Back in the 1980s, when I was a reporter for the Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle, we had a managing editor who used the newsroom e-mail system to provoke discussion and bring the newsroom closer together as a group. One day he conducted a poll on whether we were pro-choice or pro-life. Some of us declined to answer, but of those who did, all (including me) were in favor of abortion rights, except for one person.
Did this raise questions about whether we could be balanced our coverage? Maybe it did, although we seemed to get the same number of complaints from the pro-choice and pro-life sides. To the extent this was a problem, I don’t know what we could have done about it, except to try extra-hard to be fair to the side we didn’t agree with. Nobody asked my opinion on this or any other controversial issue when I was interviewed for the job, and for obvious reasons I don’t think newsrooms would benefit from affirmative action policies for conservatives.
Journalism is a field which attracts people with particular sets of values, as does medicine, law, teaching, police work, military service and entrepreneurial business, and these values affect your outlook. That’s just how things are.
Dr. Kermit Gosnell
The reason I write about this subject today is that a lot of people evidently think that (1) the murder trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell should have got more coverage than it did and (2) the reason it didn’t is that journalists are biased in favor of abortion.
Based on my newspaper experience, I think you have to turn to Chaos Theory to explain why some events become national news and others are only local news. If bias caused the Gosnell case to be under-reporter, this bias affected the right-wing press such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal as much as it did CNN and the Washington Post. In any case, it is front-page news now.
Watching this excellent docudrama about Edward R. Murrow’s battle with Senator Joe McCarthy took me back, in imagination, to those days. In 1953 and 1954, when the events of this movie took place, I was a college student in Wisconsin. I listened faithfully to Edward R. Murrow’s CBS radio news broadcasts, and admired his use of language—precise, strong, not a word wasted and his tone of voice full of majesterial disdain for liars and demagogues. I don’t remember whether I viewed Murrow’s CBS TV documentary on McCarthy when it was originally broadcast, but later, but I greatly admired it for the same reasons.
I watched it the other night on DVD at the home of my radical friend Larry, who pointed out that the time frame of the movie coincided with the CIA-sponsored coups against the elected governments of Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954—both of which planted the seeds of the tragic histories of those two countries down to this day. I don’t remember if Murrow ever did broadcasts on those two events. At the time they did not loom large in my consciousness. To the extent that I thought about them, I thought about them not as examples of American imperialism, but as episodes in the global struggle against totalitarian Communism.
My writings for the student newspaper were about academic freedom, which all educated, right-thinking people were for, and about racial discrimination, which all educated right-thinking people were against. I thought the danger to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights came from demagogues like McCarthy and the Southern segregationists. I did not think there was anything systemically wrong with the basic institutions of American society, nor did Edward R. Murrow.
It is only in the past 20 years, and especially the past 10 years, that I have begun to see that I was wrong, and radical friends such as Larry were right. U.S. government policies that I saw as byproducts of the struggle against Communism continued and grew stronger after the fall of Communism.
The movie depicts a program that Murrow did defending Milo Radulovich, an Air Force lieutenant who lost his commission on the grounds that he had been determined to be a security risk on the basis of secret information. He had been asked to sever ties with his immigrant father, who subscribed to a Serbian-language newspaper published on Communist Yugoslavia, and his sister, who allegedly was active in liberal and left-wing causes.
Today this seems almost quaint. The U.S. government now uses secret information to designate people for “targeted killing”.
I think the Internet is potentially one of the greatest tools to promote human freedom and access to ideas and knowledge. I think it also is potentially one of the greatest tools of Big Brother for surveillance and censorship. For this reason I was particularly interested in the two-part series on the Cypherpunks on Julian Assange’s The World Tomorrow program. The RT network recently released an uncut version of Assange’s Cypherpunk interviews, which I also viewed with great interest.
The first part is more than an hour long and the second part is two hours long, and my guess is that most people who view this post won’t have the time or the interest to watch them in their entirety. But I am posting them anyhow, for whoever might be interested, and also am linking to them in my Documentaries menu on the right.
The Cypherpunks are a loose movement whose goal is to promote individual privacy by providing encryption that would allow people to prevent unauthorized people, including government agents, from reading their private communication. Assange interviewed three notable Cypherpunks—Andy Muller-Maguhn of Germany, a member of the Chaos Computer Club, a hacker organization; Jeremie Zimmerman of France, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net, which advocates for free circulation of knowledge on the Internet; and Jacob Appelbaum of the USA, an independent computer security researcher and a participant in the Tor project to create on-line anonymity systems.
They drew a frightening, but (I think) true, picture of the ability of governments to collect and record every electronic transaction by every individual—e-mails, credit card purchases, Google searches, bank deposits and withdrawals, telephone calls—while themselves operating behind a veil of secrecy.
Applebaum gave an example of a man indicted for posting information on the Internet in violation of a secret law whose text he was not allowed to see. The judge was allowed to see the law, and the man was acquitted, but presumably the loophole in the law was tightened up. I have to write “presumably” because there is no way to know.
Muller-Maguhn said that just as the invention of the printing press made everyone a potential reader, the creation of the Internet has made everyone a potential writer. Anyone, not just professional writers who are able to please professional editors, has the means of writing out what they think and know, and communicating it to the world. This is valuable and important, and it doesn’t matter that only a little of the writing is of high quality.
These three, and Assange himself, are more libertarian than socialist. Assange said the three basic freedoms, from which all other freedoms flow, are (1) freedom to communicate, (2) freedom of movement and (3) freedom to engage in economic transactions, and the third may be the most fundamental. He may have been playing devil’s advocate when he said the latter, but I don’t think so.
I came across these videos on This Day in Wikileaks, a daily blog with daily news and commentary about Wikileaks, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. I have put a link to it on my Links menu on the right.
Julian Assange’s The World Tomorrow was broadcast by the RT (Russia Today) network. It was started by the Russian government for its own purposes, and for that reason should be regarded with skepticism, but it also provides information and ideas not available through the established U.S. TV networks. In the same way, the Voice of America is an agent of the U.S. government, but provides information to Russians they might not get from their domestic broadcasters. When I was younger, I never thought I would ever make this comparison, but times have changed.
When I was a newspaper reporter, I used to console myself with the thought that at least I had a job that could not be shipped overseas. This is no longer true. Some newspapers are outsourcing editing and even reporting of local news to countries such as India and the Philippines.
All this is made possible by the Internet. A lot of information is available on-line. You don’t have to walk to city hall or the county courthouse to get it. You don’t have to be in the same city to interview a local official by phone. Press releases are available on-line, and you can rewrite them as easily in one place as another. Some public meetings are televised and even available on YouTube; you don’t have to be at the meeting to summarize what was said.
What is lost is the background knowledge that comes from living in a community, which enables you to understand the significance and context of what you report. But this is not quantifiable. For certain newspaper executives, particularly executives of newspaper chains who spend only a few years in each place, what counts is cutting and improving the next quarter’s financial results. Longer-term consequences are somebody else’s problem.
Click on Now They’re Even Outsourcing “Local” Journalismfor a report by Ryan Smith on Journatic and Blockshopper, two journalism outsourcing companies. He told how he worked for Journatic as a copy editor of articles written about local news in Chicago, Houston and other U.S. cities by far-distant reports in, among other places, the Philippines.
Click on Outsourcing Journalismfor an older report on outsourcing local news editing and reporting to India.
Eli Pariser, former director of the online organization MoveOn, discovered a surprising and alarming thing about Google. When he does a Google search, the menu he sees on a give topic is different from the menu one of his friends would see. That is, Google has algorithms, based on his past Google searches and his demographic characteristics, that give him a unique menu based on what he is likely to be interested in. Facebook, too, deletes links from his Facebook page that its algorithms determine that he is not interested in. He found Facebook deleted links from his conservative friends because he clicked on them less often than links from his liberal friends.
The problem with this, he said, is that unless you proactively seek out diverse sources of information, you will wind up in a bubble in which everything you get through Google or Facebook will confirm what you already think you know. He wrote a book about this (which I haven’t read) entitled The Filter Bubble:What the Internet Is Hiding From You.
What this means is that unless you proactively seek out diverse sources of information, you’re not going to get diverse sources of information. That is a fixable problem. The more serious problem is the other uses that Google, Facebook and other Internet companies make of the data they come on us. By integrating seemingly minor bits of information from diverse sources, they can come up with a well-informed guess about what products you’ll buy, your politics and religion and even your personal habits.
The problem with this is that (1) this information can be made available to credit reporting agencies, employers, the Department of Homeland Security and other organizations who will use it in ways adverse to your interests and (2) the information may not be accurate. Parisi in the TED video above says that if you drink milk rather than wine with your meals, and you frequent fast-food restaurants, demographers would say you’re probably a political conservative. Well, I drink more milk than wine, and I greatly enjoy an Arby’s roast beef sandwich, and I consider myself a political liberal.
Years ago I used to joke that the same software that Amazon uses to determine that “people like you liked the following books” could be used by the Department of Homeland Security to determine that “people like you committed acts of terrorism.” I no longer think of this as a joke. President Obama and the Central Intelligence Agency use computer algorithms in drawing up kill lists of people in tribal areas of Yemen and Pakistan.
Click on Bubble Trouble for an argument by Jacob Weisberg of Slate that Parisi exaggerates the problem. Weisberg had friends of different political beliefs do Google searches on highly charged political subjects, and found little difference in the results.
Click on Google Personalizationfor directions as to how to turn off the Google personalization feature.
I think it is a good thing, and not a bad thing, that the killing of Trayvon Martin is a national news story. If it weren’t, the whole case might have been brushed under the rug.
But George Zimmerman is entitled to a fair trial, in which he is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And both he and we, the people, are entitled to accurate news coverage, which we have not always got.
It would have been despicable of Spike Lee and Rev. Al Sharpton to publish George Zimmerman’s address even if they hadn’t published the wrong address and subjected an innocent person to harassment. It is wrong that Zimmerman has to go into hiding—although Trayvon Martin’s family might say that this is better than being dead.
A criminal trial is not a good place to resolve complex social issues. Racial profiling is a serious problem, Florida’s stand-your-ground law is a serious problem. But when George Zimmerman goes to trial, the only issue to be tried is whether the prosecution can prove he is guilty of second-degree murder.
Many legal experts doubt that there is a case for a second-degree murder conviction. Second-degree murder is an intentional but unplanned killing, or assault in which the death of the victim was a distinct possibility. They argue there would be a stronger case for a lesser charge, such as manslaughter or assault. Here in New York, there is a crime called “reckless endangerment.” which might fit.
What I wanted to see in the case, and what I now do see, is for the law to treat the killing of a young man as a serious matter. I am willing to let a judge and jury decide whether Zimmerman has committed a crime or deserves to be punished. I just want him to be held accountable for what he did.
Click on Altering the Zimmerman Tapefor Ta-Nehisi Coates’ comment on NBC’s doctoring the tapes of Zimmerman’s 911 call to make Zimmerman appear racially prejudiced.
Click on The Trayvon-Industrial Complexfor a post about the exploitation of the Trayvon Martin killing by Rod Dreher of The American Conservative. The comment thread is well worth reading.
Click on Trayvon Martin Photosfor Snopes.com’s report on bogus photos of Trayvon Martin being circulated on the Internet by Zimmerman supporters. Click on Koch Plays George Zimmerman’s Legal Fees?for Snopes.com’s exposure of another false rumor. These may be just the tip of the iceberg of false information circulating in the Internet.
Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has closed the U.S. base in Ecuador and expelled the U.S. ambassador, while inviting Chinese investment. According to U.S. embassy cables published by WikiLeaks, he is the most popular president in Ecuador’s history.
He survived a 2010 coup attempt. Interviewed on Julian Assange’s The World Tomorrow program, he told Assange that the United States is the only country in the world not in danger of a military coup because it doesn’t have a U.S. embassy. He said the U.S. embassy directly paid units of the Ecuadorian national police force, who reported to the U.S. ambassador and not to him.
He said he would welcome a U.S. base in Ecuador provided that Ecuador could establish a military base on Miami. And he said Ecuador is actively looking for investment by China, Russia and Brazil. If the United States depends on Chinese financing of its budget and trade deficit, he said, it can’t be wrong for Ecuador to look for Chinese financing.
The most controversial thing he has done is his crackdown on the Ecuadorian press. When President Correa was elected in 2007, the government only operated on TV station. His administration seized two TV stations in 2008, and has sued various journalists for defamation of character. Journalist Emilio Palacio, along with three owners of his newspaper, El Universo, was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay a $40 million fine early in 2011. Palacio fled the country and was last reported living in Miami.
This kind of thing is not unique to Ecuador. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez also has cracked down on the right-wing adversarial press in his country.
Correa defended his action to Julian Assange by saying that five of the seven newspapers in Ecuador are controlled by the big banks, and are working to undermine his administration. They don’t tell the truth, he said; by arrangement, none of them published any of the U.S. embassy cables, revealed by WikiLeaks, that related to Ecuador.
Assange said the media companies in the United States, Britain and other countries are equally corrupt. The solution, he said, is to break up the big media companies and make it easier for independent voices to publish, not to use the power of government to suppress freedom of the press. I think he’s right. I also think he could have been tougher in his interview on this issue.
I watch Assange’s The World Tomorrow because he interviews Interesting people who would never appear on American network television. Assange is not an adversarial interviewer – more like Charlie Rose than the late Mike Wallace – and I sometimes have to do some follow-up to get the complete picture, as I did with this interview.
Click on Digital Journalfor links to previous episodes and a summary of the latest episode.
In September, 2008, a BP oil rig in the Caspian Sea had a blowout and oil spill, caused by exactly the same kind of failure as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico a year and a half later. Yet BP executives before and after the Deepwater Horizon spill maintained that BP had a perfect safety record, and the oil spill could not have been predicted.
BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast, whose interview by Paul Jay of the Real News Network is shown above, said he got a tip about the BP spill in the Caspian Sea, and flew incognito to Azerbaijan to interview eyewitnesses. He said he was arrested on arrival, and the eyewitnesses were scared of being interviewed on camera, but the facts were later confirmed by a State Department cable which was revealed by Wikileaks. This was part of the batch of cables that Bradley Manning is being prosecuted for allegedly revealing.
Palast’s story was aired by the BBC and other European TV networks. He said he provided his information to American TV networks, but they never responded. It is interesting to speculate why.
[Added 6/1/12] If Greg Palast is right, and the two BP oil spills were due solely to that company’s negligence, that means deep ocean drilling may be safe, if it is done with proper safety procedures.
Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, now has his own TV program, The World Tomorrow, on the RT (Russia Today) 24-hour news network. Despite his dangerous situation [1], he looks like he is having a good time.
His first program, shown above, was broadcast last week. It was an interview with Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, with a video hookup between Assange in England and Nasrallah at a secret location in Lebanon. The interview is shown above. I thought Assange provided an interesting and informative look at a figure who is little-known in the United States. I admire his journalistic professionalism and his interviewing technique. Assange asked probing questions in a civil manner, then allowed his subject to answer without interruption.
His second program, shown below, was broadcast yesterday. It was less successful, in my opinion. It was a joint interview with David Horowitz, once a left-wing radical who supported the Black Panthers and now a right-wing Zionist, and Slavoj Zizek, once a dissident in Communist Yugoslavia and now a proponent of Communism 2.0, a new version without the mistakes of the old. I imagine Assange’s idea was to have the two of them tell their stories, which would have been fascinating, but instead he allowed the program to be dominated by Horowitz’s ranting against the supposedly left-wing President Obama [2]. Horowitz wasn’t engaged in conversation. He was playing for Team Right against Team Left.
Assange’s program will be broadcast on Tuesdays. I intend to watch it on YouTube every Wednesday, and I will post a YouTube link to any program I find especially interesting.
Swedish television did an excellent documentary on Julian Assange in December, 2010, to which I linked in a post. The documentary was taken down, but I found a new version, which I include in my links menu under Important Documentaries. I also inserted the new version in the original post.
Why care about Vladimir Putin? He is the President of the Russian Federation, the only nation in the world that, because of its nuclear arsenal, is capable of threatening the existence of the United States.
