In honor of tax day

(my op-eds)

archive: shaping the container

link   (my op-eds)

from april 2009

Newspapers vs. Google vs. Newspapers… Back when I was a journalism student in College Park (UMD), Dr. Petrick told us we would someday get our newspaper over the tube and could even talk back to it. (!!!) The loss of a physical newspaper was expected. Good things about it, right upfront. No more black ink on your fingers, no more trees going down, no more gas used to deliver it.

Of course, it’s so much more than that. We lose editors. Editors who shape content, as in what gets on the frontpage (say, 911) and what gets buried (say, the holocaust through the early 1940’s). In full health, a big strapping paper was a big strapping news gathering machine, reporters stationed in far-flung places who knew the area they covered, the culture, and how it all might fit into the grand puzzle. But those types of correspondents have been drying up for at least the last decade, boiling down to the few hardboiled, the few embedded glams.

Worse, wire services have been bought up, shamelessly spun. UPI, now a Rev. Moonie operation. But et tu, AP? Faxes from the far right have been feeding Congress since the 90’s, posing and accepted as gospel. Rupert Murdoch’s Faux News now owns The Wall Street Journal. So the crud has been eating away at journalism in a big MRSA way. And, as science warns us, corporate pork farming is dangerous to humans.

Radio: deliberately dominated by the far right. Clearchannel bought up the majority of stations and the FCC changed the rules that protected us from such vultures. Who listens to it? Truck drivers, night watchmen… The ones who turn on FOX news when they get couch-wise with a brew.

And then we have THE INTERNET. Shiny! Ruled by their own thirst and hunger, individuals used it to sort through the dark wall of the Bush years. We got it right on 13 Myths because we could search and connect directly to sources. Some even connected to us. Sure, the Free Republic has its few, ready and eager to be part of the disinformed, willing to turn from truth and fair and good just so they might annihilate the current bogey (liberals, Muslims, god haters...), whatever helps them circle their wagons… But there’s also Talking Points Memo, which brought down Gonzo and helped George Allen bring his own veryself to ruin. Wateringholes formed from e-mailers who formed into e-lists… Because folks began checking things out.

None of it possible without Google there to search. But those searches, imho, have been harder to negotiate, less able to help penetrate the wall of late. Interested parties buy up search words, saturate and drown information. And — the biggest potential for suffocation — who chooses what stories go up on your google news page? That’s the power the internet is capable of having over news. The power of an editor. Thus we become our own editor. And just at the time that the good old liberal arts education — which is what it takes to even begin to see your way to how things might connect, to begin to understand how much there might be involved in "knowing" — our students have been taking business degrees. MBA’s. Pure tech… I remember reading Reader’s Digest in a doc’s waiting room, a story about an insightful man in an ER who made a casual poetical comment — something well known, from the Bard or maybe Moby Dick — to the tech who was taking his vitals. Next thing he knew, the psychiatric staff descended on him. Ignorant of the source of his casual insightful aside, they thought he was suicidal.

Interesting turn of plot. Who will write its history? Will any of it have existed at all?

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plot thickeners:

The Filter Bubble,  Eli Parisner

transcript

Never forget this: we were lied into war

The Progress Report's extensive low-down on Faux News (that's Fox News, o my Rush loving brother-in-law) contains a link to a 2003 story:

A NETWORK OF DISINFORMATION: Fox repeatedly deceives its audience. A 2003 study found that 80 percent of those who primarily relied on Fox News believed falsehoods about why the U.S. invaded Iraq.

This point was so driven home back when we did 13 Myths, and a source of general pessimism (read our comments as we worked).

Obviously, media failed us, Fox News best of all. Of course, they tried so hard. I was watching, switching channels when the jets hit the World Trade Center, and Fox was calling for war with Iraq even before they fell.

The link Progress Report sends us to is a reprint of the original Knight-Ridder wire story. The link is now dead, centro.net dropping the knight-ridder archives, but google finds it in other places, and thanks to the Wayback Machine, you can still find the knight-ridder special reports.

"How do you know this?" Imbibe. Train your palate.



KnightRidder Washington Memo Special Report The decisions, policies and intelligence behind the Iraq War
•  Alliance between Chalabi, U.S. conservatives now in ruins, 5/28/04
 •  Relationship with Chalabi proves costly for Bush administration, 4/23/04
 •  Officials investigate how INC's Chalabi obtained U.S. intelligence, 5/21/04
 •  Iraqi group linked to questionable intelligence loses U.S. funding, 5/18/04
 •  White House released claims of defector deemed unreliable by CIA, 5/17/04
 •  Iraqi exile group may have violated rules barring it from lobbying, 4/22/04
 •  Intelligence memo before 9-11 noted suspicions of possible hijackings, 4/10/04
 •  As fighting continues, quest to bring democracy to Iraq nears failure, 4/10/04
 •  Senior U.S. officials say battle could be turning point in Iraq, 4/6/04
 •  INC supplied defectors who were sources of questionable pre-war information, officials say, 4/3/04
 •  With 90 days to handover of Iraq control, U.S. faces big obstacles, 4/2/04
 •  Faulty intelligence continues to plague U.S. efforts in Iraq, 3/19/04
 •  Iraqi exile group fed false information to news media, 3/15/04
 •  White House responds to Knight Ridder article, 3/12/04
 •  CIA director disputes Cheney assertions on Iraq, 3/9/04
 •  Doubts cast on efforts to link Saddam, al-Qaida, 3/2/04
 •  Iraqi National Congress faces growing number of investigations, 2/27/04
 •  Rumsfeld advisor who vocally endorsed Saddam's ouster resigns, 2/25/04
 •  Officials: U.S. still paying millions to group that provided false Iraqi intelligence, 2/21/04
 •  Most pre-war information from Iraqi defectors was iffy, officials say, 2/13/04
 •  Panel to probe whether officials exaggerated prewar intelligence, 2/12/04
 •  Doubts, dissent stripped from public version of Iraq assessment, 2/9/04
 •  What went wrong with Iraq intelligence? 2/6/04
 •  Intelligence officials warned that Iraq WMD information was iffy, 2/6/04
 •  Knight Ridder journalists honored for stories on war planning, 2/4/04
 •  Iraq intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified errors, officials say, 2/2/04
 •  More Iraqis supporting resistance, CIA report says, 11/11/03
 •  Saddam wanted secret negotiations with U.S., officials say, 11/5/03
 •  CIA investigated tip on WMD from previously discredited source, 10/14/03
 •  Questions, criticism surround information that led to start of war, 7/18/03
 •  No real planning for postwar Iraq, 7/11/03
 •  Bush administration pushed for proof linking Saddam, al-Qaida, 7/3/03
 •  Internal review backs CIA on Iraq, but notes lack of details, 7/2/03
 •  U. N. committee finds no connection between Iraq, al-Qaida, 6/26/03
 •  White House was warned of dubious intelligence used in speech, official says, 6/12/03
 •  Bush, Aides made some prewar claims they couldn't back up, documents say, 6/6/03
 •  Failure to find weapons in Iraq leads to intelligence scrutiny6/2/03
 •  Troubling questions over justification for war in Iraq, 5/31/03
 •  Bush Administration scoffs at Iraq's weapons report, 12/20/02
 •  Infighting among U.S. intelligence agencies fuels dispute over Iraq, 10/27/02
 •  Some in Bush administration have misgivings about Iraq policy, 10/8/02
 •  CIA report reveals analysts' split over extent of Iraqi nuclear threat, 10/4/02
 •  Lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons worries top U.S. officials, 9/6/02

Review: Selling Us The War In Iraq

Interesting, the links you can still follow, the links that have disappeared (missing links? try the wayback). (Oh what a night. Info emailed to me out of nowhere...) But for your term paper pleasure, feast avoo...

13 MYTHS ABOUT THE CASE FOR WAR IN IRAQ

"13 myths" about Iraq was released in March 2003 at http://13myths.org. 

in full :

(my op-eds)
Government is us
deborah conner
op-ed roanoke times,
Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Boom and bust is ever the stuff of market economies, especially when fierce competition is embraced over sense and symbiosis. In nature, the real world of laws we live by, only cancers work so selfishly, and they compete to the point of killing their host. Not a good way to do business.
Looking back, one can make an argument that groups that focused on community building -- guilds, granges, civic groups like the Masons -- were buffers for this wild fluctuation. How did insurance develop? Locals got together and pooled resources so that when Farmer A's barn burned down (lightning, acts of God; stuff happens), all would help rebuild it.
But coming out of the Gilded Age, when -- like today -- a small group of individuals were obscenely rich, there was indeed some major hocus-pocus stepping up to contrive a bailout. All business is conspiracy, if you think about it. Simple self-interest, keeping the lid on, putting out fires: conspiracy, collusion.
With paper speculation based on theory (e.g., the short-sighted 1997 Nobel Prize-winning derivative formulas that proved wrong) -- fool's gold, whatever thin air the market can be made to agree is its worth -- we have something like a grand casino, and you know the house always wins. Thus the house perpetuates itself, and everyone goes along, hoping to cut losses and praying that the house keeps standing. Goldman Sachs is mothership Titanic. I can hear them walking down its halls telling each other "Act normal! We'll think of something!"
In truth, resources are ultimately finite, and so is need. From biology we know that maintaining a biosphere has to be (and will make itself) a factor in any living system. At the heart of it all must be a realistic long-range energy policy, which some seem to be doing their best to distract us from.
Bob McDonnell, current governor of Virginia, tells us his party believes big government is bad. He wants to let the free market rule, lower taxes and, in their place, let the churches step up to the plate. We know from history how fair and reasoned such a Calvinist cosmos was in the past. So did the Founding Fathers.
With Franklin D. Roosevelt, regulation became the grand experiment, and it served us well until it was abandoned, most simply by not being enforced. Drowning government in a bath tub is easily accomplished by quietly underfunding enforcement agencies.
The thing that government can do and has done is protect people. It gave us the 40-hour work week, stopped child labor. By fair and reasoned lawmaking, it gave us the middle class. It keeps the bridges from falling down. Food safe.
And what is "it" -- government -- but the people? Except when it's the corporations, their lobbyists, their players. Those who drown human rights and equal access in a bathtub.
Right now because of rumor mongers, fear-manufactured corporate astroturf, patriot vigilantes and their self-fulfilling non-historic prophecies, we stand to lose the things that are actually precious: Order, peace, growth, life.

link: Government is us

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orts n slarts
Financial Reform 101
Inside The Great American Bubble Machine
The Warning
Breaking the Bank
Wall Street's Bailout Hustle
Punks and Plutocrats
Inside the Meltdown
Munny