Steve Weissman : The U.S. Role in Iran's 'Green Revolution'

Photo from BrooWaha.com.
Iran: Seen to Be Meddling

Our multimedia meddlers sought... to help mobilize the millions of Iranians who had already turned against the regime of Ahmadinejad and were questioning the theocratic rule of the ayatollahs.

By Steve Weissman / July 7, 2009

Between threats from hard-line ayatollahs to execute protest leaders and the media frenzy over the death of Michael Jackson, Iran's "Green Revolution" appears to have stalled. But, it's far from over.

Unless President Obama or Congress cut off their funding, our official radio and TV services, the shadowy National Endowment for Democracy and the State Department's "democracy-promoters" will all keep fighting to the last Iranian, while the CIA and Pentagon continue sending their state-sponsored terrorists into Iran. Then, as likely as not, the meddlers will hand off to the "bomb Iran" crowd, whose solidarity with the Iranian protesters extends to blowing them to smithereens.

Covert action does not go away just because TV cameras turn away. And neither should its critics, who need to explain more clearly what Washington and its allies have been doing in Iran. For most people, one question stands out: How could outsiders possibly call millions of gutsy Iranians onto the streets?

The answer is basic. Outsiders could do nothing if not for the very real discontent within Iran and the courage of Iranians to protest. Even in its heyday, the CIA had trouble making something out of nothing, though it came close in Iran in 1953 when it paid protesters to take to the streets against the nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossaddeq. That was truly a rent-a-mob.

Now in the digital age, our multimedia meddlers sought instead to help mobilize the millions of Iranians who had already turned against the regime of Ahmadinejad and were questioning the theocratic rule of the ayatollahs. Much of this target audience fell among the young urban middle class, who were savvy about online, mobile and digital media. To these people, Washington provided what Peter Ackerman and Ramin Ahmadi called "a clear strategic vision and steady leadership."

This strategic vision and leadership included several elements, some of which I highlighted in earlier columns: Training sessions and field manuals on nonviolent tactics. A vast infusion of new media, especially Twitter and Facebook. And the coordinated messaging of the big western bullhorn, especially the BBC's Farsi language services, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Radio Farda, and Voice of America's Persian Service, which before the election, according to CNN, "bought extra satellite paths into Iran to avoid any government jamming."

Expatriate Iranian satellite TV, mostly from the Los Angeles area, would add to the cheerleading, as would most of the commercial mass media.

With all this in place, Washington had to answer a truly divisive question. Should the meddlers support Iranian opposition groups who wanted to boycott their country's presidential elections? Or should they covertly back former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, who had taken part in the creation of Lebanon's Hezbollah and the killing of Iranian dissidents? In democracy-promotion American style, Washington gets to pick which "democrats" to promote. The nod went to Mousavi.

A week before the election, Voice of America's (VOA) Persian Service reported that a hard-line ayatollah had issued a fatwa authorizing election supervisors to change votes to make sure that Ahmadinejad won. Whether the fatwa ever existed remains a mystery. But the extensive coverage that VOA gave the story laid the groundwork for the "Green Revolution" that was to follow.

Mousavi gave the signal to start. Hours before the voting ended, he loudly declared himself "definitely the winner," suggested that the government was trying to steal the election, and opened the door to major protests. This was the script, to which Mousavi stuck in the days that followed.

The Iranian government responded that Ahmadinejad had won an overwhelming majority, and the battle lines were drawn. Foreign scholars might debate whether Ahmadinejad or Mousavi won and by how much, providing ammunition for pundits on all sides. But to Mousavi and the Western meddlers, as to Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the actual vote no longer mattered, if it ever did.

The big Western bullhorn quickly spread Mousavi's claims all over Iran and the world, as did the new media, churning out tens of thousands of messages saying that the government had stolen the election and calling for huge protests in the streets. Facebook and Twitter offered an added advantage. Anyone could anonymously post messages, and who would know whether they came from Tehran, Dubai, Jerusalem or Washington?

With continuing support from both the Western bullhorn and the new media that Washington had worked so hard to promote, the "Green Revolution" took to the streets. Naturally, the protests took on an ebb and flow of their own that no one could predict or control. They are now in an ebb, but the protesters will return in time, likely with industrial action and a general strike that Western meddlers will continue to support.

But, we have an alternative. Just think how much more credibility the protesters would have with their own people if, before the next round, Washington publicly pulled the plug on all our many bureaucracies that intervene so blatantly in other countries.

President Obama has famously said that he did not want "to be seen to be meddling" in Iran's election. He would do better if, as he tried to do with torture, he made absolutely clear to Americans and the world that we should not and will not meddle, whether seen or not.

[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France.]

Source / truthout

For previous articles by Steve Weissman on The Rag Blog, including earlier posts on this subject, go here.

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Dick J. Reavis : Journalism Faces Full Court Press

Full Court Press

Until and unless the press understands that its mission is to be the champion of the people’s welfare, nobody can plan for its recovery.

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / June 30, 2009

As almost everybody knows, the outlook for the mainstream press is bleak. Metro dailies like the Austin American-Statesman are likely to shutter within a decade. National newspapers like The New York Times may survive as ink-on-paper publications, but even the future of their electronic versions is uncertain because nobody has figured out how to “monetize” the web. Trembling before this scenario, friends of the press holler that “if the press dies, democracy dies!”

While nobody can dismiss any of the troubles facing the press, I think that the usual worriers have got the cart before the horse. Changes in technology will not bring about the downfall of the press. Buggy whip makers were sidelined, it is true, but the last buggy-chassis builders were the first auto chassis builders, and the last buggy upholstery workers were the first auto upholstery workers. The same is already true in the press: paper-newspaper editors have become web editors.

But civic life, which provided the content of the front-page sections of newspapers, is ailing, even moribund. If American democracy withers, newspapers that cover its life (usually with reverence and decorum) will wither, too -- and that notion is far more menacing to newspapers than anything about the web.

The idea that democracy might die is by no means new with me. I found it several years ago in Robert Putnam’s 2001 book, Bowling Alone, a catalog of the decline of unions, political clubs, PTAs, even bowling leagues -- of democratic institutions in the broadest sense of the term. (The book gets its title from the observation that during the 1950s, most bowlers played on teams; today, most bowl alone.) The problem with Putnam’s book isn’t that it isn’t seminal, but instead, that if Karl Marx wrote Capital today, it would be a sensation for six weeks. All of our media are now geared to the pace of talk-entertainment shows. Everything published is a fad.

When I first read Bowling Alone several years ago, my impression was, “Oh, so the U. S. is catching up with Mexico.” Our southern neighbor has long been a country where only 15 percent of households buy newspapers, and in which, as a consequence --as will soon be the case here -- carrier delivery is unknown. It is fair to say that at least until 2000 -- and things haven’t changed greatly since then -- Mexican democracy was an affair of those who had a financial stake in its doings, roughly, the 15 percent who read newspapers. Even today Mexican commoners neither believe that their nation is in good hands, nor that they can do anything about it. For them, the news might as well be a record of hurricanes and tornadoes, of natural forces, acts of God.

It isn’t that Mexicans can’t, or don’t read. They do. For decades, the nation’s leading newspaper has been a soccer daily. Feeling powerless as citizens, Mexicans turn their attention to sports, the music stage, the telenovelas and currently, to cop-and-narco jousts.

American democracy is not as far removed from the Mexican version as Americana buffs would like to think. Hollywood, Nashville and the NBA are the real plazas of our public life, Facebook, our most democratic periodical. Our villains come from the realm of pop culture, more than from public life: while millions clamored for O.J., Michael Jackson and Michael Vick to be brought to the bar, almost nobody clamors for the indictment of Yoo, Cheney or Bush, in part because they are minor-league celebrities, unworthy of spectacle or awe. Our heroes are mostly pop, too. If Obama was the presidential choice of collegians, that was largely because he was cool: had Biden headed the ticket, Salin Palin would be vice-president today.

American newspapers were failing long before the Internet was born. In 1952, the average American family read 1.3 newspapers per day. That figure has steadily declined to below .4. “Readers” of web publications, though more numerous with every count, spend about 20 minutes a week with online newspapers. Twenty minutes per day was the usual time in the heyday of print and public involvement. Older generations still read more than younger ones, but the most recent figures show a drop in all age categories. Joe Six Pack has quit reading and Joe College mainly reads headlines, probably about sports and entertainment stars.

People who consider themselves friends of the press are now spinning ideas to save it. But it may be too late. A new format, tax-supported subsidies or foundation grants won’t revive the press because those measures can’t revive democracy, which was never in the best of health, anyway.

Perhaps the problem is best explained, as everything today, by a sports analogy. Front-page news has essentially been a report on the fortunes of the home team -- our representatives in government. The news is as interesting as the scores. Not long ago, students at Sacramento State voted down a fee increase to support campus athletics. A New York Times story on their referendum quoted the student body president as explaining that “I just don’t think that students care too much about it, because they’re not winning the big games.” It’s a fair guess that students at Sacramento State don’t read about their Hornets, either.

It is the same with our government. The disasters that even the youngest of us have witnessed, including the Afghan and Iraq wars and the ongoing financial collapse, were in part the work of the players we put in office to catch special-interest fly balls and to hit home runs. Before Tet, did our press print even the facts about the war in Vietnam? Did it decry the outsourcing of our industrial base, the dismantling our unions? Did its business sections tell us that the housing boom was a looming bust? Reporters at the New York Times won Pulitzers for promoting the myths that justified the war in Iraq, and as Bill Moyers has pointed out in a documentary, Buying the War, most invasion shills are still at work as columnists, telling the nation what is wise.

Our government, the citizenry’s home team, has been failing its fans, and hasn’t hit a homer, by my estimate, since at least 1964, when Medicare was passed. Who wants to read about chronic losers? Who wants to read their apologists? Instead of using the colorful and partisan languages of the sports pages, the front-page press tried to report political affairs in a neutral, “objective” and detached way -- as if readers had no home team, nobody to bat for them, nobody who deserved a cheer. Of course, most politicians had been bought to throw the games they played for the people’s team -- but the newspapers weren’t leading the fans in any rounds of booing.

The survival of the mainstream press now depends upon the detachment and indifference that it took such pains to cultivate in its readership. It is improbable that readers will rise to save it, in which case, even to talk of its salvation is beside the point. Until and unless the press understands that its mission is to be the champion of the people’s welfare, nobody can plan for its recovery. When Mickey Mantle lay dying, when Barry Bonds was discredited, smart managers didn’t wring their hands and moan. They looked for replacements -- or transferred their talents to other teams.

[Dick J. Reavis is an award-winning journalist, educator and author. He wrote for Austin’s underground newspaper The Rag, and was a senior editor at Texas Monthly magazine. Dick Reavis’ book, The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation, about the siege and burning of the Branch Davidian compound, was published by Simon and Schuster and may be the definitive work on the subject.]

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Iran, Cyber Warfare and the CIA : The World is Watching

Twitter and the new Iranian revolution. Cartoon by Ian D. Marsden / truthout.
Iran: The world is watching

[The media] give wall-to-wall coverage of the protesters, whose heroism is very real. But the TV cameras and front-page headlines completely ignore how hard Washington worked to stir up the protests...

By Steve Weissman / June 30, 2009

When President Barack Obama warned Iran's ayatollahs that the world was watching their brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters, he touched a sacred chord for a whole generation of American activists. Back in 1968, as TV cameras broadcast dramatic images of Mayor Daley's police cracking heads at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, anti-war demonstrators famously chanted, "the whole world is watching."

In the eyes of the mass media, of course, not all protests or electile dysfunctions are equal. After 9/11, our free press largely ignored persuasive evidence that Al Gore had won the presidential elections in Florida, while TV cameras gave scant coverage to demonstrations against George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. But for those in Washington planning regime change in Tehran, the media problem was not how to convince CNN and the BBC to beat the drums for the "Green Revolution."

The problem was far trickier. How would Washington's media mavens help bring a protest to the streets? And how would they guarantee a continuing flow of powerful images and poignant words between the protesters and the watching world?

Their solution took many forms, from TV and radio broadcasting reminiscent of the cold war to the latest in Internet technology, including the widespread use of Twitter and Facebook. Since 2006, the State Department alone spent more than $200 million on the effort. The money went to its in-house Iran bashers and "democracy-promoters," the Voice of America's (VOA) Farsi language broadcasts, Radio Free Europe's round-the-clock Radio Farda and the secretive National Endowment for Democracy, which funded several other groups.

This $200 million came on top of the $400 million that Congress allocated in 2007 for regime change in Iran, some of which went for the CIA's state-supported terrorism inside Iranian borders.

Whether the overthrow of Ahmadinejad succeeds or fails, the Green Revolution will indeed have many fathers, and critics should avoid pointing the finger at only the CIA or its spin-off, the National Endowment for Democracy. Orange, Rose and Green Revolutions in other countries require coordinated US government intervention, aimed at creating what Rutgers journalism professor Jack Bratich has called "genetically modified" grassroots movements.

Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the widely reported use of Twitter, Facebook, and other of the new media's social networking tools. How did these tools come to play such a pivotal role in Iran's "Green Revolution"? In large part because Washington made a huge push to encourage their use as part of its strategy of democracy promotion, which in Iran became full-scale psychological warfare.

Meet Jared Cohen, the young State Department official who asked Twitter not to close down for maintenance during hours that Iran's protesters might need the service. He is not your everyday computer geek, who just happened to know the nice folks at Twitter.

Author of the widely acclaimed "Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East," Cohen had served as Condoleezza Rice's adviser on youth and technology, especially in the Muslim world. In that role, he worked with Twitter, Facebook, Howcast, Google, MTV, and others in an official campaign to promote online, mobile and digital networking "as a tool for youth empowerment against violence and oppression."

And not just in Iran. Speaking last December on a web chat to publicize the State Department's Alliance of Youth Movements Summit, Cohen talked the talk of the official democracy promoters. "Wherever civil society organizations exist or individuals have causes that promote non-violent youth causes, we want them to have the knowledge and information on how to develop an online component to what they are trying to achieve," he said.

With Cohen as the Alliance's international press contact, the State Department put out an online "field manual" that provided best practices, videos and steps for building these kinds of movements.

Promoting his book in 2007 to The New Yorker, Cohen gave a different impression. The State Department still had him traveling, he said. But now he was plugged into power.

"Basically, I do a safer version of what I used to do," he explained. "Now I'm in a place where I can take what young people are saying to me and work with my colleagues in Operations and in the embassies to do something that actually happens on the ground."

Cohen could not stop talking. "I always say that the largest party in every country -- the largest opposition group in every country -- is the youth party," he said.

Frankly, I was flabbergasted. Had the spirit of Abbie Hoffman and his Yippies, the Youth International Party, gone from anti-war demonstrations in Chicago to work in the very belly of the beast, all nonviolently, of course, and armed with the newest of new media? No wonder Cohen's boss Condi Rice sounded so ecstatic when she described the Internet as "possibly one of the greatest tools for democratization and individual freedom that we've ever seen."

As Rice well knew, the new media is especially great for meddling in another country, especially when Washington and its allies have so many other psywar tools at their disposal. Take, for example, The Washington Post's recent article "Persian News Network Finds New Life in Contested Iranian Election." The ayatollahs had cracked down on free speech, wrote the Post, and Voice of America was rushing to the rescue.

"What we're seeing is a new level of cyber warfare," said producer Gareth Conway, referring to the Iranian government's blocking of text-messaging services and Internet sites and Iranians' attempts to fight back. "We're trying to give viewers updates on technology, how they can continue to communicate with each other."

"As protests have erupted over the heavily disputed reelection of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, VOA's Persian-language TV network and a similar BBC service have emerged as a critical way for Iranians to share information."

Yes, the whole world is watching, as President Obama suggests. But our supposedly free media show only half of the picture. They give wall-to-wall coverage of the protesters, whose heroism is very real. But the TV cameras and front-page headlines completely ignore how hard Washington worked to stir up the protests, and most of the supposedly progressive blogosphere wears the same political blinders. Old media or new, to a child of the cold war, the self-righteous dupery is déjà vu all over again.

[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France. He is also a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]

Source / truthout

For previous articles by Steve Weissman in this series on the aftermath of the Iranian elections, go here.

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Tangled Web : Tech and the Struggle in Iran

The War in Cyberspace
Web tangled in Iranian struggle

By Martin J Young / June 20, 2009

HUA HIN, Thailand -- As Iranians attempt to come to terms with the outcome of their recent presidential elections, battle lines are being drawn in cyberspace. The combatants are the government in Tehran with its heavy-handed censorship of the Internet and media in one corner and the ever-increasing numbers of tech-savvy opposition supporters in the other.

Iran is up there with the likes of China, Vietnam, Thailand and North Korea when it comes to Internet censorship prowess, all of which have in recent years jailed Internet users and violated the rights of online free speech. Iran has more than 20 million Internet users, ranking the country second only to Israel in the Middle East in terms of the percentage of its population using the net.

Iran employs an advanced semantic filtering system in conjunction with an official committee responsible for identifying and reporting websites that violate the government's stringent guidelines. These basically target all non-Islamic websites, women's websites, and any that appear to be promoting Western cultural influences, such as movies and music. Every Internet service provider must be approved by both the Telecommunication Company of Iran and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. An estimated 10 million websites have already been blocked, and that was before the recent elections.

The media clampdown intensified as everyone from foreign correspondents to Iranian students took to the Internet to spread the word and share the news as events unfolded on the streets of Tehran this week. Social networking websites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube have become the favored platforms of communication as tracking users on these is not an easy task. The government's only option would be to follow in China's footsteps and block the websites entirely, which it has done for a number of them.

The US government has taken an unusual step by calling on Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance, which would cause a temporary suspension of service and prevent Iranians sharing information. The move could highlight the Barack Obama administration's acknowledgement of the power that social websites have in the organization of protests and the flow of information.

Internet users across the globe have pledged to help Iranians avoid detection and possible arrest by attempting to make it harder for the government to track them. By using proxy servers, they are able to change their web addresses or location settings to make it appear as if they are posting information from outside Iran. This gives the Iranian Internet police a tough job in tracking down the genuine bloggers living inside the country. Sympathizers are also setting up their own proxies to help Iranians bypass government filters.

A proxy is essentially a web server or network that bridges the gap between the user and the destination website by masking the Internet address of either connection. By disguising the Internet address (IP) they can make the connection appear anonymous and thus enable access to otherwise blocked websites.

Popular websites themselves have offered support by providing software and means to bypass the censors in Iran. The Pirate Bay, a high-traffic file sharing site has offered support by temporarily changing its name to Persian Bay and linking to a protest forum it helped to setup. The forum "aims to be a secure and reliable way of communication for Iranians and friends", and offers instructions on how to use proxy servers and access the Internet anonymously along side advice from techies around the world on circumnavigating government blocks.

Websites providing software to surf incognito such as the Tor Project have seen surges in traffic this week and a slew of new sites have appeared offering assistance. The Global Internet Freedom Consortium, or GIF, also provides anti-censorship software and has resumed services to Iran since the election crisis. It predominantly serves China. "Due to the dynamic situation in Iran caused by the election and its protest aftermath, the number of daily 'hits' from Iran has tripled during the past week," said GIF deputy director Shiyu Zhou. The site has experienced server overloads this week from a reported 400,000 unique users accessing it from Iran. GIF last year introduced a Farsi language version of the Freegate software and usage has since surged.

Software solutions such as these have become popular throughout Asia in recent years as more countries stifle the free flow of information over the Internet.

[Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.]

Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd.

Source / Asia Times

Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

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Jonah Raskin : Class of '09 Speaks Out on New Media

For four months, from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. every Wednesday, freedom of speech seemed to be alive and well in an old fashioned classroom where students asked questions, talked in small groups and wrote with pens and pencils on lined-paper.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 31, 2009

Ben is a newly minted college graduate in California. He’s in his early twenties, energetic and hopeful, and he has recently created and published his own flashy magazine. In many ways, though he belongs to the current generation that supposedly thrives on Facebook and Twitter, he is still very much caught up in old print media.

Readers can actually touch and hold his magazine. They can turn its pages. “The latest technology has freed us from the four walls of our bedrooms,” Ben says. “But it has also restricted us. Social network sites supposedly allow us to ‘express ourselves.’ And yet they also limit our ability to express ourselves. Moreover, the proper way to write and communicate has been lost in the transition to new media.”

Kent belongs to the same generation as Ben; he, too, is a recent college graduate. During his senior year he worked as an intern at one of the radio stations in the Pacifica network of non-commercial stations. Like Ben, Kent has apprehensions about the brave new technological world he and his contemporaries have entered. He also wants very much to be a part of it. “The convergence of media is a fearful thing,” he said. “It can be used for all the wrong reasons. Big Brother can use it to watch us and control us. But I want to be a part of the revolution that is taking place and that is changing the ways that people receive news and information.”

Ben and Kent were students in a class that I taught in the spring 2009 semester. They and 63 other college seniors sat in a large lecture hall where I taught communication law. For four months -- from January through May -- all of us thought long and hard about the ways that new media is changing old laws about privacy, libel, copyright and the First Amendment. We talked, argued, debated, discussed the use of the “F” word,’ the “N” word, the “C” word and more. The only rule in the class was this -- “it is forbidden to forbid.” No fights broke out, and no one personally attacked any one else. For four months, from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. every Wednesday, freedom of speech seemed to be alive and well in an old fashioned classroom where students asked questions, talked in small groups and wrote with pens and pencils on lined-paper.

Karen was another senior in the class, and while she was happy to finish four years of college she was also apprehensive about entering the job market knowing full well that a job would be difficult to find given the high levels of unemployment. “Now that I’m graduating it all seems so surreal,” she said. Like Ben and Kent, Karen was aware of the speed with which changes are happening in the media. “It’s not the same as it used to be 50 years ago, or even 50 minutes ago,” she said. “Media is constantly changing and to be involved with it as I hope to be, I know I must change in order to stay current.”

Most of the students in the class feel ambivalent about the changes that are taking place. They don’t see any way to stop them, or even slow them down. And, though they have grown up their entire lives with computers, and have always used them, they also look back with a sense of nostalgia to a world before computers, the Internet, and the Web took hold. Some of the students, especially those from other countries, came of age in worlds without modern technology. Maria was born and raised in Brazil, in a town in which no one had a telephone at home. Everyone who wanted to make a call had to go to a phone in the street.

“The moment I put my feet down in the United States in 2001, I literally thought that I had stepped into a spaceship,” she said. “I felt I was reborn. Now that I’ve been in this new environment for the past eight years, and now that everything seems to be available literally in the palm of my hand, I notice that I am no longer satisfied with what I have. I am continually reaching for the next new thing, the next new Apple phone. I want the first flying car, and I want to be able to go to the moon in a few hours.”

Jenny was born in the United States -- in the green, rolling hills of Kentucky before moving to California -- and like Maria she also grew up without much technology. “My parents were young, carefree hippies,” she said. “I never had a Barbie, a boob tube, a video game, or a computer, though I do remember my mother listening to National Public Radio.” Jenny doesn’t feel deprived by her hippie parents, and she hopes to raise children as she was raised -- without a TV or a computer. She’ll probably have a harder time with her children than her parents had with her.

Patrick had a different story to tell, perhaps because his father was a graphic designer who wanted the latest technology. Born in 1986, and raised in what he called a “conservative” family, Patrick remembered the day in 1992 when his dad came home with a “mysterious object in a large cardboard box with the icon of an apple on the outside.” He added, “My dad fed this machine a plastic disk and it seemed to come to life, blipping and clicking, whirling and ticking.”

From then on Patrick felt at home with computers. They seemed almost human to him. In college he quickly created a space for himself at MySpace, and made a home for himself on the campus radio station where he learned -- as he put it -- “to say and do anything I wanted.” It was a new experience for him. At home he had been “censored” by his parents. He feels that he will never again have the freedom to express himself that he has had on the college radio station, but now that he has had a taste of that freedom it will be difficult to give up. “I understand that in order to find a job I might have to clean up a bit my MySpace and Facebook pages,” he said. “But I also don’t want to compromise who I am.”

Tom echoes that idea. A car lover, and an outdoorsman, as well as a videographer, he has strong feelings about media freedom. “I believe that the Internet ought to be the one place that needs to be unregulated and where we can transfer information freely across the globe,” he said. “If you think Obama is a communist you ought to be able to say it.”

His classmate Ralph comes from a small town in rural California. He plans to become a schoolteacher and a football coach at a high school. “I love my generation,” he says. “I think we’re great. But we also ought to realize that the media pushes a lot of crap on us and we hungrily eat it up, even when we know its crap.”

The students in the class were all proud of themselves and their peers, and proud of their generation, too. But they were also critical of their generation. In fact, no one is more critical of this generation than the members of the generation themselves. They all feel that in the rush to embrace new media much that is valuable had been lost, and much of it might be irretrievable.

“Text messaging has taken away the mystery of the first date, the mystery of a conversation,” Janet said. Like many others in the class she had clear expectations of what she hoped for after she graduated from college and went to work. “I want to dress like I want (no uniforms),” she said. “I don’t want to be censored by any company I work for. I want to know the truth about everything, and I want to know what is happening at the company, too. There will be no holding me back, and not any of us, either I suspect. We’ve known freedoms through the new media and no one will be able to take them from us – at least not without a fight.”

Karen – who noted that the world seem to be changing every 50 minutes -- had drawn up a list of rules for herself -- and for anyone else who was looking for rules for themselves. Her list sounded new and fresh, and yet it might have been written fifty years ago, as well: “be kind and gracious; work hard and don’t half-ass things; be honest -- lying only hurts you, especially within the media; and stay true to yourself in a world of fakes and liars.”

[Jonah Raskin is a prominent author, poet, educator and political activist. His most recent book is The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution. He contributes regularly to The Rag Blog.]

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New Media Targeted With Harassment, Arrests at RNC

Using horseback officers, police moved to cut off demonstrators during GOP convention in St. Paul. Photo by Nick Vlcek / City Pages.
'Dozens of journalists, photographers, bloggers and videomakers arrested in an orchestrated round up of independents covering the Republican National Convention'
By Timothy Karr / September 3, 2008

In St. Paul this week, a new generation of media makers is under assault by the city's mayor and law enforcement officers.

These local officials think freedom of the press extends only to their allies in mainstream media.

For the rest of us, practicing journalism is a crime.

While reports of brutal police arrests and home invasions are still coming in, by Tuesday night the picture became clear.

Targeting the New Press

The list of those detained ranges from the well-known (Democracy Now's Amy Goodman) and well-established (Associated Press photographer Matt Rourke) -- to the bootstrapping bloggers and video makers who are covering local protests for TheUptake.org, Twin Cities Indymedia, I-Witness and other outlets.

Police -- with firearms drawn -- raided a meeting of the video journalists and arrested independent media, bloggers and videomakers. Journalists covering protests have been pointed out by authorities, blasted with tear gas and pepper spray, and brutalized while in custody.

Democracy Now's Goodman reports that a U.S. Secret Service agent ripped her press credentials from her neck the moment she identified herself to him as a member of the media. Her producers emerged yesterday from their jail cells bloodied and scarred, reporting unusually harsh treatment at the hands of local and federal authorities.

Mayor Coleman's Silence

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman hasn't responded to repeated phone and e-mail requests for comments on the targeting of journalists. Instead he praised the work of Police Chief John Harrington and painted those arrested as a small band of outsiders and vandals intent upon committing felonies against the good people of his city.

In less than a day, more than 35,000 people have signed a letter from Free Press (my employer) to Mayor Coleman condemning the arrests and demanding that he and local prosecutors immediately "free all detained journalists and drop all charges against them."

But when Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald pressed Harrington and Coleman to respond to widespread reports of journalist arrests, Harrington claimed ignorance while Coleman stood silent at his side.

Police spokesman Don Walsh intervened only to say that "arrest have been made" and that all those arrested were involved in criminal activities and not "simply non-participants."

Strib Forgets About Free Speech

In a bizarre editorial on Tuesday, the Minneapolis St. Paul Star Tribune hailed the police crackdown as "appropriate," blaming unrest on outsiders from beyond the Twin Cities.

"Many of those arrested in St. Paul weren't carrying IDs or wouldn't give their names. Those who were identified came from Lexington, Ky.; Brooklyn, N.Y.; Portland, Ore., and dozens of other U.S. cities," they wrote. "These weren't the sons and daughters of Highland Park and south Minneapolis."

The Star Tribune itself is owned by out-of-towners from Avista Capital Partners, a New York City private equity firm specializing in energy, healthcare and media investments.

Other than a brief story about Goodman's arrest, the paper has failed to report on the apparent targeting of independent reporters, even though groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists have sounded the alarm.

Sweeping Real Journalism Under the Carpet

Here we have every indication of an orchestrated assault by federal and local law enforcement agencies to stifle independent sources of information. As shocking as this conduct is, more disturbing is the fact that the mayor's office and the local daily seem so unconcerned.

It's not difficult to understand why. With local leaders making every effort to roll out the welcome mat for mainstream media and the GOP, they'd rather sweep beneath the carpet those pesky independents who are showing us a side of the spectacle that is less scripted for prime time.

As an elected representative, Mayor Coleman should take a stand on behalf of a free press, rein in aggressive and violent tactics by local law enforcement, stop the targeting of journalists and immediately drop all charges against them.

As a powerful news organization, the Star Tribune should know better, and should be sticking up for a free press, regardless of the form it takes.

For now, the democratic spirit of journalism is alive not in the Star Tribune newsroom, but among the video-blogs and cellphone reports that are bubbling up from outside the convention.

Timothy Karr is Campaign Director for Free Press and SavetheInternet.com. Tim served as executive director of MediaChannel.org and vice president of Globalvision New Media and the Globalvision News Network. He has also worked extensively as an editor, reporter and photojournalist for the Associated Press, Time Inc., New York Times and Australia Consolidated Press. Karr critiques, analyzes and reports on media and media policy in his popular blog, MediaCitizen.

Source / The Huffington Post

Thanks to Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte / The Rag Blog

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The American Left : Do We Have a Progressive Movement Today?

Is there a new progressive movement? If so, it's different from the last one: sixties anti-war demonstration was part of the New Left movement. Photo courtesy of Robert Altman.
George Bush 'has succeeded in bringing moderates, liberals, and progressives closer together than at any time in decades'
By Ken Brociner

Even if there are only fleeting moments when many of us can feel - in our bones - that there really is such a thing as "a national progressive movement," the fact is that those moments are real.

George W. Bush will go down in history as one of this country’s worst presidents ever. But there is at least one thing we can genuinely thank him for: He has succeeded in bringing moderates, liberals, and progressives closer together than at any time in decades. But do the many political connections created since Bush took office actually add up to something that can be called a (or “the”) “progressive movement”?

The short answer is - it depends on who you ask. Over the past five or six years, I have been struck by the wide range of answers to this question within progressive circles. Some progressives believe it is premature to talk about the existence of a singular “progressive movement” - as opposed to the existence of a number of separate but related progressive movements. Some even dismiss the importance of the question to begin with - considering the issue either irrelevant or of secondary importance.

The question of whether or not we constitute “a movement” cuts to the very core of just who “we” are at the present moment. How we answer it is bound to shape the programs and strategies we develop in the months and years ahead.

I recently interviewed a few leading intellectuals and activists to find out whether or not they believe it is accurate to say that today - less than four months before the 2008 election - “a progressive movement” actually exists.

Bill Gamson is the co-director of Boston College’s Media/Movement Research and Action Project — and one of the leading scholars in the field of social movement theory. In an email interview last week this is what he had to say:

“Is there a field of actors – formal organizations and/or networks — who are trying to mobilize people for collective action to challenge and change social, political, and economic inequalities? Of course. Sometimes they work in coalitions and sometimes they work independently. Do they always work together harmoniously with a common strategy? Of course not. But that doesn’t make them less of a progressive movement.”

Offering a strikingly different perspective was Charles Knight, the president of the Commonwealth Institute, an independent, public policy research center in Cambridge, Mass. Knight, who also co-directs the institute’s Progressive Strategies Studies Project, said he sees ” a progressive political tendency,” but not a movement.

“But I would agree that there are movement elements within progressive politics today,” Knight said. “Still, while referring to a ‘progressive movement’ does give people a feeling of being part of something bigger, it’s important that progressives have a sense of our own history, and that we not throw around the term ‘movement’ too loosely.”

I also spoke with Fred Berman, a leading activist/organizer in the Boston area. Berman, one of the leaders of the Progressive Democrats of Somerville (which is affiliated with Democracy for America), spends most of his time working on issues like regional development, affordable housing and government accountability. He told me: “I do feel connected to people and organizations that are working on particular issues on a local, state, or national level. But that feels very different than being part of an overarching national movement.”

Todd Gitlin, a longtime activist and professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, has written several important books that discuss progressive movement building, including, most recently, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent. When I asked Gitlin what he thought about the current state of progressivism, he said: “It’s a wish more than an accomplished fact to say that there is a single progressive movement. There are movements, plural, some moving more vigorously than others…. Insofar as there is a single movement, it’s a reaction to the depredations of the Bush years.”

Is there any way to synthesize these different viewpoints? I think there is. For four out of the last six years, I have attended the Take Back America (TBA) conferences, now held every spring in Washington D.C. TBA brings together progressive politicians and leaders, activists, and organizers from the peace, labor, civil rights, economic justice, environmental, women’s, gay rights and netroots movements. But each year - from lecterns, in panel discussions and in the corridors, one hears constant references to “the progressive movement.”

This has never felt like a political line or wishful thinking to me, but rather a perfectly appropriate way of capturing the essence of what is happening right then and there, during three jam-packed days of speeches and discussions. Sure, the 2,000 or so people who attend each year are not reading from the same playbook on a year-round basis. And most people in attendance have individual organizational allegiances of one sort or another. But that feeling of being part of a national “movement” that so many people get from attending the TBA conferences is something quite real. I know I can practically “taste it,” and I doubt I am alone in this.

Other activists find that same feeling of connectivity when they attend mass anti-war demonstrations, the annual Netroots Nation conference, or national meetings of their labor unions - especially when representatives of other movements show up to offer solidarity.

Throughout this decade, progressive groups large and small have significantly increased their connections to each other in all sorts of ways unimaginable just ten years ago. One excellent example of this is the recently formed Health Care for America Now coalition that includes many of the leading unions and progressive organizations in the country, such as ACORN, AFSCME, SEIU, MoveOn, USAction, and The Campaign for America’s Future.

Obviously, the Internet has been a big part of these new connections - but the stolen 2000 election, the war in Iraq and Bush’s many other disastrous policies have also been instrumental in bringing progressives together.

Even if there are only fleeting moments when many of us can feel - in our bones - that there really is such a thing as “a national progressive movement,” the fact is that those moments are real. Which raises this question: How can we hold onto and enhance those feelings of nationwide connectivity?

Clearly, one way is to expand “the movement” (what it was universally called in the ’60s) itself. The idealism and mass participation in the Obama campaign provides us with an enormous opportunity to do just that. We also need to create more effective relationships, links, and coalitions between the various components of the progressive movement.

But equally important is that we expand our collective awareness of the existence of a national movement. To some extent, what this really boils down to is how we think, write, and talk about ourselves. The more frequently we refer to the progressive movement, the more we actually solidify its — and thus our — existence as a nationwide entity.

Back in the 1960s, the lines were more clearly drawn than they are today. Both the counterculture and the New Left (which constantly overlapped) felt as if they were practically at war with “the system.” There was no need to promote a sense of there being “a movement” forty years ago — it was in the very air one breathed. But the situation today is very different: opposition to the war in Iraq hasn’t generated anywhere near the kind of cataclysmic revolt within American society that the war in Vietnam did. And nothing today approximates the ’60s mass rebellion of youth - when millions openly rejected the cultural and social norms of “mainstream America.”

Still, it seems clear that - thanks to the Internet and new connections between progressive organizations - “a movement” has come back into existence since Bush took office.

Perhaps it’s a matter of seeing the proverbial glass as half full. For what is to be gained by insisting it is still half empty? By looking at our movement positively, we not only boost our spirits, but help to foster progressive unity rather than fragmentation. After all, if we are “a movement, ” than we need to act like one.

As the Jefferson Airplane so aptly put it back in 1969, “We can be together… we should be together.”

[Ken Brociner's essays and book reviews have appeared in Dissent, In These Times and Israel Horizons. He also has a biweekly column in the Somerville (Mass.) Journal.]

Source / In These Times / Posted August 5, 2008

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