journalism

"It’s easy enough to find reporting in major US news outlets describing the hardships many Americans are facing. But lamenting inequality is one thing, and acknowledging—or, God forbid, highlighting—efforts to rectify it are very much another for corporate media."

"...1995. Abrams was on the Charlie Rose Show with Allan Nairn, who is one of the best and most knowledgeable reporters about US foreign policy. And Nairn said that George Bush I—this was, again, 1995—had talked about putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity. And Nairn said, like, “That’s a good idea, but if you’re serious, you’re going to have to be even-handed, and so you’re going to have to prosecute people like this guy that I’m on the show with, Elliott Abrams.” And Elliott Abrams found this idea preposterous, and chuckled about it, and said, like, “Well, you know, if you want to do that, that would mean putting all the American officials who won the Cold War in the dock.” And that actually is a pretty fair point from Abrams. It’s not like he somehow fooled Ronald Reagan, that he fooled George W. Bush. I mean, they knew what he was doing. He was doing what they wanted him to do. And this is US foreign policy; this is what it’s like. There are doves and there are hawks, but the difference between them is not that great. And if you were going to put the hawks on trial, if you’re going to be honest about it, you’re going to have to put a lot of the doves there, too."

"...viral video company... In the Now, was taken off Facebook because of its indirect connection to the Russian government... The Facebook page of Voice of America, the US government’s main broadcast outlet... doesn’t seem to be any acknowledgement at all that VoA is connected to the US government—just the slogan, “The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth”...” If you’re thinking that Facebook—90 percent of whose customers are not in the United States—should treat Russian-backed outlets differently than US-backed outlets because the US supports peace and democracy, or doesn’t use social media to try to manipulate other nations…. Well, this is why it’s important to get your information from a variety of sources."

"Election Focus 2020: The obvious questions the endorsement raises are how it might influence Biden’s military policy, and perhaps whether such an endorsement would be demotivating for antiwar voters in Biden’s voter base."

"Whatever inflammatory rhetoric North Korean officials may or may not use in the face of perceived attacks on the country, journalists ought to remind their audiences that North Korean government officials are no more suicidal than any other country’s leaders."

"The New York Times purported to explain how the Taliban managed to “outlast a superpower through nearly 19 years of grinding war,” without examining at all how the US contributed to reviving and sustaining the Taliban insurgency."

"After Curfew, Detroit Police Act Aggressively to Disperse Protesters Who Refused to Leave” (Detroit Free Press, 5/31/20) “Minneapolis Officers Use More Aggressive Tactics Against Protesters as Rallies Flare Around US” (NBC News, 5/31/20) “An Agitated Trump Encourages Governors to Use Aggressive Tactics on Protesters” (CNN, 6/1/20)“An “Police Turn More Aggressive Against Protesters and Bystanders Alike, Adding to Disorder” (Washington Post, 5/31/20) “After Curfew, Protesters Are Again Met With Strong Police Response in New York City” (New York Times, 6/4/20)..."

"Reuters routinely buries information that would badly damage the reputation of US allies in the Americas. Whether those allies are bureaucrats from the Organization of American States and the dictatorship they helped install in Bolivia (FAIR.org, 12/17/19), violent protesters in Nicaragua (FAIR.org, 8/23/18) or Venezuelan politicians who support lethal US sanctions on their own country (FAIR.org, 6/14/19), the London-based news service can be counted on to cover for them. In the case of Ecuador, a servile US ally since President Lenín Moreno took office in 2017, Reuters has ignored efforts to prevent Moreno’s strongest opponents from participating in the presidential and legislative elections scheduled for 2021."

"Why would the US government care so much about such a seemingly innocuous app? The reasons for Trump’s rage are at once comical and frightening. On the one hand, Trump has found what might appear to be a random media issue to deflect from his various problems (plummeting poll numbers, rising Covid cases, slumping economy), a phenomenon that lends itself to ribbing from satirists and talkshow hosts. But the deeper problem is that he is leveraging his executive position to fight and try to take control of a media group with the excuse of its being foreign, which is both a threat to free speech and free press, and adds to his administration’s pugnacious Sinophobia... The reason he has fixated on TikTok, it seems clear, is because of its reported use by young online activists to organize spurious reservations to his Tulsa rally—contributing to his humiliation when the sparse attendance failed to match his boastful expectations. Trump’s use of the power of the federal government to punish media outlets he perceives as having crossed him is part of a disturbing pattern of contempt for the First Amendment’s protection of the press..."

"...We live in a society where some people have a great deal of power, and most people have very little. And that this works out well for the few and not so well for the many. This plays out in the political realm with the few using their power to support candidates who would maintain that power. In the past..[news] outlets told us very little about which candidates were beholden to whose interests,,, ensuring that few people outside the donor class were aware of who was doing the donating. A funny thing happened in the 21st century: The development of digital technologies made it much cheaper to create and distribute information... this ability allows us to have conversations about politics that we’ve always needed and never have had until now... These discussions of candidates’ financial and policy histories can look like negativity—because it’s seldom good news when a line can be drawn between where politicians gets their resources and how they do their jobs. But the possibility of picking nominees based on who can best serve the interests of voters rather than donors is really one of the most positive developments in modern politics."

"International opinion largely opposes Donald Trump’s current and threatened intervention in Venezuela, but that’s not the impression you get US corporate news media, who appear to be all-in with Trump’s push for the ouster of democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro... In reality, 75 percent of the world’s countries reject the US anointing of Juan Guaidó—whom most Venezuelans hadn’t heard of when Trump declared him their leader. And the UN has formally condemned US sanctions on Venezuela, which a special rapporteur compared to a “medieval siege.”...Corporate media’s fealty to the idea that the United States has the right if not the duty to overthrow other countries’ leadership to suit our—some of our—interests doesn’t begin and end with Venezuela. But the history of coverage of the country is especially illustrative of what it looks like when elite media work strenuously to maintain the storyline on an “official enemy.”"

"WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should never have been punished for working with a whistleblower to expose war crimes.... The material exposed atrocities perpetrated by the US military, as well as other disgraceful acts—like US diplomats strategizing on how to undermine elected governments out of favor with Washington, spying on official US allies and bullying poor countries into paying wildly exorbitant prices for life-saving drugs... The point of journalism is to expose horrific crimes like this so that the powerful people who order them pay legal consequences, not the ones who expose them."

"More people are coming to consider that racist policing cannot be ‘reformed’ with an occasional lawsuit and some implicit-bias classes."

"It’s vital to have a discussion of such abuses, backed by $3 billion in annual US military aid to Israel. Instead, we got another debate on how to label Ilhan Omar. Which was exactly her point."

"In order to have a legal arrest, you need probable cause to believe that the person committed a crime. And these snatches, by unidentified federal officials in unmarked vehicles, snatching peaceful protesters off the streets, transporting them to unknown locations without informing them of why they’re being arrested, and later releasing them with no record of their arrest, violates the law. And this “proactive” arrest that the Department of Homeland Security is intending to carry out, violates the Fourth Amendment, which requires that, as I said, an arrest be supported by probable cause.... There is nothing in the law that allows “proactive arrest.”"

"In major-paper opinion coverage of the Singapore summit, the people with the most to lose and gain from the summit, the people whose nation was actually being discussed—Koreans—were almost uniformly ignored. Three major US papers—the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal—had only one Korean-authored op-ed out of 41 opinion pieces on the subject of the Korean peace talks.... The Post had 23 total opinion pieces, the Times had 16 and the Journal four. The only op-ed by a Korean was a pro-summit piece on June 12 by Moon Chung-in, an aide to South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Of the 41 editorials or op-eds only four (9 percent), were broadly positive about the Trump/Kim summit, 29 (70 percent) were negative and eight (21 percent) were mixed or ambiguous. The full list, current as of June 19, is here.... As FAIR noted in May (5/7/18), there’s a huge chasm between how recent peace efforts are being received in ostensible US ally South Korea and how they’re being covered in US media."

"The Trump administration in April began enforcing a “zero-tolerance” immigration policy that has resulted in thousands of immigrant children being separated from their families. On June 18, ProPublica released an audio recording from inside a Border Patrol detention facility; children separated from parents and family members could be heard crying in the background, while a six-year-old girl from El Salvador begged for someone to let her call her aunt. The recording reminded the public of the undeniable reality that immigration policy has deep and lasting effects on actual people. However, as corporate media dove into this story, the voices of those impacted most by immigration policy were drowned out by soundbites from congress members and Trump administration officials... The few immigrants and civil rights advocates who were cited often expressed the crucial point that those coming into the United States are generally trying to escape imminent violence or political instability... Corporate TV news programs amplified the voices of the federal government while neglecting to show the lives and tell the stories of those affected by federal policy. The programs framed the story as whether or not families who try to cross the US/Mexico border should be separated, rather than exploring the causes and consequences of the current situation. In their coverage, the lived experiences of these immigrants are reduced to leverage for US politicians."

"The public could soon learn more about the FBI’s practice of impersonating documentary film crews as part of its criminal investigations. The nonprofit Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records about this technique. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia March 1 rejected the FBI’s attempt to keep those records private."

"I disclosed that I had been involved in discussions "regarding the formation of a new organization designed to support independent journalists and groups such as WikiLeaks under attack by the US and other governments."... Its name is Freedom of the Press Foundation...The primary impetus for the formation of this group was to block the US government from ever again being able to attack and suffocate an independent journalistic enterprise the way it did with WikiLeaks. Government pressure and the eager compliance of large financial corporations (such as Visa, Master Card, Bank of America, etc.) has - by design - made it extremely difficult for anyone to donate to WikiLeaks, while many people are simply afraid to directly support the group (for reasons I explained here)."

"Several weeks ago, I wrote about the steps taken by the US government to pressure large corporations to choke off the finances and other means of support for WikiLeaks in retaliation for the group's exposure of substantial government deceit, wrongdoing and illegality. Because WikiLeaks has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime, I wrote: "that the US government largely succeeded in using extra-legal and extra-judicial means to cripple an adverse journalistic outlet is a truly consequential episode.""

"Finding that the need for police scrutiny outweighs officer privacy, a New York appeals court rejected Tuesday a challenge from the city’s largest police union that would have blocked public access to body-cam footage of three police-related shootings. Representing roughly 36,000 [police] officers, the PBA [Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association] hired one of President Donald Trump’s personal law firms for the fight...“To hold otherwise would defeat the purpose of the body-worn-camera program to promote increased transparency and public accountability,” a three-judge panel of the New York Appellate Division’s First Department unanimously found. The Washington-based advocacy group Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press led more than a dozen media organizations in... the fight..."

"Journalists covering the arrival of caravans of migrants from Central America along the U.S. southern border have faced harassment, additional screenings, and targeting by both U.S. and Mexican authorities."

"The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has documented at least five journalists who have been stopped on the U.S. side of the border since December 2018 in the course of doing their jobs covering the migrant caravan. Some have been stopped numerous times, where they are put in situations that could threaten their privacy, reporting processes, and confidential sources."

"New York’s freelance journalists won a favorable ruling Tuesday when a judge refused to force a reporter to reveal her source for a story on a securities fraud case... The case attracted the attention of Yale Law School and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which filed briefs advocating for the case to be unsealed."

"Nothing is more vital than enabling true transparency and adversarial journalism, and preventing further assaults on them."

"CoreCivic and GEO Group's revenues totaled a combined $4.1 billion last year, and detention contracts made up about a quarter of that. Both companies are contending with increased competition and declines in their prison businesses, but that's been offset by growth in the detention business... The ACLU... said the expansion of migrant detention in recent years has been driven by private business, not by the federal government."

"The largest share of migrant detainees are held in longer-term centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Currently, about 52,000 migrants are held in ICE custody. A majority of them — 71%, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center — are housed in facilities operated by private prison companies. Immigrant activists say such secrecy has enabled the detention industry to grow with little oversight."

"In October, David Beasley, head of the U.N. food agency, tweeted a cheeky congratulations to Musk for reportedly earning $36 billion in a single day. "1/6 of your one-day increase would save 42 million lives that are knocking on famine's door," he wrote... Musk tweeted: "If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it." ...Beasley quickly clarified that his earlier tweet referred to feeding "people on the brink of starvation" and not solving world hunger, he invited Musk to meet "anywhere—Earth or space" to discuss the potential donation. So far, Musk has made no commitments to the agency. Still... How much of a dent would $6 billion make when it comes to feeding millions? ...WFP raised $8.4 billion last year, yet the global food crisis has only worsened. In fact, since Musk and Beasley first started their Twitter conversation, the total number of people at risk of famine has risen to 45 million... Elon Musk asked Twitter followers if he should sell Tesla shares. They said yes."

"As children under 5 wait for FDA approval of a COVID-19 vaccine, some kids still need to catch up on routine vaccines for other diseases, including measles, mumps, and meningitis. According to UNICEF and the WHO, 23 million children globally missed out on basic childhood vaccines that are typically received through routine health services in 2020. Some children in the U.S. caught up last year, but the vaccination rate was still 7 percent lower than years before the pandemic. That’s according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

"The mission of NPR is to work in partnership with Member Stations to create a more informed public — one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas and cultures. To accomplish our mission, we produce, acquire, and distribute programming that meets the highest standards of public service in journalism and cultural expression; we represent our members in matters of their mutual interest; and we provide satellite interconnection for the entire public radio system."

"We are confident any review of our programming and underwriting practices will confirm NPR's adherence to these rules [...] We have worked for decades with the FCC in support of noncommercial educational broadcasters who provide essential information, educational programming, and emergency alerts to local communities across the United States."

"When was the last time the US Marines were called upon to defend the homeland, in the homeland? Perhaps in the War of 1812 and arguably in the Civil War, but otherwise deployed abroad ever since. Missions include toppling reformist governments in this hemisphere and confronting Middle Eastern towel heads who supposedly hate our freedoms, presumably including our constitutional right to mow down fellow Americans with licensed large-caliber weaponry... Perhaps I’m being unnecessarily harsh, but couldn’t NPR just sometimes question what all this preparedness, both domestic and foreign, is about?...NPR’s due diligence is missing in action. No matter what military or veteran hardship story NPR covers, there’s no questioning of assumptions that our armed forces are a force for good, everywhere in the world.... The estimated 1000 or so US military bases scattered throughout 156 countries..."

"On November 8, 2002...National Public Radio’s All Things Considered aired a story by longtime correspondent Tom Gjelten. “A war against Iraq would begin with a bombing campaign, and the resources for that phase of action are largely in place already,” he reported. The tone was reassuring: “Defense officials are confident the U.N. Timeline will not get in their way. For one thing, they’re going ahead in the meantime with war preparations. Says one senior military officer, ‘When the order does come, we have to be ready to rock ’n’ roll.’” It was a notable phrase for a highranking officer at the Pentagon to use with reference to activities that were sure to kill large numbers of people. The comment did not meet with any critical response; none of the news report’s several hundred words offered a perspective contrary to the numbing language that distanced listeners from the human catastrophes of actual war. Such reporting is safe. Chances are slim that it will rankle government sources, news executives, network owners, advertisers or—in the case of “public broadcasting”—large underwriters. While NPR seems more and more to stand for “National Pentagon Radio,” objections from listeners have apparently mattered little to those in charge. This should be no surprise. NPR’s president and CEO, Kevin Klose, once served as director of the International Broadcasting Bureau, the U.S. government agency responsible for the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Radio and Television Marti."

"Producing features on a diverse range of civic and political activities is far below NPR's and PBS's funder-friendly range of entertaining programs. On weekends, to counter the commercial vapidity and the ditto-head Sunday interview shows, PBS and NPR are just not there. They simply do not look for, or listen to, the rumble of people who are on the ground, acting with conscience, organizing to break through power. Meanwhile, smaller programs-such as Democracy Now with Amy Goodman-are picking up the slack of these larger outlets, despite their comparably modest budgets and staff size."

"In the past few years, listeners to National Public Radio have been hearing frequent announcements that “America’s natural gas” is an underwriter of NPR programming. These spots, created by America’s Natural Gas Alliance, an industry group, claim that increased use of gas is reducing greenhouse emissions and making the world a greener place... There is very little discussion anywhere in the media about the desperate necessity for very rapid, very deep reductions in greenhouse emissions worldwide if we are to keep the rise in global atmospheric temperature to less than 2° C—the threshold beyond which warming could go into unstoppable overdrive. One can listen to countless hours of news reports, including those on Morning Edition and All Things Considered, without hearing anything about the impossibility of achieving those necessary reductions if the world does not resolve to leave a large share—perhaps two-thirds or more—of global fossil fuel reserves in the ground."

"In this way, we in the U.S., who may otherwise be moved to care about the fate of millions in Yemen whose lives are being upended with our own government’s complicity, are lulled into complacency, with our comfortable feeling about our nation’s inherent goodness fully intact. The result is that those in power in our ostensibly democratic government are given a free hand to aid and abet such atrocities as the near-total destruction of Yemen without the fear of any reprisal or approbation."

"In her recent book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate... Naomi Klein notes, Corporations and their allies in the big environmental organizations know that leaving most fossil fuels, including natural gas, in the ground in order to stop runaway warming would deal a serious if not mortal blow to big-business-as-usual, so they will never go along with it. We also can’t seriously expect the corporate media to report reliably on this situation. But we can and should demand that NPR and other public media be fully supported by public funds so that they can declare independence from the corporate world and get some relief from their gas problem."

"I certainly consume NPR news more than any other mainstream source, usually listening to it at least twice daily, though I abhor its coverage of international events. For these reasons, and with the reader’s forbearance, I have chosen to single NPR out to look at how we in the U.S. are collectively misled into ignoring or accepting our own government’s atrocities. This week, NPR has had some significant segments on the world’s refugee crisis, the worst since World War II."

"On any given day, you can listen to the news on CNN or National Public Radio, then tune in to a Pacifica station. You would think you were hearing reports from different Planets. We inhabit the same planet, but we see it through different lenses."

"While Syria is always mentioned in these segments and gets much mention on NPR in general, there is barely a mention of the refugee crisis emanating from Yemen. And, this is a big omission, for as the International Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) has recently reported, Yemen had more people displaced last year due to conflict than any other country on earth. Thus, 2.2 million people were displaced by the armed conflict in Yemen in 2015, a figure which accounts for over 25% of the 8.6 million people displaced around the globe due to conflict last year. In addition to Yemen’s refugee crisis, the IDMC also notes that over 14 million Yemenis are on the verge of starvation as a result of the current conflict."

"I never thought I’d be the target of an NPR attack piece. Through my twenties I even looked to NPR as an outlet full of good, progressive, thoughtful reporting – You know, the soothing voices occasionally interrupted by music no one really listens to but that sounds good between soft-spoken ivy league journalists over the age of 50. Everything about NPR subtly reinforced the idea, “Everything is fine. You’re probably a middle to upper class white person or you hope to be one day, and that’s just great. Everything is fine.”.. Then I woke up. About the time NPR was avoiding Occupy Wall Street – or when they did cover it, acting like those of us who supported it were brainless hippies without a point or at least none that would fit easily into the lives of suburbanites with two kids, one cat, and a robust retirement account. In hindsight I should’ve woken up sooner. I should’ve seen the truth about the time most NPR shows were pushing for war in Iraq, buying into the WMD lie. Or maybe I should’ve realized the truth when Kevin Klose took over as President of NPR in 1998. Klose came straight from a nice seat as director of the US Information Agency, described as “a United States agency devoted to ‘public diplomacy’ (AKA propaganda).”"

"In her five-minute interview with Ursula Wilder, a CIA psychologist whose job there is debriefing returning spies, NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly (their alleged National Security Correspondent) spoke of what makes someone who reveals state secrets tick. Kelly failed big-time to probe Wilder about whether she ever thought an insider might ever have a patriotic motivation to inform the public of illegal behavior on the part of the agency. Based on Wilders’ profile of leakers, the answer would surely have been No, but it sure would have been nice to ask. Instead, the official story is simple. Each and every leaker, Wilder maintained, suffers from some DSM psychopathy, such as impulsiveness, narcissism or drug addiction, often compounded by exigencies such as marital discord or gambling debts. Leaks all stem from character defects, Wilder says—and Kelly doesn’t contradict—not to blowback by thwarted careerists or misdeeds the agency wants to disappear....If they’re stressed, it’s likely that their personal lives are out of control, their problems self-inflicted. Any time you have a problem with power, the problem is you. Hear for yourself..."

"...The only discussion I have found that NPR gave to Yemen in the context of the world refugee crisis was one, solitary piece back on May 11, and that piece was very telling in what it refused to say about the causes for Yemen’s mass displacement problem... The result of this disproportionate news coverage is that the listener could very well miss out entirely on any discussion of such issues as U.S.-backed crimes in Yemen. And, even if one does hear a segment or two on this matter, this issue will be easily forgotten and certainly not taken as seriously or treated as urgently as the misdeeds of the U.S.’s ostensible enemies, such as Syria’s Assad government, to which NPR gives nearly obsessive attention."

"Going to where the silence is. That is the responsibility of a journalist: giving a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful."

"We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly."

"You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion."

"WikiLeaks has achieved far more than what The New York Times and The Washington Post in their celebrated incarnations did. No newspaper has come close to matching the secrets and lies of power that Assange and Snowden have disclosed. That both men are fugitives is indicative of the retreat of liberal democracies from principles of freedom and justice. Why is WikiLeaks a landmark in journalism? Because its revelations have told us, with 100 per cent accuracy, how and why much of the world is divided and run."

"But for the media to name their coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq the same as what the Pentagon calls it—everyday seeing 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'—you have to ask: 'If this were state controlled media, how would it be any different?'"

"When I began as a journalist, especially as a foreign correspondent, the press in the UK was conservative and owned by powerful establishment forces, as it is now. But the difference compared to today is that there were spaces for independent journalism that dissented from the received 'wisdom' of authority. That space has now all but closed and independent journalists have gone to the internet, or to a metaphoric underground."

"Journalists can help people by telling the truth, or by as much truth as they can find, and acting not as agents of governments, of power, but of people. That is real journalism. The rest is specious and false."