Category: media-general

By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, media-general, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice

We *have* made progress! A Utah newspaper, the Herald Journal, ran its first announcement of a same-sex marriage–and only four people canceled their subscriptions!

The paper ran a very clear announcement of its rationale here.

Bravo to the paper–and its readers, who I guess have noticed that the world is changing.

I live in Massachusetts. We’ve had gay marriage for I think three years now. And guess what–the sky hasn’t fallen! I think a lot of the people who supported some of the homophobic responses in the past have realized, now that they see openly gay married couples raising families, having jobs, and enjoying such taken-for-granted-by-heterosexuals privileges as visiting their partner in the hospital, that it is no threat to heterosexual marriage.

I have never understood why they felt threatened in the first place. My wife and I will be celebrating our 25th anniversary in October. We’ve been to several gay and lesbian weddings. I think it makes a family stronger when a couple can express their love and commitment and take on the responsibilities and benefits.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, media-general, Peace and War

It’s all over the blogosphere–but not in the mainstream news: Cheney’s office considered sending in heavily armed Navy Seals on boats disguised as Iranian craft to create an artificial incident so the US could go to war against Iran, according to Seymour Hersh. The project was rejected, as Americans killing Americans didn’t sound appealing. But that they even considered it makes you wonder–this goes beyond even the deceptions used to get us into Iraq.

And why is the msm so silent on this?

Hersh is one of the most distinguished investigative journalists of our time–the person who broke the My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam war, more than 30 years ago, and who has broken several stories about various nefarious deeds in the Bush administration.

If this allegation is true (as I suspect it is), it is without question grounds for impeachment and probably criminal prosecution. But where’s the investigation?

In the first five pages of Google results for hersh hormuz seals, there is exactly one bit of coverage of Hersh’s very serious allegation in the mainstream media, from WQXT, St. Augustine, Florida. There was a story on today’s Democracy Now, which is where I heard about it–but that’s not the mainstream media.

Today, my local paper had an article about Britney Spears’ father continuing legal oversight over her finances. Why is this news, while a plot to take an illegal action and disguise it as the work of a hostile government in order to enter a war goes unmentioned?

I don’t give a flying f about Brittney–but I sure do care about actions on the part of our government that lead to lives lost, decrease the effectiveness of our diplomacy, channel the resources of the US government into all the wrong places, etc.

Video clip and transcript of Hersh’s interview at the Campus Progress journalism conference. Here’s a quick bit:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice

Call for Action: Fight the “Orphaning” of
Writers’ Constitutional Right to Copyright Protection
By guest blogger Jerry Colby, President, National Writers Union

[Note from Shel: This was originally sent by Jerry as a letter to members of the NWU. I asked if I could post it here to share with non-NWU members.]

Librarians typically want to expand the public’s access to their
collections. It’s in their nature to help people grow in
knowledge. While getting a salary, they do not do this just for
money.

Online database companies and publishers, like librarians,
archive works in the arts and sciences. They, too, want to see
more people using the works they have stored in digital format.
Unlike librarians, however, they do this for profit by selling
digital copies of others’ works. For years they did this without
seeking permission from writers and artists who created these
works – until the Supreme Court in 2001 declared this illegal in
its Tasini v. New York Times et al. decision which affirmed that
usage of work must be paid for in electronic media.

The database companies and publishers have not given up their
efforts to seize control of the rights to copyrighted works they
want to sell through the Internet. Beside all-rights contracts,
they have also targeted a category of copyrighted works whose
authors are least likely to defend themselves because their
whereabouts are unknown. The media industry has taken to calling
these books, plays, articles, poems, photographs, illustrations,
and so on “orphan works.” Now the publishers want the legal right
to use these works without the rights-holders’ permission. All
they would have to do, as proposed in new legislation (S. 2913,
the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008), is make a “diligent
effort” to locate the rights-holder which is “reasonable and
appropriate” according to government standards for “best
practice” overseen by copyright experts hired by libraries. Such
searches would be beyond the budgets of all but the largest
publishers and database companies.

This would stand copyright law on its head. Since the 1976
Copyright Act went into effect in 1978, writers supposedly had to
do nothing to enjoy copyright protection of their works. Any work
not in the public domain cannot be used without permission of the
rights-holder. This “opt-in” requirement is in compliance with
the spirit of the copyright clause in Article 1, Section 8 of the
U.S. Constitution, which vested original and exclusive ownership
of works with their creators for a limited time (currently the
lifetime of the creator plus 70 years) in order to encourage
innovation in American society. Such a bill strikes at the very
heart of capitalism’s success and the source of innovation
crucial to any nation’s cultural and economic growth. What is
really being proposed is the orphaning of our constitutional
right to copyright protection.

Should this orphan works bill become law, infringement of
copyright of orphaned works, both domestic and foreign, would be
permitted after a vague “due diligence” search for the rights-
holder. The negative impact this could have is manifold. Our
foreign trade partners who take copyright very seriously would
fight American companies encouraged by this act to raid works
summarily declared orphan after computer and phone searches. It
takes little imagination to see where this might lead.
Retaliatory raids by competing foreign companies on American
orphan works could escalate into trade wars over orphaned
intellectual property. Given the enormous role intellectual
property plays in the global market, such trade wars could easily
expand and unravel carefully negotiated international trade
agreements. Ironically, this orphan works act could damage
international trade in such intellectual property as music and
movies where the U.S. still holds a favorable trade balance.

Congress should signal an end to the decades-long indulgence of
corporate greed and insist everyone play by same the rules. It
should table the onerous bill until a more thought-through
version that respects the property rights of creators can be
crafted.

Congresspeople are very sensitive to influence during national
election years. Writers would be wise to remind their
representatives to observe the constitutional covenant with
American writers and artists. I urge all NWU members to take the
lead here, look at the two letters on orphan works currently
posted on the nwu.org website for ideas, and write your own
letters to Congress. Be sure to also send a copy of your letters
to the National Office.

Gerard Colby, trade union activist, investigative journalist and author, is currently serving his second term as the President of the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981. Colby is co-author (with Charlotte Dennett) of Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (HarperCollins, 1995), author of Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Lyle Stuart, 1984), and lead contributor to Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Prometheus, 2003), winner of the 2003 National Press Club award for press criticism.

He can be reached at GColby@nwu.org.

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By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics, media-general

By some weird coincidence, both Seth Godin and David Garfinkel (names well known to any student of modern marketing) went after the media for distorting the news to artificially create drama this week.

Godin, posting today, looked at CNN’s report on yesterday’s Indiana and North Carolina primaries, and found the headline and focus only told one part of the story. While accurate on its face, the headline, “Clinton ‘full speed ahead’ After Indiana Nail-biter”, was misleading.

A more appropriate but less dramatic rendition of the results, he says, would have conveyed a very different story.

The page would have been more accurate if it had said things like, “Obama gains more than 200,000 votes over Clinton” or “Obama campaign further extends delegate lead, picking up 12 more delegates” or even “Obama pummels Clinton in the bigger state.”

That’s not dramatic, though, and as William Randolph Hearst taught us a long time ago, the goal is to sell newspapers, not to report the news.

A day earlier, Garfinkel attacked the San Francisco Chronicle for similar manipulation on a totally different topic: “Is Any Web Site Safe? No Way to be Sure.”

First, Garfinkel points out that the paper is using a technique for which journalists often diss marketers:

The headline is bad enough — but we all know that fear sells, and it certainly sells newspapers. (Don’t think I’m going to take it lightly though the next time I see or hear a journalist taking a swipe at an ad because it preys on people’s fears.)

And then he points out the neurolinguistic programming (NLP) implications of a headline that could be read several different ways.

This intersection of the journalist mind and the marketer mind is a stream where I swim regularly, and I think both of these guys are right. What do you think?

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, media-general, Peace and War

More on the scandal I wrote about Sunday regarding the Pentagon’s shills infiltrating the media in the run-up to the Iraq war.

This from Jim Lehrer’s Online News Report. Lehrer’s guest was John Stauber, founder/executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy and author of Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq and other books:

What happened here was a psy-ops campaign, an incredible government propaganda campaign whereby Donald Rumsfeld and Torie Clark, the head of public relations for the Pentagon, designed a program to recruit 75, at least 75 former military officers, as your report said, most of them now lobbyists or consultants to military contractors, and insert them, beginning in 2002, before the attack on Iraq was even launched, into the major networks to manage the messages, to be surrogates.

And that’s the words that are actually used, “message multipliers” for the secretary of defense and for the Pentagon. This program continues right up to now.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And is the essence of this that what they did was — what the Pentagon did was illegal?

JOHN STAUBER: Yes, what they did was illegal. Now, the Pentagon might contest that, but we’ve had various laws on the books in our country going back to the 1920s. It is illegal for the U.S. government to propagandize citizens in this way.

In my opinion, this war could have never been sold if it were not for this sophisticated propaganda campaign. And what we need is congressional investigation of not just this Pentagon military analyst program, but all the rest of the deception and propaganda that came out of the Bush administration and out of the Pentagon that allowed them to sell and manage this war.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general

Two related stories that I found in the Romensko news-about-newspapers newsletter. First, on Journalism.org, that the WSJ is shifting a lot of its front page coverage away from finance and toward politics and international news. and second, one columnist on the Recovering Journalist blog speculates, very cogently, that Rupert Murdoch is attempting to essentially surround the New York Times with its properties, fighting from below with the New York Post, from above with the Wall Street Journal, and laterally with a possible purchase and relaunch of a metro NYC edition) of Newsday.

As a former New Yorker his growing media empire makes me nervous. I remember when the New York Post was a very decent newspaper, before he got his tabloid-sensationalist fingers into it. Of course, he doesn’t always kill a paper’s journalistic integrity; the London times still seems to be doing ok, and Murdoch has owned it since 1981. But I surely would not want to see him owning both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times–America’s only two national papers other than the USA Today.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, media-general, Peace and War, Uncategorized

A recent front-page story in the New York Times reveals that the Pentagon has gone far beyond paying Armstrong Williams. A whole gaggle of retired military leaders posing as neutral pundits turn out to have been under the sway of the Pentagon:

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

The Times stops short of accusing these military figures of taking money directly from the Pentagon. But they were, in a real sense, embedded, and these relationships were not disclosed to the electronic news outlets who hired them. Democracy Now reported two days later that the military flew some of these people to Iraq at its own expense and conducted one-sided briefings there.

Peter Hart of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, one of two commentators on the DN segment, says the media was completely lacking in due diligence, inviting these pundits without asking questions:

I think the extent of the briefings was somewhat shocking and the blase attitude from the networks. They didn’t care what military contractors these guys were representing when they were out at the studio. They didn’t care that the Pentagon was flying them on their own dime to Iraq. Just basic journalistic judgment was completely lacking here. So I think the story is really about a media failure, more than a Pentagon failure. The Pentagon did exactly what you would expect to do, taking advantage of this media bias in favor of having more and more generals on the air when the country is at war.

And when the commentators were in a position to refute the Pentagon, they stayed silent. Hart again:

One of the most shocking things in the story is that in early 2003, these guys got a briefing about WMDs, and the government said, “We actually don’t have hard evidence right now that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.” Did any of them go on the air and say that? No. The Pentagon, I think, had total control and total faith that these guys would deliver the message that they intended to deliver to the public, and that’s exactly what they did, and the media did very little to counteract this overwhelming propaganda campaign from the Pentagon.

And there were consequences to those who strayed from the party line:

Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the ”twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give ”a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox ”may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was ”not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was ”precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, ”simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

And still, the Democrats won’t talk about impeachment. Considering the extremely bellicose noises this same government and its media allies are making about Iran, we had bloody well put that impeachment discussion “back on the table.”

And still, as Arianna Huffington points out, most of the mainstream media not only ducks responsibility for its many failures leading up to and continuing through the war, but doesn’t even acknowledge there’s a problem.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Media Ethics, media-general, Shel's Personal Life

Just stumbled across a fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell, the brilliant and bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, on the ethical issues he faces as a journalist who also writes books and also gives speeches. Among other things, he notes the latitude he has as a staff writer for the New Yorker compared to the extremely narrow ability to express any opinion he faced at his former employer, the Washington Post.

As a PR writer/consultant, speaker, journalist, book author, and webzine editor with a specialty in the intersection of marketing and ethics, I grapple with these issues every day. and I found myself not only agreeing with almost everything Gladwell says here (amazing considering the piece is four years old), but wishing I had written it.

Gladwell turns out to be quite good at defining his bo8undaries. An example:

On behalf of the business side of the New Yorker, I have repeatedly given talks or presentations to representatives of companies that advertise with the magazine. For some of those presentations, I have been paid. And on a number of occasions, those groups have included people from the U.S. automobile industry. Has that biased me in favor of the Big Three? Well, no. As I’ve stated, last January I wrote an article bitterly attacking the SUV, which has been the cornerstone of the financial success of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler over the past ten years. Giving a speech does not buy my allegiance to the interests of my audience. Why? Because giving a paid speech to a group for an hour is simply not enough to create a bias in that group’s favor. It’s a very different sort of transaction. I’m not invited to speak to those medical groups because I promise to agree with their position on health care, and I’m not invited to speak to groups from Detroit because I promise to agree with their position on SUVs. In fact, my position on health insurance or SUVs never comes up. I’m invited because those audiences want to hear about my work.

I say Bravo, and I recommend the piece highly–with the caveat that (like many great articles in the New Yorker) the piece is quite long and you’d be better off hitting the print button.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Copywriting, General Commentary, media-general

As a copywriter, I love a good turn of phrase that makes you rethink your reality. It’s why I’m a fan of people like Sam Horn, author of books like ConZentrate, Tongue Fu!®, and Take the Bully by the Horns. It’s why I’ve written press releases with headlines like “It’s 10 O’Clock–Do You Know Where Your Credit History Is?” and “The One who Dies With the Most Toys–Is Just As Dead.”

And it’s why I was utterly captivated to read this on Perry Marshall’s site:

This whole “recession” thing everyone’s blathering about was merely fabricated by the media (you know, the people we trust to deliver the “news” to us) so they’ll have more to, uh, g-r-i-p-e about while they assault us with election propaganda.

Did you know that ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN have predicted 40 out of the last 2 recessions?

I love that: “predicted 40 out of the last 2 recessions.” It’s a completely fresh and interesting way to state that he thinks the media are lousy at economic predictions.

Do I agree with him? Well…my own business is doing pretty well, but I choose to live in an abundant world, and the world tends to reaffirm that conviction. However, I definitely see some areas of concern about the economy–in housing, in job creation, and other factors, most of which I can easily blame on the Bush administration.

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