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The Student Movement Standing Up to the Honduran Regime |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51412"><span class="small">Tom Sullivan, Jacobin</span></a>
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Saturday, 17 August 2019 13:29 |
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Sullivan writes: "It's been ten years since a US-backed coup installed a repressive neoliberal regime in Honduras. Now, a student movement has emerged to challenge the government's agenda of privatization and militarization."
Students protest in front of a line of riot police outside the Congress building in Tegucigalpa, April 30, 2019. (photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images)
The Student Movement Standing Up to the Honduran Regime
By Tom Sullivan, Jacobin
17 August 19
It’s been ten years since a US-backed coup installed a repressive neoliberal regime in Honduras. Now, a student movement has emerged to challenge the government’s agenda of privatization and militarization.
 en years have passed since the democratically elected center-right president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was removed in a military coup. On the same day of a referendum to create a National Constituent Assembly that sought to rewrite the military dictatorship’s 1982 Constitution, Zelaya was whisked away to Costa Rica still in his pajamas. Observers across Latin America, watching nervously to see how President Obama would respond to his first real foreign policy test in the region, quickly had their hopes for a shift in US policy crushed. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were quick to legitimize the coup and call for new elections that in Clinton’s words would “render the question of Zelaya moot.”
Clinton has defended the US role in the coup by arguing that to declare it a “coup” would have forced the United States to cut off all aid to the country, ultimately hurting the Honduran people. Yet since then, Washington has found no shortage of alternative ways to hurt the Honduran people, who have watched their country turn into one of the most violent and dangerous in the world.
The current status quo in Honduras is reminiscent of the days of US-backed death squads during the 1970s and ’80s Central American civil wars. Since the coup, a right-wing dictatorship — maintained through an alliance between the military, landowning elites, and the media — has increased ties with the United States while drastically militarizing the country. In July 2013, the regime created the Intelligence Troop and Special Security Group. The next month in August, with a quick amendment to the Constitution to avoid the prohibition on military participation in policing, the Military Police was created. Even the DEA has entered the scene, through its Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team (FAST) which is now conducting operations in the country.
After the brief scare that Zelaya’s self-declared “center-right” government might bring socialism to the country — one of the coup’s central justifications — Honduras has returned to a program of neoliberalization. But popular resistance to this agenda has been strong. The fraudulent reelection of President Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) in 2017 was an important moment proving the criminality and violence of the regime: Hernández brutally cracked down on protesters, killing seventeen. Since only April of this year, state security forces have killed at least eight people protesting privatization attempts to health and education.
In what is starting to look each day more like a defining lucha (fight) for Honduras between a regime lacking legitimacy and a diverse movement of street protests, the role of the student movement has been critical. The key battleground has been the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) in the capital, Tegucigalpa. With a student population of over 93,000, since the coup UNAH has become both a symbol of government encroachment into Honduran society as well as popular resistance against the regime. Bitter fights have broken out over everything from administrative changes, to attempts to criminalize student protest, to an increase of the passing grade from 60 percent to 70 percent, which would have effectively kicked 13,000 students out of the university. Various groups within the movement have taken their fight all the way to the National Congress and even the Supreme Court of Justice, which in 2015 ruled in favor of ten students who had been illegally suspended for shutting down a UNAH campus in protest for sixteen days.
Student resistance first began to form in response to the 2009–2017 administration of UNAH under Rector Julieta Castellanos, a strong ally of the regime. In the words of one student protester, “many consider that this process of government control developed and intensified during” her rectorship and that “this is the origin and maturing moment of many of the conflicts of the university today.” One of Castellanos’s first acts as rector was to fire sixty workers at UNAH for allegedly illegally protesting on campus. When her term came to an end in April 2013, she stayed on as “interim rector.” Meanwhile, an act of Congress was passed to remove the rule of no-reelection, allowing her to continue in her role. The man responsible for steering the reform through the National Congress is now the current president: Juan Orlando Hernández.
The student movement is diverse, accommodating a range of ideologies and tactics. This year it has intensified as wider movements against Hernández’s attempts to privatize the health and education sectors have grown. Massive street protests have been led by La Plataforma para la Defensa de la Salud y Educación (Platform for the Defense of Health and Education), made up of various unions with more than seventy thousand combined members. Despite attacks by the staunchly pro-regime media, La Plataforma achieved a huge victory in June when Hernández backed down and repealed the law. It was a watershed moment of popular power against a regime that needed to deploy the military, when the police alone could not repress the movement.
On campus, the most important group within the student resistance is El Movimiento Estudiantil Universitario (The University Student Movement). Formed in 2016, the movement has proven unflinching in the face of the state security apparatus. For over two and a half years it has taken over buildings, led mass protests, multiple times shut down campuses for weeks at a time, and even caused the cancellation of an entire semester in 2016. The MEU has provoked the ire of the political class, represented by the closely protected former rector Castellanos herself, who accused the group of acts of terror and being of the extreme left.
These accusations have not prevented the MEU from winning wide support among the student body. The MEU fights for the democratization of UNAH, while joining its struggle with national-level action, supporting the wider social movement against the neoliberal ruling class. The MEU has been leading the student movement mainly through calling for large-scale student mobilization. A flashpoint was reached on June 24, when the military police invaded the UNAH campus and fired live ammunition at students. Remarkably, no students lost their lives, despite a number of serious injuries. Still, the protests are refusing to stand down.
It is important to understand that a key part of the spirit of UNAH is its autonomy. It’s so important that it is part of the university’s name and identity, National Autonomous University of Honduras. When the Military Police entered the campus and fired upon students, it was not just a disgraceful act of government repression against students, it was a direct violation of UNAH’s autonomy. In every sense of the word, it was an invasion.
Consequently, much of the fight has been for control of the all-powerful Consejo Universitario (University Council) which has the power to name a board which in turn appoints the executive of the university in the rector. The students, teachers, and administrators each have a 33 percent share in the voting makeup of the council. The student movement is now trying to ally itself with the teachers to have a clear majority control. Across the diversity of the student movement is one common desire: verdadera representación (true representation). For one senior student organizer who prefers to remain anonymous, this means the decentralization of power. To this student leader, one of the most pertinent problems is that the frentes universitarios (student groups) have “sold out” and belong to the political parties who try and use them for power and leverage within the country’s most important educational institution. In plain words, “estan jodiendo a nosotros” (“they’re fucking us”).
In Honduras, to oppose the government has become dangerous. The state apparatus has made it clear that any calls of “Fuera JOH!” (“Out JOH!”) will not be tolerated. The regime is protected by a national media that discredits any form of anti-government resistance and an international media whose only coverage of the country is to demonize its most vulnerable people who flee extreme violence and poverty. Under this imperial shield, Hernández is employing state violence and repression without fear of consequence.
Emboldened by Washington’s unequivocal support of the 2009 coup and the fraudulent 2017 election, as well as the 2015 constitutional change to allow presidential reelection, Hernández knows he is safe to apply a whatever-means-necessary approach to the mass protests that are now beginning to radicalize and call for his resignation. With the recent revelation that the president has been involved in drug trafficking with his brother — who is currently under arrest in the United States — “to maintain and enhance their power,” Honduras is on the precipice of becoming a narco-state. This makes it harder for the United States to publicly support Hernández. But when push comes to shove, he remains Washington’s man.
Now more than ever, the Honduran people are in need of international solidarity. The crisis they are suffering epitomizes the very worst of imperialism and neoliberalism. Hernández, with his known links to drug trafficking and criminal gangs, employs the state apparatus against his own people while corrupting democratic institutions to further entrench himself and the oligarchy that supports him in power. All this while unleashing a torrent of privatization attempts against the most vulnerable people. In response, students and workers are valiantly leading the fight. All who believe in anti-imperialism and power from below must show their solidarity with the Honduran people in this critical time.
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FOCUS: The FBI Could Fight Far-Right Violence if They Wanted to - but They Don't |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51411"><span class="small">Mike German, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Saturday, 17 August 2019 13:05 |
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German writes: "Federal law enforcement officials have all the tools necessary to address far-right violence proactively - as my own successful investigations as an FBI undercover agent in the 1990s indicate."
A candlelight vigil after the mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. (photo: ABC)
The FBI Could Fight Far-Right Violence if They Wanted to - but They Don't
By Mike German, Guardian UK
17 August 19
There are currently 52 federal terrorism laws available to address entirely domestic acts of political violence
 ederal law enforcement officials have all the tools necessary to address far-right violence proactively – as my own successful investigations as an FBI undercover agent in the 1990s indicate. They have simply chosen as a matter of policy not to prioritize these cases. What role racism, latent or overt, plays in these decisions has yet to be explored.
There are currently 52 federal terrorism laws available to address entirely domestic acts of political violence. Congress has also passed five federal hate crimes statutes specifically designed to punish the types of violence white supremacists and other far-right militants often commit against vulnerable communities. Organized crime and conspiracy statutes can also be used to dismantle white supremacist gangs.
When white nationalists commit deadly attacks like the El Paso shooting, these crimes fit the statutory definition of domestic terrorism. Terrorism remains the FBI’s top priority. It ranks hate crimes fifth and organized crime sixth, however. So, when FBI agents or federal prosecutors initially label far-right violence as hate crimes, or gang crimes, they de-prioritize these cases, limiting the available resources and narrowing the scope of the investigations.
Worse, as a matter of policy, the justice department defers the vast majority of hate crimes to state and local police and prosecutors, who are often ill-equipped or uninterested in pursuing these cases. Justice department crime victim surveys estimate there are approximately 230,000 violent hate crimes annually, yet federal prosecutors charge only about 25 hate crimes defendants each year. State and local law enforcement, however, are not picking up the slack. Only about 12% of state and local law enforcement agencies report hate crimes occurring in their jurisdictions, and in some states, reported hate crimes are rarely prosecuted as such.
These deficiencies in the law enforcement response to hate crimes are not new. And a justice department-funded study in 2000 examining the barriers to hate crime reporting identified fear of the police as the primary reason victims refuse to report. This is unsurprising: the communities targeted by white supremacist violence are often disproportionately targeted by police violence and abuse as well.
It is easy to paint white supremacy as an extreme ideology relegated to the fringes of our society. The violence these fringe actors inflict on our society tears at the social fabric, but it represents just a tiny fraction of the 17,000 annual homicides in the US. It is a manageable problem when law enforcement and our government leaders focus on reducing it. Historically, they have chosen not to.
The legacy of our government’s official sanction of white supremacy continues to linger, particularly infecting our criminal justice system and immigration policies. The FBI remains an overwhelmingly white, male organization, which may partly explain why it would treat white supremacist violence as a less serious concern than an imaginary Black Identity Extremist movement. Recent reports documenting law enforcement cooperation with violent far-right groups and antipathy toward their victims at riotous demonstrations in Sacramento, California, and in Portland, Oregon, demand investigation to see what role bias plays in the police response.
Though the justice department and FBI officials have claimed renewed interest in tackling white supremacist violence, their actions raise continued concerns about how they are using counterterrorism authorities.
More troubling, recent reporting that revealed the active participation of police officers in white supremacist groups and racist social media activity by a small but significant number of police officers and border patrol officials makes clear that overt and organized racism continues to fester within agencies sworn to protect the public safety as well. The FBI has repeatedly warned its agents about white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement, urging caution about sharing sensitive intelligence about domestic terrorism cases. But it has taken few concrete actions to protect communities of color from these racist officers. Given this disturbing reality, giving law enforcement greater domestic terrorism powers may not be the safest or most effective solution.
So what is Congress to do?
Policymakers and intelligence analysts need better data regarding the scope of white supremacist violence in this country and around the world in order to craft more effective responses. A number of pending bills require the justice department to provide this information.
We need a new approach, not deeper investments in failed methods.
Our latest Brennan Center report urged Congress to find ways the federal government can fund programs designed to repair the communal injuries that hate violence inflicts, by building social inclusion through investments in education, social services, and employment. When white supremacists use violence to divide us, our response should be designed to empower the victimized communities, not just the police.
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FOCUS: Don't Burn Trees to Fight Climate Change - Let Them Grow |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35861"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Saturday, 17 August 2019 10:56 |
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McKibben writes: "Of all the solutions to climate change, ones that involve trees make people the happiest. Earlier this year, when a Swiss study announced that planting 1.2 trillion trees might cancel out a decade's worth of carbon emissions, people swooned (at least on Twitter)."
Bill McKibben. (photo: Wolfgang Schmidt)
Don't Burn Trees to Fight Climate Change - Let Them Grow
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
17 August 19
 f all the solutions to climate change, ones that involve trees make people the happiest. Earlier this year, when a Swiss study announced that planting 1.2 trillion trees might cancel out a decade’s worth of carbon emissions, people swooned (at least on Twitter). And last month, when Ethiopian officials announced that twenty-three million of their citizens had planted three hundred and fifty million trees in a single day, the swooning intensified. Someone tweeted, “This should be like the ice bucket challenge thing.”
So it may surprise you to learn that, at the moment, the main way in which the world employs trees to fight climate change is by cutting them down and burning them. Across much of Europe, countries and utilities are meeting their carbon-reduction targets by importing wood pellets from the southeastern United States and burning them in place of coal: giant ships keep up a steady flow of wood across the Atlantic. “Biomass makes up fifty per cent of the renewables mix in the E.U.,” Rita Frost, a campaigner for the Dogwood Alliance, a nonprofit organization based in Asheville, North Carolina, told me. And the practice could be on the rise in the United States, where new renewable-energy targets proposed by some Democrats and Republicans in Congress, as well as by the E.P.A., treat “biomass”—fuels derived from plants—as “carbon-neutral,” much to the pleasure of the forestry industry. “Big logging groups are up on Capitol Hill working hard,” Alexandra Wisner, the associate director of the Rachel Carson Council, told me, when I spoke with her recently. The story of how this happened begins with good intentions. As concern about climate change rose during the nineteen-nineties, back when solar power, for instance, cost ten times what it does now, people casting about for alternatives to fossil fuels looked to trees. Trees, of course, are carbon—when you burn them you release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But the logic went like this: if you cut down a tree, another will grow in its place. And, as that tree grows, it will suck up carbon from the atmosphere—so, in carbon terms, it should be a wash. In 2009, Middlebury College, where I teach, was lauded for replacing its oil-fired boilers with a small biomass plant; I remember how proud the students who first presented the idea to the board of trustees were. William R. Moomaw, a climate and policy scientist who has published some of the most recent papers on the carbon cycle of forests, told me about the impact of biomass, saying, “back in those days, I thought it could be considered carbon neutral. But I hadn’t done the math. I hadn’t done the physics.” Once scientists did that work, they fairly quickly figured out the problem. Burning wood to generate electricity expels a big puff of carbon into the atmosphere now. Eventually, if the forest regrows, that carbon will be sucked back up. But eventually will be too long—as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made clear last fall, we’re going to break the back of the climate system in the next few decades. For all intents and purposes, in the short term, wood is just another fossil fuel, and in climate terms the short term is mostly what matters. As an M.I.T. study put it last year, while the regrowth of forests, if it happens, can eventually repay the carbon debt created by the burning of wood pellets, that payback time ranges from forty-four years to a hundred and four in forests in the eastern U.S., and, in the meantime, the carbon you’ve emitted can produce “potentially irreversible impacts that may arise before the long-run benefits are realized.” As the scientific research on this carbon debt emerged, in the past decade, at least a few of us in the environmental movement started voicing opposition to burning trees. The most effective leadership has come from the Southeast, where community activists have pointed out that logging rates are now the highest in the world, and that rural communities—often communities of color—are being disrupted by endless lines of logging trucks and by air pollution from plants where trees are turned into easy-to-ship pellets. Earlier this year, a proposal to build the largest pellet mill in the world, in Lucedale, Mississippi, drew opposition from a coalition that included the N.A.A.C.P. and which predicted that the plant would have a “disastrous effect on the people, wildlife, and climate.” But Mississippi environmental officials approved an air permit for the plant, which would employ ninety full-time workers, and so far European officials have also turned a deaf ear to the opposition: new E.U. regulations will keep treating the cutting down of trees as carbon neutral at least through 2030, meaning that utilities can burn wood in their old plants and receive massive subsidies for theoretically reducing their emissions. The Drax power plant, in the North of England, which burns more wood than any power plant on Earth, gets 2.2 million dollars a day in subsidies. But a new study, commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center and released on Monday, makes clear that, even under the most conservative estimates, Drax’s burning of wood pellets that it imports from the American South will “increase carbon pollution in the atmosphere for more than forty years, well beyond the timeframe identified by the IPCC as critical for carbon reduction.”
European subsidies treat power plants that burn wood as the equivalent of, say, solar panels, despite the fact that, under even the most generous scenarios, they emit at least ten times as much carbon, when factoring in the energy that it takes to make the panels. “They’re looking for ways to shift their infrastructure without drastically overhauling it,” Bob Musil, a veteran-environmentalist who now runs the Rachel Carson Council, said. “Ways that don’t cause shifts in culture.” It’s remarkably similar to what happened in the United States with fracking: political leaders, including some in the Obama Administration, decided that the least-fuss way to replace coal would be with natural gas, only to learn that, as new science emerged, they had in fact replaced carbon emissions with leaking methane, which was making the climate crisis worse. In this case, the greenwashing is particularly misleading, because burning trees defies the carbon math in another way, too: once they have been cut down, the trees won’t be there to soak up the carbon. “The Southeast U.S. is falsely seen as a sustainable source of wood,” Danna Smith, the executive director of the Dogwood Alliance, told me, because when the trees are cut down they can regrow—unlike, say, in the Amazon, where thin soils usually mean that when trees are cut down the land becomes pasture. She added, “But these forests are vital carbon sinks.”
In fact, the newest research shows just what folly biomass burning really is. This summer, William Moomaw was the co-author of a paper that tracked carbon accumulation in trees. Planting all those trees in Ethiopia definitely helps pull carbon from the air, but not as much as letting existing trees keep growing would. Unlike human beings, who gain most of their height in their early years, Moomaw explained to me, “trees grow more rapidly in their middle period, and that extends far longer than most people realize.” A stand of white pines, for instance, will take up twenty-two tons of carbon by its fiftieth year, which is about when it would get cut down to make pellets. “But, if you let it grow another fifty years, it adds twenty-five tons,” he said. “And in the next fifty years it adds 28.5 tons. It would be a mistake to cut them down when they’re forty and make plywood. It’s really foolish to cut them down when they’re forty and burn them, especially now that we’ve got cheap solar.” He calls letting trees stand and accumulate carbon “proforestation”—as opposed to reforestation. “You can get to some pretty big numbers this way,” Moomaw added. “The Woods Hole Research Center found that, if we let secondary forests grow around the world, they would sequester 2.8 billion tons of carbon a year, which is about sixty per cent of the gap between what humans produce annually and what natural systems currently soak up. Instead, we’re increasingly cutting them down to burn for fuel.” Earlier this year, Moomaw helped draft a letter to the European Parliament which made these points, and it was signed by nearly eight hundred scientists, mostly from Europe and North America. So far, the scientists have received no reply; perhaps they should have also sent an ice bucket.
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Shove It, Media: Bernie Sanders Is Right |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51410"><span class="small">Jeff Cohen, Salon</span></a>
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Saturday, 17 August 2019 08:40 |
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Cohen writes: "Mainstream journalists are having a ridiculous hissy fit over Sen. Bernie Sanders' suggestion that there may be a connection between the owner of a news outlet and the content or biases of that outlet's coverage."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Antonella Crescimbeni)
Shove It, Media: Bernie Sanders Is Right
By Jeff Cohen, Salon
17 August 19
Mainstream media is shocked at Sanders' suggestion that ownership influences coverage. I can tell you it's true
 ainstream journalists are having a ridiculous hissy fit over Sen. Bernie Sanders’ suggestion that there may be a connection between the owner of a news outlet and the content or biases of that outlet’s coverage.
If Sanders had suggested that Rupert Murdoch’s ownership of Fox News impacts its coverage, few would argue with him. But Sanders referred to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ ownership of the Washington Post — a corporate centrist outlet. And the senator, an Amazon critic, complained that the newspaper “doesn’t write particularly good articles about me.”
Immediately, the Post’s top editor denounced Sanders’ “conspiracy theory” – claiming his newsroom operates “with full independence.” A Post columnist tweeted that she’d never “heard a hint of Jeff Bezos interfering.”
Are they deluding themselves? Or sincerely clueless?
I worked in and around mainstream TV news for years, including at corporate centrist outlets CNN and MSNBC. Unlike at Fox News (where I’d also been a paid contributor), there’s almost never a memo or direct order from top management to cover or not cover certain stories or viewpoints.
But here's the sad reality: There doesn’t have to be a memo from the owner to achieve the homogeneity of coverage at “centrist” outlets that media watchdog groups like FAIR (which I founded) have documented in study after study over the decades.
It happens because of groupthink. It happens because top editors and producers know — without being told — which issues and sources are off limits. No orders need be given, for example, for rank-and-file journalists to understand that the business of the corporate boss or top advertisers is off-limits, short of criminal indictments.
No memo is needed to achieve the narrowness of perspective — selecting all the usual experts from all the usual think tanks to say all the usual things. Think Tom Friedman. Or Barry McCaffrey. Or Neera Tanden. Or any of the elite club members who’ve been proven to be absurdly wrong time and again about national or global affairs.
And then ask yourself why someone like Noam Chomsky can be quoted regularly in the biggest mainstream outlets abroad, but almost never in mass media in his own country — even though he mostly analyzes the policies of his own country’s government.
Bernie Sanders is one of the world’s most effective critics of Jeff Bezos and the fact that Amazon paid no federal income tax last year. And the Bezos-owned newspaper has exhibited an unrelenting bias against Sanders in recent years — perhaps most acutely in March 2016, when FAIR analyst Adam Johnson famously wrote an article that quickly went viral: “Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours.” Among the Post's headlines during that period: “Five Reasons Bernie Sanders Lost Last Night’s Democratic Debate,” followed an hour later by “Bernie Sanders’s Two Big Lies About the Global Economy,” followed a few hours later by “Even Bernie Sanders Can Beat Donald Trump.”
The day after this anti-Bernie barrage, which included a half-dozen articles on how badly he’d performed in the Michigan Democratic primary debate with Hillary Clinton, Sanders shocked the Post and the rest of the political establishment by defeating Clinton in Michigan’s primary.
If you still want to believe there’s no connection between corporate media ownership and content, join me in a mental exercise: Imagine how quickly heads would roll at the Post in the fantastical event that it somehow produced even three negative stories about owner Jeff Bezos in a few hours. (Needless to say, there’s much to critically report about Bezos, including Amazon’s tax avoidance, labor exploitation, taxpayer subsidies and CIA contracts.)
I said above that there’s “almost never a memo or order from top management” to newsroom journalists. In normal times, the media system works smoothly without top-down directives. But in times of crisis, such as during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq — when I was a senior producer of MSNBC’s primetime Phil Donahue show — there may well be orders and memos.
As the invasion neared, top management at MSNBC/NBC News ordered us to bias our panel discussions. If we booked one guest who was antiwar on Iraq, we needed two who were pro-war. If we booked two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. When a producer proposed booking Michael Moore, she was told that three right-wingers would be required for balance. (I thought about proposing Noam Chomsky as a guest, but our stage couldn’t have accommodated the 28 right-wingers we might have needed for balance.)
During that period, we were told by MSNBC brass that invasion opponent Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. attorney general, should not appear on the channel. Apparently, some sort of blacklist.
When the Donahue show was terminated three weeks before the Iraq invasion, internal memos that had circulated among top NBC News executives actually leaked. (God bless whistleblowers!) One memo said that Phil Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. . . . He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The memo described a dreaded scenario in which the Donahue show would become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
NBC’s solution? Pull the plug.
My point is a simple one: Our corporate-owned media system too often functions as a corporate-friendly propaganda system, and it operates smoothly. It typically operates without orders from the owner or top management, and without firings for blatantly political reasons.
At MSNBC in those months, we were ordered to bias our content. Memos were written. I don’t know that orders were given in all the other big TV newsrooms. Yet, the content was amazingly homogeneous.
How else do you explain this finding from FAIR? In the two weeks surrounding Secretary of State Colin Powell’s inaccurate, pro-invasion presentation to the UN in February 2003, there were 393 on-camera sources discussing Iraq on the nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS. Only three of them represented the antiwar movement. That’s less than 1 percent of the total.
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have become, it seems, something of a collector: old magazines filled with young starlets, Mason jars full of homemade concoctions, confidants who were once wayward lovers, and a cat who hasn’t lived with his rightful owner—my now grown middle child—for too many years. There is a row of empty ceramic planters lining my window sill, awaiting soil and seeds and a goodness that will never arrive.
