Sunday, August 31, 2008

The news media in post 9/11 America

9/01/08

On March 11 2002, six months after 9/11, the BBC filed this report:

The mood in America … is almost martial at times. Flags remain draped on buildings. The veteran CBS newscaster Dan Rather almost broke down at the end of one evening news as he spoke of the soldiers who had died in the fighting. People have little time for critics abroad.


When a year later, the United States invaded Iraq, digitally generated American flags waved behind news anchors on the country’s 24-7 cable newscasts. Some anchors gushed their enthusiasm for “shock-and-awe.” And polls showed roughly half of Americans believed it had been Iraqis, not largely Saudis, who flown planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

How did this happen? For the most part, American reporters stopped questioning, stopped challenging, an administration that back then had the support of 80 percent of the American public. Recognizing that it faced little real scrutiny, the Bush Administration either made up or manipulated whatever facts it found convenient. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, it said. Iraq was the central front in the war against Al Qaeda. This was not a war of aggression but a fight to preserve freedom.

In turn, the American press’ failure was not a willful promulgation of propaganda but a skewed application of the press principles of objective journalism. The objective reporter should examine all facts and then report truth, giving those disputing the facts a modest chance to respond. But today, the American press simply gives the views of two sides equal weight – even if one flies in the face of what the facts show. That has been – and remains – the U.S. news media’s biggest failing.

Today,the American press continues to misapply the concepts of objectivity, even as the Bush Administration's popularity has plumetted. Yes, George Bush gets more negative press. But the country’s twin wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, remain bloodless. Violence is rarely shown or written about. The crippling cost of war -- $10 billion a month – is rarely examined. And American excesses, torture included, get short shrift in the news.

No, the American media do not intentionally propagandize. But they have been – and to some extent remain – complicit in their silence.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

How Democrats Should Attack the Republican Ticket

By Jerry Lanson

Barely 12 hours after Barack Obama’s stirring yet specific acceptance speech buoyed supporters, John McCain shook up the presidential race by selecting a largely unknown first-term governor and mother of five as his running mate.

Democrats have initially reacted by deriding Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s utter lack of foreign policy experience. Certainly McCain has left himself vulnerable to lines of attack, but, for Democrats, this is the wrong one. Barack Obama on Thursday night argued that judgment, not experience, should guide foreign policy. He made a good case for the argument and for his judgment. So it only seems fair to find out what Sarah Palin’s judgment on foreign policy is like before going on the offensive against her.

This Democrats do know this about Palin: She’s a strong conservative, who opposes all abortion, is against any form of contraception (including for married couples), believes creationism should be taught alongside Darwinism in the schools, is a lifetime member of the NRA, and favors drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (which McCain has opposed). This thrills the Republican right but makes her vulnerable to nuanced Democratic attacks down the road. The party certainly can remind the Hillary Clinton supporters McCain is pandering to that Sarah Palin is no Hillary -- in fact her positions are 180 degrees opposite.

But for the most part, Democrats should ignore Palin and save their fire for McCain himself. They should question his judgment in appointing a total newcomer in turbulent times, an individual untested on any policy issue abroad or in the Lower 4(Obama, in comparison, has visited world leaders, waged some 20 debates with a formidable senator and former president’s wife, dealt with legislation on a national scale and appointed a partner, in Joseph Biden, who can compliment his relative weakness in foreign policy.).

Even more so, Democrats should target the hypocrisy of the Republican’s campaign. How, they should ask, can John McCain play up a public image of independence while actually pandering to the right? How can he play up a public image of independence while running an advertising campaign of smear and fear? (Perhaps Democrats should, have “some fun,” as McCain likes to say before launching his nastiest ads, and ask whether McCain is having difficulty remembering from week to week whether experience really does count, or whether he’s for or against Bush tax cuts, for or against offshore oil drilling, for or against the supposed independence of action and word advertised by his “Straight Talk Express.”)

John McCain, the Democrats should insist, cannot have it both ways. He can’t repeatedly bash Barack Obama for being too inexperienced and too unprepared and then select someone as his understudy who has less experience and less preparation. He can’t tie himself to the mantle of the neoconservatives, the social conservatives and the Swiftboating tactics of the last election cycle and then proudly signal that his campaign is about maverick-minded reform. He can't be the insider and the outsider at the same time.

The American public is not stupid. Lay out these themes clearly and repeatedly, and people will get it. (It doesn’t take 60 seconds of seeing the Obama family on stage to realize that these are not fire-breathing radical extremists that some McCain backers try to paint them as.)

If Democrats hammer the theme of hypocrisy in the McCain campaign, Republicans will limp out of their convention like a jalopy with a gas vapor lock. They’ll sputter and then stall.

But the last thing Democrats want is to mock the one woman who did make it to the “final four” – Sarah Palin -- thus reminding Hillary Clinton’s backers of the wounds the Democrats’ successful convention week did a great deal to heal. The Republicans are trying to goad them into just such a mistake.