No Muslims here!

I have to be thankful to the Anti-Defamation League, for without them, I might not be living here and they've done much to silence the skinheads and neo-Nazis and Jew haters that would still kill us all if they could. They've done much to get Church printing presses to stop printing the infamous "protocols" fraud and making them stop teaching that kill Christian babies for their blood. But as I've said countless times, being persecuted doesn't make one virtuous.

The ADL has jumped on the out of control bandwagon, protesting the building of the "Ground Zero Mosque" which isn't a mosque and isn't at Ground Zero. I don't know how to describe that without displaying it as offensive to the freedom of religion which is one of the few things an American can point to as being fundamentally American in origin, albeit no longer unique.

To what do we owe the self-righteous attitude behind it? We're furious at a group of terrorists almost small enough to fill a school bus and most of whom are dead: so furious that we don't want anyone to worship the God of Abraham in a different way within our sight. So furious that we will ignore the prohibition against establishing a religion as permissible or not permissible or restricting the rights of one as opposed to another. If Muslims have no right to a community center in New York, they have no right to a community and if they have not that, we have not reason to see this as a country worth supporting

CROUCHING TOWARDS EXTINCTION

Virtually all species of marine turtles in the world are classified as highly endangered, and some are on the verge of extinction. In all instances, human interference in their life cycle is to blame, such as beach front development, light pollution on their nesting sites, injuries from boat strikes, drownings in nets (also known as 'by catch'), and unsustainable over harvesting of their eggs. It is estimated that only one in every ten thousand turtle hatchlings will make it to adulthood. The following photo essay tells the story:

On this beach in Costa Rica, over harvesting means there will be no hatchlings this season to replenish the species. A species that has survived 200 million years will vanish. Thanks to my friend Jim L. for supplying the photos.

Banking On The Widow's Mite

Get ready to chew gravel in the parking lot in sheer fury: an investigation of several large national insurance corporations has been launched by NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for what, in my opinion, amounts to the most cynical sort of war profiteering I can imagine. Eight insurers are suspected of managing the insurance payouts to military widows in such a way that the insurers continue to make a profit on benefits that belong to the deceased serviceman's family.


According to CNN,

The attorney general's office said it appears some insurers tell families of fallen military personnel that policy payouts will be placed in an interest-bearing account. But the bulk of the interest benefits the insurers, and the cash is not placed in banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Cuomo's office said.

His office said insurers place cash in their corporate accounts, reportedly earning up to 4.8 percent interest while paying families as little as 0.5 percent interest.

 Eight insurance companies have been subpoenaed, including Prudential and MetLife. Prudential's practices are offered as an example of the way this scam feature works: the beneficiary receives what appears to be a checkbook from JP Morgan Chase to access their benefits; however, according to Cuomo's office,

"Instead, Prudential must send money to JPMorgan Chase before the checks can clear," the attorney general's office said. "Prudential beneficiaries are also not informed that, under a 2008 law, they have one year to place the death benefits in a Roth IRA and earn tax-free investment gains for the rest of their lives. Thus, real financial harm is suffered by Prudential's lack of disclosure."

 So, to break it down, they keep the death benefit and earn corporate interest on it, pay a lower interest rate to the beneficiary (who believes the money is earning a "competitive interest rate"), pocket the difference, and control the gate through which the money flows (possibly slowing that flow if it benefits the corporation?). Scummy. Slime. Bags.


Both the Veteran's Administration and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' office are looking into the investigation. And, of course, we're taking all this with a grain of gravel, since Cuomo is running for the governor's office in New York.

Add-On:

Muslims hate dogs

Shortly before I left the Midwest for Florida, a local Methodist Church with a largely Korean congregation was spray painted with the message: "Chines go home." Swastikas were spray painted on sidewalks and a leader of a self-styled Evangelist Church murdered a black Football coach and shot up a car containing two local Korean-Americans in protest of the growing ethnic diversity of America. Yes, it was an upscale suburb of Chicago and yes, most people were appalled. Since then, we've become more inured to such things, and since then, major political groups have become indistinguishable from what was a demented, lunatic fringe. The largest news disseminator in the country has become a preacher of the same kind of rage -- and we listen as disciples at the feet of wisdom.

I can't act surprised to see a similar fear and loathing phenomenon pervading my Florida neighborhood. No shots are being fired, but it's hard to come away from any social gathering without that sick, sinking feeling in my stomach resulting from some offhand remark about Mexicans. What must they be thinking of me? Is anyone really a bigot as concerns only one group? I think not. Is such bigotry confined to the uneducated? Hardly: the Beck Brigade contains the majority of millionaires I know and none who have anything to worry about from some undocumented day-laborer hanging around the Home Depot parking lot. Yet they do. They worry themselves sick that our government is being taken over by Black people who will make sure that no other black people will have to work for a living any more. They worry themselves sick that American Muslims will somehow institute Sharia and set aside the constitution, while they themselves see that tattered document as an impediment to Christian sovereignty.

"Islam is not a religion. It is a worldwide political movement meant [sic] on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law...."

reads an anonymous e-mail tied to a California Tea Party group. Where I live, such a thing is likely to be as sermon to the converted. It's a tenet as firmly adhered to as that "Obamacare" depends on "death panels" to keep costs down and that the US constitution is meant to subjugate all people under Christian law. But there are no Mosques here, not Islamic community centers as there are in other parts of the country. In California, in Tennessee, in New York and elsewhere, the bigoted scum that is America is being called upon to disrupt prayer with loud protest and being encouraged to bring dogs: because Muslims "hate dogs."

When I was a young man, traveling and studying in Europe, I heatedly defended my country against pervasive charges of racism and bigotry and imperialism, pointing to the strides being made in the 1960's. I was wrong, I was a fool and I wish I had not been. We have been jailing people for their political thoughts since the beginning, we replaced slavery with repression and subjugation, we've had laws reducing the rights of one ethnic group after another. We've denied entry and we have expelled citizens for their racial origins. We whine about invasive government while we use it to invade the lives of millions. We've made a straw devil out of those who have worked to undo the intrinsic hatred that is American culture. We have, save for a few glorious moments, been cowards, bullies and barbarians as likely to tear our own countrymen apart as the enemies, real and imagined, from without. There is no patriotism, no sense of a common goal, only flag waving and warriors at war -- and fear, always the fear.

Have we forsaken our ideals or did we ever really have any beyond "every man for himself" and "fuck you?"

THE BOOK OF JOBS – Revised Global Edition

Earlier this week, Robert Reich posted this article, The Great Decoupling of Corporate Profits from Jobs. His observations and conclusions: Corporate profits are up; the largest 500 companies have stashed away an estimated $1 trillion in cash; but the winnings are not translating into jobs at home. Why?

American corporations are investing in regions where the profits are coming from: Overseas. They are investing in low-wage markets, investing in laborsaving technologies, paying dividends to shareholders or buying back equity, and rewarding themselves with fat bonuses.  Forget trickle-down economics, Reich says:  No amount of profits or tax cuts will create more jobs.

Reich offers a grim but accurate assessment of the current situation, but he hardly scratches the surface.

"Start-Ups, Not Bailouts,” says the eminently more-opinionated-than-informed columnist for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, who is still stuck in the skunkwork days of garage start-ups that turned Apple Computer into a household name. What Friedman and others do not grasp is that the bristling days of Silicon Valley are forever gone.

In this BusinessWeek article How America Can Create Jobs, Andrew Groves, who served as Intel’s CEO from 1987 to 2005, knows what blunderbuss pundits do not; he knows his business:

American companies discovered that they could have their manufacturing and even their engineering done more cheaply overseas (…) The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn (…) Some 250,000 Foxconn employees in Southern China produce Apple’s products. Apple, meanwhile, has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. That means for every Apple worker in the U.S., there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods, and iPhones. The same roughly 10-to-1 relationship holds for Dell, disk-drive maker Seagate Technology, and other U.S. companies [such as Dell, Microsoft, HP, and Intel as examples].

When Apple sells an iPhone, is it considered an American product or an import? How much of our so-called Gross Domestic Product is actually domestic?

Here’s an inconvenient truth. The next generation of whiz-bang products will also be made in Asia, and the high-tech sector that drove the American economy in the 1980s and 90s will no longer generate jobs at home. With 90% of the work force located overseas, a rose may still be a rose, but American products are no longer American products. For every consumer dollar spent, most of the revenue stream will support overseas economies and an overseas workforce.

Want more bad news? Alternative energy technologies – the so-called job-driving engines of the future (which include advanced batteries, photovoltaics, and wind power) – will most likely be outsourced too. For instance, all commercially produced photovoltaic panels, originally invented in America, come from China.  Lithium-ion batteries, the all-important component of the electric cars of the future, will most likely come from Asia:

(Click on graph to enlarge)

Yes, everyone knows Asian labor is cheap.  How cheap, you ask?  If it takes 10 overseas jobs for every domestic one to bring an American product to market, there is an inverse relationship in worker compensation.  For every dollar spent in America, you can always find someone somewhere who can do the same job for ten cents or less. An M.D. in Mumbai, for example, can read your MRI scan for one-tenth the cost of an American expert.  Yes, this is no exaggeration.  Every American job that can be exported WILL be exported … even M.D. and Ph.D. level jobs in the medical and pharmaceutical industries (which also means your highly sensitive financial and medical records, including your social security number and other personal data, are also going abroad). Why bother studying for an advanced degree when the only jobs left will be those that cannot be exported … flipping hamburgers or waiting on tables.

Why should American corporations give a damn about American workers when their customers are no longer on Main Street but worldwide.  Globalization has freed them from the encumbrances of citizenship.

Arizona burning

"The law was made for man, not man for the law"

-Jesus of Nazareth-

He's "not going to put up with any civil disobedience" said the notorious Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff on Good Morning America. No doubt he expects to see some, as the infamous Arizona "show me your papers" law goes into effect tomorrow. Protest is all "hype" anyway and it's "a crime to be here illegally and everyone should enforce" it. Everyone?

It sounds like fun and I can't wait to start enforcing the law myself -- I mean all the laws, of course and since I have the firepower, why not stop every blond person I see and make him prove he's not Canadian? It's all a cowboy movie to sheriff Joe Arpaio, so why shouldn't I play along? But, of course, it's not the law in general that we should all enforce, it's the infamous Arizona law reducing the rights of anyone looking to any Arizona Cop like he has Native American ancestry.

But why pick on this comic book villain? The idea is widely popular, particularly in the old Confederate states, where good manners, big hearts and small minds go hand in hand. Civil disobedience is, in fact, just what we need to clog up the courts and disable and embarrass the damned fools who pretend it's all about the law and not a distraction to hide another expansion of police power. We need just what was so effective in the 1960's; thousands and thousands of people to flood the streets of Arizona looking illegal. We need a spectacle: sit-ins, marches, civil disobedience, dogs, water cannons and an impotent, sputtering, apoplectic, beer-belly Joe looking like the Dukes of Hazzard relic he is.

Now, before you reach for some more canned rage: no, I'm not in favor of allowing undocumented workers to remain, or letting people overstay their visas, just don't tell me we have to become a brutal, inhumane police state to correct the problem and if it isn't all based on racial purity, tell me why we don't know or care how many Canadians or Englishmen are working here and living here without benefit of citizenship.

Of Childhood Innocence and Rice Fields

I think that intensity is both my gift and my flaw. I am passionate about those things in which I believe but sometimes the passion is so intense that I forget to breathe. I think that I'm perhaps too hard on my fellow humans. I get frustrated with our disdain for the pursuit of the intellectual and angered by our obsessive selfishness. Every now and then I realize that it's time for me to stop and smell the roses, to embrace the moments of joy, to be awed by our creativity instead of appalled by our destructive impulses.

My nearly 19 month old great nephew is the joy of my life. I entertain him by blowing bubbles; he lets me know when he wants more bubble blowing by walking over, placing a small hand on each of my knees and announcing, "Bub." He never tires of trying to capture those spheres of soap and water, and I never tire of blowing them.


When he's at my house, he likes to follow me around whenever I leave the room. Generally the trip is to the kitchen in response to his announcement, "Eat, eat," his shorthand for, "I'm hungry." He makes me laugh at the way he walks close to the open refrigerator and peers inside as if seeking hidden treasure. His new favorite thing is to drink out of my cup, a blue and white 28 oz monster cup. My job is to hold the cup as he sips out of my straw. Most of the time, it contains water, but once it was a bit of mango juice. His face lit up and he did a little jig as he tasted it.


I hope that he will be creative. His grandfather Bob, my sister's husband, is a talented musician, so he's got creative genes.


The creative impulse may be humankind's saving grace. We make grand wars but we also make grand music and art. We paint masterpieces on ceilings and walls. We write operas with music so sweetly beautiful that it makes us weep with joy.

I saw an interesting story on the CBS evening news about rice art in Japan. Artists create images that are transferred onto computer generated grids and enlarged on a massive scale. Then the entire town comes together to plant the images in rice. How wonderfully awesome that hundreds of people work to create these transistory works of art. The rice is eventually harvested, but before the harvest tens of thousands of visitors come to town, boosting the local economy, as they view the rice fields in all their glory.

Inakadate Village, where this creative endeavor began has a population of 8,400. Last year there were 170,000 visitors to the village's rice field. Other rural areas of Japan have also created their own rice art.


I felt uplifted by this story. It seems that I may be wrong about humankind. Perhaps there is hope for a better us, a hope born out of the innocence of childhood and rice fields.

Happy now?

Is the Gulf of Mexico becoming the cesspool of the Oil business; the repository of all the spills resulting from accidents, neglect, irresponsible drilling and all the other inevitable situations we refuse to listen to while sneering at "enviros" and calling for more oil whatever the cost?

Sure it is, but we may just be beginning to give a damn, now that it's appearing that many of us won't live to see that section of the great mother of life, the World Ocean, and it's shorelines restored to any kind of health.

We have another gusher, apparently. Just off the coast near New Orleans where a barge has reportedly crashed into a well spilling more oil just where we need it least and just where we have our equipment otherwise occupied. It hasn't been the first time, and it won't be the last, but maybe now we're starting to realize that you can't get all the world's oil out of the ground without the nasty consequences we've been ignoring. You can't transport it by ship or by pipeline and you can't pump it without leaks and spills and fires and of course, loss of life.

Yes, that's right, you're paying three bucks a gallon -- much, much less than other countries do and all our efforts to ruin what's left of what's worth keeping in our country aren't going to reduce that price. It's all going to get worse until you start listening to those hippie, treehugging, sandal wearing weirdos and stop listening to the bought and paid for politicians who refuse to do a damned thing that might stop the campaign contributions and free propaganda that keep them in office. The rich TV blowhards, your friends, your neighbors and all their stupid stories about vast reserves of oil ready to pour into your tanks if only the government and those environmental freaks would let our friends at Exxon sell it to China and Japan at a higher price than we want to pay.

I'd like to blame it all on Republicans, like the ones in Florida who refuse to take any steps whatever to keep the oil off our shores ( or the industrial and agricultural waste that poison our inland waters) but even the President we elected in our naivete, thinking that he could be immune, has been tainted.

Oil corrupts. Big oil corrupts big time, whether it's in Nigeria, Venezuela or Iraq. It's corrupted us and has corrupted presidents since the Harding administration. But before you think I'm going into another partisan rant, think again. It's us - it's you who elect these people. It's the American people, the snickering snarky states of America looking for scapegoats while we support the Palins and the McCains and the Cheneys and the Bush's who tell us we need more oil and that we need only to disregard all prudence to get and use more of it and faster. Yes, they either bought or bamboozled Obama into thinking it was all so safe despite the shaky safety record and now they want you to forget that we all cooperated in eliminating all traces of safety standards -- you know, the things we've been dumb enough to see as "Communism." It's us, the soccer moms, the commuters, the SUV fashionistas who don't think past our daily concerns and laugh at the concept of giving a damn about the future. You wanted oil and you've got oil. Are you happy now?

NOTHING LIKE A GOOD DUMP TO CLEAR THE ROOM

If the document dump of 90,000+ pages by WikiLeaks revealed anything, there is a huge disparity between ‘truth’ versus the ‘official’ story. Shades of Vietnam? Although it will take weeks, perhaps months, to read, redact, and release the full dump, two themes have emerged that will remain essentially unchanged:

• The Bush/Cheney administration underestimated, shortchanged, and mismanaged the Afghan War as it underestimated, shortchanged, and mismanaged the Iraq War.

• Pakistan has never been an honest partner in the conflict. As Pakistan pocketed billions in economic and military aid, its secret intelligence agency served as a clearinghouse for Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgents.

If I were the President facing an unfixable war, what would I do?  Find a way to let the truth be told … and switch on the ceiling fan!

A CONTEST OF MADMEN FOR THE PRIMACY OF THE SEWER

By Octopus

If the title of this post caught your attention, you have come to right place. The art of writing an audience-grabbing headline is one of the first lessons learned in Journalism 101 and a convention born in the Gilded Age of the late 19th Century. Yellow journalism is a derisive term that has become synonymous with lurid and sensational headlines, scare- and scandal-mongering, and journalistic misconduct. When discussing the failings of contemporary journalism, the era of the yellow press is likely to be invoked. The criticisms are valid because the features of yellow journalism continue to live and thrive in our modern mass media. Before I continue, perhaps I should give this post a less presupposing title:

Yellow Journalism in the Age of Cable News

Although elusive to definition, most historians agree on the signature traits of yellow journalism:

• Sensational or misleading headlines “that screamed excitement about comparatively unimportant news” (Mott); a “variety of topics reported on the front page, including news of politics, war, international diplomacy, sports, and society” (Campbell);

• A “lavish use of pictures, many of them without significance” (Mott); “bold and experimental layouts … enhanced by the use of color” (Campbell)

• “Imposters and frauds of various kinds” (Mott); “a tendency to rely on anonymous sources, particularly in dispatches of leading reporters” (Campbell);

• A “more or less ostentatious sympathy with the underdog … with campaigns against abuses suffered by the common people” (Mott); “a fearless and efficient instrument for the exposure of public wrongdoing” (Campbell);

• A “hearty indulgence in self-congratulation” (Campbell) to drive circulation and sales, but not necessarily serve the public interest with accurate or newsworthy stories.

Originally coined by Ervin Wardman of the New York Press, the term ‘yellow journalism’ has never explicitly been defined, although popular accounts attribute the term to a comic strip character nicknamed the ‘Yellow Kid’ drawn by cartoonist Richard F. Outcault. Yellow journalism begins with the competitive rivalry between two publishing legends, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

When Pulitzer bought the New York World in 1883, he introduced provocative headlines, pictures, games, and novelties to attract readers and boost circulation. Although Pulitzer was certainly an ambitious and aggressive newspaper entrepreneur, his motives were not entirely self-serving. Pulitzer also believed in journalism as a civic responsibility whose mission is to improve society. In an era marked by immigration, labor unrest, abuses of power, and injustice, Pulitzer transformed the World into the dominant metropolitan daily of New York City … and the leading voice of social reform.

During his student years at Harvard, William Randolph Hearst read and admired the World. When Hearst inherited the San Francisco Examiner from his father in 1887, he resolved to turn it into a similarly engaging tabloid with editorial and layout innovations borrowed from Pulitzer. The Examiner featured garish headlines, crime stories cast as morality plays, crusades against public corruption, and scantily clad pinups. By 1895 and flushed with success, Hearst set his sights on new markets and acquired a penny paper called the New York Journal.

Virtually overnight, the contest between the World and the Journal devolved into a clash of America’s most famous newspaper titans. In the fierce rough-and-tumble rivalries typical of the Gilded Age, each tried to surpass the other with ever more garish headlines and self-congratulatory boasting. In response to competition from the Journal, Pulitzer dropped the price of the World to a penny to drive Hearst out of business. In retaliation, Hearst raided Pulitzer’s staff including Richard Outcault, creator of the ‘Yellow Kid.’

In short order, yellow journalism spread to Boston, Chicago, Denver, and beyond. The staid establishment tabloids of the era denounced the excesses of the yellow press, as evidenced in this 1906 commentary by Harper’s Weekly:

”We may talk about the perils incident to the concentration of wealth, about the perils flowing from a disregard of fiduciary responsibility, about abuses of privilege, about exploiting the government for private advantage; but all these menaces, great as they are, are nothing compared with the deliberate, persistent, artful, purchased endeavor to pervert and vitiate the public judgment.”

Sound familiar? Even in simpler times, critics called attention to the presumed malevolence of media to shape public opinion, a concern still shared a century later. Despite its flamboyant and checkered history, Campbell acknowledges the contributions of a genre that transformed American society and culture:

”It was a lively, provocative, swaggering style of journalism well suited to an innovative and expansive time – a period when the United States first projected its military power beyond the Western Hemisphere in a sustained manner.”

All told, yellow journalism has been described as irritating yet irresistible, imaginative yet frivolous, aggressive yet self-indulgent, and activist but arrogant. These historical accounts are useful in understanding it’s contemporary reincarnations. Against this background, perhaps the more pressing questions to ask ourselves are: What has remained the same? What has changed? Should we be concerned?

To find examples of yellow journalism in contemporary media, we need look no further than supermarket tabloids brimming with stories of alien abductions and lurid celebrity gossip. The genre has migrated from print media to the Internet as embodied in these headlines at the Huffington Post:

Ellen Page Peed In Bucket, Composted Her Urine

Stunning Lingerie Model WILL Run Naked After World Cup Loss

'Nazi Octopus' Slain By Argentine TV Host In World Cup Revenge

As yellow journalists dispense ‘frivolities and slush,’ the last signature trait of the genre is impenitence and a stubborn refusal to be held accountable. Rarely, if ever, will yellow journalists acknowledge their errors, excesses, or indiscretions. These survey results sum up the state of contemporary journalism:

According to the Columbia Journalism Review:

• 70% of respondents believe journalists are doing a ‘poor’ job of correcting their mistakes;

• 91% say newsrooms need more honesty and openness in addressing editorial errors;

• 40% accuse reporters of hiding their mistakes.

According to the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

• 73% of respondents are skeptical about the accuracy of news;

• 85% believe newspapers ‘over-dramatize’ stories to grab attention and audience share;

• 59% say newspapers are more motivated by profit than serving the public interest.

Has anything changed from the Gilded Age to the present? Not according to these surveys. Yellow journalism is not some long deceased ancestor from a bygone era but living offspring born of the same DNA; and no cable news channel typifies the genre better than Fox News.

”Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox. And this balance here has been completely reversed. The thing that sustains a strong Fox network if the thing that undermines a strong Republican party” (David Frum, March 23, 2010).

How ironic! Here is George Bush’s former speechwriter accusing a conservative news network of being the tail that wags the dog. More than a tacit admission of partisan bias, Frum has the temerity to regard Fox News as a dedicated mouthpiece for the Republican Party and the naivety to overlook the prerogatives of independent media operating within the framework of free enterprise. Fox News is far more likely to put commercial self-interest above loyalty, and why should Frum presume otherwise! Furthermore, how does a biased and partisan news network – especially in the employ of powerful interests - better serve the public? According to Howell Rains, former executive editor of the New York Times:

[Fox News] has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalism since World War II … Why has our profession, through its general silence – or only spasmodic protest – helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in it [sic] conclusions and biased in its gestalt?

For Howell Rains, the answer lies in economics, in the collapse of print journalism, and steep losses in audience share at CNN, CBS, ABC, and NBC. Even Roger Ailes, chief architect of the Fox News stratagem, boasts about seeing himself as a producer of ratings rather than as a journalist, that audience share is his only yardstick.

Night after night on Fox News, under-educated former disc jockeys with scarcely a college course on their resumé expound on every conceivable topic – politics, economics, foreign affairs, energy, religion, and public morality. These bellicose, arrogant, and shameless clowns weave delusional narratives about how government death panels will kill your grandmother, how liberals will seize your guns and property, how a sinister art deco plot will subvert capitalism and corrupt your kids. Their daily fulminations are rife with fabrications, misinformation, and outright lies.

Hannity and Beck are modern analogues of the charlatans and fraudsters that once characterized the yellow press. When we catch them in the act of dissembling, they reflexively lash out when criticized, demonize their opponents, or feign innocence by claiming the mantle of entertainment. Perhaps more to the point, they are the ‘yellow kids’ of broadcast journalism. From the Gilded Age to the present, has anything changed?


Media Consolidation

Historians debunk the myth that Hearst had provoked the Spanish-American War.  There were thousands of independently owned newspapers with close ties to rural communities, and the vast majority of Americans did not live in population centers served by the yellow press.  Thus, no tabloid had the reach or power to influence national opinion (Campbell).

By 1975, however, two-thirds of all independently owned newspapers and one-third of all independently owned TV stations had disappeared. Twenty-two companies now control 70% of national newspaper circulation, and ten companies own broadcast networks that reach 85% of the American public. Five companies dominate the cable news network segment – the same ones that own the top Internet news sites.

What has changed from the Gilded Age to the present? Media consolidation has concentrated far more power among too few players, which now have the means to dominate markets and “pervert and vitiate the public judgment.”  Sadly, the latest Nielson ratings confirm this impression. Of the top 30 programs on primetime cable news, Fox occupies the top 10 slots:

By far, Fox News commands the dominant position in the cable news segment, which gives it a powerful platform to push a hard line partisan agenda and move public opinion. If Roger Ailes understands yellow journalism, he also understands his audience - those undiscerning viewers who forgo critical thinking and prefer to have their morality pre-packaged in church pews and their politics shrink-wrapped on the nightly news.

Should we be concerned? You betcha! We have long known how media can be manipulated – by paying journalists to promote a corporate or industry viewpoint, by hiring PR firms to feed stories to the press, by faking news with maliciously edited videotape, by using smear tactics to destroy reputations, by repeating hot-button weasel words to propagate suspicion and fear, by leveraging the powers of government to shape public opinion and sell a war. We understand intuitively how often our news networks have failed in their mission and betrayed our trust.

Furthermore, we understand intuitively that today’s viewers are far less informed – and more willing to be suckered by demagogues and propagandists - than a generation ago. The Center for Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland tested this hypothesis. During a seven-month study, researchers asked news consumers a series of questions about the Iraq War and world opinion of American foreign policy. What they measured: A disturbing pattern of wrong answers, errors, and misconceptions by cable news source:

Surprisingly, differences in party affiliation and educational attainment do not fully account for these results. Among Republicans, those who got their news from cable networks had a 25% higher error rate compared with those who got their news from PBS/NPR. For viewers with a college education, the error rate for cable news consumers averaged 27%, compared with only 10% for patrons of PBS/NPR. Clearly, cable news networks are failing to inform the public, and the worst by far is Fox.

In closing, I leave you with the following quotations:

"You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country, but we keep going backwards. We have become more racist. This was their doing. Breitbart put that together, misrepresenting what I was saying, and Fox carried it" (Shirley Sherrod, July 21, 2010).

In his keynote address to the National Conference on Media Reform (November 8, 2003), Bill Moyers warned of a “quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to … the most powerful interests in the world.”  I leave the last word to our friend and colleague at the Swash Zone, Bloggingdino, who recently said (11:31 AM, July 21, 2010):

“I'm reminded of William Shirer's account in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich of just how strongly a non-stop stream of propaganda affected his own judgment … he [Shirer] found it hard to discount completely even the sort of offal that his journalistic instincts told him must be false, mainly because it was coming through vital information channels and being repeated by everyone. Amplification and bad argument from authority, in other words, worked together to create a toxic discursive bubble inside of which an entire nation was forced to live and breathe.”

That’s the way it is in 2010. American news journalism has finally fulfilled the ambitions of its progenitors by turning itself into “a contest of madmen for the primacy of the sewer.” Good night and good luck.


References:
ABC News, David Frum on GOP: Now We Work for Fox.
W. Joseph Campbell (2003), Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, Praeger.
Daily Source, Current Problems in the Media.
Global Issues, Media Manipulation.
Huffington Post, Cable News Ratings: Top 30 Programs In Q2 2010.
Media Matters, Shirley Sherrod: I'm a Victim of Breitbart, Fox 'Racism'.
Frank Luther Mott (1962), American Journalism: A History: 1690-1960, 3d ed., Macmillan.
Bill Moyers, Keynote Address to the National Conference on Media Reform.
Howell Raines, Why don't honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?