By Danny Schechter
Mediachannel.org
That time has come again.
There will be a new march on Washington this Saturday, a ritual rallying of the
anti-war army that will arrive by the busload as they have twice a year, once
in the fall, once in the Spring, for decades on issue after issue.
This month's mobilization promises to be a big one because the war has lost
public support with only a minority of Americans now endorsing it. The
outrages we saw on television after the Katrina catastrophe has stirred even
more anger.
For the first time, the Bush Administration seems on the defensive as its
public approval ratings fall and some dissenting voices in Republican ranks
begin to get heard.
Hence, a timely march on Washington.
You can almost predict the slogans we will hear and the stirring rhetoric from
the stage. It will rouse but will it inform? Will it lead us into a deeper
understanding and commitment?
THE PLAN
Here's the plan from the United For Peace and Justice website:
Saturday, September 24
Massive March & Rally, Peace and Justice Festival, Operation Ceasefire Concert
Sunday, September 25
Interfaith Service, Training for Grassroots Lobby Day, Training for Mass
Nonviolent Civil Resistance, National Meeting for Counter-Recruitment
Monday, September 26
Grassroots Congressional Lobby Day &
Mass Nonviolent Civil Resistance at the White House
But, notice, how once again, most of the energy is aimed only at government,
at the White House, at Bush and his boys (and girl, Ms. Condoleezza.) They are
the target but, alas, they are only part of the problem.
With so many activists coming to town, and some staying for Monday, why
not split them up into teams and smaller marches and bring some popular
fury to other government institutions and interests that are complicit in the
war and the policies that activists want to oppose.
WHERE IS THE MARCH ON THE MEDIA?
Where is the march on the media? The media is the front face of the corporate
interests who stage manage the government. In an age of globalization,
challenging corporate power is as essential as lambasting government.
Washington is a media city, home to many influential major outlets including the
Washington Post, the Washington Times and USA Today. Every network has a
big bureau there. The National Press Building houses many media offices.
Washington is the home of the FCC, the federal agency which makes
official media policy. It's the base of the reactionary National Association
of Broadcasters and cable industry.
It's the center of lobbying by well-connected law firms and K Street influence
peddlers who are paid big bucks to carry Big media's water.
We all know that the war could not have galvanized the support it did without
media collusion and complicity, a charge I document in my forthcoming book
When News Lies, and film WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception.
(wmdthefilm.com). Many others like Senator Byrd have denounced a media
which fell for the war "hook, line and sinker."
THE MEDIA MERGED WITH THE PENTAGON
We all know how the media "merged" with the Pentagon's pro-war
propaganda effort and not just with its embedded journalist program.
We all know about the jingoism posing as journalism on the airwaves, the
false claims, the contrived "facts" and, yes, the relentless ongoing deception.
We know this was also a war by media.
We know how few anti-war voices were on TV and how many conservative
pundits dominated the discourse 24/7.
We know that the stream of lies continues. We know that their limited
apologies and "Mea Culpas" were just ways of co-opting critics and pacifying
the public.
So why not add some media targets in the mix so that marchers can express
their disgust with media subservience and demand Truth as well as
media responsibility and accountability?
Back on February 15th, a small group that wanted to picket CNN were
discouraged on the grounds that they would "alienate" the reporters.
Did you see the pathetic coverage? They didn't have to be alienated. They,
like many corporate media outlets, already are-alienated from deeper truths
and honest reporting.
In that period, the networks and not just CNN had become PNN-The
Pentagon News Network.
It is time to recognize that the war in Iraq was not just a government crime.
It was and is also a media crime.
Recently, in the Katrina coverage, we had a glimpse of media outlets briefly off their
bended knees speaking truth to power. Far too many are going back to
business as usual.
We need to keep the pressure on, to move the media and press the press to
play the role they should be playing in a robust democracy.
And to protest their performance when they don't.
What do you say?
News Dissector Danny Schechter is the "blogger-in-chief" of
Mediachannel.org. Comments to Dissector@medichannel.org
September 18, 2005
Talking in the Dark
By CLIVE THOMPSON, New York Times Magazine
When was the last time you heard a "busy tone" on a telephone? Probably not
for years. Our phone system is so robust, our mobile phones are so
ubiquitous and voice mail and e-mail are such reliable backups that instant,
unhindered access to friends, colleagues and relatives has come to seem a
right and not a privilege. Indeed, if you include instant-messaging, blogs
and cellphone text messages, you might think we're living in the golden age
of communications.
Except when disaster hits. Two weeks ago, I tried calling a colleague down
in New Orleans - and found myself listening to the annoying honk of a busy
signal and the static of a dead phone line. Katrina had disrupted the city's
communications grid, and residents and emergency responders were grappling
with the chaos that ensued. For a week, just about the only people with
communications were those government officials and reporters lucky enough to
have two-way radios or satellite phones with adequately charged batteries.
Everyone else staggered around in blind ignorance - which helped produce
horrifying pandemonium. We saw a similar lesson in 9/11: When communications
crumble, so does society.
Is there a way to prevent such breakdowns in the future? In fact,
disaster-preparedness experts and high-tech inventors are already developing
the idea of blanketing cities with what they call a "WiFi mesh." WiFi, of
course, is the technology you may use at home or in a Starbucks to connect a
laptop wirelessly to the Internet; a mesh is a vast, self-correcting network
of WiFi antennas that could work together to provide crucial backup in a
disaster.
To understand what makes WiFi useful in a catastrophe, consider some
frailties of our regular phone-company communications. Phone systems are
reliable on a day-to-day basis, but they have a key vulnerability: They're
centralized. In any city, a handful of central "switches" handle the work of
routing local phone calls. During 9/11, several important switches were
located across the street from the World Trade Center and were damaged in
the towers' collapse, blacking out parts of New York.
To make matters worse, phone systems are rarely designed to allow more than
10 percent of the population to talk simultaneously, and far more people
than that rush to the telephone in an emergency. In the New York City
blackout of 2003, while most land lines continued to function, the cellphone
circuits were overjammed.
Katrina posed even worse problems. As phone traffic surged, the water was
destroying a vast area, including underground phone lines. Mobile-phone
networks, too, were ruined, because they're routed through communication
towers that crumpled like paper in Katrina's 140-mile-an-hour winds. As a
final insult, Katrina knocked out the power grid in swaths of the Gulf Coast
- which was fatal for phone systems that require thousands of watts of
juice. The surviving mobile-phone sites in New Orleans could run on
diesel-generator backup, but with just one tank of gas each, they were
capable of operating for only a few days. Even the mayor nearly lost contact
with the outside world. After their satellite phones ran out of power,
employees of the mayor's office broke into an Office Depot and lifted
phones, routers and the store's own computer server.
WiFi meshes elegantly dodge our phone system's central problems. They're
low-power and ultracheap - and decentralized like the Internet itself, which
was initially conceived to withstand a nuclear attack. You can use WiFi to
build a do-it-yourself phone system that is highly resistant to disaster.
In Chicago, the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a nonprofit
organization, hooked up dozens of households in the neighborhoods of North
Lawndale and Pilsen with WiFi nodes that form a mesh. Each node can
communicate with its neighbor a few hundred feet away; by cooperating in
this fashion, they form an enormous bucket brigade, each passing the data
signal along until everyone is sharing it. If one single household connects
to the Internet, all the other households can instantly dip in. Best of all,
the WiFi mesh can handle not only data but also phone calls - via the magic
of "voice over IP," an increasingly popular technique for transmitting
conversation over the Internet. Should the local phone lines suddenly
collapse, the residents of these neighborhoods can still make calls to one
another using headsets attached to their computers. In essence, they are
their own backup phone company.
Unlike a normal land-line or mobile phone system, a WiFi mesh has no single
weak point. Knock out any single node in one of the Chicago neighborhoods -
destroy an entire house, for that matter - and the mesh has enough
redundancy to work around the missing link. The nodes are also durable;
they're tiny shoe-box-size devices, which means they're far less likely to
be wiped out by hurricanes than enormous mobile-phone-company antennas.
"We've been running these little Apollo 13 disaster scenarios where a bunch
of our nodes get taken out, and the whole system just reconfigures itself
automatically," said Paul Smith, who helped build the Chicago networks.
So why don't cities build their own WiFi meshes to help cope with the next
disaster? Scatter enough nodes on rooftops citywide, and then if the phone
system collapses, there will probably be a surviving mesh strong enough to
serve as a rudimentary backup. Connect even a single satellite uplink to the
mesh, and the entire town remains linked to the outside world. Best of all,
each WiFi node uses extremely little power - about 10 watts, barely a sixth
of the average light bulb. Even if a city's power grid fails, a car battery
or solar panel could keep a node running for days or weeks, filling the gap
while the phone companies rebuild their land-line and mobile-phone
structures.
These disaster experiments are already under way. When Katrina hit, Smith
and other volunteer communications enthusiasts rushed down to Louisiana. In
Rayville, his team of techies clambered up a local tower to blast WiFi
signals 50 miles through the countryside; their signals reached refugees
clustered in church basements with computers but no Internet connections.
"We're trying to make sure families can contact each other, and get online
to register with FEMA's Web site," Smith told me.
The cost is laughably small. City engineers could build a mesh using parts
on sale at any Circuit City. (Smith's neighborhood mesh in Chicago cost $350
per node, and he figures it could take only $650 apiece to equip every node
with an emergency battery.) Alternatively, a city could simply hire a
mesh-networking company like Tropos Networks, which estimates a cost of
$70,000 to cover a square mile with DSL-speed connections. These numbers are
so low that they are virtually rounding errors in any city's budget.
WiFi does have its limitations. To begin with, an antenna can communicate
with another antenna only if it has a clear line of sight. But because the
system is so inexpensive, it wouldn't be difficult to address this problem
by placing antennas closely together in congested areas. Of course, a WiFi
mesh wouldn't work if its users had no supply of electricity. And emergency
responders and the military will always need to rely on their own
high-quality two-way radios and satellite phones. But for the rest of us,
when disaster next strikes, WiFi meshes could be the clever system that
keeps people in contact - from house to house.
Reported By Thenmozhi Soundararajan and Anita Johnson
Written By Jeff Chang of Katrina Media Justice Delegation
To Barbara Bush, the Astrodome was a poor people's heaven. From the floor of the Dome, however, life seemed a lot closer to hell.
HOUSTON, September 13 - Outside the Houston Astrodome earlier this week, dozens of tents for State Farm Insurance, the Bank of America, Chase, Veteran's Aid, and many more seemed to promise a quick return to something like shopping-mall normalcy. It was easy to sign up for a credit card. An ATM city had sprung up, so you could slide your new card in and get cash right away, and pay the bill later.
At press briefings organized by local officials, the story was upbeat, a shining example of government, business, and charity coming together to do good. Thousands of evacuees were being processed, more than 500 children were been reunited with their families, and life went on.
But behind the doors of the Astrodome, survival and frustration were the order of the day. Jamel Bell, who fled his flooded Ninth Ward in New Orleans, found no salvation here. "Inside it feels like prison," he said. At curfew, he says, the evacuees were locked in.
News teams from independent sources, such as our own, were continuously harassed by local officials and police. Reporters from KPFT, the Pacifica station in Houston, tossed their press badges for Red Cross volunteer badges in order to do their work. In Baton Rouge, hip-hop journalist and WBAI reporter Rosa Clemente was arrested and briefly detained after National Guardsmen attempted to confiscate her recording equipment.
Despite news reports that evacuees were being moved through the system and out of the center efficiently and quickly, there were up to 35,000 evacuees daily in the building. Cots of weary people stretched across the floor. Celebrities, followed by television cameras, filed in and out. The food was terrible, the meat in the sandwiches sometimes served still frozen. Surveillance was heavy, and the tensions on the floor remained thick.
Many evacuees tried to forget the brutal images of their evacuation: skin sores on a man wading through toxic waters, a chaotic stampede of evacuees on a bridge towards a line of buses, the traumatic separation of families at evacuation checkpoints. An unnamed woman survivor told KPFT radio host Robert Muhammad that National Guardsmen had raped her friend and left her in the swamp. Amidst apocalyptic scenes that seemed biblical, Dionne Wright, a custodian in her mid-30s, tried to calm her daugher. "This is not the end," she said. "This is not the end."
Raver Price, a 19-year old woman from the largely black and poor Ninth Ward, felt she heard rumblings before the levee break, and wondered if they were the sounds of man-made dynamite. When she and her hungry friends took food from a flooded store, she encountered a Guardsman who sneered at her, "I can't wait to kill you bitches."
Among the displaced New Orleans youths in the Astrodome, some neighborhood rivalries did not go out with the tide, and fights sometimes broke out between different crews. Many evacuees said that when they went to sleep, they kept one eye on their belongings.
Before dawn, often as early as 5:30am, lines for basic services?including those to find housing or obtain the much-desired $2000 relief check from FEMA and the $235 relief check from the Red Cross?began forming, and processing continued until 8pm.
Many were mystified by FEMA rules. Households are only allowed to report one address for the one-time check to be sent to. But for families still in the midst of being reunited, or on the verge of being sent to another evacuation center or even another city, the logic seemed bizarre.
Yet some families left without anything. Immigrants, including many of the estimated 30,000 displaced Vietnamese Americans here in Houston, were being turned away. Even legal residents learned that their green cards are not enough to qualify them for disaster aid. These realizations invariably came after hours of waiting. FEMA and the Red Cross had no translators on hand.
Au Huynh came down from Philadelphia to help in the relief efforts. "I was a refugee, I came here in 1989," she said. "I don't think there is a political mark on being a refugee. (Being a refugee means) being displaced because of political reasons or environmental reason. It's important to recognize the rights of refugees, it shouldn't be based on being a citizen in terms of getting relief."
Huynh had called the Red Cross to volunteer as a translator, but they said they had no need for her. So, through the internet, she found a small Houston group called Save The Boat People SOS that was setting up relief efforts. The organization is one of the Asian American community organizations working with a network of Buddhist temples in Houston on an extraordinary parallel relief effort.
With most Asian American evacuees being routed away from the Astrodome, volunteers took them in at the Hong Kong City Mall. In the parking lot, there are piles of donated clothing. At a card table, volunteers work on their own personal laptops and cellphones to find shelter, make urgent medical referrals, and reunite families.
Some 50,000 Vietnamese worked the Louisiana coast as fisherman and in New Orleans in the service and manufacturing sectors, alongside a large community of Filipino American shrimpers, the oldest Filipino community in North America. So the volunteers at the Hong Kong City Mall expect many more evacuees.
But these efforts are short-term. Houston officials have been pushing to move all the evacuees out of the Astrodome and the Reliant Center by Saturday into the Reliant Arena. They say that they might not be able to complete the efforts until next week.
Meanwhile, the evacuees wonder and worry about their future. Many want to return, and most believe they will be able to do so in a week or two. But while New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin has allowed the homeowners and business owners of the Garden District and the French Quarter to return this week, there are still no dates set for poor, largely African American neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward to reopen.
Evacuees are being shipped off all over the country?San Francisco, Michigan, and New York?with no return ticket. As pundits and planners across the country have begun to call for neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward to be bulldozed and permanently abandoned, many evacuees have begun to ask if there is an agenda afoot to eliminate the city's poor and people of color. Organizers from the New Orleans organization Community Labor United have begun calling for "evacuees from our community to actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans."
In the Astrodome, Dolores Johnson has another cold sandwich and shakes her head. She asks, "We are able-bodied. Why can't we be involved in the process to rebuild our homes?"
COMING NEXT: How New Orleans' evacuees and community organizers are reacting to redevelopment and resettlement plans.
Rancor plagues Chronicle employee buyouts:
120 to be told they can't reconsider applications and must resign
By Michael Stoll, GradetheNews.org
Posted Sept. 16, 2005
Staffing cuts at the San Francisco Chronicle are happening more swiftly than most people in the newsroom had anticipated, and in a manner that's forced the resignations of some who apparently were not sure they wanted to go.
About 120 Chronicle employees, including several of the paper's well-known veteran journalists, have been or are soon to be told that they must leave -- even though many thought they had time to reconsider their earlier applications for an employee-buyout option.
Among those on their way out, according to several people in the newsroom: columnist and editorial writer Ken Garcia, sports writer Glenn Dickey and religion writer Don Lattin. So far about 90 people have been told to leave, so more names will filter out over the next week.
The severance packages, which are designed to intice the most experienced employees to leave, are also drawing fire from some local journalists who warn that the paper could suffer a loss of institutional memory.
The Northern California Media Workers Guild -- the union representing about 900 employees at the Chronicle, half of them in the newsroom -- said it was surprised that management was telling union members they must leave their jobs and accept a lump-sum payments without the chance to mull their choices with family and financial advisers.
Michael Cabanatuan, a Chronicle reporter and president of the union, said he was led to believe that some employees had a 45-day period in which to withdraw their applications. "They're saying that if you applied you've essentially offered to resign," Mr. Cabanatuan said. "We obviously disagree."
The union told Chronicle staff this week that management had agreed to make individual exceptions, but it wasn't clear under what circumstances. A management spokeswoman, Patricia Hoyt, responded that the paper won't budge on whom it wants out the door. She also declined to specify how many jobs will be cut from the newsroom, and how many from other departments.
One Chronicle staffer who did not want to be identified said departing workers received "no acknowledgment, not even a sheet cake, from the managers. No thank you notes. No speeches. Everything but armed security guards. It's ugly."
Some journalists said they could not talk on the record because they believed documents they were made to sign under the agreement would prohibit them from speaking ill of the paper. Others were waiting to hear a definitive resolution before deciding what to do, if in fact they had a choice anymore.
Mr. Lattin, the religion writer, has written for the Chronicle, and the Examiner before that, a total of 28 years. He's currently on unpaid leave to write a book, and thinks he can make a living at it. He applied for the buyout and was accepted. He wrote in an e-mail that he's still "waiting to see the final numbers before making a final decision."
"If I go, I will also do some freelance writing, and may even get a job at another newspaper," Mr. Lattin wrote. "I really don't know at this point. I am considering any and all offers."
The notices of termination, starting Sept. 8, asked some employees to leave by today -- sending waves of panic through the newsroom, several journalists said. The union objected to management's approach and the two sides are continuing to talk.
Ms. Hoyt, the Chronicle spokeswoman, said the language in the application was clear: Employees agreed to give up their jobs when they applied for the buyouts. For legal reasons, she said, those 40 years old and older have 45 days in which to sign a "separation agreement" that holds the paper immune from lawsuits and gags employees about trade secrets -- but they did not have 45 days to decide whether or not to leave. Those under 40 had no choice but to sign.
In exchange they get up to five weeks' worth of pay up-front for every year of service, up to two years' pay. But the plan is weighted to nudge older employees out: Including what they get from the existing retirement plan, workers 55 and older get five weeks' pay for every year, those 40 and older get four, and those under 40 get three.
The latest round of buyouts comes after months of tense negotiations over a contract that expired July 1. The Chronicle announced that it was losing $62 million a year and needed to reduce its workforce.
After both sides braced for a strike, the union ratified a new contract later that month that called for pay cuts for some, longer working hours for part-time employees and other union concessions. The union's one clear victory was an agreement that management would lay off workers selectively only if fewer than 120 applied for the retirement-incentive package.
By this week at least 215 had applied. Since only 120 will be accepted, the rest will keep their jobs, and there will presumably be no involuntary layoffs.
The loss of 120 Guild positions will be the steepest onetime workforce cut since 2000, when the staffs of the Chronicle competing San Francisco Examiner merged in a takeover of the Chronicle by the Examiner's owner, the Hearst Corporation. The Guild estimates it has lost about 200 jobs at the Chronicle since then through layoffs and attrition.
On Wednesday, the union sent out a memo that outlined the union's objections, and said that management had agreed to "consider on a case by case basis any objections" due to the misunderstanding about the resignation clause, which management maintains gave employees only until Aug. 31 -- before hearing word of their acceptance -- to retract.
The memo said in part: "this week some employees whose bid for a buyout was accepted were told that they must leave their jobs by Friday of this week, without having received a written final description of the terms of the buyout. These employees -- some of whom have worked for the Chronicle and/or the Examiner for decades -- also were given no time to review the decision."
Ms. Hoyt said the union memo was not entirely accurate, and that management would have an official response soon. She said the number of people told to leave within one week was fewer than 25. She also declined to specify how many of the guild members whose applications were accepted work in the newsroom.
"People put in for these buyouts," she said. "It shouldn't be a surprise that they were accepted. The people we've accepted are working with their managers about when their departure date will be."
Paul Kleyman, editor of Aging Today and a board member of the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, said the move to rid the paper of experienced journalists sends the wrong message to the newsroom.
"No doubt, some wanted the buyout, which is why they applied, and will use it as a step into the next phase of their retirement or midlife careers," he wrote in an e-mail.
But, he wrote, the strategy could be bad for journalism. "The pattern of eliminating the most seasoned editorial staff -- often dismissed as 'old war horses' or 'dead wood' who should make way for new talent -- should raise alarms in local media about what I call the 'younging down' of the media. News organizations need to consider the loss of institutional memory, or knowledge depth about certain topics or the workings of public institutions, of deep-bench Rolodexes, of the mentorship every department needs to train new or emerging reporters."
One journalist who did not apply for the buyout, but still didn't want to be named to avoid getting caught up in labor strife, had this to say the buyout offer: "This is about as humane a way to trim staff as possible. But they seem to be implementing it really badly."
Memo to the Chronicle staff from the Northern California Media Workers Guild:
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2005 5:49 PM
Subject: MEMO TO CHRONICLE GUILD MEMBERS FROM DOUG CUTHBERTSON
-
Sept. 14, 2005
Memo to Chronicle Guild members
From Doug Cuthbertson, Executive Officer
In meetings this week, the Chronicle has assured the Guild that its abrupt terminations of employees who applied for the buyout will be halted.
Management representatives said they would consider on a case by case basis any objections under various circumstances:
° Employees may not want to accept the buyouts even though they applied during the month of August, on grounds they believed an offer would give them the option of accepting or turning it down.
° Employees may want to have the buyout documentation in hand to review for themselves, and with family, financial counselors, etc., before making a decision and signing off.
° Employees may want to work out a termination date "in collaboration with" their department head, as an early company Q&A sheet had promised.
° Some employees had expected to have up to 45 days to consider the buyout document before having to sign it, and up to 7 days after that to rescind the signature, under legal provisions previously cited by the company in writing and verbally by supervisors. The Guild had underscored this provision in earlier memos and Q&A bulletins to members, after learning of these terms from management representatives during the bargaining process.
By way of background, this week some employees whose bid for a buyout was accepted were told that they must leave their jobs by Friday of this week, without having received a written final description of the terms of the buyout. These employees -- some of whom have worked for the Chronicle and/or the Examiner for decades -- also were given no time to review the decision.
In its discussions with the company, the Guild made a formal objection to one provision of the management buyout acceptance letter which states that employees upon acceptance are terminated no matter what. The Guild also made it clear that we are prepared to litigate if the Chronicle moves ahead and terminates employees without giving them time to consider their decision.
At this point, we don't know how many employees who were granted the buyout now wish they had not applied, or how many others have unanswered questions about how the Company has handled their case. We ask that any employees with questions about their status consult with their Guild representatives as soon as possible. Krhodes@sfchronicle.com, dcuthbertson@mediaworkers.org mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com
Finally, we have pointed out to the company that such conduct on its part has a devastating effect not only on the employees who are leaving but on those who are remaining behind.
By Danny Schechter
The Katrina media coverage started out the way the Iraq war coverage did
with reports from government agencies---The official Hurricane Center was
the major source. But once the crisis surfaced, the press was there well before
the government. And reporters began to tell it like the saw it with spin and
network control at a minimum.
The result: something we’ve become unaccustomed to on the airwaves. At
times, truth reared an unexpected face like it did in some of the reporting
from Vietnam when correspondents showed the war’s horrors. In this
“conflict,” some dead bodies were shown but not across the board. As the
Poynter Institute noted: ‘Many newsrooms' policies prevent displaying
pictures of dead bodies. Yet the bodies are a big part of this story. Telling the
truth about the bodies may be the hardest challenge editors will face.” Again,
it sounds like Iraq, dejavu all over again.
Some Brave Media Surfaces
Yet, as Jack Shafer of SLATE noted many TV journalists were more outspoken
than usual, ‘In the last couple of days, many of the broadcasters reporting
from the bowl-shaped toxic waste dump that was once the city of New
Orleans have stopped playing the role of wind-swept wet men facing down a
big storm to become public advocates for the poor, the displaced, the
starving, the dying, and the dead.”
With the non-surprising exception of Fox News, race and class issues finally
surfaced on television. The fact that these stories was there at all was unusual
although the statisticians at the Center for American Progress reported this
type of coverage was not that extensive:
“1.6%: Proportion of all segments on all three networks over the full seven
day period that focused on race or class issues (of approximately 1,300 total
segments).
3.8%: Proportion of all segments on all three networks over the final three
days, 9/1-9/3, that focused on race or class issues.
6: Number of segments in which race and class were discussed outside an
interview with an African American. Five of those segments were packages by
network anchors; one was an interview with former Sen. John Edwards. The
remaining 16 segments were interviews with African American government
officials and religious, civil rights, or education figures.”
At the same time, well-known TV journalists were not shy about grilling
public officials and challenging the incompetence of the relief effort. In this
regard CNN’s Anderson Cooper, ABC’s Ted Koppel and NBC’s Brian Williams
and Tim Russert distinguished themselves in ways we have yet to see in the
Iraq war coverage.
What You Can’t Say
The media companies were less brave. NBC censored comments by rap star
Kayne West on a live telethon when it was rebroadcast on the West Coast. He
had said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people," and also criticized
the coverage, "I hate the way they portray us in the media, if you see a black
family, it says they're looting. See a white family, it says they're looking for
food." The east coast heard his anger; the west coast couldn’t. Marginalizing
dissenters is common in all wars.
What goes around comes around. Wars in foreign lands always rebound or
“blow back” into the countries that start them. The disastrous failures in Iraq
and earlier in Vietnam are mirrored by the colossal ineptitude we have been
watching day after day in a new disaster that is not over yet. More hurricanes
are expected along with a public health breakdown.
Isn’t it time for our media and all of us to start discussing these parallels. And
then, do something about them.
News Dissector Danny Schechter is the “blogger-in-chief’ of
Mediachannel.org and the director of WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception), a
film on the media coverage of the Iraq War.