Harry Targ : The Media and Ideological Hegemony

The media shape our consciousness. Image from Look for the Words.
Taking on the media:
Challenging ideological hegemony

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / May 16, 2011

The media and political, economic, educational, religious, and entertainment institutions shape our consciousness. People are told, inspired, coerced, and manipulated to think in certain ways, usually ways that support the economic and political interests of the rich and powerful.

Sometimes theoretical arguments about “ideological hegemony” are too abstract or too immobilizing. However, specific efforts at thought control at the community level can be understood and identified. And campaigns to challenge them are feasible, as many examples in cities and towns illustrate.

For example, I live in a Lafayette/West Lafayette, Indiana, twin cities with about 100,000 permanent residents. The greater metropolitan area, like most small and big communities, is “served” by one newspaper, the Journal & Courier.

The J & C has a circulation of about 33,000 and is owned by the Gannett Corporation. While its editorial board changes from time to time the general tone and framing of news in the paper is conservative.

From time to time stories appear about trade union events and occasionally stories are published which are critical of the major employer in the area, Purdue University. But for the most part the J & C serves as a booster for conservative politics and values, highlighting patriotism, businesses, religion, sports, personalities, and local crime over serious political issues in the community, the state, or the nation.

The interests and perspectives of working people are almost never reflected in its pages.

To illustrate we can take a look at one issue, Saturday, May 7, 2011. That day the paper had four sections: news and views; local stories; sports and business; and entertainment.

The first section consisted of nine stories, four of them local in content. Page one, with a photo of an American flag in technicolor and a helicopter in the background, featured the honoring of seven medal of honor winners from American wars such as Vietnam who were flown into Lafayette to dedicate the new “Medal of Honor Bridge” in the county. They arrived by Huey helicopter landing at the Faith Baptist Church. “As the recipients carefully exited the helicopter, they mingled with the children and other grateful spectators.”

The second story, with a picture, was of a resident of Monticello, Indiana, 20 miles away, who admitted to a murder. Both these stories jumped to inside pages.

Page three, called “Nation & World,” featured a few longer stories and “In Brief” two paragraph accounts of events going on around the world. The two biggest stories on this page reported on Al Qaida’s warning of revenge and the special role of stealth helicopters in the raid on bin Laden’s residence. Page four was a full-page ad for an auto dealership and five was the “Opinions” page.

The J & C does publish letters to the editor, though edited, and on Saturdays, statements by local residents called “My Life, My Story.” This time the question two residents were asked to address was “If you could live forever, would you? Why?” One respondent said she would live for ever in heaven “as all Christians have been promised eternal life in John 3:16.”

The editorials often endorse conservative politics. On this Saturday it praised a former executive of a local Eli Lilly pharmaceutical laboratory that was going to be closed. He saved the firm from closing, and with it 700 jobs, by finding a German purchaser.

On the back page of the first section were three stories and a large segment of the story of medal of honor winners, helicopters, and the new bridge continued from page one. One of the stories, in my view buried, was about President Obama’s visit to Indianapolis, just 60 miles away. Obama visited Allison Transmission’s Plant No.7 which had received “a heavy flow of federal cash for the President’s vehicle of choice, a hybrid that runs on electricity and less gasoline.”

The article cited the President’s claim that in plants like these the American economy would be rebuilding and new jobs would be created. A smaller story just under the one about the President’s visit was about Governor Mitch Daniel’s welcoming of the President. It said that this was President Obama’s fifth visit to the state and only the first time the Governor welcomed him.

Since the paper I am describing was a Saturday edition it included the glossy magazine insert “US Weekend magazine. The special highlighted story, front cover and all, was on “Our Warrior Moms.” Of course inside the magazine were such features as “Who’s Hot in Hollywood,” and “Birthday Buzz.” (I found out I am just a bit older than half the distance in age between Billy Joel and Don Rickles.)

While the J & C distributes 33,000 of their papers with enormous resources from Gannett and lots of large local advertisers, a new monthly newspaper, Lafayette Independent, has almost completed its first year of publication, based on the hard work of about 20 progressives.

LI prints from 2,000 to 3,000 copies, is produced by a volunteer editorial committee, draws upon local and internet writers, and is distributed by a network of peace and justice activists, progressive Democrats, and others. It replaced another alternative monthly newspaper, The Community Times, which had a 10-year career.

The May issue of LI is dense with copy, perhaps too dense. It is a 12-page paper. The front page included a story about a food drive organized by union letter carriers and an account of the desperate need for prison reform in Indiana.

Interior pages had stories on such subjects as Workers Memorial Day, the Midwest Peace and Justice Summit held in Indianapolis, costs of the war in Iraq and what that has meant for Hoosiers, the threat to public education in Indiana, the consequences to reproductive health due to elimination of funding for Planned Parenthood in the state, and the need to end reliance on nuclear power.

In addition, there was an interesting article on the rich jazz scene in the community.

Ads are inexpensive and draw upon the labor council, crafts persons, community organizations, and local businesses. Each issue has a detailed calendar of events, particularly those sponsored by local progressive groups.

Thinking seriously about local progressive responses to ideological hegemony and its print media expression some ideas come to mind:

1. Progressives need to rigorously define what that hegemony is. What kinds of information, media frames, and ideologies are being distributed through the dominant news outlets? What are the priorities given to information: through stories, story placement in the papers, photos used, column inches of stories with different emphases AND what items never find their way into news print?


2. Who pays for the news papers? Who are the local advertisers? Can they be influenced to withdraw their vital financial support from newspapers that do not represent what citizens need and want to know? Can they be prevailed upon to support alternatives?


3. Who are the 33,000 subscribers to the J & C? Are they avid readers of the news coverage or primarily people checking out community calendars, comics, crossword puzzles, and obituaries? Can alternative papers address these interests as well? Have questions ever been posed to the 33,000 about whether they think the newspaper in town really meets their needs.


4. Can we create alternative media that appeal to, draw upon, and fulfill the needs of the vast majority of peoples living in our communities: workers, women, minorities, and youth?


5. As we discuss strategies for change, should we be thinking about alternative newspapers, radio stations, websites, and/or other venues for public communication of our ideas in our communities? Should we invite these potential consumers of progressive media to work for it, write its stories, and pay for its production? And is organizing around a progressive media project at the local level a good way to build networks of activists?

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Jonah Raskin : Tina Brown is Blushing Bride

Blushing bride. Image from Weddingstar.
READ THIS SKIP THAT:
The Daily Beast weds Newsweek

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 16, 2010

Mergers of media giants usually attract attention in the media, and for the moment the merger of Newsweek and The Daily Beast is big news. Tina Brown is back -- perhaps bigger than ever before. The former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and the founder and the editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast, Brown described the merger as a “marriage,” and added that some marriages take longer than others to happen.

Brown brings a certain amount of sex appeal with her to her new job at Newsweek, as well as considerable experience in print media. But her sex appeal and her experience hardy seem enough to rescue the 75-year-old news magazine and rival of Time that is owned by Sidney Harman -- now 92-years-old; it will take more than Brown to prevent the sinking of that hoary old beast, Newsweek.

It’s estimated that Newsweek will lose $20 million this year; The Daily Beast -- that’s owned by Barry Diller’s Inter Active Corp (IAC) -- is only expected to lose $10 million this year. IAC also owns Evite and Excite and more. Newsweek thinks that online journalism and information is the shot in the arm that it needs; The Daily Beast thinks that Newsweek will add credibility. If it's a marriage, as Brown says it is, than It's more like a shot-gun marriage than a marriage of true love.

In either case, no one under the age of 25 is reading either Newsweek or The Daily Beast, which is a good reason advertisers are not flocking to either of them. The marriage ---or merge -- between the two of them seems like an act of desperation more than anything else.

The bigger story that the merger hides is the crisis of old-fashioned print media that print media doesn’t want to face, and doesn’t want to write about. It’s one of the biggest news stories of our time, and it’s not going to go away. It’s bigger than TV or the movies or radio, and one of these days we’re going to read a news story that says “Newsweek Closes Shop.”

Jonah Raskin is a professor of communication studies at Sonoma State University.]

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Harry Targ : Robert Gibbs and the 'Professional Left'

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs slammed the "professional left" for being too critical of Barack Obama. Photo by Carolyn Kaster /AP.
Criticizing Obama:
A dialectical look at the 'professional left'

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2010

I view as despicable the Obama administration strategy, expressed through Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, of ostracizing members of what he called the “professional left” who criticize shortcomings of administration policies.

Progressives have appropriately condemned economic policies that limited job stimuli, bailed out banks without nationalizing them, assumed away the very popular single payer option in health care reform, escalated war in Afghanistan, stalled the end of the blockade on Cuba, and maintained an imperial military presence in Latin America, East Asia, and just about everyplace else. The administration has not pursued immigration reform, climate change legislation, and the Employee Free Choice Act.

However, the reality of the first 19 months of this administration includes some health care reform, modest symbolic gestures to reduce hostilities toward other countries and the reintroduction of diplomacy as a tool of international relations, negotiations on the reduction of nuclear weapons, reestablishment of funding to international agencies that promote family planning, and a set of economic policies that bailed out banks and the auto industry that reduced somewhat the horrific consequences of the current recession.

The Obama administration still has on the table a progressive agenda concerning the environment, labor, job creation, and foreign policy. This is a public agenda for which he can and will be held accountable while electoral and tea party opponents are committed to the destruction of public institutions, fairness, and access to basic human needs.

As I read the Gibbs comments, however, a small part of me, I confess, was reminded of those who are inalterably opposed to every policy and practice of this administration. Some analysts on the left have articulated views that seem to me to ignore the historical context, the constellation of political forces today, the consciousness of people at the grassroots, and the almost omnipresence of an electronic media that frames virtually everything in terms of markets, the terrorist threat, unions as “special interests,” and government as an unmitigated evil.

I was ruminating about this discomfort I have with some of our left discourse as I sat through the August meeting of the Northwest Central Labor Council, Indiana, AFL-CIO meeting. We were listening to a presentation by a labor lawyer who works for a firm that specializes in cases of worker injuries and deaths on the job. This firm, for years, has worked with liberal state legislators, mostly Democrats, to get legislation passed that might guarantee the right of families of deceased workers to sue for deaths of loved ones at workplaces and to provide access to workers compensation.

It seems that Indiana law limits legal and compensation claims for victims of mesothelioma and other asbestos exposure diseases to cases occurring within the last 10 years. Scientific evidence indicates that victims of workplace asbestos exposure may not appear for 20 or 30 years. In effect, most claims for survivors and victims of asbestos related diseases would be ineligible for compensation.

Then the Council heard from State Rep. Dennis Tyler (D-Muncie) who has been working with the law firm, George and Sipes, to change the law. Tyler described the procedural roadblocks to proposed legislative reform in 2009; Republican opposition in both the State House and Senate to legislative reform, and lobbying efforts by the Indiana Manufacturers Association, the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, Associated Builders and Contractors, the National Federation of Independent Business, Indiana Energy Association, the Indiana Petroleum Council, and the Insurance Institute of Indiana.

The Tyler Bill was reintroduced in 2010. As George and Sipes describes the outcome:

The bill was assigned to the House Labor and Employment Committee and was heard in late January. With the bill about to pass the Committee and move to the House floor for a vote, the Republicans on the Committee, doing the bidding of the manufacturer and insurance lobbyists, walked out, which left too few members to hold a vote, effectively killing the bill.

In Council discussion State Rep. Tyler admitted that Indiana working people, including union members, are disillusioned with both parties and the electoral process generally. However, as expected from a state politician, he pointed out that the only hope workers and families have for some assistance when mesothelioma hits a family is to elect a pro-worker, largely Democratic, State House. Traditionally, in the Indiana legislature, Democrats have a narrow lead in the House and rarely control the Senate.

This fall, the Democrats could lose the House, which will not only bury any prospects of reform on asbestos compensation legislation but a Republican victory in the House and Senate would lead almost immediately to passage of legislation making Indiana a so-called “Right-to-Work” state. “Right-to-Work states allow workers in unionized workplaces to not join the unions that represent their interests. Wage rates and union membership in Right-to-Work states are uniformly less than in states that have not embraced such anti-union legislation.

So what do we on the “left” do? We surely do not want to be fodder for the White House strategy to convince voters that they are not “left.” We surely do not want to support more off shore drilling, more war in Afghanistan, allocation of fewer resources for public employment and green jobs etc.

But, at the same time, we need to work to protect workers stricken with mesothelioma. We need to work to create real regulation of mines, of oil drilling, of global warming. We need to push for single-payer health care. We need to mobilize around a real job creation agenda. And we need to demand that with tight resources our needs must be paid for by a dramatic draw-down of military spending.

In the end, I come to the conclusion that we on the “left” must continue to perform to Robert Gibb’s characterization. But, I believe we must also continue to work in our communities, our states and nationally, electorally and in the streets, to improve the lives of all who suffer today as we organize to build a better world tomorrow.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Larry Ray : Hitting the Pause Button

From the land of the 'oil geezer':
America's round-the-clock 'churnalism'

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2010

GULFPORT, Mississippi -- This column has been on pause for almost a month.

The disgust and distraction from smelly, greasy petroleum pollution rolling onto beaches and marshes just a mile or so from my home has been mostly responsible for the hiatus. But the general roar of background noise from today’s “news media” is more disgusting, distracting, and off-putting than the BP oil well blowout itself.

Immediately dubbed “the oil spill,” it is not a spill at all. It is a runaway blown-out oil well almost a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico that has been pumping an estimated 40-60,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf for almost three months. It is a very complex story that requires at least a basic understanding of high school physics and knowledge of basic geology to discuss it in any sort of meaningful way.

It also helps to know something about hydrocarbons and the advanced technology used in oil and gas drilling and producing deep ocean oil wells. But those basic requirements don't stop pretty news faces from blathering on, basically clueless, reading teleprompter tripe or swapping fuzzy speculation amongst themselves.

The plight of gulf coast residents is heralded by local politicians and a few, including a morbidly obese New Orleans area parish president, have become regulars on national newscasts as they growl and repeat their attacks on BP and the U.S. government. Not that there isn't plenty to growl about, if you like to listen to it over and over.

In May, immediately after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and plunged to the bottom, the short, hyper, bald headed afternoon CNN ringmaster exclaimed breathlessly that they had just discovered a “geezer of oil” coming from the sea floor. And that was before the reporting got really bad.

Nightly stories with video of oil soaked birds and massive pollution of sensitive marine marsh lands requires only a video camera and a talking head reciting the lines of the generic “Gee isn’t this a shame” news story template. Works equally well for earthquakes, floods and raging forest fires.

Mix in the soap opera of BP CEO, Tony Hayward, with his passive Lemur-like gaze and terminal case of foot-in-mouth disease (it has just been announced he is leaving BP in a matter of weeks), then add grimy pre-November election political dirt, tea party racism, and General McChrystal’s inglorious cashiering for trash talking his Commander in Chief, and Arizona's Nazi immigration law and viola... non-stop, 24-7 all American “churnalism.”

That churnalism, mixed with endless side-effect warnings of 4-hour erections, rashes, and diarrhea from the drug commercials that dominate the evening news and the off switch is the best bet. The New York Times and a cuppa coffee in the mornings along with a visit to the BBC and a couple of Italian major newspapers seems to provide an adequate news balance.

With the dog days of summer spreading record breaking heat and humidity across much of the nation and the threat of an above average hurricane season here where Katrina tore us up almost five years ago, I will probably just keep the pause button pressed and plan to be back, intact, by Thanksgiving or maybe before, hopefully.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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Salon et al : Romancing the Stone

On a roll: Image from Luminous Landscape.
Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone:
The Salon/Adobe/Oracle/Dell connection

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / July 3, 2010

As the recent replacement of General McChrystal by General Petraeus as military leader of the Pentagon’s war in Afghanistan indicates, Rolling Stone magazine can publish an article that has a profound effect on U.S. politics during the current historical era of endless war abroad and endless economic recession at home.

But it’s unlikely that Rolling Stone will publish many news articles that are critical of either the Internet magazine Salon’s lack of reporting about U.S. political prisoners or of the way Salon, Adobe Systems, Oracle, or Dell Inc. executives obtain their wealth.

Here's why:

1. As of June 1, 2010, Rolling Stone owner Jann Wenner and his Wenner Media LLC firm apparently owned 10.1 percent of the Salon Media Group’s common stock;
2. Adobe Systems Co-Chairman of the Board John Warnock is also Salon’s Chairman of the Board;
3. former Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen sits on Oracle’s corporate board;
4. and current Adobe president and CEO, Shantanu Narayen, sits next to Texas Billionaire Michael Dell on the Dell Inc. Board of Directors.

Between 2004 and February 2006, Wenner also sat on Salon’s board of directors, after investing $200,000 in the Salon Media Group in December 2003. According to a January 15, 2004, Salon press release, after Rolling Stone invested in Salon, the Salon founder and then-CEO, David Talbot, stated:

I look forward to working with Jann Wenner on the Salon board of directors... Everyone at Salon is also very excited about collaborating with Rolling Stone... Salon’s partnership with Rolling Stone is full of great promise.

The same press release also reported that Wenner said:

I’m excited about this collaboration between Rolling Stone and Salon.

Ironically, a few years before Wenner joined its corporate board, Salon had posted an article by Sean Elder on June 28, 2002, titled “The Death of Rolling Stone,” which observed:

...The truth is that Rolling Stone has been such an undistinguished hybrid -- part ‘70s-style journalism (investigative reporting, distinct voices and rambling interviews), and part any other entertainment magazine you can name for so long that most of its subscribers are probably unaware that they still get it...

As Rolling Stone has slowly morphed into a magazine just like dozens of others, it has lost its reason for being... Rolling Stone seems like an anachronism, the Ladies’ Home Journal of rock journalism...

Salon’s Website attracts about 5.4 million unique visitors per month and “ultimately, Salon charges advertisers for a set number of ad impressions viewed by a Website visitor,” according to the Salon Media Group’s June 2010 10K S.E.C. financial filing.

Between March 2009 and March 2010, for example, Salon collected over $2.9 million from its corporate advertisers and $701,000 from its 15,800 paid subscribers (who pay Salon between $29 and $45 each year). In addition, none of Salon’s 45 full-time and two part-time employees are unionized or subject to a collective bargaining agreement.

Yet, according to its June 2010 10K financial filing:

Salon has been relying on cash infusions primarily from related parties to fund operations. The related parties are generally John Warnock, Chairman of the Board of Salon, and William Hambrecht. William Hambrecht is the father of Salon’s former President and Chief Executive Officer, Elizabeth Hambrecht, a Director of the Company. During the year ended March 31, 2010, related parties provided approximately $2.6 million in new loans.

Curtailment of cash investments and borrowing guarantees by related parties could detrimentally impact Salon’s cash availability and its ability to fund its operations.

Warnock (a founder and former CEO of Adobe Systems, as well as an Adobe board co-chairman since 1989) has sat on the Salon corporate board since 2001 and been Salon’s chairman of the board since December 2006. As of June 1, 2010, Adobe board chairman Warnock owned 41 percent of Salon’s Series D Preferred Stock, 52.8 percent of Salon’s Series C Preferred Stock, and 18.5 percent of Salon’s Series A Preferred Stock; while his Adobe Systems firm owned 100 percent of Salon’s Series B Preferred Stock.

Besides providing “cash infusions” for the media firm whose former president and former CEO is his daughter, William Hambrecht currently sits next to Salon board member Elizabeth Hambrecht on the WR Hambrecht & Co. investment firm’s corporate board, is a member of the Motorola and AOL corporate boards, and co-founded the United Football League in December 2009. The Hambrecht family’s tax-exempt Sarah & William Hambrecht Foundation also owns stock in Salon.

Sitting next to Salon Chairman of the Board Warnock on Adobe’s corporate board between December 2000 and April 2008 was an Adobe executive named Bruce Chizen who “has served as a strategic advisor to Adobe Systems Incorporated... since November 2007,” according to the website of the Oracle computer software company -- on whose corporate board former Adobe board member (and Adobe’s CEO between April 2000 and January 2005) Chizen currently sits. Coincidentally, on June 16, 2010, Bloomberg News reported the following:

Oracle Corp., the world’s second- biggest software maker, faces a lawsuit brought by a whistleblower and the U.S. Justice Department claiming it overcharged the government by tens of millions of dollars.

“Oracle failed to disclose discounts that it gave its most favored commercial customers, according to a complaint in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. Under General Services Administration contracts, the government must get the company’s best prices, according to the complaint.

“Oracle knowingly and recklessly employed these techniques to offer commercial customers deeper discounts without offering those deeper discounts to the U.S. government," it said...

The complaint alleges "various schemes Oracle used to give commercial customers deeper discounts than the GSA schedule provided."

Taxpayers "overpaid for each Oracle software product by the amount of discounts and reductions from other commercial pricing practices that should applied to each such purchase," according to the complaint...

When Oracle board member Chizen was an executive at Salon board chairman Warnock’s Adobe firm, he apparently was not reluctant to eliminate the jobs of a lot of Adobe workers in order to enrich Adobe’s already wealthy top executives and stockholders. As the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, observed on June 3, 1999:

Adobe Systems Inc. yesterday announced it will slash 250 jobs by the end of the year, the second round of layoffs to hit the San Jose graphics software maker in the past nine months.

...The layoffs... will cut about 9 percent of Adobe's workforce...

Yet in the same breath, Adobe executives said revenues for its second quarter, which ends tomorrow, should be better than expected. Adobe expects as much as $246 million in revenues for the quarter, which would touch the high end of analysts' estimates.

"The business is doing well and we are certainly excited by that," said Bruce Chizen, Adobe executive vice president for worldwide products.

"But we have an obligation to... our stockholders... to grow this company aggressively" he said...

Adobe dominates the market for graphics and document software used by publishers with programs like Illustrator, Photoshop and PageMaker…

Last August, Adobe announced a restructuring that eventually pared 350 positions, or 12 percent, of its workforce...

...Chizen said the company's goal is to save about $25 million to $30 million in administrative costs annually.

And in 2005, Chizen and Salon board chairman Warnock’s profitable Adobe firm was also not reluctant to lay off more U.S. workers, despite generating “record profits” in 2005. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (12/16/05) noted:

Adobe Systems Inc. posted higher fourth-quarter earnings Thursday but said it expects to cut 650 to 700 jobs as it folds recently acquired rival Macromedia Inc. into its operations...

At Thursday's earnings announcement, Chief Executive Bruce Chizen said 2005 was "another remarkable year for Adobe." He added, "We grew our business 18 percent, generated record profits, and for the third consecutive year achieved record revenue for the fourth quarter and year." ...

The 11 percent to 12 percent companywide work force reduction will... help the company... achieve its 2006 financial targets, said Murray Demo, Adobe's chief financial officer...

Salon Chairman of the Board Warnock founded his then-privately-owned Adobe Systems firm with his current co-chairman of the Adobe corporate board, Charles Geschke, in 1982; but, ironically, “their original product called PostScript was derived from technology... developed at the University of Utah,” a publicly-funded state university, according to A History of the Personal Computer by Roy Allan.

The same book also noted that “shortly after the founding of Adobe, Apple Computer made a significant financial investment in the company.”

Besides owing 19 percent of Adobe’s stock until 1989, Apple Computer was apparently, simultaneously, the biggest “customer” of the same Adobe firm that it partially owned until 1989. As the 1997 book Apple by Jim Carlton revealed:

[Apple Computer Founder] Steve Jobs... got Apple to invest $2.5 million in... in Adobe...

By 1989, Adobe had grown to a minibehemoth selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Postscript and related programs per year... Adobe licensed PostScript for use on Apple’s Macintosh, with Adobe receiving royalty payments as well as money for the use of PostScript-related Type 1 fonts... It had mushroomed in size in tandem with Apple’s growth...

...Apple paid Adobe royalties on PostScript sold in Laser-Writers, as well as an extra $300 for each Type 1 font needed to print characters...

In 1986, for example, Apple accounted for 80 percent of Adobe’s sales, according to the International Directory of Company Histories.

The current Adobe CEO and president (who both sits next to Salon board chairman Warnock on Adobe’s corporate board and next to Texas Billionaire Dell on Dell Inc.’s corporate board), Shantanu Narayen, also has not been reluctant to lay-off a lot of Adobe workers. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, for example, on December 4, 2008:

Adobe Systems in San Jose is laying off 600 employees...

The layoffs... represent 8 percent of Adobe's global workforce...

“The global economic crisis significantly impacted our revenue during the fourth quarter," Adobe's president and chief executive officer, Shantanu Narayen, said in a statement. "We have taken action to reduce our operating costs and fine-tune the focus of our resources on key strategic priorities."

Yet the AFL-CIO website indicates that “in 2009 Shantanu Narayen received $6,663,781 in total compensation” -- after the Adobe CEO and Dell Inc. board member eliminated the jobs of eight percent of Adobe’s workers in 2008. And although Adobe’s 2009 revenues still exceeded $2.9 billion, in November 2009 the Tech Crunch website confirmed that Adobe executives were going to lay off 680 more Adobe workers -- representing nine percent of Adobe’s remaining work force -- in 2010.

According to the TechAmerica Foundation’s recently-released annual Cyberstates report, Cyberstates 2010: The Definitive State-by-State Analysis of the High-Technology Industry, the U.S. high-tech industry lost 245,600 jobs in 2009 -- including 112,600 jobs eliminated by high-tech manufacturing firm executives and 20,700 jobs eliminated by software services company executives.

But at Adobe board Co-Chairman Warnock’s Salon Media Group, Salon executives still seem to earn a lot more money than the average U.S. worker. According to Salon’s December 2009 10K financial filing, for example, Salon Editor-in-Chief Joan Walsh “received cash compensation of $219,000 during fiscal year 2009” and “Richard Gingras, who became” Salon's “CEO effective May 1, 2009, earns a base salary of $230,000.”

Coincidentally, in a July 10, 1999 Salon article, Salon Editor-in-Chief Walsh wrote the following in reference to U.S. political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and his U.S. left supporters:

...The Mumia cult sickens me like little else in American politics today. For the white left, it's Black Panther worship all over again, with even less to worship... Abu-Jamal has done little but run a one-man self-promotion machine from prison.

...Mumia's minions are content with marching in the streets and signing petitions on behalf of their cuddly convict. "He is just beautiful," says author Alice Walker. "He has a lot of light. He reminds me of Nelson Mandela." What an insult to Mandela...

Mumia madness pushed me over the edge earlier this year, when Oakland teachers demanded to stage a teach-in on his behalf throughout the Oakland schools...

Besides owning both stock in Adobe Co-Chairman Warnock’s Salon Media Group and Rolling Stone magazine, Wenner’s media firm also owns both Us Weekly magazine (www.usmagazine.com) and Men’s Journal magazine (www.mensjournal.com). According to New York Magazine (3/27/00) in at the turn of the century, Wenner Media was still a private company “worth somewhere between $500 million and $750 million, with earnings in the $40 million-to-$60 million range.”

In the early 1990s, Wenner spent about four months out of the year at his three-story country manor in East Hampton, Long Island, employed servants there, and also owned both a five-story Manhattan townhouse and a Mercedes limousine, according to the book Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History by Robert Draper.

And in October 2009, Wenner apparently purchased an eight-room, three-story waterfront home on one and a half acres in Montauk, Long Island for $11.9 million -- after previously purchasing a 62.9 acre upstate estate in Tivoli, New York for $5.8 million in 2007, according to the New York Post (10/22/09).

So if you’re a U.S. music fan who’s been suffering economically during the current U.S. historical era of endless war abroad and endless economic recession at home (or been laid-off recently by corporations like Adobe, Oracle, and Dell), don’t expect Rolling Stone or Salon to be that eager to promote a more equitable redistribution of the U.S. celebrity music world and U.S. high-technology computer industry’s surplus wealth in 2010.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]
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Dick J. Reavis : Texas Monthly's 'Where I'm From'

Erykah Badu (right) at nine years, with her sister Nayrok, six, in Dallas in 1980. Badu contributed to Texas Monthly's special edition. Photo from Texas Monthly.
Signs of a new inclusiveness?
Texas Monthly's special edition

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / May 25, 2010

The current issue of Texas Monthly, a “special edition” whose theme is “Where I’m From” is worth some reading, some scrutiny, and some thought.

Though the funerary photo of Laura [Eva von Braun] Bush on its cover is an eyesore, its teaser lines carry an eye-raising message. Nineteen contributors and interviewees -- mostly notables and novelists -- are named there: four of them are Mexican-American, two of them black.

With luck, the issue’s inclusiveness forecasts a new and better day at the magazine. It’s as if Texans, and all Texans, could produce a national-class magazine without heavy supervision from the non-Texans who dominate the state’s industry of words.

A few weeks ago, Mexican-American writers chastised the editors of both the Texas Observer and the Monthly for accepting slots on a panel of 11 other whites at an Observer-sponsored “Texas Writer’s Festival.” From the sidelines I assailed them for billing non-Texan whites as homefolk.

But the Monthly’s special edition would have already been at its printer -- outside of Texas -- when the controversy arose, and that might indicate that the magazine, or at least its editor, Jake Silverstein, had already turned a corner, if only for a single issue.

The significance of “Where I’m From,” however, goes beyond questions of color and regional origin. As a commercial product, this artifact is an oddity. Mass-market magazines are generally aimed at prosperous and prospering readers 25 to 40 because that’s the demographic advertisers seek.

The Monthly’s “From” issue mainly carries accounts of life in Texas before 1970, certainly before 1985. In the annals of the industry’s prized readership, anything before 1985 is history, and anything before 1970 is ancient history -- and as Henry Ford long ago told us, for Americans “history is bunk.”


If not many young people will turn the pages of this edition, their parents will, and that probably explains either its origin -- or merely its commercial convenience. The magazine’s paid pages include a 42-page advertorial from institutions of higher learning: private and public colleges alike are seeking students who pay full tuition. The issue is so fat with ad pages -- including eight advertorials, running a total of 78 pages -- that getting to its content is like fighting one’s way through the canebrakes along the lower Rio Grande.

The issue describes Texas through memories of childhood and adolescence, and that’s a relief from the usual definitions: Texas as a cluster of Metropolitan Statistical Areas, or markets, and Texas as a collection of electoral districts, a la Texas Tribune. Sadly, of the 10 shorter pieces in the front of the magazine, in sections entitled “Growing Up,” and “Leaving,” six come from people in the environs of New York City. Those contributors are mainly writers who, because the project of Texas publishing was betrayed, have made their careers in the American industry’s hometown. But even expatriate accounts tell us what Texas is like.

The traditional answer to the question, “What Is Texas?,” as founding writers at the Monthly often noted, was to be found in the pages of Texas Highways: nice people doing nice things, especially in county seats. Though some of the same Pollyanna approach is evident in the “Where I’m From” issue, a few of its accounts get closer to the truth, as I see it, anyway.

My observation has been that, when they are sincere, all thoughtful Texans voice a love-hate relationship with their setting, just as people in Northern Mexico do. The state’s turbulent history and even its terrains, like those of Northern Mexico, don’t offer us much choice: Texas is not Maine or Costa Rica or California North.

By that standard, the prize contribution in the “From” issue is an as-told-to piece from Rick Perry, his recollection of his upbringing on a dry-land North Texas cotton farm. Perry told interviewer Silverstein things like:

[The area around Haskell] could be one of the most beautiful places or it could be one of the most desolate, brutal, uninviting and uninspiring places … I spent a lot of time just alone with my dog. A lot.

Perry talks about daylight darkness created by dust storms, about bathing in No. 2 tubs, and, as John Kelso has noted in an Austin American-Statesman send-up, mother-made underwear. His tale is truly worth telling as fiction -- in a novel by the likes of Cormack McCarthy.

On the other hand, in an interview with Monthly long-timer Mimi Swartz, Democrat Bill White talks in middle-class truisms, Texas Highways style.

The view of Texas as a locale not merely of nostalgia, but also as a problem or project leaps out, too, with contributions of El Paso historian David Dorado Romo, who finds commonalities in the Texas-Mexico and Israeli-Palestinian borders, and of Erykah Badu, who reports that “…in the late eighties crack cocaine came and everything went to hell” in the South Dallas neighborhood of her childhood.

For Perry, the question “what was Texas” does not draw an idyllic answer, and for both Romo and Badu, what’s relevant is not only “what was Texas?” but “what is it becoming?” That worry should torment both the Monthly and the 25-to-40 demographic in the issues to follow “Where I’m From.”

[A native Texan, Dick J. Reavis is an award-winning journalist, educator, and author who teaches journalism at North Carolina State University. He is a former staffer at the Moore County News, The Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, the San Antonio Light, the Dallas Observer, Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the San Antonio Express-News. He also wrote for The Rag in Austin in the Sixties. His latest book is Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers.]

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Robert Jensen : The Collapse of Journalism/The Journalism of Collapse

Image from Knight Science Journalism Tracker.
New Storytelling and a New Story:
The Collapse of Journalism/The Journalism of Collapse

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / March 26, 2010

[A version of this essay was delivered as the Lawrence Dana Pinkham Memorial Lecture, Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, India, March 18, 2010.]

There is considerable attention paid in the United States to the collapse of journalism -- both in terms of the demise of the business model for corporate commercial news media, and the evermore superficial, shallow, and senseless content that is inadequate for citizens concerned with self-governance.

This collapse is part of larger crises in the political and economic spheres, crises rooted in the incompatibility of democracy and capitalism. New journalistic vehicles for storytelling are desperately needed.

There has been far less discussion of the need for a journalism of collapse -- the challenge to tell the story of a world facing multiple crises in the realms of social justice and sustainability. This collapse of the basic political and economic systems of the modern world, with dramatic consequences on the human and ecological fronts, demands not only new storytelling vehicles but a new story.

In this essay I want to review the failure of existing systems and suggest ideas for how to think about something radically different, through the lens of journalists’ work. The phrase “how to think about” should not be interpreted to mean “provide a well-developed plan for”; I don’t have magical answers to these difficult questions, and neither does anyone else.

The first task is to face the fact that every problem we encounter does not necessarily have a solution that we can identify, or even imagine, in the moment; that identifying how existing systems have failed does not guarantee we have the capacity to devise new systems that will succeed.

This is a realistic attitude, not a defeatist one. The lack of a guarantee of success does not mean the inevitability of failure, and it does not absolve us of our responsibility to struggle to understand what is happening and to act as moral agents in a difficult world. In fact, I think such realism is required for serious attempts at fashioning a response to the crises.

The eventual solutions, if there are to be solutions, may come in frameworks so different from our current understanding that we can’t yet see even their outlines, let alone the details. This is a time when we should be focused on “questions that go beyond the available answers,” to borrow a phrase from sustainable agriculture researcher Wes Jackson.

The old story

Before taking up that challenge, I want to identify the story that dominates our era, what we might call the story of perpetual progress and endless expansion. This is the larger cultural narrative in which specific stories that appear in journalistic outlets are set. Charting the whole history of this story is beyond the scope of this essay, so I will confine myself to the post-WWII era in which I have lived, when this progress/expansion story has dominated not only in the United States and other developed countries but most of the world.

This story goes like this: In the modern world, human beings have dramatically expanded our understanding of how the natural world works, allowing us not only to control and exploit the resources of the non-human world but also to find ways to distribute those resources in a more just and democratic fashion. The progress/expansion story assumes we have knowledge -- or the capacity to acquire knowledge -- that is adequate to run the world competently, and that the application of that knowledge will produce a constantly expanding bounty that, in theory, can provide for all.

The two great systems of the post-WWII era that were in direct conflict -- the capitalist West led by the United States and the communist East led by the Soviet Union -- shared an allegiance to this story, that humans had the ability to understand and control, to shape the future, to become God-like in some sense.

Even in places that carved out some independence in the Cold War, such as India, the same philosophy dominated, evidenced most clearly in big dam projects and the Green Revolution’s model of water-intensive, chemical farming.

The failure of the communist challenge was said to be “the end of history,” a point where the only work remaining was the application of our technical knowledge to lingering problems within a system of global capitalism and liberal democracy. Even with the widening of inequality and the clear threats to the ecosystem from human intervention, the progress/expansion story continues to dominate, bolstered by a widely held technological fundamentalism (more on that later).

The bumper-sticker version of this philosophy: More and bigger is better, forever and ever.

There’s one slight problem: If we continue to believe this story, and to base individual decisions and collective policies on it, we will dramatically accelerate the drawdown of the ecological capital of the planet, hastening the point at which the ecosystem will no longer be able to sustain human life as we know it at this level. In the process, we can expect not only more inequality, but in times of intense competition for resources, a dramatic increase in social conflict.

This critique cannot be dismissed as hysteric apocalypticism; it is a reasonable judgment, given all the evidence. The progress/expansion story has left us with enduring levels of human inequality that violate our moral principles and threaten to undermine any social stability, and an endangered ecosystem that threatens our very survival. Whatever systems and institutions we devise to replace those at the root of these problems, the underlying progress/expansion narrative has to change.

The collapse of journalism

In the United States, it is clear that at least in the short term, there will be fewer professional journalists working in fewer outlets with fewer resources for reporting. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism sums it up in its 2010 State of the News Media report: “[W]e estimate that the newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000, or roughly 30 percent. That leaves an estimated $4.4 billion remaining. Even if the economy improves we predict more cuts in 2010.” Newspapers are hurting the worst, but there is no good news from any news media.

That loss of capacity comes from plunging ad revenues: In 2009, ad revenue fell 26 percent for U.S. newspapers, including online, bringing the total loss over the past three years to 43 percent. Local television ad revenue fell 22 percent, triple the decline the year before. Other media also saw a decline in ad revenue: radio, 22 percent; magazine, 17 percent; network TV, 8 percent (for network news alone, probably more).

Online ad revenue overall fell 5 percent, and revenue to news sites most likely also fared much worse. Cable news was the only commercial news sector keeping its head above water, barely, according to the report.

Revenue is down, and so are audiences. The PEJ study reports audience growth only in digital and cable news, with declines in local TV and network news. Print newspaper circulation fell 10.6 percent in 2009, and since 2000, daily circulation has fallen 25.6 percent.

This decline is also reflected in employment. According to a report by UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc., there was a 22 percent increase in the journalism jobs lost from September 2008 through August 2009, compared with a general job loss rate of 8 percent. The news industry shed 35,885 jobs in a one-year period straddling 2008 and 2009.

Despite experiments with new ways to organize and support journalists -- including grant-funded news operations such as Pro Publica, university/newsroom partnerships, citizen journalism collaborations with professional newsrooms, and various web projects -- it is clear that, at least in the short term, there simply will be less journalism created by professional journalists.

It also seems clear that of the journalism remaining, a growing percentage is of less value to the project of enhancing democracy. I don’t want to pretend there was a golden age when professional journalism provided the critical and independent inquiry that citizens need to function as citizens.

For reasons articulated by critics such as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, contemporary professional journalism is hamstrung by institutional and ideological constraints that have been built into professional practices. As a result, corporate news owners rarely have to discipline mainstream journalists, who are socialized to accept the ideological prison in which they work and police other inmates.

But even with that rather large caveat, the slide of much of contemporary journalism into banality is frightening. Of public affairs journalism, we might paraphrase an old joke about hard-to-please restaurant patrons: “The food is awful here,” one says, and the friend replies, “Yes, and they’ve reduced the portions.”

The markers of this slide in quality are clear enough: An obsession with entertainment and sports, especially large-scale spectacles; routine exploitation of sexuality and violence in ways corrosive to human dignity; an endless fascination with celebrity, with the standards of what constitutes celebrity continually dropping; and a growing imposition of those spectacle and celebrity values on public affairs.

This is not a screed against entertainment, pleasure, fun, or the people’s desire to gain pleasure from fun entertainment. It is not an attempt to glorify the rational and devalue the emotional. It is not a self-indulgent lament that the kind of journalism I prefer is losing out. It’s an accurate description of our increasing numbed-out and intellectually vapid culture.

How much of this collapse of journalism is driven by the explosion of news outlets in a 24-hour news cycle, as an ever-larger media beast demands to be fed? How much is a product of bottom-line-focused news managers’ longstanding obsession with producing the extraordinary profits demanded by top-floor-dwelling executives? How much is panic caused by these dramatic drops in audience and revenue by so-called legacy media, leading to desperation in programming?

Whatever the relative weight of these causes, the effect is clear: In the mainstream outlets through which most people in the United States get their news, there is less journalism relevant to citizens’ role in a democracy and more journalism-like material that dulls our collective capacity for independent critical thinking. If journalists had only to struggle to return to some previous state in which they did a better job, that would be hard enough. But journalists can’t be satisfied with striving toward standards from the past. A new journalism is needed.

The journalism of collapse

The immediate crises that journalism and journalists face -- some rooted in the pathology of professionalism and its illusory claims to neutrality, and some rooted in the predatory nature of capitalism and its illusory commitment to democracy -- are serious, but in some sense trivial compared to the long-term crises in a profoundly unjust and fundamentally unsustainable world. We have to deal with the collapse of journalism, but we also must begin to fashion a journalism of collapse.

To reiterate my basic premise: Whatever the specific story being told in modern journalism, those stories typically are set in that larger narrative of perpetual progress and endless expansion. What kind of story is needed for a world that desperately needs to rethink its idea of progress in a world that is no longer expanding?

Here’s the story: On March 17, 2051, the world will pump its last easily accessible barrel of usable oil. By that time, cancer directly attributable to human-created toxicity will kill 125 million people per year, while major disruptions in the hydrological cycle will so dramatically reduce the amount of fresh water that 18.9 percent of the human population will die each year as a direct result.

On June 14, 2047, exactly half of the area of the world’s oceans will be dead zones, incapable of supporting significant marine life. Three and a half years later, topsoil losses will have reached the point where even with petrochemical based fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, yields will drop by 50 percent on the most fertile soil and fall to zero on soil that has effectively gone sterile due to contamination and compaction.

But there won’t be any petrochemicals anyway, because there won’t be any oil. And there won’t be enough water. And so there won’t be enough food. And getting reliable broadband internet service will be difficult.

OK, that was all meant to be funny. That, of course, is not the story. The story we need to tell won’t be focused on predictions about specific aspects of collapse. I have no doubt that if the human community continues on its present trajectory, such statistics will be all too real. I have no doubt that if the human community does not change that trajectory in substantial ways fairly soon, the future will be grim.

But rather than scurrying to make specific predictions, journalism should struggle to help people understand the processes that make that preceding paragraph plausible, and hence not funny at all. There’s little humor in the recognition that continued commitment to an ideology of perpetual progress and endless expansion -- operationally defined as ever greater human consumption of the ecological capital of the planet -- is a dead end. More and bigger not only is not better, it is not possible.

The response I often get to this view is the assertion that we need not worry about the physical limits of the planet because human ingenuity will invent increasingly clever ways of exploiting those resources.

This technological fundamentalism -- the belief that the use of evermore sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology -- is more prevalent, and more dangerous, than religious fundamentalism. History teaches that we should be more cautious and pay attention to the unintended effects of such technology with an eye on the long term.

The fundamentalists believe the future is always bright, apparently because they wish it to be so. But the desire to live in an endless expanding world of bounty -- a desire found both in those who currently have access to that bounty and those who don’t but crave it -- is not a guarantee of it. We certainly know this at the individual level, that “you can’t always get what you want,” as the song goes, and what holds for us as individuals is also true for us as a species.

Those of us who question such declarations are often said to be “anti-technology,” which is a meaningless insult designed to derail serious discussion. All human beings use technology of some kind, whether stone tools or computers. An anti-fundamentalist position is not that all technology is bad, but that the introduction of new technology should be evaluated carefully on the basis of its effects -- predictable and unpredictable -- on human communities and the non-human world, with an understanding of the limits of our knowledge to control the larger world.

So the first step in crafting a new narrative for journalists is to reject technological fundamentalism and deal with a harsh reality: In the future we will have to make due with far less energy, which means less high-technology and a need for more creative ways of coping. Journalists have to tell stories about what that kind of creativity looks like. They have to reject the gee-whizzery of much of the contemporary science and technology reporting and emphasize the activities of those with a deeper ecological worldview.

There also is a corresponding need to tell stories about redefining our concept of the good life. Again, the basics are in pop songs: “all you need is love,” and “money can’t buy you love.” We all agree, yet that narrative of progress/expansion is rooted in the belief that acquisition and consumption are consistent with a good life, or perhaps even required for it.

Central to that redefinition is accepting that collectively we have to learn to live with less. In a world with grotesque inequalities in the distribution of wealth, some of our sisters and brothers are already living with less -- less than what is required for a decent life, which reflects the unjust nature of our social systems.

For those of us in the more affluent sectors, the question is not only whether we will work for a more just distribution within the human family, but how we respond when the world imposes stricter limits on us all.

Living with less is crucial not only to ecological survival but to long-term human fulfillment. People in the United States live with an abundance of most everything -- except meaning. The people who defend the existing system most aggressively are typically either in the deepest denial, refusing to acknowledge their culture’s spiritual emptiness, or else have been the privileged beneficiaries of the system. This is not to suggest that poverty produces virtue, but to recognize that affluence tends to erode it.

A world that steps back from high-energy, high-technology answers to all questions will no doubt be a harder world in some ways. But the way people cope without such technological “solutions” can help create and solidify human bonds. Indeed, the high-energy/high-technology world often contributes to impoverished relationships as well as the destruction of longstanding cultural practices and the information those practices transmit.

Stepping back from this fundamentalism is not simply a sacrifice but an exchange of a certain kind of comfort and easy amusement for a different set of rewards. We need not romanticize community life or ignore the inequalities that structure our communities to recognize that human flourishing takes place in community and progressive social change doesn’t happen when people are isolated.

Telling this story is important in a world in which people have come to believe the good life is synonymous with consumption and the ability to acquire increasingly sophisticated technology. The specific stories told in the journalism of collapse will reject technological fundamentalism and aid people in the struggle to redefine the good life.

Journalists need not merely speculate about these things; across the United States people are actively engaged in such projects. Though not yet a majority, these people are planning transition towns, developing permaculture systems, creating community gardens, reclaiming domestic arts that have atrophied, organizing worker-owned cooperative businesses. They are experimenting with alternatives to the dominant culture, and in doing so they are, implicitly or explicitly, rejecting technological fundamentalism and redefining the good life.

This journalism of collapse I am proposing would include stories about the problems we face, the harsh reality of a contracting world of less energy. But it also would include stories about people’s experiments with new definitions of progress and the good life. Such an approach to journalism would not only highlight the threats but also shine a light on the way people are coping with the threats.

Journalism in the prophetic voice

I would call this kind of storytelling “journalism in the prophetic voice,” borrowing a theological term for secular purposes. I prefer to speak about the prophetic voice rather than prophets because everyone is capable of speaking in the voice; the prophetic is not the exclusive property of particular people labeled as prophets.

I also avoid the term prophecy, which is often used to describe a claim to be able to see the future. The complexity of these crises makes any claim to predict the details of what lies ahead absurd. All we can say is that, absent a radical change in our relationship to each other and the non-human world, we’re in for a rough ride in the coming decades. Though the consequences of that ride are likely to be more overwhelming than anything humans have faced, certainly people at other crucial historical moments have faced crises without clear paths or knowledge of the outcome. A twenty-five-year-old Karl Marx wrote about this in a letter to a friend in1843:

The internal difficulties seem to be almost greater than the external obstacles. ... Not only has a state of general anarchy set in among the reformers, but everyone will have to admit to himself that he has no exact idea what the future ought to be. On the other hand, it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one.

We should understand the prophetic as the calling out of injustice, the willingness not only to confront the abuses of the powerful but to acknowledge our own complicity. To speak prophetically requires us first to see honestly -- both how our world is structured by illegitimate authority that causes suffering beyond the telling, and how we who live in the privileged parts of the world are implicated in that suffering. In that same letter, Marx went on to discuss the need for this kind of “ruthless criticism”:

But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.

To speak prophetically is to refuse to shrink from what we discover about the injustice of the world. It is to name the wars of empire as unjust; to name an economic system that leaves half the world in abject poverty as unjust; to name the dominance of men, of heterosexuals, of white people as unjust. And it is to name the human destruction of Creation as our most profound failure. At the same time, to speak prophetically is to refuse to shrink from our own place in these systems. We must confront the powers that be, and ourselves.

Another prominent historical figure put it this way in 1909: “One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand the popular feeling and to give expression to it; another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments; and the third is fearlessly to expose popular defects.” That was Mohandas Gandhi, on the first page of Hind Swaraj.

Those tasks -- attempting to understand and give expression to what ordinary people feel, and then advocating progressive goals, while at the same time exposing problems in the culture -- are not likely to make one’s life easy. Journalists willing to take this position will find themselves in a tense place, between a ruling elite that is not interested in seriously changing the distribution of power and a general public that typically does not want to confront these difficult realities of collapse.

To speak from a prophetic position is to guarantee that one will find little rest and small comfort. Such is the fate of a commitment to truth-telling in difficult times, and times have never been more difficult.

But others have faced similar challenges. Looking to the tradition in the Hebrew Bible, the prophets condemned corrupt leaders and also called out all those privileged people in society who had turned from the demands of justice, which the faith makes central to human life. In his analysis of these prophets, the scholar and activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel concluded:

Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption. In a community not indifferent to suffering, uncompromisingly impatient with cruelty and falsehood, continually concerned for God and every man, crime would be infrequent rather than common.

That phrase, few are guilty but all are responsible, captures the challenge of the journalism of collapse. We can easily identify those powerful figures guilty of specific crimes. Who is guilty in perpetrating the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq? That’s easy -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice. Who is guilty in the bailout of Wall Street and the big banks: That’s easy, too -- Bush and Obama, Paulsen and Geithner, Bernanke and the boys. One task of journalists is to pursue the guilty, perhaps with a bit more fervor than contemporary U.S. news media; our journalists are too polite in handling war criminals and servants of the wealthy.

But when we look at the fragile state of the world, in some sense our future depends on recognizing that we all are responsible, depending on our status in society and resources available to us. Those of us in affluent sectors of society have the most to answer for, and the task of journalists is to raise questions uncomfortable for us all. This will rarely make journalists popular, but that also is not new. In each of the four Gospels, Jesus reminds us: “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” (Mark 6:4)

Since journalism has never really been an honorable profession, perhaps that makes us the perfect candidates for raising our voices prophetically.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); and The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing. Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online here.]

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MEDIA / ACORN Hoax : Times Won't Admit It Was Wrong

Pimp and ho: James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles went undercover at ACORN. But guess what: They weren't dressed like this!
NYT and the ACORN Hoax:
Paper won't admit its mistakes

March 11, 2010

Ignoring calls from numerous critics, the New York Times refuses to own up to mistakes in the paper's coverage of the now-famous right-wing videotapes attacking the community organizing group ACORN. Instead, the paper's public editor, Clark Hoyt, is relying on an absurd semantic justification in order to claim the paper does not need to print any corrections.

As conventionally reported in the Times and elsewhere, right-wing activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles dressed up as a pimp and a prostitute and visited several local ACORN offices, where office workers gave the duo advice on setting up a brothel, concealing a child prostitution ring and so forth. But many of the key "facts" surrounding the videos are either in dispute or are demonstrable fabrications.

Though O'Keefe appears in various scenes in the videos wearing a garish and absurd "pimp" costume, he in fact did not wear the outfit when he appeared in the ACORN offices (Washington Independent, 2/19/10); he was dressed in a button-down shirt and slacks. This fact undermines one of the key contentions of the ACORN smear--that the group is so hopelessly corrupt that they would dispense advice to an obvious criminal.

What's more, the "advice" that they received, according to the transcripts released by O'Keefe and Giles, does not appear to be as incriminating as it was portrayed in the videos--and echoed in outlets like the New York Times.

A review of the Times coverage:

• In an early piece (9/16/09), readers were told of the "amateur actors, posing as a prostitute and a pimp and recorded on hidden cameras in visits to ACORN offices.... Conservative advocates and broadcasters were gleeful about the success of the tactics in exposing ACORN workers, who appeared to blithely encourage prostitution and tax evasion." The Times explained:

  The undercover videos showed a scantily dressed young woman, Hannah Giles, posing as a prostitute, while a young man, James O'Keefe, played her pimp. They visited ACORN offices in Baltimore, Washington, Brooklyn and San Bernardino, Calif., candidly describing their illicit business and asking the advice of ACORN workers. Among other questions, they asked how to buy a house to use as a brothel employing underage girls from El Salvador.

  The paper also reported that O'Keefe "was dressed so outlandishly that he might have been playing in a risque high school play. But in the footage made public--initially by a new website, BigGovernment.com--ACORN employees raised no objections to the criminal plans. Instead, they eagerly counseled the couple on how to hide their activities from the authorities, avoid taxes and make the brothel scheme work."


• Three days later (9/19/09): "Their travels in the gaudy guise of pimp and prostitute through various offices of ACORN, the national community organizing group, caught its low-level employees in five cities sounding eager to assist with tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution."


• New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt weighed in (9/27/09), chiding the paper for not being more aggressive in promoting the ACORN videos--lamenting that Times readers weren't as up-to-speed on the story as "followers of Fox News," who already knew "that a video sting had caught ACORN workers counseling a bogus prostitute and pimp on how to set up a brothel staffed by under-age girls, avoid detection and cheat on taxes."


• The following week (10/4/09), Hoyt was on the ACORN case again: "To recap: Two conservative activists with a concealed video camera, posing as a prostitute and her pimp, visited offices of ACORN, the community organizing group, and lured employees into bizarre conversations about how to establish a bordello, cheat on taxes and smuggle in underage girls from Central America."


• After O'Keefe was charged in January with attempting to tamper with the phone system in Sen. Mary Landrieu's office, the Times reported under the headline, "After Arrest, Provocateur's Tactics Are Questioned"
  (1/28/10): "Mr. O'Keefe is a conservative activist who gained fame last year by posing as a pimp and secretly recording members of the community group ACORN giving him advice on how to set up a brothel."


• On January 31, 2010: "Mr. O'Keefe made his biggest national splash last year when he dressed up as a pimp and trained his secret camera on counselors with the liberal community group ACORN -- eliciting advice on financing a brothel on videos that would threaten to become ACORN's undoing.


• On March 2, 2010, under the headline, "ACORN's Advice to Fake Pimp Was No Crime, Prosecutor Says, "the Times reported: "The ACORN employees in Brooklyn who were captured on a hidden camera seeming to offer conservative activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute creative advice on how to get a mortgage have been cleared of wrongdoing by the Brooklyn district attorney's office."

But the story the Times continues to tell is wildly misleading, as a review of the publicly available transcripts of his visit (BigGovernment.com) makes clear. O'Keefe never dressed as a pimp during his visits to ACORN offices, seems to never actually represent himself as a "pimp," and the advice he solicits is usually about how to file income taxes (which is not "tax evasion"). In at least one encounter (at a Baltimore ACORN office), the pair seemed to first insist that Giles was a dancer, not a prostitute.

In the case recounted in the March 2 Times story, the transcripts show that O'Keefe did not portray himself as a pimp to the ACORN workers in Brooklyn, but told them that he was trying to help his prostitute girlfriend. In part of the exchange, O'Keefe and his accomplice seem to be telling ACORN staffers that they are attempting to buy a house to protect child prostitutes from an abusive pimp.

Throughout the months the Times covered the story, it made a major mistake: believing that Internet videos produced by right-wing activists were to be trusted uncritically, rather than approached with the skepticism due to anything you'd come across on the Web. O'Keefe and the Web publisher Andrew Breitbart refused to make unedited copies of the videotape public, and with good reason: A more complete viewing, as the transcripts show, would produce a much different impression.

While the Times decide to skip the standard rules of journalism, ACORN commissioned an independent investigation led by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger (12/7/09), which noted that the

unedited videos have never been made public. The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O'Keefe's and Ms.Giles' comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

So what has the Times done in response? As reported extensively by blogger Brad Friedman (Brad Blog), several Times staffers have been asked to justify the paper's lack of accountability. In the most remarkable exchange, public editor Clark Hoyt--who had criticized the paper for not doing enough reporting on the tapes--wrote that the paper had made no errors that merited a correction (Brad Blog, 2/23/10). He explained that the January 31 story "says O'Keefe dressed up as a pimp and trained his hidden camera on ACORN counselors. It does not say he did those two things at the same time."

It is hard to believe that Hoyt actually believes what he's saying here. The obvious implication from the language of the article (and the others documented above) is that ACORN was dispensing advice to someone dressed up in an absurd pimp outfit. The Times chose to believe that O'Keefe's work was journalism that didn't need to be treated skeptically. The videos were in fact a hoax, and the Times was duped. Its readers deserve to know as much--and ACORN, which suffered serious political damage as a result of the false stories, deserves an apology.

In his September column criticizing the paper for being slow to report the ACORN videos, Hoyt wrote: "Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like the Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself." Worse than looking partisan, though, is being wrong.

ACTION: Encourage New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt to recommond that the paper investigate the ACORN videos and produce a report that clarifies the record.

CONTACT:
New York Times
Clark Hoyt, Public Editor
public@nytimes.com
Phone: (212) 556-7652

Source / Fair.org

The Rag Blog

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Sarah Palin : Popularity Dropping Like a Rock

She may still be a good story
But Palin's poll numbers keep going south

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / February 12, 2010

The teabaggers, Republican right-wingers, political pundits, and media talking heads seemed determined to keep Sarah Palin relevant, and an important figure on the American political scene. For the media talking heads, she is a good story since few people are noncommittal about Palin -- you either like her or hate her.

Three TV networks even carried her speech to the sham teabagger convention a few days ago (although I doubt that many Americans watched). The media seems to think that Palin actually makes politics interesting, and they don't want her to go away because then they would be reduced to covering only boring real politicians -- whom the American public really won't take much interest in for another couple of years.

The political pundits basically have the same interest as the media talking heads. They know a column about Palin will get readers -- even those who hate her will read the column. Whereas, a column about Mitt Romney or some other semi-competent politician will not get nearly the readership. Therefore, they go out of their way to try and convince readers that Palin is popular and actually has a chance to be elected to something again.

As for the teabaggers and right-wing Republicans, they are just trying to remain relevant themselves. They have to appeal to the Palin-bots, because they make up a large part of the base for both groups and without them they would wither into insignificance. The teabaggers have little connection to reality, but I think most Republicans know Palin is not a real possibility as a candidate -- they just can't say that out loud without angering a large part of their base.

But regardless of how hard the teabaggers, Republicans, pundits and media personalities try to keep Palin relevant to the national political scene, the American people aren't buying it. With each month that goes by, fewer people have a favorable opinion of Sarah Palin. As the chart above shows, Palin's popularity is dropping like a rock(and has been dropping since September of 2008).

According to Washington Post/ABC News polls, back in September 2008 Palin had a favorability rating of nearly 60%. At that time, she was new on the national political scene and the public knew very little about her. But as the public learned more, her favorability rating has dropped in every poll taken since then.

According to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, taken after her nationally televised speech, her popularity is still declining. Currently, 37% of Americans view her favorably (the lowest of any poll so far) and 55% of Americans view her unfavorably (a clear majority, even considering the 3% margin of error).

But it gets even worse for Palin. That's because about 30% of those who view her favorably don't think she is qualified to be president. Only 26% of Americans believe she is qualified, while a full 71% say she is not qualified. These numbers are also going in the wrong direction for Palin (back in November 2009 38% said she was qualified and 60% said she wasn't).

The powers that be may still be touting the viability of a Palin candidacy, but the American people are simply not buying it.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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