No Questions Asked

A few interesting articles.

The first focuses on the fighting that killed hundreds outside of Najaf. Patrick Cockburn reports from Baghdad that “there are growing suspicions in Iraq that the official story of the battle outside Najaf between a messianic Iraqi cult and the Iraqi security forces supported by the US, in which 263 people were killed and 210 wounded, is a fabrication. The heavy casualties may be evidence of an unpremeditated massacre.”

The second article is by Juan Cole and describes the dangers of Bush’s “anti-Iran fatwa” as Iranians prepare for a pilgrimage to the cities of Karbala and Najaf. The administration declared it open season on Iranians in Iraq when he gave the order for American troops to “kill or capture” any Iranian intelligence agents they discovered in the country.

Cole asks this pertinent question: “Given Bush’s new directive, how will U.S. troops distinguish between innocent Iranian devotees and spies? What if U.S. troops kill pilgrims in a mistaken belief that they are covert operatives? Leaving aside whether U.S. law authorizes such a broad, vague use of deadly force against foreign nationals, which is unclear, Shiite religious sensibilities would be inflamed in both Iraq and Iran, furthering the potential for a widening conflict.”

It is a recipe for disaster.

Let’s stop this impending conflict with Iran. Contact the Democratic leadership (see contact information below taken from United for Peace and Justice website: http://www.unitedforpeace.org/) and urge them to stop the antagonistic stance towards Iran. Join a peace movement group (my current favorite is Code Pink, Women for Peace, http://www.codepink4peace.org/).

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, U.S. House Democratic Leader
sf.nancy@mail.house.gov
California office voice: 415-556-4802; Washington office voice: 202-225-4965

Sen. Harry Reid, U.S. Senate Democratic Leader
Online contact form
Nevada office voice: 775-882-7343; Washington office voice: 202-224-3542

Gov. Howard Dean, Chair, Democratic National Committee
Online contact form
Washington office voice: 202-803-8000

Sen. Charles Schumer, Chair, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
Online contact form
Washington office voice: 202-224-2447

Rep. Rahm Emanuel, Chair, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
Online contact form
Washington office voice: 202-863-1500

It is extremely important that we pay close attention to the news because the administration is attempting to once again pull us into a war. This time the country is Iran and the methods used to convince the public that Iran is “a bad guy” — as our president would ridiculously label a country — are exactly the same methods the administration used to convince us of the need to go to war in Iraq.

Some news reports provide us with hints that the US is working toward building support for a war by demonizing the country and its leadership. This attempt started months ago, with news media misrepresenting reports about Iran’s weapons capabilities and what the president of Iran said.

MediaChannel.org has an excellent piece by Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force Col. who has studied propaganda and military strategy. Here’s what Gardiner says: Why has the White House created an interagency working group whose mission is to build outrage in the world about Iran? The whole effort is so much in the pattern of message preparation for Gulf II that I am left concerned.

In other words, not only does it look as if there are military preparations for striking Iran, it looks as if the White House is doing public opinion preparations for a strike on Iran. Three items stand out this week.

Similarly, Information Clearinghouse has Scott Ritter talking about the bigger picture — a total war that includes Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

We claim to have learned our lessons from the way we were misled in the buildup to the war in Iraq. Let’s not allow it to happen again.

Call your member of Congress and tell them to keep their hands off Iran. Write a letter to your newspaper editor. Remind everyone you see that we were deceived about weapons of mass destruction just a few years ago and that the same methods used to convince us of the need to go to war in Iraq are being used again. Let’s stop this madness before it goes any further.

This is a message by the web master:

Lisa will be at Fordham University in New York City tomorrow evening to discuss the issues covered in her book.

Here is the information on Fordham University’’s web site:

Alumna to Analyze Post-9/11 News Coverage

Veteran journalist Lisa Finnegan (GED ’03), returns to Fordham to analyze American news coverage since 9/11, the subject of her new book, No Questions Asked (Praeger Publishers, 2006), on Tuesday, Jan. 23 at 7:30 p.m. in Room 521 at the Lowenstein Center, Lincoln Center campus.

No Questions Asked compares the U.S. media reporting on post-9/11 events, such as the Iraq war and the 2004 presidential elections, with international media coverage of the same events. The book analyzes how patriotism, fear, obedience, indifference and propaganda influenced news reporting during that timeline.

Finnegan, an award-winning journalist, has written for major newspapers and news services, and was the editor of Occupational Hazards Magazine. While a student at Fordham, she collaborated with Harold Takooshian, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at Fordham and president of the American Psychological Association Society for General Psychology, on a study about attitudes toward terrorism. Results of the study were published in the Fordham Law Journal as “The USA Patriot Act: Civil Liberties, The Media, and Public Opinion,” in May 2003.

The event is hosted by the Fordham Psychology Association and Psi Chi.

I just got back from the National Conference for Media Reform (sponsored by the Free Press) and I have to say, I am once again optimistic that we can regain the flow of information in our country.

What is obvious is there is a grassroots campaign to revitalize and to restructure the media in a way that will bring about more freedom of expression and debate and greater public understanding. More than 3,500 people attended the conference in Memphis to discuss everything from reducing payola in the radio industry to liberate the airwaves, to better educating journalists about their role in society.

And I am encouraged. The message I took out of the conference is that if we can’t change mainstream media then we will increase the influence and poplularity of the independent, so-called fringe media. We will fight one-sided stories as we have done for years by strongly blogging the truth, creating new places for people to find information and news and by pushing for independent news sources — like DemocracyNow! — to be made available throughout the country.

What I am most excited about is that academics are joining the fight. Journalism school professors and university deans are creating media literacy classes that will better educate their students about the news. Stony Brook University, for example, has created a class on media literacy program that all students will be requited to take. An educated consumer will help create change. If the public demands better news and broader coverage, then the mainstream media must change. If it doesn’t then it will not survive.

Check out Bill Moyer’s rowsing speech (Part 1 (YouTube) Part 2 (YouTube), All (QT) ) at the conference. You can also watch many of the panel discussions and presentations (you can listen to the audio of all sessions).

Be encouraged. Change takes time but change is on its way.

This is a review about Lisa’s book at Amazon.com

/Webmaster

Even before 9/11, I had been increasingly disturbed by the disconnection between the reporting of news in the USA and what I receive via my satellite connection from France, Germany and elsewhere. In the post 9/11 world, the gap in factual reporting and astute interpretation between US media and much of the rest of the world became positively bizarre. What could explain this cultural shift in news reporting, this apparent decay of the US Fourth Estate?

Lisa Finnegan has squarely addressed my bewilderment in her new book, No Questions Asked, itself an excellent example of reportage. The title says it all. In the fallout from 9/11 reporters and news analysts stopped asking questions. Better to say, they stopped asking hard questions, they stopped asking follow-up questions, they stopped asking embarrassing questions.

Why? Finnegan cites and documents the reasons and the trends.

Patriotism and groupthink. US Americans and their news reporters like much of the rest of the population were emotionally overwhelmed by the events of 9/11. They lost it, so to speak when it came to examining the causes, hard facts and political motivations surrounding this unheard of attack on the US homeland. Once lost, independence of perspective was next to impossible to regain. A quagmire of unqualified patriotism and groupthink suffocated independant thinking and inquiry. Under stress, the culture had shifted to blind survival values. Dissent, when not attacked as treason, was dismissed or omitted was slightly reported and relegated to the back pages. The media willingly and even eagerly accepted direction from the government on what to write and not write. Being the government’s mouthpiece was suddenly a virtuous thing to do.

Growing media monopoly. The culture of newsmaking and news selling had been in a process of transformation and consolidation. Media giants and moguls left little room for independent thinking when the emphasis is on profits in an enviornment of political, competitive and advertising pressures. Embarrassing questions sap power and cost money, as they often inquire into power and money. Cost cutting reduces time and resources for free and first hand investigation. Corporate and editorial policies are aligned to sell what they think people want to hear. They must bow to public opinion and so it is extremely important that they create it favorable to themselves. Post 9/11 reporting became a tug of war between broadcasting insecurity and promising security in the form of clear, easy answers. It delivered the poison and gave the recipe for the antidote in the same paragraph.

Gentrification of the newsroom. Finnegan also shows how news reporters themselves had changed culturally and socially. Through the first half of the 20th Century, US news reporters seemed to largely stem from the US working classes, with strong connections to the mainstream of the time, and possessed of considerable street sense. They smelled and instinctively distrusted political and corporate interests. Today many successful college educated writers and anchors have moved into upper class wealth and have few if any first hand experiences of the realities they could and should in many instances be reporting.

Tailor made news. Add to this, the “selling of the war.” Vast sums of public money have been used to hire public relations firms and professionals to not only spin the political priorities of the Bush administration but to actually write the news reports and articles to be distributed to media both home and abroad.

Sacrificing objectivity for access. Few of us with outside perspectives could resist the temptation to replace “embedded” with “in bed with” when discussing the construction of war reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reporters all but became part of the US military itself, while “unilaterals,” independently moving reporters were excluded and even fired upon by US forces. US Americans got to see a sanitized version of the war, which, as Finnegan points out in a magnificent metaphor, amounted to “seeing the war through a soda straw.” Foreign media and direct footage were carefully filtered and censored and the costs of the war in US and other casualties were deemed uninteresting. On the political scene access to administration news conferences was restricted to those who asked safe questions–troublemakers lost their credentials and were isolated from news sources. Language is continually reinvented to mask unpleasant realities. Collateral damage, insurgent, and the like, cover the nakedness of civilian gore and resistence.

The power of Finnegan’s analysis of the recent history, this cultural shift in media and news reporting, could perhaps be written off by some as a rant from the left. However, the author has carefully let the newspeople on all sides speak for themselves. The book is packed with quotations and reflections on the part of people who are household names in the USA: Rather, Chung, Maher. Blitzer, Amanpour, and numerous others. Despite the clear evidence of dereliction of the duty to ask questions, many are still likely to excuse themselves or blame other forces for their temerity and seduction than to apologize and address the issues. The core US value of “speaking up” here as elsewhere seems to be replaced by CYA.

In time, reality began to seep through the cracks. No WMDs, lots of real torture, flouting of the Geneva Convention, gutted constitutional rights, and above all the callous response to Katrina’s victims are starting to bring home the terrible lack of investigative mettle and the ability of the both the USA as a nation and its media to see and criticize themselves.Will this lesson be taught and learned and make a difference? Finnegan offers steps back to honesty, responsibility and sanity, but how do you fix a broken mirror…?

This is an update from the web master.

Lisa is not able to access the site for a few days since she is attending the Conference For Media reform.

 

The National Conference for Media Reform

Memphis, Tennessee | January 11-14, 2007