Q: Where Does the Media Turn for Information & Opinions? A: Rightward

I suppose there is no surprise here. The figures are for 2008 and are from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [look here]. The FAIR folks are trumpeting the increase in media reliance on "progressive" organizations. But three things are important: (1) This may be a blip caused by the mistaken perception that the newly elected President was a progressive and the media seeking views or reactions "his" camp.(2) The top 25 list of sources is dominated by Centrist & Conservative outfits - indeed they nearly sweep the top 10. And (3) the left-right spectrum in American politics has hardly stood still in recent decades, the Republicans have dragged it inexorably rightward. So who knows what "centrist" means? (Thanks MSH!)

The Consequences of Speaking the Truth in American Politics - Part 2

"No one has ever doubted that truth and politics
are on rather bad terms with each other . . ."
~ Hannah Arendt

James O'Keefe - pimper of truth - outside
the U.S. Federal Building in New Orleans,
Louisiana on May 26, 2010.

Well, a high level official at the U.S. Department of State has been fired because he managed to admit in public that the Obama administration's ongoing treatment of Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of giving classified files to WikiLeaks, is “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” According to news reports, P.J. Crowley "resigned" his position, but we all know better than that. He was forced out for telling the truth. Does the administration think this sort of behavior makes their position less stupid?

And speaking of stupid . . . the higher ups at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and at NPR must be a least a tiny bit chagrined for falling over themselves to fire folks in the wake of conservative outrage after one of their employees told the truth about the Tea Party and the GOP. Heads rolled and, on inspection, the putatively incriminating video of said truth telling, produced by serial liar James O'Keefe, turns out to be just the sort of crap everyone ought to have expected in the first place.

The Consequences of Speaking the Truth in American Politics

Well, apparently it is now not possible for anyone to actually characterize our American right-wingers in accurate terms. As The New York Times reports an executive at NPR is being pilloried for suggesting that he considers (and according to the reports he clearly states that he is speaking for himself not the network) the Tea Party racist and thinks they have high jacked the Republican Party. My problem is that this is seen as an opinion rather than an accurate description. The assessment of the relationship between the TP and the GOP is eminently defensible. And the remarks about the racism of the TP movement are denied only by the movement itself. It is, after all, a movement of resentful well off white men (mostly) who are pissed off about the increased visibility of women, minorities and the disadvantaged. The next time a conservative whines to you about how American political culture is stacked against them, this episode should serve as a sufficient reply.*

And, of course, how many times will putative liberal elites fall for the hypocritical undercover stings that right wingers are trying to set? Actually, the "success" rate of these stings is remarkably low. The NPR folks ought to have avoided the situation entirely. But having agreed to have lunch with the impostors (aka liars) they repeatedly refused alleged no-strings financial offers and clearly differentiated their personal from their official views. In other words these people acted professionally and the right is still whining. Good grief!

And, predictably the head of NPR now has fallen on her sword over this putative "scandal." Even if you think that is an appropriate response (which I do not), can anyone recall a conservative ever resigning from anything in this sort of case?
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* And before anyone goes off about how there is a double standard here relative to the notorious Juan Williams, remember that this was an individual (a fund raiser, not a journalist) speaking at a private luncheon and offering his personal views. Williams was being paid to proclaim himself in the national media. He lost his job at NPR for doing so in ways that called his journalistic credibility into question. I actually defended Williams at the time, even though I think he is a windbag.

This is Independent Media?

If you read The Guardian, it was front page news yesterday that Raymond Davis - the man at the center of current dispute between the U.S. and Pakistan - is a CIA operative. I suppose that is hardly a surprise. Nor, unfortunately, is it a surprise that the American press has been complicit in seeking to hide that fact. As The Guardian reports: "A number of US media outlets learned about Davis's CIA role but have kept it under wraps at the request of the Obama administration." Just now* The New York Times has admitted to this complicity:

"The New York Times had agreed to temporarily withhold information about Mr. Davis’s ties to the agency at the request of the Obama administration, which argued that disclosure of his specific job would put his life at risk. Several foreign news organizations have disclosed some aspects of Mr. Davis’s work with the C.I.A., and on Monday, American officials lifted their request to withhold publication. "

Even though Davis's CIA connection is common knowledge you can, for instance, listen to this report at npr from this morning and never hear that fact mentioned. This is independent media?
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* Meaning within the past hour.

The Assault on Lara Logan Should Not Be Marginal to Our Reflections on the Flowering of Democracy

Photojournalism is a dangerous occupation. But as is typically the case, the dangers are not evenly distributed. There are two forthright essays at The New York Times on the dangers that beset women journalists. You can find them here and here. The women who've written these essays - Kim Barker and Sarina Tavernise - were prompted to do so by the vicious attack on correspondent Lara Logan by a mob of men in Tahrir Square last week. It goes without saying, I hope, that Logan has proven courageous in making public her own experience. In case it doesn't, I recommend this thoughtful comment. It is good news that she apparently is recovering from the physical harm she suffered.

Yet another response to Logan's experience appears here at npr. In it, Jane Arraf rightly holds up a mirror to those here in the west who are condemning the sorts of cultures that allegedly sustain attacks like the one Logan endured. Arraf's remarks are not, as conservatives will surely insist, about blaming the West; they are an invitation to learn something about ourselves instead of merely posing as cheerleaders. There is nothing wrong with celebrating the spread of democratic values. But there is nothing wrong either with acknowledging how partially and precariously they exist here at home.

Tucson Billboard

Gee, what is it like to live in Tuscon? Is all interaction, all communication about shooting? (This comes from HuffPost.) Are right wingers incapable of thinking without reference to this sort of metaphor or analogy?

(Almost) No Comment: Fox News is the American Pravda

"In most cases those who had greater levels of exposure to news sources had lower levels of misinformation. There were, however, a number of cases where greater exposure to a particular news source increased misinformation on some issues.

Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely), most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points), the economy is getting worse (26 points), most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points), the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points), their own income taxes have gone up (14 points), the auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points), when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points) and that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points). The effect was also not simply a function of partisan bias, as people who voted Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to have such misinformation than those who did not watch it--though by a lesser margin than those who voted Republican."*

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* Source: Here.

Politics in America: Craven Press, Credulous Public

I want to call attention to two columns that Glenn Greenwald has posted at Salon.com in the past few days. The first is on the putative terrorist attack 'foiled' by the FBI in Portland, Oregon last week; the second is on the reaction to the Wikileaks document dump this weekend. In both offerings Greenwald rightly focuses in on the credulousness of the public and the cravenness of the mainstream press in the face of assertions made by government officials.

Here are some of the good bits from Greenwald's response to reaction to the alleged terrorist plot:

"Media accounts are almost uniformly trumpeting this event exactly as the FBI describes it. Loyalists of both parties are doing the same, with Democratic Party commentators proclaiming that this proves how great and effective Democrats are at stopping The Evil Terrorists, while right-wing polemicists point to this arrest as yet more proof that those menacing Muslims sure are violent and dangerous.

What's missing from all of these celebrations is an iota of questioning or skepticism. All of the information about this episode -- all of it -- comes exclusively from an FBI affidavit filed in connection with a Criminal Complaint against Mohamud. As shocking and upsetting as this may be to some, FBI claims are sometimes one-sided, unreliable and even untrue, especially when such claims -- as here -- are uncorroborated and unexamined.That's why we have what we call "trials" before assuming guilt or even before believing that we know what happened: because the government doesn't always tell the complete truth, because they often skew reality, because things often look much different once the accused is permitted to present his own facts and subject the government's claims to scrutiny. [ . . . ]

It may very well be that the FBI successfully and within legal limits arrested a dangerous criminal intent on carrying out a serious Terrorist plot that would have killed many innocent people, in which case they deserve praise. [ . . . ]

But it may also just as easily be the case that the FBI -- as they've done many times in the past -- found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a "Terrorist plot" which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI's own concoction."

His column on Wikileaks is less easy to summarize because its targets are more diffuse. In it he excoriates the press for its servility and various commentators for their hypocrisy and callousness. The ultimate focus is on how Americans seem to be wholly unable to think critically in the face of government duplicity and dissembling.

Juan & the Pesky Muslim Terrorists

I am sitting in O'Hare airport listening to the repeated announcements about the DHS security level - it is orange, should you be wondering. So, it seems apposite to comment on the latest media dust-up.

Juan Williams should not have lost his job for confessing his personal prejudices. We all have them. Some are more ignorant than others. And the ignorance of your prejudices changes with context. (Hence, even if the scare tactics of DHS are not meant to inflame prejudices, it is predictable that they do so.) So, here is something for Juan to ponder as he enjoys his new $2M gig with the Fox folks: given recent research demonstrating that engineers are over-represented among Islamicist types, perhaps we ought to worry when we spy fellow passengers of middle eastern descent wearing pocket protectors? They are asserting their identity as techno-geeks over everything else. Or perhaps we ought to work at keeping our prejudices in check. Williams's thoughts on Muslims are just ignorant. But they are no more ignorant than what passes for news reporting by npr's own Dina Temple-Raston on a regular basis. She sees terrorists - Muslim ones- lurking under the bed regularly and tends to simply parrot claims by any American official peddling fear and anxiety. So why just fire Juan?

According to npr they fired Williams for engaging in activity contrary to their commitment to objective journalism, or something like that. Well, Williams has been taking money from Fox for years. How is that consistent with objective journalism? Getting paid to consort with Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and other propagandists seems to me to have been sufficient grounds for separation.

And, by the way, this has nothing to do with George Soros. ... The folks at Fox seem to think that sponsors simply buy and sell mouthpieces everywhere and not just on their network.

Lessons from Katrina

As we approach the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina destroying New Orleans, I am heading out to the annual APSA convention. Once again the conference is in Washington, DC - as it was on that weekend in 2005. Posts will be - at best - intermittent through Sunday.

But here are a set of essays by Rebecca Sonit on lessons for the post-Katrina world - from The Nation here, The L.A. Times here, and from Yes! here. Solnit points out, once again, that the dangers in NOLA in the immediate wake of the storm emerged more from ineptitude and malign neglect on the part of government, the misrepresentations of the media and the violence of mercenaries, police and white vigilantes - all animated largely by racist fear fear and animosity - than from the poor residents whom the storm displaced.

Using Aisha ~ Can We Get Beyond Time's Propaganda (Again)

A couple of days go I posted a response to this essay by Susie Linfield in which she agonizes (and I do not mean that in a pejorative sense) about the fate of women in Afghanistan in the event the U.S. were to withdraw from military operations there. Linfield's essay was occasioned by the notorious recent cover of Time magazine, depicting a young woman maimed by Taliban thugs for resisting an arranged marriage. My comments on Linfield was my second post on the matter.

The folks at Time importuned: "What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan?" And their reply was that the Taliban would be unleashed, placing the modest but real gains women have made in Afghanistan at grave risk. In the past couple of days, I've come across a couple of articles [1] [2] in The New York Times that suggest that the problem in Afghanistan is not just the Taliban, but other trends in Islam* as it is institutionalized there, putatively "moderate" or "mainstream" clerics who are more than willing to accommodate fundamentalists. In other words, the claim that we might just stay long enough to quash the Taliban (no minor feat, in itself) seems radically to underestimate the cultural problem. We are not, by military means, going to overturn or reform or whatever a traditional culture.

There are a couple of other matters. In the first place we are talking about a set of practices that we in the west deem 'barbaric' ~ "stoning — along with other traditional penalties like whipping and the amputation of hands." In the second place Afghanistan is hardly the only place where such practices ('stoning' specifically) are indulged ~ "in addition to Iran, they include Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Nigeria." These observations suggest that if we have concerns about human rights generally (you know, protection from 'cruel and unusual punishment') and women's rights specifically (since such punishments for 'sex crimes' tend to be meted out disproportionately to women) we ought to be intervening in those other places.

But let's set such messy, complicating factors** aside and focus exclusively and narrowly on Afghanistan. After all, such rhetorical narrowing is the point among pro-war types striking moralistic stances. Here is one telling passage:

"Perhaps most worrisome were signs of support for the action from mainstream religious authorities in Afghanistan. The head of the Ulema Council in Kunduz Province, Mawlawi Abdul Yaqub, interviewed by telephone, said Monday that stoning to death was the appropriate punishment for an illegal sexual relationship, although he declined to give his view on this particular case. An Ulema Council is a body of Islamic clerics with religious authority in a region.

And less than a week earlier, the national Ulema Council brought together 350 religious scholars in a meeting with government religious officials, who issued a joint statement on Aug. 10 calling for more punishment under Shariah law, apparently referring to stoning, amputations and lashings.

Failure to carry out such “Islamic provisions,” the council statement said, was hindering the peace process and encouraging crime.

The controversy could have implications for efforts by Afghan officials to reconcile with Taliban leaders and draw them into power-sharing talks.

Afghan officials, supported by Western countries, have insisted that Taliban leaders would have to accept the Afghan Constitution, which guarantees women’s rights, and not expect a return to Shariah law."

So, all you pro-war types, what, exactly is the plan here? How long do you think we should we 'stay'? What would you count as 'success'? Uprooting the Taliban? Subverting the other "mainstream" actors who seem to endorse barbaric practices? When we finish in Afghanistan, shall we proceed to Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? (After all the connections between those countries and al-Quaeda are reasonably well documented.) What would count as 'success' there? If we want to pose the question the Time cover presses upon us, why not pose these questions too? The answer is that asking them does not allow us to be quite so moralistic, quite so certain of what we have grounds to do.

Military force is a blunt instrument. It is ill-suited to the task of trying to protect women - or anyone else - in Afghanistan from fundamentalist thugs or those who abet them. I am not sure how better to proceed. But that discussion is hampered by a preoccupation with 'winning' an impossible military mission. And propaganda of the sort that Time has spewed simply obscures that fact. But that, after all, is the point, isn't it?
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* Please Note: The practices under discussion, as the essays in The Times make clear, do not derive from the Koran but from ancillary sources. The extent to which they are "Islamic" is contested.

** We can set aside too the hypocrisy of the U.S. with its official commitment to the death penalty and huge prison population of disproportionately minority and poor men has much claim to be scolding others about barbaric practices. We'll leave aside too the newly found willingness of American administrations to blatantly ignore the principles of international law in the prosecution of the GWOT.

Talkng Back ~ Susie Linfield on Time and Afghanistan

"Bieber’s photograph of Aisha . . . is disgusting. I am very glad that Time ran it." So says Susie Linfield in this pointed essay at Dissent online. As is usual, Linfield offers smart and insightful comments on the fracas surrounding the image. She insists that "the photo, taken by South African photographer Jodi Bieber, did the opposite and is, in a sense, a model of how photography can be used."

Interestingly, though, Linfield doesn't actually discuss the use of the photograph as much as she excoriates "the antiwar Left and . . . feminists" who "[w]ith a couple of notable exceptions," have responded to the Time cover with "a dispiriting lack of appropriately complex thinking, or, one might say, a distressingly reductive reading of events and of what feminism, and leftism, might mean." Since I have already posted on the cover in a highly critical way, I feel as though it is important to engage Linfield. So, here goes.

In the first place there is ample room for agreement:

There were, however, some thoughtful responses to the Time photo and the larger issues it raises. And in this case, thoughtful means uncertain. (Contrary to what readers of this piece might think thus far, I am not an advocate of “staying in Afghanistan.” In fact, I am thoroughly confused about what the “right” thing to do is; the only thing I’m certain of is that there are no good choices—and certainly no unambiguously good choices—on offer.) For some, the agonizing question is how to respond to conflicting demands.

OK. That is a more or less accurate depiction of where I stand. Conflicted. However, nothing Linfield says there is incompatible with the following.

[1] Attributing a significant helping of hypocrisy and disingenuousness to the people at Time. As I noted earlier, to the best of my knowledge the editorial staff there showed scant concern with women's rights when, for instance, the "moderates" in the U.S. Congress negotiated to have the demands of our own fundamentalists (e.g., the Catholic Bishops on abortion rights) incorporated into the health insurance legislation.

Moreover, the notion that this story is not a brief for staying in Afghanistan is simply not credible. Linfield bemoans the fact that the Time story has not generated any debate. But, having read the report, let's be clear that it accords roughly zero attention to any alternative beyond 'stay the course.' If, as Linfield rightly insists, we read the report for evidence of what Afghan women think, why not read it for evidence of what the folks at Time think? Absent an argument to the contrary, it seems entirely appropriate to charge Time with trafficking in propaganda.

[2] Acknowledging that the Taliban are barbaric thugs and that the Afghan people and nearly everyone else would be significantly better off if they could be eliminated. Nothing I've said so far reduces to the position that "the ousting of the Taliban [is] inconsequential, or that a commitment to women’s rights is only a form of hypocrisy." I think ousting the Taliban is quite consequential. But not in the abstract. How many lives - Afghan and American and other - are we willing to expend? What means - torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, imprecise drone attacks - are we willing to use? These are political questions, not as Linfield insists, questions of "conscience." And, beyond a protest about simplistic thinking she offers no answers to them.

On the charge of hypocrisy, let's agree that the matter is best addressed by attributing bad faith not to some indeterminate "we," but to identifiable actors and agencies. When discussing members of the Bush administration, various right-wing war-mongers, and, as I've just suggested, the folks at Time and other bastions of corporate media, I have no problem claiming that the newly discovered commitment to women's rights is "only hypocrisy," false concern trotted out to rationalize a disastrous policy. (By disastrous I mean a policy that has been poorly executed from the start and for which there is no plausible criterion of "success.")

[3] Questioning just what it means to speak, as Linfield does, of "the NATO presence." If this is not to work simply as euphemism for a war prosecuted by American troops, we need to be clear. How many non-American military personnel are in Afghanistan? I don't know but I suspect the answer is someplace in the vicinity of "few." And what about consequences? I recall hearing a report on npr recently that stated that Taliban and other 'insurgents' cause roughly three-quarters of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. American troops and their allies cause the remaining quarter. But, the report went on, many Afghans remain convinced that something like the opposite is the case. If we grant that our campaign in Afghanistan is of a 'hearts and minds' sort, this is troubling. Continued military intervention may simply be a losing strategy on that dimension. I am not certain of that, but absent some evidence to the contrary, it is hard to discount skepticism.

Likewise, Linfield rightly insists that we "at least call barbarism by its right name." OK, let's do. The various tactics I just mentioned - torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, 'collateral damage' caused by drone attacks, and so forth - are barbaric. Agreed? (And recall that I've already conceded that the Taliban and their terrorist tactics are barbaric.) What are the alternatives? Neither the Time piece nor Susie Linfield offer any suggestions. But that is where we ought to be headed - a discussion of how to proceed that does not simply assume that our current policy and tactics will "work" (whatever that means).

[4] Questioning what it is that Afghan women (is that a homogeneous category?) "want"? There is a strange ambiguity in Linfield's essay. On the one hand she thinks we ought to be paying attention to what Afghan women say (at least as the Time folks report that). On the other hand, she dismisses those who are concerned with attributing "agency" to those same women. This ambiguity is perhaps unavoidable. I agree that the downtrodden generally are not going to, without significant aid and support, throw off their oppressors. Conversely, it is unclear that clauses in the constitution alter underlying realities in the hinterlands. And I am not so sanguine that the Time report offers an even-handed assessment of the views that Afghan women articulate. Those views, as I have noted here before, are complex. They are not, in short, determinative. They do not mitigate the uncertainty that Linfield herself feels. To assert otherwise, I think, displays a dismaying level of credulousness.

[5] Recalling that much of the current disaster in Afghanistan is the result (wholly or partly) of U.S. policy. We funded the precursors of the Taliban against the Soviets. And we prosecuted a war in Iraq instead of dealing with the Taliban and their links to al-Qaeda. How confident are we - Linfield, I, others who think the Afghan campaign is a mess - that the folks who brought us those policies can clean up even part of the mess they've made?

Being a progressive or a leftist indeed requires avoiding knee-jerk reactions. The latter, after all, make one a reactionary. Insofar as the Time cover story has prompted debate it has proven valuable. But, I suspect that any such debate has been an unintended consequence. The folks at Time used the cover photo for a quite specific purpose - to shore up support for continued American military intervention. In other words, they are seeking to thwart debate by painting those who criticize the war as fools who are willing to sacrifice women's rights. (How does their report differ from the claims of BushCo to which Linfield refers?) In my view, they have undertaken that task in what I think is a hypocritical way. That brings me round to my initial claim: Time has used photography for propaganda.
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Update: Lest you think I am overly suspicious of the good folks at Time, I recommend this post which not only claims that the CIA has been pushing the "women's rights" angle on defending the Afghan mission, but makes the following point, which should be especially pressing for a news weekly:

It’s worth noting that the Taliban are Sunni, not Shia, and that the US-backed president has enacted a law for the non-Taliban sector of society, rolling back rights for women that were written into the constitution. Before the elections, the Times Online reported that “the United States and Britain [were] opposed to any strong public protest [against the law] because they fear[ed] that speaking out could disrupt [the] election.” The bill was pushed through parliament in February of 2009 and came into effect in July of last year. Afghan women fumed, while US and UK leaders stood by, and where was Time’s cover advocating for women’s rights then? Here are the covers they ran in February 2009.

Update 2: See also this post at Conscientious.

In the "Marketplace of Ideas" Working People Have Been Silenced: Media Bias in Reporting on the Recession

My co-conspirator Susan Orr points out that over at Crooked Timber my friend Henry Farrell has posted on this recent report from the nice folks at the Pew Research Center. Surprise! In their coverage of our "recession" (speaking of euphemisms) the "mainstream media" - more appropriately labeled corporate media - base their reporting overwhelmingly on sources from government and business while systematically ignoring trade unions.

In analyzing sources in stories, however, the fundamental pattern is the same. Those in government, and especially Obama administration staffers, dominated the conversation. Representatives of business and industry came next, followed by academics and independent observers. But the voices of ordinary citizens and people in the workplace trailed behind, appearing in only about one in every five stories.

The president himself or key staffers in the West Wing of the White House were sources in 28% of the stories. Representatives from federal agencies were in 25%. And fully 61% of stories included a government representative of some kind, including those from state and local government.

Representatives of business, those identified as clearly speaking on behalf of the company or corporation, were the next most prominent sources, figuring in about 40% of the stories.

In many of the economic storylines, ordinary citizens and workers were well down the rung of sources. For instance, they were heard in only 8% of the stories gauging the severity and trajectory of the recession, 9% of the stories about the financial sector and 11% of the stories about the stimulus program.

One subset of the American workforce was virtually shut out of the coverage entirely. Representatives of organized labor unions were sources in a mere 2% of all the economy stories studied (stress added).

I must say that this finding is hardly surprising.

War, Propaganda, Censorship: The Military Reveals the Actual Power Relations "Embedded" in Their Relations to With the News Media

Michael Hastings at the ISAF base in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Photograph © Mikhail Galustov for RollingStone/Redux.

In late June Michael Hastings published this story in Rolling Stone. The picture above accompanied that story which cost a high ranking military officer his job and career. I think Hastings was right to publish the story. To the best of my knowledge, while many commentators questioned the 'propriety' of his doing so, none actually contested the details of what he wrote. Well, it turns out that the military apparently doesn't much want Hastings around any more and has canceled his next scheduled "embed" in Afghanistan. You can read the news here at Mother Jones.*

Is there anyone who is really surprised by this? I'd be surprised if there were. Tit-for-tat, and so forth. What is outrageous is not this decision to kick Hastings to the curb. That is simply authoritarian reflex. Predictable. What is outrageous is that the news media has voluntarily embraced the legitimacy of the entire system of "embedded" reporting. Having done that, they really cannot complain that the military unilaterally dictates the rules of engagement. This episode simply reveals in especially stark form the power relations to which the press has acquiesced.

The press should pride itself on being untrustworthy (which is not the same thing as being dishonest, quite the reverse) when it comes to political and military authorities. In the current context the premium seems to be quite the reverse.
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Update (8/6/2010): More here.

TIME & War Propaganda

You will likely have seen the original cover (top) and may be interested in this shameless rationalization TIME printed. The editors insist: "We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground." Right. You ought also to see the second, photo-shopped version (Thanks Stan!) and read the reasoning of the fellow who took license with the original (scroll down the comments). His claim is only modestly less credulous. For some sensible discussion go here.

You might ask: So, you oppose the war? What about the Taliban and women's rights? Good questions. But, yes, I still oppose the war. And my simple, visceral retort is "What about, say, the Catholic church and women's (or children's) rights? What about the medieval attitudes that our own fundamentalists display regarding women's rights?"

My more complicated retort is, "OK, we can agree that the Taliban are fundamentalist thugs. But we are not going to get rid of them in any plausible scenario. And the ineffectual and corrupt Karzi regime is hardly an enlightened replacement. You might say the same of "our" fundamentalist allies in Pakistan. And, oh, by the way, let's have a graphic TIME cover story on the many various families we have bombed into oblivion in predator drone attacks - you know, the people we treat as collateral damage - and then talk support for the war." After all, we are deploying the drones mainly in hopes of avoiding American military casualties! I suppose Afghan lives are not worth quite as much?

This cover story is propaganda, pure and simple. TIME hardly is a font of feminist politics when it comes to our own relatively comfy lives. And, whether they admit it or not, they've adopted a moralistic stance in the service of a losing war.
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P.S.: The cover photo was taken, in the words of the TIME folk, "the distinguished South African photographer Jodi Bieber."

Orwell's Shadow: Fighting talk: The new propaganda ~ Robert Fisk

Fighting Talk: The New Propaganda
Robert Fisk

The Independent
21 June 2010

Following the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It's Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror...

But I am doing the Israelis an injustice. Their lexicon, and that of the White House – most of the time – and our reporters' lexicon, is the same. Yes, let's be fair to the Israelis. Their lexicon goes like this: Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror.

How many times did I just use the word "terror"? Twenty. But it might as well be 60, or 100, or 1,000, or a million. We are in love with the word, seduced by it, fixated by it, attacked by it, assaulted by it, raped by it, committed to it. It is love and sadism and death in one double syllable, the prime time-theme song, the opening of every television symphony, the headline of every page, a punctuation mark in our journalism, a semicolon, a comma, our most powerful full stop. "Terror, terror, terror, terror". Each repetition justifies its predecessor.

Most of all, it's about the terror of power and the power of terror. Power and terror have become interchangeable. We journalists have let this happen. Our language has become not just a debased ally, but a full verbal partner in the language of governments and armies and generals and weapons. ... more ...

A reader, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, emailed the other day, calling my attention to this essay - both acute and astute - by Robert Fisk in The Independent. I thought I'd pass along his recommendation. Fisk argues, I think persuasively, that the news media - journalists, editors, publishers and producers, networks - are hostage to language and concepts that are peddled for political purposes and that they, the media, are relatively oblivious to the history and purposes of that language and those concepts. If we need always ask 'who is using this photograph and for what purpose,' the same is true too of words. Thanks Stanley!