Pro-Dorner Protests At LAPD, When News Lies: The 10th Anniversary of The Iraq Disaster, Same Issues Are With US; Family Denies Blade Killed Girlfriend,
February 16th, 2013 - by: Danny
See new update of Mediachannel.org. More Analysis. More Good Reads. As The Media Watch The World. We Watch The Media. The NewsDissector.net blog is written every day by your News Dissector, Danny Schechter, featuring a survey of what’s in the News and whats not, and offering other more critical ways of looking at the world. Your ideas welcome to dissector@mediachannel.org. This report was written on 2.16.13/ •Protests At LAPD LOS ANGELES (AP) — Dozens of protesters rallied outside Los Angeles police headquarters Saturday in support of Christopher Dorner, the former LAPD officer and suspected killer of four who died after a shootout and fire this week at a mountain cabin following one of the biggest manhunts in recent memory. Protesters told the Los Angeles Times (http://lat.ms/11Ndm6i ) they didn’t support Dorner’s deadly methods, but objected to police corruption and brutality, and believed Dorner’s claims of racism and unfair treatment by the department. Many said they were angered by the conduct of the manhunt that led to Dorner’s death and injuries to innocent bystanders who were mistaken for him. Michael Nam, 30, who held a sign with a flaming tombstone and the inscription “RIP Habeas Corpus,” said it was “pretty obvious” police had no intention of bringing Dorner in alive. “They were the judge, the jury and the executioner,” Nam said. “As an American citizen, you have the right to a trial and due process by law.” During the hunt for Dorner, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck called for Dorner’s surrender and said he didn’t want to see the suspect or anyone else injured. •BBC: How a good police officer went rogue strong>The Tenth Anniversary of The Crime As we mark the tenth anniversary of that obscenity known as the Iraq War, I want to take you down memory lane to reprise one of my efforts to show how our media did as much or more to promote the war as the Bush Administration. I wrote countless blogs about the run-up to the war, how it was fought, and how it was covered. I wrote two books, Enbedded and When News Lies and made the film WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception. Here’s the “Opening Salvo” from that comment on media complicity and the war. When News Lies details an examination of media coverage of the Iraq War through the war’s second anniversary in the spring of 2005. This book and companion film, WMD, together tell a multi-layered story of the war itself and the way in which it was spun and mis- covered by so many journalists and leading media out- The story of the role of the media in the Iraq War was begun in my earlier tome,Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception, in which I tracked the TV coverage that Americans were exposed to from the run-up of the war through the summer of 2003. When News Lies brings the story up-to-date, furthering the chronicle while trying to ferret out the shifting rationales given for engaging in the war in the first place. When Embedded was written, it was a rather lonely dissent focused on the media coverage of the Iraq War, even as a rather large, global anti-war movement challenged the Bush Administration’s decision. There were a few journalists who complained that journalists were failing. In the Independent in London, Mary Dejevsky wrote under the heading: “Let’s be honest: journalists failed” (3/2/04): \It is hard now to think back to September 2002 and January 2003 when the government issued its two dossiers on Iraq’s weapons. To hazard that these [the WMDS] might not exist was to invite ridicule. … Very few of us have anything like the specialist expertise needed to assess the technical information we were given [about the alleged existence of WMD]. In 2005, a New York Times writer called the critics of the day “lonely people.” “Lonely?” Had he missed the 30 million people in the street in the largest protest in the history of the world? In fact, there were critics on media outlets worldwide, and many in the U.S., especially in the independent media sector. The problem is they were largely ignored, and still are. Two years later, When News Lies revisits the media coverage of the ongoing war with a deeper indictment of the role of the media. The addition of the film, WMD, adds a visual dimension to the story I’ve been telling My concerns are, and for a long time have been, focused on the uses and con- vergence of media in an era, as Marshall McLuhan once put it, in which “the cov- erage is the war, … news men and media men around the world are the fighters, not the soldiers any more.” (Understanding Media, 1964). When News Lies offers a subjective assessment and a personal perspective of the subject because it is also about this journalist’s own fight for larger truths. My battle is being fought not in some academic institution but in the media trenches, where my weaponry “deploys” the ammunition of words, online and off, through media appearances, lectures, panels and op-ed columns, along with the power of documentary cinema to expose and challenge a carefully constructed pro-war narrative disseminated by the U.S. media. The film itself as a subject is included in When News Lies not as a self-promo- tional exercise but because I believe why and how our media is made (including my own) is a legitimate topic to examine. My first book, The More You Watch, the Less You Know, delved into the internal culture of media companies to try to explain their arcane decision-making processes. This is important not only to expose the intricacies of mainstream media but also to discuss the politics and impact of counter or alternative media in challenging a dominant media para- digm. In my view, it takes a media insider to best explain how it all works, and an activist to evaluate what effect it has. When News Lies not only critiques the main- stream media but dissects my own work as well. I am a believer in participatory journalism. I don’t pretend, like so many of my colleagues, to be a detached “objective” observer. I don’t deny I have a point of view or that I can make mistakes. At the same time, I try to be careful in my con- clusions and to avoid simplistic media bashing. After all, I am a media maker, too, struggling to get my work read and seen in an environment of declining respect for fact-based journalism. I often put myself into my work as a witness, explaining my motivations and rationale. It makes for more honesty. In When News Lies, I also speak personally, and sometimes humorously, about what a struggle the WMD film project has been without minimizing the obstacles that independent filmmakers face. The journalists who covered the war were well-equipped and well-compensated by big media companies. Those of us who challenge them are not. When News Lies is based on my own close observations and monitoring of many media outlets from the run-up to the “shock and awe” campaign, to the devasta- tion it created in the cradle of civilization, to the continuing occupation and the ongoing battle to engineer a partial exit strategy. It peers into the way our media system helped make the Iraq War palatable to a frightened public and therefore possible and also examines the media crisis inside a much larger political crisis. When News Lies represents an attempt to probe below the surface of the issues and behind the scenes of the coverage. I recognize that I am only one media ana- lyst in a sea of media folk with louder voices and larger followings. It was harder for me to get heard with only a low-budget megaphone and an online electronic media platform. Our hyper-competitive media world today is an insecure one where journalists and media executives feel constant pressure and experience intense anxiety. It is no wonder that many mainstream journalists tend toward defensiveness or even outright hostility at unwelcome criticisms, especially from anyone whom they perceive to be on the margins. When you live through the coverage of a war, you don’t always want to hear carping from someone who didn’t. I remember how my own credibility as a Vietnam War critic was strengthened after I had gone there. In the case of Iraq, they were there. I wasn’t. Yet the TV coverage did bring me closer to the action. My complaints are less about individual journalists, includ- ing the embeds, than the media companies that exploited the war for their own reasons. I have focused on the problem of deception because the Iraq War was and is deceptive in all of its dimensions from its rationale to its method, from its military tactics to its reconstruction commitments. Not surprisingly, a deceptive war begat deceptive news coverage and the other way around. We now know thanks to recently released internal documents like the Downing Street Memo, a report on a leaked high-level intelligence briefing in London, that the U.S. and its allies were busy inventing and reinventing their rationales for the war, a process that includ- ed “fixing” the intelligence to bring it in line with government strategies. I believe the coverage was also “fixed.” This book is about “crossing the line,” not by individual reporters but in a larg- \er sense by media companies and our media system which was (and is) far more collusive with the war makers than is publicly understood. I am in no position to judge the specific choices and work of individual colleagues, but I can and do make judgments about the coverage overall. A World Tribunal on Iraq which did sit in symbolic judgment in February 2005 judged the coverage harshly. And so When News Lies is not just an academic treatise but a call to action. It is more than a polemic because the issues it raises go to the heart of the future of democracy. The media companies who rallied the public to war were not just bad journalists but criminally complicit in an illegal and immoral undertaking. This is serious. They relinquished their constitutional duty, neglected professional stan- dards and, as the World Tribunal found, violated international law. “Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.” American democracy was invaded by the invasion of Iraq. A response and a counter-narrative are vital in the fight for a deeper understanding and more truth in media. My films and books are my contributions to this profound and ongoing challenge. I bring an insider’s experience and an outsider’s perspective to the task. I have done the best I can to be as accurate as I can, and of course am responsi- ble for all errors and omissions. The stakes in the fight for truth are high, as veteran PBS producer Bill Moyers made clear in a speech to a National Media Reform Conference in mid-May 2005: “An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only parti- san information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can dieIs Iran The New Iraq of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.” It is my sincere hope that When News Lies will challenge our contemporary media-fed war dances and point to some of the answers we urgently need if we are to renew our media and save our democracies. These Issues are Still Alive as are the parallels •FAIR:Is Iran The New Iraq? Yesterday it was Tubes, Today It’s Magnets •MSNBC: Rachel Maddow Takes on John McCain for Historic Revisionism on Iraq War •ICH:Sleeping Through the Coup •Paul Craig Roberts: While Left And Right Fight, Power Wins •Richard Eskow: The Great Wealth Robbery •The Week: Why Americans hate Congress •Pistorius’ family strongly denies murder charge PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) – Oscar Pistorius is “numb with shock as well as grief” after the shooting death of his model girlfriend at his home in South Africa, the runner’s uncle said Saturday, as his family strongly denied prosecutors’ claims that he murdered her. Arnold Pistorius spoke with The Associated Press and two other South African journalists/. •BBC: TV channel defends Steenkamp show •Fluent: ‘Fiscal trouble ahead for most future retirees’ •Tom Hartmann: 102 Year Old Face of Voter Suppression • New Analysis: Porn By The Numbers •••Thank you for reading the Blog. Be sure to check out the new Mediachannel.org and subscribe. We need your support. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
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What turned Christopher Dorner from a respectable political science graduate and Navy reservist to a “cop killer”?
Opening salvo
lets in the U.S.
through Embedded; various essays, columns and articles that have appeared in print; and my daily blog at Mediachannel.org about the media war being fought alongside of the military conflict. In many ways I consider myself at war with the war and its coverage.
When News Lies further explores an ongoing debate about the war that is per- haps more advanced in other countries than in our own. In February 2005, I testified in Rome before a citizens’ World Tribunal on Iraq in a session that exam- ined the role of the media and found its conduct highly immoral and perhaps ille- gal. It also examined media complicity in promoting the war. My testimony is included here to help open the forum to domestic debate as well.
As I write, there is still a great deal that we don’t know about why the U.S. went to war or how the war is being fought. Many of these decisions and practices are still smothered in secrecy and laced with disinformation. Prominent experts and journalists still disagree not only on the whys but also on the whats. There is no definitive accepted history, even on the “facts.”
The words of the late United States Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black on the “duty” of a free press must not be forgotten:
•CLG: Guards ransacked, seized Guantanamo defendants’ legal documents
While the prisoners accused of plotting the [Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld-'Lucky Larry' Silverstein] September 11 attacks were in the Guantanamo Bay courtroom this week, guards seized confidential legal documents, books, photos and even toilet paper from their cells, according to a prison camp lawyer. Defense lawyers said some defendants returned to their cells after court sessions earlier in the week to find that bins containing their legal documents had been ransacked and confidential papers relating to their defense were missing. The seizures happened while the camp’s top legal adviser was on the witness stand giving assurances that no one was reading those private legal documents, said Cheryl Bormann, an attorney for defendant Walid Bin Attash.
•The Atlantic: Drone Court Won’t Solve The Problem
•Karzai: NATO Airstrikes Must End
By Phillip Farruggio
The sad fact that we live in the mother of all military empires! Alas, the two party con job and their presstitutes are embedded with the powers that be.
By Paul Craig Roberts
If the power that has been established over the American people is to be shattered, it will come from outside.
By Richard Eskow
There’s a Great Robbery underway, although most of its perpetrators don’t see themselves as robbers. Instead they’re sustained by delusions that protect them from facing the consequences of their own actions.
•Guns: WASHINGTON (AP) – Congress’ latest crack at a new assault weapons ban would protect more than 2,200 specific firearms, including a semi-automatic rifle that is nearly identical to one of the guns used in the bloodiest shootout in FBI history. One model of that firearm, the Ruger .223 caliber Mini-14, is on the proposed list to be banned, while a different model of the same gun is on a list of exemptions
A South African TV channel defends its decision to air a reality show featuring the girlfriend of Oscar Pistorius, the athlete accused of her murder.
For the first time, a massive data set of 10,000 porn stars has been extracted from the world’s largest database of adult films and performers. I’ve spent the last six months analyzing it to discover the truth about what the average performer looks like, what they do on film, and how their role has evolved over the last forty years.
- About Danny Schechter
Danny Schechter is an Emmy award winning journalist, television producer and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs and speaks about media issues.
His latest film is PLUNDER The Crime Of Our Time.
Mr. Schechter is NOT the Godfather of Soul.
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