My Kitchen Table

Tom Regan's Decoding Middle East Media

Esquire, Nov. 1882 - The Man who Married Dan Rather

- "Moments" - somebody watches something and feels it, tastes it and knows it." (Van Gordon) Sauter wanted several such moments of 'intense feeling' in every broadcast."

- an emphasis on heart-tugging TV "moments"

Concentration of Media Ownership

In 1981, forty-six media companies controlled most of the book, magazine, newspaper, movie, and television industries. By 1986, this number had shrunk to twenty-nine and by 1989 to twenty-five. Then, in the 1990s, the process of conglomeration in the media was so rapid that one could scarcely follow the players. Disney bought ABC, Westinghouse bought CBS, and General Electric took over NBC. A new network, Fox, was able to supply some competition, but only because it was part of a huge global newspaper, book, and TV empire belonging to Rupert Murdoch. Time/Warner not only controlled magazines, movies, and books, but had also taken over Turner Broadcasting, CNN, and a wide swath of the cable TV distribution network.

By 1997, just seven giant companies had nearly cornered the vast multimedia markets of the United States: Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Viacom, Time/Warner, Newhouse, General Electric, Westinghouse, and Disney.

Media ownership study ordered destroyed
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14836500/

The analysis showed local ownership of television stations adds almost five and one-half minutes of total news to broadcasts and more than three minutes of "on-location" news. The conclusion is at odds with FCC arguments made when it voted in 2003 to increase the number of television stations a company could own in a single market. It was part of a broader decision liberalizing ownership rules. At that time, the agency pointed to evidence that "commonly owned television stations are more likely to carry local news than other stations."

Humans prefer cockiness to expertise 

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227115.500-humans-prefer-cockiness-to-expertise.html

No True Scotsman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman

Boston Globe series on Saddam Statue

http://www.boston.com/news/packages/iraq/galleries/statue/01.htm

Toppling of Saddam Statue

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Toppling_the_statue_of_Saddam_Hussein

Boston Globe Story on incident

http://www.boston.com/news/packages/iraq/globe_stories/041003_snap_judgements.htm

When contemplating war, beware of babies in incubators

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p25s02-cogn.html

NYT: We Made Big Mistakes On Front-Page Gitmo Story, But We Did Not Get Spun

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/06/nyt_editors_note_walks_back_claims_in_front-page_g.php

Seeing the news through "cultural values"

Several years ago, Karyn Karnheim, who was then at the AEI, noted that people filter their views through their cultural values. That's why a fact is not a fact to them, unless it aligns with their own views. She also added that reporters frequently don't understand when people seem to ignore what seems "indisputable" to them. What actually happened or what was actually said really matters very little. 

1. (Left) Ha'aretz (especially Brad Burston's “Special Place in Hell” - http://www.haaretz.com/

2. (Right) Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/

3. Palestinian News Network - http://english.pnn.ps/

4. BBC News (Middle East) - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/default.stm

5. Salam Pax (The Baghdad Blogger) - http://salampax.wordpress.com/

6. Al Jazeera (English) - http://english.aljazeera.net/

7. Magharbeia.com (Northern Africa) - http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/homepage/default

8. Albawaba.com (Great gateway site) - http://www.albawaba.com/

9. Hurriyet (Turkey) - http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/english/home/

10. Daily Star (Lebanon – One of the best media sources in Middle East) - http://www.dailystar.com.lb/

Rami Khouri
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=102988

11. Jordan Times - http://www.jordantimes.com/

12. Islamic Republic News Agency (Iran) - http://www.irna.ir/En/?idLanguage=3

13. Gulf Times - http://www.gulf-times.com/

14. The Peninsula - http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/index00.asp

15. Dawn (Pakistan) - http://www.dawn.com/

16. Watching America - http://watchingamerica.com/News/

17. Doha Center for Media Freedom - http://www.dohacenter.org/Media-freedom-in-the-Middle-East,1525.html

Culture Unplugged
http://www.cultureunplugged.com/index.php

Informed Content
http://www.juancole.com/

Middle East Blogs
http://www.blogged.com/directory/society/culture/regions/middle-east

Jordan Watch
http://batir.jeeran.com/

Iraqi Blog Count
http://iraqblogcount.blogspot.com/

Pro-American Muslims
http://proamericanmuslims.wordpress.com/

How the GOP Lost Nancy Pelosi

They had her. They really did.

There was blood in the water and the GOP sharks were circling Nancy Pelosi, snapping at her as they edged closer and closer. It was only a matter of time, and the GOP could claim a major victory - the scalp of the Speaker of the House.

And then it was gone.

Like the air going out of a balloon, the GOP effort to sink Pelosi was deflating, largely because of their own ineptitude. The president delivered the coup de grace with his Sonia Sotomayor nomination. The momentum switched back to the Democrats. The beltway media, a pack of lemmings at the best of time, were on to the next story. The GOP was in disarray once again.

Same old, same old.

Now, I'm not the biggest Nancy Pelosi fan in the world. I think the
statement she made about the CIA lying to her about waterboarding
detainees smacked of a desperate politician trying to manipulate her
way out of a debacle of her own making. And for my taste, she's a bit too interested
in being speaker, and not enough in doing what's best for the country.

But more than any other incident that we've seen since the Democrats assumed control of the legislative and executive branches of the government, this one illustrates just how leaderless the Republicans are. Not that Rep. John Boehner and Rep. Eric Cantor aren't trying. But in a party where everyone thinks they are the leader, it's hard to march to the beat of only one drummer.

You could feel the tide going out over the weekend. First, media reports started to circulate that the GOP had overplayed its hand. Newt Gingrich called for her ouster (which, in a Democratic-controlled house, was never going to happen), and then former VP Dick Cheney, who had no business in this argument, took a few jabs at her. It started to become a lot easier for the Democrats to portray this as a partisan attack, moving the spotlight away from what Pelosi had actually said.

"The best thing for anyone, let alone Nancy Pelosi, is to be the
subject of a petty, venal, absurd attack by Newt Gingrich," said Rep.
Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.). "He’s the gift that keeps on giving."

Meanwhile Boehner was trying to slow down his colleagues. He believed, and I agreed with him, that if Republicans started calling for her removal before they had actually investigated her CIA claims, the opportunity would be lost.

Then on Friday, the Republican National Committee stepped in it. They released a commercial that compared Pelosi to the James Bond villain Pussy Galore.

As Andie Coller wrote in Politico:

"The wisdom of equating the first woman speaker of the House with a
character whose first name also happens to be among the most vulgar
terms for a part of the female anatomy might be debated – if the RNC were willing to do so, which it was not. An RNC spokesperson refused
repeated requests by POLITICO to explain the point of the video, or the
intended connection between Pelosi and Galore.

"But what isn’t open to debate is that the waterboarding conflict has
been accompanied by a cascade of attacks on the speaker, not as a
leader or a legislator, but as a woman."

Which is, of course, a recipe for Republican disaster. By focusing on the speaker's gender, instead of her mistake, the RNC and the mouths-that-roared on talk radio only further succeeded in undermining Boehner's plan of attack.

Even GOP members of Congress were outraged by the Galore comparison.

"I thought it was reprehensible, irresponsible and unpersuasive," Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told Politico. "If we're going to regain the credibility of the American people, we're
going to have to stop with silly antics like that. It may get a snide
chuckle inside the Beltway, but it offends most people. We have to get away from the politics of personal destruction," he said of the video.

(Tell that to Rush, OK?)

Then on Sunday, Sen. Dick Durbin, who was debating Gingrich about the Pelosi statement on Meet The Press, reminded Gingrich that he himself had said that the CIA had "damaged our national security and misled the American people" over the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran in 2007. And he also reminded the former speaker that another GOP member in 2008 had accused the CIA of lying about an earlier report. Gingrich defended both statements, exactly what the Democrats wanted in their effort to paint the attacks on Pelosi as just another partisan effort by the Republicans.

Then over the weekend, news started to leak about Sotomayor, and Pelosi was gone. Any hopes the GOP had of undermining the speaker's authority had vanished. It was a genius political move by Obama - he took the heat off of Pelosi, thus earning an IOU from her, and threw the Republicans into confusion about how to attack Sotomayor - yet another example of too many leaders of the GOP.

Oh, they still might try to get at Pelosi. But it's too late. I've lived in DC long enough to know that the media is always looking for "the next big thing" to report on. Pelosi is, sadly for the GOP, old news. Newt is left sputtering, the RNC has egg on its face, and poor John Boenher has a massive migraine.

I hope he has a lot of Tylenol. I think his headaches are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

Conservatives having trouble finding way back to reality based community

My kids, I'm happy to say, love to read. They'll choose a good book over TV almost any time. (Although the computer will tempt them a lot.) Right now, they are going through a science fiction fantasy phase. One of their favorite story themes is the young hero or heroine who suddenly finds themselves plucked from their everyday life and sent to a strange new world, almost always ruled by a tyrant or being threatened by a strange menace. After numerous adventures, where they defeat the foe, they find their way back to our world, although it can be difficult and often jarring.

Strangely enough, this story line is very similar to the one we've been living the past eight years during the Bush administration. Republicans created a world separate from the "reality based community" that Karl Rove once dismissed in a New York Times magazine piece.

But after numerous challenges and the election of Barack Obama, we found our way back to the real world. No more make believe. A majority of Americans felt it was time that we got back to business after eight years of obfuscation, mismanagement and disastrous government.

But not everyone has adapted well to this return to the reality based community. Conservatives, and in particular those associated with the previous administration (or their media outlets like Fox News), are having a hard time giving up the notion that just because they say it's so, it's still so. Time and time again, these conservatives -- like Rove or former Vice President Cheney -- have acted as if the fantasy they worked so hard to create was still in place.

There are too many examples of this phenomena to list them all, so let's just go over a few.

For instance, their reactions to the release of the Bush torture memos by the  Obama administration. First, there is the "up is down" answer that says waterboarding isn't torture - despite official government documents that show we believe it is when other governments do it, or the fact that we've put people on trial in the past for doing it to American soldiers.

Or that by actually confirming that we did torture people, we won't be able to torture potential enemies in the future - despite the fact that President Obama has put an end to all these practices.

Or that by confirming that we did torture people, it will negatively affect the way the rest of the world looks at the US.

Uhm, perhaps this line is actually a poor attempt at humor, considering that one of the main "accomplishments" of the previous administration was that the only thing that fell farther than America's standing in the world was the stock market. And the Bush administration played a large role in that as well.

But really, it's the comments from Rove and Cheney in particular that show how hard these folks are holding on to a world that currently exists only in their own minds. When Rove criticizes Obama for being "too political" or "playing politics" or when Cheney says that Obama is making the US "less safe," it's as if (to borrow a conservative meme from 9/11) they are living in a pre-Nov. 4, 2008 world.

And with little leadership in Congress and with Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck et al. being the most vocal conservatives, many conservatives are not likely to find their way back to reality anytime soon. There are signs, mind you, that some conservatives have realized that they are back in Kansas and not in Oz any more. David Frum, David Brooks, Patrick Ruffini, Andrew Sullivan and Megan McCain come to mind as some of the best bets to create a new reality based conservatism.

And it's important that they persevere. There is a temptation for politicians of all strips to eventually wonder into some fantasy place that doesn't really exist. Democrats are not immune. If we're going to keep the Dems focused on reality, we'll need thoughtful, reality based conservatives to help keep them there.

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Right versus wrong and why the mainstream media has failed America on torture memos

One of the most puzzling aspects of the ongoing revelations of the use of torture by the Bush administration, has been the reluctance of the mainstream media to use the word to describe the treatment of many detainees. The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR ... the list goes on and on. Normally the way they phrase it is "harsh interrogation" or "enhanced interrogation techniques" or - the most cowardly option - "what some people describe as torture."

I remember very well this reluctance when I worked in the media. After the Abu Ghraib photos emerged, I wrote a column about the US using torture, detailing how the US had actually used it many times in the past. I was told I could not use the word "torture." I said look at the photos, read about what was done to the detainees ... if it looks like a duck, etc. No, you can't use the word torture I was told. The unspoken reason was "Americans' don't torture."

Well, we now know that this isn't true. And we've known it for quite a while. Everyone, it seems, except the mainstream media, and former Bush administration and CIA officials desperate to cover up their tracks. Recently the MSM have developed another "meme." It's left versus right on the issue. Only left-wing bloggers are calling it torture.

Wrong. The Obama administration calls waterboarding torture. International law calls it torture. Several top military and intelligence officials call it torture. But the mainstream media are still pussyfooting around the obvious.

In a piece this morning in the Huffington Post, Arianne Huffington wrote:

"This is a defining moment for America.

"The way we respond -- or fail to respond -- to the revelations about the Bush administration's use of torture will delineate -- for ourselves and for the world -- the kind of country we are.

"It is a test of our courage and our convictions. A test of whether we are indeed a nation of laws -- or a nation that pays lip service to the notion of being a nation of laws."

And this is the point that the MSM refuses to address. It's not a question of right versus left, it's a question of right versus wrong. If we look the other way, refuse to address the way the previous administration ignored both American and international law, or used dubious legal opinions to provide a fig leaf for its law breaking, then you can be sure some other future administration will do the same thing.

So why has the MSM been so reluctant to call a duck a duck?

I think we're dealing with another weapons of mass destruction moment. The MSM missed the obvious signs that torturing was occuring (Abu Ghraib was one hell of an obvious sign). They allowed their fear of being called too liberal to report the facts, and hid behind the excuse of "objectivity." And the Washington-based media, once again, valued their contacts inside the administration more than they valued reporting the truth.

As CNN's Campbell Brown so famously said during last year's presidential campaign, "If someone tells me it's sunny outside and I look and it's raining, I'm going to say it's raining."  Even now, with the torture memos, the Red Cross report and the Senate report, the MSM STILL refuse to telling us it's raining outside.

America Ten Years After Columbine

The American debate about gun regulation begins and ends with a tacit agreement that the occasional massacre is the price we pay for freedom. No wonder teddy bears and candles are the only national gun policy we have. -- Dahlia Litwick, Slate

It’s always been a mystery to me. The way so many of my fellow Americans feel about guns. It’s as if a country that is normally sane and thoughtful suddenly loses its mind and adopts a position so extreme that to question it at all is considered anti-American.

I don’t own a gun. My brother had an old .22 (I think) pea shooter when he was a kid. I’m not sure he ever fired it. I sure don’t remember him doing so. And I don’t normally hang out with people who own guns. Or at least who don’t do so ostentatiously. My best friend’s roommate in Georgia once told me she had a pistol, but I never saw it.

When I moved here from Canada in 1991, I knew what that meant. It meant more religion in politics (there is almost none in Canada) and that you couldn’t talk about gun control. And it’s not that I hate guns. Humans have been hunting forever. And Americans have been hunting with guns since the first settlers landed in Jamestown.

No, it’s not guns themselves; it’s the people who use them. I suppose that’s what the NRA means when it says that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. It’s true. But what the NRA never adds is that guns, especially assault weapons and the like, make it a lot easier to kill a lot of people all at once over a very quick period of time.

After all, do we really believe that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold could have stabbed 13 students and teachers to death, or that Seung-Hui Cho could have walked the corridors of Virginia Tech and stabbed 32 people to death in 10 to 12 minutes? Of course not. And any one who is being honest with themselves will agree. (A 1998 study on penetrating cardiac injuries found that the mortality rate for gunshot wounds to the heart is 84%, compared to 30% for people who sustain stab wounds to the heart, for instance.)

Guns don’t kill people, but they make it a lot easier to kill people. A lot of people.

I suppose that’s what Dahlia Litwick means when she says that the occasional (I would say regular) mass murder is the price we pay for freedom. The NRA certainly thinks it’s a fair trade. No question the same is true for Republicans. And Democrats are more than happy (or too scared to do otherwise) to trade votes for dead children in a school library. Or murdered immigrants at a community center. Or slain policemen in Oakland and in Pittsburgh.

What I find the most amusing about the real hardcore gun rights people -- you know, the ones who protest when any politician tries to enact laws that will make it easier for police to track guns used by criminals, or that stem the flow of Americans guns to murderous drug gangs in Mexico, or that allow officials in New York to stop guns shops in Virginia from selling weapons that kill cops in the Big Apple, or that stop the sale of ammunition like hollow point bullets -- is their argument that we can’t have ANY kind of gun control because we always have to be ready in case the government tries to make us all slaves. We all need to be able to purchase an Uzi, you know, just in case a black helicopter lands in our backyard and tries to take us to the gulags that Glenn Beck likes to hallucinate about on Fox. And there is no middle ground, no reasonable compromise.

Look, I don’t want to take hunters’ guns from them. And I do believe that people have a right to defend themselves and their property. But try as I might, I still struggle to see why it’s an infringement of anyone’s right to go through a background check at a gun show. After all, we go through all kinds of security checks at airports these days and there are far fewer people killed by terrorism in American each year than die by hand guns for instance. Or in those ‘occasional massacres.’

Or why people object to measures that would help law enforcement do a better job - normally something the right falls over itself to accomplish. Only on this issue do those on the right sound like they belong to the Weather Underground, where everybody has to be afraid of ‘the man.”

But I also recognize that this is a losing battle. Certainly at this moment. The NRA has effectively neutralized most voices, certainly in the Congress and even in the White House. That’s just realpolitiks. As I said, even asking to talk about the issue brings out mass mailings and e-mail bombs that raise “they’re going to take out guns away” hysteria to a level that the NRA can easily raise millions dollars in a couple of hours. Just counterproductive.

So as we sit here 10 years after Columbine (and just a few of the better known ‘occasional massacres’ that have happened since that day) and all we can basically say is, well, too bad. Real shame, eh. Pity that it happened. Why, we ought to do something about that.

Like next to nothing. Or just nothing at all. Nothing.

 

This is a list of some of the mass shootings in the US since Columbine. I included the one from 1984, because I still think it’s one of the country’s worst.

--July 18, 1984, James Huberty opened fire at a McDonald’s restaurant in Southern California, killing 22 people and wounding 19 others.

-- Atlanta,Georgia, July 1999. A stockmarket day trader goes on a day-long shooting rampage, killing 12 people including his wife and two children before taking his own life.

-- Fort Worth,Texas, September 1999. A gunman opens fire at a prayer service, killing six people before committing suicide.

-- Dec. 26, 2000. Michael McDermott kills seven co-workers at an Internet consulting company in Wakefield,Massachusetts.

-- Washington, October 2002. A series of sniper-style shootings, some carried out from the boot of a car, claims 10 lives, mostly in the Washington area. Many of the attacks were carried out with a semi-automatic assault rifle.

-- Chicago, August 2003. A worker who was laid off shoots and kills six of his former co-workers with a semi-automatic pistol. The shooter had a lengthy arrest record, including for weapons offenses.

-- Birchwood,Wisconsin, November 2004. A hunter opens fire with an SKS assault rifle, killing six other hunters and wounding two after an argument.

-- Brookfield, Wisconsin, March 2005. A man fires 22 rounds during a church service, killing seven people.

-- Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, October 2006. A truck driver armed with two rifles, a semi-automatic handgun and 600 rounds of ammunition kills five schoolgirls execution-style in an Amish schoolhouse, and seriously wounds six others before shooting himself.

-- Blacksburg,Virginia, April 2007. A student shoots 47 people at Virginia Tech, killing 32 before he commits suicide, in the deadliest mass shooting in the United States.

-- Omaha,Nebraska, December 2007. Nine people are killed and five others injured after a 20-year-old shooter armed with a military-style assault rifle attacks shoppers in a mall.

-- Carnation,Washington. December 2007. A woman and her boyfriend shoot dead six members of her family, including two children, ages three and six, on Christmas Eve, using large-caliber pistols.

-- Chicago. February 2008. Six women are tied-up and shot at a suburban clothing store. Five of the women die. The gunman has not been found.

-- DeKalb,Illinois. February 2008. A man opens fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, killing five students and wounding 16 before turning his weapon on himself.

-- Alger,Washington. September 2008. A mentally ill man who had been released from jail a month earlier shoots eight people, killing six.

-- Covina,California. December 2008. A man dressed in a Santa Claus suit opens fire at a family Christmas party at his ex-wife's home and then sets fire to the house. Nine people are killed in the home. The gunman later kills himself.

-- Geneva County and Coffee County, Alabama. March 12 2009. In a shooting spree that tears through several towns, a 28-year-old out-of-work man kills 10 people, including his mother and a toddler.

-- North Carolina. March 29, 2009. A heavily-armed gunman shoots dead eight people, many elderly and sick patients, in a North Carolina nursing home.

-- Santa Clara,California, March 30, 2009. Six people are shot dead in an apparent murder-suicide at a home in an upscale Silicon Valley neighborhood.

-- Binghamton, New York. April 3, 2009. Up to 13 people are killed as a gunman goes on a rampage at a civic center in the town of Binghamton.

The truth about US and torture

“inter arma silent leges” - In times of war, the laws are silent.

Cicero

Five years ago this month, on the day the Abu Gharab photos were released, a friend stopped by my desk at the Christian Science Monitor. He saw that I was writing on the photos for that day’s version of The Daily Update on Terrorism and Security. “I can’t actually believe this happened,” he said to me. I turned and looked at him. I told him I could. He was shocked by my answer. “Americans don’t do that kind of thing,” he told me. I just smiled at him.

He was wrong. Americans absolutely do that kind of thing. Over the decades, we have tortured and abused people with the best (or worst) of them. Whether you’re talking about the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and now (as we know from the release of the torture documents today), Iraq and Afghanistan, US soldiers or agents of the government have carried out acts which under modern definitions can be called war crimes.

There is one important difference, however, that I will discuss a little bit later.

Take, for instance, Andersonville during the Civil War, a Confederate POW camp so foul that its commander was executed at war’s end, the only Confederate official to be tried and convicted of war crimes resulting from that “late unpleasantness.” Meanwhile, during the Spanish-American War, in particular during fighting in the Philippines, the atrocities being committed by American troops against the native population grew so intense that President McKinley blocked press reports from the region for fear it would harm his chances at reelection in 1900.

If you want to know about the kinds of brutal torture that we carried out in Vietnam, read this piece from former UPI correspondent Perry Deane Young on what he and his roommate, the late Sean Flynn, saw during their years there:

“The two pictures that I had saved show [from Flynn’s work] one Viet Cong prisoner strapped to an Asian version of the western cross; another one shows a VC suspect being strung upside down for his interrogation. These were routine procedures. In the manuscript for my Vietnam memoir, Two of the Missing, I had mentioned another popular method of attaching a crank telephone with wires to a man's testicles.”

Which brings us to the release today of four “torture” memos written by senior Bush administration officials. There was intense pressure on President Obama not to release the memos. But to his credit, he did, and although he did say that he would not seek to prosecute CIA staffers who tortured suspects “believing in good faith that they had legal authority to do what they did,” don’t be surprised if we find that a few of them didn’t act in good faith, especially those lawyers who wrote the memos. (John Yoo and Jay Bybee, are you listening?)

The memos show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that in order to fight evil, we succumbed to it ourselves. As Cicero noted in the quote at the top, we basically suspended the laws we believe in, the ones that we like to tell the rest of the world makes us different from the bad guys, and instead we did things that run contrary to the ‘Judeo-Christian” ethic so many in the Bush administration liked to talk about.

And that also leads to another conclusion, one that I will give the floor to columnist/blogger Andrew Sullivan to make:

“I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated, constructed, or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith. When you place it alongside the Red Cross' debriefing of the torture victims, the fit is almost perfect. I say "almost" because even Jay Bybee, in this unprofessional travesty of lawyering, stipulates that these techniques might be combined successively in any ways that could cumulatively become torture even in his absurd redefinition of the term. And yet the ICRC report shows, as one might imagine that outside these specious legalisms, such distinctions never hold in practice. And they didn't. Human beings were contorted into classic stress positions used by the Gestapo; they had towels tied around their necks in order to smash their bodies against walls; they were denied of all sleep for up to eleven days and nights at a time; they were stuck in tiny suffocating boxes; they were waterboarded just as the victims of the Khmer Rouge were waterboarded. And through all this, Bush and Cheney had lawyers prepared to write elaborate memos saying that all of this was legal, constitutional, moral and not severe pain and suffering.”

But we’re American. We don’t torture, right? We don’t do the things that we demand that other people be hunted down, captured and brought back for trial? Right.

In the end, the pure blind truth is that for all our fine words, when you come right down to it, there is very, very little difference between many of the people making the decisions on our side, and those making the decisions on the other side. Decisions that they then tell young men and women to carry out.

But there is that one difference I mentioned above, and it’s what I hope will save us once again. For every George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, or LBJ and Robert McNamara, or Nixon and Kissinger, there is a man or a woman in the US military or in a group like the ACLU or Human Rights Watch, who just won’t let them get away with it. Who fight and fight and fight until the truth comes out. And as much as Americans hate to have that mirror held up to their faces, and to see themselves reflected in that mirror, it is the one thing that brings us out of our brutality and reminds us why this nation was founded in the first place.

If there is anything that makes us different from the “bad guys,” it is this willingness to put our sins out in front of the world. It is a sign of the moral courage that others want to respect in us. And if we are to regain our place of respect with those we care about in the world, it’s a necessity to undertake.

IPhone blogging

Just trying my new iPhone blogging app to see if it works.

The Catholic Church will never be at home in a secular democracy

The controversy surrounding Notre Dame University's invitation to President Obama shows why the Catholic Church will never be at home or comfortable in a secular democracy or in a tradition of academic freedom. That doesn't mean, of course, that Catholic universities will kowtow to the Vatican. They've shown many times that they won't, to their everlasting credit. But the negative reaction of US bishops to the idea of honoring President Obama is illustrative of how small-minded and conservative the church has become.

The president of the United States represents all Americans. I think it's fine if students want to protest his appearance on campus - that's absolutely in the American tradition. And if you look at the overall score sheet, there is little doubt that the church would agree with most of Obama's policies. (Not to mention that Obama is not a Catholic, so is not restricted by any church teachings on the matter.)

But where you stand on abortion has become the only way to determine if you are a "real" Catholic. As a former Catholic who left the church for a wide range of reasons, it saddens me to see the church increasingly retreat into conservative, insular positions. The many bone-headed statements of Benedict XVI, which result in him spending as much time apologizing and backtracking as shepherding the flock, are the best example of a church bureaucracy trying to pull the church back to a time in which the world no longer exists, or wants to exist.

There are many good people in the Catholic Church. It's unfortunate that they are lead by such a close-minded group of aging males.

The Ballad of Bernie Madoff

God's will?

So this guy, C. Wielinski, was sitting at his dining room table in his home in Buffalo, and a plane literally fell on him and killed him. I confess I have a hard time seeing "God's will" in this. I find the idea repugnant - that God would "preordain" that Wielinski would die in this way. I guess that's why I could never be a Christian fundamentalist.

A couple of months ago, I heard on NPR one of the survivors of the '"infamous" plane crash in the Andes in the 70s when the survivors ate the bodies in order not to starve to death. He said something that has become my personal mantra: "Plan like you'll live to be 100, live like you'll die tomorrow."

Because you just never know when a plane will fall out of the sky on you.

The conflict agenda of the mainstream (and not so mainstream) media

More than a few years ago, when I toiled for the CBC back in my native Canada, the executive producer of the radio show on which I was working sent me out to do an interview. She didn't just send me out with a tape recorder and an idea for a story, however - she practically told me what she wanted the person being interviewed to say. So I arranged to meet the person, and lo and behold, the story turned out to be completely different that what my editor had portrayed. It was far less dominated by conflict than my producer had envisioned. It was still a great story - just more complex and nuance.

Excited, I went back to the studio and explained that, while the story had changed, it was still a great piece. "I don't want it," my producer snarled. "It's not what I wanted to get from that interview."

I ran into this attitude repeatedly during my years as a journalist, regardless of the particular medium I was working in. I remember once being told by a TV producer that my story about illegal overfishing by Canadians (who love to blame that particular problem on other nations) needed more "bang-bang." I told him that most fisherman don't tend to pack heat on the high seas. Again it was a case where complexity and nuance were being ignored in favor of conflict.

I'm reminded of this watching, reading and listening to the coverage of the first month of the Obama administration. Several friends (liberals for sure) have complained that the media seems willing to jump on every little mistake the guy makes. (To be fair, some haven't been so little, even by his own measure.) But what these friends don't understand is that the media is not being driven by an anti-Obama agenda. It is driven by a conflict agenda.

The media needs conflict the way an alcoholic needs a drink. while this is certainly true of mainstream media (and TV in particular) it's also true of new forms of digital media. It is easier to tell a nuanced and complex story online, but it's also true that most small media sites seek out conflict when telling a story.

In the US, conflict means the Republicans going after the Obama agenda. While reporters, commentators and editors might tell you that they support the idea of bringing the country together, in their dark, secret places they hate the idea of bipartisanship. How boring it would be if everybody just got along. So it benefits both the GOP AND the media to have the Republicans be as obstructionist as possible. It helps sell newspapers, as they say.

Not all media coverage of conflict is bad, of course. Often conflict is driven by legitimate differences of opinion. Coverage of those differences is essential to the future of democracy in the US. But like Ritalin taken too often and when not needed, the media is hooked on conflict and must find it in everything. And so this message is reinforced in society - the public only sees conflict and believes that little else is possible.

(I found one notable exception to this rule. The Christian Science Monitor would often tell reporters covering "conflicts" to look for the people who were trying to overcome the differences and work together.)

Why I don't miss watching cable news

Out here in rural northern Virginia, we don't get cable TV. Comcast and those folks haven't ventured to my part of Loudoun County and I will never, ever get a satellite dish (they look like carbuncles on the side of a house). So when I do watch TV -- which is about an hour every other day -- what I normally watch is the Retro TV channel I now get because of my digital TV converter. (Love seeing those old episodes of "Emergency" again!)

My primary news sources are the Internet and NPR on the radio. So I am not subjected to the round-the-clock, millisecond-by-millisecond instant analysis of anything that happens anywhere that you get on cable TV news.

There are no unimportant events on cable news. The car chase in Minneapolis, the court appearance of a well-known sports or entertainment figure in L.A., the small plane crash in Iowa, where the Dow is at any particular moment, etc. Each event is reported on as if it is the most important story in the world AT THAT MOMENT. But only for that moment, because in the next moment, well, it's old news.

This style of reporting reminds me of a line from the Stephen Sondheim play "Into the Words." I might be paraphrasing a bit but one of the characters sings that if every moment was an important one, then there would be no important moments. Or it would be impossible to tell the really important ones from the ones that are just the ordinary clutter of everyday life.

This is the problem that America media now face, cable news in particular. In their desire to feed the 24x7 news beast to keep the ratings up so as to make a profit (it all comes down to making a profit), cable news relies on an "anything that happens is worth reporting" model that turns all news -- including stuff that's really not important -- into "moments."

This results in a dilution in news value of all stories. Take this posting from a reader at Andrew Sullivan's blog, about cable news reporting on the stimulus package:

American media, be it sports, gossip, celebrity, or politics, has for at least the past ten years (I am 24 so my sample size is rather small) presented each story of the day as something that is a really important, defining event. In turn, this has had the effect on me and many of my peers of the feeling that nothing is important.  Which is why I have been so excited to see something truly important happen in my lifetime when Obama was elected.  Now we have another truly important event, the economic crisis, and the media is still making micro events the story and missing the enormous picture.

Will Willkinson, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, nails another aspect of this news style on his blog, also in regards to the way the media has been reporting the recent stimulus debate on the Hill: the desire to make every point worthy of discussion, regardless of its merits, in order to be "objective."

I think the problem with the American media is that it’s full of Americans who overestimate the importance of American micro-politics, and so, consciously or subconsciously, undertake every damn story as a public-opinion-shaping framing our counter-framing exercise and eventually forget how to report the obvious interpretation of events. This isn’t willful. The obvious interpretation of events has simply become invisible to their team-spirited minds. This is not to say that there isn’t, at the the same time, a very strong sense of the professional obligation to be “objective,” but that tends to manifest itself as pretending to take the other team’s talking points seriously, which is really not at all what objectivity requires.

So what we end up with is the idea that every single thing that is reported on is important, and every single aspect of those stories are worth reporting. So we have is news that isn't news. And as the Andrew Sullivan reader points out, people start to believe that there really isn't anything important being reported. A problem for all media, but one that finds it ultimate manifestation on the cable news channels.

As for me, reading various sources on the Internet that offer a more straight-forward look at events or listening the longer more textured pieces that NPR can do on the radio, I find I have a much better grasp of what's really going on than I did when I did watch cable news.

Why charging for news content won't work for general interest newspapers

Former Time editor Walter Isaacson is the latest in a long line of newspaper fans who argues that something needs to be done in order to save the dinosaurs before they become extinct. His solution - micropayments. He mentions David Carr's recent article that suggest an iTunes model for newspapers. Rather than paying a lot for a paper, pay pennies instead for an article or photo, etc.

While I remember this idea being pushed in the mid-90s, only now, Isaacson argues, does the technology exist to make it work. Isaacson writes that he believes that people should pay something for what they read because if online news sites rely only on advertising, basically they will lose their moral compass.

Well, it's a nice idea, but I don't think it's going to work. At least not for general interest newspapers and here's why: if you charge me for something, I'm going to go and find the person willing to give it to me for free.

Charging for content works for a site like The Wall Street Journal because they are peddling a very specific commodity - news about business. Yes, they also cover the rest of the world as well, but the business people who get their bosses to pay for their subscriptions read the Journal for a specific purpose - the rest of the world is just gravy.

But with a general interest newspaper, here is what would happen. Say The New York Times tried again to charge for parts of the paper or for stories (the first time didn't work out so well). Once I couldn't read my Times any more, well, I would go and read USA Today. Or the Chicago Tribune. Or the Christian Science Monitor. Or Slate. Or Politico. Or other sources of free news. Even if a lot of papers start to charge, you can bet there'll be one publication out there (and the reality is that there would be many) that will continue to give it away for free because of the ad revenue. (I'm not so sure I buy the idea that ad revenue will morally corrupt a paper, but I'm open to the argument - but regardless of what I or Isaacson might think, others will be happy to take the money.)

Because if a site is getting more eyeballs because it's free, you can bet your bottom dollar that advertisers are going to go there. Advertisers don't give a hoot about saving journalism. They care about the best bang for their buck. And even if we did have micropayments for stories, journalism would still rely on ad revenue to make a profit - as it does even now.

The iTunes music model worked for Apple because it was CHEAPER than the alternative of buying an entire album. Here the opposite is true. The iTunes model for online news would be more expensive (even if it was just charging pennies) than the current model of free news. Now you tell me, based on the way that American consumers look at everything else they buy, which model they would choose?

There is a lot more that could be argued on the topic. But I'm afraid that we're just closing the barn doors after the horse is out of the barn. Media people have to deal with that fact -- information might not want to be free but it is -- and the resulting economic model and find a way we can harness that filly so she can take us where we want to go

Merkel: Pope must clarify Holocaust stance

It seems that Pope Benedict's veer towards the support of individuals and organizations that are anti-Semitic has provoked the wrath of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Association Press reports that Merkel says the Pope must "make 'a very clear statement' rejection of Holocaust denials after a former bishop was rehabilitated by the Vatican."

Her rare and public demand came amid increasing outrage among Germany's Roman Catholic leaders over the pope's decision to lift the excommunication of British-born Richard Williamson, who questioned whether 6 million Jews were gassed during the Nazi Holocaust.

Merkel said she "does not believe" there has been adequate clarification of the Vatican's position on the Holocaust amid the firestorm of controversy that broke out after Williamson's rehabilitation by the German-born pope.

The Vatican, not one to book demands from a mere woman, said the Pope had already clarified his stance. "The pope's thinking on the subject of the Holocaust has been expressed very clearly," said Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi.

This is beginning to spin out of Benedict's control. Even the Catholic Cardinal from Mainz, Germany has called for called for an apology from "a high level." Cardinal Karl Lehmann said ""There must also be consequences for those who are responsible for this."

Christopher Hitchens: Pope's decisions affect us, even if we're not Catholic

This is a very interesting, absolutely controversial article from writer Christopher Hitchens which argues that Pope Benedict's recent decisions that allowed a Holocaust dening bishop back into the church, along with his embrace of those with far-right, anti-Semitic pre-Vatican II beliefs is something that all people, not just more liberal Catholics should ne concerned about.

Hitchens is a well-known atheist, so he says in one way, what the Pope does or doesn't do matters not to him. But his argument is that by endorsing people and measures (like the Latinate mass that include a prayer on Good Friday for the conversion of the Jews') who are so openly against Jews, he is undermining the fight against anti-Semitism everywhere. Here is how he ends his article:

As a nonbeliever, this is not my problem. But the indulgence of prejudice and paranoia under the cloak of faith is my problem as a citizen. As with Cardinal Bernard Law, the enabler of child-molestation, who is now sheltered by Rome and who was able to vote in the election of Ratzinger as pope, so with those who slander the Jews with innuendo and worse, and who spread the vile libels that blame the democratic United States for the theocratic terrorist attacks upon it. One might think a responsible church would be indignantly arraigning and expelling such people rather than piously seeking reconciliation with them. Apparently, one would be wrong.