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Banned
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Originally Posted by Cynthetiq
as I read the OP and all the replies, I don't understand what the "work for Independence" from means.
In my lifetime alone I've seen swings of the winds of change, back and forth, I don't see how we are locked into anything really.
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If you owned the lake front property pictured in the thread's OP, maybe you would better see "how we are locked into anything".
This concept hasn't changed since it was studied beginning in 1924:
(My reference to "independence" in the thread's title, refers to "independence" from this!)
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http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/caplow.htm
New River Media Interview with: Theodore Caplow
Commonwealth Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia Co-Author, The First Measured Century
.. QUESTION: What kind of criteria were used to select Muncie?
THEODORE CAPLOW:....The Middletown one study does not really contain a critique of consumerism. It contains a critique of class stratification, and the fact that the business class as they saw it were not only exploiting the working class, but also attempting to control them ideologically....
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Cynthetiq, the examples in the next quote box illustrate the lack of "independence" of the corporate news media from the government. The "star" NY Times "war correspondent", Michael Gordon, continues to "get away with", being nothing more than an effing stenographer for the penatgon/Bush administration....and the NY Times is viewed by conservatives as "too liberal".
Just read Michael Gordon's June 20 article, posted near the bottom of the next quote box......
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/09/hoyt/
Monday July 9, 2007 06:50 EDT
The ongoing journalistic scandal at the New York Times
....And most significantly of all, Hoyt's criticisms are grounded not in a technical violation of some petty rule or failure to adhere to some debatable journalistic custom, but rather, involve the worst journalistic sin of all: namely, a failure to treat government claims with skepticism and a willingness mindlessly to recite such claims without scrutiny. If a newspaper simply prints government claims without skepticism, what remote value does it have other than as a propaganda amplifier? None. And yet, as Hoyt's column potently demonstrates, that is exactly what the NYT is doing in Iraq -- yet again......
... Just consider the record of Michael Gordon -- who, I want to stress, is not personally the problem but merely the most vivid manifestation of the ills of American political journalism. Based exclusively upon what has appeared in the Times itself -- thus excluding all external criticisms of his reporting -- this is Gordon's record of shame over the last four years:
* A May 26, 2004 NYT Editors' Note http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/in...&ex=1184126400 identifies several articles written or co-written by Gordon about the Bush administration's pro-war Iraq claims and says about that reporting "that it was not as rigorous as it should have been"; that the war-fueling case "was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged"; and the reporting was flawed because "Administration officials were allowed to hold forth at length" with virtually no challenge or dissent.
* On January 28, 2007, NYT Public Editor Byron Calame reports http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/op...erland&emc=rss that "Times editors have carefully made clear their disapproval of the expression of a personal opinion about Iraq on national television by the paper's chief military correspondent, Michael Gordon," in which Gordon expressed clear support for President Bush's "surge" plan. The Times Washington Bureau Chief, Philip Taubman, said that Gordon "stepped over the line" by admitting that he supported escalation in Iraq.
* On February 27, 2007, Calame gently though clearly criticized http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...=&pagewanted=2 an article by Gordon written about the Bush administration's "saber-rattling about Iranian intervention in Iraq" (and other articles on the same topic) on the ground that (a) Gordon's article violated the paper's rules on the use of anonymous government sources; (b) the reported government claims about Iran "needed some qualification" about whether they were based on evidence or inference; (c) readers "deserved a clearer sense" of whether such a belief about the Iranian leadership's involvement in Iraqi insurgent attacks is shared by a consensus of intelligence officials (which, as even the President subsequently admitted, http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/...ipt/index.html it was not); and, most incriminatingly (given its obvious similarity to Gordon's pre-war failures), (d) "editors didn't make sure all conflicting views were always clearly reported" and the "story also should have noted . . . that the president's view on this point differed from the intelligence assessment given readers of [Gordon's] Feb. 10 article."
* Hoyt's column yesterday identifies a series of articles about Iraq, many written or co-written by Gordon, which "slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda's role in Iraq," and further criticized the articles because "in using the language of the administration," these articles presented a misleading picture of Iraq.
Does anyone at the NYT really need help seeing the clear pattern here? What more does Gordon need to do in order to show how journalistically irresponsible he is, how either incapable or unwilling he is to treat Bush administration claims about the war with skepticism and do anything other than serve as an obedient vessel for pro-war government claims?
This is a disgraceful record that continuously exhibits the same journalistic sins and the same exceedingly transparent pro-war, pro-Bush bias, not just bias that Gordon harbors personally but bias which time and again permeates his "reporting." And again, this is the record as established by the Times itself. There are countless other instances where Gordon does this that do not make it into the pages of his newspaper, but which are nonetheless egregious.
And yet, the Editors of the NYT continue not only to make Gordon their featured star reporter when it comes both to Iraq and related stories about Iran, but also to approve of the same defective, corrupt journalistic methods that are his hallmark. The deficiencies in his reporting are not complex or hidden. They are all right there out in the open, easy to see. All one has to do is read Gordon's articles and it is immediately apparent that, time and again, they do nothing other than recite highly questionable and highly inflammatory claims from the military and the Bush administration, and he conveys them with no meaningful question, challenge, dissent, or qualification.
And he does this not once, but over and over. This is exactly what the NYT claims to be so ashamed of its having done prior to the war, and yet it so plainly continues to do it, four years later -- in the form of the same reporter and likely the same editors. After all, as Hoyt's column demonstrate, it is not just Gordon who is guilty of these failures. If bloggers can see it, and Hoyt sees it, isn't it safe to assume that the editors who approve of these articles see it, too? How can they not? ....
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http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t...avx0qT3nZkbstg
June 20, 2008
U.S. Says Israeli Exercise Seemed Directed at Iran
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON — Israel carried out a major military exercise earlier this month that American officials say appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Several American officials said the Israeli exercise appeared to be an effort to develop the military’s capacity to carry out long-range strikes and to demonstrate the seriousness with which Israel views Iran’s nuclear program.
More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters participated in the maneuvers, which were carried out over the eastern Mediterranean and over Greece during the first week of June, American officials said.
The exercise also included Israeli helicopters that could be used to rescue downed pilots. The helicopters and refueling tankers flew more than 900 miles, which is about the same distance between Israel and Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, American officials said.
Israeli officials declined to discuss the details of the exercise. A spokesman for the Israeli military would say only that the country’s air force “regularly trains for various missions in order to confront and meet the challenges posed by the threats facing Israel.”
But the scope of the Israeli exercise virtually guaranteed that it would be noticed by American and other foreign intelligence agencies. A senior Pentagon official who has been briefed on the exercise, and who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the matter, said the exercise appeared to serve multiple purposes.
One Israeli goal, the Pentagon official said, was to practice flight tactics, aerial refueling and all other details of a possible strike against Iran’s nuclear installations and its long-range conventional missiles.
A second, the official said, was to send a clear message to the United States and other countries that Israel was prepared to act militarily if diplomatic efforts to stop Iran from producing bomb-grade uranium continued to falter.
“They wanted us to know, they wanted the Europeans to know, and they wanted the Iranians to know,” the Pentagon official said. “There’s a lot of signaling going on at different levels.”
Several American officials said they did not believe that the Israeli government had concluded that it must attack Iran and did not think that such a strike was imminent. ....
....Israeli officials have told their American counterparts that Mr. Mofaz’s statement does not represent official policy. But American officials were also told that Israel had prepared plans for striking nuclear targets in Iran and could carry them out if needed.......
....“They are clearly nervous about this and have their air defense on guard,” a Bush administration official said of the Iranians.......
....Pentagon officials said that Israel’s air forces usually conducted a major early summer training exercise, often flying over the Mediterranean or training ranges in Turkey where they practice bombing runs and aerial refueling. But the exercise this month involved a larger number of aircraft than had been previously observed, and included a lengthy combat rescue mission......
.......“They rehearse it, rehearse it and rehearse it, so if they actually have to do it, they’re ready,” the Pentagon official said. “They’re not taking any options off the table.”
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As can be clearly seen in Michael Gordon's June 20 article above, coming a full year after Glenn Greenwald's scathing criticism of Michael Gordon's "stenography", and of the apparent approval of his reporting by the NY Times editors who claim to condemn it but publish it anyway.... there is a problem with the most prominent newspaper in the US acting as a PR outlet to distribute, verbatim, whatever the pentagon or the administration recites to it, even anonymously, without qualification or challenge, by the NY Times!
If the Times reporting is "too liberal", where do you suppose conservatives are going to get a "truer" view? Could it be to some source so far to the right that it influences the views of conservatives to the point that they are so far right, that they "fall over" the edge?
Isn't raising awareness that ALL mainstream news coverage is compromised by the corporate interests who own it, the first step of a new drive for independence of the American people, beginning with more independence in the way that they think?
The "independent" news media.... "silent" in 2003, silent for the next five years, silent, all the way to today.
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Judith Miller, The New York Times , and the Propaganda Model
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
tor Bill Keller, apologizing for aspects of NYT ...... (2004) “The Times and Iraq”, New York Times, 26 May, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/international/ ...
http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/pmt/ex...boydbarret.pdf
View as html (html page= #4)
From page #v 438:
The Case of The New York Times 2002–2004
By late June 2003, it was increasingly clear to
most commentators that the Bush administration
had lied about weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) in Iraq in order to justify the
March invasion. A Washington Post (WP) story
(Kurtz, 2003) dissected the stories of Judith
Miller of the NYT arguing that Miller had acted
as conduit for stories originating in US military
and intelligence agencies. Miller was connected
to right-wing and pro-Zionist think tanks such
as the American Enterprise Institute, Hudson
Institute, Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, and Middle East Forum. She had cultivated
a relationship with Ahmed Chalabi, a
convicted embezzler and head of the Iraqi
National Congress (INC), a US-financed exile
group with close ties to the Pentagon’s civilian
leadership. Miller functioned as liaison between
the US military and the INC. Chalabi had provided
her with misleading information that was
to form the basis of many front-page NYT stories
concerning WMD. Yet Miller never quoted
Chalabi in those stories and both State Depart......
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Despite the NY Times editor, Bill Keller's "apology", the co-author of at least two of Judith Miller's WMD "articles", is "still at it".... acting as an uncritical steno-conduit of military/Bush admin, propaganda, to this day:
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http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...on#post2432081
....More Official US "Iran bashing":
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Then there was the Explosively Formed Projectile (EFP) story of Iranians supplying Shia militias with especially lethal IEDs which the military and intelligence community pitched to credulous journalists. On February 10, 2007, Michael Gordon came out with the first of several pieces at the New York Times which were notable for their anonymous sourcing and unsubstantiated claims. These articles were heavily criticized in the blogosphere but it didn't stop Gordon from revisiting the subject on March 27, 2007 and August 8, 2007 and recycling many of the previous charges.
....<h3>In Gordon's original piece the accusation was made that the smuggling of EFPs into Iraq was "approved by Supreme Leader Khamenei and carried out by the Quds Force." This claim quickly fell apart but it did not stop Bush without any additional evidence from asserting</h3> in a February 14, 2007 Valentine's Day presser:
I can say with certainty that the Quds Force, a part of the Iranian government, has provided these sophisticated I.E.D.'s that have harmed our troops . . . And I'd like to repeat, I do not know whether or not the Quds Force was ordered from the top echelons of the government. But my point is, what's worse, them ordering it and it happening, or them not ordering it and its happening?
Blaming the Iranians for American deaths in Iraq provided a useful excuse for Bush's failures there and helped gin up the case for a future conflict with Iran.
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<h3>Boys, how many times will the NeoCons manipulate your concern and emotions, your patriotic "fervor"? They can only do it to you if you're already open to it, and you let them.....</h3>
The editor, Bill Keller, and the public editor of the NY Times admit that they willingly allowed themselves to be fooled by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney concerning justification for invading Iraq. Surely these NY Times staffers are not men of greater integrity, higher principle, than you guys are?
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/opinion/25pubed.html
February 25, 2007
The Public Editor
Approaching Iran Intelligence With Intelligent Skepticism
By BYRON CALAME
COVERAGE of the American saber- rattling about Iranian intervention in Iraq posed an important test for The New York Times, <h3>given the paper’s discredited pre-war articles about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.</h3> And it has triggered a rash of complaints from readers who believed The Times was again serving as a megaphone for the White House.
I decided to review The Times’s articles of the past month, focusing on two key aspects of newsroom culture that affect the coverage of intelligence and national security. The degree of skepticism was an obvious choice, given the lack of it during the pre-war embarrassment. The other was the level of editing vigilance reflected in the stories.
This time the issue is whether the Iranian government is providing weapons and support to Shiite militias in Iraq. The Times and other media had frequently mentioned, as early as 2005, the military’s belief that some sophisticated roadside bombs were coming from Iran. By late 2006 these bombs, known as explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.’s, were killing a larger number of Americans. The growing death toll caused the commanders in Iraq to call for action.
The problem came front and center early this year after President Bush had authorized raids on Iranian facilities in Iraq in an attempt to confirm and disrupt the suspected flow of E.F.P.’s. When the Iranian ambassador to Iraq, among others, called for an explanation of the raids, the Bush administration promised to provide one shortly. Then a Page 1 story in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/world/middleeast/10weapons.html">The Times on Saturday, Feb. 10</a>, reported an intelligence community consensus that Iran is providing the deadly E.F.P.’s, and offered fresh details. That Sunday in Baghdad, military officials gave an anonymous briefing about the bombs. Later in the week, at a news conference, the president addressed the issue.
The situation closely parallels the pre-war period when The Times prominently reported that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Deeply shamed when they were not found, the paper <a href="http://nytimes.com/ref/international/middleeast/20040526CRITIQUE.html">publicly acknowledged</a> that its coverage had been “insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.”
Times editors clearly were mindful of the W.M.D. coverage as they pursued the Iranian weapons issue. “W.M.D. has informed everything we’ve done on Iran,” Bill Keller, the executive editor, told me three days after the Baghdad briefing. “We don’t have to tell the reporters to be as skeptical as possible. W.M.D. restored a level of skepticism.”
The skepticism and qualification, for example, were woven into <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/world/middleeast/12weapons.html">The Times’s Feb. 12 article</a> about the Baghdad briefing. The result was solid journalism that helped readers sort out the physical evidence — such as captured roadside bombs with serial numbers — from the intelligence assessments based on inferences and deductions.
Consider this healthy skepticism in the third paragraph of the story by James Glanz from Baghdad: “The officials also asserted, without providing direct evidence, that Iranian leaders had authorized smuggling those weapons into Iraq for use against the Americans. The officials said such an assertion was an inference based on general intelligence assessments.”
Qualifications appropriately permeated the article. The unnamed military officials, it said, asserted “without specific evidence that the Iranian security apparatus, called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force controlled delivery of the materials to Iraq. And in a further inference, the officials asserted that the Quds Force, sometimes called the I.R.G.C.- Quds, could be involved only with Iranian government complicity.”
The Times’s in-depth Saturday article laying out details of the E.F.P. issue contained a clear-cut qualification, prominently placed right in the second paragraph: “The assertion of an Iranian role in supplying the device to Shiite militias reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies, although officials acknowledge that the picture is not entirely complete.” The story by Michael R. Gordon, the paper’s chief military correspondent, had been in the works for more than two weeks and was published after The Times learned on Friday that the military briefing was scheduled for Sunday, Mr. Keller said.
(Mr. Gordon has become a favorite target of many critical readers, who charge that the paper’s Iran coverage is somehow tainted because he had shared the byline on a flawed Page 1 W.M.D. article. I don’t buy that view, and I think the quality of his current journalism deserves to be evaluated on its own merits.)
While the Saturday scoop relied heavily on anonymous sources from unnamed agencies, the article described an admirable search for those likely to have differing views. It cited interviews with “civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies,” and pointed out that group included “some whose agencies have previously been skeptical about the significance of Iran’s role in Iraq.”
One intelligence “assessment” in the Saturday article, however, needed some qualification. “As part of its strategy in Iraq,” the story said, “Iran is implementing a deliberate, calibrated policy — approved by Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei and carried out by the Quds Force. ...” To the extent that the assessment was based on inferences, readers deserved to be reminded of that. And they deserved a clearer sense of the extent to which the “broad agreement” cited high up in the article applied to this specific assessment.
The Times continued to seek reaction to the E.F.P. intelligence from a variety of government officials, turning up <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/world/middleeast/13weapons.html">what a Page 1 article on Feb. 13</a> termed a “healthy dose of skepticism.” The next day, President Bush addressed the credibility of the intelligence assessments at a news conference, saying he was certain that factions within the Iranian government had supplied the roadside bombs. But he carefully added: “I do not know whether or not the Quds Force was ordered from the top echelons of the government” — a point made in the lead paragraph of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/world/middleeast/15prexy.html">The Times’s story on Feb. 15</a>.
Editing vigilance on intelligence and national security coverage means dealing with the <a href=""http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/opinion/30publiceditor.html>anonymous sourcing</a> that many deem essential to bringing vital issues to light in that murky area. So editors need to ensure that unnamed sources are in a position to know and that any biases are clear to the reporter.
The Times’s most important requirement for anonymous sources — that an editor must know their identity — was followed for Mr. Gordon’s Feb. 10 story. Douglas Jehl, a deputy chief of the Washington bureau and his editor, told me he knew the name of each anonymous source in the article. The story also attempted a generalized explanation of why the officials were willing to talk. I do wish, however, that the article had found a way to comply with the paper’s policy of explaining why sources are allowed to remain unnamed.
The risk that the anonymity masked a policy-driven leak such as those that fed some of The Times’s pre-war W.M.D. coverage was reviewed before the Feb. 10 article was published. In an e-mail, Philip Taubman, the Washington bureau chief, wrote that he asked early on: “Did a tip or information come from the policy echelons of the government, from intelligence agencies, from American commanders and troops in Iraq?” In this case, he said: “Michael Gordon’s coverage started at ground level in Iraq, and has not been based on policy-driven leaks in Washington.”
Failing to reach out for dissenting views was a pre-war shortcoming, The Times has previously acknowledged. So even after Mr. Gordon had “nailed” key parts of the Feb. 10 article, according to Mr. Keller, editors specifically asked him “to talk to places in government that had been skeptical of W.M.D.,” such as the State Department.
Still, editors didn’t make sure all conflicting views were always clearly reported. For example, the article on Mr. Bush’s news conference pointed out that the position of the president — and the similar position taken earlier in the week by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — differed from the suggestion at the Sunday Baghdad briefing that the weapons effort involved top levels of the Iranian government. That story also should have noted, however, that the president’s view on this point differed from the intelligence assessment given readers of the Feb. 10 article.
On balance, The Times’s E.F.P. stories of the past month — especially the carefully qualified Baghdad briefing article — reflected healthy levels of skepticism and editing vigilance. They also showed that it’s possible for coverage not to be totally dictated by government intelligence leaks. And that lesson could serve Times readers well if the administration should ever decide to publicly invoke intelligence assessments in its simmering struggle to restrain Iran’s development of a nuclear capability.
The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.
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The most watched TV anchor in 2007, Brian Williams of NBC, "responded" to the criticism of NBC's failure to inform it's viewers that it's own "military experts" profited personally from the war and lobbied for it to happen.....ONLY ON WILLIAM"s blog....not "on the air", to his viewers:
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Originally Posted by Greenwald
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...4/30/williams/
After I wrote about Williams' blog item yesterday, his blog was deluged with commenters angrily demanding to know http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn.com/ar...53442.aspx?p=2 why he has failed to address the NYT expose. In response, Williams wrote a new blog item last night http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn.com/ar...29/958477.aspx in which he purports -- finally -- to respond to the story, and I can't recommend highly enough that it be read by anyone wanting to understand how our establishment journalist class thinks and acts.
The essence of Williams' response: he did absolutely nothing wrong. Nor did any of the military analysts used by NBC News. Nor did his network. These are all honest, patriotic men whose integrity is beyond reproach. Here's but a sampling of Williams' defense:
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Originally Posted by NBC's Brian Williams
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/30/williams/
A few of you correctly noted I’ve yet to respond to the recent Times front-page article on the military analysts employed by the television networks, including this one.
I read the article with great interest. I've worked with two men since I've had this job -- both retired, heavily-decorated U.S. Army four-star Generals -- Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey. As I'm sure is obvious to even a casual viewer, I quickly entered into a close friendship with both men. . . .
All I can say is this: these two guys never gave what I considered to be the party line. They were tough, honest critics of the U.S. military effort in Iraq. If you've had any exposure to retired officers of that rank (and we've not had any five-star Generals in the modern era) then you know: these men are passionate patriots. In my dealings with them, they were also honest brokers. . . .
At no time did our analysts, on my watch or to my knowledge, attempt to push a rosy Pentagon agenda before our viewers. I think they are better men than that, and I believe our news division is better than that.
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Quote:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030421/interns
TV's Conflicted Experts
By Daniel Benaim, Priyanka Motaparthy & Vishesh Kumar
This article appeared in the April 21, 2003 edition of The Nation.
April 3, 2003
....NBC News has yet to disclose those or other involvements that give McCaffrey a vested interest in Operation Iraqi Freedom.......
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Cynthetiq, all of us come to "know what we know", the same way....via press reports. The major press and news gathering sources are almost all owned by major corporations. Instead of being independent of the government, and thus, able to challenge what it tells us, and to uncover and expose the non-classified information the government tries to keep secret, but has no right to keep secret, the press instead, helps the government to keep it secret and to distort what is released.....by copying down what "anonymous government sources" dictates to it, and then prints and broadcasts it all as "news".
Nothing will change until the press begins to not act in league with the government agenda, and begins to uncover and report the secrets of the powerful. That is independence.
Last edited by host; 07-06-2008 at 12:46 PM..
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