Show of Farce

Here's a great editorial from this week's Village Voice, by Sydney Schanberg, the Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist whose real-life experiences in Cambodia with close friend Dith Pran before the genocide were dramatized in the great film "The Killing Fields."

Show of Farce
The press digs itself into holes; the government covers up its own errors—the system at work
by Sydney H. Schanberg
May 24th, 2005

This would seem to be one of those moments in American history when satire becomes obsolete. It's because our national dialogue has itself become a full-blown, round-the-clock farce. The White House and the press are major players. Exhibit A: Newsweek made a telling error recently by publishing a story that lacked proper confirmation—about American military jailers desecrating the Koran to break down their Muslim prisoners. A week or so later, Islamic protest riots partly related to the story left at least 15 people dead in Afghanistan.

The Bush White House, suffering a yawning credibility gap from the Iraq war plus a global wave of anti-American sentiment, leaped on the press mistake and, even after a Newsweek apology and retraction, said the magazine should go further and "repair the damage" by "speaking out" about American values to the Muslim world. "The values that the United States stands for . . . the values we hold so dearly," as Bush spokesman Scott McClellan put it.

Reasonable citizens could not be blamed for rolling their eyes at such an exhortation. Indeed, what values has the Bush administration stood for and paraded before the world? For one, it can no longer be sanely disputed that this president led the nation into the Iraq war on a platform of false information. No stockpiles of "weapons of mass destruction" were found in Iraq. There was no imminent threat. Bush hailed our soldiers as heroes, but he sent them into battle without proper body armor or armored vehicles and without a large enough force or any real plan for restoring order after Saddam Hussein was ousted. Avoidable casualties have been the result. And the continuing scandal about the torture of Muslim prisoners needn't have happened at all if the White House had sent properly trained and disciplined units to run the detention centers.

Just what values does the loyal Mr. McClellan think all these policies and practices and behavior add up to? Does he really think we should present this list to the world as the sum of what America stands for?

Newsweek erred and has been deeply embarrassed and shaken. Unlike the president and his band, the press does make mistakes and, at least in the present era, it owns up to them.

But this story is much larger than a Newsweek article that may have contributed to unforeseen yet nasty mayhem. Our whole country is in an embarrassed and embarrassing state. We are deeply divided—fractured may be a truer word. People are uncertain and nervous about the future, yet the White House and its Republican-controlled Congress regularly paper over the war and serious domestic problems with little more than advertising slogans. And now the voters, from their separated clans and interest groups and political fraternities, scream epithets at each other—it's as if we have nothing in common as Americans.

The press is very much a part of this national dissonance. Over the past few decades, it gradually depreciated itself and dug its own hole. Even as the digital revolution enhanced reporters' fact-finding abilities and produced better investigative, serious journalism, the profession in other ways allowed itself to grow softer and looser. Gossip and celebrity chitchat crept into the news sections. We began covering the sex lives of public figures even when we could not demonstrate that their private indiscretions had any effect on their public performance or public policy. Remember the Miami Herald stakeout in 1987 at Gary Hart's townhouse that revealed his marital infidelity and ousted him from the presidential race? That was a landmark in the press's slippery slide. News became more like a game. It was entertainment. Later, of course, we gave the world the Monica saga of sex in the White House. Michael Isikoff, co-author of the Newsweek article currently in dispute, was a major unearther of the lubricious details back then. In devoting such investigative energy and resources to a love-nest story, the press took resources away from matters that actually have a tangible effect on American lives.

The press's proprietors and editors (some of the latter, to their credit, winced as they participated) told us that this was the necessary path to the future if we were to survive financially. They said we had to enliven newspapers and news on television so we could capture those 18- to 49-year-olds and thus draw the big advertisers who yearned to sell them things. "Get jiggy with it!" they told the newsroom doubters.

Almost without noticing, the press began losing its memory about its crucial adversary role. At America's beginning, the founding fathers, in establishing the fundamentals of this democracy, said a free press was necessary as one of the country's checks and balances. That explains John Peter Zenger and Thomas Paine and the First Amendment.

As amnesia about our history spread, the major news companies began making deals with the government. In 1991, you may recall, they agreed to accept the Pentagon's ground rules for covering the first Gulf war. The rules decreed that reporters had to be accompanied at all times by military babysitters who would not only select the story sites but pre-interview soldiers at those sites to avoid any lapses into truth telling. And that was how America, on television and in print, was handed its first major sanitized war. Another landmark. (The father of the current president was in the Oval Office then. Dick Cheney was the Pentagon chief.)

Journalists used to come largely from the "outsider" precincts of our culture. They were children of immigrants and working people, raised simply, not prone to cozying up to power or accommodating power. That's because the press was supposed to be a watchdog on power on behalf of the public. That has changed—not completely, but it has changed. At times now, too many reporters seem to be channeling Dickens's Oliver Twist, with their bowls outstretched toward their government minders, asking: "Please, sir, may I have some more gruel?"

Finally, into the era of press compliance stepped a presidency that had imperial ambitions and imperious ways. One of those ways is lockstep secrecy. The Bush White House's golden rule goes something like this: Jolly the press, but tell them nothing but boilerplate; hide from them anything embarrassing and anything that might give them evidence of our mistakes and fallibility. It's a little bit like a monarchy, which America thought it had shed two centuries ago. Like the first one (the reign of King George III), this one too is non-benevolent.

Facing this extreme choke hold, the Washington press corps has begun to resist, finally. The rest of us in the press should back them solidly and stand up as professionals to bring about strong change, not lip service. We are in a fight for old established principles. The nation as a whole is in the same fight, though it does not fully realize it yet.

Some people say the national cacophony is merely a season of bitter partisan jousting between Democrats and Republicans. In rebuttal, I believe the evidence is strong that the Bush government has perverted important American traditions. I believe the press, too, fell into a perversion. We welcomed the anointing of journalists as celebrities and over time sowed other bad seeds as well. The harvest was Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley, Stephen Glass, and a laundry list of other fabricators and corner-cutters who flourished under loosened standards. Some of the country's top newspaper editors gave this explanation: The Internet had created a 24-hour news cycle that inflamed the news business's competitive fever and left the editorial gatekeepers little time to winnow out the chaff and the misreporting. There's some truth in their words about the arrival of an unending news cycle. But the rest of the rationale won't wash. The devil didn't make us do it.

The river of press scandals has brought about change. Ombudspersons have multiplied at newspapers. The screening of copy has tightened up. The use of "anonymous sources" has been reduced. (Newsweek, in "A Letter to Our Readers" in its latest issue, lays out its stricter newsroom standards.) But the press remains under siege, under a microscope, trying to rebuild the people's confidence in what they read in the paper and what they're told on television.

The struggle with the Bush White House and its acolytes will also be a hard slog. They cling to an ideological view and concede nothing to those who have different beliefs. Nonetheless, the press, if it doesn't want to become the national piñata, will have to clean up its house and vigorously fight for its traditional role in this democracy.

To get an idea of how the Bush government deals with the press and public, let's take a look at how it handled the original Newsweek article, which was 354 words long and ran in the Periscope section in the May 9 issue. The reference to desecration of Islam's holy book said: "Among the previously unreported cases [of abuse at the Guantánamo Bay detention center], sources tell Newsweek: Interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur'an down a toilet . . . " The article went on to say this incident and other findings were "expected in an upcoming report by the U.S. Southern Command in Miami . . . "

Newsweek's editor, Mark Whitaker, says that before deciding to publish the item, "we approached two separate Defense Department officials for comment. One declined to give us a response; the other challenged another aspect of the story but did not dispute the Qur'an charge." The other "aspect," Newsweek says, was corrected before publication.

More than a week passed before the Pentagon complained about the Koran reference. In a news story in its May 18 edition, The New York Times wrote that the Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, "said that the military was still reviewing whether there had been any incidents of Koran abuse at the [Guantánamo] prison." Di Rita was quoted as saying: "We've not previously included [the issue of Koran desecration] in any kind of previous investigations into detainee operations, because there haven't been credible allegations to that effect." He added that "there have been instances, and we'll have more to say about it as we learn more, but where a Koran may have fallen to the floor in the course of searching a cell."

When Newsweek went back to its original source (there was only one, contrary to the citation of "sources" in the original item), the person, described as a senior government official who had been reliable in the past, said he could no longer be certain he saw that Koran reference in the Southern Command report. He said he might have read it elsewhere.

Other articles alleging Koran desecration by American interrogators have appeared in the press here and abroad. The March issue of Harper's, for example, carried an account given by a former Afghan detainee to a Daniel Rothenberg, identified as a human rights researcher. The former prisoner recounted many abuses including the following:

" . . . Then they would throw the Holy Koran on the ground or drop it in the latrine. This made us very upset."

In summary, similar allegations, based on prisoner accounts, have been aired by the International Committee of the Red Cross and others. The Pentagon's position is that its rules against mishandling the Koran are stringent and that these prisoners are lying to foment trouble.

The Pentagon has so far declined to make public the Southern Command report. The White House has still never apologized for, or retracted, its false claims about weapons of mass destruction and imminent threat.

Those are the sounds of secrecy. They are not quiet things. They are the wild, unloosed sounds of the inmates in full control of the asylum.

Rumsfeld wants more media censorship

<>It's so ironic. Instead of saying that these things never happened, he just says there should be more control over the media so these stories don't leak out to the public to soil their pristine image of righteousness.

"This is really the first war in history that is being conducted in an era of multiple global satellite television networks, 24-hour news outlets with live coverage of terrorist attacks, disasters and combat operations," Rumsfeld said in a speech to members of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. U.S. officials, he said, must also deal with "a global Internet with universal access and no inhibitions, e-mail, cell phones, digital cameras wielded by anyone and everyone" and "a seemingly casual disregard for the protection of classified information, resulting in a near continuous hemorrhage of classified documents, to the detriment of the country." The United States needs to respond to anti-American messages with greater agility and speed if it is to win the ideological struggle with Islamic extremists, Rumsfeld said. "We'll need to develop considerably more sophisticated ways of using these new means of communication that are now available to reach the many and diverse audiences," he said.

Does this mean they'll try to censor even further to keep news of violence, hypocrisy & lies from reaching the world? Some people have other ideas about Mr. Rumsfeld:

May 26, 2005
Give Rumsfeld the Pinochet Treatment, Says US Amnesty Chief
by Jim Lobe

If the administration of President George W. Bush fails to conduct a truly independent investigation of U.S. abuses against detainees in Iraq and elsewhere, foreign governments should investigate and prosecute those senior officials who bear responsibility for them, the head of the U.S. chapter of Amnesty International said Wednesday. Speaking at the release of Amnesty's annual report, William Schulz charged that Washington has become "a leading purveyor and practitioner" of torture and ill-treatment and that senior officials should face prosecution by other governments for violations of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture.

Among those officials, Schulz named Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet, and senior officers at U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu Ghraib, Iraq.

"If the U.S. government continues to shirk its responsibility, Amnesty International calls on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior U.S. officials involved in the torture scandal," said Schulz, who added that violations of the torture convention, which has been ratified by the United States and some 138 other countries, can be prosecuted in any jurisdiction.

"If those investigations support prosecution, the governments should arrest any official who enters their territory and begin legal proceedings against them," he added. "The apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera because they may find themselves under arrest as (former Chilean dictator) Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998."

"A wall of secrecy is protecting those who masterminded and developed the U.S. torture policy," Schulz said. "Unless those who drew the blueprint for torture, approved it, and ordered it implemented are held accountable, the United States' once-proud reputation as an exemplar of human rights will remain in tatters."

Schulz's appeal for foreign governments to take the initiative coincided with the launch of a bipartisan drive endorsed by some 350 attorneys and legal scholars urging the administration to establish an independent commission to address the allegations of abuse and torture, including an assessment of the responsibility of senior administration officials and military officers.

The failure to address the responsibility of officials and officers at the top of the command chain, particularly in light of the disclosure of memos which appeared to authorize at least some of the tactics carried out against detainees, has provoked repeated demands by human rights groups to appoint an independent commission to conduct a thorough examination. Last summer, the 400,000-lawyer American Bar Association joined Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in those demands. But the Bush administration has rejected them, arguing that the Pentagon's own efforts to investigate and prosecute abuses were adequate. The Republican leadership in Congress has also paralyzed efforts by Democratic and some Republican lawmakers to create a commission.

The refusal to investigate translates into effective "tolerance" for torture and mistreatment, Schulz said, resulting not only in the spread of such practices but also in the destruction of U.S. credibility when it assails other countries, such as Syria or Egypt, for human rights violations.

"It is the height of hypocrisy for the U.S. government itself to use the very torture techniques that it routinely condemns in other countries," he said. "When the U.S. government then calls upon foreign leaders to bring to justice those who commit or authorize human rights violations in their own countries, why should those foreign leaders listen?" "

The United States government continues to turn a blind eye to mounting evidence of widespread abuse of detainees held in its custody," said ACLU director Anthony Romero. "If we are to truly repair America's standing in the world, the Bush administration must hold accountable high-ranking officials who allow the continuing abuse and torture of detainees."

Friendly Fire

washingtonpost.com
Tillman's Parents Are Critical Of Army
Family Questions Reversal On Cause of Ranger's Death

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 23, 2005; A01

Former NFL player Pat Tillman's family is lashing out against the Army, saying that the military's investigations into Tillman's friendly-fire death in Afghanistan last year were a sham and that Army efforts to cover up the truth have made it harder for them to deal with their loss.

More than a year after their son was shot several times by his fellow Army Rangers on a craggy hillside near the Pakistani border, Tillman's mother and father said in interviews that they believe the military and the government created a heroic tale about how their son died to foster a patriotic response across the country. They say the Army's "lies" about what happened have made them suspicious, and that they are certain they will never get the full story.

"Pat had high ideals about the country; that's why he did what he did," Mary Tillman said in her first lengthy interview since her son's death. "The military let him down. The administration let him down. It was a sign of disrespect. The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting."

Tillman, a popular player for the Arizona Cardinals, gave up stardom in the National Football League after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to join the Army Rangers with his brother. After a tour in Iraq, their unit was sent to Afghanistan in spring 2004, where they were to hunt for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Shortly after arriving in the mountains to fight, Tillman was killed in a barrage of gunfire from his own men, mistaken for the enemy as he got into position to defend them.

Immediately, the Army kept the soldiers on the ground quiet and told Tillman's family and the public that he was killed by enemy fire while storming a hill, barking orders to his fellow Rangers. After a public memorial service, at which Tillman received the Silver Star, the Army told Tillman's family what had really happened, that he had been killed by his own men.

In separate interviews in their home town of San Jose and by telephone, Tillman's parents, who are divorced, spoke about their ordeal with the Army with simmering frustration and anger. A series of military investigations have offered differing accounts of Tillman's death. The most recent report revealed more deeply the confusion and disarray surrounding the mission he was on, and more clearly showed that the family had been kept in the dark about details of his death.

The latest investigation, written about by The Washington Post earlier this month, showed that soldiers in Afghanistan knew almost immediately that they had killed Tillman by mistake in what they believed was a firefight with enemies on a tight canyon road. The investigation also revealed that soldiers later burned Tillman's uniform and body armor.

That information was slow to make it back to the United States, the report said, and Army officials here were unaware that his death on April 22, 2004, was fratricide when they notified the family that Tillman had been shot.

Over the next 10 days, however, top-ranking Army officials -- including the theater commander, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid -- were told of the reports that Tillman had been killed by his own men, the investigation said. But the Army waited until a formal investigation was finished before telling the family -- which was weeks after a nationally televised memorial service that honored Tillman on May 3, 2004.

Patrick Tillman Sr., a San Jose lawyer, said he is furious about what he found in the volumes of witness statements and investigative documents the Army has given to the family. He decried what he calls a "botched homicide investigation" and blames high-ranking Army officers for presenting "outright lies" to the family and to the public.

"After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this," Patrick Tillman said. "They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy."

Army spokesmen maintain that the Army has done everything it can to keep the family informed about the investigation, offering to answer relatives' questions and going back to them as investigators gathered more information.

Army officials said Friday that the Army "reaffirms its heartfelt sorrow to the Tillman family and all families who have lost loved ones during this war." Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, an Army spokesman, said the Army acts with compassion and heartfelt commitment when informing grieving families, often a painful duty.

"In the case of the death of Corporal Patrick Tillman, the Army made mistakes in reporting the circumstances of his death to the family," Brooks said. "For these, we apologize. We cannot undo those early mistakes."

Brooks said the Army has "actively and directly" informed the Tillman family regarding investigations into his death and has dedicated a team of soldiers and civilians to answering the family's questions through phone calls and personal meetings while ensuring the family "was as well informed as they could be."

Mary Tillman keeps her son's wedding album in the living room of the house where he grew up, and his Arizona State University football jersey, still dirty from the 1997 Rose Bowl game, hangs in a nearby closet. With each new version of events, her mind swirls with new theories about what really happened and why. She questions how an elite Army unit could gun down its most recognizable member at such close range. She dwells on distances and boulders and piles of documents and the words of frenzied men.

"It makes you feel like you're losing your mind in a way," she said. "You imagine things. When you don't know the truth, certain details can be blown out of proportion. The truth may be painful, but it's the truth. You start to contrive all these scenarios that could have taken place because they just kept lying. If you feel you're being lied to, you can never put it to rest."

Patrick Tillman Sr. believes he will never get the truth, and he says he is resigned to that now. But he wants everyone in the chain of command, from Tillman's direct supervisors to the one-star general who conducted the latest investigation, to face discipline for "dishonorable acts." He also said the soldiers who killed his son have not been adequately punished.

"Maybe lying's not a big deal anymore," he said. "Pat's dead, and this isn't going to bring him back. But these guys should have been held up to scrutiny, right up the chain of command, and no one has."

That their son was famous opened up the situation to problems, the Tillmans say, in part because of the devastating public relations loss his death represented for the military. Mary Tillman says the government used her son for weeks after his death, perpetuating an untrue story to capitalize on his altruism -- just as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was erupting publicly. She said she was particularly offended when President Bush offered a taped memorial message to Tillman at a Cardinals football game shortly before the presidential election last fall. She again felt as though her son was being used, something he never would have wanted.

"Every day is sort of emotional," Mary Tillman said. "It just keeps slapping me in the face. To find that he was killed in this debacle -- everything that could have gone wrong did -- it's so much harder to take. We should not have been subjected to all of this. This lie was to cover their image. I think there's a lot more yet that we don't even know, or they wouldn't still be covering their tails.

"If this is what happens when someone high profile dies, I can only imagine what happens with everyone else."

U.S. covering up mad cow cases, scientist says

Canadian Press

OTTAWA — A scientist and former inspector for the U.S Agriculture Department says he's willing to take a lie detector test to back his claim that his government is covering up mad cow disease.
Lester Friedlander, now a consumer advocate, was fired from his job as head of inspections at a large meat-packing plant in Philadelphia in 1995 after criticizing what he called unsafe practices.
Friedlander said he knows U.S. Agriculture Department veterinarians who sent suspect cow brains to private laboratories that confirmed mad cow infection, but samples from the same animals were cleared by government labs. "It's several veterinarians that have given me similar stories about sending cow brains in,'' he said in an interview Tuesday. "It might be shocking for Canadians but it wouldn't be shocking for veterinarians that have worked for the USDA. "I'm willing to back this up with a voice stress analysis test or even a lie detector test.'' Friedlander wouldn't name the veterinarians, saying they still work for the Agriculture Department and would be fired if identified.

The department has denied Friedlander's allegations, which were first reported last week.

Rob McNabb, a spokesman for the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, said it does seem puzzling that four mad cow cases have been detected in Canadian-born cattle but none in U.S.-born cattle.
"It's true that the risk ... is very similar, and it is surprising,'' he said. There are 120 million cattle in the United States, 15 million in Canada. "I guess there's always going to be people raising the question, `How come it's 4-0?','' he said. But McNabb wouldn't comment on Friedlander's allegations.

Michael Hansen, a scientist with the U.S. Consumers Union in Washington, said there's widespread suspicion about the testing of three suspected cases of mad cow in U.S. cattle. Hansen said all tests came back negative in the three cases but the USDA used a rapid test based on immuno-histochemistry, not the Western blot test which is considered most reliable. "Many of the top scientists think that's insane,'' he said of the use of the less reliable test. He said there are also suspicions about a recent case in St. Angelo, Tex., when officials at an abattoir noticed a cow was staggering and wanted it tested, but permission was refused. "The federal inspectors and the plant employees all wanted to test the animal and basically (the USDA) said, `Nah, we're not going to do that.' So the animal was sent to rendering and was never tested.''

Hansen said there appears to be a great lack of eagerness to detect mad cow in the United States. A study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis three years ago concluded there was a 20 per cent chance that mad cow was present in the United States. The U.S. government closed its border to live cattle imports from Canada in 2003 after a single Canadian cow tested positive for the disease. Three other Canadian cases have been confirmed since then, one in a Washington State cow that originally came from Canada. The border was to reopen to live cattle March 7 this year but that was delayed by a challenge from a U.S. cattle industry lobby group. Friedlander was in Ottawa to testify at a Commons committee examining proposed changes to the Canadian food regulation system.

Remedy for an insane policy -- Test all beef for mad cow
Robert Lull, Steve Heilig
Friday, May 14, 2004

Mad cow disease remains a worrying mystery. Meat from infected animals can infect consumers with prions, which cause variant Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease, a progressive degeneration of the brain that is always fatal.

Mad cow disease (the common term for bovine spongiform encephalopathy) is caused by prions, the infectious misshapen proteins discovered by University of California researcher Stanley Prusiner, who received a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his groundbreaking work. Prusiner has referred to BSE-related diseases as "new, strange and scary."

Unfortunately, it seems that some governmental officials and agricultural leaders are not so worried about the threat that prion diseases such as BSE present -- not only to animals, but to humans as well. A human outbreak of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, caused by eating prion-contaminated beef from cattle with BSE, killed approximately 150 people in England in the 1990s. At that time, up to a third of British herds were found to be contaminated before the infection was controlled.

The one cow found to test positive in the United States in December unleashed a flurry of concern here, with much confusion over how much of a threat that case might have posed. Equally disturbing were varying allegations that the beef industry and governmental regulators were not being entirely forthcoming about the details of this case and were trying to reassure the public without enough scientific evidence to do so. There admittedly is much scientific uncertainty about how much a threat BSE poses to humans.

In recognition of that uncertainty, Japan has taken the BSE threat seriously and now routinely tests all slaughtered cattle and sheep for the presence of prion infection. The U.S. government persists in much more limited testing -- fewer than 1 percent of all cows are so tested -- arguing that scientific uncertainty makes universal testing too expensive. Yet Consumers Union has testified that such testing would add, at most, five cents a pound to the cost of beef. But Creekstone Farms in Kansas, seeking to certify its beef BSE-free and thus be able to sell it to Japan as well as concerned consumers here, have been threatened by the U.S. Department of Agriculture with legal action and severe fines to stop them from testing all their cattle for the BSE-causing prion. New tests can detect such prions in a short enough time to allow use on all animals at the time of slaughter.

Why would USDA oppose such testing? If it is positive, that would be good for human safety (one of the USDA's missions); but it could also trigger public reaction bad for the beef industry's profits. Wouldn't USDA be happy that any infected animal was detected before infecting a human? What possible justification can they have for denying beef producers who want to test every cow, at their own cost, in order to sell safety-certified beef?

At this time, testing all cows slaughtered for human consumption for the presence of BSE prions rather than late-stage full-blown neurological disease -- which is the only test now used by the USDA -- makes good sense as a public health precaution until more data are accumulated on the new rapid tests for BSE prions. This is why the San Francisco Medical Society supports this position -- as does Prusiner, the Nobel winner.

While the details of the threat are being determined, it is time to err on the side of safety, rather than on assurances from beef industry spokesmen. If it does turn out that testing 100 percent of animals is not warranted, good -- the standards could then be relaxed, and we'd all be safe rather than sorry. Right now, though, despite all assurances from those in charge, we just don't know.

Even if we cannot test all cattle, certainly there is no good reason to keep a ban on voluntary testing by responsible members of the cattle industry. This would provide consumers with a real choice regarding the safety of their beef products. It would also allow our cattle industry to reopen the markets now closed for beef sales in Japan and other countries that insist each slaughtered animal be certified negative for prions.

Congress and the public need to send our agricultural regulators at the USDA a strong message about their obligation to public health -- and consumer choice. Leading scientists agree that eating prions is a bad idea. If your doctor told you an inexpensive test could reduce your risk of contracting something that would kill you, you'd ask for that test. Likewise, isn't it time we pay the extra nickel per pound to be sure the beef we eat is free of a fatal disease?

Robert Lull, M.D., is professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, chief of Nuclear Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital and a past president of the San Francisco Medical Society. Steve Heilig is co-editor of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, director of Public Health and Education for the San Francisco Medical Society and co-director of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment.

In a related story, Dr. Lull, author of the above editorial, was found stabbed less than a week after the above was printed. Coincidence? What do you think?

SAN FRANCISCO
Doctor stabbed to death--Police hope killer left DNA at scene
Jaxon Van Derbeken and Sabin Russell
Friday, May 20, 2005

A prominent physician at San Francisco General Hospital who once headed the San Francisco Medical Society was found stabbed to death inside the doorway of his Diamond Heights home Thursday, police said. Dr. Robert J. Lull, 64, was discovered on the floor in the entryway of his hilltop home on Gold Mine Drive at Jade Place shortly after noon. Hospital officials, concerned when he did not show up for the clinic he ran in nuclear medicine, alerted his personal assistant, Elsie Garce, who found the body, authorities said.Lull was last seen at an appointment with his doctor at 3:40 p.m. Wednesday, according to police. Neighbors reported nothing unusual at the residence either Wednesday night or Thursday morning.

"At this point, we can't say what the circumstances were, but we know he was the victim of a homicide,'' said San Francisco police Inspector Holly Pera. "We're piecing together evidence at the scene.'' Lull was well liked by his neighbors and respected by his colleagues, Pera said. "He had a real love for medicine,'' she said. She said she could not fathom why someone would attack him. "I don't think he has any enemies as far as I know of,'' she said.

Medical Society spokesman Steve Heilig said Lull was a thoughtful scientist with a long military background. He favored nuclear power as a solution to global warming, but he was so passionately opposed to the development of proposed "bunker buster" nuclear weapons that he co-sponsored a resolution at the California Medical Association House of Delegates opposing the technology. The resolution did not pass.

"He was a rigorous scientist, but he had a real open mind," Heilig said. "He liked to learn stuff.''

CPB, PBS headed for censorship?

From Salon.com
Making PBS as "fair and balanced" as Fox
Critics blast the CPB's unprecedented move to hire competing, "Crossfire"-style ombudsmen, saying the move is intended to make public broadcasting toe a right-wing line.

By Eric Boehlert

May 17, 2005 | Seen as a way to shine light on the news-gathering process and encourage transparency between reporters and news consumers, ombudsmen traditionally help build a sense of trust. But the announcement by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- the federally funded nonprofit group that oversees public radio and television -- that it was creating an ombudsmen's office seems to have done the opposite, raising questions and suspicions about the group's true intent.

Specifically, observers wonder why the CPB, which is largely a funding organization, would get involved in critiquing news programs that it does not create, schedule or broadcast. More disconcerting, though, was the CPB's unique decision to hire two ombudsmen to check PBS for balance. The dueling-ombudsmen format is unprecedented in mainstream journalism.

"It mystifies me," says Geneva Overholser, a Washington-based University of Missouri journalism professor who served as the Washington Post's ombudsman from 1995 to 1998. "What in the world does it mean to have two? It makes no sense." She argues that ombudsman responsibilities are specifically designed to be carried out by just one person as way to demonstrate that a single journalist can be open-minded and listen to all sides of a dispute. By setting up a sort of left-vs.-right, "Crossfire" approach, Overholser says, the CPB model "participates in the ideological charade that journalists can't be fair. This is a perversion of the ombudsman. I'm surprised Ken Bode would feel comfortable with this."

Bode, a former NBC and CNN reporter, is one of the CPB's newly hired ombudsmen. He most recently worked as a columnist for the Indianapolis Star, where readers often wrote angry letters deriding him as a liberal, though he endorsed a Republican last year for governor of Indiana.

When asked last year to write about his worst day as a journalist, Bode detailed the afternoon President Reagan was shot, recalling, "Like many Americans, I never saw President Reagan quite the same again. As someone said at the time, he went into the hospital as Ronald Reagan; he came out as John Wayne."

The CPB's other new ombudsman is William Schulz, an avowed conservative and former editor at Reader's Digest, which the National Review once described as "the quintessential magazine of 'red-state' America." Schulz worked alongside CPB chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, a Republican, for decades at Reader's Digest.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that during a meeting in February with the head of National Public Radio, Tomlinson outlined the CPB ombudsmen's responsibilities and specifically noted that the board planned to hire one liberal ombudsman and one conservative one.

Both Bode and Schulz declined to comment for this article.

The two-person, right-vs.-left approach "is antithetical" to the ombudsman position, says Jeffrey Dvorkin, who holds that position for NPR and serves as president of the Organization of News Ombudsmen. "The value of the ombudsman is as an ideological and political independent."

"Why stop at two ombudsmen? Why not have four or a committee of 12?" quips Carl Stern, a former correspondent for NBC News who teaches journalism ethics at George Washington University and, like Overholser, is a member of PBS's Editorial Standards Review Committee. "Balancing ombudsmen -- when will this end? Are we going to have armies of ombudsmen? This is silliness."

The CPB's unorthodox action comes against a backdrop of increasingly heated allegations about liberal bias at PBS's 349 stations nationwide. Tomlinson has been making several moves to counter what he says is PBS's lack of "objectivity and balance" or, more specifically, the perception of a lack of balance at PBS.

Last week the Beltway battle escalated further when Reps. David Obey, D-Wis., and John Dingell, D-Mich., asked the CPB's inspector general to investigate whether Tomlinson overstepped the law by secretly hiring a consultant, at a cost of $10,000, to monitor the weekly PBS news program "Now With Bill Moyers" for liberal bias. The Democrats want a determination of whether Tomlinson violated the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which "prohibits interference by Federal officials over the content and distribution of public programming" and the application of political litmus tests in hiring decisions.

On May 12, the inspector general announced he would launch the requested investigation. Then on May 15, in a speech in St. Louis, Moyers blasted Tomlinson, insisting conservatives' real agenda is to silent journalists who ask tough questions. "The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party gets," Moyers said. "That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth."

Tomlinson declined to comment for this article. As the controversy continues to intensify, he has been sticking exclusively to the friendly confines of conservative media to tell his side of the story. Last week he wrote an on Op-Ed for the Washington Times. And he appeared on Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor" on May 12 and PBS's "Unfiltered With Tucker Carlson" on May 13. During the O'Reilly interview, Tomlinson insisted that he has never talked to the White House about PBS. "The point is not to gain support for the Bush administration," he said. "The point is to gain support for public television." Yet Tomlinson hired Mary Catherine Andrews to oversee the creation of CPB's ombudsmen's office while she was still on the White House payroll.

Tomlinson was among those who greenlighted the creation of PBS's "Unfiltered" last year to provide an additional conservative platform on public television. Fittingly, the show served a useful purpose for Tomlinson on the May 13 broadcast, where he continued to make the unsubstantiated -- and unchallenged -- claim that PBS suffers from a liberal bias and that programs like "Now" do "a lot of damage to public television."

The claim is unsubstantiated because the CPB's own internal polling -- surveys it has refused to release independently -- shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans do not think PBS has a liberal bias. As for the "damage" caused by "Now," the program generated exactly 24 angry e-mails to the CPB during calendar year 2003.

Tomlinson was not challenged much during the O'Reilly and Carlson interviews. At the conclusion of his interview with O'Reilly, Tomlinson said, "We love your show," and Carlson concluded his "Unfiltered" interview with, "I suspect your liberal critics will always feel threatened by you. And [that's] good, as far as I'm concerned. Ken Tomlinson, I think you're great."

One of Tomlinson's key fairness-and-balance" initiatives -- implemented with the help of the White House aide he hired -- was to create guidelines for the new CPB ombudsman positions. The newly unveiled charter notes that the position is independent and "will encourage public dialogue aimed at achieving high standards of excellence and balance in public broadcasting."

An ombudsman typically functions as an advocate for, or representative of, news consumers -- a designated person they can contact to complain about a report. As the Organization of News Ombudsmen outlines the position, "A news ombudsman receives and investigates complaints from newspaper readers or listeners or viewers of radio and television stations about accuracy, fairness, balance and good taste in news coverage."

But the CPB itself has no "readers or listeners or viewers." That disconnect was evident in the first programming critiques offered by Bode and Schulz, which did not appear to be driven by listener or viewer concerns. Instead, both men simply sampled specific programming and wrote up their thoughts. (They reviewed different reports.)

As the station group that purchases, schedules and airs programming, "PBS is the more appropriate organization for an ombudsman," notes Christy Carpenter, a former Democratic-appointed member of the CPB board.

National Public Radio already employs an ombudsman, and PBS is exploring hiring its own. And while there had been some public discussion about CPB's hiring its own ombudsman, the announcement of the hiring of Bode and Schulz caught PBS officials unaware; they were not told that candidates were being interviewed, let alone that the two men would soon start.

But it is CPB's tapping of two ombudsmen that has most raised eyebrows in journalism circles, particularly the suggestion by Tomlinson that Schulz would serve as a sort of conservative advocate while Bode represented liberal complaints.

"I don't think ombudsmen should be in the 'Crossfire' business," NPR's Dvorkin says. "I think it exacerbates conflict rather than resolves it."

Overholser adds, "The whole two-person approach is rigged. Everything about this smells of adhering to a certain ideology and dressing it up as concern about objectivity and balance."

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Pushing PBS to the right
Republicans have launched a heavy-handed campaign to correct public broadcasting's "liberal slant." There's just one problem: Most Americans don't think it has one.

By Eric Boehlert

May 10, 2005 | In the early 1970s a civil war erupted inside the fledgling world of public television. Upset with what they saw as its liberal news and public affairs programming, and particularly its tough coverage of the Vietnam War and the Watergate hearings, Nixon administration officials moved to rein in public television by stacking the board at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which acts as a governing body for the hundreds of local stations nationwide. The board then sought to control national programming decisions and curtail news programming.

"There were tremendous fights, with the Nixon Administration trying to prevent public television from doing any public affairs programming at all," former PBS president Lawrence Grossman once recalled to the New York Times. But Nixon's end run ultimately failed. In 1979, Newsweek quoted a PBS executive who insisted, "The war between CPB and PBS is over."

Today it's back on.

Amid a flurry of high-profile personnel changes, suppressed polling data, revised journalism guidelines, new oversight ground rules and deep suspicion, the CPB board -- once again under the control of White House-friendly Republicans -- and PBS are battling each other over content and allegations of PBS's liberal bias. The brawl is shaping up to make the Nixon-era dust-up seem tame by comparison: This weekend one PBS station manager dubbed CPB's crusade for "balance" a "witch hunt."

"It's designed to get people's attention and warn them not to do programming that will be questioned," says David Fanning, executive producer of "Frontline," PBS's award-winning investigative series. "We ask hard questions to people in power. That's anathema to some people in Washington these days."

"The situation is very concerning," says Christy Carpenter, a former Democrat-appointed member of the CPB board. She says that with the 2003 arrival of Republican CPB chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, "the tone of the discussion became increasingly partisan. There was an agenda being pushed to bring in more conservative voices. It's appropriate to have a wide spectrum, and I have no objection if conservative voices are in the mix. But I had the impression that more was being pursued than just balance."

Traditionally charged with a dual role as PBS's personal cheerleader (creating goodwill on Capitol Hill) and bank account (CPB serves as a crucial funding source), the government-run, nonprofit CPB has again, as in the Nixon era, turned its attention to overseeing PBS programming, insisting that the more than 300 PBS affiliates nationwide acknowledge that their programming suffers from a liberal bias.

The effort by Tomlinson and his allies at the CPB -- at least one of whom thinks producers should face "penalties" if their programming is deemed unbalanced -- echoes the cry of conservatives who for the past three decades have accused PBS of a liberal bias. (During the '70s it was referred to as an "Eastern elite" bias.) Although PBS, compared with commercial TV news outlets, probably does pose more pressing questions to those in power, its hallmark "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," for example, makes sure to include mainstream conservatives, such as New York Times columnist David Brooks, in its regular mix. The truth is that the widespread bias that board members are so eager to fix doesn't exist.

Tomlinson, a former editor at the staunchly conservative Reader's Digest who over the years has contributed exclusively to Republican politicians, was not available to comment for this story. But in April he told the Washington Post, "I am concerned about perceptions that not all parts of the political spectrum are reflected on public broadcasting."

Ernest Wilson, a Democrat-appointed CPB board member, agrees that fairness and balance represent "a genuine political concern" -- in part because "people who believe fairness and balance is a problem at PBS include some legislators on the Commerce Committee" (which oversees CPB funding). "But there are a myriad of other issues that are more important than fairness and balance. For instance, most of our PBS viewers are between the ages of 1 and 7 and 47 and 80, and there's nobody in between. That's a problem. And that's not a fairness and balance problem."

Asked if he thought the increasingly heated debate about objectivity had hijacked the CPB's larger agenda, Wilson said, "Yes, at the moment."

A CPB spokesman denies that the corporation has become distracted by the fairness and balance issue. "We're rolling up our sleeves and focusing on our core mission," says Eben Peck.

Yet it remains unclear what the evidence is for PBS's liberal bias. What are the egregious examples of so-called unfairness that are fueling the current controversy? Tomlinson himself rarely singles out any particular programming as being guilty of bias, or of not meeting public broadcasting's journalism standards. Rather than cite any actual infractions by PBS programs, Tomlinson has said he's concerned by the mere perception of a bias.

Last week he was quoted in Broadcasting and Cable magazine as saying he wanted to "broaden support for public broadcasting" while "eliminating the perception of political bias." And in response to a New York Times article last week on the tension between CPB and PBS, Tomlinson released a statement that read, in part, "Eliminating the perception of political bias ... is important to maintain continued public support for public broadcasting."

But the question remains, a perception of political bias by whom -- Republican politicians and conservative activists, or PBS viewers? If most PBS viewers and other Americans don't think the programming is biased -- and two internal polls prove they don't -- then why is the CPB unleashing this campaign?

Tomlinson has tipped his hand in the past. In the Nov. 17, 2003, issue of Current magazine, which covers public broadcasting, he argued, "If a significant number of conservatives are saying public TV is not for them, we need to change that" (emphasis added).

So if a significant number of environmentalists, or libertarians or Latinos or Asians, say public TV is not for them, will the CPB be willing to take drastic action to remedy that perception? And what constitutes a "significant number"? According to CPB polling done in 2003, 12 percent of Americans think PBS has a conservative bias. Why isn't the CPB board addressing that as well?

"They've established their own version of political correctness," says Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "Tomlinson is taking things to the extreme with his ambitious agenda."

In fact, the CPB's crusade seems to flip on its head the organization's mandate, which, following Nixon's attempt at political interference, has been to act as PBS's "heat shield," insulating PBS programming from outside political pressure. Instead, the CPB is demanding programming changes to meet its political concerns.

The CPB was created and funded by Congress to provide about 20 percent of PBS's programming budget. Under the Public Broadcasting Act, the White House can appoint no more than five of the nine CPB board seats. One of the Democratic seats is unfilled, as it has been for several years, giving Republicans a comfortable decision-making majority.

During an interview for NPR's "On the Media," which aired over the weekend, Tomlinson insisted, "I did not choose to bring controversy to public broadcasting over the issue of balance. Others did." Yet recent events certainly suggest Tomlinson and his Bush-appointed allies on the CPB board have been fixated on the issue of balance.

Last year CPB handpicked two new conservative-leaning programs to balance out the alleged liberal bias on PBS: "Tucker Carlson Unfiltered," hosted by the conservative pundit, and "The Journal Editorial Report," featuring the uniformly pro-Bush editors from the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. The two shows became perhaps the first in CPB history to be greenlighted specifically because they had an overt political perspective. That kind of micromanaging of the program schedule ought to be off-limits, says former board member Carpenter: "The board should not get involved in individual programming decisions. That's outside its purview."

Without the knowledge of his board, Tomlinson last year contracted with an outside consultant -- at a cost of $10,000 -- to monitor the weekly PBS news program "Now With Bill Moyers" for liberal bias, according to a report in the New York Times.

Late last year CPB suggested that PBS's long-established journalism standards were inadequate and urged it to alter the wording of its "objectivity and balance" guidelines.

In March, Tomlinson hired a White House staffer to help draft guidelines for the new positions of PBS ombudsmen, who would specifically monitor bias in programming.

Last month, without informing PBS first, CPB appointed the ombudsmen. One of the men last year publicly endorsed a Republican for governor in Indiana, and the other, a self-described conservative, is a close friend of Tomlinson's.

CPB shocked the public broadcasting community on April 8 by refusing to renew the contract of its chief executive officer, Kathleen Cox. She was replaced with Ken Ferree, a Republican who was a top advisor to Michael Powell, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and who helped Powell craft new rules that would have drastically loosened media-ownership rules.

Finally, Tomlinson wants to tap the former co-chairman of the Republican National Committee, Patricia Harrison, to step in as the permanent CEO.

"People feel like this is a mission for him," says one public-television source. Adds another veteran, "Everybody's scared to death."

What's especially curious about the current objectivity controversy is that PBS airs hundreds of hours of programming each week, most of which is educational and cultural, and yet CPB's entire fairness and balance campaign -- dismissing its CEO, creating new shows, trying to rewrite PBS's journalism guidelines, hiring ombudsmen -- appears to stem from a single weekly program, Moyers' "Now." "All they talk about is the Moyers show," notes Carpenter. "Where else is the bias or the perceived bias?"

Moyers left the show (which has since been cut back to just 30 minutes) months ago, yet conservative media critics, rather than celebrate his departure, continue to rally against Moyers with a vengeance. In his May 6 attack on PBS posted online, Brent Bozell dedicated nearly half his column to attacking Moyers and detailing his alleged bias (for example, criticizing Condoleezza Rice's "pattern of ineptness").

Even when Moyers hosted the show, which routinely aired critical reports about the Bush administration, "Now" wasn't exactly a lightning rod for viewers' wrath. According to an attachment to CPB's annual report to Congress, CPB, eager for public feedback, created "Open to the Public," an interactive forum in which viewers can express concerns. For calendar year 2003, the most recent year for which statistics are publicly available, the initiative produced 1,139 e-mails from viewers. According to CPB, just 24 of those -- or roughly 2 percent -- were angry e-mails about "Now." (Drawing the most comments was "Sit and Be Fit," an exercise program for seniors; viewers e-mailed asking that it be shown on more local stations.) While individual PBS stations may have logged more complaints about "Now," CPB's own feedback mechanism barely registered any concern about the program.

The findings likely come as little surprise to CPB officials, who obviously pored over results from a 2003 survey on liberal bias conducted jointly by a Republican and a Democratic firm. (The firms later hosted focus groups in red states, inviting only people who had complained about a liberal bias at PBS, so they could further detail their complaints.) As the "Research Objectives" portion of the results states, the survey's top priority was to "re-measure the extent to which people view news and information programming on PBS and NPR as being biased" (emphasis added).

Why "re-measure"? Because, according to public television insiders, the first batch of polling done in 2002 produced unsatisfactory results from the CPB board's perspective; it showed little viewer concern about bias. "Tomlinson commissioned two polls. The first results were too good, and he didn't believe them," says one source. "After the Iraq war, the board commissioned another round of polling, and they thought they'd get worse results." But the board didn't. Asked specifically about PBS's war coverage, only 7 percent of respondents thought it was "slanted." "They couldn't use any of it" to bolster any claims of bias, says the source. Overall, just 21 percent of respondents thought PBS was too liberal.

Of course, if Tomlinson and his colleagues were looking for good news about PBS instead of bad, the wider poll results -- a healthy 80 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of public broadcasting -- would have been trumpeted as a triumph. (In an NPR interview aired last weekend, Tomlinson suggested that that 80 percent should be higher.) Meanwhile, a strong majority thinks PBS's news and information programming is more trustworthy, and more in-depth, than that of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN. Most viewers think PBS is a "valuable cultural resource," and a plurality of 48 percent want the government to provide more funding to PBS. (Only 10 percent want it to provide less.) But despite the good news, the CPB board refused to tout these results or even release them independently.

Says Democratic CPB board member Wilson, "It's very important that the American public see these polls. They were paid for with public money and should be seen." Asked about any discussion the board had about the polls and releasing them widely to the public, Wilson says, "I'm not going to talk about what happens in the board meetings."

It should be noted that the polling firms did report "a disparity between Republicans and Democrats with respect to their views towards news and information programming on public broadcasting." They're likely referring to the finding that 36 percent of Republicans think PBS has a liberal bias, compared with 21 percent of all respondents.

But Republicans' complaints about PBS bias are consistent with how they view most mainstream news organizations. According to one of the most comprehensive surveys on public opinion about the media, conducted in 1997 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Republicans "are more likely to say news organizations favor one side than are Democrats or independents." In that survey, 77 percent of Republicans thought the press was biased, compared with 58 percent of Democrats. In other words, polls are likely to find about far more Republicans complaining about bias no matter which media outlet is being analyzed.

Despite its own polling showing that bias was not a concern perceived by most Americans, the CPB pressed ahead with its aggressive plans to fix the problem. At her 2003 Senate confirmation hearing, Republican CPB board member (and major GOP fundraiser) Cheryl Halpern not only suggested that producers be penalized for any programming deemed to be biased but also demanded that PBS operate under an "objective, balanced code of journalistic ethics, [which] has got to prevail across the board, and there needs to be accountability."

The truth is, PBS stations have operated under a strict code of journalistic ethics for decades. But late last year, as part of its contract renewal with PBS, which earmarks $29.5 million for the network in programming funds, CPB for the first time asked for a change in PBS's journalism guidelines. For the previous 14 years of the multimillion-dollar contract, CPB had relied on PBS to operate under its own well-established journalism standards. According to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which established the CPB, the corporation must meet several goals. One is ensuring a "strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature." The CPB instead moved to introduce statutory language making "objectivity and balance" guidelines an enforceable legal requirement.

PBS balked. Claiming a First Amendment infringement and an unprecedented attempt by the CPB to assert direct control over its broadcasting, the network's attorneys noted that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had previously ruled that the "objectivity and balance" provision from the '67 Act "is not a substantive standard, legally enforceable by agencies or courts." The CPB relented, but still wants to OK PBS's journalism standards, which are in the process of being updated by a panel of journalists and academics. If the CPB objects to portions of those standards, that could spark yet another showdown.

"I think the goal is to change the kind of journalism PBS occasionally does," says Chester at Center for Digital Democracy. "To sort of press for balance within each individual program and neuter PBS's ability to do serious reporting."

In his recent "On the Media" interview, Tomlinson insisted he simply wants to create a balance on the PBS schedule, so that for every liberal program there's a counterbalancing conservative program. But in December 2003, three months after being elected as the CPB's chairman, Tomlinson wrote a letter to the head of PBS, complaining, "'Now With Bill Moyers' does not contain anything approaching the balance the law requires for public broadcasting" (emphasis added), as if suggesting the use of a stopwatch to time how many minutes each side has to tell its story.

But there has never been a standard, or "law," requiring PBS to adhere to balance within each program. Instead, like the old fairness doctrine that applied to commercial broadcasters before it was rescinded during the Reagan administration, the fairness and balance guideline for PBS is measured by the totality of the network's schedule of programming.

In Saturday's Denver Post, James Morgese, president and general manager of the Rocky Mountain PBS station, wrote, "If what is happening in Washington goes unchecked, we will probably have to start counting which shows or even which guests on shows will balance or counter-balance each other, and then start tabulating the amount of minutes, or even seconds, devoted to ideological points of view." Morgese dubbed the current CPB objectivity campaign a "witch hunt."

Ironically, if strict new legal guidelines on fairness were applied, among the first shows that would have to be singled out for violating them would be "The Journal Editorial Report." Like "Tucker Carlson Unfiltered," which was shepherded to air with seed money from CPB, "The Journal Editorial Report" was tapped as a priority by the CPB to balance out "Now." But unlike "Now," which books conservative advocates such as Ralph Reed to debate issues, "The Journal Editorial Report" makes little effort to air opposing viewpoints during its weekly discussion of political events. For instance, during its March 25 segment on the unfolding Terri Schiavo story, every panelist agreed Congress had done the right thing by intervening in the right-to-die case, placing them well out of the American mainstream, which overwhelmingly objected to lawmakers' intervention in the case, according to several polls.

CPB board member Wilson suggests it's not just the Journal's editors who are out of step. "Ask the American people about fairness and balance at PBS and it's not at the top of their list. But it is at the top of the list for some within a small Beltway loop."

And for the moment, those people control public television.

What's going on with media manipulation?

Am I the only person disturbed by the Newsweek Magazine backpedalling when the Pentagon refused to validate or confirm their inflammatory article about US interrogators desecrating the Koran in front of detainees? Since when do news sources retract their stories because they are told to by the Government? Instead of realizing their awesome power to change and call the Government to task for their wrongdoings, they just retract a story the Pentagon doesn't agree with. This seems mighty close to "journalism" in fascist states.

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight - ask questions and be skeptical.--Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers denounced on Sunday the right wing and top officials at the White House, saying they are trying to silence their critics by controlling the news media. He also took aim at reporters who become little more than willing government "stenographers." And he said the public increasingly is content with just enough news to confirm its own biases. Moyers said those in power - government officials and their allies in the media - mean to stay there by punishing journalists "who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable." Moyers described those officials as "obsessed with control" of the media. He said they are using the government "to threaten and intimidate."

Moyers answered for the first time recent charges that public television in general and he in particular have become too liberal. Those charges are from Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and, in effect, Moyers' boss at the network. Tomlinson, a Republican, paid an outside consultant $10,000 to keep track of the political leanings of guests on Moyers' show, "Now." Moyers left the show last year but is back on public television as host of the series "Wide Angle." Tomlinson, on the recommendation of administration officials, hired a senior White House aide to draw up guidelines to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts, according to a report in The New York Times on May 2. Tomlinson has denied that he was carrying out a White House mandate.

Moyers said he knew his broadcasts have created a backlash in Washington. "The more compelling our journalism, the angrier became the radical right of the Republican Party," he said.
"That's because the one thing they loath more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth."

Moyers' speech was interrupted by standing ovations at the Conference for Media Reform here over the weekend. More than 2,500 people attended the three-day conference.

"In contrast to the conservative mantra that public television routinely features the voices of establishment critics," he said, alternative voices on public television are rare and usually drowned out by government and corporate views. Moyers said that's exactly what the right wing wants. "They want your reporting to validate their belief system, and when it doesn't God forbid. Without a trace of irony, the powers that be have appropriated the news speak vernacular of George Orwell's '1984,' giving us a program, no child will be left behind, while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged children. They give us legislation calling for clear skies and healthy forests" while "turning over public lands to the energy industry."

From David Rossie's column:

Robert Kennedy Jr. pointed out in a recent Vanity Fair article, the far right not only has control of the legislative and executive branches of government, it has virtual control of most of the mass media. The extreme right controls talk radio. Conservative corporations control the purse strings of the major television news operations, not just Fox News, which is an unabashed organ of the Republican Party. It was not by chance that Bob Schieffer was named moderator of the final presidential debate last fall. As Kennedy noted, Schieffer asked not a single question about the environment, concentrating instead "on abortion, gay marriage and the personal faith of the candidates, an agenda that could have been dictated by Karl Rove." And who's to say it wasn't?

Shortly after he was named interim anchor of the CBS evening news, Schieffer told a late night interviewer that if Bush can bring our troops home from Iraq by Christmas he will go down in history as a great president. Sure, forget what he and Cheney have done to the economy, the environment, health care, the treasury and thousands of American families mourning the loss of their sons, daughters and spouses. This disaster of a president is one step away from becoming one with Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson. Just ask Bob.

Kennedy quotes Bill Moyers, recently chased to the margins of a newly Republican-dominated Public Broadcasting System: "We have an ideological press that's interested in the election of Republicans, and a mainstream press that's interested in the bottom line. Therefore we don't have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American people."

No, we have propaganda machine:

As sharp-eyed readers learned a few months ago from single-paragraph articles buried deep inside their newspapers, Pat Tillman died pointlessly, a hapless victim of "friendly fire" who never got the chance to choose between bravery and cowardice. As if that wasn't bad enough, the Washington Post now reports that Pentagon and White House officials knew the truth "within days" after his April 22, 2004 shooting by fellow Army Rangers but "decided not to inform Tillman's family or the public until weeks after" the nationally televised martyr-a-thon.

It gets worse. So desperate were the military brass to carry off their propaganda coup that they lied to Tillman's brother, a fellow soldier who arrived on the scene shortly after the incident, about how he died. Writing in an army report, Brigadier General Gary Jones admits that the official cover-up even included "the destruction of evidence": the army burned Tillman's Ranger uniform and body armor to hide the fact that he had died in a hail of American bullets, fired by troops who had "lost situational awareness to the point they had no idea where they were."

"We didn't want the world finding out what actually happened," one soldier told Jones. A perfect summary of the war on terrorism.

The weapons of mass destruction turned out to be a figment of Donald Rumsfeld's imagination. The Thanksgiving turkey Bush presented to the troops turned out to be plastic, as much of a staged photo op as the gloriously iconic and phony toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad by jubilant Iraqi civilians--well, actually a few dozen marines and CIA-financed operatives. So many of the Administration's "triumphs" have been exposed as frauds that one has to wonder whether that was really Saddam in the spider hole. We shouldn't blame the White House for producing lies; that's what politicians do. But we expect better from the media who disseminate them.

Case study: the Washington Post's dutiful transcription of the Jessica Lynch hoax. Played up on page one and running on for thousands of words, the fanciful Pentagon version had the pilot from West Virginia emptying her clip before finally succumbing to a gunshot wound (and possible rape) by evil Iraqi ambushers, then freed from her tormentors at a heavily-guarded POW hospital. Like the Pat Tillman story, it was pure fiction. Private Lynch, neither shot nor sexually violated, said she was injured when her vehicle crashed. She never got off a shot because her gun jammed. As she told reporters who were willing to listen, her Iraqi doctors and nurses had given her excellent care. She credited them for saving her life. In a weird sort of prequel to the shooting of an Italian journalist, they had even attempted to turn her over at a U.S. checkpoint but were forced to flee when American troops fired at them.

The Descent of Tom DeLay

Monday, May 9, 2005 CNN.com

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Forget the freebie trips across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Forget the casinos and the allegedly illicit contributions -- they represent only degrees of avarice.

To grasp the moral bankruptcy of the public Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, you only have to know about Frank Murkowski and Saipan. Today, Frank Murkowki is the governor of Alaska, but from 1980 to 2002, he was a conservative Republican senator from Alaska. How conservative? His voting record earned him zero ratings from organized labor's AFL-CIO and the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, and perfect 100s from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Conservative Union. But as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Frank Murkowski became furious at the abusive sweatshop conditions endured by workers, overwhelmingly immigrants, in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, of which Saipan is the capital. Because they were produced in a territory of the United States, garments traveled tariff-free and quota-free to the profitable U.S. market and were entitled to display the coveted "Made in the USA" label. Among the manufacturers that had profited from the un-free labor market on the island were Tommy Hilfiger USA, Gap, Calvin Klein and Liz Claiborne.

Moved by the sworn testimony of U.S. officials and human-rights advocates that the 91 percent of the workforce who were immigrants -- from China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh -- were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks minus plumbing, work 12 hours a day, often seven days a week, without any of the legal protections U.S. workers are guaranteed, Murkowski wrote a bill to extend the protection of U.S. labor and minimum-wage laws to the workers in the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas.

So compelling was the case for change the Alaska Republican marshaled that in early 2000, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Murkowski worker reform bill. But one man primarily stopped the U.S. House from even considering that worker-reform bill: then-House Republican Whip Tom DeLay. According to law firm records recently made public, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, paid millions to stop reform and keep the status quo, met personally at least two dozen times with DeLay on the subject in one two-year period. The DeLay staff was often in daily contact with Abramoff. DeLay traveled with his family and staff over New Year's of 1997 on an Abramoff scholarship endowed by his client, the government of the territory, to the Marianas, where golf and snorkeling were enjoyed.

DeLay fully approved of the working and living conditions. The Texan's salute to the owners and Abramoff's government clients was recorded by ABC-TV News: "You are a shining light for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free-market system." Later, DeLay would tell The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin that the low-wage, anti-union conditions of the Marianas constituted "a perfect petri dish of capitalism. It's like my Galapagos Island." (I guess for some people, "capitalism" and "slavery" are synonyms?)

Contrast that with what then-Sen. Murkowski told me in a 1998 interview: "The last time we heard a justification that economic advances would be jeopardized if workers were treated properly was shortly before Appomattox."

The "Made in the USA" label means standards of quality and standards of conduct. But more important than how a product is made is how the people who make that product are treated -- as human beings with innate dignity -- who are free to organize and entitled to a living wage. Did somebody say something about moral values?

An image worth 1,000 words

Well, this says it all. An "ornament" designed to express the sentiments of the anti-choice, pro-war folks who believe that life is sacred as long as it's going to fight for defense contractor wealth some day. This adorable pre-life death-worship ornament comes in "Brown" or "Caucasian". Actually, I think the "brown" one is jauntier,what with the green beret and all.




Protect our troops - from the womb to the war. What if the fetus you were going to abort would grow up to be a soldier bringing democracy to a godless dictatorship? Plastic replica of an 11-12 week old fetus, 3" long, holding a firearm in its precious little hand, with an assortment of other military paraphernalia, encased in a translucent plastic ornament, with a patriotic yellow ribbon on top. Includes a metal ornament hanger. If only a womb were this safe, attractive and reasonably priced! (Yeah, right, only $14.95!!) Show that you support the "culture of life" by buying and proudly displaying one of these patriotic unborn Americans.

Just when you thought you could comprehend the level of twisted, psychotic, sickness in the minds of these brainwashed monsters, they come up with something truly surreal and surprise you all over again. This is perfect as satire-- it's funny that they are actually serious about it, enough to manufacture this garbage. Onward, fetal soldiers!

Meanwhile, here's the types of things our college physics departments are working on these days:
Human rights activists have objected to the weapon, saying that it could cause blindness. Military officials say that people would close their eyes quickly before any damage to their eyes would occur.



Current Projects include SLEEPING BEAUTY, directed towards the battlefield use of mind-altering electromagnetic weapons. This project is headed by Jack Verona, a highly placed Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer. Dr. Michael Persinger of Laurentian University is also employed on the project. Other sources have revealed a project entitled MONARCH which, supposedly, is directed towards the deliberate creation of severe multiple personality disorder.
Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, has compiled a fairly extensive catalogue of effects that have resulted from low frequency signals targeted upon the women protesters.These include: vertigo, retinal bleeding, burnt face (even at night), nausea, sleep disturbances, palpitations, loss of concentration, loss of memory, disorientation, severe headaches, temporary paralysis, faulty speech co-ordination, irritability and a sense of panic in non-panic situations.

By using very low frequency electromagnetic radiation -- the waves way below radio frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum -- Eldon Byrd found he could induce the brain to release behavior-regulating chemicals. "We could put animals into a stupor," he says by hitting them with these frequencies. He even ran a small project that used magnetic fields to cause certain brain cells in rats to release histamine. In humans, this would cause instant flulike symptoms and produce nausea. "These fields were extremely weak. They were undetectable. The effects were nonlethal and reversible. You could disable a person temporarily. It [would have been] like a stun gun."

Here's a cool link with much more info:
http://www.takingaim.info/

Falling and Faltering
A hundred days into his second term, President Bush’s agenda is in trouble. And things are not looking much better for Republicans on Capitol Hill.

By Eleanor Clift

ontributing Editor,Newsweek
April 29, 2005

His second term is in a sinkhole. The American people give him low marks on everything but the war on terrorism, and that’s because there hasn’t been a second attack on U.S. soil. President George W. Bush is inept on economic policy, out of his depth on the issue of Social Security and rudderless on foreign policy. Yet, as he demonstrated in his press conference last night, Bush conveys unshakeable confidence, arrogance even. His core message: we know where we’re going At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, cracks are appearing in the Republican phalanx on Capitol Hill. Ohio GOP Sen. George Voinovich stunned the White House last week by calling for a timeout on the nomination of John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations. Democrats surfaced new charges about Bolton’s heavy-handed treatment of underlings, and Voinovich agreed that the charges deserved a full hearing. Voinovich doesn’t always toe the line on Bush policies. “I have too much common sense,” he told NEWSWEEK. “I’ve been around a long time.” His concerns about Bolton’s temperament are genuine.

The politics are so volatile that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid came close to calling Bush a liar after the White House weighed in on the side of Senate Republicans in urging the elimination of the 60-vote threshold on judicial nominations. He added that Bush is always on time for his meetings with congressional leaders, that he spends the first 50 minutes talking about foreign affairs and leaves only the last 10 minutes for questions.

If the Republicans, with White House backing, invoke the so-called “nuclear option” to confirm Bush’s judges with a 50-plus-Cheney strategy, the Democrats will retaliate. Democrats will not shut down the Senate, Reid says. To the contrary, they’ll keep the Senate open for longer hours to talk about issues people care about, like health care, raising the minimum wage, gas prices and veterans benefits. Under Republican control, senators enjoy a two-and-a-half-day workweek, popping into town late Monday evening and leaving in a rush by noon Thursday.

On the House side, all the attention has been on Majority Leader Tom DeLay and the rigged ethics rules, which Republicans finally withdrew this week to open the door to an investigation of DeLay’s lobbyist-paid trips abroad to golf resorts. Other House rules enacted by the GOP are equally egregious. Democrats are routinely limited to five minutes of debate. Controversial votes are scheduled in the middle of the night when nobody’s watching. They’re called “vampire votes.” California Democrat Ellen Tauscher says it’s all about “shrinking the aperture” so Republicans can say Democrats have no ideas, that all they do is say no. “They don’t just want to win; they want to obliterate us,” she says. That’s been the formula for five years under Bush and DeLay. The good news is that it’s blowing up in their face.