A morally bankrupt pundit class

David Broder, the so-called ‘dean’ of the US pundit class, suggests that Barack Obama should go to war with Iran in order to boost the economy and his re-election chances. Stephen Walt provides the required dissection of this insanity.

Jonah Goldberg wonders why Julian Assange of WikiLeaks has not already been murdered by US security forces. He even specifies that Assange should be ‘garroted’. Goldberg’s barbaric nature is, of course, well documented. It does not matter how many times people like Juan Cole slap him down, he resurfaces.

Our keyboard commandos are always willing to send other people to their deaths to compensate for some weird sense of personal inadequacy. And our major media continue to publish them.

The US media’s subservience to the government and the Pentagon

I have praised Glenn Greenwald before but today’s article on the WikiLeaks releases and the response of the major American media is absolutely brilliant in its analysis. It is an absolute must-read.

Also see a fascinating video of a forum and Q/A with Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg. It is long but engrossing. Assange comes across as a very smart and courageous person who is totally committed to continuing the practice putting out official government documents to the public.

I have just made a donation to WikiLeaks. You can also do so here.

More on the WikiLeaks release and US media coverage

In a previous post I described how the US media carefully conforms to meet the needs of the establishment. One sees this on display again with the new WikiLeaks release. Glenn Greenwald compares the worldwide coverage of the explosive nature of the new revelations with the carefully sanitized version given to the US public by the major media outlets here and the focus on the trivial, such as Julian Assange’s private life.

Ellen Knickmeyer, former Baghdad bureau chief of the Washington Post, writes about the upbeat press briefings she received from the US government while covering the war and now says that “Thanks to WikiLeaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded.” Of course, it is a safe bet that if she were still at the Post, she would not be allowed to write that.

As I repeatedly said, WikiLeaks is serving the same public service as Daniel Ellsberg did when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which is why he is such a strong supporter of their actions. If he had tried to leak them to the New York Times today, they probably would not publish them and may even turn him in to the FBI.

More on the Juan Williams firing

As I have said before, my delight with the firing of Juan Williams was simple. I thought he was a lousy journalist and I was glad not to have to listen to him anymore. But Jason Linkins captures why the firing was so unusual and it is not because of free speech issues:

Yesterday, NPR cashiered correspondent Juan Williams for doing something that had hitherto never been considered an offense in media circles: defaming Muslims. Up until now, you could lose your job for saying intemperate things about Jews and about Christians and about Matt Drudge. You could even lose a job for failing to defame Muslims. But we seem to be in undiscovered country at the moment.

Glenn Greenwald explains that some are expressing outrage because creating anti-Muslim fear is their goal and the NPR action has threatened their drive towards it by making it seem as if bigotry towards Muslims should be treated the same way as bigotry towards any other group.

The double standard in our political discourse — which tolerates and even encourages anti-Muslim bigotry while stigmatizing other forms — has been as beneficial as it has been glaring. NPR’s firing of Juan Williams threatened to change that by rendering this bigotry as toxic and stigmatized as other types. That could not be allowed, which is why the backlash against NPR was so rapid, intense and widespread. I’m not referring here to those who object to viewpoint-based firings of journalists in general and who have applied that belief consistently: that’s a perfectly reasonable view to hold (and one I share). I’m referring to those who rail against NPR’s actions by invoking free expression principles they plainly do not support and which they eagerly violate whenever the viewpoint in question is one they dislike. For most NPR critics, the real danger from Williams’ firing is not to free expression, but to the ongoing fear-mongering campaign of defamation and bigotry against Muslims (both foreign and domestic) that is so indispensable to so many agendas.

That sounds right to me.

James Wolcott has his usual droll but accurate take on the event. He points out that Williams can now fully be the kind of person that Fox News loves, the minority who panders to white resentment by validating their stereotypes about minorities, saying “Well, clearly that day has come and such a relief it must be for Williams, able to capitulate to conservative middle-aged white men without having to fret about whatever flak he might get back home at NPR.”

The internet as a new media model

An interesting example of the power and utility of the internet was a recent case in England. Simon Singh, in an article in the London Guardian, criticized the British Chiropractic Association “for claiming that its members could treat children for colic, ear infections, asthma, prolonged crying, and sleeping and feeding conditions by manipulating their spines… Singh said that claims were made without sufficient evidence, described the treatments as “bogus”, and criticised the BCA for “happily promoting” them.”

The BCA sued Singh personally under Britain’s absurdly strict libel laws and he faced the possibility of financial ruin. But what happened was that a volunteer army of bloggers swung into action investigating every single claim of the chiropractors and showing that Singh’s charge was true. As Ben Goldacre writes:

Fifteen months after the case began, the BCA finally released the academic evidence it was using to support specific claims. Within 24 hours this was taken apart meticulously by bloggers, referencing primary research papers, and looking in every corner.

Professor David Colquhoun of UCL pointed out, on infant colic, that the BCA cited weak evidence in its favour, while ignoring strong evidence contradicting its claims. He posted the evidence and explained it. LayScience flagged up the BCA selectively quoting a Cochrane review. Every stone was turned by Quackometer, APGaylard, Gimpyblog, EvidenceMatters, Dr Petra Boynton, MinistryofTruth, Holfordwatch, legal blogger Jack of Kent, and many more. At every turn they have taken the opportunity to explain a different principle of evidence based medicine – the sin of cherry-picking results, the ways a clinical trial can be unfair by design – to an engaged lay audience, with clarity as well as swagger.
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But more interestingly than that, a ragged band of bloggers from all walks of life has, to my mind, done a better job of subjecting an entire industry’s claims to meaningful, public, scientific scrutiny than the media, the industry itself, and even its own regulator. (my italics)

As a result, the chiropractors dropped their claim against Singh and may now have to pay his legal costs as well. The claims of the chiropractors have been exposed to the whole world.

Legendary journalist I. F. Stone was probably the prototypical blogger before the internet even existed, doing the kind of detailed analysis that good reporting requires and which requires a passion for the work. It cannot be just a job. Victor Navasky says that Stone,

although he never attended presidential press conferences, cultivated no highly placed inside sources and declined to attend off-the-record briefings, time and again he scooped the most powerful press corps in the world.

His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congressional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line, examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documentation of incursions on civil rights and liberties. He lived in the public domain.

There is still an essential role for journalists to go out and gather first-hand information, questioning people, and obtaining documents. But they are inadequate when it comes to analysis either because they filter the raw information through the establishment lens or they simply do not have the time or knowledge or expertise to do a thorough examination and analysis. It is mostly bloggers who are now doing that kind of thing, picking up Stone’s baton and working in the public domain to glean information that the big media journalists cannot or will not do. Of course, there is a huge amount of rubbish on the internet. But as time goes by, bloggers and their readers will become much better at what they do, the former becoming more careful and authoritative, the latter at being able to distinguish good sources of information from the bad.

I. F. Stone’s own credo is a inspiration to all independent journalists and bloggers: “To write the truth as I see it; to defend the weak against the strong; to fight for justice; and to seek, as best I can, to bring healing perspectives to bear on the terrible hates and fears of mankind, in the hope of someday bringing about one world, in which men will enjoy the differences of the human garden instead of killing each other over them.”

It’s all cynical political calculations for our media

Over at Slate, Tim Scocca points out how the affected cynical, world-weary, oh-so-savvy media narrative that drives US political reporting infects even their coverage of foreign news stories like the Chilean mine rescue. (Via Balloon Juice.)

The idea that maybe, just maybe, something should be done and is because it is worth doing for its own sake does not seem to occur to them.

The emerging power of new media and blogs

The new media on the internet provides a way to break free of the blinkered view that the traditional media provides. What the new media offers is a vast array of informed people who are willing to do the meticulous and painstaking work to get to the truth. The traditional media cannot or will not do this either because they want to go with the superficial and sensational in their search for ratings or because they are laying off their investigative reporters or because they do not want to offend powerful interests, because they themselves are part of the corporate elite

This year, investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill received the second annual Izzy Award, named after the legendary investigative reporter I. F. “Izzy” Stone, and given for outstanding achievement in independent media. The first winners were Amy Goodman of Democracy Now and Glenn Greenwald. In an interview, Scahill talks about the potential of the new alternative media made possible by the internet.

I believe that the way independent journalists are most effectively able to conduct their work is by maintaining their independence from the powerful. I don’t hob-nob with the powerful. I don’t count among my friends executives or other powerful people. I think it’s important for independent journalists to not be beholden to any special interests whatsoever.
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I think we’re at a moment where we have a lot of really good independent journalism that’s being produced by bloggers and independent journalists, but we also need to not go far away from that tradition of peer review, editing and fact-checking.
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We live in a very exciting time in independent media. Corporate journalists are less powerful now than they were 10 years ago, but their owners are much more powerful. Still, the journalists themselves — they’re no longer these sort of regal kings on a hill. Peggy Noonan represents a dying generation of people that pontificate from a golden palace somewhere, hoping the poor will never get through her gates.

The poor are now journalists around the world. The question is: how do we fund it? How do we keep it viable? How do we keep it credible? And that is our challenge right now.

Glenn Greenwald has a nice piece on the value of blogs that was displayed when the traditional media misrepresented Sonia Sotomayor when she was nominated to the US Supreme Court. The media used an original blog report as the source to present a distorted picture of her and it was the blogs that fought back to correct the record.

Another case where blogs forced a reporter to retract was when New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin indulged in some gratuitous union bashing in a TV interview, suggesting that unionized companies were all doomed to failure. The counter-examples came thick and fast and quick on the blogs, forcing him to recant. He is unlikely to make that mistake again. This kind of accountability and correction is unlikely to have happened in the pre-internet, pre-blog days.