lead, but then changing its meaning through an inaccurate paraphrase. The story actually begins: "Bluntly contradicting the Bush administration, the commission investigating the September 11 attacks
reported Wednesday there was 'no credible evidence' that Saddam Hussein had ties with Al Qaeda."
Hume changed the allegation, from Hussein having ties with Al Qaeda to his
having ties to the September 11 attacks, in order to knock it down, claiming that the Bush administration never linked Iraq to September 11. But that is not accurate either: Bush's letter to Congress formally announcing the commencement of hostilities against Iraq (3/18/03)
explained that the use of force would be directed against "terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." In his "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the U.S.S. Lincoln (5/1/03), Bush declared that the invasion of
Iraq had "removed an ally of Al Qaeda."
And during an interview on NBC's Meet the Press (9/14/03), when Vice President Dick Cheney was asked if he was "surprised" that so many Americans connected Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, Cheney responded:
"No. I think it's not surprising that people make that connection.... You and I talked about this two years ago. I can remember you asking me this question just a few days after the original attack. At the time I said no, we didn't have any evidence of that. We've learned a couple of things. We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s, that it involved training, for example, on BW and CW [biological weapons and chemical weapons], that Al Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the Al Qaeda organization."
Clearly, Cheney was describing exactly the sort of "collaborative relationship" that the September 11 commission now says that Iraq did not have with Al Qaeda, and stating that this relationship makes it "not surprising" that people would connect Iraq with the September 11
attacks.
But Fox kept advancing the notion that the commission's report actually backed up what the Bush administration has been saying. Hume explained that Bush has long denied a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, while maintaining that "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties." This is, according to Hume, "an assertion the commission's
report actually supports."
The report indicates several meetings between Iraqi intelligence and bin Laden, who was attempting to set up training camps in Iraq and procure weapons. The Iraqis apparently "did not respond" to those requests. This is a far cry from what most people would call a "tie" or a
"connection."
And Cheney and Bush have long argued that Iraq/Al Qaeda "connections" included weapons training and other "high-level contacts"; Bush has said directly (11/7/02) that Husssein "is a threat because he's dealing with Al Qaeda."
The commission's report does not support those allegations. The report also indicated that the supposed meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague probably never happened. That meeting has been cited by Bush officials, most notably Cheney, as evidence connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda and specifically to the 9/11 plot.
Fox reported on the report's implicit contradictions of administration claims as if they were an invention of the media. On Hume's Special Report show (6/16/04), the anchor got the ball rolling: "There were a lot of media reports today that said that major, new cold water had been
tossed on the administration claims about Iraq and Al Qaeda. What about it?"
Pundit Jeff Birnbaum of the Washington Post answered: "Well, I don't think that that's true.... The Bush administration did not claim that there was a connection between 9/11 and Iraq. That was not the claim. That was not the claim. What, in fact, the staff report indicates is that there was considerable interaction between bin Laden and Iraq. It may not have produced all that much, but it was clear that they're fellow travelers."
NPR correspondent Mara Liasson continued: "I agree with Jeff. I mean, the fact that the administration's arguments for going against Iraq was not because it caused 9/11. Now, it's true that a lot of Americans did conflate the two and did think that Saddam Hussein had something to do with it." (In fact, a poll found that Fox viewers were the most likely news consumers to believe this unsubstantiated claim--PIPA, 10/2/03.)
On June 17's Special Report, guest anchor Jim Angle claimed, "The 9/11 commission staff concluded there was no collaboration between the two to attack the U.S. But critics suggested that meant no ties at all." The commission actually said that there was no "collaborative relationship" at all, not just on the question of attacking the United States.
When the White House struck back at the media over its coverage of the report, some at Fox seemed enthusiastic. "The Bush administration strikes back against the deceptive media," cheered Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, before playing a clip of Cheney appearing on CNBC (6/17/04)
characterizing a New York Times headline as "outrageous."
O'Reilly did not air another portion of Cheney's interview in which he lied about a previous statement he had made. When host Gloria Borger mentioned that Cheney had previously described the meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence as "pretty well confirmed," Cheney interrupted: "No, I never said that... Absoutely not." But he had said just that, on NBC's Meet the Press (12/9/01): ''That's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.''
But for O'Reilly, it was other media that were deceptive: "Cheney has a right to be angry, and so does every American who wants a truthful media," he explained. "Anti-Bush zealots are hurting the fight against terror by misleading Americans about what's actually happening. That puts all of our lives in danger."
It's not surprising that the Bush administration would try to parse the meaning of words like "link" or "tie" in order to spin the commission report in its favor. But journalists should challenge official spin, not promote it.
ACTION: Ask the Fox News Channel why it sought to defend the Bush administration, instead of reporting the facts about the interim report of the 9/11 commission.
CONTACT: [Contact information deleted due to the timely nature of the issue. --MN]
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain a polite tone. Please send a copy of your correspondence to fair@fair.org.
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Return to chronology 22 Jun 2004
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 15:50:15 -0700 FAIR-L http://www.fair.org/press-releases/missing-explosives.html
MEDIA ADVISORY: October 29, 2004
When the New York Times reported on Monday (10/25/04) that over 300 tons of high-explosive materials appeared to be missing from an Iraqi weapons facility, it was no surprise that the Bush administration and conservative pundits would quickly challenge the story. But recent reporting has taken this spin as proof that the facts of the story are in dispute-- even though new evidence disproves the administration's rebuttals.
On October 28, ABC affiliate KSTP released footage that was shot by its embedded reporters on April 18, 2003, showing members of the 101st Airborne Division searching the Al Qaqaa bunkers. Clearly visible on the tape are containers marked with labels that indicate the barrels contained the high explosives in question. ABC World News Tonight broadcast the footage on October 28, noting that soldiers opened the bunkers that had been sealed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),
discovered the high explosives, and then left those bunkers open and unguarded. Given that the tape was shot nine days after the fall of Baghdad, it would appear to prove that at least some of these explosives were looted after the U.S. invasion-- a scenario that is consistent with statements from Iraqi officials and witnesses to the looting (Agence France Presse, 10/27/04; New York Times, 10/28/04). As ABC's Martha Raddatz put it, "It is the strongest evidence to date the explosives
disappeared after the U.S. had taken control of Iraq."
On the other hand, on the same day the Pentagon released satellite images that they claim show vehicles near some of the bunkers at the Al Qaqaa site on March 17, 2003. That would seem to be an attempt to bolster the administration's claim that the explosives were removed by Saddam Hussein prior to the U.S. invasion, though there is no evidence that the trucks did anything at all with the explosives in question. Indeed, the fact that trucks were in the vicinity of bunkers that contained
large amounts of battlefield weapons (in addition to the high explosives) just before a war seems hardly newsworthy. Certainly the presence of trucks near the bunkers does nothing to undermine the footage of explosives in the bunkers days later.
But despite their dubious relevance, the Pentagon images-- along with the White House's continued criticism of Kerry for bringing up the issue at all-- seemed to leave some news outlets uncertain about the facts. A subhead above a Los Angeles Times story read, "Reporters Taped Troops Apparently Finding Munitions. A Pentagon Photo Implies Otherwise." The actual article, however, noted that the Pentagon photo implied very little: "The photograph reveals little about the fate of the 377 tons
of explosives, part of an estimated 600,000 tons of explosives believed to have been scattered throughout Iraq at the time."
And even though ABC's network newscast had broadcast the KSTP footage, ABC's Ted Koppel reached a very different conclusion on the Nightline broadcast later that evening (10/28/04). Koppel explained that "a friend" in the military had reminded him that he was actually at Al Qaqaa during the war, and that "my friend, the senior military commander, believes that the explosives had already been removed by Saddam's forces before we ever got there. The Iraqis, he said, were convinced that the
U.S. was going to bomb the place." For some reason, the theory advanced by his military friend was apparently more credible to Koppel than the television footage ABC had aired hours earlier that debunked his thesis.
Instead of reporting on this newly discovered footage from Al Qaqaa, the Washington Post (10/29/04) pursued a different angle: "This week's assertions by Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign about the few hundred tons said to have vanished from Iraq's Qaqaa facility have struck some defense experts as exaggerated." The story's point, that the invasion allowed vast quantities of weapons to be looted all over Iraq, would hardly seem to undermine Kerry's critique of the Bush administration.
Ignoring the evidence released the day before that explosives were on site after the fall of Baghdad, the Post instead reported that "Pentagon officials, reconstructing a timeline of what might have occurred at Qaqaa, believe they have narrowed the window for the disappearance to a two-month period between mid-March 2003, when the IAEA verified its seals were still in place, and May 2003, when U.S. military search teams arrived at the site and found it had been looted, stripped and
vandalized." If the Post had reported on the KSTP footage, though, the paper would have been able to shut much of the Pentagon's "window."
Not surprisingly, Fox News Channel continued to aggressively challenge the explosives story, even after the KSTP footage surfaced. On Special Report (10/28/04), anchor Brit Hume told viewers that "officials cite further evidence the material had been moved before U.S. troops arrived"-- apparently a reference to the inconclusive Pentagon satellite images. Special Report did not even mention the KSTP footage. But Fox campaign reporter Carl Cameron claimed that the news of the day was damaging
to the Kerry campaign, since "the Iraqi explosives may have disappeared before the invasion, undercutting Kerry's attack on the president." Cameron added, "The Democrat hoped the explosive story would be explosive. But the president is already calling it a dud, accusing Kerry of saying anything to get elected."
The Los Angeles Times followed a similar tack with an article (10/29/04) headlined "Munitions Issue Cuts Both Ways." The only evidence the paper found to support the idea that the issue would be harmful to Kerry were the claims of White House strategist Karl Rove, Bush communications director Nicolle Devenish and George W. Bush.
That the subject of a scandal gets to decide how important it is is an odd notion-- but many journalists seemed to put more faith in administration pronouncements than in videotaped evidence.
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Return to the entry on the Bush censorship page.
Return to chronology 29 Oct 2004
Date:Fri, 3 Dec 2004 09:52:20 -0800 FAIR-L http://www.fair.org/activism/church-ad.html
ACTION ALERT: December 3, 2004
Three broadcast networks have rejected an advertisement from the United Church of Christ, deeming the ad's message of tolerance to be too controversial.
Citing the Bush administration's proposal of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, CBS and UPN have refused to run a UCC commercial that advertises the church's acceptance of all people, including gays and lesbians. NBC also deemed the ad "too controversial" to air (UCC.org, 11/30/04).
The ad depicts two bouncers in front of a church letting in two white girls and a white heterosexual couple but turning away others, including people of color, a man in a wheelchair, and two men holding hands. A message reads, "Jesus didn't turn people away. Neither do we." As the camera pans over a crowd of diverse UCC members, including a woman who puts her arm around another woman, a voiceover states, "No matter who you are, or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here."
Because ABC has a policy against accepting any religious advertising, UCC did not attempt to place an ad on the network (San Francisco Chronicle, 12/2/04). Several networks accepted the ad, including ABC Family, Fox and TNT.
According to the UCC (UCC.org, 11/30/04), CBS explained the rejection in a letter to the group:
"Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations, and the fact that the Executive Branch has recently proposed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the [CBS and UPN] networks."
CBS spokesperson Dana McClintock elaborated on that explanation two days later (Newsday, 12/2/04): "If there is a public policy debate going on, as there is on the issue of gay marriage, we do not accept advocacy advertisements."
CBS and NBC have certainly not been consistent in their rejection of advocacy ads. As Media Matters for America noted (6/18/04), CBS ran an ad during the 2003 Super Bowl from the White House Drug Control Policy Agency that suggested that casual marijuana smokers support terrorism-- a controversial proposition, to say the least. And NBC in 1993 sold two half-hour blocs of time to Ross Perot to criticize President Bill Clinton's economic policies (Media Matters, 12/1/04).
But a network asserting that it would reject an ad for expressing a political viewpoint is problematic in itself. Viacom, which owns both CBS and UPN, has explained its policy in various ways after coming under fire for refusing independent political ads on its networks in the past.
In October, Viacom's MTV Networks blocked an ad from the progressive group Compare Decide Vote that compared the presidential candidates' policy positions on issues important to young people. A Viacom spokesperson argued that it didn't need to air such ads because "across all our properties, we talk about these issues every day" (Media Daily News, 10/13/04).
When Viacom blocked an ad from the anti-war group Not In Our Name prior to the Iraq War, CBS executive vice president Martin Franks argued that such an advertising policy was necessary for a national network (New York Times, 3/13/03): "How could you take an advocacy ad and have it reflect the values of the entire nation?"
As FAIR has argued before, Viacom's position that its own coverage of important political issues renders political ads unnecessary is arrogant and unfounded (FAIR Action Alert, 10/18/04). And to argue that ads should reflect the values of the entire nation holds them to an implausible standard that the network's own programming would be hard-pressed to meet-- as, for that matter, would its non-political advertising.
But in this case, it's hard to see how the UCC spot can even be considered an advocacy ad at all. CBS makes quite a leap to interpret the UCC ad as advocating for gay marriage or entering a public policy debate; the ad never mentions or even implies that the gay couples featured are or wish to be married, or that the UCC condones gay marriage. That the Bush administration's opposition to gay marriage should lead CBS to block an ad that simply notes a church's acceptance of gay people is
astounding and troubling.
While NBC's explanation of its rejection made no mention of the Bush administration, it did seem rather concerned with the reaction of other churches. "The problem is not that it depicted gays, but that it suggested clearly that there are churches that don't permit a variety of individuals to participate," said Alan Wurtzel, president of research for NBC (Boston Globe, 12/2/04).
It's true that the ad's metaphorical message is that some groups are not welcomed by some churches-- and that's a reality that has been made clear in countless news reports on various Christian sects that have barred gays and lesbians from being ordained, prohibited gay marriages and proclaimed their opposition to homosexuality.
By blocking an ad that acknowledges the existence of homophobia in some churches, NBC gives extraordinary censorial power to those churches. Both NBC and CBS set a dangerous precedent by extending their advertising policies to block ads that might, without advocating any political position, contradict or offend the administration or its religious allies.
ACTION: Please contact CBS and NBC and urge them to reverse the absurd policy that deems a church's acceptance of all people to be "too controversial" to air.
CONTACT: [Contact information deleted due to the timely nature of the issue. --MN]
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Return to chronology 01 Dec 2004
2004, December 06: Report of a whitewash of possible treason and preferential treatment
By exposing the name of Wilson's wife -- Valerie Plame -- Novak not only put an end to her
undercover work on weapons of mass destruction issues, possibly putting at risk the lives of any foreign sources who may have cooperated with her. He also may have abetted a federal crime: It's a felony for a government official to knowingly disclose the name of any undercover agency operative, an act serious enough that the Bush administration eventually agreed to name an independent prosecutor (the only one appointed during Bush's first term) to find out who was responsible. That prosecutor,
Patrick Fitzgerald, has since subpoenaed other journalists who received the leaked information. Two of them -- Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine -- ran the information only after Novak first publicized Plame's name; both refused to disclose their sources, were held in contempt of court, and face prison time if their appeals don't succeed. [...]
Far from requiring Novak to explain or apologize for his actions, Novak's corporate sponsors have gone out of their way to praise him. During a CNN news segment after the investigation was announced, Blitzer offered a "personal note" about the scandal: "All of us who know Bob Novak know he's one of the best reporters in the business and has been for nearly half a century." Blitzer's guest -- Steve Huntley, who is Novak's editor at his home paper, the Chicago Sun-Times -- was likewise
effusive, calling the columnist "one of the best reporters in this country." When I called CNN to ask if Novak's statements to Blitzer and on "Crossfire" [on 29 Sep 2004] were part of an arrangement where he would talk about the case just that once and then never again, the network declined to comment. Return to chronology 10 Dec 2004
2005, January 12: CBS' Cowardice and Conflicts Behind Purge
The "panel" was just two guys as qualified for the job as they are for landing the space shuttle: Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi.
Remember Dickie Thornburgh? He was on the Bush 41 Administration's payroll. His grand accomplishment as Bush's Attorney General was to whitewash the investigation of the Exxon Valdez Oil spill, letting the oil giant off the hook on big damages. Thornburgh's fat pay as counsel to Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, the Washington law-and-lobbying outfit, is substantially due to his job as a Bush retainer. This is the kind of stinky conflict of interest that hardly suggests "independent." Why not just
appoint Karl Rove as CBS' grand inquisitor and be done with it?
Then there's Boccardi, not exactly a prince of journalism. This is the gent who, as CEO of the Associated Press, spiked his own wire service's exposure of Oliver North and his traitorous dealings with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Legendary AP investigative reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger found their stories outing the Iran-Contra scandal in 1986 stopped by their bosses. They did not know that Boccardi was on those very days deep in the midst of talks with North, participating in the
conspiracy. [Boy howdy! And yet, Republican snivellers will still shower shit and derision in all directions on the subject of "the liberal press"! Between this, Karen Ryan, Armstrong Williams, and the continuing contention over the alleged bias at Fox News, I am developing a tendency to accuse the American lackey press of being a conservative press. Intellectually, I still recognize that the corporate press will shamelessly suck up to the politics of whichever party is in power, but I am increasingly
tending to react emotionally despite that. And naturally, this "Independent Review Panel" ignored all the reputable evidence against Bush in arriving at its findings. --MN
[Addendum (15 Jan 2005:) On 12 Jan, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting issued a media advisory warning that CBS's investigation lacked integrity. It also explored how this incident is another example of corporate favoritism toward the Bush regime. --MN]
Return to chronology 12 Jan 2005
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 13:55:36 -0800 FAIR-L http://www.fair.org/activism/pbs-buster.html
ACTION ALERT: January 31, 2005
PBS has pulled an episode of the children's show Postcards From Buster that includes children with lesbian mothers. The episode was yanked the same day that PBS received a letter from new Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings condemning the episode and asking PBS to "strongly consider" returning the federal money that went toward its production.
In the episode, Buster, an animated rabbit, visits Vermont, where he learns how maple sugar is made and visits the home of real-life children who invite him in for dinner and introduce him to their "mom and Gillian."
WGBH, the Boston PBS affiliate station that produced the program, still plans to air the pulled episode and make it available to other stations, but without PBS or Department of Education support (Washington Times, 12/27/05).
PBS chief operating officer Wayne Godwin and spokesperson Lea Sloan gave a variety of reasons for PBS's decision to censor the show; Godwin said the episode brought up an issue that was "best left for parents and children to address together at a time and manner of their own choosing," while Sloan said it was "sensitive in today's political climate" (Associated Press, 1/27/05). Godwin also pointed out that some children wouldn't have a parent with them to "put it in context" (Washington Post,
1/27/05), but at the same time indicated that it was precisely the context that parents and media coverage gave the episode that created the problem:
"The concern really was that there's a point where background becomes foreground. No matter if the parents were intended to be background, with this specific item in this particular program they might simply be foreground because of press attention to it and parental attention to it" (New York Times, 1/27/05).
Godwin went on to claim the episode conflicted with PBS's purpose: "The presence of a couple headed by two mothers would not be appropriate curricular purpose that PBS should provide."
It's a disturbing view for the COO of PBS to hold, particularly since public television's mandate as set forth in the 1967 Carnegie Commission Report is to "provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard," to serve as "a forum for controversy and debate," and to broadcast programs that "help us see America whole, in all its diversity."
Indeed, it would seem that PBS's decision to drop the episode would more likely violate the terms of its Education Department grant than would the episode itself; the grant requires funded programs to:
Previous families featured in Postcards episodes have included Mormons, Hmong and Pentecostal Christians. It's hard to interpret PBS's selective reading of its own mandate in the censorship of Postcards as anything but political pandering in the face of government threats; Spellings' letter included the blunt reminder that "two years ago the Senate Appropriations Committee raised questions about the accountability of funds appropriated for Ready-To-Learn programs" (Washington Post, 1/27/05).
What's more, according to a New York Times report (1/27/05), PBS officials-- including PBS president Pat Mitchell-- screened the Vermont episode and deemed it appropriate just a few days before pulling it.
Unfortunately, PBS's decision is hardly surprising, given its history of moving to the right under pressure from conservative critics. The network recently added two conservative public affairs programs to its lineup, apparently to "balance" the alleged liberal bias of NOW With Bill Moyers. At the time, Moyers had already announced his intended retirement, and since his departure the show has been cut back to half an hour (see FAIR Action Alert, 9/17/04).
And this wouldn't be the first time PBS has backed down on gay and lesbian issues; in 1994, PBS refused to provide funding for a second year of its popular and critically acclaimed miniseries Tales of the City, which included gay characters. The show had prompted the American Family Association to call PBS the "Homosexual Pride Tax-Funded TV Network" and urge their followers to "shut down" PBS. Though PBS called the decision financial, Tales was actually a remarkably profitable series
(Extra!, 7-8/94).
Just two years earlier, when New York City PBS affiliate WNYC began producing In the Life, television's first nationwide gay-oriented show, conservatives had vigorously attacked public television from the Senate floor. Former Republican Sen. Bob Dole railed, "It seems that the broadcasting apologists are hiding behind Big Bird, Mr. Rogers and Masterpiece Theatre, laying down their quality smokescreen while they shovel out funding for gay and lesbian shows" (Village Voice, 6/30/92; see also
Extra!, 6/93). In the face of such threats and criticism, PBS refused to distribute the show; over 10 years later, the program still receives no financial or distribution support from PBS.
ACTION: Please contact PBS and ask them to support programming according to their mandate, not political pressures.
CONTACT: [Contact information deleted due to the timely nature of the issue. --MN]
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Return to Bush Censorship Page 26 Jan 2005
Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 13:05:39 -0800 FAIR-L http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2055
ACTION ALERT: February 7, 2005
In its February 3 edition, USA Today not only failed to challenge a George W. Bush distortion about Social Security-- it actually changed Bush's remarks to make them more accurate.
Summarizing Bush's case for privatizing the program, reporter Judy Keen explained: "Two days after winning re-election, Bush said his top priority would be Social Security, which he says will go into the red in 2018 and won't have enough money to pay promised benefits in 2042." And in a Q & A piece, the paper made the same claim: Answering the question, "Is Social Security bankrupt?" the paper responded that "Bush says that in 2042, it won't be able to pay 100 percent of guaranteed benefits;
CBO says 2052."
But Bush's claims about Social Security's solvency have not usually been so nuanced. In a January 11 appearance, Bush spoke of a system that would be "flat bust, bankrupt" by the time workers in their 20s were set to retire. And during the State of the Union address that prompted USA Today's coverage, Bush gave his most familiar description of Social Security's finances: "By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt."
That claim is misleading, if not completely false; the Social Security trustees, using very conservative assumptions about economic growth, predict that the program will be able to pay about 75 percent of benefits after 2042, while the Congressional Budget Office believes that point will come ten years later. Even then, the system will be able to pay more to future retirees than current recipients get; and some economists argue that if the economy grows about as quickly in the future as it
has in the past, Social Security may in fact never run short of cash.
By changing Bush's false claim to a more accurate one, USA Today committed a serious journalistic error. The primary news value in Bush's comments was their deceptive nature; by "improving" them, USA Today did Bush a favor-- and its readers a disservice.
ACTION: CONTACT: [Contact information deleted due to the timely nature of the issue. --MN]
FAIR contact information deleted as redundant. Click this link to access particulars.
Return to chronology 07 Feb 2005
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 14:57:27 -0800 FAIR-L http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2452
MEDIA ADVISORY: February 22, 2005
George W. Bush's February 17 nomination of John Negroponte to the newly created job of director of intelligence was the subject of a flurry of media coverage. But one part of Negroponte's resume was given little attention: his role in the brutal and illegal Contra war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the mid-1980s.
From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, a country that was being used as a training and staging ground for the CIA-created and -backed Contra armies, who relied on a terrorist strategy of targeting civilians. Those years saw a massive increase in U.S. military aid to Honduras, and Negroponte was a key player in organizing training for the Contras and procuring weapons for the armies that the United States was building in order to topple the socialist Nicaraguan
government (Extra!, 9-10/01).
Negroponte's ambassadorship was marked by another human rights scandal: the Honduran army's Battalion 316, which operated as a death squad that tortured, killed or disappeared "subversive" Hondurans-- and at least one U.S. citizen, Catholic priest James Carney. Despite regular reporting of such crimes in the Honduran press, the human rights reports of Negroponte's embassy consistently failed to raise these issues. Critics contend that this was no accident: If such crimes had been
acknowledged, U.S. aid to the country's military would have come under scrutiny, which could have jeopardized the Contra operations.
Many reports included brief mentions of Negroponte's past. The New York Times (2/18/05), for example, noted that "critics say" that Negroponte "turned a blind eye to human rights abuses" in Honduras. But the Times (like most mainstream reports) quoted no critics on the subject; to get a sense of what Negroponte's critics actually said, you had to tune into Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now (2/18/05), where Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive said that Negroponte "essentially ran
Honduras as the Reagan administration changed it from a small Central American country into a territorial battleship, if you will, to fight the Contra war and overthrow the Sandinista government. He was really the head person in charge of this whole operation, which became a massive paramilitary war in the early 1980s."
Kornbluh added that declassified documents from those years show Negroponte had "stepped out of being U.S. ambassador and kind of put on the hat of a C.I.A. station chief in pushing for the Contras to get more arms, in lobbying and meeting with very high Honduran officials to facilitate U.S. support for the Contras and Honduran cooperation, even after the U.S. Congress terminated official support for the Contra war."
The night of Bush's announcement, network news broadcasts woefully understated or misrepresented this history. On NBC Nightly News (2/17/05), reporter Andrea Mitchell glossed over Negroponte's Honduran record: "As Ronald Reagan's ambassador to Honduras, he was accused of ignoring death squads and America's secret war against Nicaragua." While Negroponte might be accused of ignoring Honduran death squads, no one could credibly suggest he was ignoring "America's secret war against Nicaragua."
The documentary evidence, as Kornbluh explained, suggests that he was intimately involved with running it. ABC's Good Morning America Robin Roberts turned this reality on its head (2/18/05), noting that Negroponte's "entire life has been a lesson in quiet and measured diplomacy" and that "he generated controversy long after a stint in Honduras when he denied he knew anything about the work of Contra rebel death squads."
Some reporters simply soft-pedaled the history; as CNN reporter Kitty Pilgrim put it (2/17/05), "During his four-year stint as U.S. ambassador to Honduras, he had a difficult balancing act in the battle against Communism in the neighboring Sandinista government in Nicaragua." (Sandinista Nicaragua, of course, was not Communist, but a country with a mixed economy and regular elections, one of which voted the Sandinistas out of power in 1990.) Pilgrim's CNN colleague, Paula Zahn (2/17/05),
complained that "the critics are already out there sniping at him."
Fox News reporter Carl Cameron (2/17/05) noted that "the only partisan criticism noted Negroponte's role as U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the '80s, when he played a key role in the Reagan administration's covert disruption of Communism in the Nicaragua." In this case, "covert disruption" stands in as a euphemism for a bloody guerrilla war that took the lives of thousands of civilians. Cameron went on to note that the "partisan" remarks "came from a member of the House, which has no vote on
his nomination."
NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly made similar observations (2/17/05), noting that previous confirmation hearings generated "a lot of questions about the role he played during the early '80s when he was the ambassador to Honduras." Kelly seemed aware of this history, but thought it a settled matter: "He has already dealt with those issues and obviously answered them satisfactorily-- he was confirmed for that job at the United Nations."
Some pundits were remarkably lenient in the standards by which Negroponte should be judged. Fox News Channel commentator Charles Krauthammer explained (2/17/05) that "he was the ambassador in Honduras during the Contra war. So he clearly knows how to deal with clandestine operations. That was a pretty clandestine one for several years. And he didn't end up in jail, which is a pretty good attribute for him. A lot of others practically did."
In general, right-wing pundits and commentators were much more likely than mainstream news reporters to cite Negroponte's shady past-- as proof that he is the right man for the job. On CNBC (2/17/05), Tony Blankley happily summarized Negroponte's human rights record: "Negroponte is not just some ambassador. He has a track record. Starting in Honduras in 1981, he was the ambassador who oversaw the management when the Argentines turned over the covert operations against the Nicaraguans. He took
over that responsibility. He managed it operationally. The CIA was very impressed with the way he handled that."
After James Warren of the Chicago Tribune disagreed (calling the Contra war an "at times slimy operation"), Blankley offered a blunt response-- "Well, we won"-- which host Lawrence Kudlow endorsed: "We did win. Thank you, Tony. I was just going to say, you know, the forces of freedom triumphed with a little bit of help from the right country."
Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes took the same line (2/19/05): "I would say on Central America, I give John Negroponte credit, along with people like Elliott Abrams and President Reagan, for creating democracy in all those countries in Central America, in Nicaragua, in El Salvador and in Honduras, where Marxists were going to take over, they fought them back." By way of balance, Fox pundit and NPR correspondent Juan Williams noted that while he didn't "have any love for Marxists," it was
important to note "what death squads do to people, and you understand that nuns were involved, Fred, then you think-- wait a second-- excess is not to be tolerated in the name of democracy." Barnes' response: "Well, now that we have democracy, there are no death squads."
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Return to chronology 22 Feb 2005
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FCC Moves to Lift Cross-Ownership Ban
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Move Would Also Impact Internet
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NPR Continues Distortion on Mideast "Calm"
Subject: Media Activists Impact Iraq Coverage
From:"FAIR" <fair@fair.org>
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Media Activists Impact Iraq Coverage
This is George. This is the gas George bought for his SUV.
These are the countries where the executive bought the oil that made the gas that George bought for his SUV. And these are the terrorists who get money from those countries every time George fills up his SUV.
Reprinted with permission of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Subject:Some Critical Media Voices Face Censorship
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Subject:Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
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Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments:
Gen. says White House pushed Saddam link without evidence
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But--I'm willing to say it, but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence."
---
By Al Franken. Humorist Al Franken and his publisher the Penguin Group had a suit filed against them on this day. The suit was filed by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News in State Supreme Court in New York, and alleges that the title of Franken's most recent book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, infringes on Fox New's trademark of the words Fair & Balanced, which was registered in 1995. The suit asks that Dutton Books be required to
rename the book and that it pay an unspecified amount for damages. Dutton spokeswoman Lisa Johnson accused News Corporaton, which owns Fox News, of attempting to suppress the book. She is quoted as saying, "The attempt to keep the public from reading Franken's message is un-American." She was also quoted by the New York Times as saying, "It is extraordinary that one of the largest media corporations would take such action. In trying to suppress Al Franken's book, News Corp. is undermining First
Amendment principles that protect all media by guaranteeing a free, open and vigorous debate of public issues."
The Press Effect: [...]
Kathleen Hall Jamieson &
Paul Waldman -2003
ISBN 0-19-515277-8
Dewey # 071.3 J323PI Watched A Wild Hog Eat My Baby
Bill Sloan -2001
ISBN 1-57392-902-6
Dewey # 071.3 S634I
The viewership of Fox News has risen sharply over the last year with a mix of fast-paced news coverage and commentary, although it has been criticized for turning
traditional not ions of objectivity on its head. The network, however, calls its coverage fair and balanced and says it offers a needed alternative to a traditionally liberal media.
Viewership had almost certainly risen because Fox News was in favour of the invasion of Iraq and because its "journalists" fail to properly investigate breaking events or to offer truly fair and balanced reporting. Rupert Murdoch made his fortune publishing tabloid newspapers, and when he came to America
he continue d the format. —MN] By Al Franken. U.S. District Judge Denny Chin, listened to oral arguments for about half an hour and proclaimed the lawsuit was "wholly without merit, both factually and legally." The suit alleges that the cover layout "is likely to cause confusion among consumers as to the origin and sponsorship of the book." The judge said, "There is no likelihood of confusion as to the origin and sponsorship of the book ... or that consumers will be misled that Fox or Mr. O'Reilly are sponsors of
the book." During the arguments, Judge Chin even held up a book by Bill O'Reilly, entitled The Good, the Bad and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life, and asked, "Isn't Mr. O'Reilly doing exactly the same thing?" Attorney Dori Hanswirth, representing Fox, replied that it wasn't the same thing, contending that the cover of Franken's book did not qualify as satire on the grounds that, "This is much too subtle to be considered a parody." Floyd Abrams, representing Franken, said to
that, "a book is allowed to criticize a holder of a trademark and mock a trademark as well." Abrams also argued, "There is no way a person not completely dense would be confused by this cover to think that Fox is accusing Bill O'Reilly of being a liar. There is nothing confusing about this."
In a written statement, Fox allowed as to how it respected the judgement of the court and was evaluating its options. Which means it might file an appeal. Spokesman Paul Schur is quoted, "We don't care if it's Al Franken, Al Lewis or Weird Al Yankovic. We're here to protect our trademark and our talent."
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Journalists Find "Calm" When Only Palestinians Die
By Al Franken. Fox News spokeswoman Irena Steffen, in announcing the action, said in part, "It's time to return Al Franken to the obscurity that he's normally accustomed to." Floyd Abrams, who represented Mr Franken and the publisher Penguin in the case, said the withdrawal of the suit was "welcome, if overdue", and, "Fox's lack of grace in ending its suit is of the same nature as its name-calling and silly efforts to deal with criticism of it in the first place." Al Franken
commented, "I was hoping they'd keep it going for a few more news cycles," joking that he was "disappointed".
Subject: Another Falsehood on Iraq Goes Unchallenged
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Another Falsehood on Iraq Goes Unchallenged
ACTIVISM UPDATE:
Times Corrects Iraq Inspections Myth
An article on Wednesday about renewed criticism of the Bush administration for its handling of intelligence before the Iraq war misstated the circumstances under which international weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998. They were withdrawn by the United Nations, not expelled by Saddam Hussein.
------
Subject:Is Media Bias Filtering Out Good News from Iraq?
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Subject:CNN to Al Jazeera: Why Report Civilian Deaths?
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Subject:Hard to Find Women's March on Television News
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ABC World News Tonight
Phone: 212-456-4040
mailto:PeterJennings@abcnews.com
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Subject:"Harsh Methods" Aren't Torture, Says the NY Times
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"Harsh Methods" Aren't Torture, Says the NY Times
Subject:Fox News Spins 9/11 Commission Report
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Subject: Missing the Evidence on Missing Explosives
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Missing the Evidence on Missing Explosives
Reports ignore videotapes that debunk administration claims
Subject:Networks Bar Ad Promoting Tolerance
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Networks Bar Ad Promoting Tolerance:
A church's acceptance of gays is deemed "too controversial"
By Robert Novak and associates. In a report entitled Little Big Man , written by Amy Sullivan of Washington Monthly, and which was reprinted at Alternet.org, Ms. Sullivan examines the actions of Robert Novak in the Valerie Plame Affair, as well as other questionable conduct by Mr. Novak, and tells of how he has not only escaped prosecution for failing to reveal his source while two other reporters fail prison time, but was lauded for committing the felony by news
outlets.
During the summer of 2003, someone in the Bush White House decided to extract a pound of flesh from former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of the administration's rationale for the Iraq war, by revealing to members of the press that Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA agent. And though the leak was peddled to several journalists, only one was willing to actually print it: Robert Novak.
Ms. Sullivan then went on to write about how she had been forbidden to ask about his role in the Plame Affair, even though Novak had already spoken publicly about it:
The one ground rule for my interview with Novak for this article, conveyed to me by his assistant, Kathleen, was that I could not ask him any questions about the Plame case. It wasn't that Novak wouldn't answer such questions; that was so obvious as almost to go without saying. But if I raised the topic in any way, she told me, "the interview will be immediately terminated." The morning of the scheduled interview, Kathleen called me to say that Mr. Novak wanted to "make sure" I
understood that if the Plame case came up during our talk, the interview would be over. I assured her that I got the picture.
Ms. Sullivan also examines a couple of clear and present conflicts of interest. See the source article for more background. By Greg Palast. This piece posted to CommonDreams.org on this date, examines the continuing erosion of free press principles. In this case, CBS appointed two former government officials to investigate the 60 Minutes story about President Bush's National Guard service. Mr. Palast wrote in part:
"Independent" my ass. CBS' cowardly purge of five journalists who exposed George Bush's dodging of the Vietnam War draft was done under cover of what the network laughably called an "Independent Review Panel."
Five members of the 60 Minutes staff were fired in what appears very much to have been a stalinist type purge.
Subject:PBS Censors Postcards From Buster
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PBS Censors Postcards From Buster
Episode featuring lesbian moms deemed not 'appropriate'
Return to chronology 31 Jan 2005
Subject:USA Today Covers for Bush's Social Security Distortion
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USA Today Covers for Bush's Social Security Distortion
Ask USA Today to print a clarification noting that they mischaracterized Bush's claims about Social Security's demise.
Subject:Media Omissions on Negroponte's Record
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Media Omissions on Negroponte's Record