Category Archives: Media

LA Weekly: The shoot anchors don’t they?

Contrary to the scripture so often quoted in these areas of Louisiana and Mississippi, the TV newscasters knew the truth, but the truth did not set them free. And the truth telling soon turned to backslapping. Lost amid all the self-congratulation by broadcasters once the crisis point had been passed was the fact that TV journalists went back to business-as-usual by the weekend. Their choke chains had been yanked by no-longer-inattentive parent-company bosses who, fearful of any FCC regulatory fallout from fingering Dubya for the FEMA fuckups, decided yet again to sacrifice community need for corporate greed.

Now comes the real test of pathos vs. profit: whether the TV newscasters will spend the fresh reservoir of truth and trust earned with the public to challenge FEMAís attempt to perpetrate a campaign of mass deception. Thatís the only way to describe what Reuters says is the agencyís attempt to block the news media from photographing the dead ó officials have readied 25,000 body bags ó as they are recovered from flooded New Orleans. Yet again, as it did with the coffins coming home from the Iraqi War and its violent aftermath, the Bush administration wants to hide from the public the lethal consequences of its flawed programs and policies.

Democracy Now!”: Is the government trying to stem the tide of images from New Orleans by threatening journalist?

Journalists covering New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina report that militarization in and around the city has hindered their work and threatened their physical safety. We hear from two journalists who were reporting in New Orleans recently.

Soldiers, cops muzzle reporters in wake of Katrina

From NBC’s Bryan Williams: An interesting dynamic is taking shape in this city, not altogether positive: after days of rampant lawlessness (making for what I think most would agree was an impossible job for the New Orleans Police Department during those first few crucial days of rising water, pitch-black nights and looting of stores) the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement. In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won’t be any pictures of this particular group of guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media… obvious members of the media… armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It’s a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

Martial law creates tense situation for reporter

New Orleans — I did not actually count the number of automatic weapons pointed at me, but there were at least five, and I was certain they were all locked and loaded, or whatever that military phrase is signifying that a gun is ready to blow a hole in somebody.

Apparent Hunter S. Thompson suicide note published by Rolling Stone

The brief message, scrawled in black marker and titled ”Football Season Is Over” (an apparent reference to the end of the NFL season he avidly followed as fan), reads as follows:

“No More Games. No More bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun –for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt.”

Gonzo journalist and political genius Dr. H. S. Thompson killed himself last February.

A New Breed of Public Servant

US censoring Katrina coverage

When U.S. officials asked the news media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they were censoring a key part of the disaster story, free- speech watchdogs said yesterday.

The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in line with the Bush administration’s ban on images of flag-draped U.S. military coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors charged in separate telephone interviews.

I was watching CNN when Anderson Cooper finally got sick of Senator Mary Landrieu’s brown-nosing of Congressional colleagues and interrupted to tell her that bodies were being eaten by rats in Waveland, Mississippi and nobody there really gave a rat’s ass about political backslapping. Cooper said:

“Excuse me, Senator, I’m sorry for interrupting. I haven’t heard that, because, for the last four days, I’ve been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi and to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated…. It kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats.”

(Here’s the transcript and here’s the video.)

The LA Times and Slate have interesting stories on how some broadcast journalists are ditching their chummy chit chat and finally saying what the rest of us are thinking.

It’s nice to see at least a few folks in the US MSM seriously challenging the official lies and stonewalling of politicians, but I doubt this is a revolution.

In fact, in midst of the so-call “rebellion of the talking heads,” The New York Times reprinted without contradiction Bush’s false claim that nobody “anticipated the breach of the levees” and ABC News was downplaying the Bush administration’s failure to prepare for and respond to Hurrican Katrina.

Well in the week I’ve been away lot’s has happened and the big news has been hurricane Katrina. I’ve not been exploring the blogosphere lately or reading much on the net, but here’s a story from yesterday’s Los Angeles Times on the warnings about the the disaster that was waiting to happen in NOLA and how the politicans and others ignored the warnings. (A similar story on unheeded warningsis on the NPR website.)

The LA Times story highlights the five-part special report by the New Orleans Times-Picayne newspaper titled “Washing Away,” which was published June 23-27, 2002. The first story in the series was on how the levee system which was NOLA’s best protection from flooding might turn against the city…prescient to say the least.

In September of 2002 National Public Radio’s Daniel Zwerdling did a two-part series on the hurricane risk in NOLA.

Here’s an excerpt for the LA Times story describing Zwerdling’s 2002 report:

“…Zwerdling accompanied scientist Joe Suhayda, a researcher from Louisiana State University, as he used an extending measuring rod to determine how high hurricane-driven flood waters might rise in the French Quarter if a levee gave way. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of what followed:

Suhayda: It’s well above the second floor there and it’s just about to the rooftop.

Zwerdling: Do you expect this kind of hurricane and this kind of flooding to hit New Orleans in our lifetime?

Suhayda: Well, I would say the probability is yes….

Zwerdling: So, basically, the part of New Orleans that most Americans and most people around the world think of as New Orleans would disappear underwater.

Suhayda: It would. That’s right.

The NPR report went on to note that none of Suhayda’s views were even remotely controversial in the scientific or engineering communities. This was not global warming — or even second-hand smoke. And, as Zwerdling went on to explain with great clarity, there was similar agreement that the steps taken by the federal and state government in earlier years to protect the city from smaller storms and to ensure that the Mississippi River would remain open to commerce had dramatically increased the danger from the inevitable larger storm. It was, in other words, the same conclusion the Times-Picayune’s reporters reached.”

Several stories on wikimainia from MediaChannel.org:

WIKIMANIA
Ground Zero, at least last week, was Frankfurt, Germany, site of Wikimania, the first global gathering of the self-styled ‘wikipedians’ who collectively are well on their way to the goal of providing free online encyclopedias in every language on earth. MediaChannel.org’s Rory O’Connor was there and reports on the Big Bang of the next information revolution.

BEYOND AN ENCYCLOPEDIA: WHAT’S NEXT FOR WIKIMANIA?
In just 10 years Wikimedia has evolved into a phenomenon, spawning a worldwide community that has created a brand potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars and a website now in the top 50 that gets more traffic than USA Today and The New York Times put together. And it all happened through the efforts of volunteers, without a bureaucratic top-down organization, staff structure or marketing budget. News Dissector Danny Schechter was at the Wikimedia Conference and reports on the Wikipedia phenomenon.

WIKIPEDIA TO TIGHTEN GRIP
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says the Wiki web encyclopaedia written and edited by internet users from all over the world plans to impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content.

While Fox’s Brit Hume’s first thoughts following the London bombings were of money be be made in the market, Media Matters reports that other Fox anchors celebrated the “advantage” the bombings give to the “Western world” and opined that a “golden opportunity was missed” to “blow up Paris, and who cares?”

London Bombings “Advantage” for the West

“…one of the [Fox News] network’s anchors, Brian Kilmeade, said the attacks worked to the Western world’s advantage and he blasted the international gathering at the G8 for focusing on global warming and African aid instead of terrorism. Here is some of what he said right after Tony Blair spoke yesterday. This is FOX anchor Brian Kilmeade talking to another FOX’s Paul Varney:
KILMEADE: And that was the first time since 9-11 when they should know, and they do know now, that terrorism should be Number 1. But it’s important for them all to be together. I think that works to our advantage, in the Western world’s advantage, for people to experience something like this together, just 500 miles from where the attacks have happened.”

VARNEY: It puts the Number 1 issue right back on the front burner right at the point where all these world leaders are meeting. It takes global warming off the front burner. It takes African aid off the front burner. It sticks terrorism and the fight on the war on terror, right up front all over again.

KILMEADE: Yeah.”

Here’s the clip from Media Matters.

“Golden opportunity” missed to “blow up Paris”

The day before the July 7 terrorist attacks on London buses and subways, Fox News host John Gibson stated that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) “missed a golden opportunity” because, if France had been selected to host the 2012 Olympics, terrorists would “blow up Paris, and who cares?” Following the London attacks, Gibson reiterated that the IOC ought to have selected Paris instead of London, because the British should “let somebody else be worried about guys with backpack bombs for a while.”

From the July 6 broadcast of Westwood One’s The Radio Factor with Bill O’Reilly, guest-hosted by Gibson:

GIBSON: By the way, just wanted to tell you people, we missed — the International Olympic Committee missed a golden opportunity today. If they had picked France, if they had picked France instead of London to hold the Olympics, it would have been the one time we could look forward to where we didn’t worry about terrorism. They’d blow up Paris, and who cares?

From the “My Word” segment of the July 7 edition of Fox News’ The Big Story with John Gibson:

GIBSON: The bombings in London: This is why I thought the Brits should let the French have the Olympics — let somebody else be worried about guys with backpack bombs for a while.

Here’s the clip.