Posts tagged Journalism
Captain Kangaroo Court
May 6th
In the era of Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, John Chancellor, and Harry Reasoner, it wouldn’t have been necessary to turn to a comedy cable network for a rational take on the news. Today, in the era of corporate media conglomerates, there’s very little choice. The quality of journalism today is a far cry from what it used to be. From the extreme cases like Fox News, which hardly deserves to be called a news network, to the less obvious cases found across the networks and the major newspapers. Especially when it comes to politics. Glenn Greenwald frequently harps on this issue on his blog, where he rails against the penchant journalists have today for automatically granting anonymity to their sources. A recent Greenwald post, for example, takes on Jeffrey Rosen and The New Republic for publishing anonymous smears against a potential Supreme Court nominee.
So while an aging, and increasingly irrelevant, segment of the population stays glued to Fox News or other mainstream media sources, young forward-looking progressives are turning to faux journalists who are passionate about entertaining their audiences, but also feel strongly about the state of the world and the direction America is going. Of course, I’m talking about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Stewart’s passion for his country often shows through in his interviews, such as it did in a recent episode where he discussed torture with Cliff May. Colbert’s passion comes through in the cerebral humor that he is so good at. Such as in this particular segment below.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Word – Captain Kangaroo Court | ||||
|
||||
Now, somebody just let the Republicans know that he’s not really a conservative.
China on the Ethics of Journalism
Apr 16th
China’s response to Jack Cafferty’s recent on-air, negative comments about Chinese products and the Chinese government borders on the absurd. Cafferty said:
“I don’t know if China is any different, but our relationship with China is certainly different,” Cafferty said. “We’re in hock to the Chinese up to our eyeballs because of the war in Iraq, for one thing. They’re holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of our paper. We are also running hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of trade deficits with them, as we continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we’re buying from Wal-Mart.
“So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed,” he said. “I think they’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.
He later clarified that he was referring to the government when he said “goons and thugs”, not to the Chinese people. And China’s official response:
“Cafferty used the microphone in his hands to slander China and the Chinese people (and) seriously violated professional ethics of journalism and human conscience,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Tuesday, according to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency.
She said Cafferty’s remarks “reflected his arrogance, ignorance and hostility towards the Chinese people, ignited indignation of Chinese (at) home and abroad and will be condemned by those who safeguard justice around the world.”
First of all, for China to accuse a foreign journalist of a lapse of ethics is like the Bush administration accusing another government of violating human rights. China ranks right near the bottom when it comes to the ethics of journalism. The tight control they have over their own media, restricting journalistic freedom to the point that there are few outlets that are anything other than a government mouthpiece, does not qualify the Chinese government to be a judge of ethics. Nor does the way they suppress any news that damage’s the country’s image, as most recently demonstrated by the protests over Tibet.
Secondly, Asians are generally very prideful. Any negative words about an Asian country or its people will hurt their pride. I’ve seen it frequently here in Korea when they’ve gotten bad press in other countries. But generally, they tend to keep it at home, with the local media going off on tirades against those who dares show such disrespect. China’s reaction, on the otherhand, is typical of a non-Democratic government. These dictatorial regimes love to publicly pout, call names, and throw tantrums when the foreign media says something they don’t like. Just look at all of the garbage that comes out of North Korea when they get their feelings hurt.
So I’m not surprised that the Chinese spokeswoman called Cafferty arrogant, ignorant, and hostile towards the Chinese. Nor am I surprised at the reaction of Chinese people, particularly since Cafferty didn’t explicitly indicate that he was talking about the government in his initial comments (though it most likely wouldn’t have made a difference). That’s to be expected. But accusing him of a lack of journalistic ethics quite defies logic, given their track record.
Then again, it says something that the Chinese place so much value on the opinions of Jack Cafferty. I’ve always like to hear his opinions, but I didn’t know he had that kind of influence!
The Media’s Role
Mar 9th
One of many major ailments afflicting the United States these days is a flaccid mainstream media. Rather than being rigid, strongly standing up to the political establishment and asking the tough questions, reporters too often blithely roll over and let our government get away with whatever the crime of the day is. The illegal invasion of Iraq, the steady erosion of constitutional liberties, the violation of human rights through torture and illegal detention, and the numerous other abuses of power carried out by the Bush administration and a compliant Congress were all enabled by a mainstream media unwilling to challenge authority.
The alternative media, of course, has no such qualms. They just don’t always get the same access granted to the corporate-driven media. Former constitutional law and civil rights lawyer Glenn Greenwald takes the mainstream media to task after Tucker Carlson made an ass of himself by claiming the British media’s journalistic standards “are so much dramatically lower than they are [in the United States]“. In reality, the British media has proven to be much more reliable in trying to get to the truth when interviewing US officials. Greenwald includes some videos in the article that demonstrate just that.
Credit to Tucker Carlson for being so (unintentionally) candid about the lowly, subservient role of the American press with regard to “the relationship between the press and the powerful.” A journalist should never do anything that “hurts” the powerful, otherwise the powerful won’t give access to the press any longer. Presumably, the press should only do things that please the powerful so that the powerful keep talking to the press, so that the press in turn can keep pleasing the powerful, in an endless, symbiotic, mutually beneficial cycle. Rarely does someone who plays the role of a “journalist” on TV so candidly describe their real function.
In April of last year, Bill Moyers put together a special called Buying the War that examines in detail the failure of the mainstream media to do what they were supposed to do in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. Rather than challenging the Bush administration on the information being put out, the media instead became an administration mouthpiece that allowed government officials to repeatedly market the invasion to the public through lies and deceptions. Media organizations that did try to get to the truth often backed down once the “Patriot Police” branded them unpatriotic. If you still live under the illusion that the government never lies and that the media is fair and balanced, you really need to watch this documentary. Moyers can go for the truth because his program is broadcast on PBS and funded through charitable donations, free of the corporate strings binding mainstream media organizations.
It’s the alternative media, the blogs and independently operated news web sites, that we have to turn to for the truth. Sure, there is a great deal of junk littering the net, opinions and conspiracies reported as fact and some things just outright made up. But there have emerged a number of legitimate sites that verify and cross check the information they publish. These sites, like Bill Moyers, are not beholden to corporate or political interests and are free to challenge the truth. Their collective voice is steadily growing and will hopefully become a solid alternative to mainstream media outlets, reaching a larger number of citizens, in the future. This is one of many reasons why net neutrality needs to be preserved. Open the door for independent internet news sites to be silenced and they most certainly will be. This isn’t your grandfather’s America.
Americans are involved in a struggle that most aren’t even aware of. It’s not the perpetually hyped “War on Terror”, but a war on truth. The Bush administration skillfully used the media to dupe the public. It’s no longer a secret that they lied and stretched the truth on numerous occasions in order to win support for an illegal invasion on a sovereign nation that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. It is not in the interest of the American people, nor of the future of our once great country, to let this tomfoolery continue. Mainstream media organizations need to be held accountable for their lack of journalistic morality and failure to report the truth. We need to actively support alternative media organizations that aren’t afraid to ask the tough questions, to challenge blind assertions, and are not willing to be a mouthpiece for a government that has no qualms about lying to the people it is intended to serve.
