When big-time reporters decide to try their hands at media criticism, the results are usually disappointing–but they can also be quite revealing.  So when a video of CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley started to making the rounds, the headlines associated with it piqued my interest. Over at the Weekly Standard, it was “CBS Anchor: ‘We Are Getting Big Stories Wrong, Over and Over Again. ‘”Well, that sounds like pretty dramatic self-criticism. But, as expected, Pelley’s media criticism mostly misses the mark.

[pullquote]   By the way, keep in mind that the invective is on our tab, don’t blame the author of this piece—Peter Hart— for it.— P. Greanville
••••[/pullquote]

Give him points for drama, though. “Our house is on fire,” he warned near the beginning of his talk at Quinnipiac University. The house is the “magnificent mansion that we call American journalism.” And Pelley did say what the headlines suggested: “We’re getting the big stories wrong, over and over again.”So what are those stories? Pelley specifically points out one: In the aftermath of the Newtown school massacre, he inaccurately reported that the shooter’s mother worked at the school. That was, in his words, “absolutely wrong.”So why do things like this happen? Well, Pelley attempts to answer by pointing a finger at technology:

Never before in human history has more information been available to more people.  But at the same time, never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people.

He moves on to the Boston marathon bombings. “Our nation was attacked by terrorists,” he explains, “and amateur journalists became digital vigilantes.”

“Innocent people were marked as suspects,” he goes on, “their pictures and their names ricocheted all over Twitter and Facebook and Reddit.”

Now we’re getting to the real point. He goes on:

That fire that started on the Internet spread to our more established newsrooms as well. In a world where everyone is a publisher, no one is an editor. And that is the danger we face today.

Editors are the people who decide that some information should be vetted before it is aired. Yes, the existence of the Internet means that rumors can spread faster–but did that really cause CNN to botch a report about a “dark-skinned” suspect, or the New York Post to put a photo of two young men on its cover, falsely suggesting they were suspects in the bombing?

To Pelley, the problem is clear: “Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. That’s not journalism. That’s gossip.”

While that’s a mischaracterization, the problem with journalism isn’t the existence of Twitter; it’s the failure of some journalists to exercise sound judgment.

The idea that the big problem with journalism is that TV networks air breaking news that is inaccurate lets media off the hook.  The problem with coverage of the Iraq War was not that reporters listened to Facebook or Twitter, neither of which existed at the time of the invasion; rather, they listened too often to elite sources who were wrong. And they continue to rely on official sources to steer the news agenda.

The Internet, if anything, provides for a way for people to hear from a more diverse set of voices, and to act as a check on big media.

Pelley was right in one respect: The media’s obsession with being “first” on a story, even when that means beating out your broadcast rivals by a few seconds, is a waste of time.  True enough–and that’s a problem that is in no way related to the dangers of Reddit.

“Maybe a touch of humility would serve us better, and serve the public better as well,” Pelley declares. No argument there. But then, moments later, Pelley pronounced: “America has the best journalism in the world.”  Hey–what happened to humility!

PETER HART is one of FAIR’s senior editors and analysts. We appreciate his work. 

Following release of the results of a recent Fairleigh Dickinson University poll showing 29% of registered voters in the U.S. believe armed revolution to ‘protect liberties’ may be necessary the self-appointed political ‘center’ went into full conniption in defense of the established order. Visions of shotgun wielding Tea Partiers were trotted out, racists no doubt, storming the Capitol to roll back the radical progress President Barack Obama and a blameless Congress have made to save ‘our fledgling democracy’ from the predations of empire, the corrupting influence of money in politics, the growing and conspicuous divide between haves and have-nots, the murderous militarism of the war industry and the oppressive machinations of a militarized police. Accurate descriptions of official policies to which the citizenry might legitimately object were prominent in their absence.

Framed as reaction to the ascendance of America’s first black President and the ‘liberal agenda’ he studiously paid lip service to while factually acting in the service of his rich campaign contributors and the corporations they own, missing was where this ‘movement’ fits into recent American history. On the political right the ‘Militia’ movement of armed defenders of American ‘liberties’ arose in the mid-1990s. The economic context was a prior decade of de-industrialization of the heartland attributable to Federal Reserve efforts to ‘tame’ inflation (high interest rates raised the value of the U.S. dollar making industrial exports uncompetitive), military cuts following the end of the Cold War that disproportionately affected the rural middle class and the savage, largely gratuitous mass layoffs by corporate America that were the fashion between 1990 – 1995. While poorly understood and often even more poorly articulated at the time, the ‘New World Order’ against which the Militias were preparing to fight was a rough proxy for the factually ascendant plutocracy now patron and sole beneficiary of official Washington policy.

[pullquote]   In a masterful propaganda stroke, the decades-long corporate project of eviscerating the real left in the United States has produced a rump political spectrum in which status quo liberals have been impudently paraded as “left,” thereby damning in the minds of most Americans what the actual left truly represents, and creating a gigantic political opportunity for the ultra Right.  Mind you, there was never anything accidental about the switcheroo.—The Editors [/pullquote]

Unmentioned out of apparent residual embarrassment are left wing revolutionaries, a/k/a ‘terrorists,’ long known to enthusiastically object to economic predation, historical and current police violence against their persons, colleagues, families and communities, wanton militarism in the interests of imperial capital and the class predations of reigning plutocracies—all the policies good liberals support when a credentialed guy in a $3,000 suit explains in liberal-speak the policies of the radical right are ‘liberal.’ To the ongoing humiliation of said professional left, South American Marxists / Leninists and homegrown anarcho-collectivists impede, or at least have in the not so distant past, their corporate fund raising and networking efforts at the annual con-fabs held at five-star hotels in exotic locales where they no doubt enthusiastically discuss the locale and menu of the next year’s con-fab. As anyone receiving a paycheck from the responsible left could tell you, ‘working within the system’ is the only way to ‘get a seat at the table.’

The basis of the current charge these would-be revolutionaries are from the radical right is that over twice as many registered Republicans (44%) as Democrats (18%) claim to be ready to take up arms (27% of Independents join them). Having apparently declined to ask the economic status of the respondents, economic class was pre-determined to be irrelevant to both the poll questions and liberal discussion of them. Beyond this, it seems a reasonable assumption a racist, reactionary right composes some proportion of those ready to take up arms, just as it is represented in the police forces of major U.S. cities, in the military, in senior management positions in large corporations, is regularly welcomed at White House functions and serves on the Boards of Directors of prominent cultural institutions. While the apparent liberal fear is of heavily armed trailer park rednecks swilling beer while trying to reclaim the Ku Klux Klan from the FBI and local police forces, the facts of the existing political economy suggest the revolution of the radical right was won some decades past. So what exactly is it bourgeois commentators are defending?

The ‘centrist’ tale told is of a once dominant culture displaced by history that is now desperate to reclaim its right– the ‘Leave it to Beaver’ world of white privilege being ‘stolen’ by Spanish speaking immigrants, Affirmative Action receiving ‘minorities,’ and feckless academics promoting the interests of ‘others’ over their own heritage and culture. The tale not being told is of a political economy re-dedicated some decades back to capitalist accumulation at any cost that has resulted in wildly skewed income distribution, stagnant incomes for most of the population, regular and large scale unemployment, widespread and increasing economic insecurity, predation by large corporations now exempted from laws and accountability, the diminishment of public institutions and a national state wholly dedicated to serving the tiny elite who now control the country. The liberal tale needn’t be wrong to be irrelevant— while the ‘feelings’ of racist right-wing reactionaries may be strong; there is little possibility they would have actual effect without the wholesale economic dispossession now under way.

One aspect missing in the debate over gun control– the back-story of the Fairleigh Dickinson poll, is gun control advocates only look at the civilian side of the issue. Coincident in recent decades with increasing concentration of political-economic power has been the militarization of the police; the massive build out of incarceration and prisons as capitalist enterprises, the erosion of legal protections from illegitimate state and commercial power, the growth of intrusive surveillance technologies and a shift to formal race and class-based strategies of police repression. On the one hand gun control advocates argue the fear of growing state power is lunatic paranoia while on the other there is no apparent interest on their part in disarming the increasingly militarized state against who the claims of outsized power are being made. This contradiction, combined with the articulated fear of an ideological right accompanied by implicit acceptance of the institutional right, points to the class basis for liberal fears. While ideological right-wing reactionaries are the perceived threat to bourgeois liberals, the facts of daily existence posed by institutional racism, the ‘legal status’ machinations used to exploit the manufactured immigrant underclass, and the rapidly and visibly growing class divide supported by state policies and enforced with state power, affect the lives of more people far more dramatically.

Put another way, it is the reaction of the growing underclass bourgeois liberals fear, not the diminishing material conditions faced by it. But the diminishing conditions are not fact of nature, but of policy. In but one example, Mr. Obama’s assorted efforts to solve the ‘foreclosure crisis’ his administration inherited were unwaveringly designed to screw ordinary citizens, both black and white, for the benefit of outlaw banks. Even so, residual anger over the bank bailouts would have diminished if wages and employment had recovered from depression levels. But wages for most Americans remain well below where they were six years ago and unemployment and underemployment remain at historically high levels. Were this not coincident with the full restoration of the fortunes of the reigning plutocracy at the expense of the broad citizenry these facts could be attributed to ignorance of basic economics on the part of establishment Washington. But this is not the case. The fortunes of the people ‘who matter’ were effectively restored—the economic mechanics for doing so are understood. It is entirely reasonable to conclude Mr. Obama and liberal Democrats (and Republicans) are tools of a predator class not just indifferent to the well being of most Americans, but one that actively benefits at their expense.

Congressional Republicans may more publicly promote economic and political predation under the guise of libertarian ‘freedom,’ but it is Democrats since President Bill Clinton (Jimmy Carter actually) who have more effectively promoted them. And therein lies at least part of the reason for current political angst. Beginning in 2006 when the Democrat majority was returned to Congress to the election of ‘liberal’ Democrat Barack Obama to the Presidency in 2008, the American electorate offered a rebuke of the murderous overreach and increasing plutocratic control of the George W. Bush era. And with it, the opportunity arose, in theory at least, to repudiate those excesses and chart a different course for the nation. Congressional Democrats immediately abdicated leadership under the conspicuous lie they needed a super majority to govern and Barack Obama set about codifying the most far reaching abuses of governmental power established by the Bush administration while demonstrating unwavering fealty to the reigning plutocracy. By describing his own policies as ‘moderate Republican’ Mr. Obama made it clear the electoral choice is between degrees of Republican—in contemporary terms the establishment Party of the radical right. When the possibility of affecting political change through the ballot box is removed, no other choice remains but to use other means to do so.

On a number of specific policy issues the feared non-establishment right may be inarticulate but may still have a point. By putting forward a conspicuously inadequate economic stimulus program when he entered office Mr. Obama ‘proved’ to a citizenry more concerned with just getting by than with the arcana of macroeconomic debates that Keynesian remedies don’t work. (Mr. Obama was loudly and repeatedly warned of this outcome at the time). Mr. Obama’s health care program forces financially strapped citizens to buy expensive private health insurance from for-profit companies with little redress for legitimate claims denied and with unchanged probability of economic ruin from exorbitant health care costs. To the Tea Party point, when associated with the increased militarization of the police, mass incarceration and diminished civil rights, this joining of state and corporate interests satisfies Italian fascist Benito Mussolini’s definition of fascism as the ‘corporate state.’ And in contrast to educated, connected, bourgeois liberals, those on the receiving end of illegitimate searches, arrests and incarceration, illegitimate foreclosures, predatory student loans from scam private educators and various and sundry state and commercial predations, have no other choice but to act collectively outside of ‘official’ channels if recourse is to be had. In other words, the question of whether the existing order is worth maintaining depends very much on where one exists within it.

The remaining charge is the existing political order represents the democratically chosen will of the citizenry and efforts to change it outside of (highly controlled) elections are necessarily to force the wishes of an aggressive minority onto the broader citizenry. But the consistent distance between poll results of Americans asked what policies they favor and official government policies belies this claim. From bank bailouts to environmental policies to government works programs to raising taxes on the wealthy to increased funding for education and social insurance, Americans are consistently far to the left of official Washington policy. And the direction of this distance is important—the conceit that calls for radical change are from a loutish right contradicts the reality the greatest distance between actual and desired policy is from the left.

The tactic of official Washington is to misrepresent policies as being in the broader interest while making largely empty gestures on social issues like gay rights. And even this formulation ignores the highly developed technologies for manufacturing consent by ‘private’ media acting for private interests under the guise of faux ‘adversarial’ politics by the one Party state. Far from repudiating George W. Bush’s extra-legal grab of executive power, Democrat Barack Obama has achieved the most radical extensions of it in American history. And as liberals railed at Mr. Bush’s kowtowing to his wealthy constituents, it is this same constituency that is the sole beneficiary of Mr. Obama’s time in office. These are specifically, visibly and unequivocally the policies of the radical right integrated into Western political institutions by ‘both’ political parties over the last forty years. And from those who bothered to ask, this is not the will of the people that is being represented. So again, what is it that liberals are defending?

It is a virtual certainty professional liberals and progressives were sitting behind their office desks only last year when the NYPD (New York Police Department) and Oakland police were beating the crap out of Occupy, firing projectiles into faces at point blank range and parking their motorcycles on the legs of NLG (National Lawyers Guild) observers for daring to protest the ‘liberal’ state / plutocrat nexus. This was in marked contrast to Federal and local police respect for the ‘rights’ of Tea Partiers to carry loaded weapons at rallies for their political ‘opposition.’ FBI and local police infiltration of Occupy, including illegal ‘pre-emptive’ kidnappings and all manner of dirty tricks, was immediate, intense and had the desired effect of creating paranoia and mistrust. And those efforts tie historically to the COINTELPRO facilitated murders of black leaders and radical disruption of the legal and constitutionally ‘protected’ rights of (real) leftist and anti-war organizations trying to affect substantive political change in the 1960s and early 1970s. But the grassroots Tea Partiers aren’t responsible for the different treatment they received– the institutions of the radical right in Federal and state government working in the interests of their ruling class patrons are.

By framing the Fairleigh Dickinson poll results in Democrat / Republican and left / right terms bourgeois liberals left unstated, purposely or not, the joined class interests that are at a minimum a relevant aspect of widespread political disaffection. Ironically, Wall Street is well ahead of the professional left in understanding this—any regular reader of the financial press would find many titans of finance incredulous at how narrow, and potentially politically destabilizing, the class interest represented by official Washington, and in particular by corporate Democrats, has become. And straightforwardly, domestic victims of Washington’s plutocrat-friendly policies of recent decades, the unemployed, underemployed, fraudulently indebted, illegitimately foreclosed upon, impoverished and fraudulently arrested and incarcerated, weren’t victimized based on major political Party affiliation– they were victimized based on class. Put another way, middle and lower class Tea Partiers may have more interests in common with inner city socialists, communists, anarcho-collectivists and undocumented immigrants than they have with wealthy Republican patrons of the Tea Party. That this possibility hasn’t already been offered to them is a challenge for the left. And likewise, through unwavering support for corporate Democrats, even if from near-total ignorance of their actual policies, liberals and the bourgeois left promote the interests of the very rich against all who aren’t, including in most cases their own.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York

From our archives—Articles you should have read when they came out but missed.—

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
readersupportednews.org | with select comments

Postal officials say they must close about 3,700 underused post offices (there are 32,000 nationally) while offering alternative services through local businesses. They also want to consolidate hundreds of regional processing centers and eliminate Saturday mail deliveries.

n aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was warning me about this last week. There are organic reasons for all of this: The U.S. Postal Service is staring down the same barrel trained at our magazine and newspaper businesses, i.e. its revenue model is being wiped out by the internet.

But politics also plays a huge part in this. In 2006, in what looks like an attempt to bust the Postal Workers’ Union, George Bush signed into law the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. This law required the Postal Service to pre-fund 100 percent of its entire future obligations for 75 years of health benefits to its employees – and not only do it, but do it within ten years. No other organization, public or private, has to pre-fund 100 percent of its future health benefits.

“No one prefunds at more than 30 percent,” Anthony Vegliante, the U.S. Postal Service’s executive vice president, told reporters last year.

The new law forced the postal service to come up with about $5.5 billion a year for the ten years following the bill’s passage. In 2006, before those payments kicked in, the USPS generated a small profit. Not surprisingly, the USPS is now basically broke.

The 2006 law also bars the Postal Service from offering “nonpostal services,” which means the USPS can’t, say, open up a bank, or an internet cafe, or come up with any new entrepreneurial ideas to generate new income, as postal services do in other countries.

The transparent purpose of this law, which was pushed heavily by industry lobbyists, was to break a public sector union and privatize the mail industry. Before the 2006 act, the postal service did one thing, did it well, and, minus the need to generate profits and bonuses for executives, did it cheaply. It paid for itself and was not a burden to taxpayers.

Post offices also have a huge non-financial impact: In a lot of small towns, the post office is the town, and shutting them down will basically remove the only casual meeting place for people in mountain areas and remote farming villages and so on. Of course, there’s always one Wal-Mart for every dozen or so post offices, so people I guess can drive the extra twenty miles and meet there …

This is a classic example of private-sector lobbyists using the government to protect its profits and keep prices inflated. Sen. Sanders is pushing a bill that would delay the end of Saturday deliveryfor two years, and prevent a number of post-office closings, but the writing is on the wall, unless there’s a public outcry. So definitely write your congressman and ask him to roll back Bush’s idiotic law, and at least give the Post Office a chance to sink or swim on its own.

As body parts are retrieved from the collapsed multi-story building, mass anger with the political establishment has deepened. The fact that no survivors have been found since heavy cranes began clearing debris have heightened relatives’ concerns that these operations will end the chances of rescuing remaining survivors.