That’s because paid circulation of daily newspapers nationally fell more than 10 percent from a year ago. Some papers suffered truly horrendous daily circulation losses: the San Francisco Chronicle (down 25.8 percent), The Boston Globe (down 18.5 percent) and The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger (down 22.2 percent), reports Rick Edmonds on his Poynter Biz Blog. USA Today, hit by a slump in travel, fell nearly 18 percent. The circulation of 400 daily newspapers has fallen to only 30 million readers.

This hemorrhaging of circulation — the worst ever — will have serious consequences. Expect newspaper staffs, already slashed below the minimum necessary to adequately cover their turf, to be cut further. Expect more shallow, one-source stories. Expect more stories laden with anonymous sources because the poorly paid, younger, inexperienced reporters left on staff won’t have the skill to persuade sources to speak on the record. Expect more wire-service content because local stories won’t get done. Expect corporate newspaper management to continue to stall on finding a business model that enhances the public-service mission of journalism. Expect more style than substance.

Just expect less of what good newspapers used to be. The nation’s newspapers, the constitutionally anointed watchdogs and adversaries of government, can no longer be considered as successful in those roles as they used to be.

Mr. Edmonds lists several reasons for this continuing, massive loss of paid circulation. From his Biz Blog:

• Readers continue to migrate from print to the Internet — sometimes to newspapers’ own sites, sometimes to aggregators.
• Papers, metros especially, are voluntarily trimming circulation to remote areas because they are more expensive to serve and less valuable to advertisers.
• So-called “start pressure,” the selling of new subscriptions to replace lost ones, has taken a hit from cost-cutting.
• Decisions at many papers to aggressively increase subscription and single copy prices has resulted in fewer copies being sold, though circulation revenue has increased.
• This period is the first to include the full impact of the recession, in which some consumers are dropping subscriptions and others buying the paper less frequently.
• Smaller news staffs and news space make the product weaker and less appealing.

In 2008, newspapers shed more than 9,000 jobs. This year, so far, newspapers have cut more than 14,100 jobs. How can such cuts in reporting and other capabilities not have serious social, cultural, and political consequences? Yes, various foundation-funded, non-profit, experimental approaches to independent newsgathering have emerged. Consider the well-intended efforts of ProPublica and MinnPost. (Read Alan Mutter’s excellent two-part take on non-profit news startups.)

Too little, perhaps too late. American journalism sprouted from local printers who became family owners of newspapers — local newspapers. The Founders intended the First Amendment to protect those who owned presses and printed newspapers from interference by the government. But the utility of the First Amendment has been eroded by overt corporate mismanagement and malpractice far more than covert government malfeasance.

At the local level, newspaper staffs have been reduced far below necessary levels for competent, comprehensive coverage of local government. Government didn’t cause this — but it now benefits from the ability to operate with far less inspection by journalists.

No non-profit efforts on the horizon would make up for the quantitative loss of experienced reporters nationally. Fewer reporters means fewer watchdogs.

How is that not costly to a democracy?

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the 182 nations of the world had a combined GDP of nearly $60.9 trillion (or $60,900 billion) in 2008. But comparing the GDP data to the Fortune 500 data produces the table at right (click for the top 182 nations and corporations each, in order). If Exxon Mobil were a country, it would rank 25^th in the world, right between Norway and Austria. Wal-Mart would rank 27^th, sandwiched between Austria and Taiwan. Chevron would rank 28^th, ConocoPhillips 42^nd, GE 49^th, GM 59^th, Ford 60^th, and AT&T, H-P, and Valero would be ranked 64-66 respectively.

In fact, all of the Fortune 500 would rank above the 40 smallest national economies in the world. And the smallest company on Fortune’s list of the 1000 largest U.S. companies would be larger than the national economies of 28 entire countries. Exxon Mobil’s revenue is greater than the combined GDP of the 78 smallest countries (out of a total of 182) in the world.

And yet the Supreme Court took the unusual step of ordering a hearing during the court’s recess in order to hear legal arguments over whether corporate money could be spent to influence elections and whether the current bans on most such money in politics were constitutional. And indications are that the conservative majority will likely rule to overturn nearly 20 years of precedent and rule that it is constitutional for corporate money to be spent directly to influence local, state, and federal elections.

According to the Constitutional Accountability Center, the four liberal justices were the ones quoting from the U.S. Constitution to support their questions and arguments:

Justice Ginsburg reminded Olson that it is living persons, not corporations, who are “endowed by [their] Creator with unalienable rights.” Justice Sotomayor, too, picked up on this theme, emphasizing how the Supreme Court had rewritten the Constitution to create the fiction that corporations are persons entitled to the same basic rights as human beings. If we are looking to constitutional first principles to topple precedents, she asked, why shouldn’t we also look at the cases that invented corporate constitutional personhood and “imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics”?

Several of the court’s conservatives are supposed to be Originalists, judges who believe that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed at it’s writing (except for amendments, of course) and has not changed since then. Granting state creations the rights guaranteed to flesh and blood people when the Constitution doesn’t mention state creations is hypocrisy of the first order. It’s also an example of the very judicial activism than the Senate Republicans who voted against confirming Justice Sotomayor feared she would bring to the court. Perhaps the most activist judge on the Supreme Court today, defined by being the most willing to overrule Congress, is Antonin Scalia.

At present, corporate profits may not be spent to directly influence elections. This has historically been the case because corporations can live effectively forever and amass financial resources that no individual person could equal, and because legislators and courts have been concerned about corporate influence corrupting the political process. In essence, these are many of the same arguments that federal law uses to ban foreign nationals and governments from donating money to political campaigns. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, there are no foreign governments suing for free speech rights to influence elections.

The problem twofold – corporations are presently considered people, and money is considered speech. Corporations were defined legally as people for the purposes of limiting personal liability in the event of a business failure. But one of the results is that corporations have claimed the rights guaranteed to real people in the Bill of Rights, specifically the First Amendment right to free speech. And because the Supreme Court declared, in Buckley v. Valeo, that spending money equals exercising the right to free speech, corporations are now claiming that their money should be given identical rights to the money of individual citizens.

There are at least two direct solutions to this problem. The first would be to overturn Buckley v. Valeo. This would make money no longer equal to speech and could be an even more significant change in legal precedent than overturning 100 years of campaign limits on corporate donations to candidates. It would also require the conservatives on the court to go against their known personal ideologies.

The second is to redefine corporations so that they are not considered individual people for all situations. This would certainly require federal legislation and would probably require state legislation as well. It would also require that the economic and political powers at the state and federal levels voluntarily relinquish the power that corporate money (via PACs today, possibly via direct contributions in a few months) brings them.

Neither is particularly likely given the composition of the Supreme Court and the major influence of money in politics today.

Eventually, though, if the laws are overturned, enough companies will corrupt enough politicians with direct donations that they’ll overreach, and the public reaction will be swift and unstoppable. And when that happens, Exxon Mobil’s money and Wal-Mart’s money and Chevron’s money will be as untouchable as money from Hugo Chavez of Venezuela or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Both of which have smaller economies than either Exxon Mobil or Wal-Mart.

I can assemble with others to complain about the government. I can petition the government for redress of grievances. I can practice a religion free of government interference. Most importantly, I have the right to speak my mind. I can say whatever I want about the government short of advocating violence against it. I am free to speak or write critically about the actions or inactions of my government.

I can be a critic of my government because for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of Americans before me fought and died for my right to do that.

In this young century, however, Americans have suffered increased assaults on their rights — especially privacy — by their own government, all in the name of the proclaimed need for “national security.” Because of fear, government continues to attempt to foreclose on constitutional protections.

Government may erode constitutional guarantees in the absence of the watchful eye of the governed. Rights not exercised may become rights lost. It is an obligation of citizenship for Americans that they continually critique and comment on the actions of their government. That is how we shape our government. Failure to do so allows government to shape us and our rights instead.

At the moment, America has a slew of problems confronting it — record unemployment, a shrinking economy, two foreign wars, a two-party system run amok, and an enormous fiscal deficit, just to name a few.

As we toss the steak on the barbecue and watch the fireworks today, let’s keep in mind the rights and riches we do have, the historical cost of attaining them, and the future risk of losing them if we fail to speak up when government displeases us.

Dear Conservatives:

Your fellow Americans demand an answer — and we want it now. Just one simple question:

Are you deliberately trying to start a civil war?

Just answer the question. Yes or no. Don’t insult us with elisions, evasions, dithering, qualifications, or conditional answers. We need to know what your intentions are — and we need to know NOW. People are being shot dead in the streets of America at the rate of several per month now. You may not want responsibility for this — but the whackadoodles pulling the triggers make no bones about who put them up to this.

You did.

The assassins themselves are ratting you out. They’re telling us, straight up, that they were inspired to act by the hate radio talkers that you empowered — one of whom is now the de facto head of the Republican party. They got it from media outlets owned by your biggest donors. They got it from bloggers who receive daily talking points faxed in from the GOP. They got it from activists representing causes that would have never become causes in the first place if the issues hadn’t been politically expedient for you.

Beyond that: You’ve already admitted your own complicity. When the Department of Homeland Security expressed their worries about right- wing extremist violence last April, practically every conservative pundit in the country went into a righteous fit. DHS never named anyone directly, so it was astonishing how many of you on the right were so quick to step up and claim that that memo was slandering you, personally and collectively. Since you were so eager to claim that that memo was all about you, now that the violence has come to pass, we’re well justified in holding you to that.

And please don’t insult our intelligence by saying that these acts are the work of lone wolves, and that you don’t have anything to do with this, and that it’s all the fault of the left. It’s true that there have always been crazies in our midst. But by choosing to gain power through a politics that only motivates through hate and fear, you’ve recruited a good-sized army of those crazies, armed them up, and turned them into paranoid monsters that are now running loose on the American landscape.

We know you have absolute and utter contempt for the intelligence of the average American, but trying to blame the left for creating this situation is a fabrication so vast that it tells us you don’t even have so much as a shred of respect for yourselves. Even you seem to know that your word is worth nothing to most Americans now — and you don’t seem to care.

You don’t seem to give a damn about the future of this country, either. You’re just in it to win the next election, increase profits for the next quarter, or boost your ratings in the next book. As long as selling hate accomplishes any of these goals, you’ll do it — without regard for the cultural sewage you’re creating, without regard for the way you’ve polluted the political landscape, and now apparently without even a moment’s regard for the innocent lives that are being lost because you seem bent on destroying every shred of trust required for our democracy to function.

But the bodies are piling up. We are demanding an accounting from you. We are demanding that you take responsibility for the situation you’ve created. We are looking you straight in the eyes and demanding a straight answer:

Are you deliberately trying to start a civil war?

If your answer is yes, then stop this cowardly half-assed screwing around. You speak the language of war and honor; but the honor code of the warriors you pretend to revere demands that you declare your intentions. If you really believe that the only way to get the America you want is to negate a fair election, shred the Constitution, and violently cleanse the country of everyone who doesn’t agree with you, then man up and get on with it. If it’s a shooting war you want, do not doubt that there are plenty of progressives who will oblige you. If this goal is so important that you’re really willing to kill for it, please don’t forget that you will also need to be willing to die for it. Because, like martyrs Greg McKendry and Steven Johns proved, we are willing to do whatever is necessary to stop you.

If your answer is no, then you have just one other choice. Knock off the tantrums, grow up, rebuild your party, come back to the table, and sit down and govern with us. (We know this will be a stretch, but we think some of you are capable of it.) You will need to learn, many of you for the first time, to get your way as adults do — without fear- based politics, polarizing rhetoric, on-air threats against those who disagree with you, and repeating outrageous lies in the face of stone facts and irrefutable evidence.

And most of all: you need to stop feeding the crazies. You need to disavow them in every way possible — sincerely, emphatically, and with full awareness that every time one of these people acts, it destroys the credibility of “conservatives,” “Republicans,” and “the right wing” in the eyes of the country. You cannot assassinate your way back to power. And don’t doubt for a moment that the majority of Americans — even those who agree with your ideas — will abandon your cause forever once it realizes that’s what you’re trying to do.

Since you’re the ones funding the violent radicals on your flank, you need to stop sending them money. Since you know far more about their activities than any one else, you need to be the ones who turn them in. Since you’re the ones who make heroes and martyrs out of them, you need to be the ones who call them out as criminals. Until you do this
– consistently, wholeheartedly, and responsibly — we can only conclude that these assassins are operating with your support and approval, and that you are intentionally trying to start an armed revolution in America.

That’s your choice. Are you deliberately trying to start a civil war? Or are you willing to work for real civility, and return to your seat at the table, ready to help us choose the country’s future?

Yes or No. Right now. The window is closing fast behind you. And once it closes, none of us — not you, not us, not anyone — will have the choice to avoid the catastrophe that will follow. It’s your decision. And you need to make it now.

Sara Robinson is one of the few trained social futurists in North America, and will complete her MS in Futures Studies from the University of Houston in 2009. Her skill set includes trend analysis, scenario development, futures research, social change theories, systems thinking, and strategic planning. She is a fellow at Campaign for America’s Future.

But this week, it gave its product to me for free. I would have gladly paid up to 5 cents to read just one of its stories. But the JS didn’t charge me. What kind of business model allows me to consume a product for free?

I learned of the story through an e-mailed version of Romenesko, the legendary (or infamous, depending on your POV), media news page at Poynter. org, the Web site of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.

The Poynter e-mail contained this tease: “Wisconsin university football coach bans student reporters (http://www.jsonline.com/business/43539347.html).” I clicked on the link and —ta da — there it was, a story written by JS reporter Don Walker. Free. Didn’t have to pay a penny. And I would have. Gladly.

I know this isn’t a rare phenomenon. I suspect you’ve read news for free online, too. Bet you kinda expect it to be free, even demand that it be free. Perhaps you think it’s some kind of birthright. But in the long run, if you do not pay for the product of professional journalists, you will lose one of your best defenses against secrecy, corruption, and tyranny.

Those who wish to keep information from you, those who demand or offer kickbacks and bribes to get what they want, those who wish to secretly manipulate the levers of power unfairly for selfish financial advantage, those who wish to attain and maintain power over you … they’re winning. They’re winning because fewer and fewer journalists are keeping an eye on them, holding them accountable for their words and actions. Remember, that’s the deal the Founders gave the press: Hold government accountable, and we’ll protect you from government intervention.

If you don’t pay for the product produced by professional journalists who cover the “eat-your-spinach” stories bloggers don’t, won’t, or can’t, then don’t complain if the powerful and influential take advantage of the lack of scrutiny formerly provided by the 5,900 journalists who lost their jobs last year.

In 1990 America’s daily newspapers had 56,900 staffers, very close to the historical high, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Newspapers were cash cows for investors, with profits north of 20 percent. In 2000, the population of journalists at dailies was still high — 56,400. Then the Internet came, folks say, and stole all the advertising revenue. Profit margins have been halved — as revenue has dropped precipitously. (Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Apparently, bad management and arrogance had much to do with the decline of circulation, and hence the declining advertising revenue, of daily newspapers. In effect, corporate newspaper management shot itself in the foot as it bad-mouthed the Internet as an irrelevant upstart.)

To attempt to maintain the profitability of that now-highly suspect business model, newspaper managements whacked jobs — the very jobs that produce the product those executives presumably want to sell. This has to be among the dumbest responses to economic stress in corporate history.

At the end of 2008, only 46,700 journalists were left at the America’s daily newspapers. 2009 is off to a rough beginning: The Web site Paper Cuts reports that about 8,500 newspaper staffers (including journalists) have been laid off or bought out as of mid-April. (Paper Cuts is a Web site by Erica Smith, who has been tracking newspaper layoffs since 2007.) It is possible that by 2010, the number of daily print journalists will have been halved in only a decade.

Surely that’s not a positive development for the democratic health of the Republic.

Interestingly, the nation’s premier journalism graduate programs are seeing marked increases in applications: Columbia, up 38 percent; Stanford, 20 percent; and NYU, 6 percent. But these new students are not necessarily seeking to become journalists. Says Jim O’Brien, director of Northwestern University’s Medill Career Services office:

Corporate communications is a growth area in terms of opportunities for jobs for our MSJ grads. Both corporations and nonprofits who are interested in communications, where they had typically looked at an English major before, are now thinking that a journalism grad might have leg up on those candidates because of their training.

This is a two-pronged blow to “eat-your-spinach” news. First, newspapers are shedding the very people trained —and paid — to do that. Second, former journalists and others are seeking graduate journalism degrees to become corporate communicators.

That means fewer professionally trained and experienced journalists are digging for information corporations and governments wish to hide, and more smart people are being trained — and, eventually, paid handsomely — to do the hiding.

They’re winning. Democracy is losing. Please consider that next time you read a news story online — for free. It may be, in the long run, a very costly read.

April 20, 2009: 11:19 am MDT

Ten years ago a co-worker turned to me and said something that I’ll never forget, no matter how long I live: “Hey, Sammy, there’s been a school shooting in Littleton.”

Since that day a great deal has been written and said about Columbine High School and the events of 4.20.99, and like a lot of other people I’ve tried my hardest to make sense of something that seemed (and still seems) inherently senseless. Tried and failed. Now, ten years on, the grief hasn’t fully dissipated here in the city that I have come to call home, and even if we manage to understand the whos, whats, and hows, there’s a part of us that’s doomed to wrestle forever with the whys.

We’ve learned a lot over the past decade, though, and as we mark the tenth anniversary of Columbine, let’s begin by recounting three important lessons.

1: The authorities cannot be relied on. From the emergency response through the investigation process, Columbine was a case study in how not to.

I hate to be overly critical of police because they really have to do a hellish job, but that day witnessed one of the worst failures by a law enforcement agency that we’ve ever seen.

Two officers exchanged fire with one of the teenage gunmen just outside the school door, then stopped — as they had been trained to do — to wait for a SWAT team. During the 45 minutes it took for the SWAT team to assemble and go in, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot 10 of the 13 people they killed that day.

The killers committed suicide around the time the makeshift SWAT team finally entered. But the SWAT officers took several hours more to secure the place, moving methodically from room by room. One of the wounded, teacher Dave Sanders, slowly bled to death. [Source]

If this is the book on how to operate, explain to me exactly why you need a SWAT team in the first place. Events would have played out more or less identically if the SWAT budget had instead been allocated to Parks & Rec.

The good news, as the article goes on to explain, is that the meltdown at Columbine led to “active shooter” training, which is credited with making police officers across the country far more effective in these kinds of cases.

Sadly, there’s no indication at all that the longer, more mind-numbing process of investigating and reporting has been improved. “Quagmire,” “spin,” “cover-up,” “embarrassment,” “lost” and “hidden” reports – at every turn those charged with getting to the bottom of the worst school shooting in history acted like they were auditioning for roles on CSI Hooterville.

If the whole story – or at least most of it – is known today, it is despite these officials, not because of them.

2: Religious interests will colonize your grief for their own ends. As I walked the grounds of Columbine and Clement Park a few days after the massacre, I was absolutely staggered at the extent to which the tragedy had been transformed into an explicitly Christian extravaganza. Which was a little fascinating, since it wasn’t a Christian school and unless you were sucker enough to believe that there was a religious tint to the killings (there wasn’t – more on this in a minute) the tragedy had about as much to do with Jesus as it did Kubla Khan. Still, the impromptu memorials prayed, beseeched, questioned and promised in a distinctly evangelical way that had to make non-evangelicals a little uncomfortable. After all, this was their town, too, and I can say with absolute certainty that it didn’t matter what your religion was or wasn’t. Columbine was personal and the grief it engendered was profound.

It wasn’t just my imagination, either. One prominent local minister said he felt like he’d been “hit over the head with Jesus.”

To top it all off, Billy Graham’s lackwit boy Franklin parachuted in to preside over a nationally televised Mournapalooza service. No doubt some were comforted by the presence of a bona fide religious carpetbagger, but it’s hard to see, looking back, how the needs of the community were actually addressed by the self-serving machinations of a C-list opportunist.

To put it in Chaucerian terms, we could have done with a little less Summoner and a little more Parson.

3: The mainstream press values the narrative above the facts. They were goths! It was the Trenchcoat Mafia! They were targeting jocks, blacks and Christians! Cassie Bernall said yes!

Lie. Lie. Lie, lie, lie. And damnable, intentional lie. Local and national “reporters” could have been outperformed by monkeys with Ouija boards.

Not that the run-of-the-mill press bumbling came as any real surprise – journalistic malpractice is well-known in Colorado. But ineptitude is one thing. Outright, overt, premeditated lies are quite another, and that’s exactly what both of Denver’s mainstream papers – the Denver Post and the recently-defunct Rocky Mountain News did when they ran the “Cassie Bernall said yes” story as fact. They knew, by their own admission, that it was false, so why did they lie? Well, the lie seemed to be providing comfort to a grieving city.

Take that as the foundational operating principle for a free press and see where it leads…

If some of us have sort of moved on, then, if we have somehow clawed our way to a modicum of closure, it has been against a backdrop of secrecy, deceit, ineptitude and a pervasive moral pathology born of evangelical self-righteousness. Whatever insights we have attained, whatever emotional peace we have found, it has all been accomplished without the help of our community’s central institutions. As a result, I suspect that many of us mark the tenth anniversary with a little anger, a little bitterness.

There’s not much I can do about that except to suggest that what happened ten years ago today was not a one-off. It has happened since and it will almost certainly happen again, and my deep suspicion is that these kinds of events arise, in part, as a result of the dysfunctions noted here. That is, the governmental breakdown, the evangelical circus and the unforgivable duplicity of those who were granted particular 1st Amendment freedoms so that they could safely tell us the goddamned truth were not results of Columbine. Maybe I’m cynical, but it seems to me that these flaws in the fabric of our society existed well in advance of 4.20.99 and it’s hardly surprising that a sick system would spawn broken children capable of unspeakable barbarism. Nor is it surprising that the system would then cannibalize those children and their victims in order to slake its spiraling lust for ignorance and hatred.

Whatever was wrong ten years and one day ago is still wrong.

Next

• Was Columbine the rule or the exception?
• Columbine and the power of symbols
  

Until the discovery of newspapers as profitable cash cows by Wall Street more than four decades ago, newspapers were owned by people who had 1) worked as journalists, 2) understood the community the paper served, 3) believed in the public service mission of journalism, and 4) understood the need for an appropriate profit to maintain that mission of serving the public interest.

Those owners and publishers understood what they were selling — the ability of their editorial staffs to tell both wanted and needed stories to their readers about their communities. They knew that readers wanted and would buy their papers for sports, Dear Abby, and crossword puzzles. But they also knew their readers needed and would also buy well-done, “eat-your-spinach” stories about corrupt government and its agencies; misbehaving businesses; shenanigans of politicians; and fire, court and police activities. But that’s all changed now.

Those owners and publishers understood their audiences’ needs and wants. They knew that to maintain the daily stream of salable and profitable content they needed a sufficient number of well-trained, experienced journalists who knew their beats and their sources.

Those owners and publishers are a minority now, bought out by profit-maximizing mega-corporations seeking to turn these 10-percent papers into 30-percent papers. The old, ink-stained owners have been replaced by corporate minions who never worked in a newsroom and who believe that whatever is placed on a newspaper page (or a Web site) is sufficient to breed substantial profit.

Google “editorial staff cuts.” You’ll probably find that American newspapers cut a few thousand journalists last year and bought out hundreds more. Gone are minds that produced the content that is the product that newspapers have historically sold to readers for a few hundred years.

Modern newspaper management has made numerous bone-headed decisions in the past 15 years, mostly from failing to anticipate the influence of the Web as a delivery vehicle for news — and from failing to charge for the unique content journalists produced during those nascent days of news Web sites.

Now these corporate management tycoons are making an error likely to prove fatal to their attempts to recover from their missteps and misdeeds. Oh, sure, they’re trying to dump the printing presses in a rush to be Web-only. But what will they put there?

Because current newspaper owners have so few roots into the meaning and role of journalism in American life, they’re getting rid of the minds responsible for locally generated, unique content.

That’s the content that readers used to be willing to buy. If it’s not present in these new, Web-only aggregations passing for news, no one’s going to read it — free or not.

Corporate newspapers owners should show some spine — hire back experienced journalists, and plenty of them. Produce newspapers, Web-only or not, worth reading. That’s their only route to return to profitability and respectability.

(Tip o’ the hat to my colleague John Hanchette.)

We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas. – Natalie Maines

I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching. – Merle Haggard

Last night over dinner the subject of The Dixie Chicks came up, and I got mad all over again. Which is unfortunate, because when you think about artists that talented the last thing on your mind ought to be anger. But still, it’s been six long years now since “the top of the world came crashing down,” and I can’t quite free myself of my rage at the staggering ignorance that led so many Americans to piss on the 1st Amendment by attempting to destroy the careers of Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robinson. Frankly, I don’t know how Natalie can make it through a performance of “The Long Way Around” or “Not Ready to Make Nice” because I can barely listen to the songs without wanting to take a folding chair to every goddamned corporate radio executive and program director in America responsible for driving them from the airwaves.

No doubt that this makes me a lesser man than I should be. I can’t imagine that the Chicks would approve of my violent impulses (which, I have to admit, are a little too literal for my own comfort), given the grace with which they have navigated the turbulence surrounding their lives in recent years. In truth, they haven’t taken the long way around so much as they have taken the high road, and I regret that I’m not quite worthy of the example they have set for those of us trying to lead civilized lives in the midst of so much willful ignorance.

In recognition of their willingness to risk their careers speaking truth to power and for their courage in facing the backlash (which included death threats, let’s remember) that’s all too frequently aimed at uppity women in the less advanced corners of our nation, Scholars & Rogues is proud to honor The Dixie Chicks as our latest Scrogues and accord them a place in our masthead of fame.

And, if it isn’t obvious, then I’ll apologize in advance for not being up to the standards that Natalie, Martie and Emily have set. They’re not to blame for my tribute to them.

What Did the War on The Dixie Chicks Teach Us About Our Freedoms?

Some time back I read a story in the international press about the rise of fundamentalist Islam in one of Europe’s leading nations – I believe it was the Netherlands, but can’t recall for certain. They’re apparently facing the prospect that one day this minority could grow to the point where it could go to the polls and, using the legitimate engines of the democratic system available to it, vote to eradicate the nation’s religious freedoms. A politician was asked what should be done in this case. His answer was that nothing should be done – it must be allowed, since it would be the result of a democratic process.

Quite a conundrum, that. What to do when democracy is used to dispose of democracy? Obviously America is under no immediate threat from organized Islamist voters, but we do have our own Christian Taliban problem, don’t we? What should we, here in the Land of the Free^®, think about those who do not value actual freedom of religion? How many Americans would we send off to die to preserve the free speech rights of those who’d squelch the free speech rights of their fellow citizens? What should a true patriot do when confronted with the reality that the tools of liberty are being used against Lady Liberty herself?

My own code of ethics has always said that you cannot allow a barbarian to use your civilization as a weapon against you. A man who insists on fighting according to a set of honorable rules while his opponent is using a tire iron to liquefy his testicles deserves what happens to him. In my angrier moments I’ve said that no, you don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with a flamethrower.

But that’s just me, and you’ll recall from earlier that I’m perhaps not to be taken as a role model. Still, we do live in a nation with many who do not share our respect for Constitutional freedoms. Exactly how many I can’t say, but I feel comfortable with “millions and millions.” It’s certain that without such people we’d not have had to endure eight years of Bush/Cheney thuggery.

I’m Not Ready to Make Nice

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don’t mind sayin’
It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and
I don’t have time to go round and round and round
It’s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn’t if I could
‘Cause I’m mad as hell
Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should

This was the message – “shut up and sing.” You’re not being paid to think, you mouthy little bitches, you’re being paid to entertain us. Now dance, girlies. God Bless America.

History will validate, with a minimum of controversy, the sentiments Natalie Maines expressed at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre on March 10, 2003. Hopefully the record will point to our present moment and note that already the momentum had shifted and that within a generation people would have an impossible time imagining how such an affront to freedom was ever possible. Hopefully.

For the time being, “mad as hell” doesn’t begin to describe the indignation that those of us working to move this culture forward by promoting genuinely intelligent and pro-human values ought to feel, even now. I won’t tell you how to think and act, of course – you have a conscience and a brain, and you can be trusted to take in the information and perspectives around you and form an opinion that you can live by.

But for my part, I have a message for the “shut up and sing” crowd: I’m not ready to back down and I never will be. Your values are at odds with the principles upon which this nation was founded and true liberty cannot survive if your brand of flag-waving ignorance is allowed to thrive. You will not be allowed to use the freedoms that our founders fought for as weapons to stifle freedom for others.

You have declared a culture war, so here’s where the lines are drawn: I’m on the side of enlightenment, free and informed expression and the power of pro-humanist pursuits to produce a better society where we all enjoy the fruits of our shared accomplishments.

What side are you on?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Buff U is pointing to all manner of irregularities in Churchill’s scholarship, asserting that he was fired for plagiarism. Ward’s attorneys have another theory:

His lawyer, David Lane, has sought to portray him as the victim of a “howling mob” of university administrators, conservative media and politicians who were “falling over themselves” to have him fired.

You’ll recall that in the aftermath of 9/11, Churchill penned a screed that referred to the victims in the Twin Towers as “little Eichmanns” for their role in propping up an unjust political and economic system. Trust me when I say that “howling mob” is, if anything, a charitable characterization of the group that sought Churchill’s dismissal.

Before I go further, let me note that I’m not an attorney, so my take isn’t something that’s going to find its way into the case studies mentioned earlier. Further, I have a strong investment in what happens at CU since that’s where I earned my PhD. I know the place and I love it dearly, despite the fact that it can’t seem to go more than a few days at a time without shooting itself in the foot. So if my general lack of lawyering knowledge seems infused by a bit conflictedness and/or frustration, you’ll now know why. Back to the case.

CU lawyers will be asking the jury to pay attention to the technical minutiae attending academic integrity. Churchill’s lawyers will be asking the jury to pay attention to the politics that drove the inquisition. Who’s right?

From my humble perspective, it seems clear that both are right, and that more broadly, everyone was wrong.

• There is zero doubt about the pressure brought by the “howling mob,” which comprises a barely educated pack of slobbering wingnuts and the “leaders” who follow them everywhere. The political right in Colorado knows little and cares less about academic integrity, and I’ve remarked about the state’s “war on education” for a reason. CU’s current president is an anti-academic freedom global warning denier who’s unparalleled in his unfitness for leadership among America’s major universities, and former president Betsy Hoffman’s testimony that she’s endured an “all-out assault” by conservative politicians not only seems plausible, it would have been remarkable had it happened any other way.
• Multiple faculty committes found serious fault with Churchill’s scholarship. Churchill’s various claims are unconvincing, at best. The practices of cultures with oral traditions notwithstanding, when you’re a prof in a research one institution you know the rules and you follow them. You don’t like them, you go after them, but you do not simply ignore them.
• While I have not learned, through the years, to trust uncritically the actions or motivations of university administrators, the final faculty committee report is compelling. It did not recommend that Churchill be fired – two members called for dismissal, but the majority recommended suspension and demotion. However, that means that they were unanimous in their opinion that he was guilty of academic dishonesty. This is a critical piece of evidence. I have some small understanding of the CU/Boulder culture, and can tell you that tenured profs are going to be incredibly sensitive to political encroachments on academic freedom. Their decision in the Churchill case could potentially widen the door to future partisan attacks on unpopular (or misunderstood) scholarship, so my assumption is that Churchill received (as one committee member testified) “the great big benefit of the doubt.”

But wait, you say. They don’t hand out tenure like they would coupons for 10% off a burrito at Illegal Pete’s. How did Ward go from tenure-worthy scholar to dirty cheating whore overnight?

Right. And when all is said and done, I expect the jury to be sitting there convinced of two things. One, Churchill broke the rules and by that standard deserved to be turfed. Two, the process that brought the breach to light was the result of a politically motivated witch-hunt that violated every tenet of the academic freedom upon which our entire university system rests. (If you don’t believe the second part of this equation, let’s talk. I have some prime waterfront property in south-central Florida that’s ripe for development, and you may be just the slack-jawed hillbilly shrewd investor I’ve been looking for.) “Fruit of a poisoned tree” is a term you may have heard if you watch the average courtroom drama. Yes, the perp had the half-eaten remains of 12 murdered prostitutes hanging from hooks in his dayroom, but the cops didn’t have a warrant. So we have to find some way of getting him, and if that means a workaround or two, so be it. Light that torch and hand me my pitchfork, would you?

In sum, it’s a fascinating case that will ask the jurors to focus on the details of the law despite the overpowering stench of politics and, frankly, the fact that the plaintiff isn’t terribly cuddly. Let’s be honest – Ward Churchill is a jackass, although you and I probably think so for different reasons. Here’s mine. He had an opportunity to make an intelligent and altogether valid scholarly argument about the character of our system – and I’m not asking you to agree with the proposition, but merely to understand that such a thing would have been perfectly legitimate within the context of his job; however, instead of behaving like a tenured scholar at a flagship research one university he started lobbing firebombs. Fine. This was a calculated choice and he should have been prepared to deal with the inevitable consequences.

I can’t help thinking that you’d play hell trying to seat a jury that’s a) intellectually capable of tracking the arcane nuances surrounding the tenure and academic research processes, and b) remaining unbiased by the controversial things that Churchill has written and said. This isn’t necessarily a slam at the jury pool, either, because I imagine the case would be extremely difficult for me, as well.

My guess is that both sides have already drafted their respective notices of appeal.

It’s  been suggested before that Jon Stewart is perhaps America’s most trustworthy journalist. Which is nice for him, but not so good for the rest of us, because he’s not a journalist. He’s a comedian. He’s David Letterman. He’s Larry the Cable Guy. He’s Phyllis Diller. He makes his living by making people laugh.

But here he is, once again stepping up and telling truth to power in ways that seem spectacular to us. (And make no mistake – money is power in America, and media conglomerates are among power’s most critical brokers. So stomping the balls off of Jim Cramer does, in fact, constitute speaking truth to power.)

The relevant part of that last paragraph occurs toward the end of the first sentence. What Stewart did has been the talk of the entire fucking world in the last 48 hours. He, a guy with a TV show, hauled a man out into the town square who has done, by omission or commission – your choice – grave damage to countless Americans. Whether Cramer contributed to the insanity that has led us to our current economic apocalypse directly or whether his worst sin is that he did not use his platform to call out the guilty in advance, he and his employers played a noteworthy role in facilitating our financial crash. And we, the citizenry of the information-logged society in the history of the solar system, stand agog: motherfucking WOW! Did you SEE that?!

This is the tragedy. We’re as staggered at the occurrence of actual journalism as we would be by the sight of Rosie O’Donnell clubbing Donald Trump to death with her boobs. The fact that the only journalism in recent memory has emanated from Comedy Central is … well, it’s like shooting novocaine into the leg of a quadriplegic, really.

Cap and Bells

It’s never been easy – or profitable, or even safe – to speak truth to power. America circa 2009 isn’t the first place when the ordained channels have failed to convey to the people an accurate accounting of the events shaping their lives. In fact, what we’re dealing with now is more reflective of the historical rule than it is the exception.

Throughout most of history you’ve had to search for the truth about power in indirect commentaries: literature, and especially speculative genre fiction, for instance. Comedy. Art. The forms allow a person with a point of view to express it while maintaining a sheen of plausible deniability. “Oh, no, your majesty, I wasn’t writing about your munificent presence! The malevolent criminal monarch in my story is something I imagined might exist in a less just society on a planet in another galaxy.” It’s good to remember that science fiction and fantasy are never about the future or other worlds – they’re always about here and now.

And there’s the very old tradition of the fool. The jester, in his classical incarnation, was the only one in the court who could get away with telling the truth. The fact that he was a certified nutball removed enough credibility from his words that he could say serious things without being taken seriously. He was fine so long as he didn’t slip into lucidity.

Put another way, the truth has always been there if you knew where to look and understood the code. 2009 isn’t a lot different from 1009 in that respect, I imagine. There can be a price to be paid if the wrong person says the wrong thing in the wrong way. Once upon a time the price might be that your loved ones would get to watch your head being paraded around on a pike. Now the price might be something as pedestrian as losing a job opportunity or having your reputation perma-slandered by a vicious partisan noise machine. But there’s always risk, so the citizen bent on telling the truth needs to understand the context.

Clowning America

Throughout the Bush years any journalist with the temerity to act like an actual reporter paid a price. The default was loss of “access,” and that was pretty terrifying to most on the best because your ability to survive was going to be hindered if you couldn’t get anywhere near the newsmakers. This wasn’t the worst that could happen, of course. Ask Joe Wilson or that mealy-mouthed cocksucker Scott McClellan (not a journalist by any means, but a good illustration of the point) what happened when you hit the Bush/Cheney mob a little too close to home. At best, it took courage and hopefully enough cash-on-hand to sustain you through some hard times.

Clearly that wasn’t the only place where the institutions of the Fourth Estate lacked, and continue to lack, courage. As Stewart makes brutally clear in his 20 minute-plus dismemberment of Jim Cramer – a man not heretofore known for being short on words or self-confidence – finding malpractice in the field of financial journalism (my new favorite oxymoron, by the way) is about as tough as finding loose morals in a whorehouse. Think about it. You have CNBC, FOX’s biz news, the Wall Street Journal, the financial sections of hundreds of newspapers, and how many more business “news” outlets. How many of them were warning you of the things that we’re now told were more or less inevitable? (Told by some, I should say – others are still trying to say there was no way we could have predicted this. Which is bullshit – I know some very sharp people who predicted it, but they don’t have TV shows, in large part because they’re the sorts willing to tell the truth about rigged games. Maybe they should have put together an irreverent ventriloquist act or written a fantasy novel.

Media as far as they eye can see, so much media, so much “analysis,” and not a drop of journalism in sight.

It’s true that Jon Stewart isn’t the first funny guy in history to be the best available source of reliable reporting on the social, political and economic condition. But most of those places didn’t have democracies. Most didn’t have a free press. And none of them had more access to information or channels of distribution than we do.

“Journalism is no worse off now than it was during the reign of Caligula” is a true statement, but it’s not the sort of thing an advanced society should have to settle for, either.

Let’s get Jon Stewart the Peabody. Then a Pulitzer for The Onion. And why not a Nobel for the karma-obsessed lead in My Name is Earl?

If that’s the world we’re willing to accept, it’s the best we deserve.

The response? The USA PATRIOT Act. It authorized expanded powers for US intelligence and law enforcement agencies including surveillance capabilities, broadened the definition of “terrorism”, increased border security and gave the Treasury the ability to stop money laundering the world over.

But its authority is so broad that it can lend itself to abuse. It gives power to wiretap and spy on law-abiding American citizens including monitoring what they read at the library, “sneak and peek”  without a warrant, and access to medical and financial records. Plus, this large bill was being quickly pushed through Congress without giving it full consideration or even being read by those voting on it.

Now imagine if almost every Democratic member of Congress voted against the Act based on those reasons. Or perhaps they didn’t trust this new, untested administration to do what is right. Or maybe they did it to just make a point about party unity. Would there be a public outcry? Would the pundits say that the opposition party did not grasp the enormity of the situation and that in this moment of peril it is better to “shoot first and ask questions later”? With the great danger the country is in, would it be better to err on the side of giving too much power to the government to deal with the crisis than too little?

Remember your mental answers to those questions as I change the circumstances slightly.

Let’s zoom back to the present day. The national and world economies have never been in as bad shape since the Great Depression. We have been losing a half a million jobs a month since the election and now 4.81 million people collect unemployment benefits, the highest number in at least 40 years. Consumer confidence is at a 29-year low. The Dow has lost a quarter of its value since September. The financial sector has $1.17 trillion in defaulted loans on its books which lead to a 12.4% reduction in housing prices. 1 in 9 US homes are now vacant.

The response? The $787 billion economic recovery package. It offers the largest tax cut in US history,  $272 billion for the working class. $58 billion to jump-start green energy infrastructure and another $90 billion to shore up traditional infrastructure – from bridges to roads to levees and transit. There’s $100 billion to boost welfare and unemployment, $112 billion for health care in Medicare, electronic medial records and preventative care. And then there’s billions for school reconstruction, greening federal buildings, Head Start, buying foreclosed homes, and laying down broadband for the entire country.

But this is a big bill. At a heft of over 1000 pages it has the biggest price tag of any stimulus bill ever debated in Congress. And that debate didn’t include many Republicans; only the very moderate got to influence the bill significantly while the more conservative members got their ideas heard out but never implemented. But this bill is so large it would fundamentally change the size and scope of the government’s influence in American lives. And like the PATRIOT Act, this thing blazed through Congress and no one had a chance to read it all.

Now the Republicans had their equivalent of the PATRIOT Act sitting in front of them. So what would they do? What if almost every Republican member of Congress voted against the Act based on the above reasons? Or perhaps they didn’t trust this new, untested administration to do what is right. Or maybe they did it to just make a point about party unity. Would there be a public outcry? Would the pundits say that the opposition party did not grasp the enormity of the situation and that in this moment of peril it is better to “shoot first and ask questions later”? With the great danger the country is in, would it be better to err on the side of giving too much power to the government to deal with the crisis than too little?

Some might balk at equating 9/11 with the current economic crisis. But its impact and reach are very similar. There was a lot of talk about going into the depths of another Great Depression, but the institutions and foundations laid down after the Great Depression would prevent that great of a collapse. Just like there was a lot of talk about 9/11 being another Pearl Harbor, but we were then facing a coalition of highly militarized, fascist countries actively attacking America and invading its allies.   Now we are facing a small number of fanatics with light arms. You can compare the two by type but not size.

Let me put it in an SAT equation:

Pearl Harbor : 9/11 :: Great Depression : today’s major recession

Our country has faced worse in the past and it is entirely within our capabilities to deal with our present crises. And while the Democrats were willing to take on 9/11 on the Republicans’ terms, the Republicans aren’t willing to tackle this economic crisis with the Democrats holding the reins. Every single House Republican voted against this bill along with all but three Senators. This is either because the Republicans don’t appreciate the dire straits that we are in, they had issues about the substance of the bill and way that it was pushed through, or they are more concerned with with their party than their country. My guess that it is a little of all three.

But if you’re all pissed off about that, how about Olympic athletes wrapping themselves in the flag? Or flag napkins? Or a car painted as a flag? Flying a flag in the rain or leaving it up overnight unlit? Flag beach towels? Flags on campaign buttons? In every case, that’s mistreatment of the U.S. flag, according to the Flag Code.

According to the US Code, Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 8, “Respect for the flag”:

(b) The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise.

So much for those beach towels.

(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery
(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform.

And so much for flag clothing.

(h) The flag should never be used as a receptacle for receiving, holding, carrying, or delivering anything.
(i) It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard.

And there goes those campaign buttons, napkins, cups, and plates.

(e) The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in any way.

And given how dirty cars get (pigeons, insects, road grime, slush), you’d think that a flag paint job on a car would qualify as “easily soiled.”

As for displaying the flag, let’s not forget that all-weather flags are OK in bad weather, but no flag should be displayed unlit overnight – it’s disrespectful, and against US Code Title 4 Chapter 1 Section 6.

Tell you what – you don’t question the patriotism of Obama’s supporters and I won’t question the patriotism of all the Olympic athletes who have soiled a flag with their sweat, of all the swimmers who have lain on a flag beach towel, of all the patriots who throw millions of flags away on the Fourth of July every year. Deal?

Image credit: Baltimore Sun

It’s not yet known who was behind the attack.

Paul Preston, who runs the network, was understandably at the point of despair early today, posting a note saying that the operation was dead. Fortunately his latest missive notes that things are stabilized and moving ahead, and for this we’re grateful.

With luck today’s events will result in the development of a more reliable infrastructure. Paul has done heroic work building and maintaining SoapBlox, but like a lot of us out here, he’s been doing so with precious little support or resources. Perhaps today’s hack was inevitable, and I hope that it won’t be long before we can all look back and say things like “that was the best thing that ever happened to the progressive blog network.”

UPDATE: New statement from SoapBlox provides additional details.

Meanwhile, I don’t know if anyone has yet had time to call the FBI. If not, it needs to happen soon. Never mind the nature of the views being expressed on these sites – this attack was a naked broadside aimed at the very infrastructure of public speech and discourse in America, just as surely as if vandals had destroyed the presses used by the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine back in the 1700s. As long as the United States professes to be in the free speech business, actions like these cannot be allowed to stand.

Those responsible need to be found and brought to justice, and we at Scholars & Rogues hope that the incoming Attorney General feels as strongly on this point as we do.

Let me return to a period which is widely regarded within the advanced industrial societies as a high water mark of public service broadcasting, the BBC in the early 1960s. A key figure from those years was Sir Arthur fforde (that is the correct, if old-fashioned spelling of his name), in my view quite possibly the greatest of the chairmen of the BBC. In 1963 he published a little booklet called What is Broadcasting About, which was printed privately in an edition of 400. In this at first curious piece he tries to lay out a theological context for what was happening within the BBC, which was then at the height of its creative and social impact on British society, and causing all kinds of heartburn among what used to be called the Establishment.

The Sheer Banality of Contemporary Culture

The book is, on first reading, impenetrably obscure. On second reading what becomes clear is that it is fforde’s attempt to harmonize the BBC’s emergent agnostic and humanistic ethos with a more ancient view of the nature of religious experience. Even as I write that it does feel almost quaint, but there lies within the pages of fforde’s book arguments that are, or should be, central to any contemporary discussion of the role and purpose of broadcasting in an allegedly mature, cultured democracy. He writes:

“By its nature broadcasting must be in a constant and sensitive relationship with the moral condition of society.”

He felt that the moral establishment had failed modern society and that broadcasting was a way in which that failure could be rectified. He added that it

“is of cardinal importance that everyone in a position of responsibility should be ready to set himself or herself the duty of assuring, to those creative members of staff, who must take the daily, hourly, and even instantaneous decisions . . . that measure of freedom, independence and elan without which the arts do not flourish.”

fforde understood that then, just as now, the moral condition of society was undergoing an important change as standards which had for so long, for so many people, been successful route maps, were being redrafted. What concerned him, was not the change per se, but whether the standards which would replace them were worthy, even if they were secular rather than religious? It is a good, always necessary, question.

It goes without saying that it is my firm conviction that it is precisely the absence of such protective layers and imaginative commitments that have nurtured, brought to the surface, the boorishness, sheer banality of contemporary culture, here and elsewhere. That idea of providing a protective layer within which the imaginative spirit might create, lay at the heart of the BBC version of public service broadcasting which increasingly flourished in the post-war years.

Ian Jacob, Director-General of the BBC from 1952 to 1959, refined the notion. In 1958, in an internal document called Basic Propositions, he described public service broadcasting as:

. . . a compound of a system of control, an attitude of mind, and an aim, which if successfully achieved results in a service which cannot be given by any other means. The system of control is full independence, or the maximum degree of independence that Parliament will accord. The attitude of mind is an intelligent one capable of attracting to the service the highest quality of character and intellect. The aim is to give the best and the most comprehensive service of broadcasting to the public that is possible. The motive that underlies the whole operation is a vital factor; it must not be vitiated by political or commercial consideration.

This is one of the best attempts to capture in words a concept and view of broadcasting which remains central to the world of cultural politics. Yet even here the vision, the articulation, is limited. Jacob’s words imply that we understand the nature of public service broadcasting not by defining it, but by recognizing its results, rather as one plots the presence of a hidden planet or a subatomic particle not by “seeing” it, but by measuring the effects of its presence.

The Pilkington Committee, a committee under the chairmanship of Sir Harry Pilkington set up by the British government in 1960 to undertake an inquiry into the future of British broadcasting, said as much when it reported in 1962: “though its standards exist and are recognizable, broadcasting is more nearly an art than an exact science. It deals in tastes and values and is not precisely definable.” The committee added:

“The duty of providing a service of broadcasting, and the responsibility for what is broadcast, are vested in public corporations since the purposes and effects of broadcasting are such that the duty and responsibility should not be left to the ordinary processes of commercial enterprise, and because there are compelling objections to their being undertaken by the State…”

It suggested that the products of these bodies should be a service which fully realizes the purpose of broadcasting, which it later defined as:

“…one which will use the medium with an acute awareness of its power to influence values and moral standards; will respect the public right to choose from amongst the widest possible range of subject matter, purposefully treated; will at the same time be aware of and care about public tastes and attitudes in all their variety; and will constantly be on the watch for and ready to try the new and unusual.”

The Dream of the Mob

The beast that lurks in the shrubbery of these kinds of discussions is that whatever the definitional uncertainties, that great broadcasting can be experienced and recognized but never properly captured by language, means that someone has to decide on what is “good” and “bad,” that there should be a guiding hand, by what has been referred to as “custodians” or the “caretakers” of culture. For much of the history of public broadcasting this idea – so anathema today – was simply taken for granted. Hierarchies of social status and cultural judgment were simply assumed.

A key justification for the custodial role in most societies where public service broadcasting was established was that since the radio frequency used for transmissions was a limited natural resource, someone had to ensure that its use served the public good, and the whole community. The cultural geology of this decision had, however, a deeper level to it, based on 19th Century assumptions about the ways in which the arts and humanities could elevate the human condition.

In fact, one way of looking at the creation of public service broadcasting in the early years of the 20th Century is that it was the relocation of a 19th Century humanistic dream that through culture the fragile structure of civilization could be nurtured and protected. The fear that drove that dream was of “the mob,” the pervasive belief among cultural, religious and political elites that there was indeed a dark side to the human soul that was, when let loose, dangerous and devastating to the flesh as well as the spirit.

And who is to say that they were wrong, nestling as they did between the first great war and a looming second. And let us not forget that John Adams in his dialogue with Jefferson about the nature of democracy made the comment that a “mob is no less a mob because they are with you.” There remained, however, well into the 20th Century, a residual faith, tied to the whole condition of Enlightenment humanism and belief in progress, that popular culture need not be debauched but could in fact transcend itself. Consider these key passages from the Pilkington Report:

“Television does not, and cannot, merely reflect the moral standards of society. It must affect them, either by changing or by reinforcing them…..

Because the range of experience is not finite but constantly growing, and because the growing points are usually most significant, it is on these that challenges to existing assumptions and beliefs are made, where the claims to new knowledge and new awareness are stated. If our society is to respond to the challenges and judge the claims, they must be put before it. All broadcasting, and television especially, must be ready and anxious to experiment, to show the new and unusual, to give a hearing to dissent. Here, broadcasting must be most willing to make mistakes; for if it does not, it will make no discoveries.”

The suggestion here isn’t that public broadcasters are all hoping and dreaming that their programs will transform people from cultural and intellectual slobs into something of which one can more readily approve. But rather that objectively some such argument must be the last line of defense. The language is of standards, quality, excellence, range. The logic is of social enrichment, that in however indefinable a manner this society is “better” for having programs produced from within the framework of those social arguments that pursue a public interest, compared to those programs produced within an environment in which commerce or politics prevail.

The Consequences of Public Taste

It is interesting and extremely useful, to counterpose these principles, values and ambitions documented over the past several pages with the evolving realities of cultural production as a market, since they entail very different world views. I have long suspected that the potency of the market is its simplicity, in that it doesn’t ask very much of anyone – there is no required effort to engage at some deeper level what it is that is being broadcast. The more purposeful, social and cultural agenda of the European model does demand – as it should – some effort on the part of the audience-qua-citizen. The audience-qua-consumer is easier to feed.

There is, however, another ironic potency in the market model, one that speaks to an inherent tension in the deep commitment to the idea of the collective, “the public,” “the public sphere,” the “cultural sphere.” This inevitably rests uneasily with what is an even more basic principle on which our cultures were, and are, established, the foundational sovereignty of the individual. The fact of this latent tension could be avoided for much of the history of broadcasting, for example, by touting the argument that because the natural resource of the radio spectrum was scarce it had to be carefully controlled so that everyone could benefit. This was a useful fiction. The agenda of the founding figures of public broadcasting was always about nurturing social and cultural good, and maintaining standards that would not be populist. In other words there was always a residual fear of the consequences of untrammeled public taste.

The beauty of the idea of the market, for those who wish to make the case rhetorically, is that it represents the triumph of populism – some of which is intelligent, much of which is corrupted, but it is populism nevertheless. Its potency lies in the fact that it embodies a kind of faux democracy, the individual making his or her own choices from the range of cultural goods made available by the market. It is a difficult argument to oppose since the essential premise of western governance and culture in modernity is that society is constituted of individuals who are rational, informed and sovereign, an admittedly nonsensical but nonetheless potent conceptualization. There is obvious utility in this for proponents of the market, because if one cannot interfere with the right of Everyman as citizen to act as Everyman as consumer then one cannot, by definition, interfere with the market because one would thereby not be interfering with this or that company that markets its wares, but with the very stuff of democratic civilization.

Another charge against the kind of values I have been discussing here rests on a rejection of the very idea of making a judgment about what is good or bad, since this implies a hierarchy of values. In the argot of pseudo-postmodernism this is anathema. In his latest book, Richard Hoggart writes well about the problems of this relativistic perspective:

“It is a growing characteristic of mass communications today – in the press, magazines and much broadcasting – that they show no respect at all for the ‘life of the mind’ (a good and essential phrase), but dismiss such things as elitist and not for people ‘such as us’; not that ‘we’ now think ourselves inferior, but quite the opposite; we are members of the overwhelming majority who are going the way the world is going. This is the dead center of popular and unassailable taste. Chat-show hosts and hostesses display it daily, television ‘personalities’ are pleased to indicate that they have no tastes which in anyway differ from those of their mass audiences, and certainly none which might seem ‘better’ than those of the audiences. The broadsheet newspapers often fall backwards into those postures. Such words, words of evaluation, have fallen out of the populist lexicon. Broadcasting interviewers see themselves as ‘the voice of the common man,’ which is a reductive myth; their common man is all too often an invented vulgarian.”

He points out that the Booker Prize for 2001 was not awarded to a writer that public opinion seemed too favor. When asked why, one of the judges said, “This prize is not meant to be a reflection of public taste. It is a prize for literary quality.” Hoggart concludes:

“At the bottom of the acceptance of relativism as the only belief is, paradoxically, a belief that there is no such thing as belief or conviction. That can do much to remove guilt or even the feeling of being somehow lost, since relativism provides a Dead Sea of common feelings in which we float, all warm and supported. The motto used to promote the soap-opera East Enders, repeatedly shown on television, hammers away with: ‘Everyone’s talking about it.’ ‘So what?’ – is the only self-respecting response.”

It is terribly easy to turn this around and to make the accusation of elitism, made all the more weighty in an age where the very idea of a hierarchy of values is called into question, indeed seen as out of date – useless, of course, we are dealing with the majestic superior ability of a Michael Jordan or a Roger Clemens or a Peyton Manning.

Those who would argue for the market, for giving people only what they want, for abandoning other, larger more principled judgments that see human beings, citizens, as something other than statistics in skins, principles that celebrate excellence as much they reject tat, must persuade us that all is well and cheery, must hope that we never do come to understand the comment made by Hector, in Alan Bennett’s History Boys. He suggests that in the presence of great literature (and I would expand this to all great culture, whether in print, or on the screen at home and in the movie theater) it is as if a hand has reached out and taken our own.

The Foundational Principle of the Republic

There is, however, another important lesson from the events of the past ten years, for me most profoundly reflected in the hate mail (e- and snail-) that I received, particularly after Karr was released. This is far from the first time this has happened and it was probably on no greater scale than the attacks that took place after David Mills and I made the first of our documentaries. The reactions then were incredible, with phone-in campaigns to the Dean’s office, letters to the President of CU, to the then-Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Phil DiStefano, to the Regents, almost all calling for me to be fired. The university was nothing but supportive, for which I was and am grateful. There was even a bizarre attempt by some to get Congress to revoke my green card. It was all very strange and intense, so when Karr happened the flood of attacks was neither unusual nor unexpected. I simply became a useful whipping boy for, well, for what?

I think the answer here is again quite complex. Obviously there were those who hated the position I had taken on the Ramsey case, and the fact that I had been very vocal and public in my belief that John and Patsy were innocent. (That was actually not my position in 1997 and 1998. I didn’t know, because I couldn’t know, what the evidence was so that when we made the first documentary the question of their guilt or innocence was conceptually irrelevant.) To then, in 2002, make a documentary, working with Lou Smit, that laid out the case that an intruder killed JonBenet would inevitably incur further wrath. Clearly, however, what was thrown at those who came out in support of the Ramseys and argued their innocence (one of the lead detectives on the investigation described Lou Smit as a “delusional old man,” a comment that would be offensive if it weren’t so silly), was nothing compared to the intense and unrelenting abuse that the Ramseys and their family had to endure.

However, what perplexed then, as it does now, was, why? Why the fury, the anger, the inability to disagree without hating, a condition which defines not just the narrative around JonBenet, but a vast acreage of public discourse.

Honest disagreement, the ability to engage in rational discourse is the foundational principle of the Republic. On April 13, 1943, the bicentennial of the birth of Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt inaugurated the Jefferson Memorial in Washington and declared:

“Thomas Jefferson believed, as we believe, in Man. He believed, as we believe, that men are capable of their own government, and that no king, no tyrant, no dictator can govern for them as well as they can govern for themselves.” FDR concluded his address by proclaiming Jefferson’s own words that are etched into the memorial, words that are wonderfully and determinedly paradoxical, the very essence of the Enlightenment: “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” In his 1988 biography of Jefferson, The Pursuit of Reason, Noble Cunningham notes that despite Jefferson’s numerous interests and accomplishments, “…certain basic tenets motivated his life and shaped his actions in whatever challenge he faced. Of these, none was stronger than his belief in ‘the sufficiency of reason for the care of human affairs.’ As a man of the Enlightenment who believed in the application of reason to society as well as to nature, Jefferson throughout his life pursued the use of reason as the means by which mankind could obtain a more perfect society… (He believed) that ‘knowledge is power, that knowledge is safety, that knowledge is happiness’…” His faith in the power of reason “nourished his belief in progress, under-girded his political principles, explained his devotion to learning and to educational opportunity for every person, and produced the optimistic outlook that failed him only as he approached the end of a very long life.”

In 1927, in the case Whitney v. California, Justice Louis Brandeis, in what is widely regarded as the most profound articulation of the meaning and importance of the First Amendment, wrote:

“Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to speak as you will and speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones…. “

Brandeis’ vision rests on a basic premise: that there is both a human capacity and an urge to use language to pursue truth. The assumption about the power of language and evolved thought has guided the whole history of our culture, or, perhaps more accurately, it has guided the idea of what our culture should look like: informed citizens, engaged in mature reasoning, arriving at decent and proper ends.

The question now in play is this: in a society whose forms of popular, mediated, mass culture are all but bereft of evolved language, whose education system leaves much to be desired in its failure to nurture the critical thinking capabilities of its students, to what extent can it still claim to continue Jefferson’s “pursuit of reason,” and Brandeis’ “secret of liberty”?In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that we live in a place in time in which there is a great demand, from different corners, for a studied silence. It was clear to me, still is, that there was, to many people’s way of thinking, something unseemly about even suggesting a counter-narrative about the Ramsey case.

There is, unfortunately, nothing remarkable about this. Witness the rigidities of great swaths of people, here and elsewhere, with fundamentalist religious beliefs. Consider what happens when the likes of Daniel Moynihan in the 1960s and Bill Cosby more recently tried to engage a debate about the social ills of the African-American family. And, of course, think through the extraordinary difficulty that was faced by anyone who, in the years after 9/11, wished to challenge the brutish and stupid foreign policy of the Bush administration, underpinned as it was by a public hysteria that sought some kind of psychological relief by clinging desperately to the symbol of the flag and the mother’s milk succour of patriotism.

Passion and Reason

There is another, related way of thinking about this that also comes out of 18th Century thought. In that time physicians believed that the mind was divided into three main faculties – reason, feeling and will and that, as Norman Dain wrote in his 1964 book, Concepts of Insanity, “sanity prevailed when reason remained master over feelings and will. Violent emotions would overthrow the power of reason.” The essential premise then, as now, is that we are rational. That is why we expect the juror and the citizen to arrive a conclusion in the wake of a clear and rational engagement with the available information and evidence, even though in neither case are they required to explain how they arrive at any given conclusion. However, as Arthur O. Lovejoy notes in Reflections on Human Nature, while “…the philosophers of the Age of Reason believed that although reason should control the other mental faculties, in fact the passions, or emotions, always ruled supreme: reason served primarily to accomplish the aims of the passions.”

This description fits perfectly to what happened in the Ramsey narrative, where many people were driven by intense, even primal passions, all the while using their capacity to reason to cobble together “information” to demonstrate the legitimacy of the visceral hatred of the Ramseys and of anyone who argued the case that an intruder killed JonBenet. On a larger scale, as I write, fully one-third of the public believes that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11, and almost half of the public continues to hold to the idea that humans were created in their current form at one moment in time in the past 10,000 years, offering a mountain of “evidence” to support what the scientific community would deem to be an absurd belief. They hold fast to such beliefs, even in the face of their obvious falsity, because not to do so would shatter whatever semblance of emotional calm they still cling to, and still desperately need.

Another issue that perplexed me was that there was something about Patsy that seemed to make a lot of people not just uneasy, but ready and willing to believe that she was capable of killing her child, possibly with the assistance of John, and then making it like someone else was responsible. The obvious question is: why? Yet again, I think the answer taps into a complex of emotional and psychological conditions of how, in this instance, we come to think about crime, and in particular, how we “see” guilt.

What was important here in understanding the narrative that surrounded Patsy was that it was not the presence of any meaningful evidence that suggested her involvement, and indeed what evidence did exist, such as the DNA, pointed away. Rather, there was a loose and vague perception, held by many, as to who she was. There were many facets to the case, the forensics, the theories, the flawed investigation, the small town Gothic atmospherics, but I had long understood that much of the essential energy within that narrative had literally been looking us in the face, Patsy’s face, and the fact that she entered JonBenet in the pageants reflected, for many people, a moral laxity the depth of which was such that she was indeed capable of brutalizing her daughter in a moment of anger and then pretending that it was someone else. It is not an argument that I can even begin to understand, but it is one which was simply assumed by many people. It was almost as if, in pointing the finger at her, there was some kind of emotional relief.

In her 1990 book, The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm takes a fascinating look at the case of Jeffrey MacDonald and the writer Joe McGinnis. MacDonald was serving three life sentences for murdering his wife and two children. McGinnis had come to prominence in the 1960s for his book The Selling of the President, which told in savage detail the way in which advertising had been used by the Nixon campaign. He had subsequently developed a successful writing career, including a book about the MacDonald case, Fatal Vision.

McGinnis had written the book at the suggestion of MacDonald, whose intent was to have McGinnis vindicate him in his claim that he was innocent. Malcolm’s account points to the way in which McGinnis ingratiated himself with MacDonald, leading him to believe that he was a friend who did indeed believe in MacDonald’s innocence. When the book finally appeared it was a portrait of a psychopathic killer, not the ode to a wrongfully convicted friend which MacDonald had been expecting. MacDonald sued and almost won (one juror refused to support MacDonald) prompting Malcolm’s wry comment: “…five of the six jurors were persuaded that a man who was serving three consecutive life sentences for the murder of his wife and two small children was deserving of more sympathy than the writer who had deceived him.”

There is one passage in Malcolm’s book in which she describes a dinner conversation she had with MacDonald’s attorney, Gary Bostwick, and his wife, Janette, a psychotherapist. At one point Janette interjects:

“In my work, a patient will come in and say, ‘This is the truth about me.’ Then, later in the therapy, a significant and entirely opposite truth may emerge – but they’re both true.” In Malcolm’s account, Bostwick responds: “It’s the same with the judicial process…People feel that it’s a search for the truth. But I don’t think that is its function in this society. I’m convinced that its function is cathartic. It’s a means for allowing people to air their differences, to let them feel as if they had a forum. You release tension in the social body in some way, whether or not you come to the truth.”

There is much to agree with in what Bostwick was saying and in explaining what happened to Patsy. It also perhaps helps explain why the media pay an almost obsessive attention to certain cases, not just to formal legal proceedings, but also to the pseudo-trials that take place on television, talk radio and in print media. They do so in part because they are part of that process of societal catharsis, given energy by rumor, gossip and almost obsessive voyeurism and the cruel brew of “certainty,” as to what “happened.” In the end “truth” is not what judgment of guilt and innocence is about, it is all about mood.

The Unreal Made Real

The problem is compounded by the fact that the media, who should properly have been a countervailing force to these tendencies, were themselves complicit in fueling the firestorm in which the Ramseys found themselves engulfed. It has been pointed out by such people as Tom Patterson, the Benjamin C. Bradlee Professor at the Kennedy School of Government, that at some point in the 1970s, the tradition and character of investigative journalism in the American media began to change. At its best that tradition had journalists going to considerable lengths to unearth facts, to dig beneath the surface of a story to reveal hidden truths or, as with the Pentagon Papers, to offer enriched interpretation of information which already exists. As Patterson told the Committee of Concerned Journalists,

“by the late 1970s we find a substitute for careful, deep, investigative reporting – allegations that surface in the news based on claims by sources that are not combined with factual digging on the reporter’s part. The tendency increased in the 1980s, increased again in the 1990s… The use of unnamed and anonymous sources becomes a larger proportion of the total…”

It certainly characterized the coverage of the Ramsey case.

One particular consequence of this is to allow rumor and gossip to flourish and to establish potent, feverish irrationalities and “understandings” of an event in which the unreal is made real, the stupid profound, ignorance knowledge and the bigoted insightful. There is no question that rumor and gossip are part of who we are, and serve as social and emotional utilities in “explaining” the world around us. In the context of crime rumor, gossip and innuendo can become a potent means of establishing a paradigm from within which one sees something “this” way rather than “that.” The only way to step outside of this is to engage the evidence, think through the narrative of the crime, question commonsensical ways of thinking, use critical faculty, in other words to do what most people, most of the time have neither the patience, the resources nor desire to do. What is clear, though, is that in the vortex of rumor and gossip minor personality traits, small eccentric quirks of character can be quickly transformed into hints of some dark underlying condition.

A particularly odious aspect to rumour, gossip and innuendo is that they are rarely if ever presented as such. They can masquerade as “concern” for the victim, a pretentious proffering of “…it pains me to say this but…” The gossip or rumour-monger is not especially concerned with solving a problem, rather drawing a kind of narcissistic sustenance from them, from “knowing” something that others don’t. I was, for example, told by three different people, who were in no way connected, that they knew someone who had been on the chair lift at the Eldora ski area near Boulder with a cop who told them that the Ramseys were about to be arrested, and I was told this in each case with a kind of knowing glee. And gossips thrive on the negative, the controversial and the sensational – qualities which were present in abundance in the Ramsey case, as neither the media nor their public heeded the admonition of Psalm 34: 13-15: “Guard your tongue from evil, your lips from deceitful speech.”

So at one level the lesson was, yet again, that the idea of reasoned discourse is, in this culture as in much of the rest of the world, on life support. What still plagues me, though, is why, how did this come about? Perhaps it was always there, this corrosive hostility to an idea not liked, a person who is different, “the other,” the “alien,” a fear of narratives that are complex, a demand for that which is simple and readily understood. I’m reminded of William James’ comment that “…a great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” Perhaps there is a deep human instinct to manage neurotic anxiety by projecting outward irrational loathing. One way of thinking about how the culture dealt with the case (and one could put many others cases and situations in here) is to see it all as what one might call a “persecution text,” an acting out of something that, however troubling, seems to be deeply human.

There is in fact an extensive literature on this, such as R. I. Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Laurie Carlson’s A Fever in Salem, Richard Sugarman’s Rancour Against Time, Rene Girard’s The Scapegoat, Max Scheler’s Ressentiment, Robert Wuthnow’s Meaning and Moral Order, Hugh Trevor Roper’s work on historical patterns in lynchings and a veritable library of works dealing with Salem, perhaps most notably Kai Erikson’s Wayward Puritans.

This is a rich and fascinating literature, but at its core is a relatively simple argument: that anxiety at the individual and collective level, caused by external circumstance, creates a powerful urge to punish – someone, something, somewhere. The emotional physics are: punish – feel better. It doesn’t, of course, except in a momentary sense, work. This would be troubling in and of itself, but it becomes especially so when the mood is used as fodder for entertainment, and therefore boosts in ratings and circulation.

I have long thought that John and Patsy Ramsey were “guilty” well before JonBenet died, that they would both be, but Patsy in particular, the ready object of resentment, a kind of class loathing, but that in this presumption of guilty evil lay emotional utility and significant profit. It has certainly been my experience that much of the public mind in the Ramsey case was defined by unreason and that its suggestible irrationalities reflected a larger condition, and a fearsome thought, that the Age of Reason never really happened except in the fevered, if would-be noble, utopian imaginings of the Founding Fathers.

Remember those comments I used at the beginning, where people expressed their profound, if unfounded belief in Ramsey guilt. In them I had the first whiff of what I’ve been trying to engage here, a sense of a canker in the social and moral order within which we just happen to dwell. It troubled me partly because of that feeling I expressed earlier of the desire for life to be fair and decent and just, a good and caring place of fine principle with a moral culture (of whatever theological or a-theological stripe) that was not of the Fallen. It also troubled me because within the stench of spite and hate lay a very serious question as to who we really are, of who we should properly see in the morning’s mirror.

Next: An Awful, Dark Year

INDEX

The second company, Philip Morris, is suing using a totally different legal logic. They say it’s an unconstitutional abridgment of their First Amendment right to free speech.

In 2003, the Supreme Court dismissed Nike, Inc., et al, Petitioners v. Marc Kasky (with dissents on the dismissal by Justice Breyer and Justice Kennedy). According to the dismissal concurrence (linked above), the case essentially involved a private California citizen (Marc Kasky) suing Nike for unfair and deceptive practices under California’s Unfair Competition Law, specifically that “Nike made a number of ‘false statements and/or material omissions of fact’ concerning the working conditions under which Nike products are manufactured.” Nike’s response was that Kasky’s suit was unconstitutional since Nike had a First Amendment right (ostensibly guaranteed by its status as a juristic person) to say anything it wanted in its “commercial speech” (ie advertising). The Supreme Court initially granted, and then subsequently dismissed without deciding the constitutional questions, a hearing on this issue.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle article, Philip Morris is claiming that “‘…the purpose and effect of the ordinance is to suppress communications directed to adult smokers, in violation of our constitutional rights’, said Joe Murillo, a lawyer representing Philip Morris USA.” Understandably, the director of the city’s Department of Public Health, Mitch Katz, is not impressed:

“Do you remember any part of the Bill of Rights being about pharmacies selling tobacco?” he asked. “Philip Morris has fought every attempt by public health officials to save lives by curbing smoking … It’s a badge of honor for anyone in public health to be sued by Philip Morris”

It’s probably not a coincidence that Philip Morris is suing in California, the same state that brought the question of corporate personhood and First Amendment protections for commercial speech before the Supreme Court previously. California was one of the first states to adopt false advertising legislation (Sections 17500-17509 of California State Law), and California’s restrictions on both advertising and unfair competition are quite strict. In addition, California is the nation’s largest single market and as such it drives much of the nation’s regulations(which is why energy and automobile companies fight tooth and claw against California’s strict carbon emissions law, among others). A win in California would have a great deal of influence on regulations throughout the rest of the country, including at the federal level with the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection – Advertising Practices Division.

For more on corporate personhood, please visit Reclaim Democracy.

Related Posts:
Money, speech, and corporate personhood
Have we finally discovered a disadvantage to corporate personhood?

In short, we know – at an abstract level – that they aren’t telling us the important stories. But … what are those stories that they aren’t telling us? When they send a “reporter” to cover the latest Sarah Palin photo-op, what story have they decided not to cover?

Thanks to Project Censored, whose “objective is training of SSU students in media research and First Amendment issues and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States,” we actually have a concrete, detailed sense of what stories the MSM doesn’t deem fit to print. Each year they release their Top 25 Censored Stories – the most important should-be news events that most people simply aren’t hearing about – and the list never fails to appall. How, we have to ask, can a semi-responsible press organization waste even a second of time on the trivia that passes for news these days (let’s see what FOX has up at the moment … ah, here’s one: “Lesbian Pics Prompt School to Change Yearbook Policy”) when all these other stories – massively important stories that have meaningful implications for the lives of Americans – are ignored?

Here’s this year’s list, and you can click for the stories at the Project Censored page:

# 1. Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
# 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA
# 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business
# 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
# 5 Seizing War Protesters’ Assets
# 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
# 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking
# 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly
# 9 Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify
# 10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture
# 11 El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror
# 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
# 13 Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq
# 14 Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste
# 15 Worldwide Slavery
# 16 Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights
# 17 UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights
# 18 Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers
# 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction
# 20 Marijuana Arrests Set New Record
# 21 NATO Considers “First Strike” Nuclear Option
# 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid
# 23 FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs
# 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror
# 25 Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

Not that any of this stacks up against Jenna Bush’s wedding, of course, but you get my point.

As it says right up there in our masthead, “think – it ain’t illegal yet.” Your ability to think is, in part, a function of what you give your brain to think about (garbage in, garbage out, after all). Thanks to Project Censored, we don’t have to settle for the prefabricated faux-news entertainment product – let’s call it Newz-Whiz® – that the corporate media insist on slopping up.

Remember, ignorance isn’t a crime unless it’s self-inflicted.

As noted a couple weeks ago, the S&R team hooked up with the crew from Zero Coordinate and Eccentric Production at the DNC in Denver. In addition to their invaluable help in shooting the Lee Camp interview, we also worked together in covering the Returned Soldiers/Rage Against the Machine/Tent State march on the DNC.

Natalie Ashodian and her team have now produced a powerful video from that march, and for those who only read about it (or, as is more likely the case, given how little attention the mainstream press paid to it, never even heard about it in the first place) this coverage is extremely important.

Click here to view the embedded video.

First: it should never, ever be considered acceptable to quote a candidate or official making a false claim without noting its falsity. Reporters do this all the time, justifying it by saying they’re just presenting both sides, or that they aren’t making the false claim, they’re just reporting it, or saying they corrected three other false claims in the article. That is not sufficient: if a journalist includes a false or misleading claim in their news report — in any form — without indicating that is false, they are actively helping to spread misinformation.

Second: the way in which news reports debunk misinformation matters a great deal. If Candidate A lies about Candidate B, for example, the fact that Candidate A is lying should be the lede – otherwise the news report just drills the false claim into readers’ and viewers’ minds, allowing the misinformation to take hold before it is corrected. As I wrote in my column on Friday, the news media too often privileges lies rather than punishing them.

To put it simply, we need a press that, when it hears a public figure lying, understands that the story isn’t the substance of the lie, which therefore needs repeating; it’s that a public figure is lying. And it’s okay to use these words. When a public figure says something that is patently false, and that he or she knows or ought to know, as a matter of basic competence, then it is okay to report what happened: Candidate A lied this morning. That is not opinion – it is a statement of fact.

So I second MediaMatters (and the Shankar Vedantam piece they’re riffing on) here. I’d also like to broaden the discussion a bit in order to provide some context for the appropriate use of terms like “negative ad,” “go/went negative” and “attack ad.” I heard one of the network nitwits this morning talking about another round of “attack ads” – a lede that reinforces the message that the candidates are campaigning “negatively.” This approaching to packaging the story pretends that the claims of the ads are irrelevent. If Candidate A indicts Candidate B for lying, and Candidate B shoots back with an ad that lies about Candidate A some more, a reporter (or morning show host pretending to be a reporter) who frames these events as an exchange of negative ads has not only failed to accurately report the story, he or she has in fact added to the lie.

All “negative” ads are not alike, and I’d be grateful if someone would explain the difference to the collected asshaberdashery at NBC “News.” Let’s illustrate with a couple examples:

• Congressman Bob has been using his office to conduct all manner of graft and fraud for 20 years and a recent investigation has brought it all to light. His challenger, Assemblywoman Jane, runs an ad pointing all this out and saying that it’s time to run the criminals out of the statehouse.
• Congressman Bob runs an ad accusing Assemblywoman Jane of being a communist millionaire crook who blows lobbyists under her desk. All of these assertions are either demonstrably false or at the very least based on little more than Bob’s imagination.

NBC leads its morning show with a story about mudslinging in the campaign and repeats the substance of the charges in the story without making clear that one ad is truthful while the other is bad creative writing. In doing so, they have certainly provided “balance,” but they have also done to the truth what the guys in that shop did to Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction. They not only fail to bring truth to the audience, their malfeasance helps the audience internalize an outright lie.

It’s reached the point where as soon as I hear the term “negative campaigning,” or any iteration thereof, I immediately assume that I’m about to be lied to. If the source is one I know to usually be credible, I figure they simply haven’t thought about how they’ve bought into this corrosive, corruption-enabling canard, which must originally have been fabricated on the same hellish meme-forge that gave us “Japan-bashing” and “flip-flopping.”

If I hear it from a member of the mainstream press or someone who gets their information about the world from those corporatist sources, I assume either stupidity, intentional dishonesty or a measure of both.

Regardless of the source or intent, however, this kind of uncritical, half-educated rage for the faux-ethics of “balance” and “fairness” is doing very real damage to our society. Given the central role played by Big Media in our politics, then, the first step in holding our leaders to a higher standard is to demand that the press hold itself to some kind of standard – and really, just about any kind of standard would be an improvement.