The shameless schmoozing of beltway journalists with the politicians they are supposed to be covering critically continues in the Obama administration. I wrote earlier about how Obama started this practice a week before he was even inaugurated. Is anyone even surprised anymore that the media is so lousy and so pro-establishment and only gets worked up over trivialities?
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Many people may not realize how carefully scripted talk shows are. When we watch people even yell at each other in seemingly spontaneous ways, we are actually watching a carefully planned show. People are selected to appear on these shows based on positions that they will take. So if you want to have a career as a media commentator, it is best if you have a predictable response to the stock issues that the media covers. It is even better if you can say predictable things in unpredictable ways, like Ann Coulter. But woe to you if you are an original thinker or a thoughtful person who actually responds based on the specifics of the situation. You are of no use to the producers of these shows because you are simply too unpredictable. The best way to understand these shows is to think of them as plays in which the actors are allowed to improvise within the limits of the characters that they play.
John Amato provides a revealing look behind the scenes at how the ‘news’ shows set up the guests for their programs, selecting guests who will only say what the producers of the shows want them to say. For one show, the producers sent out an email to someone saying, “Wanted to see if you’re available today at 4:05 for Neil’s show today. The topic is on Obama and his cockiness. We’re looking for someone who will say, yes, he’s cocky and his cockiness will hurt him.” Yes, they can be that specific.
Journalists often ‘work the phones’, as they like to call it, calling up lots of people on their Rolodexes until they have the quotes they need to flesh out the story that they have already written. I have been interviewed on occasion for some news story. When I read the story later, it is always the case that my comments have been selected to fit into a narrative that the writer seemed to have decided upon even before talking to me. The same is true for the ‘person in the street’ interviews. They may interview many, many people to get the quotes they need to drive the pre-ordained narrative.
But in order to ensure that the pre-ordained message gets transmitted, truly original or different or dissenting voices have to be marginalized. Glenn Greenwald describes how that is done:
[I]n our political discourse, the two party establishments typically define what is “sane,” and anyone outside of those parameters is, by definition, “crazy.” “Crazy” is the way that political orthodoxies are enforced and the leadership of the two political parties preserved as the only viable choices for Sane People to embrace. Anyone who tiptoes outside of those establishment parameters — from Ron Paul on the right to Dennis Kucinich on the left, to say nothing of Further Left advocates — is, more or less by definition, branded as “crazy” by all Serious, mainstream people.
The converse is even more perverse: the Washington establishment — which has endorsed countless insane policies, wrought so much destruction on every level, and has provoked the intense hatred of the American citizenry across the ideological spectrum — is the exclusive determinant for what is “sane.”
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While all of that is happening, those whom all Serious, Sane people agree are Crazy — people like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul and Alan Grayson — vehemently oppose most if not all of that and try to find ways to expand the realm of legitimate debate and political alliances beyond the suffocating stranglehold of those responsible. So who exactly is Crazy?
You can read more by Greenwald on this topic.
The media is at its worst when it is implicated in wrongdoing. Then it closes ranks and stonewalls in exactly the same way that the government or businesses do. A classic case is when it was revealed that the so-called ‘military analysts’ who gave supposedly ‘objective’ views on the Iraq war were actually being briefed by the Pentagon and paid for promoting a particular view. The news networks knew this and did not reveal the information to their viewers. Even after their lack of forthrightness was revealed, the media did not cover it.
The US is governed by a corrupt and incestuous business (mostly finance sector)-politicians-media oligarchy that is slowly but surely diving the country into the ditch because of its relentless pursuit of private wealth at the expense of the public good. The only silver lining is that all oligarchs are inherently unstable and eventually collapse under the weight of their own greed, as the groups and individual members within it start attacking each other once the public treasury has been thoroughly looted. But while that is going on the general public will suffer.
One of the big propaganda successes of the right wing conservative movement in the US has been the portrayal of the mainstream media as ‘liberal’. They have become so good at driving home this message that the media goes out of its way to have conservatives and extreme right wing people over-represented in its ranks. It seems like there is nothing that a right wing crank (like Erick Erickson, Marty Peretz, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, or Glenn Beck) can say that will prevent him or her from securing a perch in the media, while those who lack that protective barrier (like Helen Thomas or Octavia Nasr or David Weigel or Rick Sanchez) can get fired. People who are not right wing usually have to prove themselves to be ‘safe’ voices (i.e., not say anything remotely insightful, let alone controversial) to get even a toehold.
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They are apparently making a new version of this hit TV show that ran from 1968 to 1980. I don’t know if it will reprise the theme music from the original, which was one of the best ever.
Ah, nostalgia! Too bad that the increased demand for commercial time is squeezing out opening theme music.
Labor Day used to be the traditional kick off for political campaigns though we now live in nonstop, year-round campaign mode. But as we approach election day in November, we should steel ourselves for an even increased focus on the trivial and sensational.
If you want to better understand why election coverage is so vapid, see Michael Hastings’s excellent GQ article Hack: Confessions of a Presidential Campaign Reporter on his experience in the 2008 elections.
Hastings is the reporter whose story in Rolling Stone resulted in General Stanley McChrystal being fired from his job in charge of the war in Afghanistan. In 2007, he was assigned by Newsweek to cover the front runners in the 2008 election and although this was considered a plum high-profile assignment, his increasing disgust with the kind of access politics that was required resulted in him quitting midway through and moving to another beat.
In order to minimize the impact of the WikiLeaks expose, the government is trying to adopt a ‘move along, nothing new to see here’ message, hoping that the major media will drop the matter. But Nick Turse lists what he calls five ‘jaw-dropping’ stories to emerge from WikiLeaks release of documents that he says demand national media attention.
Scott Horton describes how what he calls the ‘national-security state’ is striking back at this latest threat to its information hegemony. Establishment journalists are tut-tutting about how WikiLeaks is being irresponsible by simply releasing secret documents without ‘editing’ them (which is just an euphemism for letting the governments decide what should be published) or ‘providing context’ (which means putting the government’s spin on them).
As part of the anti-WikiLeaks propaganda effort, Admiral Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claims that WikiLeaks may have “blood on its hands” because of the leaks. This is truly rich since it comes from someone whose forces have killed tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of innocent civilians in their invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Maximillian Forte has a good analysis on the benefits of the WikiLeaks release as well as on some of the concerns. The most serious one that is being used to discredit WikiLeaks is the lack of redaction of the names of Afghan informants who may now face reprisals at the hands of the brutal Taliban. It is not clear if the sheer volume of documents overwhelmed the small WikiLeaks staff or they were just careless or whether it was deliberate. But it now turns out that WikiLeaks asked for help from the US government to provide reviewers to tell them what names should be redacted and they were rebuffed. WikiLeaks asked the New York Times reporter to act as an intermediary to convey this request and the reporter did so even as the paper condemned WikiLeaks for not doing the redacting. This is typical New York Times behavior, always seeking to ingratiate itself with the government by dutifully relaying their spin.
WikiLeaks has again offered the US government the opportunity to review the second set of documents before their release to enable them to identify the names of informants that should be redacted. It looks like the government has again chosen to refuse the offer. Thus the US government shares considerable responsibility for any danger that befalls their informants. As Glenn Greenwald says:
In the conflict between the U.S. Government and WikiLeaks, it is true that one of the parties seems steadfastly indifferent to the lives of Afghan civilians. Despite the very valid criticisms that more care should have been exercised before that first set of documents was released, the party most guilty of that indifference is not WikiLeaks.
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For whatever reasons — because it wanted WikiLeaks to release the documents with the names of Afghan sources to damage its credibility, because it was indifferent to the potential harm — the Pentagon simply failed to pursue that option [of reviewing the documents and suggesting redactions], just as it is doing now with the next 15,000 documents. Are those the actions of officials with any genuine concern for the harm to Afghan civilians, other than to the extent it be can exploited to harm its arch-enemy, WikiLeaks?
It seems pretty clear that the US government is lying (as usual) in its efforts to discredit WikLeaks. But its long history of lying is so great that only the establishment US press takes it seriously or at least pretends to do so.
Will the effort to shut down WikiLeaks succeed? There is always the chance that it might, given the power and ruthlessness of the US government. But WikiLeaks is nothing if not resourceful. They have exploited sophisticated computer encryption technology to elude investigators. Assange has also now become now a columnist for a Swedish newspaper, thus giving him journalist status and enabling him to take advantage of the strong protections that country provides journalists.
But whatever happens to WikiLeaks, they have shown the world that there is another model of journalism that is far more powerful than what we have now, and that does not require journalists to ingratiate and debase themselves towards powerful figures. It is interesting that younger people (those under 50) are more likely to see the WikiLeaks disclosure as serving the public interest than those over 50. I am hopeful that young and idealistic aspiring journalists, people who really care about getting the truth out there, will find Assange and WikiLeaks and even Bradley Manning, with their vaguely outlaw personas, hacker histories, and nose-thumbing at those in power, to be far more romantic and appealing role models than the toadying, well-coiffed crop that follows the Watergate model and are the ones that now show up on TV and in government and military press briefing rooms and spout platitudes in support of the government.
If I was an idealistic young man starting out as a journalist, I know which model I would choose.
Needless to say, the emergence of the WikiLeaks model is a danger to those who want to be able to control the message, lie to the public, and make sure that only viewpoints that have been filtered by ‘respectable’ people should be voiced in the marketplace. There are already signs that the leaks have led to a drop in support for the war in Afghanistan.
Hence there is now an organized campaign to shut down WikiLeaks and discredit it. It should thus not be surprising that the establishment media, upset by WikiLeaks exposing its complicity and undermining its gatekeeper role, is eagerly joining up with the Pentagon and the Obama administration in waging war on it.
As part of its war on WikiLeaks, it seems clear that the Obama administration is seeking to make Bradley Manning, the 22-year old soldier accused of leaking to WikiLeaks the Collateral Murder video, into a warning for other potential leakers and it will not matter if the government believes he is the leaker or not. Based on the allegation of a former hacker who claims that Manning told him he was the leaker, the US arrested Manning on May 26 and took him away to jail in Kuwait where he was kept incommunicado before being transferred recently to Quantico military prison in Virginia. He has been charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice with, among other things, “communicating, transmitting and delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source”. Attempts to provide him with independent legal representation have been rebuffed by the Obama regime, which should be no surprise to readers of this blog where I have repeatedly described Obama’s contempt for due process. Friends of Manning are trying to obtain due process for him.
Glenn Greenwald has an excellent summary of the curious features of the Manning case, the strange, publicity-seeking person Adrian Lamo who turned him in, and Lamo’s journalist friend who broke the story. It should be borne in mind that no evidence has been presented for the common assumption that Manning had anything to do with the Afghan documents leak. He has only been charged in connection with the Collateral Murder video. Jeremy Scahill also writes that Manning’s reported words to Lamo indicate that Manning strongly felt that this kind of information should be in the public domain. WikiLeaks provides leakers with the kind of outlet that whistleblowers need.
Meanwhile, there have been various rumors spread about Manning’s personal life and motives, trying to portray him as someone who a disgruntled loner and about his sexual life and his mental state. All this by way of trying him in the media before he is even proven to have been the leaker.
We also have the strange on-again, off-again, and then on-again investigation of rape against WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange in Sweden. James Fallows at The Atlantic explores the arguments for and against the theory that Assange was set up, possibly by the CIA
I have no idea of the truth of these allegations which will presumably be investigated thoroughly according to Swedish law. If he is guilty of rape, then Assange should be punished because that is an awful crime. But the point of the Pentagon Papers/WikiLeaks model of journalism is that when you have the release of official documents, the identity and motives and character of both leaker and disseminator are independent of the issues raised by the leaked documents. This is unlike the Watergate anonymous source reporting where everything hinges on whether you can trust the reporter and source to be honest and truthful because you have no documentary record to fall back on.
Jeremy Scahill writes about the new things that the WikiLeaks release has revealed and how having concrete evidence changes the nature of the whole discussion from a fog in which some anonymous sources say one thing to a reporter only to be challenged by other anonymous sources, to actual facts.
Time managing editor Richard Stengel drew the contrast with WikiLeaks in an editor’s letter accompanying the story, claiming that the WikiLeaks documents, unlike the Time article, fail to provide “insight into the way life is lived” in Afghanistan or to speak to “the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead.” Actually, the documents do exactly that. WikiLeaks may not be a media outlet and Assange may not be a journalist, but why does it matter? The documents provide concrete evidence of widespread US killings of Afghan civilians and attempts to cover up killings, and they portray unaccountable Special Operations forces as roaming the country hunting people—literally. They describe incidents of mass outrage sparked by the killing of civilians and confirm that the United States is funding both sides of the war through bribes paid to the Taliban and other resistance forces.
Next: Other attempts to counter WikiLeaks.
POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on the current political dynamic
This was from January of this year but is still accurate.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
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WikiLeaks follows the basic idea of the admirable Pentagon Papers model of releasing official internal documents to the public, and thus undermining the corrupt and sycophantic Watergate model of journalism. But the internet has enabled WikiLeaks to add two important new wrinkles.
The first is that they do not need to find a news organization to agree to publish their material. They can put it on their own servers for the world to see.
The other new and extremely important wrinkle with WikiLeaks is that it is a loosely linked transnational organization made up of volunteers the world over that is not tied to any national interest and thus has much greater freedom to operate. The major media in any country is under pressure to show loyalty to their country, which means being subservient to their governments. WikiLeaks does not have any such constraints.
WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange has dismissed the idea that he has an obligation to protect the interests of the US or any other state. He makes no secret of his own antiwar motivations, saying he “loved crushing bastards” and likes “stopping people who have created victims from creating any more.”
“It is not our role to play sides for states. States have national security concerns, we do not have national security concerns,” he said.
“You often hear … that something may be a threat to U.S. national security,” he went on.
“This must be shot down whenever this statement is made. A threat to U.S. national security? Is anyone serious? The security of the entire nation of the United States? It is ridiculous!”He said he wasn’t interested in the safety of states, only the safety of individual human beings.
“If we are talking a threat to individual soldiers … or citizens of the United States, then that is potentially a genuine concern,” he said.
He also scorns the mainstream media for pulling their punches, giving the government advance warning of what they intend to publish and withholding important information if the government requests them to do so. Can anyone doubt that the reason the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have managed to continue for so long at such a great cost in terms of lives and money without public outrage is because the coverage has been sanitized?
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has an excellent piece, with good links to source materials and analyses, on the first release by WikiLeaks of the documents on the war in Afghanistan. He points out that we are witnessing a major shift in news with the arrival of big name ‘stateless’ news organizations like WikiLeaks that are not beholden to any government and hence cannot be pressured or feel the need to self-censor in order to stay in the government’s good graces. He adds that WikiLeaks has a shrewd understanding of how news is valued and used that knowledge to give three newspapers in three different countries exclusive looks at the documents three weeks in advance so that they could study them and prepare stories that were embargoed until Monday. This was done to ensure maximum exposure.
WikiLeaks definitely knows how to get publicity. It gives out what are effectively trailers for forthcoming releases, thus whetting the appetite of the public and the media. It has promised the release ‘soon’, any day now, of even more explosive documents and this is undoubtedly causing some concern to the government about what those documents contain.
In trying to combat WikiLeaks, the Obama administration has been trying to maintain two contradictory positions. On the one hand, it claims that there is nothing new in the dossier and that ‘everyone’ (by which they mean ‘everyone who matters’, i.e., the Villagers) already knew it. On the other hand, it claims that WikiLeaks is threatening national security, and is using that charge to whip up public opposition to the organization and seeking to shut it down.
Daniel Ellsberg has for a long time been appealing to government employees to become whistle blowers and leakers. His own personal regret is that he waited too long to do what he did, and that if he had acted earlier, he might have saved a lot of lives. (I am looking forward to seeing the highly praised documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers which has been nominated for a 2010 Academy Award.) Just recently he listed four documents that he would like to see leaked.
In the wake of the WikiLeaks revelations, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern writes a poignant personal account of how he, in the course of his normal duties, came into possession of secret cables that directly contradicted official US government statements on the strength of the Vietnamese forces. Revealing that secret might have shortened the Vietnam war and saved lives but he kept it secret out of a combination of concern for his career and a misplaced sense of loyalty to the government. He now deeply regrets his inaction and wonders if the equivalent of WikiLeaks had been around then, whether he and other professionals who were sick of hearing their government lying might have been more willing to release documents that told the truth.
The idea of obtaining and revealing official documents so that anyone has access to the raw data and engage in informed analysis is a radical break from current practice where the truth is closely guarded, only selected people are allowed to see and analyze raw information, and we are told to simply trust the analyses put out by the inner circle of establishment journalists who are given access to filtered information in return for favorable coverage. The WikiLeaks Afghanistan War Diary provides a rich trove of raw information for honest and independent analysts, the kind of people who would normally be shut out, and many have seized the opportunity. Phillipe Sands has a good analysis on what the revelations say about the conduct of the war in Afghanistan. Eric Margolis, who has been trying to expose the lies and propaganda concerning the Afghanistan was since 2001 says that the dossier reveals the alleged duplicitous role that Pakistan is being blasted for in the US is merely the result of acting in its own self-interest. Surely this is information that the public has a right to know?
Next: The effort to counter WikiLeaks
POST SCRIPT: Mitchell and Webb on the greatest invention yet
The Watergate model of journalism that I wrote about yesterday is one that depends upon high-level anonymous sources to provide information. But here the person providing the information usually has an agenda other than just truth or public interest, and is often seeking to drive the discussion in directions that serve either political or personal ends. There is also almost always a quid pro quo involved. The journalist provides anonymity and lack of accountability and makes the source look good in exchange for information. The problem is that there is no way for the public to judge for themselves the value of the information and has to trust the journalist and the anonymous source.
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