The Jerome Corsi Paradox

Jerome Corsi, of Swiftboat Veterans for Truth fame, is at it again. This time he's written another piece of shit book riddled with factual errors and baseless innuendo targeted at Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, entitled, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. He's been all over the media pushing his book, and on today's edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends he's made a rather revealing statement:

Here's the relevant bit of the transcript:

DOOCY: You were involved in the writing of the --

CORSI: Correct.

DOOCY: -- Swift Boat book --

CORSI: Absolutely. Right.

DOOCY: -- four years ago, and so a lot of people have suggested, well, the Obama campaign is not going to allow their candidate to get Swift Boated once again by this guy, and do you feel almost as if you yourself are being Swift Boated?

CORSI: Well, in a way, but I also think the Obama campaign is making the identical mistake as the Kerry campaign.

[emphasis mine]

Without a moment's pause, Corsi responds to Doocy's question without the slightest indication of any intention to challenge the use of the term "Swift Boated." In accepting the understood definition of the term, Corsi is essentially admitting that his previous work of fiction, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, is exactly what his critics charged -- full of factual errors and baseless smears against Democratic Senator John Kerry. It's clear that that is the opinion he has of his critics now; therefore, it follows that he is using this definition for "Swift Boated."

If, in some twist of crazy, right-wing logic, Corsi believes the term "Swift Boated" is not negative, but an honest, academic analysis of the facts, then we can only conclude that he believes his critics to be correct about The Obama Nation.

This is the Jerome Corsi Paradox -- either way, he's discredited himself in that one statement.

"Assassination" Art Exhibit Shut Down by Police

The New York Times reported today that artist Yazmany Arboleda's exhibit "The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama" was shut down by New York City police.

The exhibit was shut down by 9:30 am, and police interrogated Arboleda for about an hour. According to Arboleda, authorities were concerned that the exhibit "could excite someone to do something crazy, like break the window."

Arboleda stated that the exhibit was about character assassination and how the media has portrayed the leading Democratic candidates:

It’s art. It’s not supposed to be harmful. It’s about character assassination — about how Obama and Hillary have been portrayed by the media. [...] It’s about the media.

The exhibition is supposed to be about character assassination. [...] It’s philosophical and metaphorical.

What bothers me about this incident is that there is a clear violation of this man's 1st amendment rights to freedom of speech. On the other hand, there is the concern of "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" syndrome; however, I do not think that the word "assassination" near the names of presidential candidates in an art exhibit qualifies. There's nothing about this art exhibit that would cause a reasonable person to conclude that a threat existed.

Ultimately, I think that this is an overreaction on part of the police, and in the process this man's speech was stifled. The 1st amendment is there to protect what others may find objectionable -- we don't need a constitutional amendment to protect what is acceptable to express, we need a constitutional amendment to protect what is taboo.

One commenter, B.A., from The New York Times article gave a rather intelligent insight:

This is just one of the things that is wonderful about America. If we feel this is inappropriate, irreverent, impolite, we have equal rights to speak out against it, in forums like this, or by walking down to the location, holding up signs and protesting. If this exhibit ignites passion furiously against it, those unwilling to do more than complain from their keyboards should not endorse the bending of the law to make it go away.

The answer to speech you don't like is more speech, not police oppression and/or intimidation.

The Media Have Failed Us

Required reading from Greg Greenwald:

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" - 102

"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73

"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16

"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043

"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607

"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

There's another angle of critique that Greenwald neglects -- it's not just rampant narcissism on part of journalists, but the culture of corporate media.

Journalists are expected to contribute to the bottom line, i.e., turn a profit for the parent company. I wrote earlier about a survey which found that 91% of newspaper, magazine, TV, radio, and online journalists believed their top priority to be to "make [his/her] publication successful by creating appealing content for its audiences." Journalists have internalized the values of their owning corporation in lieu of their commitment, their civic duty, to provide to the public the necessary information to protect our democratic values and form of governance.

So, it's no wonder that the media have largely ignored the Department of Justice memo and neglected to cover of the occupation of Iraq more thoroughly as of late -- journalists think, for their own self-serving interests, that trivial matters like Obama's bowling score are more important to the American people than attacks on American civil rights and liberties.

Journalism In Trouble

Editor & Publisher reports on the 2008 PR Week/PR Newswire Media Survey. The most troubling part about the survey is this finding:

When asked to identify the most important aspect of their work, 91% of respondents say "make my publication successful by creating appealing content for its audiences" -- ahead of "educate and inform the masses," "break news," and "chronicle events as they happen." This finding, says the survey, suggests a significant level of commercial awareness on the part of journalists.

As Network predicted, Neil Postman warned, and Robert McChesney and John Nichols have identified, there are problems with corporate media -- chief among them being valuing the bottom-line over the free-flow of information to inform a democratic public.

The fact that 91% of respondents are more interested in making his/her respective publication successful rather than informative is depressing.

Fuck You, Mr. President.

Fuck you.

American Journalism Protects the Powerful

Glenn Greenwald wrote last week about Tucker Carlson's admission to a key criticism of American journalism -- that reliance on official sources leads to a less critical press which enables those in power to govern without accountability. Here's the transcript from the exchange between Carlson and UK reporter Gerri Peev about a comment that Peev published from an on-the-record interview with Barack Obama adviser Samantha Power [emphasis from Greenwald]:

CARLSON: What -- she wanted it off the record. Typically, the arrangement is if someone you're interviewing wants a quote off the record, you give it to them off the record. Why didn't you do that?

PEEV: Are you really that acquiescent in the United States? In the United Kingdom, journalists believe that on or off the record is a principle that's decided ahead of the interview. If a figure in public life.

CARLSON: Right.

PEEV: Someone who's ostensibly going to be an advisor to the man who could be the most powerful politician in the world, if she makes a comment and decides it's a bit too controversial and wants to withdraw it immediately after, unfortunately if the interview is on the record, it has to go ahead.

CARLSON: Right. Well, it's a little.

PEEV: I didn't set out in any way, shape.

CARLSON: Right. But I mean, since journalistic standards in Great Britain are so much dramatically lower than they are here, it's a little much being lectured on journalistic ethics by a reporter from the "Scotsman," but I wonder if you could just explain what you think the effect is on the relationship between the press and the powerful. People don't talk to you when you go out of your way to hurt them as you did in this piece.

Don't you think that hurts the rest of us in our effort to get to the truth from the principals in these campaigns?

PEEV: If this is the first time that candid remarks have been published about what one campaign team thinks of the other candidate, then I would argue that your journalists aren't doing a very good job of getting to the truth. Now I did not go out of my way in any way, shape or form to hurt Miss Power. I believe she's an intelligent and perfectly affable woman. In fact, she's -- she is incredibly intelligent so she -- who knows she may have known what she was doing.

She regretted it. She probably acted with integrity. It's not for me to decide one way or the other whether she did the right thing. But I did not go out and try to end her career.

Instead of holding the powerful accountable, the American press serves as a "holder of secrets" in return for access to official sources. Carlson's philosophy has major holes -- the idea that this kind of symbiotic behavior between the press and the powerful will yield truths is laughable. What reason would the powerful have to give up any truths on-the-record? The current model exempts the powerful from any public scrutiny -- the press have essentially given the powerful, willingly, their only mechanism for holding public officials accountable and there is little reason to think that accountability will be applied voluntarily.

Read the entire Greenwald post -- he goes on to talk about Tim Russert's admission in testimony during the Scooter Libby trial that all of this interviews with public officials are strictly confidential. Who does this man serve? Not the public.

Siegelman Censorhsip Update

Via Talking Points Memo, "FCC Commissioner Wants Probe of Siegelman 60 Minutes Blackout." Rueters reports:

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said he had asked the chairman of the FCC to open an inquiry into the Feb. 24 incident at WHNT, a CBS affiliate in Huntsville, Alabama, in which civil rights footage from the 1960s was blacked out.

"The FCC now needs to find out if something analogous is going on here," Copps said at a luncheon with media watchdog groups. "Was this an attempt to suppress information on the public airwaves, or was it really just a technical problem?"

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Via Sivacracy -- an Alabama television station censors a CBS broadcast implicating former Deputy Chief of Staff and current White House strategist Karl Rove in the controversial conviction of former Democratic Governor Don Siegelman in federal court. Here's the censored segment:

Sorry for the poor quality, but I refuse to embed the CBS linked video because CBS forces commercials into the video. If you've like to view the CBS linked video, go here.

What does this mean for our democracy if local television stations are allowed to censor public news broadcasts in this manner?

Presidential Primaries

I've been meaning to write down my thoughts on Presidential primaries for some time now. Not too long ago an interesting book was brought to my attention, Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse. In this book, Crouse followed the press coverage of the 1972 presidential campaigns. His analysis is considered the first to identify "pack journalism," which translates to journalists reporting in a similar way. It's a kind of "groupthink" that forms a consensus among journalists about what is newsworthy and what is not. It's how meta-narratives about candidates evolve and are eventually accepted as conventional wisdom among journalists, whether true or not.

I bring this up because I feel that a similar phenomenon is already in place as far as the importance of Presidential primaries go. Tom Tomorrow's cartoon brilliantly displays how journalists have accepted that these early primaries can decide the entire primary election. The press are applying the "conventional wisdom" that these early state primaries are somehow more important than the rest of the country, and that these votes are a representative sample which can predict the outcome of the primary before all the votes are cast.

Primary elections are very much like general elections in that these elections require a majority of the national vote to win. There is a difference between the Democratic and Republican primaries -- the Democratic primaries split the vote proportionally between the candidates to the number of votes won in each state; however, the Republican primaries employ a "winner-takes-all" approach, which gives all the votes in any given state to the victor of that state. This distinction aside, the press still seem to think that the Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina primaries can decide the national primary election for each party. How can only three states decide an election involving 50 states?

Despite this glaring logical problem with the press' assumption "conventional wisdom," they continue to proclaim that the primary election is over before it has even started. The problem here is that many Americans listen to what the press have to say about the primary election -- quite a lot actually. I suspect that when the press claim that a particular candidate's chances are nil, a good many Americans become afraid that they'll be throwing their vote away by casting for the candidate of their choice. And so, our front-runners emerge, whether or not they are actually the front-runners. Press coverage of a candidate's campaign seems to influence voters' opinions and herd those opinions to be closer to what the journalists covering the campaigns think they should be.

Just think about what happened to Howard Dean in 2004. He was an outsider that the press considered not to have a chance. His campaign was entertained as an interesting change of pace, but not anything that could lead to a nomination. When Dean won in Iowa and New Hampshire, the press turned on him. The-"scream"-heard-around-the-world narrative dominated the press' coverage, and ultimately broke his campaign.

Now, I don't have large volumes of quantitative data to suggest that the press coverage is overwhelmingly influencing the way that Americans vote, but in recent years I have witnessed how absurdly the press declares victory for the primaries so early. I have witnessed the importance that the press place upon the early primary elections, and it truly disgusts me. I also can't know that many Americans will disregard their first choice simply because the press say that that candidate is not viable, but my own experience with anecdotal evidence suggests that something is at work here. I've heard the same kind of comment from many friends and family members, "I don't want to throw my vote away, so I'm going to vote for such-and-such instead of the candidate I really want." My gut twists when I hear such words -- it's as if we've decided to abdicate our political power and throw a wrench in the whole democratic process. It makes me feel as though our elections are a sham.

The End of Journalism

This post over at QueerSighted.com makes some rather interesting observations:

It has become all too easy to shrug off the decline of legitimate news organizations and "old-fashioned" print media as the Internet and direct and digital cable TV expand by leaps and bounds. But the fact that we've reduced real news and truth to a consumer commodity subject to ratings and sales poses a threat to our freedom that is mostly ignored.

and here's how this threat has manifested itself:

[Rupert] Murdoch [owner of News Corp.] operates most of his major media properties at a loss, slashing ad rates and subscribers rates in order to drive the less well financed family-owned and journalist-owned properties into oblivion. That's his goal with The New York Times. Decades ago news outlets competed with each other through their ability to deliver the best information first, quality of writing and quality of investigative journalism. Today, the Murdoch's of the world have radically changed the paradigm forcing news outlets to compete as business entities mostly through advertising revenue. And with his deep pockets, Murdoch always has the advantage. Murdoch does not see his broadcast and print news ventures as a means to enhance the provision of free information to a free people, Murdoch rather uses his former news and information properties to propagandize his various political agenda--the anti-gay one for example--both through the dissemination of lies and the diversion of circus-like entertainment. And he's brilliant at this. Murdoch has done more damage to American democracy and freedom than a dozen George W. Bushes could ever hope to accomplish.

Why is this so important? Because without a free press there will be no one watching government. Those in a position of power will be able to abuse that power because no one is plastering their misdeeds all over the front pages for all Americans to read. Without an informed populace, voters cannot make sound decisions at the voting booth, and therefore, candidates will find it easier to lie to constituents about their intentions for office.

The blogosphere, while more democratic than traditional print newspapers, is missing something important -- credibility. People trust print news as a source for objective information because there are journalistic standards in place to ensure that that information is reliable. The methods that those like Murdoch engage in threaten to disrupt these journalistic standards, and thus, shift the focus of news gathering from keeping a watchful eye on power to more trivial pursuits, while also having the side effect of reducing the credibility of print journalism.

Moore's "Truth Squad" on the Larry King Live Interview

Last week, Michael Moore responded to the Sanjay Gupta interview on Larry King Live with another release from the Truth Squad. Moore also posted a letter to CNN asking why they hadn't responded to his webite postings yet.

Well, CNN finally responded yesterday, and to say the least, the response is less than adequate.

I'll be watching MichaelMoore.com to see if Moore responds to CNN.

UPDATE: Moore has a follow-up letter to CNN, as well as a re-cap of the confrontation.

Moore Vs. Blitzer: Part 2

Here's the rest of the interview:

Enjoy.

UPDATE:

Moore faced off with Sanjay Gupta on Larry King Live last night:

Here are parts 2 and 3.

There's a webchat posted over at HuffingtonPost with Moore, conducted after his interview with Gupta.

Michael Moore Destroys Wolf Blitzer

You have to see the video:

Go to MichaelMoore.com to see the Moore's response to Sanjay Gupta's report.

There's some commentary over at Alternet that helps to put this into perspective, too.

A History Lesson in Media and Democracy

Required reading for today -- an Al Gore speech from October of 2005. Here's a sample:

It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.

The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." That may sound like gobbledygook, but it's a phrase that packs a lot of meaning. The feudal system which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was born of their ignorance.

For further reading, look up Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

This gets me thinking... will vlogging destroy blogging as television has destroyed print, or will blogging bring a return to the Rule of Reason?

Jon Stewart on Bill Moyers Tonight

Check out a preview over at PBS.org. The website has this to say about the interview:

Why do so many get their news and analysis from his fake news show?

An interesting question indeed, especially considering that people who regularly watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are better informed than those who watch any other TV news program -- a conclusion reached by The Pew Research Center just two weeks ago. I suspect that it's because people are hungry for the truth, and the mainstream media has been pandering to the Right for so long that the American people are tuning out.

The interview will air at 9:00pm tonight on WETA channel 26, for those of you in the Washington, DC area.

Freedom of Speech

So we're all aware of Ann Coulter's remarks towards Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards about a week ago. This is old news so I'll get right to the point -- my problem is with this recent "defense" of sorts in Coulter's favor, which argues that petitioning newspapers to cease printing Coulter's column is akin to limiting her freedom of speech; or worse, it's akin to censorship.

How is this so? The 1st amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees freedom from the government limiting a person's speech, yet it says nothing about guaranteeing a forum through which to disseminate that speech. Coulter has no 1st amendment right to have her column printed in a newspaper.

The question that those who are urging newspapers to drop Coulter from their pages are asking of editors is simply this: does Coulter's column provide for the public interest? For a functioning democracy to survive, media has to be relevant, coherent, and potent. Media should be a "4th estate," asking the tough questions to those in a position of power in order to simultaneously provide for an informed populace while serving as a watchdog to the government. I think it's patently obvious to those paying attention to Coulter's career that her columns have never provided anything even resembling these principles.

This is not a censorship issue, and those who believe it is need to retake their high school civics class.