Our Truly Trivial Media

The other day Tutter posted the challenge to politicians to demand that the media ask them issue oriented questions. She also speculated what the response would be. I declare Corporate media officially dead. But, media is not dead. We are the media. Carry the message far and wide. Don't hold back.

With thanks to NativeTexan, I am posting an interview with Bobby Kennedy Jr. regarding this important issue:

http://www.sierrasummit2005.org/interviews/rfk.asp

Hey Everyone,

I received a letter this week, from the Princeton filibuster organizers and it is to you too, so here it is:

Dear Karen,

Thank you so much for your help in DC! The Democracy Cell Project kept us fed and supported, and we're very grateful for that. This unique effort wouldn't have happened without this sort of collaboration, and needless to say, we're glad it did. Thank you, too, for taking down our thoughts about what made Filibuster for Democracy so successful and making them available to others, so that the inspiration can spread!

--The Filbuster Organizers

personally signed by 14 of them--many of whom, it would appear from their unintelligble handwriting, will be going into medicine...

The report I compiled from their thoughts is here:

http://www.democracycellproject.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=598

As I have said many time, and it's just my thing .. I don't watch television. I really haven't since the 1991 Gulf War and I don't miss it at all. I did watch O'Neill, I did watch Clarke - on 60 Minutes - when their books came out. I watched "FrontLine" when the current Iraq invasion and occupation first started - they combined a bunch of footage they had & schematized the chain of events between the two Gulf War invasions and did it well. I watched a PBS special with Jim Wallis about Bush's heretical beliefs in the area of religion. I watched one minute of Zell Miller the RNC and then took a shower. I watched John Kerry concede. I also watched a few episodes of the Simpsons with my family. That's it. & I don't miss it. Sometimes I see it when in hotels and flip through the channels. Even with cable or satellite it's a giant black hole for time.

When PBS deteriorates further, that will be a crime. Another community radio station has BBC, Jim Hightower, Democracy Now. We have Air America but when I tried that out it was crackly AM and had commercials. I hate commercials even in magazines. When I get a magazine the first thing I do is tear out all the ads that don't have articles on the back that I want to read.

Once in awhile I see CNN on a big screen at the grocery store (only now I'm boycotting that store too, as I believe there are ties with Republicans) and it doesn't feel like news - it's like some sort of wierd gossip or reality show. I do know what a reality show is - I watched the first episode of Survivor and said never again. I also watched the first show of American Idol and said never again.

I have so much more free time to paint, play music, read and surf the internet! It is a shame that tv news is crap if so many people rely on it. I appreciate all the reports on it but after 14 years without it, I don't miss it at all.

By the way, I also sampled airport tv and hotel tv in various American cities, Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Paris and Istanbul oh and Bangkok (over about a 10 year period - it's not like I have time and money to travel much) and ours is definitely more filtered and at a lower level intellectually.

I see alot of "Kill Your Television" bumperstickers and I like them. My mom just called and said that lightning struck hers and I told her that she's lucky. I do know that she likes it, and when I go to visit her, I'm actually going to watch it (even Fox News) - as an experiment. My husband just handed me a $100 check to put toward a new tv for her.

Here's a great quote from Rev. Jesse Jackson to inspire you:

"We get up over and over because you can't be a champion when you're lying on the ground."

Casey, excellent post. The whole Jackson thing is so, so very yesterday in terms of my caring. And the topics I care about--well, that's not being reported. DiAnne's observations are particularly important--our media is not nearly what it could be.

Perhaps we can, as part of the "5-minutes a day" write to CNN to praise them for airing in the US the CNN International segments, which actually present solid news reporting on international issues.

Another topic:

My democracy cell is participating in this web conference to be held on Jun 24th at 2:30 pm--we're calling it "Live from Jerusalem". Here's a link that describes this interfaith, Middle East Peace Action coming up:

http://www.adifferentfuture.org./modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=30

Here's the list of venues, perhaps DCP-ers can find a location to view the videoconference near them:

http://www.adifferentfuture.org./modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=31

I'll be at the Williamsburg, VA site.

Here is a story from British media that you are unlikely to hear. Just in time for John Conyers:

The Sunday Times - Britain

June 12, 2005

Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’
Michael Smith

MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.
The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1650822,00.html

The report I compiled from their thoughts is here:

http://www.democracycellproject.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=598

Posted by: Karen at June 11, 2005 07:03 PM
Karen,

That post is one of the most instructive ever posted. Thank-you.

What is up with this? Scanning the headlines in The Guardian (before reading anything), I note a celebratory headline because of a $55 billion debt reduction deal for Africa. Then right underneath it, it has another headline that says UK Arms Sales to Africa have reached 1 Billion.

That would feed alot of people, right?

Another says Iranian Liberals are beaten by conservative thugs at the polls - sounds as though they mean beaten literally, not beaten with ballots or even electronic voting machines.

A Dean headline breaking from Associated Press was so provocative I had to read it right away - Howard throws out more red meat to supporters in Iowa, & a former DNC head says the controversy about him is just a "blip," which is probably true in the great scheme of the universe. Read it here - it's actually a little amusing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5068516,00.html

Washington Post's version includes "Return to Moral Values" in the headline

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/11/AR2005061100609.html

News about Bush: he "focuses on stalled parts of (his) agenda" (that would be destroying social security and using up energy) and he "showed deference to South Korea's leader" ("Mighty North Korea sits within artillery range of South Korea. The United States is an ocean away")

Condoleezza Rice (named after an Italian musical term) gets up at the Kennedy Center to accompany a singer with a rare disease. ("Among those in the Kennedy Center audience were U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, eight ambasssadors to the United States, Librarian of Congress James Billington, National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.") Feith is like one of the scariest neocons - remember the Office of Special Plans within the Pentagon - they started their own "intelligence"?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5068480,00.html

Russell Crowe does not get to have dinner at the White House, let alone a sleepover there, because he threw a phone.

More Mad Cows (I boycott beef also)

Oh the irony of it all!

On Call, Karen

That was indeed worth reading! Inspiring and thoughtful.

After the stupidity of Lamestream Media during the Clinton years, and now the complicity and cooperation of Lamestream Media with Bu$hCo administration in covering up all the crimes of shrubbie and cronies.... I have to seriously wonder about the ethics of Lamestream Media members....

Over a lie about a blow job, Lamestream Media acted like Clinton was about to push little red buttons he shouldn't be playing with. About serious crimes like lying to start an illegal, unjustified, immoral and unethical war for the sake of controlling Iraq's oil, not to mention prison camps, torture, protecting big manufacturers who are polluting everything, letting Halliburton gouge taxpayers, funneling money straight into pharmaceutical companies... etc. (you all know the list as well as I do)... Lamestream "journalists" can't manage to get off their lazy asses and act like journalists (even fake journalists), nor do they do any investigative journalism, nor can they seem to form an intelligent and pointed question to ask shrubbie or any of his evil cohorts....

And for that, they each get a salary..... Some job, eh?!?!?

I'm talking, of course, about the majority of Lamestream "journalists" who aren't worth a tinker's damn.

I'm not talking about the few - very few - journalists, columnists, investigative reporters, and op-ed authors we read regularly who do their jobs, ask the tough questions, deserve higher salaries, and seldom get any press for the wonderful work they do.... I just wish more of the sheeples of this world who are entitled to vote would read those same wondeful writers....

tv "news", hopeless
but the print media is beginning to show signs of life:
from page 1, Wash Post today!

Memo: U.S. Lacked Full Iraq Plan
Advisers to Blair Predicted Instability

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 12, 2005; Page A01

A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.
continue~
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/11/AR2005061100723.html

and don't miss Frank Rich's column at the NYTimes:

Don't Follow the Money

By FRANK RICH
Published: June 12, 2005

snip~
The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.

This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished.

continue~
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/opinion/12rich.html?hp

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5068516,00.html
``Dean's inflammatory rhetoric makes it clear that Democrats have no vision and would rather pander to the maniacal fringe than talk about the important issues facing our country,'' Tracey Schmitt said.
~~~~
More Mad Cows (I boycott beef also)
Oh the irony of it all!
Posted by: DiAnne at June 11, 2005 11:28 PM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More irnoy: WHY didn't the Lamestream Media journalists report about the maniacal lunatic fringe fundamentalist "christians" five and six years ago and before the last stolen election??? Seems to me their "inflammatory rhetoric" hasn't hurt their press releases one damned bit, and most of them are lying through their teeth, right along with Bu$hCo, and they are very good at ignoring reality (must be all that kool-aid they're drinking to wash down their drugs).... Unraveling that snare of lies and just plain insane talk about a rapture would require some deft thinking and writing if they found their common sense and spoke truth to fantasy and lies. Of course, it would be a miracle to get Truth published in MSM...!

Progressive Democrats do have vision, and Democrats want to stop the war, educate our children, see to it everyone has adequate and affordable medical care and, when needed, medicines, stop pollution..... It's the majority of the Lamestream Media journalists and reporters who wouldn't recognize Truth if She walked right up to them in broad daylight and slapped them upside the head.... (Ah, yes... my fantasy... Truth personified running amok in a world of lies....)

And as a PS to what I wrote yesterday about one of the sponsors of kids' programming on PBS, it's the "no child left behind' program started by the lame-brain Dumbya in the White House who can't speak properly in coherent sentences and whose legacy will be a string of malapropisms and mispronunciations....

Oy, so many ironies....

Great story, DiAnne, and thanks for posting the link!!! Sorry it got me off on a tangent, but some days I just can't stand it and I'm really glad we have Howard Dean to pave the way for other Dems to find their lost spines and lost voices for fear of offending someone... Fear of offending someone never stopped Bu$hCo, so I don't know why Dems would be criticized for FINALLY speaking up, speaking the truth, and speaking out....! Grrrrr....!

(I boycott beef, too....)

Posted by: on.to.victory4Dems at June 12, 2005 12:43 AM

Good one! Love the ending sentence!

Ah, where are journalists the likes of the young Woodward and Bernstein (I realize they've changed through the years) and people of genuine virtue like W. Mark Felt, public servants who do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do for our nation....

And if anyone missed the cartoon on that page, go back to the link and enlarge it.... It was a metaphorical slap in my face to see the truth captured in a cartoon.... and realize so few will see the truth mirrored there....

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=2958
Exerpt....
"In 2002 the Bush administration passed the No Child Left Behind Act with a small, unpublicized provision: Section 9528, "Armed Forces Recruiter Access to Students and Student Recruiting Information," requires high schools to give all student contact information to the military. Most students aren't aware they can opt out by filling out a form. "

requires high schools to give all student contact information to the military.

Posted by: NonnyO at June 12, 2005 01:59 AM

My God, Nonny! That should be illegal, it is criminal.

Posted by: Truth Shall Prevail at June 12, 2005 02:09 AM

I quite agree! It echoes in my brain as the 21st century equivalent of Hitler youth to militarize kids.... Maybe that's why I find the recent spate of war stories so offensive on PBS. As I said, I support the military, the vets (have family members among that legion of people and I am very proud of them), but there is life outside the military and I resent having it crammed down my throat in the name of the false patriotism going on nowadays. I was born nine months after VE day and consider my DNA to be red, white, and blue because I may have been a product of my parents celebrating the end of the war in the European front (they never would answer questions about how they celebrated the end of the war, but the blushing told me volumes! :-)) However, I certainly do not have to put flag pins on my clothing or fly a flag in the yard or spout all kinds of platitudes to express my patriotism.

I believe as the ancients did: Everything in moderation. But recruiting kids for the military by obtaining their home information from school records crosses all kinds of boundaries and raises my hackles.... The Bu$hCo administration has just gone way too far way too often to trample on privacy rights of individuals! Stooping to recruit kids as cannon fodder for Bu$hCo's private war to control the oil in Iraq... crosses the line!!! (IMHO, Barbara and Jenna should "volunteer" - i.e. be drafted - and forced to go into the military and be forced to serve in Iraq....)

Looks like Brittain has found it's modern day "Deep Throat."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/11/AR2005061100723.html

Memo: U.S. Lacked Full Postwar Iraq Plan
Advisers to Blair Predicted Instability

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 12, 2005; Page A01

A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.

Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government. Whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights. -Thomas Jefferson

Posted by: sparrow at June 12, 2005 08:18 AM

Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. -Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Required reading

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/opinion/12rich.html?th&emc=th

Don't Follow the Money

Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral judgment on Mr. Felt - and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that is actually run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. "I want kids to look up to heroes," Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC's "Today" show, condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring "the confidence of the president of the United States." Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored the law, proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison for his role in the break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The Times's Deep Throat on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The "Today" host, Matt Lauer, didn't mention any of this - or even that his guest had done jail time. None of the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson - and he was ubiquitous - ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified him onscreen only as a "former White House counsel."

snip

At other times the new Colsons top the old one. Though Nixon aspired to punish public broadcasting by cutting its funding, he never imagined that his apparatchiks could seize the top executive positions at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nor did he come up with the brilliant ideas of putting journalists covertly on the administration payroll and of hiring an outside P.R. firm (Ketchum) to codify an enemies list by ranking news organizations and individual reporters on the basis of how favorably they cover a specific administration policy (No Child Left Behind). President Bush has even succeeded in emasculating the post-Watergate reform that was supposed to help curb Nixonian secrecy, the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

snip

Had anyone been so rude (or professional) as to recount Mr. Colson's sordid past, or to raise the question of whether he was a hero or a traitor, the genealogical line between his Watergate-era machinations and those of his present-day successors would have been all too painfully clear. The main difference is that in the Nixon White House, the president's men plotted behind closed doors. The current administration is now so brazen it does its dirty work in plain sight.

Sorry abot podting the same article as otvfd posted. It is an excellent article and worth sharing with others.

Oncall,

It's time for a AMERICAN TRUTH SPEAKING AND CORRUPTION watching media. JUST the facts please...cut the spin, and make sure it's truthful both now and historically.

TRUTH will PREVAIL,

You're absolutely right. And at this conference a participant says, "I am making sure that we represent the party of NO CORRUPTION, NO SEX, and NO LIES". "Ok, well, no corruption and no LIE, so 2/3 ain't bad..." (BTW...miss seeing you in irc...join us soon?)

Posted by: NonnyO at June 12, 2005 01:59 AM

My God, Nonny! That should be illegal, it is criminal.

Posted by: Truth Shall Prevail at June 12, 2005 02:09 AM

Here is a site dedicated to keeping your child protected from the Armed Forces. Share it with as many people as you can.

http://www.leavemychildalone.org/

Oncall and Truth,

And another one:

http://www.afsc.org/youthmil/default.htm

(and NonnyO!)

Thanks, you guys.